Scan barcode
A review by chrisiant
Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: Gertrude Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday by Angela Y. Davis
5.0
Overall I really loved this book and was so glad I ended up borrowing it to read on a four-hour bus ride. Davis' prose is very dense and academic, at times almost too dense to wade through. I can see that being a turn-off for many readers, and it's unfortunate, because I think there's a lot of really fabulous and useful points in here. My only other criticism is that it seemed to me Davis was sometimes contorting to get the meaning out of a song that fit her argument. I generally gave her the benefit of the doubt, because so much of the meaning she was wringing from these songs came from the elements of their performance, which is obviously hard to glean from lyrics alone.
Beyond those two things, there is really nothing but awesome about this book. Davis makes numerous insightful points about the role of blues women in creating space and consciousness for black feminism. Their songs expressed the new-found sexual agency of black individuals after slavery, frankly acknowledging and celebrating women's sexual agency. They expressed the black individual experience as separate from the community experience focused on in the music of slavery, but sang them to a wide audience and addressed them in ways that called for recognition of collective experience. The songs also baldly, and without judgment, discussed topics taboo in middle-class society such as domestic violence, homosexuality, multiple relationships, prison, and poverty.
Beyond those two things, there is really nothing but awesome about this book. Davis makes numerous insightful points about the role of blues women in creating space and consciousness for black feminism. Their songs expressed the new-found sexual agency of black individuals after slavery, frankly acknowledging and celebrating women's sexual agency. They expressed the black individual experience as separate from the community experience focused on in the music of slavery, but sang them to a wide audience and addressed them in ways that called for recognition of collective experience. The songs also baldly, and without judgment, discussed topics taboo in middle-class society such as domestic violence, homosexuality, multiple relationships, prison, and poverty.