Book Description

Dreams in Double Time takes up a single question grounded in comparative, decolonial study: why was bebop, a radical, wartime music created by black experimentalists in 1940s Harlem nightclubs, so conceptually productive for Mexican American, Japanese American, and Afro-Chinese American listeners during the global realignments of the post-WWII years? The project works to answer this question by way of three novella-length chapters, each following a member of a "trio" of loosely linked writer-musicians--and, in effect, their varying contexts and communities. The first figure, James T. Araki, was a Nisei multi-instrumentalist, soldier-translator, and eventual literature and folklore scholar credited with helping introduce bebop to Japan during the Allied Occupation. The second, Raúl R. Salinas, was a Mexican American prison poet, jazz critic, and longtime activist whose investments in jazz helped document East Austin's rich music histories and instantiate a bop-inflected Chicano literary idiom. And the third, Harold Wing, was an Afro-Chinese American drummer, pianist, and songwriter who performed with bop pioneers including Charlie Parker, Errol Garner, and Babs Gonzalez--and, importantly, took the lessons of those performances to his work as a public servant in Newark's City Hall shortly after the uprisings of the late sixties. By following these figures during these postwar decades, Dreams in Double Time records the reach and importance of Harlem's black experimentalists among differently marginalized audiences of color across (and beyond) the United States--audiences newly driven to disrupt the standard logics of racial democracy. Among this project's key interventions are its interdisciplinary analyses of improvisation and composition across media; its attention to underground networks of music circulation, creation, and documentation in and beyond the United States; its investment in "histories from below" that highlight "minor" figures and materials; and its deeply relational (decolonial) commitment to the study of race and ethnicity. In form and content, Dreams in Double Time thus aspires to a fundamentally relational narrative discourse that interweaves figures, sites, materials, and histories typically considered in isolation--not to resolve their inevitable tensions in a tidy appeal to a universal, but instead to sit with them, listening for their chords.