Africa Speaks, America Answers - Robin D.G. Kelley

Hardcover
244 pgs.
Harvard University Press, Publ.
Illustrated

This collective biography demonstrates how modern Africa reshaped jazz, how modern jazz helped form a new African identity, and how musical convergences and crossings altered politics and culture on both continents. Documenting individuals and places, from Lagos to Chicago, from New York to Cape Town, Robin Kelley gives a meditation on modernity: we see innovation not as an imposition from the West but rather as indigenous, multilingual, and messy, the result of innumerable exchanges across a breadth of cultures.