Alive in the sound: Black music as counterhistory

Introduction. Black labor, value, and the anomalies of enlivened sound

First metamorphosis : property's properties of reconstructive possibility

Slave labor and the emergence of a peculiar music

Second metamorphosis : free labor and the racial-economic transaction of animated form

Scabrous sounds of a vagrant proletariat

Minstrelsy's incredible corporealities

Third metamorphosis : contests of ownership in early national markets

Ragtime's double-time accumulation

New coalescences of spectacular form : stride piano and ragtime piano rolls

Commodity circuits and the making of a jazz counterhistory

Fourth metamorphosis : racialized embodiments of hypercapitalized pop

Swing : black music's new modern becoming

Living forms, imagined truths : aesthetic breakthroughs in jazz at mid-century

Apotheosis of a new black music

Afterword : modernity's ghosts.