Black Resonance: Iconic Women Singers and African American LiteratureEmily J.Lordi. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2013.

Abstract

Black Resonance: Iconic Women Singers and African American Literature Emily J. Lordi. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2013.I thought I knew something about the history of music and artists like Mahalia Jackson and Bessie Smith; I thought I was well versed in the writings of Ralph Ellison and James Baldwin. I was wrong. Thankfully, Emily Lordi's brilliant Black Resonance: Iconic Women Singers and African American Literature took me to school. Not only does the book expand one's understanding of a myriad of iconic writers and singers, chronicling their collaborative histories, but also it offers profound and important readings of their insurgent works and their voices of freedom.At its core, Black Resonance is an examination of the shared histories, overlapping cultural discourses, and interconnections between the sonic and literary, between the artist and the writer, between song and text. Ever since Bessie Smith's improbably powerful voice conspired with the emerging 'race records' industry to make her 'the first real superstar in African American popular culture,' writes Lordi, black writers have memorialized the sounds and detailed the politics of women's singing (1). Pushing back at the conventions that separate popular culture and high culture, activism and cultural production, intellectual musings and the sonic boom, Lordi, a professor of English at University of Massachusetts, Amherst, offers a series of examples that contest and undercut the binaries and boundaries that anchor discourses around culture.Challenging the myth of the muse and the privileging of certain forms of expression, Black Resonance moves the conversation about this history, a series of artists, and our collective discourse around art, agency, and activism. It is not simply interesting intersecting vectors between writers and artists or the ways that writers, from Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison to James Baldwin and Nikki Giovanni, engaged the work of singers, from Bessie Smith and Mahalia Jackson to Billie Holiday and Aretha Franklin (and vice versa). According to the author, writers and singers are equal partners in the creation of aesthetics (5) and in the production and articulation of freedom Dreams (See Robin D. G. Kelley's Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination, 2002). Lordi remarks thatI stage them as collaborators, in the etymological sense of 'laboring together,' as they develop analogous expressive techniques. It is necessary that they know each other, or that vocalists sing about writers, in order for writers and singers to collaborate in this way. Their collaboration is not literal; nor is it perfectly symmetrical. Writers discursively co-create musical meaning when they write about singers. (5)In a chapter on Ralph Ellison and Bessie Smith, Lordi highlights the dialectics operating with their work, and their deployed aesthetics, narratives, and tropes, challenging the discursive privileging of the white gaze and its flattening of their meanings. …