by Naomi Andre
11. Dibbern, “Literary Sources,” 277. Opening of part 3.
12. I speak as someone living in a specific historical moment, aware of the brutal racial history of the far and recent past as well as the continuing legacy of such violence today.
13. My point here is that such difference is noticed. I discuss further the ways this difference is noted in the introduction to this book about recent productions of Verdi’s opera Otello.
14. A good starting point for such conversations about casting in the musical and film Carmen Jones are Fauser “Dixie Carmen” and Smith, “Black Faces, White Voices.”
15. Review from the New York Dramatic Mirror (August 12, 1905), Dodge and Rogers, Indian Territory Journals.
16. Show Boat as a musical in 1927 was also made into film versions (1929, 1931, and the influential MGM 1951 version). For more information on the various versions see Decker, Show Boat. For a discussion connecting the representation of a sexual persona with Dandridge in Carmen Jones and casting the role of Julie in the 1951 MGM film version of Show Boat see Gilbert, “American Iconoclast,” esp. 235–37.
17. Murphy, “Alumni Spotlight.” Hayes went on to have a successful performing, recording, and teaching career at Cal Arts and Pomona College.
18. Smith, “Black Faces, White Voices,” 32.
19. Ibid., 31.
20. Ibid., 37.
21. Obituary, Harry Kleiner (1915–2007), Classic TV History (blog), https://classictvhistory.wordpress.com/2008/02/11/obituary-harry-kleiner-1915-2007.
22. Smith, “Black Faces, White Voices,” 33.
23. Horne, Marilyn Horne, 76.
24. Ibid., 75.
25. Smith, “Black Faces, White Voices,” 40.
26. Horne, Marilyn Horne, 71.
27. Two helpful sources for thinking about Dash’s film Illusions and gender and race are “The Politics of Being Seen,” by S. V. Hartman and Farah Jasmine Griffin, and “Reading the Intersection of Race and Gender in Narratives of Passing,” by Valerie Smith.
28. The setting for Carmen Jones the musical has always been in the American South; a 1942 version preparing for the musical was set entirely in North Carolina, and a 1943 version placed the action of the second half in Chicago. The film moves the action to southern Florida in the beginning and then Chicago for the second half. See Fauser, “Dixie Carmen” (130) for a discussion of the versions of the Hammerstein musical.
29. Furman, “Screen Politics,” 127; “Apropos Dis an’ Dat (Preminger, 1954)” in Powrie, Babington, Davies, and Perriam, Carmen on Film, 103.
30. Smith, “Black Faces, White Voices,” 33–37.
31. Du Bois, “What is Civilization?,” 208–9. Langston Hughes, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” (first appeared in The Nation on June 23, 1926). Helene Johnson Hubbell, “Poem: Little Brown Boy,” appeared with a few other of her poems in a collection edited by Countée Cullen, Caroling Dusk: An Anthology of Verse by Negro Poets (New York: Harper, 1927). See also The Portable Harlem Renaissance Reader, edited by David Levering Lewis (New York: Penguin, 1994), 277–78. Based on a one-act play with incidental music she had written earlier, Shirley Graham Du Bois’s opera Tom-Tom premiered July 7 and 9, 1932, in Cleveland, Ohio. The opera was commissioned by the Stadium Opera Company (precursor to the Cleveland Metropolitan Opera) and was not performed again. Graham and W. E. B Du Bois started their relationship in the late 1930s and did not marry until 1950. Material about the tom-tom is from an unpublished paper, “Tom Toms and the New Negro: What is Africa to William Grant Still?” presented to at the 35th Annual Conference of the Society for American Music, Denver, 2009, by the author.
32. Joe Adams (born 1924) was one of the first black radio announcers (getting his start on Art Grogan’s Santa Monica station KOWL) in the 1940s and went on to have a top-rated daily show. Adams went on to have other roles in film and TV and later became Ray Charles’s manager and a major philanthropist. See http://www.visionaryproject.org/adamsjoe/ and http://lasentinel.net/joe-adams-a-true-living-legend-from-watts-to-the-world.html; http://www.lawattstimes.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=1633:joe-adams-legendary-manager-musical-genius-ray-charles-goes-1-on-1-with-lawt-lawt-exclusive-jordan-high-school-graduate-is-shepherd-of-the-legacy-of-musical-genius-ray-charles-and-was-the-first-black-on-radio-proving-that-hard-work-pays-off&catid=27&Itemid=117.
33. Baldwin, “Carmen Jones,” 46, 49, 52.
34. The 1954 Carmen Jones film was nominated for and won the following awards: Dorothy Dandridge was nominated for an Oscar for Best Actress in a Leading Role; this was the first time a black actress had ever been nominated for this award; Herschel Burke Gilbert was nominated for an Oscar for the Best Music/Scoring of a Musical Picture; the film won a Golden Globe for the Best Motion Picture (Musical/Comedy); Joe Adams won a Gold Globe for the Most Promising Male Newcomer; Otto Preminger was nominated for the Palme d’Or Best Film at Cannes; and Otto Preminger won the Bronze Berlin Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival.
35. Baldwin, “Carmen Jones,” 50.
36. Ibid., 50–51.
37. For discussions of the “brown paper bag test,” its early origins and its practice in New Orleans up through the beginning of the twenty-first century, see Gates and West, Future of the Race, and Dyson, Come Hell or High Water. For an early use of the term “colorism” regarding the black community see Walker, “If the Present Looks Like the Past.” Toni Morrison’s recent novel, God Help the Child (New York: Knopf, 2015) is also about this topic within a mother-daughter relationship. Recent theorizations of “colorism” have extended to any nonwhite community, including people from Japan, China, Korea, India, Pakistan, Iran, areas in the Middle East, and others.
38. Rubin Wilson, better known as Reuben Wilson, is a soul jazz organist. Born in Oklahoma in 1935, when he was five years old his family moved to Pasadena, where he got into music and boxing (which landed him his role in Carmen Jones). http://www.last.fm/music/Reuben+Wilson/+wiki. Listed as Rubin Wilson in an uncredited role on the IMDb: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0046828/fullcredits.
39. Baldwin, “Carmen Jones,” 53.
40. “Volume 10.” Encyclopedia of Popular Music, Oxford Music Online.
41. The Wikipedia entry for “rap opera” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rap_opera) contains a link to the page “A Night at the Hip Hopera,” the title of the third album by the Kleptones, released in 2004. Rather than hip hop, this album falls more under the description of “bastard pop” for fusing together samples and soundbites from the rock group Queen as well as movies, television, and other songs. Other works mentioned seem to be more in the line of concept albums that aim to include (or are awaiting funding to expand to) a video component. These albums include hip hop artist Prince Paul’s A Prince among Thieves (1999, Tommy Boy/Warner Bros.); alternative hip hop Deltron 3030, the 2000 debut album by the group of the same name (produced by Dan the Automator for 75 Ark); and nerdcore hip hop Ytcracker’s Introducing Neals (2014).
42. Since the beginning of this project and at the time of this writing, there are more artistic events calling themselves hip hopera. Two striking examples include the term that some people have used to discuss Lin Manuel Miranda’s show Hamilton (2015) and Opera Philadelphia’s educational program, Hip H’opera, in collaboration with Art Sanctuary and local schools. This program was connected to the creation of We Shall Not Be Moved (by composer Daniel Bernard Roumain and librettist Marc Bamuthi Joseph), an opera incorporating hip hop elements (co-commissioned and co-produced by Opera Philadelphia, the Apollo Theater, and the Hackney Empire in London) and premiered in Philadelphia September 16, 2017.
43. McClary, “Carmen as Perennial Fusion.”
44. The flower is an important symbol in Bizet’s opera. Carmen gives Don José a flower after she first sees him—a symbol of her enchanting him. In act 2 we find that he has kept the flower and sings his “Flower Song” to her when he declares his love for her. The rose is important in Carmen Jones as the centra
l visual image in the opening credits with a red flame behind it. It is also the flower Carmen Jones gives Joe after she sings her Habanera (“Dat’s Love”). After Da Brat uses the rose as a baton in the introduction, the last image is of her throwing the rose up into the air. At the end of the hip hopera, Da Brat ceremoniously places the rose on the road as she symbolically lays Carmen Brown to rest.
45. Another contemporaneous example of a millennial generation feminism is the movie Legally Blonde (MGM, directed by Robert Luketic and starring Reese Witherspoon), released two months after Carmen: A Hip Hopera in 2001. In the film, after being dumped by her boyfriend, sorority bombshell Reese Witherspoon decides to use her brains and her looks to get into and thrive at Harvard Law School. The movie was a big success and led to the 2003 sequel, Legally Blonde 2: Red, White and Blonde, the 2009 direct-to-DVD spin-off Legally Blondes, and the 2007 Legally Blonde: The Musical (that played in San Francisco, New York City on Broadway, and in London’s West End. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legally_Blonde.
46. The friendship between Dorothy Dandridge and Marilyn Monroe has not received a lot of attention, perhaps because interracial relationships during the time (even a nonromanticized friendship between women) were not popular. Some internet discussion can be found at http://thegentlemensfoundation.blogspot.com/2013/08/the-friendship-of-marilyn-monroe-and.html.
47. Though Monroe’s last completed film, The Misfits (United Artists [1961], written by Arthur Miller, directed by John Huston, starring Clark Gable and Montgomery Clift) was not a commercial success, it was seen as a possible new direction for Monroe into more serious and dramatic roles.
48. Baldwin, “Carmen Jones,” 53.
49. We see women of color such as Jennifer Lopez (JLo), rappers Lil’ Kim, Rihanna, Missy Elliott, and Queen Latifah, actress Kerry Washington, and later Bey (Beyoncé) herself, who have projected a sexualized brand, while also being strong and savvy businesswomen.
50. Steven Oxman, “Review: ‘Carmen: A Hip Hopera’ Variety, May 2, 2001. http://variety.com/2001/tv/reviews/carmen-a-hip-hopera-1200468590. Jill Kipnis, “DVD Sales Boom in Urban Market,” Billboard, September 14, 2002, 96. Kipnis writes: “Peter Busch, VP of video for Minnetonka, Minn.-based Musicland, says the chain has experienced strong DVD sales with a variety of urban titles, including All About the Benjamins, Carmen—A Hip Hopera. … He adds that ‘urban DVDs are a winning formula for the studies. They don’t have to spend a lot on them, the titles gain national notoriety, and they do very well on home video.’” Though informal evidence, I have found, in teaching this hip hopera in its first fifteen years, my black students overwhelmingly enjoy this film and have heard about it before we cover it in class.
51. I have written about the relocation of Carmen in two sub-Saharan settings with Carmen in Senegal and South Africa and how the vantage points have changed for those in the audience. See “Carmen in Africa.”
52. Davies and Dovey. “Bizet in Khayelitsha,” 50.
53. Viljoen and Wenzel, “Same, yet Different.”
54. Davies and Dovey, “Bizet in Khayelitsha,” 42–46. I have also discussed this opening sequence in “Carmen in Africa.”
55. The quotation in the film is longer; this is just an excerpt from the first few sentences.
56. I am referring in this situation both to the verismo element of Bizet’s original Carmen (1875) as being an early part of this late nineteenth century Italian and French artistic movement (primarily in literature and music) as well as the realistic component for today of having the setting of this film be a real community: the township of Khayelitsha.
57. “Interview with Pauline Malefane” under the Extras and Interviews for the DVD Township Opera (directed by Anthony Fabian, Elysian Films [2002]).
58. In a flashback during the first duet between Jongikhaya (Don José) and Nomakhaya (Micaela), we see an accidental tussle between Jongikhaya and his brother turn more violent. This provides a context for the plot point later on (act 3), when we see U-Carmen talking with her friends and they say that she got together with Jongikaya too quickly and that he has been beating her.
59. For a connection to Achille Mbembe’s discussion of violence in the postcolony of South Africa and the internalized PTSD issue of violence in post-apartheid South Africa see André, “Carmen in Africa,” 64–65. Viljoen and Wenzel (“Same, yet Different,” 62) also discuss violence, specifically domestic abuse in South Africa.
60. The text for Joe: “You tramp. You’re no good. You never were. Two-timin’ me like it don’t count for nothin’. Well it does. You ain’t never gonna do that to no man again.”
61. I am referring to the idea of an imagined community, particularly in the nineteenth century with the spread of print media and the perspectives of national identities. See Anderson, Imagined Communities.
62. In this reading of Don José as the hero, his behavior can be seen as similar to Radames’s actions at the end of act 3 of Aida, when he turns himself in for treason after he reveals the battle secrets to Aida (and Amonasro in hiding). Katherine Bergeron writes about this as an example of one of the facets of the colonial Egyptian siyasa. Gauthier and McFarlane also write about this moment in Aida as an example of a colonial domination through the model of the panopticon.
Chapter 6. Winnie, Opera, and South African Artistic Nationhood
1. Much of the material in this chapter appears in or is adapted from my article “Winnie, Opera, and South African Artistic Nationhood,” African Studies, 75, no. 1 (March 2016): 10–31.
2. Excerpts from the Broadway production of The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess and Winnie: The Opera are intermittently available on YouTube, promotional, and other websites. There is a commercial audio recording of the Broadway Porgy and Bess with the original cast (Audra McDonald, Norm Lewis, David Allen Grier), P. S. Classics, 2012.
3. See Erlmann “Migration and Performance”; Ansell, Soweto Blues; Taylor, Global Pop; Meintjes “Paul Simon’s Graceland.”
4. Two excellent analyses of Winnie: The Opera by South Africans are Mhlambi, “Embodied Discordance,” and Somma, “Just Say the Words.”
5. Bhabha, Location of Culture.
6. For important directions in newer studies of exoticism in opera see Locke, Musical Exoticism; Sheppard, “Revealing Masks” and “Exoticism”; Taylor, Beyond Exoticism; and Ingraham et. al. Opera in a Multicultural World.
7. Dirlik’s “Global South” and López’s “Introduction: The (Post)global South” are two helpful articles that give an outline of the concepts and ideas around the origin and uses of the term Global South.
8. Barber, Anthropology of Texts, 43.
9. Ibid., 43.
10. Nuttall, Entanglement, 11.
11. Ibid., 12.
12. I refer to black and mixed race, which is an imperfect way of including the racial category formally known as “coloured” under the apartheid system.
13. Operas performed in South Africa include canonic repertoire operas (frequently in updated productions, including two film productions: Bizet’s U-Carmen eKhayelitsha [2005] and Puccini’s La Bohème [Breathe Umphefumlo] [March 2015]) and new operas such as the Cape Town Five: 20—Operas Made in South Africa (five newly composed operas on South African themes, twenty minutes each) in November 2010; Mandela Trilogy, Stephenson and Williams, 2011; Flower of Shembe, Muyanga, 2011; Ziyankomo and the Forbidden Fruit, Mnomiya, 2012). An additional discussion of recent South African opera is outlined in André, Somma, and Mhlambi, “Introduction.”
14. I will elaborate on these two composers’ works later in this chapter. Philip Glass began his operatic career with a trilogy of Great Men (Einstein on the Beach [1976], based on Albert Einstein; Satyagraha [1979], based on Mohandas K. Gandhi; and Akhnaten [1983], based on the Pharaoh Akhenaten/Amenhotep IV of Egypt). John Adams’s operas include Nixon in China (1985), based on the life of President Richard Nixon; Death of Klinghoffer (1991), based on the life of Achille Lauro victim Leon Klinghoffer; and Dr. Atomic (2005), based o
n the life of American physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer.
15. I have simplified this early history to express the predominant trend of opera originally being part of an aristocratic European culture. There were exceptions, such as the opera scene in Venice, which had the San Cassiano public theater (opened in 1637) that included a still rather exclusive yet broader public than what we know of opera in other theaters and cities.
16. For more information on Verdi and the Risorgimento, see Gossett, “Giuseppe Verdi and the Italian Risorgimento.”
17. In this list of operas, I have named first the composer and then the librettist (for example, the operas Amistad and X, The Life and Times of Malcolm X were composed by Anthony Davis with the libretto for each written by Thulani Davis—cousin to Anthony).
18. I discuss the original 1935 version and the 2011 Broadway adaptation of Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess in chapter 4 of this book. Audra McDonald has won her sixth Tony, another one since The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess (2012), for her performance as Billie Holiday in Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar and Grill (2014). In 2015–16 she starred in the production of Shuffle Along, the remake of Noble Sissle and Eubie Blake’s landmark all-black musical from 1921.
19. See Citron, Opera on Screen; Davis and Dovey, “Bizet in Khayelitsha”; Joe and Gilman Wagner and Cinema; Levin, Richard Wagner.
20. Precedents for other studies that “re-create” voices/experiences when nothing survives (Miles, Ties that Bind; Sharpe, Ghosts of Slavery; and Fabi, Clotel). From the Diary of Sally Hemings has been referred to as a “solo opera” (so-called by composer Bolcom and librettist Seaton) and as fitting into the tradition of a monodrama (see chap. 3).
21. The civil unrest 2013–14 was fueled by three highly publicized civil rights cases wherein unarmed African American men were killed and the known perpetrators were not held responsible (two of whom were white police officers). In February 2012, unarmed seventeen-year-old African American Treyvon Martin was fatally shot by George Zimmerman, a rogue member of his community neighborhood watch in Florida who was found not guilty at trial. Over the summer and fall of 2014 the police shooting of unarmed eighteen-year old African American Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, led to his death; the grand jury did not indict the white police officer. In Staten Island, New York City, unarmed African American Eric Garner was accidently killed when a white police officer had him in a stranglehold for allegedly selling loose cigarettes. In December 2014 a grand jury decided not to indict the officer. Throughout the time of my writing, editing, and preparing this book for publication, very sadly, many more black men and women have been victims of police brutality. This is a situation that is not new but has recently come to light more prominently.