2024 Keynote Lecture by Emily J. Lordi

 ^{April 9, 4:30-6 pm, Sophus Bugges Hus, Auditorium 3} 

Listening to Whitney: Revision and Retrieval through Close Reading

Music has long been described as the prime mover of Black culture, the first and most durable of all Afrodiasporic arts. Yet musical meaning is also produced by literary and critical discourse, which has the power to definitively illuminate as well as obfuscate Black artists’ craft, vision, and impact. I suggest that close readings of pop songs performed by women artists, combined with the singers’ own commentary, provide the ground for any serious reevaluation of artists’ lives and work. These readings of neglected sources animate my current biography of Whitney Houston, a singer who has been widely celebrated but rarely studied; lamented but not listened to. They help us to build a new narrative about Houston’s genius and impact—one that overturns the dominant, reductive image of the singer as a pop princess-turned-victim, while also yielding new insights into the nexus of agency and contingency, visibility and invisibility, talent and craft. I suggest in closing that such a reconsideration is made possible by a redistribution of cultural, discursive power that Houston herself helped to advance.