#black performance

[kpopulr]

[leftofblack]

Left of Black S8:E4: Genealogies of Black Feminist Art and Performance    

On this episode of Left of Black host Mark Anthony Neal sits down with Professor Uri McMillan to discuss his recent book  Embodied Avatars: Genealogies of Black Feminist Art and Performance. McMillan is an Associate Professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles with joint appointments in the Departments of African-American Studies and Gender Studies and active affiliation with the Center for Performance Studies.

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Left of Black is hosted by Mark Anthony Neal and produced by Catherine Angst of the John Hope Franklin Center at Duke University and in collaboration with the Center for Arts + Digital Culture + Entrepreneurship (CADCE) and the Duke Council on Race + Ethnicity (DCORE).

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Follow Left of Black on Twitter: @LeftofBlack

[tajalindley]

The Bag Lady Manifesta 9.9.2017 📷 Jennifer Coard TajaLindley.com

[profkew]

Ground broken for historic National Negro Opera Company house's restoration

Restoring a deteriorating, 19th-century house isn’t what comes to mind when most people describe their dream. But Jonnet Solomon, a musician

In the 1940s, opera singer Mary Cardwell Dawson founded the company and staged performances in Pittsburgh, New York, Chicago and Washington, D.C.

[bobonbooks]

Growing Up in Working Class Youngstown -- Betty Allen

Growing Up in Working Class Youngstown — Betty Allen

She performed in opera performances as a mezzo-soprano on stages around the world to standing ovations. She was part of the first generation of Black opera singers, along with Marian Anderson to achieve wide success, breaking down racial barriers with her voice. She collaborated with the foremost American composers of her generation: Leonard Bernstein, Aaron Copland, Ned Rorem, and Virgil…

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[bobonbooks]

Review: A Little Devil in America

Review: A Little Devil in America

A Little Devil in America, Hanif Abdurraqib. New York: Random House, 2021. Summary: A celebration of Black performance and its significance for Blacks in America. Just over a year ago, I read a couple of Hanif Abdurraqib’s essays in an anthology of Columbus writers. Little did I realize how much I would encounter this Columbus writer’s name in the next year, culminating in his recent award of a…

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[salonnierealexis]

Abdurraqib also notes that there has never been a shortage of Black people willing to perform their Blackness for the right audience. Bert Williams, the vaudeville comedian, wore blackface to get a job at the Ziegfeld Follies, performing his Blackness so well that white critics said he “transcended race” and seemed “almost detached from his race altogether.” Abdurraqib recalls an episode of “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air” in which Carlton is rejected from a Black fraternity by its president because he is “Not Like the Other Blacks.” Abdurraqib points out that by the end of the episode, the audience is left wondering if it is Carlton, the Tom Jones-loving prep, or the dashiki-wearing fraternity president who is the one performing his Blackness. Here’s where the book gets more interesting. Abdurraqib acknowledges that he knows what it’s like to be in Carlton’s position and “dislocated from a specific set of Blackness.” The more challenging issue, he confesses, is that he has also been the fraternity president, forcing other Black people to hew to his expectations when, as he puts it, “we are all outside the borders of someone else’s idea of what Blackness is.” It’s one of the more powerful observations in the book, and it’s reinforced by each of the lives Abdurraqib captures so well. “The problem is that there is no way to prove oneself Black enough for every type of Black identity in the States, let alone the world,” he writes. It’s a lonely proposition and Abdurraqib doesn’t pretend to have any solutions. Rather, he is left thinking “how crucial it is to love Black people even when feeling indicted by them. Even when that indictment is not out of love (which of course it sometimes is), but out of them clocking you for a standard you are not capable of rising to.”

April 2, 2021

A LITTLE DEVIL IN AMERICA Notes in Praise of Black Performance By Hanif Abdurraqib

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/02/books/review/a-little-devil-in-america-black-performance-hanif-abdurraqib.html?campaign_id=69&emc=edit_bk_20210604&instance_id=32326&nl=books®i_id=43453557&segment_id=59935&te=1&user_id=06f6767785a14352b47f4490384ee56a