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Somewhere the moon has fallen through a window and broken into thirty pieces of silver.1 The rosary beads evoke post-biblical Christianity, but the thirty pieces of silver point directly to the Bible. The reference is to Matthew 26:14-16, where Jerusalem's chief priests secure Judas's betrayal of Jesus for that price. After Judas later returns the silver and hangs himself, the chief priests, finding it unlawful to deposit blood money in the treasury, use the bounty to buy land for burying dead foreigners (Matthew 27:7-10). \"9 Richards uses the term \"cultural braidedness\" to highlight the interwoven practice of African and American spirituality shot through Wilson's drama.10 Similarly, Harry Elam suggests that the Cycle's theology is \"distinctly creolized,\" whereby \"African spiritualism conjoins with the practical American reality; a union through which \"Wilson's spirituality overcomes the conventional Christian divide between the spirit and the flesh, between God and individual, between body and soul\"!! As Richards and Elam demonstrate, religiosity for Wilson's characters is always manifold, inflected by African ancestry, American experience, and the murky, often violent space in between. [...]the ritualistic Juba in Joe Turner can be both \"as African as possible,\" as Wilson calls for in the stage direction, and sensibly include devotional calls to the Holy Ghost of Christian theology.12 As Richards says: \"the binary of either/or is replaced by the principle of both/and\"13 The Juba, like spirituality throughout Wilson's work, is a complex amalgam of African cosmology, New World Christianity, and celebratory humanism that resists categorical conscription.

Orlando Riverius Marsh has often been pedestalled as a sound recording pioneer. Through his examination of many \"electrical\" Paramount recordings, particularly those of Ma Rainey, Ron Geesin questions how much pioneering there was, and proposes that it became misrouted, giving explanations involving analysis of Marsh's relevant patent, US1, 754, 520 of 1930, the embedded clues all pointing to why sound restorationists and keen listeners have been so perplexed and annoyed ever since.

This article explores the construction of hybrid authenticity by Bob Dylan's Theme Time Radio Hour, an XM Radio programme that aired between 2006 and 2009. Dylan's foray into radio presents compelling questions about the role of his star image in advancing a corporate strategy of premium radio that requires subscription access. Through narration and curation, a performed freeform radio format and fragments of radio history, Dylan's celebrity, voice and status as a vehicle for understanding the ‘American song tradition’ are solidified within the context of subscription satellite radio. In advance of the dominance of subscription streaming listening that companies like Spotify are now known for, Dylan's radio programme and recorded music of this period contribute to XM Radio's efforts to distinguish the satellite service from ‘traditional’ commercial format radio and to entice music listeners to become subscribers.

Explaining his process, Santiago-Hudson remarks, \"[i]f I'm going to remove something that made August incredible-his language-what do I replace it with? I replace it with pictures\" (Cox). Because the \"pictures\" that Santiago-Hudson added enhance the naturalist themes already present in the play, many of the observations made by critics about the original text are likewise relevant to the film. [...]Çiǧdem Üsekes recognizes that \"property or capital bestows power on whites in American society,\" which makes it possible for them to \"determine the course of other people's lives\" (116). In so doing, he, and the entire creative team, reminds viewers that a longing for freedom and economic opportunity served as a catalyst that prompted millions of African Americans to relocate to the North. To quote Viola Davis, the African Americans who made their way to the North \"found a place that was no better than the South\"; they found \"that there was no escaping the oppressiveness of America\" (Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, A Legacy).1 In bringing this stark reality to the screen, Wolfe shifts away from the black and white cinemagraphs used to depict the Great Migration and, instead, portrays this new life in living color. Just as Jay Plum observed that the play \"specifically resists the egalitarian myth of America as a land of endless opportunity for everyone, focusing instead on the social and economic displacement of African Americans\"

This article examines the African American queer radical feminist activist, Ernestine Eckstein, a daughter of the South born in the urban cultural center of Memphis, Tennessee and raised in the Midwest in South Bend, Indiana. This work explores the numerous barriers Eckstein faced due to her multiple intersecting identities. Drawing on oral history, archival records, magazine articles, and newspaper articles, as well as secondary literature, this work contributes to and enhances our understanding of Black and queer histories. I investigate the radical tools of resistance Eckstein employed to challenge systems of oppression constructed by white supremacy including racism, sexism, and misogynoir. Spanning a short historical era, from the mid-to-late 20th century, I explore Eckstein's political awakening and crucial role in the fight against sexual and racial discrimination. Centering Eckstein's life and activism expands ideas and understandings of Black womanhood and highlights discrimination within African American and gay and lesbian communities. In this article I center Eckstein as a fighter for equality in her own narrative rather than at the margins of queer white history and heteronormative Black women's history.

Well before Billie Holiday's doleful rendition of \"Strange Fruit,\" African American women playwrights directly confronted the subject of lynching. In addition, Angelina Weld Grimké's Rachel (1916) offers a prime example of how Black lesbian writers used coding and nuance to present queer content in lynching dramas. This reading of Grimké's work reveals how the Black lynched body and the Black lesbian body both become culturally abject within the sexual economy of lynching. Taking a holistic view of Grimké's oeuvre, I analyze Rachel alongside her erotic poetry and short stories, establishing multiple connections between the theme of lynching and lesbian longing. Grimké kept her own longings private, submerged in her literary output, yet similarities in themes, figures, and images suggest that Grimké resisted racism and homophobia simultaneously. By listening closely for how lesbian desire appears, often through absence, critics can develop new perspectives on these often overwrought, sentimental writings from the earliest moments of the Harlem Renaissance. I urge a more expansive approach to women's queerness in these incipient years, prior to Nella Larsen's Passing (1929), or the \"downlow\" coolness of Black women's blues music.

This report from the field examines the interpretation of two notable queer women from Columbus, Georgia: blues musician Gertrude “Ma” Rainey (1886–1939) and Southern Gothic author Carson McCullers (1917–1967). Although these women maintained complicated relationships with their hometown, the Columbus Museum is utilizing new ways to examine their sexuality in the context of their cultural contributions. Nuanced interpretation of Rainey’s and McCullers’s bisexuality offers opportunities to discuss connections between sexuality, gender, race, and economic realities. In presenting the museum’s efforts to interpret these fascinating personalities through exhibitions and permanent collection artifacts, this article offers ideas, strategies, and questions for public historians to consider in their own practice.

George C. Wolfe narrates a sequence from his film featuring Viola Davis and Chadwick Boseman.

What a lot of people don't understand about the 1920s is that there were at least 100 blues women recording records - from Paramount to Columbia and with the smaller record labels. When Ma gets to sing, belt and moan and says, \"Here I am\" - you can feel the tremendous legacy of strong Black women who have always been the rock and foundation of our communities. Women like Fannie Lou Hamer, C oretta Scott King, Maya Angelou, Ruby Dee, Betty Shabazz, Angela Davis, Shirley Chisholm and Sonia Sanchez.