This seminar (free and open to the public) follows Professor Daphne Brooks's lecture, "Black Swan(s) Rising: Blues Women, Female Minstrels & the Gendered Politics of Sonic Afromodernity."

The seminar aims to illuminate the imbricated histories of female blackface entertainers, black and white women's blues cultures and the emergence of the modern recording industry in the early twentieth century. Through an examination of the politics of cultural cross-pollination and appropriation, as well as racial and ethnic mimicry, the seminar will consider the central role that women vocalists have played in crafting sonic forms and aesthetics that have, in turn, served as the foundations of popular music modernity.

Daphne A. Brooks is professor of English and African-American Studies at Princeton University where she teaches courses on African-American literature and culture, performance studies, critical gender studies, and popular music culture. She is the author of two books: Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Performances of Race and Freedom, 1850-1910 (Durham, NC: Duke UP), winner of the Errol Hill Award for Outstanding Scholarship on African American Performance from ASTR and Jeff Buckley's Grace (New York: Continuum, 2005). Brooks is currently working on a new book entitled Subterranean Blues: Black Women and Sound Subcultures--from Minstrelsy through the New Millennium (Harvard University Press, forthcoming).