Scholarship on Porgy and Bess has tended to focus on issues of genre (whether it is an opera or musical), the definitive version of the work (whether or not to include numbers that were in rehearsals but left out of the premiere), and the extent of the negative racial depictions of African Americans (its evocations of minstrel stereotypes). In this talk André analyzes how Porgy and Bess articulated themes of femininity and race when it was first performed in 1935 and how these meanings changed in subsequent revivals up to the present, including the recent 2011-2012 production on Broadway. This talk examines the changing racial and gender climates through Jim Crow, the Civil Rights era, the Women’s movement of the 1970s-80s, and the current age of Obama in the White House. Porgy and Bess reflects how gender and race have been formulated to express evolving ideologies of “Americanness” in the United States.
Naomi André is an associate professor in women’s studies and the Residential College at the University of Michigan. She received her bachelor’s in music from Barnard College and master’s and doctorate in musicology from Harvard University. Her research focuses on opera and issues surrounding gender, voice, and race. Her publications include topics on Italian opera, Schoenberg, women composers, and teaching opera in prisons. Her books, Voicing Gender: Castrati, Travesti and the Second Woman in Early Nineteenth-Century Italian Opera (2006) and Blackness in Opera (2012, edited collection), focus on opera from the 19th to the mid-20th centuries and explore constructions of gender, race, and identity. Her current research interests extend to opera today in the United States and South Africa.
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