E-grāmata: Fantasies of Nina Simone

"Fantasies of Nina Simone mines the tension between our collective and individual fantasies of Nina Simone (1933-2003) the performer, Civil Rights activist, and icon, and Nina Simone's desires for herself as an ordinary person. Simone has long embodied the contradictions that Black womanhood has been made to bear in our culture: beauty and dignity, abjection and power, expansive personal talent limited by narrow opportunities for advancement, while also being tasked with resolving these contradictions. Working through Simone's biography and her scattered public archive, Jordan Alexander Stein maps two major movements in her work: her early covers of white male pop song writers and her later move to exploring Caribbean and Afro-diasporic sound, analyzing these shifts as Simone's movement towards her desires, first for authority and authorship and second for her own becoming. Looking at examples from across Simone's genre-bending, four-decade career and at her work's many uptakes and afterlives, Fantasies of Nina Simone mobilizes the psychoanalytic concept of fantasy to build a Black feminist history with and for this multi-faceted performing artist"--

Jordan Alexander Stein uses an archive of Nina Simone’s performances, images, and writings to think through the space between our collective and individual fantasies about Simone the performer, Civil Rights activist, and icon and her own fantasies about herself.

Since her death in 2003, Nina Simone has been the subject of an astonishing number of rereleased, remastered, and remixed albums and compilations as well as biographies, films, viral memes, samples, and soundtracks. In Fantasies of Nina Simone, Jordan Alexander Stein uses an archive of Simone’s performances, images, and writings to examine the space between our collective and individual fantasies about Simone the performer, civil rights activist, and icon, and her own fantasies about herself. Stein outlines how Simone gave voice to personal fantasies through releasing dozens of covers of her white male contemporaries. With her covers of George Harrison, the Bee Gees, Bob Dylan, and others, Simone explored and claimed the power and perspective that come with race and gender privilege. Looking at examples from Simone’s four-decade genre-bending career—from songbook standards, jazz, and pop to folk, junkanoo, and reggae—and at her work’s many uptakes and afterlives, Stein mobilizes the psychoanalytic concept of fantasy to build a black feminist history with and for this multifaceted performing artist.