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In Black Opera: History, Power, Engagement (published May 4, 2018), Naomi André draws on the experiences of performers and audiences to explore this music’s resonance with today’s listeners. Interacting with creators and performers, as well as with the works themselves, André reveals how black opera unearths suppressed truths. These truths provoke complex, if uncomfortable, reconsideration of racial, gender, sexual, and other oppressive ideologies. Opera, in turn, operates as a cultural and political force that employs an immense, transformative power to represent or even liberate.
In Dance Me a Song: Astaire, Balanchine, Kelly, and the American Film Musical (published June 27, 2018), Beth Genné traces Astaire’s, Balanchine’s, and Kelly’s collaborations with composers and film-makers, crossing stylistic and class boundaries to develop a truly modern dance style and genres for the film musical. She contextualizes their work within the history of dance, music, and film and its roots in the diverse dance and music cultures of jazz age America’s nation of immigrants. She demonstrates how concepts and visual-musical devices derived from dance-making would give entire films, both musical and non-musical, the rhythmic flow and feeling of dance.
Naomi André is Associate Professor in the Department of Afroamerican and African Studies, Women’s Studies, and the Associate Director for Faculty at the Residential College at the University of Michigan. Her earlier books, Voicing Gender: Castrati, Travesti, and the Second Woman in Early Nineteenth-Century Italian Opera (2006) and Blackness in Opera (2012, co-edited collection) focus on opera from the nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries and explore constructions of gender, race and identity.
Beth Genné is Professor of Dance History and Art History in the Dance Department and the Arts and Ideas concentration of the Residential College. She has written numerous book chapters on British ballet and dance in film (including Gene Kelly and Vincente Minnelli) and articles in such journals as Dance Research, Dance Chronicle, and Art Journal. Her first book, The Making of a Choreographer, was on the early training and choreographic development of Ninette de Valois, founder of the Royal Ballet.
