As a jazz scholar, I am concerned with how often black women's stories are silenced, ignored or forgotten in jazz history. But how do I effectively hear and see them? I turn to theater as a helpful medium to better embody, voice, and visualize multiple black women’s stories in ways that exceed the written page-- just as black women have long contributed well beyond the pages of jazz history. At the Camargo Foundation, I will create a play-essay, my term for the merging of theater with expository writing; it will interweave interview transcripts, field notes, theories and original play excerpts borne out of my ethnographic research on black women performers in Paris in order to foreground their silenced knowledges. Ultimately, this play-essay attempts to model more intersectional, multi-sighted and dialogical jazz scholarship.

Biography

Rashida K. Braggs is Associate Professor in Africana Studies and faculty affiliate in American Studies and Comparative Literature at Williams College. With her background in Humanities (IHUM postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University), Performance Studies (Ph.D. Northwestern University), Mass Communications (M.S. Boston University), and Theater Studies and English (B.A. Yale University), Dr. Braggs introduces a performative lens to African diasporic cultural expressions, from jazz to sports to mass media. Her book Jazz Diasporas: Race, Music and Migration in Post-World War II Paris (2016) analyzes music, literature, film, historical documents and ethnographic interviews in order to investigate the illusion of a color-blind Paris that seduced African American musicians, the strategies they used to thrive in Paris, and the transformations in personal identity that paralleled jazz’s own morphing identity from 1946-1963. In her current manuscript and accompanying performance project “Move Jazz, Black Woman Move,” Dr. Braggs explores how and why black jazz women performers of African descent migrate to, from and between Francophone cities around the world. Her work has also been published in such journals as Nottingham French Studies, The Journal of Popular Music, Palimpsest: A Journal on Women, Gender, and the Black International and The James Baldwin Review.