Black Opera: History, Power, Engagement - Softcover

André, Naomi

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0252083571 ISBN 13: 9780252083570

Publisher: University of Illinois Press, 2018

Synopsis

From classic films like Carmen Jones to contemporary works like The Diary of Sally Hemings and U-Carmen eKhayelitsa, American and South African artists and composers have used opera to reclaim black people's place in history. Naomi André draws on the experiences of performers and audiences to explore this music's resonance with today's listeners. Interacting with creators and performers, as well as with the works themselves, André reveals how black opera unearths suppressed truths. These truths provoke complex, if uncomfortable, reconsideration of racial, gender, sexual, and other oppressive ideologies. Opera, in turn, operates as a cultural and political force that employs an immense, transformative power to represent or even liberate. Viewing opera as a fertile site for critical inquiry, political activism, and social change, Black Opera lays the foundation for innovative new approaches to applied scholarship.

About this title

About the Author

Naomi André is an associate professor in the departments of African and Afroamerican Studies and Women's Studies. She also is associate director in the Residential College at the University of Michigan. She is the author of Voicing Gender: Castrati, Travesti, and the Second Woman in Early-Nineteenth-Century Italian Opera and coeditor of Blackness in Opera.
 

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Illinois Press
• Publication date: 2018
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0252083571
• ISBN 13: 9780252083570
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 282