Glocal memory in the Black Atlantic triad operas by Black women composers
Résumé
Since the turn of the 20th century, Black opera imaginaries have established a unique voice that addresses the particularities of the Black condition and Black situatedness. Scholarship on Black opera composers paid less attention to Black women opera composers who continue to remain hidden at the margins of global Black cultures. With the advances made by feminist epistemologies, interest in women’s cultural productions and histories has increased, which reveals that Black women opera music composers are highly conscientious in their engagement with social issues affecting continental African and African Diasporic communities. However, contradictions in contemporary Black consciousness over the past century introduced new complexities in understanding what has come to constitute Black identity and its ties to ethnicity and nationalism. Despite these divergent developments in contemporary Black global history, Black opera women composers’ contributions offer other lenses to engage Black people’s experiences from Africa and the African Diaspora, covering settler colonialism, enslavement, struggles for freedom, and post-liberation. Conversations opened up by Shirley Graham (writer, playwright, composer, and activist); Mark Darnford-May, Mandisi Dyantyis, and Paulina Malefane (film, music, and artistic directors respectively); and Shirley Thompson (an English composer, conductor, and violinist of Jamaican descent) within Black global liberatory politics show a Black consciousness that interlinks to race, gender, transnational Black politics, and the interrogation of the failures of post-slavery and post-colonial states in Diasporic and continental African communities. Therefore, despite the regionalised nature of the histories covered by the operas I will discuss in this article, there is an interconnecting thread in all of them that calls into question turn-of-the-21stcentury pathos that have characterised global Black politics. In attempts to engage the nadir of these regressive global Black political views, in this article, I draw on cultural memory theory and Pan-Africanism epistemologies to read Graham’s Tom Tom (1932); Dyantyis, Darnford-May, and Malefane’s Son of Man (2006); and Shirley Thompson’s Sacred Mountain: Incidents of Nanny of the Maroons (2015) as sites and anchors that dramatise the relevance and centrality of turn-of-the-20th-century Afrocentrists’ calls for Black unity, Black solidarity, and Pan-Africanism.
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