Book Review

From its opening lines, Brassroots Democracy: Maroon Ecologies and the Jazz Commons invokes a spirit of protest and resistance against centuries of anti-Black violence.This ongoing political struggle, in parallel with the continued racial violence it must respond to, is both ever-changing and yet ever present.For Benjamin Barson, among many historians, the "specter of plantation hierarchy" is still felt in contemporary forms of brutality against Black people (1).And yet, despite this common throughline in critical studies of racial inequality, Barson identifies a significant disconnect between histories of radical resistance and retellings of the early jazz era.Answering the call to intervention initiated by abolitionist and anticolonial scholars such as Angela Davis and Franz Fanon, Brassroots Democracy problematizes this misunderstanding of jazz history and the Black radical tradition, which characterizes the music of turn-of-the-century New Orleans as largely "apolitical" (7). 1 Rather, this text weaves a rich and complex narrative of the "birthplace" (or perhaps places) of jazz, one which refuses to ignore the immense "ideological stakes" of the genre (2).The book's driving political impetus is elucidated by its core framing device: Barson's titular neologism, "brassroots democracy."A portmanteau of "grassroots" activist practices and the historic brass band tradition that New Orleans in particular has become famous for, brassroots democracy is "the practice of performative assembly that laid the foundation for the simultaneous and syncretic expansion of public and musical spheres" (214).Barson focuses on the "performative assembly" of Black and Afro-Creole musicians up to and immediately following emancipation, through the periods of Black Reconstruction and the Jim Crow era, and against the political and ecological backdrop of the U.S. American south as well as the neighboring Caribbean and Mexico.This expanded geographic milieu laid out in Brassroots Democracy opens a newly invigorated examination into the role of cross-Caribbean migration and