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Jaguar
A Story of Africans in America
Paul Stoller
University of Chicago Press, 1999
Issa Boureima is a young, hip African street vendor who sells knock-off designer bags and hats in an open-air market on 125th street in Harlem. His goal is to become a "Jaguar"—a West African term for a keen entrepreneur able to spot trends and turn a profit in any marketplace. This dynamic world, largely invisible to mainstream culture, is the backdrop of this timely novel.

Faced with economic hardship in Africa, Issa has left his home in Niger and his new wife, Khadija, to seek his fortune in America. Devout Muslims, the couple has entered into a "modern" marriage: Khadija is permitted to run her own business, and Issa has agreed not to take additional wives. Issa quickly adapts to his new surroundings, however, and soon attracts several girlfriends. Aided by a network of immigrants, he easily slips through gaps in the "system" and extends his stay in America indefinitely. Following a circuit of African-American cultural festivals across America, he marvels at African-Americans' attitudes toward Africa, and wonders if he'll ever return to Niger. Meanwhile, Khadija also struggles to make it—to become a "Jaguar"—as she combats loneliness, hostile in-laws, and a traditional, male-dominated society. The eventual success of her dry goods shop and her growing affection for a helpful Arab merchant make her wonder if she'll ever join Issa in America.

Drawing on his own decades of experience among Africans both in Niger and in New York, Paul Stoller offers enormous insight into the complexities of contemporary Africa. Alive with detail, Jaguar is a story of triumph and disappointment, of dislocation and longing, and of life lived in a world that no longer recognizes boundaries.
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The Jazz Loft Project
Photographs and Tapes of W. Eugene Smith from 821 Sixth Avenue, 1957–1965
W. Eugene Smith and Sam Stephenson
University of Chicago Press, 2023
Reissue of an acclaimed collection of images from photographer W. Eugene Smith’s time in a New York City loft among jazz musicians.
 
In 1957, Eugene Smith walked away from his longtime job at Life and the home he shared with his wife and four children to move into a dilapidated, five-story loft building at 821 Sixth Avenue in New York City’s wholesale flower district. The loft was the late-night haunt of musicians, including some of the biggest names in jazz—Charles Mingus, Zoot Sims, Bill Evans, and Thelonious Monk among them. Here, from 1957 to 1965, he made nearly 40,000 photographs and approximately 4,000 hours of recordings of musicians. Smith found solace in the chaotic, somnambulistic world of the loft and its artists, and he turned his documentary impulses away from work on his major Pittsburg photo essay and toward his new surroundings.
 
Smith’s Jazz Loft Project has been legendary in the worlds of art, photography, and music for more than forty years, but until the publication of this book, no one had seen his extraordinary photographs or read any of the firsthand accounts of those who were there and lived to tell the tales.
 
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Jazzing
New York City's Unseen Scene
Thomas H. Greenland
University of Illinois Press, 2016
How do we speak about jazz? In this provocative study based on the author's deep immersion in the New York City jazz scene, Tom Greenland turns from the usual emphasis on artists and their music to focus on non-performing participants, describing them as active performers in their own right who witness and thus collaborate in a happening made one-of-a-kind by improvisation, mood, and moment. Jazzing shines a spotlight on the constituency of proprietors, booking agents, photographers, critics, publicists, painters, amateur musicians, fans, friends, and tourists that makes up New York City's contemporary jazz scene. Drawn from deep ethnographic research, interviews, and long term participant observation, Jazzing charts the ways New York's distinctive physical and social-cultural environment affects and is affected by jazz. Throughout, Greenland offers a passionate argument in favor of a radically inclusive conception of music-making, one in which individuals collectively improvise across social contexts to co-create community and musical meaning. An odyssey through the clubs and other performance spaces on and off the beaten track, Jazzing is an insider's view of a vibrant urban art world.
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Jewish Artists in New York
The Holocaust Years
Baigell, Matthew
Rutgers University Press, 2002

Calling attention to the local cultural scene as well as to events taking place in Europe, Matthew Baigell considers the art produced by Jewish artists who were inspired to respond to the murders of their fellow Jews during World War II.

Although there were only a few instances of visual documentation of events until the war’s later stages, responses to news reports and the very few authentic images received of the atrocities of the Holocaust varied from avoidance and denial to scattered attempts to create direct visual representations. Those artists who chose the latter alternative did so with little support from the Jewish intelligentsia of New York City. Art critics such as the influential Clement Greenberg purposely avoided addressing this issue at all. Jewish artists were left to cope with the events of the war in isolation, without a collective visual memory to deal with the traumas presented by news reports.

Baigell discusses how the limited access to images, information, and support during the war led to a unique artistic response created not only by the conflict itself, but also by the anti-Semitic social climate of the United States. Surveys taken in the U.S. between 1940 and 1946 demonstrate that the general population considered Jews a greater menace to the welfare of the country than the Germans or the Japanese.

Artists featured include Marc Chagall, Jacques Lipchitz, Barnett Newman, Abraham Rattner, Mark Rothko, and Max Weber.

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Jewish Immigrant Associations and American Identity in New York, 1880-1939
Daniel Soyer
Harvard University Press, 1997

How did the vast number of Jewish immigrants from different regions of Eastern Europe form their American ethnic identity?

In his answer to this question, Daniel Soyer examines how Jewish immigrant hometown associations (landsmanshaftn) transformed old-world communal ties into vehicles for integration into American society. Focusing on New York--where some 3,000 associations enrolled nearly half a million members--this study is one of the first to explore the organizations' full range of activities, and to show how the newcomers exercised a high degree of agency in their growing identification with American society.

The wide variety of landsmanshaftn--from politically radical and secular to Orthodox and from fraternal order to congregation--illustrates the diversity of influences on immigrant culture. But nearly all of these societies adopted the democratic benefits and practices that were seen as the most positive aspects of American civic culture. In contrast to the old-country hierarchical dispensers of charity, the newcomers' associations relied on mutual aid for medical care, income support, burial, and other traditional forms of self-help. During World War I, the landsmanshaftn sent aid to their war-ravaged hometowns; by the 1930s, the common identity centered increasingly upon collective reminiscing and hometown nostalgia.

The example of the Jewish landsmanshaftn suggests that many immigrants cultivated their own identification with American society to a far greater extent than is usually recognized. It also suggests that they selectively identified with those aspects of American culture that allowed them to retain emotional attachments to old-country landscapes and a sense of kinship with those who shared their heritage.

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