Book Chats—Jonathan Leal, Dreams in Double Time: On Race, Freedom, and Bebop

Levan Institute for the Humanities Book Chats—Jonathan Leal, Dreams in Double Time: On Race, Freedom, and Bebop
January 22, 2024

A discussion of Jonathan Leal's new book, Dreams in Double Time: On Race, Freedom, and Bebop (Duke University Press, 2023). The author will be joined in conversation by Daphne A. Brooks (Yale University) and Walton Muyumba (Indiana University Bloomington), moderated by Josh Kun (USC).

About the Book: In Dreams in Double Time Jonathan Leal examines how the musical revolution of bebop opened up new futures for racialized and minoritized communities. Blending lyrical nonfiction with transdisciplinary critique and moving beyond standard Black/white binary narratives of jazz history, Leal focuses on the stories and experiences of three musicians and writers of color: James Araki, a Nisei multi-instrumentalist, soldier-translator, and literature and folklore scholar; Raúl Salinas, a Chicano poet, jazz critic, and longtime activist who endured the US carceral system for over a decade; and Harold Wing, an Afro-Chinese American drummer, pianist, and songwriter who performed with bebop pioneers before working as a public servant. Leal foregrounds that for these men and their collaborators, bebop was an affectively and intellectually powerful force that helped them build community and dream new social possibilities. Bebop’s complexity and radicality, Leal contends, made it possible for those like Araki, Salinas, and Wing who grappled daily with state-sanctioned violence to challenge a racially supremacist, imperial nation, all while hearing and making the world anew.

About the Author: Jonathan Leal is the author of Dreams in Double Time (Duke University Press 2023) and co-editor of Cybermedia: Explorations in Science, Sound, and Vision (Bloomsbury 2021). A former Emerging Critic with the National Book Critics Circle and AMS-50 Fellow with the American Musicological Society, Leal earned a PhD in Modern Thought & Literature from Stanford University in 2020 and is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at the University of Southern California.

This event is part of the Levan Institute for the Humanities' “Book Chats” series, conversations about new books published by USC scholars in the humanities and humanistic social sciences. To see more events in this series, including recordings of past events, visit https://dornsife.usc.edu/levan-instit....