The Singing Voice in Contemporary Cinema - Diane Hughes
Singing a Life in Bondage: Black Vocality and Subjectivity in 12 Years a Slave
The Singing Voice in Contemporary Cinema - Diane Hughes
Gianpaolo Chiriacò [+]
Universität Innsbruck
Gianpaolo Chiriacò is a Lise Meitner researcher at the Archive of Popular Music–Universität Innsbruck. He is mainly interested in the history and anthropology of black singing voices, and in musical expressions of Afro-Italian identities and communities. He has been a fellow researcher at the University of Chicago and worked for three years at the Center for Black Music Research (Columbia College Chicago) thanks to a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellowship. He authored the book Voci Nere. Storia e antropologia del canto afroamericano (2018) and curated the symposia “Black Vocality: Cultural Memories, Identities, and Practices of African-American Singing Styles” (www.afrovocality.com). Chiriaco taught ethnomusicology and popular music at the University of Salento, where he also earned his PhD, and at the Freie Universität Bolzano-Bozen.
Description
This chapter explores the role of singing voice in defining the condition of “free slave” within Steve McQueen’s 2013 12 Years a Slave. While comparing the movie to historical documentation of black American vocal expressions, it emphasizes how they ultimately represent - both in the documentation and in the movie - the unbroken search for a safe space through the delivery of vocal sounds.