Contemporary Cuban Cinema; Nina Simone, Now

This book is a love letter to the artists, scenes, and sounds defining North Carolina’s extraordinary contributions to American popular music. David Menconi spent three decades immersed in the state’s music, where traditions run deep but the energy expands in countless directions. Menconi shows how working-class roots and rebellion tie North Carolina’s Piedmont blues, jazz, and bluegrass to beach music, rock, hip-hop, and more. From mill towns and mountain coves to college-town clubs and the stage of American Idol, Blind Boy Fuller and Doc Watson to Nina Simone and Superchunk, Step It Up and Go celebrates homegrown music just as essential to the state as barbecue and basketball. Spanning a century of history from the dawn of recorded music to the present, and with sidebars and photos that help reveal the many-splendored glory of North Carolina’s sonic landscape, this is a must-read for every music lover.

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Nina Simone as Poet and Orchestrator

Journal of Popular Music Studies ◽

10.1525/jpms.2021.33.2.130 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 33 (2) ◽

pp. 130-147

Author(s):

Marcus R. Pyle

Keyword(s):

Semantic Content ◽

Black Body ◽

Black Female ◽

The Self ◽

The Other ◽

Female Subjectivity ◽

The Gaze ◽

Nina Simone

How do you fashion an identity in a society that, at every turn, tries to snuff you out? In this article, I address Nina Simone's praxis of renaming and reinvention to demonstrate strategies of resistance. To this point, I analyze the musico-poetic setting of Nina Simone’s songs “Images” (1964) and “Four Women” (1965) to argue that her artistic musical choices sonically orchestrate varying issues of Black female subjectivity, identity, and self-making. In Simone’s songs, she refuses to discount the materiality of the Black body; instead, she envelops the Black body with signifiance and significance. The sonic bearers of semantic content become extensions of the Self—transmutable and heterodox. The compositional and poetic subtleties in these songs claim that the gaze of the Other can potentiate exteriority and freedom—what I term the “exo(p)tic.”

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The Rime of Nina Simone

Southern Cultures ◽

10.1353/scu.2018.0039 ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 24 (3) ◽

pp. 160-164

Author(s):

Tiana Clark

Keyword(s):

Nina Simone

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Santa y Andrés: A dossier

Studies in Spanish & Latin-American Cinemas ◽

10.1386/slac_00027_2 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 17 (3) ◽

pp. 377-382

Author(s):

Dunja Fehimović ◽

Ruth Goldberg

Keyword(s):

Subject Matter ◽

Film Industry ◽

Cuban Revolution ◽

Original Essays ◽

Starting Point ◽

Online Archive ◽

History Of ◽

The Subject ◽

Cuban Cinema

Carlos Lechuga’s film Santa y Andrés (2016) has enjoyed worldwide acclaim as an intimate, dramatic portrayal of the unlikely friendship that develops in rural Cuba between Andrés, a gay dissident writer, and Santa, the militant citizen who has been sent to surveil him. Declared to be extreme and/or inaccurate in its historical depictions, the film was censored in Cuba and was the subject of intense controversy and public polemics surrounding its release in 2016. Debates about the film’s subject matter and its censorship extend ongoing disagreement over the role of art within the Cuban Revolution, and the changing nature of the Cuban film industry itself. This dossier brings together new scholarship on Santa y Andrés and is linked to an online archive of some of the original essays that have been written about the film by Cuban critics and filmmakers since 2016. The aim of this project is to create a starting point for researchers who wish to investigate Santa y Andrés, evaluating the film both for its contentious initial reception, and in terms of its enduring contribution to the history of Cuban cinema.

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Stories, Bodies, Movements

Hungry Translations ◽

10.5622/illinois/9780252042577.003.0005 ◽

2019 ◽

pp. 197-240

Author(s):

Richa Nagar ◽

Sangtin Kisan Mazdoor Sangathan ◽

Parakh Theatre

Keyword(s):

Research University ◽

Ways Of Knowing ◽

The Self ◽

Public Research ◽

Graduate Course ◽

Self In Relation ◽

Du Bois ◽

Public Research University ◽

June Jordan ◽

Nina Simone

Can the ways of knowing and being co-developed with SKMS and Parakh be reworked pedagogically in a public research university? This exploration births a combined undergraduate and graduate course, 'Stories, Bodies, Movements,' which unfolds in the form of fifteen weekly 'Acts' and uses storytelling, writing, and theatre as modes of collective relearning. In absorbing the writing of W.E.B. Du Bois, June Jordan, Nina Simone, Sujatha Gidla, Om Prakash Valmiki, Viet Thanh Nguyen, and others, the Syllabus asks: What of ourselves must each member of the class offer in order to become an ethical receiver of the stories we are reading? And how might this commitment to ethically receive stories translate into an embodied journey that seeks to transform the self in relation to the collective?

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