📅&Բ;Date: Friday, September 19, 2025
🕒&Բ;Start Time: 4:00 PM
📍&Բ;Location: Harkness Chapel, Classroom
👥&Բ;Who: Free | Open to the public
Our weekly Friday colloquia showcase current research by distinguished visiting scholars alongside our own faculty and graduate students in musicology, historical performance practice, and music education. All are welcome!
A brief reception follows each talk to keep the conversation going.
About The Talk
“Black Women and Blackface Minstrelsy at the Turn of the Twentieth Century”
What might we see and hear on the Black musical theater stage circa 1900? It was shaped by Black artists negotiating the terms of the still-popular tradition of blackface minstrelsy by performing both in and out of blackface makeup, at times utilizing the power of inversion through whiteface makeup, and at other times leveraging the novelty of other ethnic, class, and gender impersonations. In this talk, Proctor argues that Black women developed strategic approaches to negotiate their place within the white- and male-dominated minstrel tradition—approaches that remain underacknowledged in the existing scholarship. Surveying a range of Black women’s performances from so-called “coon songs” to full-length minstrel shows to the exoticized spectacles of “oriental” burlesque, this talk highlights the complexity of their artistic labor in an era when minstrelsy still structured much of the American stage. Black women’s engagements with minstrelsy reveal strategies of resistance, adaptation, and creative expression that enrich and complicate our understanding of early Black musical theater.
About The Speaker
Elea Proctor is an assistant professor in the Department of African American and African Studies at The Ohio State University. Her research examines Black women’s musical performance and the blackface minstrelsy tradition.
Venue
Harkness Classroom, located inside Harkness Chapel, serves as both a lecture hall for large classes and a backstage area during events. It is also the meeting location for the CWRU Music Colloquium Series.
Health + Safety
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