Daphne Brooks is Associate Professor of English and African American Studies at Princeton University. Professor Brooks writes in the areas of African American literature, popular culture, and performance. Her most recent scholarship addresses black performativity and includes a volume titled Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Performances of Race and Freedom. On September 29, Professor Brooks delivered a public lecture titled “The Noisettes: Black Female Singers and Sonic Afro-Feminist Praxis.” In her presentation, Professor Brooks asked, “what does black feminist “noise” sound like and what are the ways that we might begin to read black female vocality and musical performance as avant-garde praxis [and] as a challenge to the symbolic order?”
Her presentation considered “the work of African American female musicians and singers as subcultural style that stresses the sonic poetics of “deformity, transformation and Refusal.” Ultimately, she aimed to “re-situate black women’s popular music performance aesthetics within the broader context of black feminist theater culture…[and explore] the potential to utilize sonic Afro-feminist paradigms as methods for (re)reading intersectional representations of the black female body.”