Recap: Listening Session - “Black Elegies in Sight & Sound”

By the CARE SYLLABUS team

On September 3, 2021, a group of 30 community members gathered at MASS MoCA to explore a series of musical performances assembled by Dr. Kimberly Juanita Brown on the occassion of her guest-curated CARE SYLLABUS module, “Black Elegies in Sight & Sound.”

The five performances, spanning genre and era, are available to listen to below:

The night’s discussion was guided by the following questions:

• What do you notice in these performances? What are you seeing and hearing? What holds your attention?

• What do these performances make you feel?

• What surprises you?

Together, Dr. Brown and the audience touched upon a set of traditions and strategies — spanning the historical and contemporary, religious and secular, personal and communal — that attested to what Brown has identified as “the representational legacy of Black cultural production that coheres around pathways of survival anchoring Black grief.”

Check out Dr. Brown’s module here.