Lecture by Gayle Wald from George Washington University

Department of Gender Studies, Faculty of Humanities, CU invites you the public lecture “Over the Rainbow: Labelle, Black Feminist Musical Self-Fashioning, and 1970s Freedom Dreams”. The lecture will be presented by Gayle Wald from George Washington University. The lecture shall take place in university area Vokovice (room FHS 1) on March 31, 2016. The lecture and the follow-up discussion will be held in English. Admission is free.

Music has always moved us, but sometimes it even mobilizes us. What are the relationships between music and affect, affect and emotion, emotion (from esmovoir, “to set in motion”) and political movements?

To get at the notion of musical mobilization, my paper focuses on the early (pre-“Lady Marmalade”) career of Nona Hendryx, Sarah Dash, and Patti LaBelle, who began making music as members of the mid-to-late 1960s girl group Patti LaBelle and the Bluebells and subsequently reinvented themselves in the early 1970s as the musically cosmopolitan trio Labelle. What specifically interests me is how, through a series of aesthetic changes (in their look, repertoire, and sound), Hendryx, Dash, and LaBelle responded to the urgent political “call” of Black Power and, in so doing, pioneered a mode of black feminist musical performance that would move and mobilize various counter-publics.

Gayle Wald is professor of English and American Studies at George Washington University in Washington, DC. She is author of three books, including Shout, Sister, Shout! (2007, Beacon), a biography of musical trailblazer Sister Rosetta Tharpe, and It's Been Beautiful: Soul! and Black Power TV (2015, Duke University Press). Currently, she edits (with Oliver Wang), the Journal of Popular Music Studies, the house publication of the U.S. branch of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music.