GO BACK AND FETCH IT: BLACK RADICALISM AND MYTHIC SOLIDARITY IN …(IPHIGENIA)

Abstract

It is difficult to watch …(Iphigenia) and not think of abolition. To bear witness to Wayne Shorter and esperanza spalding's opera is to experience the collision of classical and jazz idiom, the interruption of violent cycles, the emergence of liberation. Yet as much as …(Iphigenia) is a story of abolition, it is also a story about the staying powers of sacrifice and myth. Winds that turn the wheel of oppression are the same blessed winds that propel ships out to sea. Furthermore, the interruption of inexhaustible, parodic virgin sacrifice is framed by the bodily toil that results from rejecting that cycle. We might easily observe …(Iphigenia) as a retelling that moves myth forward, into the future. The last Iphigenia, of the Open Tense (performed by esperanza spalding), ultimately refuses her seemingly inevitable fate, retching out the words that might otherwise temporarily satisfy the whims of the bloodthirsty men around her. …(Iphigenia), however, is a piece ‘at war with itself’. Perhaps in this way more than any other, it is able to communicate the tenseless timelessness of the Black radical tradition. The cyclicity of oppressive violence is the same cyclicity that dissolves artifice, the same cyclicity that produces solidarity as a substrate.