Africa as Voices and Vibes

Musical Routes in Toni Morrison's Margaret Garner and Desdemona

Bibliographic Data

ID9251105
AuthorsSerena Guarracino (0000-0001-9347-048X, corresponding author), Guarracino Guarracino
Year2015
Volume46
Issue4
Pages56
Publication date2015-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueResearch in African Literatures (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0034-5210 • E-ISSN: 1527-2044
PublisherIndiana University Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.2979/reseafrilite.46.4.56
OpenAlexW2186055908
LanguageEN
Citations received1
References cited14

This essay provides a tentative mapping of the musical Africa emerging from Toni Morrison’s two recent forays into musical theater, the opera Margaret Garner (2005) and the theatrical piece Desdemona (2011). Both works operate as affective events taking place in performance, and while neither is actually set in Africa, both enact a memory of pre-Middle Passage experience through music. Margaret Garner , set in the US, goes back to the slave woman who killed her children—an event that had already inspired Morrison’s novel Beloved (1987)—and explores the echoes of Africa in the New World. In Desdemona , the afterlife encounter between the Shakespearean heroine and her former nanny, Barbary, contains numerous evocations of Africa, first and foremost suggested through Malian artist Rokia Traore’s idiosyncratic singing. Hence, in both works memories of an African past haunt a present elsewhere by the persistence of sound; this allows for a different approach to Africa, one that is not “represented” as much as “staged” through aural flows enacting the experience of affective memory via the global musical landscape

Acoustics · Afterlife · Art · Literature · Musical · Opera · Singing · Visual arts · History · Music History and Culture · Theater, Performance, and Music History · Theatre and Performance Studies

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