Join us for a lecture by Naomi André's entitled "Opera’s New Realism: Engaging Harm, Care and Repair."
Coupled with the scholarship of others, Naomi André's research into the construction of Black Opera (Black participation in opera through composers, librettists, subjects for plots, singers and those involved with production behind the scenes) has highlighted the insidiousness of exclusion. Black folks in the United States have been involved with opera since the nineteenth century; the erasure of this participation is painful and has caused harm.
An unexpected place to carefully repair this harm is through a recovery of this history and engaging with the present golden age of Black Opera. In this talk, André will touch on Blue (2019, Tesori and Thompson), Fire Shut Up in My Bones (2019, Blanchard and Lemmons), Omar (2022 Giddens and Abels), and Factotum (2023 Liverman and Jackson).