A Woman Is a Sometime Thing”
(Re)Covering Black Womanhood in Porgy and Bess
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 9685630 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Daphne A Brooks (Daphne A. Brooks is the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of African American Studies, American Studies, Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, and Music at Yale University. She is the author of Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Performances of Race and Freedom, 1850–1910 (2006) and Jeff Buckley's Grace (2005). She is currently working on a three-volume study of Black women and popular music culture entitled Subterranean Blues: Black Women Sound Modernity. The first volume, Liner Notes for the Revolution: The I, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2021 |
| Volume | 150 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 98-117 |
| Publication date | 2021-01-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Daedalus (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0011-5266 • E-ISSN: 1548-6192 |
| Publisher | MIT Press (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1162/daed_a_01836 |
| OpenAlex | W3120972274 |
| Language | EN |
This essay reexamines the legendary opera-musical Porgy and Bess by first tending to its origins in the dual phenomenon of early 1920s racialized sonic experimentation and the Southern literary conceits of DuBose Heyward, author of the 1925 novel Porgy on which the theater production was based. It traces the ways in which Heyward and George Gershwin's undertheorized fascination with “the vice of Black womanhood” effectively shaped the form and the content of a work often referred to as “America's most famous opera,” and it ultimately considers the ways that Black women artists navigated, complicated, and transformed the charged aesthetics of a Porgy and Bess. Their performance labor ultimately subverts an archetype whose novel roots threatened to circumscribe their representational and artistic possibility
Aesthetics · Archetype · Art · Epistemology · Literature · Musical · Opera · Phenomenon · Music History and Culture · Musicology and Musical Analysis · Philosophy · Theater, Performance, and Music History
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |