While the history of jazz and the biographies of the music’s practitioners have long enjoyed the attention of critics and audiences, the jazz musicians’ life stories, told in writing and from their personal perspectives, remain an understudied area of jazz scholarship and autobiography studies. This chapter surveys the genre of jazz autobiography by identifying its major styles, forms, and narrative patterns and tracing its century-long history from the 1920s to the 2020s. Assessing works by famous musician-writers such as Louis Armstrong, Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie, Benny Goodman, Billie Holiday, Charles Mingus, Anita O’Day, and Artie Shaw, the chapter outlines the diversity of jazz autobiography, focusing on questions of narrative perspective, written and oral style, musical influences, as well as raced, classed, and gendered experiences. The chapter suggests that this diversity is nonetheless encapsulated by a common genre poetics of the jazz life as told from the musician’s vantage point.

The defamatory posthumous stories about Raúl explained his celebrity as accidental, an extension of Afro-Argentines’ supposed servility, imitativeness, and minstrel-like buffoonery. He was, in their view, nothing but a “broken puppet” of the city’s elite, who kept him as their personal buffoon. “Celebrity” uncovers a completely different story: one in which Raúl made himself into a charismatic Black icon of the city’s popular culture and bohemian nightlife – a Black legend. This feat of self-making – his gamble that being boldly and unapologetically Black would allow his star to rise – is Raúl’s astonishing and unsung achievement. Shortly after his release from the reformatory, Raúl began to live a life that made celebrity possible. He did so largely by tapping into countercultural currents in the city’s rich popular culture: a flickering fascination with Blackness, and a partial re-claiming of Argentina’s maligned Black roots as an emblem of nativist pride or bohemian outcast glamour. Using contemporary texts and images, the chapter reconstructs Raúl’s scintillating persona as "el murciélago" (the bat) – a stylish and mysterious “creature of the night” who played a starring role in many of the city’s after-hour hotspots, especially in the bohemian world of the tango, Argentina’s emerging national dance. Indeed, by tracing Raúl’s presence in early tango dances to which he brought the candombe of his ancestors and neighbors, I am able to tell a new history of the impact of Afro-Argentine dance and music on Argentina’s national rhythm, to show that it did not disappear in the late nineteenth century, as is widely believed. The chapter pays special attention to images (photographs for which Raúl posed, cover art of tangos named for him, and others), as well as to semi-fictional texts read against the grain, in order to paint a portrait of Raúl’s successful efforts at self-fashioning as a Black dandy and Black celebrity.

Moody’s introduction observes that works of African American autobiography predate even the oft-cited 1760 Narrative of the Uncommon Sufferings, and Surprizing Deliverance of Briton Hammon, and the 1783 petition to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts filed by Belinda Royall (Sutton). Moody argues the genre of Black life writing has persistently appealed to African American authors telling life stories in promoting diverse causes from a range of African-descended ethnic backgrounds. She contends that the financial rewards of Michelle Obama’s memoir Becoming — and the testimonies it has generated — reveal African American readers look to each other for life narratives of diverse Black experiences that enable the construction, constitution, and promulgation of a credible Black self. Moreover, Moody asserts, the persistent cultural shifts of African American life writing as literary and historical phenomena have been well documented. Joining a long trajectory of critical studies, the introduction establishes the prominence of Black life writing across US history.

Chapter 7, the concluding chapter, discusses the literary production of Manasses in light of the observations made in the close readings throughout the monograph. Returning to the theoretical considerations of the functions of occasional literature, special attention is here devoted to certain aspects of Manasses’ production: the recycling of Graeco-Roman and biblical material and his own verses within and across genres. The economy of reusing motifs, words, expressions and verses is considered from the perspective of occasional literature written on commission or in the hope of achieving commissions, but also from an aesthetic viewpoint. The ways in which Manasses comments upon his own situation as a writer and inscribes his own authorship into his texts are seen as the conscious creation of an individual voice, but also as a reflection of the Komnenian trend towards poetic self-assertiveness.

Chapter 4 examines the Encomium of Michael Hagiotheodorites and a series of letters preserved in the same manuscript. Taking its point of departure from Umberto Eco’s distinction between the empirical and the model author, the analysis focuses on the story of a writer in trouble that can be reconstructed based on the encomium and the letters. The encomium offers an elaborate praise of the learning of the addressee, but there is also a more urgent message: the writer is in trouble and he needs the help of the powerful Michael to explain to the emperor that he has been slandered by his enemies. The three letters offer further clues as to the social and historical circumstances of this situation, representing a writer who saves himself from a difficult situation by mobilizing a network of friends. Regardless of Manasses’ own experiences, that situation may well reflect the reality of a Komnenian writer on command.

Chapter 3 turns to Manasses’ production of lamentations and consolatory discourses. A model for understanding the occasional text as an expression of a cultural and semiotic relationship between writer and patron, characterised by similarity, is employed. Four texts are examined: the Monody on the death of Theodora, wife of John Kontostephanos, the Consolation for John Kontostephanos (comforting him in his sorrow at the loss of Theodora), the Funerary oration on the death of Nikephoros Komnenos and the Monody on the death of his goldfinch. John Kontostephanos, who is also mentioned in the Itinerary, and Nikephoros Komnenos both seem to have been important patrons for Manasses. The reading of the Monody on the death of his goldfinch underlines the lament’s focus on the literary activities of the narrator, where the bird – a frequent symbol in Manasses’ works – seems to function as a sort of literary muse or even rhetorical alter ego of the writer.

We first presented this project at Duke Law School in 2015. At the time, Barack Obama was ending his second term as President, and the U.S. had grown accustomed to seeing a person coded as “black” holding the country’s highest political office. Obama’s presidency seemed to hearken the unequivocal acceptance of African Americans into the cultural imaginary.