In this thesis, I explore the careers and songs of Florence Price and Margaret Bonds—two African American female composers who were part of the Chicago Renaissance. Price and Bonds were members of extensive, often informal, networks of Black women that fostered creativity and forged paths to success for Black female musicians during this era. Building on the work of Black feminist scholar Patricia Hill Collins, I contend that these efforts reflect Black feminist principles of Black women working together to create supportive environments, uplift one another, and foster resistance. I further argue that Black women's agency enabled the careers of Price and Bonds and that elements of Black feminism are not only present in their professional relationships, but also in their songs. Initially, I discuss how the background of the Harlem and Chicago Renaissances and racial uplift ideology shaped these women's artistic environment. I then examine how Bonds and Price incorporated, updated, and expanded versions of these ideals in their music and careers. Drawing on the scholarship of Rae Linda Brown, Angela Davis, and Tammy L. Kernodle, I analyze Price's "Song to the Dark Virgin," "Sympathy," and "Don't You Tell Me No" and Bonds's "Dream Variation," "Note on Commercial Theater," and "No Good Man" through a Black feminist lens. I contend that although Price and Bonds depicted harsh realities of Black women's experiences, they also celebrated Black women's resistance in spite of intersectional oppression. Ultimately, analyzing Black feminism in these composer's careers and songs opens a path for further exploration of how Black women's agency can facilitate activism through art.

In Rhythm Changes: Jazz Rhythm in the African American Novel, I demonstrate how novelists from the Harlem Renaissance to the Black Arts Movement adapted jazz rhythm into literary form. In the prologue to Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison famously defines invisibility as a state of being “never quite on the beat.” Ellison frames the novel as a kind of translation of the “invisible” rhythm the narrator hears in Louis Armstrong, a syncopated rhythm rooted in Black aesthetic and cultural forms. “Could this compulsion to put invisibility down in black and white be thus an urge to make music of invisibility?” Ellison was not alone in this project. The writers I study all exemplify what Duke Ellington calls a “tone parallel”—the concept that literary form could reproduce or “parallel” the particularities of musical form. However, these writers find literary strategies to transcend parallelism, such that the lines between medium begin to touch. Considering devices that cut across music and literature—anaphora, antiphonal dialogue, polysyndeton, parataxis—I argue that novelists, not just poets, respond formally to the rhythmic concepts they hear on the bandstand, synthesizing these innovations with a broader literary tradition. Rudolph Fisher’s novel The Conjure-Man Dies brings the complex rhythmic sensibility of Louis Armstrong to detective fiction; Ann Petry’s The Street channels the rhythmic phrasing of Ethel Waters in a “novel of social criticism”; Ellison’s epic unfinished second novel follows the paratactic rhythm of the preacher and jazz trombonist; and Amiri Baraka’s The System of Dante’s Hell projects the rhythm of Sonny Rollins and Cecil Taylor onto Charles Olson’s “Projective Verse.” By finding the literary in the musical and vice versa, these novelist-experimenters move beyond Pater’s credo that all art aspires to the condition of music.