Columbia University Professor Robin Kelley discusses what it means to be an African jazz musician, and what political and commercial strings are attached to that description.
![Robin_Kelley.jpg](https://cdn.grove.wgbh.org/dims4/default/7696f26/2147483647/strip/true/crop/200x200+0+0/resize/70x70!/quality/90/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fk1-prod-gbh.s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com%2Fbrightspot%2Fmedia%2Fspeaker_headshots%2FRobin_Kelley.jpg)
Robin D. G. Kelley is Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California. He is the author of the prize-winning books *Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression *(1990); *Race Rebels: Culture Politics and the Black Working Class* (1994); *Yo Mama's DisFunktional!: Fighting the Culture Wars in Urban America* (1997), which was selected one of the top ten books of 1998 by *the Village Voice*; *Three Strikes: Miners, Musicians, Salesgirls, and the Fighting Spirit of Labor's Last Century*, written collaboratively with Dana Frank and Howard Zinn (2001); and *Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination* (2002). He also edited (with Earl Lewis), *To Make Our World Anew: A History of African Americans* (2000), a Choice Outstanding Academic Title and a History Book Club Selection. *To Make Our World Anew* was an outgrowth of an earlier collaboration with Lewis, the eleven volume Young Oxford History of African Americans (Oxford University Press, 1995-1998), of which he authored volume 10, titled *Into the Fire: African Americans Since 1970* (1996). Kelley also co-edited (with Sidney J. Lemelle) *Imagining Home: Class, Culture, and Nationalism in the African Diaspora* (1994). Kelley's essays have appeared in several anthologies and journals, including *The Nation*, *Monthly Review*, *The Voice Literary Supplement*, *New York Times*, *New York Times Magazine*, *Rolling Stone*, *Color Lines*, *Code Magazine*, *Utne Reader*, *Lenox Avenue*, and *African Studies Review*.