Thank you so much 🙏🏾 I deeply appreciate this kind note

Thank you so much, Maya! Your support means the world!

Thank you so much for the shout out, Jamie! 🙏🏾

The great Listervelt Middleton kicks it off 🙏🏾

Speaks for itself.

" . . . In constitutional law the spinelessness of the United States Supreme Court in permitting the judicial nullification of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments was and still is boldly upheld in our few law schools.” - Carter G. Woodson, The Mis-Education of the Negro

Anyway, it was deep. Left me with a lot to think about. And the singers were very good.

Especially bc it is an abrupt shift. It's definitely an element of the fantasy. But by being so over the top, it emphasizes that, in reality, enslavers acted opposite. They unapologetically exploited their own children, broke up families, and killed people "under their correction"

Even the conciliatory ending seems like a critique. It's like an alternate reality where enslavers actually admit they are wrong, course correct, punish enslaved Africans for resisting their wrongs. Initially I was unsatisfied with that ending but now I'm interpreting it differently

So, "Morgiane" fits right in with that, but is set in Western Asia, which i think makes it pretty subversive. Some of the lines in the opera seem like direct call outs of US enslavement. Very express critiques.

Not just Micheaux though. (That's just who I often think about because I'm a fan). But those themes of hidden/surprise ancestry and using that to critique enslavers and oppressors were really popular in entertainment of the late 1800s and early 1900s

This is about enslavement! It's just posed as an analogy. So good. And probably would have been controversial had it come out in the nineteenth century when it was written