Counting Blackness

In this chapter, the author reflects on the issue of race in opera and its impact on black singers. He first recounts his European operatic debut in Milan in 1960, singing the role...

The first decades of the twentieth century saw a flurry of dance ‘crazes’, from the tango and the Charleston to the jitterbug, increasingly mapped onto the language of blackness. J...

“Brilliant Corners: Improvisation and Practices of Freedom” is a critique of John Edgar Wideman’s novel,Sent for You Yesterday. The chapter interrogates Wideman’s attempt to expose...

Black Existentialism and Decolonizing Knowledge collects key philosophical writings of Lewis R. Gordon, a globally renowned scholar whose writings cover liberation struggles across...

This chapter examines the role of race and racial representation in Ernst Krenek's 1927 opera Jonny spielt auf (“Jonny Strikes Up”) in order to determine whether it can be consider...

The Minoritarian and Black Reason: A Philosophico-Literary Investigation addresses the question, how can we understand and relate responsibly to others who differ from us in our ev...

From his first novel, The Intuitionist, in 1999, Colson Whitehead has produced fiction that brilliantly blurs genre and cultural lines to demonstrate the universal angst and integr...