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 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*.