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Video short introducing the international music hall star of the late 19th and early 20th Centuries, relating her to the conditions for Black British performance artists today.
Our new collaboration with filmmaker Graham Riach explores the life of Josephine Morcashani (1870-1929), a Black British music hall star known across Europe as a glamorous cross-dressing diva. We hear tales of brandishing pistols, a flight from wartime Berlin, and discover in the archives the only known recording of Morcashani鈥檚 voice.
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鈥楬earing Ghosts: The Life & Times of Josephine Morcashani鈥� traces the life of a major star of the music hall stage in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries. Through that story it reflects on the conditions of performance for Black British artists, both then and now. The video features researcher Jeff Bowersox and performer Helen McDonald, and investigates Morcashani鈥檚 acts of self-creation, the lengths she was willing to go to in order to succeed, and the politics of preserving the archives of black performers.
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The film was created by filmmaker Graham Riach in collaboration with Jeff Bowersox and the 新香港六合彩开奖结果European Institute's Claudia Sternberg. Many thanks to Rainer Lotz the use of his recording of Josephine Morcashani.
By and with
- 听is an academic and documentary filmmaker based in Oxford and Brussels. As an academic, he specialises in world literature, with a particular interest in questions of form and aesthetics. As a filmmaker, he specialises in working with academics to tell the story of their research in words, images, and sound.
- 听is an Associate Professor of German History at UCL, where he teaches and researches German colonial history, Black European studies, and the history of toys. He is currently working on a book following Black stage entertainers across central Europe before the jazz age.听Jeff is also the managing editor of听, a web resource offering 1,000 years of Black histories in the German-speaking lands. Also check out his recent academic article on .
- is听an activist singer and storyteller, poet and performer.听
[Black Europe] & Festival of Afro-European Arts, Performance & Scholarship
This film premiered as part of our Festival of Afro-European Arts, Performance & Scholarship in June 2024.听This celebrated听Black cultural production and critical inquiry and seeks to explore the structures that make Blackness seem natural, self-evident, and variously foreign across Europe. Our overarching听[Black Europe]听work stream includes this festival, a speaker series in 2023-24 and a podcast, all to听challenge the notion of Europe as a white space, and to highlight the gaps in studies of race in Europe and in colonial contexts.
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