What is Liz Garbus’ argument about Nina Simone’s career in her documentary? How does she render her biography (the details about her life)
equivalent to her discography (the politics of her performances)?
What Is Joshua Chamber-Letson’s argument about Nina Simone’s career? How does he grant her discography its autonomy from her biography?
How does his analytical focus on her performing body as opposed to her subjectivity enable a different (minoritarian) reading of her power and
potential and the history that Nina Simone embodied?
Thinking back to figures like Selena, Ivy Queen, Ricky Martin, Beyonce, what resonances are shared with Nina Simone? How have their bodies
performed work and potential to expand or unsettle the ground of the genre-worlds and the social worlds these artists inhabited and traversed?
Feel free to link to any media that can help you articulate the arguments best- whether covered in the reading or from your own knowledge of the
artist(s). Think about queer performance and the capability to make things vibrate otherwise. What traditions of black performance does Nina draw
from? What does she borrow from soul, from blues women? What does she inherit from Blind Tom? George Johnson? What casts her out of
marketability? How does the ventriloquial fantasy (minstrelsy and the question of who is imitating who?) haunt her career? How does she give
meaning to Attali’s claim that music prefigures and reflects social formations?
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