Gayl Jones’s Corregidora and Song For Anninho: Historical Revision, Female Diaspora, and Music

María Rocío Cobo Piñero

doi:10.5007/2175-8026.2014n67p37

Authors

María Rocío Cobo Piñero Universidad de Sevilla

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.5007/2175-8026.2014n67p37

Abstract

In this article I analyze how black music may be used to (re)interpret the legacy of slavery in Gayl Jones’s literary works Corregidora (1975) and Song for Anninho (1981). I argue that female Classic Blues from the 1920s functions as a testimony of resistance and as a means to recount the stories featured in these two texts. The U.S. black author uses the cadences, themes, and tropes of the blues in order to decode female versions of the black diaspora in the Americas. In addition, by setting her literary work in Brazil, Jones establishes an inter-American dialogue and imagines polyphonic and syncretic spaces where the blues is the model for historical revision. Inscribing my study within the theoretical frame of black feminist cultural studies, I emphasize the importance of the first person enunciative voice in female blues, as well as in the texts selected.

Author Biography

María Rocío Cobo Piñero, Universidad de Sevilla

María Rocío Cobo Piñero holds a Ph.D. in North-American Literature (2014) from the Universidad de Sevilla (Spain) in co-tutorship with the Universidade Federal do Espírito Santo, where she has spent the last year and a half doing research with a predoctoral fellowship. She holds an M.A. in Arts, from the University of Pennsylvania (2001), and an M.A. in Teaching Spanish as a Second Language, from the Universidad Pablo de Olavide (Spain, 2010). Since 2004, she has taught and organized courses on Cultural Studies, Spanish Language, and Literature at Universidad de Cádiz and Universidad Pablo de Olavide. She has published on music, film, and literature from a perspective that interconnects gender, race, and migratory movements. Email: rociocobo@gmail.com