Abstract:
A ‘diva’, from the Italian for a ‘goddess’, is a feminine, otherworldly being. But what role does the racialized, black, Other play in the conception of the diva as otherworldly? While in contemporary culture, ‘diva’ is often used to denigrate or elevate Black celebrity women, historical diva studies continue overwhelmingly to be a history of white celebrity that erases a more diverse narrative. In this paper, I address this oversight by shining a light on Afrodiasporic divadom, from the conception of the cult of the diva in eighteenth-century opera to its inclusion of theatre and dance stars in the fin-de-siècle. Moving beyond scholarly tendencies to locate Black divadom as originating in nineteenth-century America, I trace it back to where the cult of the diva originated, in eighteenth-century Europe, through figures like Vittoria Tesi (1701–1775), the Afro-Italian opera star who acquired celebrity with performances that toyed with race, gender, sexuality and class through voice, costume, and cosmetics.
Recovering this first wave of Black divadom helps us understand how the intersecting notions of race, gender, sexuality and class took shape in eighteenth-century Europe, and how they have impacted and shaped Western celebrity and performance culture that continue to other Black femininity as inherently eroticized and exoticized. Building on existing scholarship on the intersecting racialization and gendering of voices in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Europe and America (Eidsheim, Thurman, Morrison), I demonstrate that vocal identity markers relating to gender and race, often presumed natural, were already being socially produced in the preceding century.
Bio:
Emmanuela Wroth is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in the Faculty of Music at the University of Cambridge. She is a socio-cultural historian, specializing in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century music theatre history and celebrity, through the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, and class. Her current project, “Diasporic Divas: Racialized and Gendered Celebrity in Western Europe, 1715–1925”, recovers the overlooked careers of black women performers. She has recently won awards both from the Transnational Opera Studies Conference and the Theatre and Performance Research Association. Her first book, “Courting Celebrity: Creating the Courtesan on the Popular Parisian Stage and Beyond, 1831–1859”, is forthcoming with Oxford University Press.
Emmanuela regularly disseminates her work publicly: she was a 2025 finalist for the BBC New Generation Thinkers scheme, she recently organized a public lecture-recital in celebration of Black History Month, and her new research is due to feature on several podcasts including “Holding Up the Ladder” and EC2.