Daphne A. Brooks | Breonna’s Song: Protest Music Epistemologies of the Right Now

OPEN TO THE PUBLIC | This lecture traces the socio-political impact and aesthetic innovations of sonic resistance as it was originally designed and bravely imagined and deployed by captive peoples of African descent and as it continues to matter in our present day. The talk will consider the insurgent musical genres and practices of a broad range of artists—from the postbellum Fisk Jubilee Singers to the 21st-century Knowles Sisters, Beyonce and Solange.

Daphne A. Brooks is the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of African American Studies, Theater Studies, American Studies, and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Yale University. She is a scholar of African-American literature and culture, performance studies, critical gender studies, and popular music culture. She will speak on "Breonna’s Song: Protest Music Epistemologies of the Right Now/"

Brooks is the author of two books, Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Performances of Race and Freedom, 1850–1910 (Duke University Press, 2006) and Jeff Buckley’s Grace (Continuum, 2005). She is currently working on a third book, Subterranean Blues: Black Women and Sound Subcultures—from Minstrelsy through the New Millennium (Harvard University Press) and is editing an anthology of essays, forthcoming from Duke University Press, and culled from “Blackstar Rising & The Purple Reign: Celebrating the Legacies of David Bowie and Prince,” a four-day international conference and concert event held at Yale which she curated.

The Yale professor has authored numerous articles on race, gender, performance and popular music culture. Her liner notes for “The Complete Tammi Terrell” and “Take a Look: Aretha Franklin Complete on Columbia” each won the ASCAP Deems Taylor Award for outstanding music writing.

To RSVP and request link, email josephalpar@bennington.edu.