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Joel Dinerstein

writer & professor
race, music & cool
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American Cool Exhibition (National Portrait Gallery, Washington DC)

December 11, 2014 in American Cool

 

What do we mean when we say someone is cool? To be cool means to exude the aura of something new and uncontainable. Cool is the opposite of innocence or virtue. Someone cool has a charismatic edge and a dark side. Cool is an earned form of individuality.

Each generation has certain individuals who bring innovation and style to a field of endeavor while projecting a certain charismatic self-possession. They are the figures selected for this exhibition: the successful rebels of American culture.


The legendary jazz saxophonist Lester Young created the modern usage of “cool” in the 1940s. At first it meant being relaxed in one’s environment against oppressive social forces, but within a generation it became a password for stylish self-control.

For the American Cool exhibit, each icon was considered with the following historical rubric in mind and possesses at least three elements of this singular American self-concept:

  1. an original artistic vision carried off with a signature style
  2. cultural rebellion or transgression for a given generation
  3. iconic power, or instant visual recognition
  4. a recognized cultural legacy

Every cool icon here created an original persona without precedent in American culture. These photographs capture the complex relationship between the real-life person, the image embraced by fans and the media, and the person’s artistic work.

What does it mean when a generation claims a certain figure as cool? What qualities does this person embody at that historical moment? American Cool explores these questions through photography, history, and popular culture. In this exhibition, cool is rendered visible, as shot by some of the finest art photographers of the past century.

Interviews

The Reading Life, WWNO New Orleans 
Click for streaming web player. 

 

The Kojo Nnamdi Show, WAMU-FM, Washington DC, August 11, 2014
Click for streaming web player. 

 

Joel Dinerstein, associate professor of English and director of the New Orleans Center for the Gulf South, discusses the American Cool exhibit he co-curated at the Smithsonian Institution's National Portrait Gallery.

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Joel Dinerstein is a professor of English at Tulane University, where he also holds a Sizeler Professorship in Judaic Studies. He is the author of a forth-coming memoir of his immi-grant Jewish family, The Last of the Ellis Island Jews (2026), and the founding editor of a new series, Lost Classics of Jewish Literature (UNO Press). His work focuses on compara-tive racisms through cultural resistance, whether anti-Semitism or anti-Black racism. His recent work emerged from two classes: (1) Jews & Race; (2) The History of Cool.

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Dinerstein is a cultural historian and a renowned expert on the concept of cool, as featured in his TED Talk, “Why Cool Matters.” He published the first history of the concept in The Origins of Cool in Postwar America (2017), a work that shifted the paradigm of cool back to its origins in jazz, film noir, and existentialism, and away from its dismissal as a superficial tool of marketing. Dinerstein curated American Cool (2014), a popular culture and photography exhibit at the National Portrait Museum, and co-wrote its catalogue of 100 cool icons. His corporate study, Coach: A Story of New York Cool, is now a collector’s item.

Dinerstein is also a jazz scholar. His first book was an award-winning theory of jazz and industrialization — Swinging the Machine: Modernity, Technology, and African American Culture Between the World Wars (2003) — and his most recent book is a short narrative history of jazz’s emergence in five urban Black neighborhoods, Jazz: A Quick Immersion (2020). He was a jazz DJ for a decade on WWOZ-FM in New Orleans, and he is currently a consultant to the New Orleans Jazz Museum.