Presents innovative formulations for how African performance and the arts shape the narratives of cultural history and politics. This collection engages with a breadth of African countries and art forms, bringing together speech, hip hop, religious healing, theatre and social justice, opera, radio, protest songs, and migrant workers' dances.
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.
The early 19th century was a period of acute transition in operatic tradition and style, when time-honoured practices gave way to the developing aesthetics of Romanticism, and the heroic, the masculine, and the feminine were profoundly reconfigured. This book traces the development of female characters in these first decades of the century.