Lecture: Andrew Brooks, "Hearing The Star of Ethiopia: Reconstructing the Music of W. E. B. Du Bois's Pageant"
- When
- Thursday, November 12, 202612:00 PM – 1:00 PM ESTAdd to calendarGoogle Calendar
- Where
- W. E. B. Du Bois LibraryOpen in Maps
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About
What did W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Star of Ethiopia sound like? Working across multiple archives and collections, this talk brings together dispersed cue sheets, manuscript scores, programs, correspondence, newspapers, and other records in an attempt to reconstruct portions of the pageant’s music. Through that reconstruction, I ask how music shaped the pageant’s staging of Black history and what attending to The Star of Ethiopia as a musical and performative event can reveal about Du Bois’s developing political-aesthetic thought in the 1910s-1920s.
Speaker Bio
Andrew Zahed-Brooks is a PhD candidate in the W. E. B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and a W. E. B. Du Bois Center Fellow. His dissertation examines Black historical pageantry and its transformation across changing political, economic, and technological conditions, tracing a trajectory from music in W. E. B. Du Bois’s pageants, through Amiri Baraka’s collaborations with Sun Ra and Archie Shepp, to contemporary work by artists including Beyoncé and Arthur Jafa.