ALICE KAPLAN INSTITUTE FOR THE HUMANITIES

The United States is currently home to 5% of the world’s population, but 25% of its incarcerated population. With more than 2.3 million people under the control of the American criminal legal system, the United States has more total people who are incarcerated than any other country in the world. Moreover, the United States has one of the most punitive approaches to criminal justice, imposing lengthy prison sentences, forcing people who are incarcerated to spend years—sometimes even decades—in solitary confinement, and providing very few educational, vocational, and recreational programs in prisons.

Punishment and incarceration also disproportionately impact people of color. Black Americans are incarcerated at more than 5 times the rate of whites. While Black Americans and Hispanics make up about 32% of the US population, they constitute 56% of the incarcerated population.

This course will use a philosophical lens to examine the causes and consequences of this crisis of mass incarceration in the United States, along with possible solutions to it, with a particular emphasis on the theories of punishment grounding our criminal legal system and, thus, our prisons. The course will have a seminar-style format and will be held at Stateville Correctional Center in Crest Hill, Illinois. Enrollment will include both Northwestern students from the Evanston campus and students in the Northwestern Prison Education Program.

This course engages the performances of Black women on the US musical stage from 1900 to 1970, focusing on singer-actresses and their vocal sound. Under the capacious vaudeville tent or proscenium arch of musical theatre belting, how did the blues shouter’s sound influence the Broadway belter’s technique? How were these sounds carried forward by Black torch singers and character actresses, nightclub vocalists, television variety performers, and Black Broadway glamour girls? Drawing on the work of scholars Shane Vogel and Daphne Brooks,
we will read performers’ autobiographies as performance theory and understand Black women singers as skillful arrangers of sound–voice teachers whose varied “singing lessons” function as vibrant scenarios for performance analysis. Our studies will take seriously what Sissieretta Jones, Bessie Smith, Ethel Waters, Pearl Bailey, Juanita Hall, Lena Horne, Diahann Carroll, Leslie Uggams, and Eartha Kitt have had to say and teach about singing on the musical stage.