Black Opera

Janelle Monaè's _Dirty Computer: An Emotion Picture_ (2018) presents an operatic drama of queer capture and fugitivity in a dystopian near-future America. Jane 57821 (Monaè), a bisexual black woman and political dissident, has been arrested along with her lovers Zen and Chè, classified as a "dirty computer," and subjected to a "cleaning" procedure that will erase her memories. As Jane lies strapped to an operating table, helpless against the administration of "Nevermind" gas, we are exposed to rich audiovisual vignettes of queer black sex, love, and friendship, which resonate and then dissapate into the sterile silence of the cleaning facility. But Jane manages to hold onto some of her own memories, ultimately escaping from the facility with the help of Zen and Chè. Responses to Dirty Computer have reinscribed celebratory liberal rhetorics of multiculturalism, creative self-expression, and reformative politics, overlooking the film's more nuanced semiotic interrogation of white liberal personhood itself. 
This paper mobilizes feminist psychoanalyitic theory and Afropessimist critiques of subjectivity to approach Dirty Computer as an allegorical 'return of the real,' in which whiteness is ultimately destroyed through the encounter with the black female abject. My treatment of the raced and gendered psychodynamics of Dirty Computer contributes to an ongoing project of addressing feminist analysis and queer-of-color critique to the performative and political conditions of operatic form, broadly concieved. Through an intertextual reading of Kristevan and Afropessmimist discourses on primary abjection, lack, refusal and disidentification, I consider how the materialities of voice, instrumentation, sound design, image, and choreography function to disrupt symbolic logics of whiteness and heteropatriarchy in Monaè's Dirty Computer and other recent intermedia works that join black radical politics, popular musical conventions and operatic narrative structure into a synergistic semiotic assemblage. In this unstable space of genre crossings and aesthetic ruptures, we may seek for the resistance of the object and the possibility of queer black liberation.

From an elaborately decorated music room in Harlem – overflowing with scores, scrapbooks, and busts of Beethoven and Wagner – the African American composer Harry Lawrence Freeman wrote opera after opera. Ambitious and prolific, Freeman wrote his first opera in 1893 and continued to compose until his death in 1954. His twenty-plus operas are conceptually rich works that explore the African diasporic past in epic registers. Yet there is a sharp tension between the scale of Freeman's ambitions and the reality he faced. He struggled to secure performance opportunities due to financial challenges, racist dismissals, and a lack of interest from both black and white audiences. Most of his operas never left that room.
Building upon work by David Gutkin, Kira Thurman, and Naomi André, I argue that nonperformance became a crucial factor in shaping Freeman's operatic imagination – but not necessarily a limiting one. Perhaps counterintuitively, the marginalization of his work enabled an unusually generative relationship to opera's characteristic qualities of artifice, extravagance, and grandeur. I first analyze one of Freeman's earliest operas, The Martyr. An original story that revises grand-opera conventions to engage substantively with issues of racial and religious difference, The Martyr exemplifies Freeman's aesthetic and intellectual commitments; additionally, its checkered performance history illuminates Freeman's ongoing struggle to reach the operagoing public. I then show how Freeman used print culture – writing, scrapbooking, and archiving – to secure his legacy. Print became an expressive vehicle more accessible than the operatic stage and, as such, a means of self-creation through which he could insist upon his own historical significance.
Ultimately, Freeman's compositional trajectory complicates a dominant narrative of African American composition in which early-twentieth-century composers are described primarily in terms of unrealized potential. Samuel Floyd, for instance, wrote that Will Marion Cook and William L. Dawson "had ambitions and talent that transcended what they accomplished," and Alex Ross characterizes these and other black composers as the "absent center" of American composition. Attention to Freeman's life and legacy helps reorient analyses of early-twentieth-century African American musical culture away from centers and mainstreams, and toward the many musical possibilities that, beyond such spaces, thrived and flourished.

The name of Sissieretta Jones, the "Black Patti," moved trains, illuminated marquees, and filled theaters across the United States in the early twentieth century. Jones began her career as a concert singer in the mid-1880s, and, from 1896-1916, headlined the Black Patti Troubadours, an African American theatrical troupe that performed comic sketches and opera scenes on the vaudeville stage. 
I will examine how Jones created her prima donna persona through archival holdings including those at Howard University, the Schomburg Center, and the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, some of which are heretofore unexplored. Jones has not often been connected to the tradition of the operatic prima donna, likely because she only performed on the concert and vaudeville stages. I argue, however, that she assumed the role of the diva – both talented and demanding, balancing femininity and independence – in order to craft a career singing opera on concert and vaudeville stages. 
This study adds to recent research on black opera performance by Naomi André (2018), who largely focused on the 20th century, and Kira Thurman's European work (2013) with my focus on the 19th-century United States, as well as work on prima donnas and performer agency in "classical" music by Katherine Preston, Susan Rutherford, and Hilary Poriss by examining how a black woman inhabited the role. Jones knew that she would never be given a fair hearing in her time: foregrounding her agency illuminates how she was able to make choices and create a stage for herself nevertheless.

Over the course of its nineteen-year existence, the Philadelphia-based American Music Theater Festival (AMTF) garnered a national reputation for fostering and presenting innovative, often experimental, works that blurred the lines between opera, theater, and musical theater. Its location was key to its success: far enough from New York City to cultivate a spirit of creative independence, but close enough to take advantage of the larger city's talent pool. This geographic and institutional balancing act was part of AMTF from its inception in 1983, when the festival's co-founders Marjorie Samoff and Eric Salzman threw their support behind Anthony Davis's nascent opera X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X, which went on to receive its official premiere at New York City Opera (NYCO) in 1986.


This paper uses AMTF and the development history of X to examine the role of festivals and institutional networks in the creation of new American operas, as well as the inter-institutional politics, mechanisms, and aesthetics of contemporary opera production. Over the course of its four-year gestation, X (or portions thereof) was developed through The Kitchen, Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), NYCO, Springfield Symphony, and AMTF. The heterogeneity of these institutions perhaps is best illustrated by the fact that when X came to NYCO, Davis and the opera's creative team became the first artists to--in effect--racially integrate NYCO's nearly all-white orchestra by requiring the inclusion of Davis's jazz ensemble, Episteme.


Drawing on new interviews with Davis, Samoff, and others, as well as archival materials held at BAM, the New York Public Library, and Davis's personal files, I argue that AMTF functioned as an artistic incubator whose dedication to aesthetic experimentation was matched by an equally strong commitment to political progressivism. This latter, unstated element of AMTF's mission resulted in a short-term transfer of institutional values, one with significant economic ramifications for NYCO. Ultimately, I build on Naomi André's work on black opera and William Robin's studies of new music institutions to reveal and critique the racial topography of American opera in the 1980s and its legacy today.

The National Negro Opera Company (NNOC) was founded in 1941 to provide performance opportunities to African American singers who were denied roles in mainstream opera houses. My paper argues that the NNOC, which survived until 1962, reflects aesthetic and political conflict over the following question: should African Americans embrace the western canon in adherence to the principle of racial uplift associated with the Harlem Renaissance or create art that addresses their racial heritage? To support this argument, I examine the NNOC's mission statement, concert reviews, and programming. 


In the 1903 book, _The Negro Problem_, W.E.B. Du Bois promoted racial uplift, according to which elite well-educated African Americans – the "talented tenth" – would improve the cultural level and public perception of their people by consuming and imitating Western European fine art. The NNOC's mission statement supports this strategy with its aim to "Establish the proper appreciation and cultural background that Opera offers." However, the NNOC did not meekly accept the white bourgeois values transmitted through opera. The mission statement also urges composers to "create more interest in composition in the Operatic field using the background of Negro Folk Tunes," thus advancing a definition of fine art that includes African American cultural products and pushes opera to be more black.


Reviews from mainstream newspapers show the difficulty of fulfilling this two-pronged aim. The _Chicago Tribune_ criticized the company's production of _La Traviata_ for copying white man's opera instead of "breaking its own ground in search of something racial." The reviewer wanted the NNOC to create a 'racial' opera held apart from Grand Opera. This would fulfill the NNOC's stated goal of performing art with ties to the racial heritage of the performers without challenging the coding of opera as exclusively white. Growing disillusionment with racial uplift and the integration of mainstream opera houses produced changes in the NNOC's programming. Initially, the company established its legitimacy through operatic classics by Verdi and Gounod, whereas later it concentrated on works by African American composers. Examining the NNOC renders visible the strategies and challenges of deconstructing the hegemonic whiteness of classical music.