Fantasies

This chapter considers the discrepancies between our contemporary fantasies of Nina Simone and Nina Simone’s own historical fantasies of Nina Simone. It engages with some of the past two decades’ rereleased, remastered, and remixed albums and compilations, as well as biographies, films, cameos in theater, television, and fiction, scholarly studies, samples, multimedia citations. These contemporary texts about Simone too express fantasies, ones that allow them to locate themselves in the present by anchoring race and gender identities in a useable past. This chapter considers the monuments to Simone created in her hometown of Tryon, North Carolina, as well as her uptake in texts by Chanel, Aardman animation, Bojack Horseman, and Lauryn Hill.