President's Plenary Lecture | "A Woman Is A Sometime Thing": Black Feminist Sound & Fury in the Porgy & Bess Archive

This lecture travels the arc of Porgy and Bess's fraught representational and formalistic history-from novel to drama to hybrid opera and musical theater production-by way of bringing to the fore the undertheorized thematic, aesthetic, and ideological immanence of mythically-conceived, wayward Black womanhood in Heyward and the Gershwins' series of racial experimentations and collaborations. This lecture recuperates the "secret history" of sonic strategy and counter-archiving deployed by a luminous array of Black women stage actors, composers, playwrights, ethnographers, and visual artists across multiple generations who inhabited or creatively critiqued the role of "Bess" and effectively dissected, disassembled, and redesigned the sound and aesthetics of Black womanhood precisely by way of wrestling with this thing that we might call the "Gershwin and Heyward problem."