Professional Mourning
Billie Holiday's "Strange Fruit" and the Remaking of Black Consciousness
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 3650374 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Samuel Galen Ng (corresponding author) |
| Year | 2023 |
| Volume | 108 |
| Issue | 4 |
| Pages | 629-655 |
| Publication date | 2023-09-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | The Journal of African American History (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1548-1867 • E-ISSN: 2153-5086 |
| Publisher | University of Chicago Press (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1086/726667 |
| OpenAlex | W4390035456 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 7 |
This article examines the impact that Billie Holiday’s singing of “Strange Fruit” had on African American audiences from 1939 until Holiday’s death in 1959. It argues that Holiday’s performances embodied and induced a state of collective mourning by way of their politically strategic efforts to frame Black existence as a site of ongoing endangerment and corresponding fear. With carefully crafted, professional expertise, Holiday’s singing generated a feeling of shared vulnerability among her Black audiences and, furthermore, presented that feeling as the very foundation of Black being. Effecting its intended political work, her singing thus prompted some of these listeners to commit themselves to eradicating the social and political conditions that reproduced the pervasive feelings of threat and trepidation structuring their own Blackness
Aesthetics · Art · Consciousness · Sociology · American and British Literature Analysis · Cinema and Media Studies · Literature, Film, and Journalism Analysis · Psychology
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |