Listening, Elsewhere and Otherwise: A Collective Listening to Shana L. Redmond’s “The Dark Prelude”

Shana L. Redmond is a writer and scholar. She is the author of Anthem: Social Movements and the Sound of Solidarity in the African Diaspora (New York University Press, 2014) and Everything Man: The Form and Function of Paul Robeson (Duke University Press, 2020), which received a number of honors, including a 2021 American Book Award. Her contributions to public thought include essays for NPR and Mother Jones as well as liner essays for Nina Simone’s You’ve Got to Learn (Verve, 2023) and Paul Robeson: Voice of Freedom (Sony, 2024). A 2023 Guggenheim fellow, she is professor of English and comparative literature at the Center for the Study of Ethnicity & Race at Columbia University.

Derek Baron is a postdoctoral associate at the Center for Cultural Analysis at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. They received their Ph.D. in historical musicology from New York University in 2023. Their book in progress is titled The Geopolitics of Voice: Sound, Listening and Law in US Settler Colonialism.

Joshua Chambers-Letson is the chair of performance studies and professor of performance studies and Asian American studies at Northwestern University. Completing a book on queer love and loss for New York University Press (forthcoming 2025), Chambers-Letson is also the author of After the Party: A Manifesto for Queer of Color and A Race So Different: Law and Performance in Asian America; co-editor of José Esteban Muñoz’s The Sense of Brown with Tavia Nyong’o and of Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig’s China Trilogy: Three Parables of Global Capital with Christine Mok.

Maya Kronfeld is assistant professor of theory in the Literature Program at Duke University, with secondary appointments in the Music Department and the Philosophy Department. Her work appears in Radical Philosophy, Jazz & Culture, Philosophy and Literature and is forthcoming in The Cambridge Companion to Philosophy and Literature, The Johns Hopkins Guide to Critical and Cultural Theory, and Political Concepts: A Lexicon. Kronfeld is also a professional pianist who has collaborated with Georgia Anne Muldrow, Toshi Reagon, Nona Hendryx, Thana Alexa and Antonio Sanchez, Christian McBride, and Taylor Eigsti, and lent her skills to drummer-led projects by Justin Brown, Blaque Dynamite, Nikki Glaspie and Thomas Pridgen. Kronfeld played keyboards on Nicole Zuraitis’s How Love Begins, which won the 2024 Grammy Award for best vocal jazz album. She is on the piano faculty at the Stanford Jazz Workshop and performed most recently at the Newport and Monterey jazz festivals.

Matthew D. Morrison is a musicologist, violinist, and associate professor in the Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music at New York University. His book, Blacksound: Making Race and Popular Music in the United States, is published by the University of California Press (2024).

Juno Richards is associate professor of English and women, gender, and sexuality studies at Yale University. They are the author of The Fury Archives: Female Citizenship, Human Rights, and the International Avant-Gardes and co-author of The Ferrante Letters: An Experiment in Collective Criticism.