‘To be black is to be funny’: ‘Coon-shouting’ and the melancholic production of the white comedienne

Brooks, Lori L.

doi:10.1080/0740770x.2014.994839

Cited by 11 publications

References 8 publications

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“I'd Rather [Sound] Blue”: Listening to Agency, Hybridity, and Intersectionality in the Vocal Recordings of Fanny Brice and Barbra Streisand

Cooper

2022

J Soc American Mus

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This article locates intersectionality, agency, and hybridity within the singing voices of Fanny Brice and Barbra Streisand by comparing recordings of “I'd Rather Be Blue,” “Second Hand Rose,” and “My Man” from the surviving Vitaphone reels of Brice's My Man (1928) with the audio from the Digital Versatile Disc (DVD) of Streisand's Funny Girl (1968). Brice and Streisand's virtuosic stylized vocal performances communicate particular classed, gendered, geographic, and racialized identities for audience consumption. This project aims to restore the sonic and aural to a body of scholarship on these performers that heretofore has focused primarily on the physical and visual. An untapped inroad for analysis lies in the sonic space between these two women, one of whom attempts to posthumously portray the other. By practicing close listening on these recordings and taking seriously the Jewish right to hybrid musical expression within and beyond the United States in the twentieth century, we can move past the essentializing discourses of the US racial binary to which Jews pose a definitional challenge, and open up further avenues for thinking about Jewish sonic difference generationally and contextually.

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“I'd Rather [Sound] Blue”: Listening to Agency, Hybridity, and Intersectionality in the Vocal Recordings of Fanny Brice and Barbra Streisand

Cooper

2022

J Soc American Mus

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Racism, public pedagogy, and the construction of a United States values infrastructure, 1661–2023: a critical reflection

Becnel

2023

Journal of Philosophy of Education

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This paper argues that public pedagogy—an educational activity that takes place outside of the traditional classroom setting—has had a potent impact on the history of racism in the United States of America. Yet this paper questions why the education academy’s scholarship has not shown a commensurate focus on the subdiscipline of public pedagogy, particularly racialized public pedagogy. I explore these topics by first examining a fateful confluence of historical circumstances involving slave codes and indentured servant laws governing low-income white workers, laws passed by the Barbados Assembly in 1661, that made their way across the Atlantic to be lifted, word-for-word, by leaders of colonial territories that became the United States. These laws ended up regulating not only the legal status of black slaves and white indentured servants in the United States, but also regulating social relations between those same black and white people. The resulting black-white social relations led to the evolution of racialized customs in what eventually became the USA, inspiring practices that undergirded black inferiority and white superiority for hundreds of years. Those customs contributed to the construction of what I have labelled a United States values infrastructure dominated by racism, which I contend is a racialized values infrastructure that exists to this day. To gain more insight into this phenomenon, this paper considers the question: how might the complexity of racialized public pedagogy be addressed in the scholarship of education literature and be imagined in a way to fit into an anti-racist curriculum?

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Introduction

2024

Blues Mamas and Broadway Belters

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The introduction lays out the key questions, terms, methods, structure, and interdisciplinary concerns of the book. The definitive black musical theatre actress is often thought of in terms of The Wiz (1975) and Dreamgirls (1980), obscuring black women who starred in US musical theatre in prior decades. Similarly, the twenty-first century casting director’s shorthand for a reductive demand of black vocality—"Take me to church!”—disavows ideas of expansion, change, and vocal co-presence for black singers. By contrast, the black feminist study of singing lessons in this book unfolds a theory of song performance as sonic citation, or twice-heard behavior. Sonic citation is not about honoring the memory of black singers. Rather, it is nondiscursive, an invitation to sing in the joyful knowledge of voices one is ever singing along with.

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‘To be black is to be funny’: ‘Coon-shouting’ and the melancholic production of the white comedienne

Cited by 11 publications

References 8 publications

“I'd Rather [Sound] Blue”: Listening to Agency, Hybridity, and Intersectionality in the Vocal Recordings of Fanny Brice and Barbra Streisand

“I'd Rather [Sound] Blue”: Listening to Agency, Hybridity, and Intersectionality in the Vocal Recordings of Fanny Brice and Barbra Streisand

Racism, public pedagogy, and the construction of a United States values infrastructure, 1661–2023: a critical reflection

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