Faculty Book Celebration: "Blackface Broken Records: On the Eve of the Blues Feminist Experiment"

Presentation by Daphne A. Brooks, the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of African American Studies, and Professor of Theater Studies, American Studies, and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Yale University - Faculty Book Celebration 2020. This talk threads together an exploration of women in blackface minstrelsy, race riots of the Progressive Era, the classic black women’s blues craze and the origins of one of the world’s most famous musicals. In particular, it questions the ways that African Americans navigated an early 20th-century popular culture that policed and restricted their sounds. Ultimately, it asserts that the struggle over radicalized sound in the 1910s was a battle waged between women artists — black and white, in the north and in the south, and on the eve of a blues music revolution.
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