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.| Title Copyright Contents Acknowledgments 1 Engaged Opera 2 Black Opera across the Atlantic: Writing Black Music History and Opera's Unusual Place 3 Haunted Legacies: Interracial Secrets From the Diary of Sally Hemings 4 Contextualizing Race and Gender in Gershwin's Porgy and Bess 5 Carmen: From Nineteenth-Century France to Settings in the United States and South Africa in the 6 Winnie, Opera, and South African Artistic Nationhood Conclusion: Engaged Musicology, Political Action, and Social Justice Notes Bibliography Index | Irving Lowens Book Award, 2020
Judy Tsou Critical Race Studies Award, 2020 — Irving Lowens Book Award, the Society for American Music
Irving Lowens Book Award, 2020
Judy Tsou Critical Race Studies Award, 2020 — American Musicology Society (AMS)
|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.