Conference Agenda

In Okinawa, hip-hop has emerged as a powerful site of cultural resistance, where young rappers gather weekly in cyphers at American Village, near the U.S. military base, transforming public spaces into arenas of political expression. A cypher—a freestyle rap session where MCs take turns improvising verses—has long been a cornerstone of hip-hop culture, fostering community, competition, and social commentary. Drawing from the global tradition of cyphers rooted in Black musical resistance, these gatherings serve as a disruption of Okinawa’s contemporary political landscape, challenging the lingering effects of Japan’s neocolonial policies and the enduring U.S. military presence. This paper explores how hip-hop in Okinawa—both through independent grassroots movements and the work of prominent artists like Awich and OZworld—story telling in lyrics, interpolates traditional Ryukyu melodies, creating a sonic bridge between Okinawa’s past and its contested present. While hip-hop serves as a medium for young rappers to voice their frustrations and reclaim their identity, it has also been strategically embraced by local politicians seeking to engage young voters. Through an ethnographic study of street-level cyphers, independent labels, and mainstream artists in Tokyo and Okinawa, respectively, this paper examines the ways in which Okinawan hip-hop negotiates racial, cultural, and political tensions, positioning itself within a larger global network of resistance. By tracing the intersections of hip-hop, race, and political agency in Okinawa, this study highlights how local artists disrupt dominant narratives and use music as a force for social change, asserting Okinawa’s autonomy within the broader framework of Japanese and U.S. geopolitical negotiations.

Between 1946 and 1956, with most theatres in ruins after the war, approximately twenty film-operas, which proved to be box-office hits, were produced in Italy. Directed by Clemente Fracassi and presenting an abridged version of Verdi’s work, Aida (1953) was the first Italian opera-film in Technicolor, achieving successful distribution across Europe and the United States. Aida’s character was embodied by the still-unknown Sophia Loren, who lip-synched Renata Tebaldi’s voice – an established practice in opera-films that extended to the other roles.

Building on the studies by Bernard Kuhn (2009) and Marcia Citron (2015), this paper explores Fracassi’s Aida against the backdrop of post-World-War-II Italy and the contemporary film industry, reflecting on the re-mediation of Verdi’s opera through cinema and the convergence of representational codes from both mediums into a hybrid aesthetic and cultural product. Firstly, I explore the creative strategies (including extensive cuts and the use of voice-over) aimed at neutralizing conventions characteristic of opera that, tacitly accepted by operagoers, were deemed incompatible with the cinematic medium. I then investigate the recourse to theatrical makeup for Sophia Loren and Afro Poli (who interpreted Amonasro, lip-synching Gino Bechi’s voice) to portray Ethiopian ethnicity. This choice, a legacy of operatic staging, clashes with the film’s intent to adapt Verdi’s opera to cinema, particularly in a period when Neorealism had redefined cinematic codes for representing blackness. Finally, I examine the interpolated scene depicting the Egyptian attack on the Ethiopians and the employment of the so-called ‘Roman salute’ in light of Italy’s ongoing reckoning with its colonialist and totalitarian past. Rooted in Jacques-Louis David’s Le Serment des Horaces (1784) and codified as a marker of antiquity in early-twentieth-century Italian and Hollywood kolossals, the ‘Roman salute’ acquired a distinct political significance during and after the totalitarian regimes that appropriated it, shifting from a tool of propaganda to one of potential critique. Drawing a parallel with Mervyn LeRoy’s film Quo vadis (1951), I argue that Fracassi’s Aida can be interpreted as an intentionally ambiguous ideological product, offering hooks for a reading that subtly condemns Fascism and calling for further analysis of Italian opera-films from that decade.

“A sexually fully-fledged literary confidant … declared of my verse: ‘If you publish it, it will cast ridicule and contempt on your whole book.’ But I persist in including the verse. If the quoted verdict is correct … I have ‘a screw loose’ intellectually, as well as being sexually and anatomically ‘a freak of Nature.’ [But] the published pieces show the psychologist what ultra-androgyne verse is like. Besides, possible androgyne readers may be able to appreciate this verse.”

These were the words of Jennie June—an individual born in the 1870s who was also called Earl Lind, Ralph Werther, and Pussie, and who strongly felt h/imself to be “a girl incarnated in a boy’s body” (Lind 1922). June was an androgyne—born male, but “neither man nor woman: with secondary psychic and physical characteristics of the one as well as the other sex” (Lind 1922). S/he authored three memoirs recounting h/is experiences within the fairie subculture in late-nineteenth-century New York, amateur performances as a female impersonator, and exploits as an escort to soldiers. H/is 1918 memoir contains “fairie songs” with original lyrics set to popular tunes. Dedicated to h/is soldiers, the songs depict love, abuse, and sadness—and highlight a cartoonishly weak, vapid construction of white femininity that June calls “the French doll-baby.”

June’s materials present an archive of extreme abjection that has received little scholarly attention, despite being a detailed written record of early gender-variant history. S/he paints the gender-variant subject as tragic, describing being “imprisoned in the body of a boy,” and “a hopeless sexual cripple." This paper explores musical means through which June articulates sexual difference—using cultural touchstones specific to the turn-of-the-century U.S.—and navigates the painful alienation of a nonnormative existence. If we are willing to listen, what might s/he tell us?

Sarah Haley (2016) writes that “song has the potential to resist containment but hold history.” As Trump’s administration endeavors to obliterate trans people from the public eye, Jennie June’s "fairie songs" are audible, living, and unruly proof that gender-variant people have always existed here, and we will continue to do so.

Recent debates about the political meanings and reception of Verdi’s “Risorgimento” operas have posed an important question: was there a surge of interest in these works immediately preceding and during the revolutions of 1848–49? In the case of I Lombardi alla prima crociata, the answer is unequivocally yes, but in order to see the pattern we must look beyond major theaters. From the Carnval season of 1847 to that of 1849 there were at least 39 Italian productions of the opera, most of them in smaller cities. These productions occurred in two distinct waves: first in the Kingdom of Lombardy-Venetia during the anxious months preceding the upheavals of 1848, then in the Papal States after the war for independence forced northern theaters to close.

The political nature of these performances is extraordinarily well documented, although this evidence has largely gone unnoticed until now. Government edicts and police reports record Austrian authorities’ alarm at the rise of patriotic expression in the theaters and at performances of I Lombardi specifically. The liberal newspapers that proliferated after the censorship reforms of 1847 provide vivid accounts of theatrical demonstrations. The librettos of these performances occasionally even include patriotic prefaces that speak openly of the opera’s political character and relevance to present events.

Indeed, these performances of I Lombardi offer particularly illuminating examples of the ways the stages, streets, and battlefields of the revolution tended to mirror one another. In the north, the crusaders’ chorus “O Signore, dal tetto natio” became a flashpoint of patriotic zeal, a substitute for Rossini’s popular—and recently banned—hymn to Pius IX. In Rome, a patriotic rally at the Colosseum in which the charismatic Padre Gavazzi exhorted his fellow Italians to join the struggle against Austria bore more than a passing resemblance to a scene in Verdi’s opera, which had just played at the Teatro Apollo. And in Naples, censors had to block an effort to mimic the regalia of the modern crusaders in the costumes of their medieval counterparts. Thus, I Lombardi played a conspicuous role in what was in many ways a theatrical revolution.