Abstract:

This essay situates hipness within a broader range of African American

history and moral debate than is generally presented in accounts of jazz

history. The perspectives of Amiri Baraka, Mezz Mezzrow, Norman Mailer,

and Dizzy Gillespie are used to develop the thesis that there is a problem with

white presumptions about how hipness relates to African American cultural

life and history. This problem requires addressing interrelationships between

race and gender, as well as the legacy of primitivism embedded in common

assumptions about how jazz since World War II relates to social consciousness,

sexual liberation, and dignity.