scholarly journals Opera, Sound Recording, and Critical Race Theory

2021 ◽  
Vol 108 ◽  
pp. 1-25
Author(s):  
Matthew Timmermans

This review essay considers the relationships among opera, sound recording, and critical race theory, and explores them at a moment when these fields are beginning to converge. One of my concerns will be the recent and ground-breaking studies and collections on opera and race by Naomi Adele André (2017, 2019), Kira Thurman (2012, 2019), Pamela Karantonis and Dylan Robinson (2011), and Mary I. Ingraham, Joseph K. So and Roy Moodley (2016). Another will be the neglected history of opera and sound recording; notable scholars here include Karen Henson (2020), Robert Cannon (2014), and Richard Leppert (2015). Finally, I will focus on the thought-provoking analyses of race and sound by Alexander Weheliye (2005), Brian Ward (2003), Jennifer Lynn Stoever (2016) and Nina Sun Eidsheim (2019). There are obvious connections among these three bodies of scholarship, yet these connections have not yet been clearly identified and explored. Although many scholars have come to embrace opera as a material and embodied phenomenon, the artform’s dissemination, analysis, and enjoyment through sound recording is still overlooked as a site of enquiry, especially its potential as a fertile site of inquiry about identity. To overlook the issue of identity in relation to recording is to perpetuate the belief that recordings are primarily documents of performance practice. It ignores the army of technicians who invisibly craft the acoustic object, many of whom are historically white and male. This review essay seeks to address this neglect and to suggest some ways in which the processes of making and consuming opera recordings is intimately related to whiteness and anti-Blackness—but also to Black possibility. In what follows, I cast a broad net, ranging widely and at times unexpectedly. I begin with some recent events in American musicology and in the New York operatic scene; then, turn to a consideration of some of the scholarship just mentioned; and finally conclude with a brief discussion of a specific recording, the Metropolitan Opera’s “live” sound recording of the 2019 production of Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess.

2021 ◽  
pp. 002216782110627
Author(s):  
Hyung Chol Yoo ◽  
Abigail K. Gabriel ◽  
Sumie Okazaki

Research within Asian American psychology continually grows to include a range of topics that expand on the heterogeneity, hybridity, and multiplicity of the Asian American psychological experience. Still, research focused on distinct racialization and psychological processes of Asians in America is limited. To advance scientific knowledge on the study of race and racism in the lives of Asian Americans, we draw on Asian critical race theory and an Asian Americanist perspective that emphasizes the unique history of oppression, resilience, and resistance among Asian Americans. First, we discuss the rationale and significance of applying Asian critical race theory to Asian American psychology. Second, we review the racialized history of Asians in America, including the dissemination of essentialist stereotypes (e.g., perpetual foreigner, model minority, and sexual deviants) and the political formation of an Asian American racial identity beginning in the late 1960s. We emphasize that this history is inextricably linked to how race and racism is understood and studied today in Asian American psychology. Finally, we discuss the implications of Asian critical race theory and an Asian Americanist perspective to research within Asian American psychology and conclude with suggestions for future research to advance current theory and methodology.


Author(s):  
Lynne Huffer

This essay offers an overview of History of Madness, including its place in Foucault's oeuvre, its publication and translation history. Huffer focuses especially on the significance of History of Madness as an under-read text whose philosophical and historical implications have not yet been adequately explored. She argues that a careful reading of History of Madness on its own terms offers resources for moving beyond some of the impasses that characterize not only twentieth-century French philosophy, but also many of the fields in the Anglophone world—especially feminist, queer, and critical race theory—that arose in the wake of a debate about madness.


Author(s):  
Tita Chico

Abstract Abstract The titles reviewed in this chapter concern science and medicine studies. They represent work drawn from a variety of contexts and disciplinary perspectives, including science and technology, the history of science, literary studies, critical race theory, public health, the philosophy of science, law, ethnography, anthropology, architecture, and geology. The chapter has five sections: 1. Histories and Historicity; 2. Epistemology and Dissemination; 3. Institutions and Praxis; 4. Bodies and Subjectivities; and 5. Conversations (Journals).


2021 ◽  
Vol 123 (5) ◽  
pp. 1-18
Author(s):  
Rosa L. Rivera-Mccutchen

Background Part of a special issue on the high-stakes testing opt-out movement, this article focuses its analysis on the movement within New York State, and examines white privilege and power within one specific organization, the NYS Allies for Public Education (NYSAPE). Specifically, I examine how the public-facing work of NYSAPE addressed (or ignored) race and/or racism in their efforts to resist high-stakes testing. I also ask, in what ways do their public stances affirm and reinforce white privilege and power? Purpose I explore the opt-out movement in New York State, and argue that it is a movement that has been largely dominated by white privilege and power. Employing critical race theory as analytical and methodological tools, I briefly examine the development and policy positions of NYSAPE, a coalition of grassroots parent, educator and community organizations. Research Design This qualitative case study focuses on NYSAPE and employs critical race theory as a methodological and analytical framework, with specific emphasis on whiteness as property (power) and interest convergence. Conclusions/Recommendations The paper aims to engage the opt-out movement in considering how its (in)actions are shaped by racism, a deeply entrenched element in our society, and pushes the movement to take a more liberatory stance for all children. Leaders within the opt-out movement, particularly in predominantly white and middle- to upper-class communities, have to examine their complicity in perpetuating racial inequities.


JCSCORE ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 36-65 ◽  
Author(s):  
Veronica A. Jones ◽  
Dian Squire

This manuscript provides a nuanced understanding of the heterogeneity of faculty and staff of color activism in the context of a racialized and racist university structure. Through the deployment of Critical Race Theory, and the couching of activism within a foundational white supremacist history of higher education, the authors are then able to repair discord between students who often see faculty and staff of color as complacent within their institutions. These critiques often do not take into consideration how racism constricts faculty and staff of color action and also comes with classist assumptions via an insinuation that all faculty and staff of color can risk loss of job as a result of activism. Moreover, an intersectional lens is not always considered in activism literature. At the same time, the authors argued that faculty and staff of color, particularly those who identify as Black, must be allowed to act in untempered ways as their livelihoods quite literally depend on changing a broader racist system.


Author(s):  
Dunfu Zhang ◽  
Richard Atimniraye Nyelade

With the rise of the coronavirus crisis, "social distancing," has emerged as a new buzzword. Politicians, journalists, commentators, news  readers, senior executives, and experts use this term blindly. However, scrutinizing the word reveals a terminological mismatch between "physical distancing" and "social distancing." While revisiting the history of physical distancing and social distancing, this article attempts to show how the term "social distancing" moved through time and winded up floating in the atmosphere. This study is based on Critical race theory, which has as its aim to uncover the ideologies that have been constructed to perpetuate the oppression of some social categories on the fallacious pretext of race superiority and purity. After going down to the ancient roots of physical distancing practices, this work will recall social distancing behaviors during the slave trade era before delving into the current confusion between both terms in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. This work stresses the importance of social scientists to assess some official terminologies before their popularization. Keywords: Social distancing, physical distancing, buzzwords, Black, racism, smell


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