A look at the emotion and movement of black artistic performances can help people understand the messages communicated by black icons from Beyonce to Barack Obama, according to several speakers at "Black Theatricality: Race and Representation in Black Literature and Culture." The conference, held Friday and Saturday, also focused on the relationship between black theatricality and social and political issues.
Throughout the conference, audience members and scholars addressed issues that could affect the past, present and future of African studies. Discussions partly covered the interaction of politics, literature and race in shaping issues like black sexuality, nationalism and trans-nationalism, cultural stereotypes and gender boundaries.
"Performance is a useful theoretical tool to engage in these issues," English professor Soyica Colbert, who helped to organize the event, said. "Performance allows for us to think about issues that exceed the text. Music isn't confined to the score we read."
The cultural history of "loft jazz" in downtown New York City is one example of the way the black performers' circumstances affected their artistic expression, according to keynote lecturer Brent Hays Edwards, a professor at Columbia University. In the 1970s, musicians would set up performance spaces in former industrial buildings in Manhattan, creating a vibrant, interdisciplinary space that fostered multimedia collaboration and artistic expression, he said.
Loft jazz was also influenced by African tribal music and dance, Edwards said, citing the piece "Dogon A.D.," a collaborative work by New York-based jazz musicians Julius Hemphill, Baikida Carroll and Abdul Wadud.
Hemphill's saxophone opera "Long Tongues" also shows the role of theatricality in the black experience, Edwards added. The piece, a one-movement work of "non-thing" sounds combined elements of jazz, blues, Afro-music, dance and film, he said. It was influenced by Ralph Ellison's novel "Invisible Man" and framed as an intellectual work, utilizing African surrealism, rhetorical stylings and improvised repartee in order to offer a "broad and penetrating reading of society," Edwards said.
At one of the conference panels, Princeton University professor Daphne Brooks used jazz singer Eartha Kitt's cabaret performances as an example of the way music can transcend social paradigms. Kitt's virtuosity, characterized by her ability to perform songs in English, French, Italian and Spanish disrupted racial expectations and established her place in a "zone outside of conventional boundaries of nation, race and class," Brooks said.
Improvised live performances and speeches allow the performer to react to the audience in ways that can motivate and create social change, according to Colbert. She cited Duke University professor Maurice Wallace's discussion of Martin Luther King Jr.'s "alluring vibrato" and the role it had in King's speeches.
"[Leaders and performers] can, and do, use it to create something beautiful, say something brilliant, motivate a crowd, calm a crowd," Colbert said of their use of theatricality.
After King's assassination, political leaders used performance to urge people into quiescence, Colbert said. Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Sandy Alexandre incorporated this idea of "stillness and quiet" into her photo series, "The Death of Emmett Till," which highlights the political power of silence, according to Colbert.
Conference organizers said they hoped to create an atmosphere at the conference where students, faculty members and influential scholars could discuss the status and future of African studies, particularly in its relationship to social justice, politics and the way race is often tied to "blackness."
"We wanted to unravel [blackness] and have a discussion about it," Colbert said. "What kind of discussion can we have with scholars and what do we understand about race now? Blackness has meaning in the 21st century."
Several speakers at the conference responded to the idea of a "post-racial" America.
The term "post-race" emerged from a conversation among black artists who did not want to be "pigeonholed," according to Colbert. Such artists envisioned a future when they could engage artistically with any kind of subject without other critics searching for a hidden racial context.
Speakers pointing the implications of a post-racial approach for identity-based programs like African-American, Asian-American and Latino studies.
"Why do we necessarily associate a black artist's art with its physical artist?" Colbert asked. "Why can't he be doing anything unrelated to race? If we had more nuanced language, we could have a more open discussion about this subject."
Dartmouth English professors Michael Chaney and Sam Vasquez also helped organize the conference, which was held in celebration of the 40th anniversary of the African and African-American Studies program at the College.
