From classic films like Carmen Jones to contemporary works like The Diary of Sally Hemings and U-Carmen eKhayelitsa, American and South African artists and composers have used opera to reclaim black people's place in history. Naomi Andre draws on the experiences of performers and audiences to explore this music's resonance with today's listeners. Interacting with creators and performers, as well as with the works themselves, Andre reveals how black opera unearths suppressed truths. These truths provoke complex, if uncomfortable, reconsideration of racial, gender, sexual, and other oppressive ideologies. Opera, in turn, operates as a cultural and political force that employs an immense, transformative power to represent or even liberate. Viewing opera as a fertile site for critical inquiry, political activism, and social change, Black Opera lays the foundation for innovative new approaches to applied scholarship.

About the Author
Naomi Andre is an associate professor in the departments of African and Afroamerican Studies and Women's Studies. She also is associate director in the Residential College at the University of Michigan. She is the author of Voicing Gender: Castrati, Travesti, and the Second Woman in Early-Nineteenth-Century Italian Opera and coeditor of Blackness in Opera.


Reviews
Irving Lowens Book Award, 2020
Judy Tsou Critical Race Studies Award, 2020- Irving Lowens Book Award, the Society for American Music
Irving Lowens Book Award, 2020
Judy Tsou Critical Race Studies Award, 2020- American Musicology Society (AMS)




Book Information
ISBN 9780252041921
Author Naomi Andre
Format Hardback
Page Count 282
Imprint University of Illinois Press
Publisher University of Illinois Press
Weight(grams) 513g
Dimensions(mm) 229mm * 152mm * 25mm