Ethics of Improvisation

Tracey Nicholls is an assistant professor of philosophy and co-director of the Women’s Studies Program at Lewis University, in the Chicago area. Born in New Zealand and raised in Canada, she brings her lived experience as an inhabitant of the British Commonwealth to bear on North American considerations of colonialism, multiculturalism, and creative ways to address social marginalization. She received her BA (2000) from the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, and her PhD (2006) from McGill University in Montreal. After defending the doctoral dissertation from which this book has developed, she took up a postdoctoral fellowship at the Centre de Recherche en Éthique de l’Université de Montréal (CRÉUM), where she wrote articles on the politics of representation in the jazz world (published in Critical Studies in Improvisation), the role improvisatory norms can play in building civil society (published in The C.L.R. James Journal), and the challenges faced by female musicians in improvised music communities (published in Cahiers de la Société québécoise de recherche en musique). In addition to her work on the political implications of aesthetic activities, and the ethics of improvisation that can be drawn out of these communities, she also publishes in decolonization theory, peace studies, Caribbean philosophy, and feminist theory.Her first book with Lexington was a co-edited volume, Fanon and the Decolonization of Philosophy (2010), and she is also presently working on two other co-edited volumes: one analyzing the nature and variety of social privileges; the other examining possibilities for cosmopolitan peacebuilding. Her teaching and student-related research focuses on the structural violence produced through social inequities and abusive relationships. She is a research associate with the Improvisation, Community, and Social Practice Project (a multi-university Government of Canada-funded research initiative), and a member of the American Philosophical Association, the Canadian Philosophical Association, the Caribbean Philosophical Association, the Concerned Philosophers for Peace, and the Society for Existential and Phenomenological Theory and Culture. She is also currently working with a group of colleagues at Lewis University to build a peace and social justice presence on campus, in the hope that this will one day include a peace studies program and research center.

• Introduction: Our Political PresentChapter One: Possibilities for a Political FutureChapter Two: Respecting ResistanceChapter Three: Aesthetic PerspectivesChapter Four: Aesthetic PitfallsChapter Five: Political PerspectivesChapter Six: Political PitfallsChapter Seven: Improvising Communities

In my judgment, An Ethics of Improvisation is a masterful work . . . It succeeds in establishing important new bridges between music and politics. A really impressive volume.