A imperatriz do blues: Bessie Smith (1894-1937) e o espaço de produção feminina de blues no século XX

Abstract

This research aspires to work the blues in a ‘historicized’ way, conceiving it as an expression or representation of African American subjects in the United States in the decades after the process of abolition of slavery as a legal system of work. In doing so, however, it is based on an intersectional perspective, rescuing the black female experience of the blues from the songs of Bessie Smith, emblematic name of the genre, in order to understand, through the representations manifested in the analyzed lyrics, how the dynamics of these intersectional violences of race, gender and class in the United States of the beginning of the 20th century worked, what were their mechanisms and limits, how this segregated black community not only dealt with it, but also how they thought about it and acted within it, using the blues as a parameter.