Name: The Strange Career of Porgy and Bess: Race, Culture, and America’s Most Famous Opera
Author: Ellen Noonan (Author)
ISBN: 9780807837160

The Strange Career of Porgy and Bess: Race, Culture, and America’s Most Famous Opera book cover

The Strange Career of Porgy and Bess: Race, Culture, and America’s Most Famous Opera

Author(s): Ellen Noonan (Author)

Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
Publication Date: 30 Dec. 2012
Edition: New
Language: English
Print length: 440 pages
ISBN-10: 0807837164
ISBN-13: 9780807837160

Book Description

Created by George Gershwin and DuBose Heyward and sung by generations of black performers, Porgy and Bess has been both embraced and reviled since its debut in 1935. In this comprehensive account, Ellen Noonan examines the opera’s long history of invention and reinvention as a barometer of twentieth-century American expectations about race, culture, and the struggle for equality. In its surprising endurance lies a myriad of local, national, and international stories.
For black performers and commentators, Porgy and Bess was a nexus for debates about cultural representation and racial uplift. White producers, critics, and even audiences spun revealing racial narratives around the show, initially in an attempt to demonstrate its authenticity and later to keep it from becoming discredited or irrelevant. Expertly weaving together the wide-ranging debates over the original novel, Porgy, and its adaptations on stage and film with a history of its intimate ties to Charleston, The Strange Career of Porgy and Bess uncovers the complexities behind one of our nation’s most long-lived cultural touchstones.

Editorial Reviews

Review

Ellen Noonan digs deep into the production and reception history of what has been called ‘the most contradictory cultural symbol ever created in the Western world.’ In this richly detailed book, Porgy and Bess becomes a prism refracting myriad triumphs and tragedies, collusions and fissures, in the American history of race, region, and culture. It is about white fantasy and black jobs, the slippery intersection of cultural and political representation, the problems of canonization, and, ultimately, the distorted feedback loop between the imaginary Catfish Row and the realities of everyday life for African Americans in Charleston. I was on the edge of my seat until the curtain call.–Karl Hagstrom Miller, University of Texas

From the Inside Flap

Created by George Gershwin and DuBose Heyward and sung by generations of black performers, Porgy and Bess has been both embraced and reviled since its debut in 1935. Ellen Noonan examines the opera’s long history of invention and reinvention as a barometer of twentieth-century American expectations about race, culture, and the struggle for equality. Expertly weaving together the wide-ranging debates over the original novel, Porgy, and its adaptations on stage and film with a history of its intimate ties to Charleston, The Strange Career of Porgy and Bess uncovers the complexities behind one of our nation’s most long-lived cultural touchstones.

About the Author

Ellen Noonan is a historian, educator, and media producer at the American Social History Project, the Graduate Center, City University of New York.

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