Author: Emily Wilbourne
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0197646913
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 521
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Book Description
"Grounded in new archival research documenting a significant presence of foreign and racially-marked individuals in Medici Florence, this book argues for the relevance of such individuals to the history of Western music and for the importance of sound-particularly musical and vocal sounds-to systems of racial and ethnic difference. Many of the individuals discussed in these pages were subject to enslavement or conditions of unfree labor; some labored at tasks that were explicitly musical or theatrical, while all intersected with sound and with practices of listening that afforded full personhood only to particular categories of people. Integrating historical detail alongside contemporary performances and musical conventions, this book makes the forceful claim that operatic musical techniques were-from their very inception-imbricated with racialized differences. Race, Voice, and Slavery in Seventeenth-Century Florence offers both a macro and micro approach to its content. The first half of the volume draws upon a wide range of archival, theatrical and historical sources to articulate the theoretical interdependence of razza (lit. "race"), voice, and music in early modern Italy; the second half focuses on the life and work of a specific, racially-marked individual: the enslaved, Black, male soprano singer, Giovannino Buonaccorsi (fl. 1651-1674). Race, Voice, and Slavery in Seventeenth-Century Florence reframes the place of racial difference in Western art music and provides a compelling pre-history to later racial formulations of the sonic"--
Author: D. R. M. Irving
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0197632203
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 353
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Book Description
Musical representations of Europe in myth and allegory are well known, but when and under what circumstances did the words "European" and "music" become linked together? What did the resulting term mean in music before 1800 and how did it evolve into the label "Western music," which features so prominently in pedagogical and scholarly discourses? In The Making of European Music in the Long Eighteenth Century, author D. R. M. Irving traces the emergence of such large-scale categories in Western European thought. Beginning in the 1670s, Jesuit missionaries in China began to refer to "European music," and for the next hundred years the term appeared almost exclusively in comparison with musics from other parts of the world. It entered common use from the 1770s, and in the 1830s became synonymous with a new concept of "Western music." Western European writers also associated these terms with notions of "progress" and "perfection." Meanwhile, changing ideas about "modern" Europe's cultural relationship with classical antiquity, together with theories that systematically and condescendingly racialized people from other continents, influenced the ways that these scholars imagined and interpreted musical pasts around the globe. Irving weaves his analyses throughout the book's historical examinations, suggesting that "European music" originates from self-fashioning in contexts of intercultural comparison outside the continent, rather than from the resolution of national aesthetic differences within it. He shows that "Western music" as understood today arose in line with the growth of Orientalism and increasing awareness of musics of "the East." All such reductive terms often imply homogeneity and essentialism, and Irving asks what a reassessment of their beginnings might mean for music history. Taken as a whole, the book shows how a renewed critique of primary sources can help dismantle historiographical constructs that arose within narratives of musical pasts involving Europe.
Author: Nicholas R. Jones
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271099089
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 203
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Book Description
There is no shortage of Black characters in Miguel de Cervantes’s works, yet there has been a profound silence about the Spanish author’s compelling literary construction and cultural codification of Black Africans and sub-Saharan Africa. In Cervantine Blackness, Nicholas R. Jones reconsiders in what sense Black subjects possess an inherent value within Cervantes’s cultural purview and literary corpus. In this unflinching critique, Jones charts important new methodological and theoretical terrain, problematizing the ways emphasis on agency has stifled and truncated the study of Black Africans and their descendants in early modern Spanish cultural and literary production. Through the lens of what he calls “Cervantine Blackness,” Jones challenges the reader to think about the blind faith that has been lent to the idea of agency—and its analogues “presence” and “resistance”—as a primary motivation for examining the lives of Black people during this period. Offering a well-crafted and sharp critique, through a systematic deconstruction of deeply rooted prejudices, Jones establishes a solid foundation for the development of a new genre of literary and cultural criticism. A searing work of literary criticism and political debate, Cervantine Blackness speaks to specialists and nonspecialists alike—anyone with a serious interest in Cervantes’s work who takes seriously a critical reckoning with the cultural, historical, and literary legacies of agency, antiblackness, and refusal within the Iberian Peninsula and the global reaches of its empire.
Author: Emily Wilbourne
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022640157X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 240
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Book Description
In this book, Emily Wilbourne boldly traces the roots of early opera back to the sounds of the commedia dell’arte. Along the way, she forges a new history of Italian opera, from the court pieces of the early seventeenth century to the public stages of Venice more than fifty years later. Wilbourne considers a series of case studies structured around the most important and widely explored operas of the period: Monteverdi’s lost L’Arianna, as well as his Il Ritorno d’Ulisse and L’incoronazione di Poppea; Mazzochi and Marazzoli’s L’Egisto, ovvero Chi soffre speri; and Cavalli’s L’Ormindo and L’Artemisia. As she demonstrates, the sound-in-performance aspect of commedia dell’arte theater—specifically, the use of dialect and verbal play—produced an audience that was accustomed to listening to sonic content rather than simply the literal meaning of spoken words. This, Wilbourne suggests, shaped the musical vocabularies of early opera and facilitated a musicalization of Italian theater. Highlighting productive ties between the two worlds, from the audiences and venues to the actors and singers, this work brilliantly shows how the sound of commedia performance ultimately underwrote the success of opera as a genre.
Author: Aine O’Healy
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253037204
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 281
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Book Description
During a period of heightened global concerns about the movement of immigrants and refugees across borders, Migrant Anxieties explores how filmmakers in Italy have probed the tensions accompanying the country's shift from an emigrant nation to a destination point for over five million immigrants over the course of three decades. Áine O'Healy traces a phenomenology of anxiety that is not only present at the sociopolitical level but also interwoven into the narrative strategies of over 30 films produced since 1990, throwing into sharp relief the interface between the local and the global in this transnational era. Starting with the representation of post-communist migrations to Italy from Eastern Europe and subsequent arrivals from Africa through the controversial frontier of Lampedusa, O'Healy explores topics as diverse as the configuration of migrant labor, affective surrogacy, Italian whiteness, and the legacy of Italy's colonial history. Showing how contemporary filmmaking practices in Italy are linked to changes in the broader media landscape, O'Healy analyzes the ways in which both Italian and migrant filmmakers are reimagining Italian society and remapping the nation's borderscape.
Author: Harry White
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0190903872
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 327
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Book Description
"The Musical Discourse of Servitude examines the music of Johann Joseph Fux (c.1660-1741) in relation to that of Johann Sebastian Bach and George Frideric Handel. Its principal argument is that Fux's long indenture as a composer of church music in Vienna gains in meaning (and cultural significance) when situated along an axis that runs between the liturgical servitude of writing music for the imperial court service and the autonomy of musical imagination which transpires in the late works of Bach and Handel. To this end, The Musical Discourse of Servitude constructs a typology of the late baroque musical imagination which draws Fux, Bach and Handel into the orbit of North Italian compositional practice"--
Author: Deirdre Cooper Owens
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820351342
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 182
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Book Description
The accomplishments of pioneering doctors such as John Peter Mettauer, James Marion Sims, and Nathan Bozeman are well documented. It is also no secret that these nineteenth-century gynecologists performed experimental caesarean sections, ovariotomies, and obstetric fistula repairs primarily on poor and powerless women. Medical Bondage breaks new ground by exploring how and why physicians denied these women their full humanity yet valued them as “medical superbodies” highly suited for medical experimentation. In Medical Bondage, Cooper Owens examines a wide range of scientific literature and less formal communications in which gynecologists created and disseminated medical fictions about their patients, such as their belief that black enslaved women could withstand pain better than white “ladies.” Even as they were advancing medicine, these doctors were legitimizing, for decades to come, groundless theories related to whiteness and blackness, men and women, and the inferiority of other races or nationalities. Medical Bondage moves between southern plantations and northern urban centers to reveal how nineteenth-century American ideas about race, health, and status influenced doctor-patient relationships in sites of healing like slave cabins, medical colleges, and hospitals. It also retells the story of black enslaved women and of Irish immigrant women from the perspective of these exploited groups and thus restores for us a picture of their lives.
Author:
Publisher: Vanderbilt University Press
ISBN: 0826504221
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 374
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Book Description
Teresa de Santo Domingo, born with the name Chicaba, was a slave captured in the territory known to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Spanish and Portuguese navigators and slave traffickers as La Mina Baja del Oro, the part of West Africa that extends through present-day eastern Ghana, Togo, Benin, and western Nigeria. Upon the death of her Spanish master, Chicaba was freed to enter a convent. The Dominicans of La Penitencia in Salamanca accepted her after she had been rejected by several other monasteries because of her skin color. Even in her own religious community, race put her at a disadvantage in the highly stratified social hierarchy of monastic houses of the era. Her life story is known to us through a document entitled Compendio de la vida ejemplar de la Venerable Madre Sor Teresa Juliana de Santo Domingo, which is the foundational documentary evidence in the case for beatification of this nun, and as such it is the most significant and comprehensive source of information about her. This volume, the first English translation of the Compendio, is a hagiography, an example of a biographical genre that recounts the lives and describes the spiritual practices of saints officially canonized by the Church, respected ecclesiastical leaders, or holy people informally recognized by local devotees. The effort to have Chicaba canonized continues today, as Fra-Molinero and Houchins explore in their introduction to the volume.
Author: Emily Wilbourne
Publisher: Open Book Publishers
ISBN: 1800640382
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 198
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Book Description
In this fascinating collection of essays, an international group of scholars explores the sonic consequences of transcultural contact in the early modern period. They examine how cultural configurations of sound impacted communication, comprehension, and the categorisation of people. Addressing questions of identity, difference, sound, and subjectivity in global early modernity, these authors share the conviction that the body itself is the most intimate of contact zones, and that the culturally contingent systems by which sounds made sense could be foreign to early modern listeners and to present day scholars. Drawing on a global range of archival evidence—from New France and New Spain, to the slave ships of the Middle Passage, to China, Europe, and the Mediterranean court environment—this collection challenges the privileged position of European acoustical practices within the discipline of global-historical musicology. The discussion of Black and non-European experiences demonstrates how the production of ‘the canon’ in the cosmopolitan centres of colonial empires was underpinned by processes of human exploitation and extraction of resources. As such, this text is a timely response to calls within the discipline to decolonise music history and to contextualise the canonical works of the European past. This volume is accessible to a wide and interdisciplinary audience, not only within musicology, but also to those interested in early modern global history, sound studies, race, and slavery.
Author: Samson Occom
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190291052
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 480
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Book Description
This volume brings together for the first time the known writings of the pioneering Native American religious and political leader, intellectual, and author, Samson Occom (Mohegan; 1723-1792). The largest surviving archive of American Indian writing before Charles Eastman (Santee Sioux; 1858-1939), Occom's writings offer unparalleled views into a Native American intellectual and cultural universe in the era of colonialization and the early United States. His letters, sermons, journals, prose, petitions, and hymns--many of them never before published--document the emergence of pantribal political consciousness among the Native peoples of New England as well as Native efforts to adapt Christianity as a tool of decolonialization. Presenting previously unpublished and newly recovered writings, this collection more than doubles available Native American writing from before 1800.
