Disruption: Maya Angelou and the Singing Body

Abstract

This presentation will provide of brief overview of the singing body in Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969), Singin’ and Swingin’ and Gettin' Merry Like Christmas (1976), and All God’s Children Need Traveling Shoes (1986). I examine how Angelou’s focus on the singing body allows a critical re-imagining of black female embodiment in which the body and the mind are interconnected. I contend that the singing body is itself, as Spillers suggests, a form of writing— a “hieroglyphic” that speaks as much to the experience of black female being as the literary text. In this presentation, I will share selected recordings of Maya Angelou’s own singing to consider questions such as: What does it mean to consider music as an archive in Angelou’s work? Specifically, what does the singing body mean for a construction of black female identity or black feminist identity? In addition to exploring challenges of the process itself and what they reveal about our values and assumptions as scholars, I will examine the significance of re- thinking the boundary lines of the body (lived experience) and voice (the expression of the mind) and what lies at the intersection. In particular, I am interested in questioning what remains troubling about the mind/soul or body/spirit connection in the re-telling of one’s life and what it proffers to discussions about gender. I argue that the singing body in Angelou’s writing disrupts normalized narratives of black female subjectivity and internalizes a discussion of boundary and dislocation within the black female body.