scholarly journals “A Woman Is a Sometime Thing”: (Re)Covering Black Womanhood in Porgy and Bess

Daedalus ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 150 (01) ◽  
pp. 98-117
Author(s):  
Daphne A. Brooks
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
Women Artists ◽  
Black Womanhood ◽  
Porgy And Bess ◽  
Theater Production

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.

scholarly journals Urban specters

2021 ◽  
pp. 026377582110302
Author(s):  
Asha Best ◽  
Margaret M Ramírez
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Black Women ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Women Artists ◽  
Social Life ◽  
The United States ◽  
Spatial Method ◽  
Urban Futures ◽  
Black Life ◽  
The Relationship

In this piece, we take up haunting as a spatial method to consider what geography can learn from ghosts. Following Avery Gordon’s theorizations of haunting as a sociological method, a consideration of the spectral offers a means of reckoning with the shadows of social life that are not always readily apparent. Drawing upon art installations in Brooklyn, NY, White Shoes (2012–2016), and Oakland, CA, House/Full of BlackWomen (2015–present), we find that in both installations, Black women artists perform hauntings, threading geographies of race, sex, and speculation across past and present. We observe how these installations operate through spectacle, embodiment, and temporal disjuncture, illuminating how Black life and labor have been central to the construction of property and urban space in the United States. In what follows, we explore the following questions: what does haunting reveal about the relationship between property, personhood, and the urban in a time of racial banishment? And the second, how might we think of haunting as a mode of refusing displacement, banishment, and archival erasure as a way of imagining “livable” urban futures in which Black life is neither static nor obsolete?

Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-19
Author(s):  
Hannah Durkin
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
Women Artists ◽  
White Men ◽  
Women Dancers ◽  
Young Black Women ◽  
The Right ◽  
Transatlantic Culture ◽  
Josephine Baker ◽  
Textual Records

This book explores Josephine Baker and Katherine Dunham’s contributions to the page and screen to shed new light on their intellectual interventions as Black women artists in midcentury transatlantic culture. Cinematic and literary spaces were for Baker and Dunham sites of mediation and marginalization in which they frequently shared authorship with white men. Yet they are also rare visual and textual records of Black women dancers’ midcentury artistry and authorship. On the page, they voiced the challenges of navigating interwar global spaces as young Black women, and their narratives shed vital light on the origins and purpose of their art. On the screen, they claimed the right to stardom while at the same time retaining some artistic autonomy and even shaping their films’ aesthetics.

A Second hand Kind of Terror

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alisha Gaines
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
Black Woman ◽  
House Staff ◽  
The Political ◽  
Johnson Administration ◽  
White House ◽  
Black Womanhood ◽  
Black Sexuality ◽  
John Howard ◽  
Previous Scholarship

Chapter Three considers the political, racial, and social crises plaguing the late 1960s by reading Soul Sister, Grace Halsell’s 1969 memoir. A freelance journalist and a White House staff writer for the Lyndon B. Johnson administration, Halsell was also a protégé of John Howard Griffin, who famously passed for black in 1959. While previous scholarship on Griffin has wrestled with his place as an enduring icon of racial empathy, this chapter details Griffin’s previously unknown mentorship of Halsell. Bolstered by extensive archival research, this chapter demonstrates how Halsell prepared for her performance of black womanhood by relying exclusively on Griffin’s instruction without any advice from black women. The chapter also situates Halsell’s blackness within important discussions around the contentious relationship between racial equality and 2nd wave feminism. Ultimately, Halsell’s six-months as a black woman in Harlem and Mississippi during the burgeoning black power movement ironically reveals grotesque assumptions about black sexuality, authenticity, and class.

From New Black Realism to Tyler Perry

2016 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 70-91 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kameron J. Copeland
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
Black Men ◽  
Black Masculinity ◽  
Black Female ◽  
Black Womanhood ◽  
Successful Approach ◽  
Female Audience

In the midst of a revival of gospel theater aimed at Black female Christian audiences, Tyler Perry mastered a successful approach to Black independent gospel plays. Eventually, Perry transferred his work to the film screen, exploring the struggles of Black women in their relationships with Black men. While his depiction of Black men has garnered much controversy, Perry characterizes Black masculinity throughout his romantic storylines using a formulaic approach seeking to uplift his predominately Black female audience, while exploring the faults and various tropes of Black masculinity. In Perry’s female-oriented romantic storylines, Black men are usually categorized as an affluent shape-shifter, neglected love interest, transformed hard worker, crooked hoodlum, or Black messiah redux. Throughout this study, Perry’s usage of these characterizations is explored. Unlike 1990s New Black Realism films, which could have driven the explosion of female-oriented gospel-themed works, Perry fuses Black theological perceptions of manhood with a patriarchal-centered exploration of Black womanhood.

The “Batty” Politic: Toward an Aesthetic of the Black Female Body

Hypatia ◽  
2003 ◽  
Vol 18 (4) ◽  
pp. 87-105
Author(s):  
Janell Hobson
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
Women Artists ◽  
Female Body ◽  
Black Female ◽  
Black Feminist ◽  
Disability Theory ◽  
History Of ◽  
Feminist Disability Theory

I assess representations of black women's derrieres, which are often depicted as grotesque, despite attempts by some black women artists to create a black feminist aesthetic that recognizes the black female body as beautiful and desirable. Utilizing a black feminist disability theory, I revisit the history of the Hottentot Venus, which contributed to the shaping of this representational trope, and I identify a recurring struggle among these artists to recover the “unmirrored” black female body.

“Something a bit more personal”: Digital storytelling and intimacy among queer Black women

Sexualities ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 23 (8) ◽  
pp. 1434-1456
Author(s):  
Dominique Adams-Santos
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
Narrative Analysis ◽  
Coming Out ◽  
Sexual Difference ◽  
Black Womanhood ◽  
Discursive Strategies ◽  
White Middle Class ◽  
Sexually Explicit ◽  
Cultural Texts ◽  
Discursive Strategy

Coming-out stories are important cultural texts wherein individuals articulate and interpret experiences of identifying as sexual minorities. Yet, much of the extant literature on coming-out stories examines narratives by white, middle-class gay men and lesbians. Critical inquiry into coming-out stories told by privileged queer subjects points to the formulaic and normative characteristics of their narratives, where sexual difference is downplayed or challenged. The goal of this article, then, is to ask whether and how coming-out narratives told by queer Black women conform to or depart from the “coming-out formula story.” Using an intersectional approach to narrative analysis, this article investigates the performative and discursive strategies that 50 women use in telling their coming-out stories on YouTube. Findings show that queer Black women’s use of intimate candor—the performative and discursive strategy of publicly revealing interior, often sexually explicit, aspects of the self—is a means through which women center desire and queerness; articulate a vision of queer Black womanhood; and complicate the coming-out formula.

Material Girls: Contemporary Black Women Artists

2012 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 109-114
Author(s):  
Adrienne L. Childs
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
Women Artists

scholarly journals Formulating Black Womanhood: A Study on Beyoncé’s Hip-Hop Song Lyrics in Beyoncé Platinum Edition Album

2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 12
Author(s):  
Ika Ayu Larasati
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
Hip Hop ◽  
Interdisciplinary Approach ◽  
Social Background ◽  
African American Culture ◽  
Black Womanhood ◽  
Mother And Daughter ◽  
Song Lyrics ◽  
Music Lyrics ◽  
The Relationship

This article aims at understanding the Black womanhood concept through Hip-Hop song lyrics, since song lyrics are not only a part of art but also a media to express people’s feelings, education, therapy and entertainment. This article also helps the readers to understand that sexuality portrayed in Hip-Hop song lyrics stands for something and has a function because music is related to the social background, message, function, and effect generated from the artwork.The qualitative method and interdisciplinary approach are used in conducting this article, which involves the literature, history, culture, sociology, and to enhance the understanding of multi-ethnic America, especially about Black womanhood. The article starts with introduction, a discussion about African American culture in general. To produce an up to date writing, the article choses the recent popular singer, Beyonce. In finding Black womanhood concepts in Beyonce’s lyrics. One thing that also needs to be highlighted is Black women’s sexuality.The findings are about Black womanhood from Beyonce’s standpoint, such as the Black woman’s self-definition, the sisterhood, the relationship between mother and daughter, and the relationship with Black men. In addition, since it highlights the Black woman’s sexuality in Hip-Hop that is based on Beyonce’s songs, it indicates that recently Black women began to realize that they have power over their own body.Keywords: Black womanhood, sexuality, Hip-Hop music, Lyrics

Geographies of Pain, Geographies of Pleasure

Walking Raddy ◽  
2018 ◽  
pp. 31-44
Author(s):  
LaKisha Michelle Simmons
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
New Orleans ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Racial Violence ◽  
Police Brutality ◽  
Black Womanhood ◽  
Performance Culture ◽  
Female Performance ◽  
Women And Girls ◽  
The City

In this chapter, LaKisha Simmons argues that the Jim Crow streets in New Orleans were sites of racial violence for black women and girls. By exploring cases of assault and police brutality on the city streets during segregation, the chapter contends that bodily vulnerability defined black womanhood. Yet despite the violence and trauma of Jim Crow life, black women went out on the streets in search of pleasure. Simmons contends that the Million Dollar Baby Dolls declared their humanity and reclaimed their bodies by seeking out pleasure. Simmons analyzes Ralston Crawford photographs of black women dancing and partying to better understand pleasure geographies and black female performance culture in New Orleans during segregation.

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