Black liberation politics and quagmires in trans-Atlantic black operas

Abstract

Legacies of colonialism, slavery, and neo-liberalism, as well as the afterlives of black liberatory politics, are laying bare shortcomings of the regionalization of black politics and the limits of the freedoms fought for. In their attempts to grapple with these realities, diasporan African communities inadvertently fractured black solidarity espoused in the ethos of transnational black unity and pan-Africanism. I argue that neoliberal capitalism and contradictions of black liberatory discourses have given rise to black identities whose outlook disavo ws values that once bound the black race around common goals of social and economic justice. Drawing from Phyllis Taoua’s notion of “unfreed freedoms,” this article uses three black operas about slavery, migration, and human trafficking to explore contradictions of the afterlives of black liberatory discourses. I show that slavery and human trafficking in Toni Morrison and Richard Danielpour’s Margaret Garner (premiered in the United States in 2005), Shirley Thompson’s The Woman Who Refused to Dance (premiered in the United Kingdom in 2007), and Mandla Langa and Hugh Masekela’s Milestones (premiered in South Africa in 1999) point to renewed ways of theorizing black solidarity by acknowledging the singularities of our black situatedness and the peculiarities of the black condition in different black contexts.