Humanities Forum: Daphne Harrison Lecture with Naomi André

Opera’s New Realism: Expanding Narratives and Representation
Naomi André, David G. Frey Distinguished Professor, Music, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
The Annual Daphne Harrison Lecture, part of the Spring 2024 Humanities Forum
Featuring UMBC’s Jubilee Singers under the direction of Janice Jackson

Since its beginnings, opera as a genre has explored “real” portrayals through naturalism and the depiction of events from history. In many ways, nineteenth-century opera fulfilled the same cultural functions that film and the cinema achieved in the twentieth century. Like other forms of media, opera in the twenty-first century continues to evolve. As opera begins to cater to more diverse audiences, performances today frequently embrace a broader mission that engages social justice in the movements around #MeToo, Queer and Trans spectrums, and Black Lives Matter. Many creative teams are weaving new narratives and representations into their productions to help address the underrepresentation of marginalized voices and repair the harm of exclusion. In this joint concert-lecture, Naomi André will explore these themes in operas coming out of diasporas involving Blackness.

Naomi André is the David G. Frey Distinguished Professor in the Department of Music at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Professor Emerita at the University of Michigan in Afroamerican and African Studies, Women’s and Gender Studies, and the Residential College. Her publications include the books Black Opera: History, Power, Engagement and Voicing Gender: Castrati, Travesti, and the Second Woman in Early Nineteenth-Century Italian Opera and co-edited collections African Performance Arts and Political Acts and Blackness in Opera. She has worked with opera companies and symphonies, and is a founding member of the Black Opera Research Network (BORN).

Co-sponsored by the Department of Music and the Department of Africana Studies.