The Dark Tree

STEVEN L. ISOARDI

In the early 1960s, pianist Horace Tapscott gave up a successful career in Lionel Hampton’s band and returned to his home in Los Angeles to found the Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra, a community arts group that focused on providing community-oriented jazz and jazz training. Over the course of almost forty years, the Arkestra, together with the related Union of God’s Musicians and Artists Ascension Foundation, were at the forefront of the vital community-based arts movements in black Los Angeles. Some three hundred artists—musicians, vocalists, poets, playwrights, painters, sculptors, and graphic artists—passed through these organizations, many ultimately remaining within the community and others moving on to achieve international fame. In The Dark Tree, Steven L. Isoardi draws on one hundred in-depth interviews with the Arkestra’s participants to tell the history of the important and largely overlooked community arts movement of African American Los Angeles. This revised and updated edition brings the story of the Arkestra up to date, as its ethos and aesthetic remain vital forces in jazz and popular music to this day.

Steven L. Isoardi is an independent scholar and editor of Songs of the Unsung: The Musical and Social Journey of Horace Tapscott, also published by Duke University Press, Central Avenue Sounds: Jazz in Los Angeles, and Jazz Generations: A Life in American Music and Society. He is the author of The Music Finds a Way: A PAPA/ UGMAA Oral History of Growing up in Postwar South Central Los Angeles

Genomics with Care Minding the Double Binds of Science

MIKE FORTUN

In Genomics with Care Mike Fortun presents an experimental ethnography of contemporary genomics, analyzing science as a complex amalgam of cognition and affect, formal logics and tacit knowledge, statistics, and ethics. Fortun examines genomics in terms of care—a dense composite of affective and cognitive forces that drive scientists and the relations they form with their objects of research, data, knowledge, and community. Reading genomics with care shows how each resists definition yet are so entangled as to become indistinguishable. Fortun analyzes four patterns of genomic care—curation, scrupulousness, solicitude, and friendship—seen in the conceptual, technological, social, and methodological changes that transpired as the genetics of the 1980s became the genomics of the 1990s, and then the “post-genomics” of the 2000s. By tracing the dense patterns made where care binds to science, Fortun shows how these patterns mark where scientists are driven to encounter structural double binds that are impossible to resolve, and yet are where scientific change and creativity occur.

Mike Fortun is Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Irvine, and author of Promising Genomics: Iceland and deCODE Genetics in a World of Speculation

October 2023

456 pages

Music / Jazz / American Studies / African American Studies and Black Diaspora

Rights: World

July 2023

360 pages

Science and Technology Studies / Anthropology

Rights: World

November