Addressing a diverse set of improvised art and music forms—from jazz and cinema to dance and literature—this volume traces how the social, political, and the aesthetic relate within the context of improvisation.

Acknowledgments  vii Introduction. What is Social Aesthetics? / Georgina Born, Eric Lewis, and Will Straw  1 Part I. The Social and the Aesthetic 1. After Relational Aesthetics: Improvised Music, the Social, and (Re)Theorizing the Aesthetic / Georgina Born  33 2. Scripting Social Interaction: Improvisation, Performance, and Western "Art" Music / Nicholas Cook  59 3. From the American Civil Rights Movement to Mali: Reflections on Social Aesthetics and Improvisation / Ingrid Monson  78 4. From Network Bands to Ubiquitous Computing: Rich Gold and the Social Aesthetics of Interactvity / George E. Lewis  91 Part II. Genre and Defintion 5. The Social Aesthetics of Swing in the 1940s: Or the Distribution of the Non-Sensible / David Brackett  113 6. What Is "Great Black Music"? The Social Aesthetics of the AACM in Paris / Eric Lewis  135 7. Kenneth Goldsmith and Uncreative Improvisation / Darren Wershler  160 Part III. Sociality and Identity 8. Strayhorn's Queer Arrangements / Lisa Barg  183 9. What's Love Got to Do with It? Creating Art, Creating Community, Creating a Better World / Tracey Nicholls  213 10. Improvisation in New Wave Cinema: Beneath the Myth, the Social / Marian Froger, translated by Will Straw  233 Part IV. Performance 11. Social Aesthetics and Transcultural Improvisation: Wayde Compton and the Performance of Black Time / Winfried Siemerling  255 12. Devices of Existence: Contact Improvisation, Mobile Performances, and Dancing through Twitter / Susan Kozel  268 13. The Dramaturgy of Spontaneity: Improvising the Social in Theater / Zoë Svendsen  288 References  309 Contributors' Biographies  335 Index  339

"The editors and authors of this important collection have assembled a striking and original set of ideas and examples to illustrate and demonstrate their contention that the time is ripe for a new approach to the classical questions of aesthetic theory. The resulting comprehensive and persuasive demonstration will persuade interested readers that the job has been done, that a social aesthetics illuminates questions that have too long been left unexplored."