Black women singers are our truth-tellers. They are cartographers for how we talk about modern life.
In her book Liner Notes for the Revolution, Yale Professor Daphne A. Brooks explores more than a century of music archives to examine the critics, collectors and listeners who have determined perceptions of Black women on stage and in the recording studio. How is it possible, she asks, that iconic artists such as Zora Neale Hurston, Aretha Franklin and Beyoncé exist simultaneously at the center and on the fringe of the culture industry?
This two-session seminar offers a startling new perspective on the story of Black women in popular music, a perspective informed by the overlooked contributions of Black women musicians who not only make glorious, pathbreaking sounds but also listen to, love, collect, think about, write about, and find ways of preserving and passing forward their sounds.
Class meets Mondays: January 24 and 31. Sessions will be recorded and made available to registered students for later viewing.
Students may purchase discounted copies of Brooks’s Liner Notes for the Revolution via Harvard University Press by entering code HOLIDAY21 at checkout.
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Daphne A. Brooks has written liner notes to accompany the recordings of Aretha Franklin, Tammi Terrell and Prince. She is the author of Liner Notes for the Revolution, “one of the most moving testaments to the power of silence, and what breaking that silence means, that I have ever read,” writes Hilton Als …
Daphne A. Brooks has written liner notes to accompany the recordings of Aretha Franklin, Tammi Terrell and Prince. She is the author of Liner Notes for the Revolution, “one of the most moving testaments to the power of silence, and what breaking that silence means, that I have ever read,” writes Hilton Als. Her other books are Jeff Buckley’s Grace and Bodies in Dissent, the winner of the Errol Hill Award. She is the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of African American Studies and Professor of Theater Studies, American Studies, and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Yale University.
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