" Shout It Out: " Patrice Rushen as polyphonist and the sounding of black women's affectability and genius (original) (raw)

“Jazz Women, Gender Politics, and the Francophone Atlantic,”

Atlantic Studies, Volume 10, Issue 1, , 2013

This article explores the francophone bourgeoisie’s class-based connection with advocates of race uplift in the United States, revealing the transnational similarities between middle-class French and American hopes and fears about racial representation through black ‘‘culture,’’ whether literary, artistic, or musical. It shows that, given this transnational context, jazz not only presented a real promise to black communities in representing their culture as innovative and civilized, but also posed a threat because of associations between jazz, primitivism, and sexually suggestive performances. Finally, it engages with the commentaries produced by black francophone women about black American performers in Paris and about black popular music. It argues that, in these commentaries, black French intellectual women began to explore how to move beyond the stereotypical images of black women generated by the jazz craze. This was a position marked by race uplift, but not necessarily a compromise position for black agency or a purely assimilationist stance. The article concludes that in the process of formulating a response to jazz, a set of literate French men and women of color began to define their ownmusic  notably the Caribbean biguine style  against jazz and to promote it as a source of pride and racial identification. In doing so, they demonstrated an early instance of Negritude values intermingled with race-uplift concerns.

“Playing Like a Man:” The Struggle of Black Women in Jazz and the Feminist Movement

2011

Ella Fitzgerald and Mary Lou Williams are two names that are firmly associated with the jazz idiom. This paper details the lives of these two women and their struggles with both race and gender throughout their careers. As the women moved through the jazz scene, they experienced prejudice not just for their race, but for their gender as well. In

Recension of the Marie Buscatto's Book, Women in Jazz: Musicality, Femininity, Marginalization

Todas as Artes Revista Luso-Brasileira de Artes e Cultura, 2022

Cristo Redentor é uma estátua que retrata Jesus Cristo, localizada no topo do morro do Corcovado, a 709 metros acima do nível do mar, com vista para parte apreciável da cidade do Rio de Janeiro. O Cristo Redentor foi criado pelo escultor francês Paul Landowski e construído pelo engenheiro brasileiro Heitor da Silva Costa, em colaboração com o engenheiro francês Albert Caquot. Construída entre 1922 e 1931, esta estátua foi produzida com concreto armado e pedra-sabão e tem trinta metros de altura-uma das maiores estátuas do mundo. Os braços do Cristo Redentor distendem-se por 28 metros de largura e a estrutura pesa 1145 toneladas. Para além de ser um símbolo do cristianismo, o Cristo igualmente se tornou um ícone cultural do Rio de Janeiro, do Brasil e da América Latina, sendo retratado no cinema, na televisão e na música. O monumento é um importante ponto turístico, que recebe, em média, 2 milhões de visitantes por ano. Christ the Redeemer is a statue depicting Jesus Christ, located atop Corcovado Mountain, 709 metres above sea level, overlooking an appreciable part of the city of Rio de Janeiro. Christ the Redeemer was created by French sculptor Paul Landowski and built by Brazilian engineer Heitor da Silva Costa, in collaboration with French engineer Albert Caquot. Constructed between 1922 and 1931, this statue was produced with reinforced concrete and soapstone and stands thirty metres high-one of the largest statues in the world. The arms of Christ the Redeemer extend 28 metres across and the structure weighs 1145 tonnes. As well as being a symbol of Christianity, the Christ has also become a cultural icon of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil and Latin America, being portrayed in film, television and music. The monument is an important tourist attraction, receiving an average of 2 million visitors per year.

Race, Space, and Gender in Ed Bland's The Cry of Jazz

Quarterly Review of Film and Video, 2013

Ed Bland's film The Cry of Jazz has been subject to increasing critical and scholarly interest since its re-release (on DVD) in 2006. Ostensibly a narrative of a musical genre, Jazz is at the same time a discourse on race relations circa the late 1950s and a meditation on African American identity. In this essay, we seek to situate this meditation within the larger social and cultural registers of both race and gender. It is our contention that, utilizing jazz as the site of struggle, Bland expresses the crisis of race relations as a crisis through gender in his presentation of a struggle for racial equality as the contest between black and white men over the possession and control of white women. Further underlining the significance of gender, black women, in a denial of their subjectivity, remain almost entirely absent from the film. The film's sexual politics is, then, a key problematic that, as it valorizes the creative expression of the black American male experience, serves to marginalize the presence, and silence the voice, of black women. Gender, though unexamined explicitly in the film, takes on significance precisely because of Bland's positing of jazz as the most profound expression of black American identity. If there is no place for black women within Bland's schematic, then the "world-making" project of jazz as conceived within The Cry of Jazz is deeply compromised. When it was first released in 1959, The Cry of Jazz was intended as a filmic response to what Bland described as the "barrage of nonsense" encountered from those who "were musically illiterate, would lecture [him] about jazz music, which they couldn't

Listening Backward: Sonic Intimacies and Cross-Racial, Queer Resonance

Performance Matters, 2020

Documenting my encounters as a white queer scholar with the sonic archive of the late Black American lesbian comic Jackie “Moms” Mabley, this paper explores the cross-racial/sexual politics of sonic historiography. Through what I term listening backward, I examine how sound procures queer sonic intimacies between critic and subject: the repetitive listening, soundwaves directly travelling from one voice to one person, and most pertinently, the historical and sociocultural contexts that make consumption of such exchange possible and/or fraught. This listening practice centres on relational and resonant modes of archiving through sound and asks: (1) How can exploring methods of sonic documentation align performance studies’ commitment to archiving the affective? (2) What might attention to not only the product of such documentation but also its performative processes offer about how the sonic can deepen modes of performance historiography and the racial/sexual politics of listening? (3) What practices of listening can centre queer intimacies and temporalities in the archive?