Thirteenth International Conference on The Arts in Society

Abstract

Considering contemporary discourse around equity and inclusive representation in the Fine and Performing Arts, this paper is a comparative study on intertextual representations of the black female subject in 18th and 19th-century visual art and their narrative, musical, and visual manifestations in the 19th-century opera, Aida by Giuseppe Verdi. Using art, music, and cultural criticism within an intersectional framework of feminist theory, critical race theory, and postcolonial theory this thesis examines the ways in which the subjectivity of the black female is suppressed in Western visual culture and visually in operatic narratives. I suggest that the symbolic power of the Fine Arts and operatic spaces work together by ascribing a visual aesthetic derived from colonialist assemblages of the black female to the body. As this aesthetic reifies in operatic spaces, this discussion also considers the intersectional positionalities of the black woman as artist, viewer, and catalyst for emancipatory artistic practice that subverts the effects of traumatic artistic methodologies. Thus, I propose that the embodied performance of black women disrupts hegemonic spaces, troubles colonialist ways of seeing, and offers possibilities for the stage to be a site of resistance to racial hegemony in the Fine and Performing Arts.