American Diva

March 25, 2024
Poet Paredez (Selenidad) explores in this vibrant study why divas—female performers characterized by their “virtuosity, charisma, and capacity for reinvention”—have been alternately “revered and reviled.” Profile subjects include Tina Turner, who performed onstage with an “inimitable ferocity” and bodily power that belied the offstage abuse she endured from her husband, Ike Turner. Rita Moreno’s “flamboyant” dancing as Anita in the film version of West Side Story mirrored the character’s (and actor’s) refusal to follow “linear” American assimilation narratives. Singer Celia Cruz asserted herself as a Black woman in the “male-dominated, lighter-skinned realm of salsa,” including during one memorable 1974 sound check for a concert in the Democratic Republic of Congo when she was told she could stop singing and didn’t, as if to say, Paredez imagines, “When you start something you better see it... all the way the fuck through.” Yet divahood has its risks, the author notes, particularly for Black and brown women. When Venus and Serena Williams refused to hew to “grateful Black athlete” stereotypes during their 2000s rise, they were jeered at and maligned for their confidence—“diva girls,” Paredez writes, were celebrated only if they “sparkled with whiteness” and didn’t acknowledge their talent. Paredez’s insightful analysis is interwoven with evocative memories of divas she’s known, including her Tía Lucia, who was “never afraid of the big gamble,” and who once marched a young Paredez into a newly opened San Antonio hotel so they could ride the glass elevators as if they were guests. The result is an inspiring ode to powerful women.

April 1, 2024
A poet's tribute to divas. Combining memoir and cultural criticism, Paredez, chair of the writing program at Columbia and author of two poetry collections, creates a lively examination of the phenomenon of the diva: "strong, complicated, virtuosic, larger-than-life, unruly women." From her own feisty aunt to opera star Nadine Sierra, divas, Paredez maintains, have shaped her as a "brown feminist writer, artist, and mother of a certain age." Growing up in San Antonio, hearing the sound of Mexican American vocalist and diva Vikki Carr was how she came to know she was Mexican. Carr's voice, she writes, was "irrefutable proof and proclamation of our Mexicanness" and her relationship "to others like me who are rarely invited to join the choruses of America's anthems." Latina divas are prominent among the many other women whom the author profiles, including Grace Jones, Tina Turner, Aretha Franklin, Selena, Celia Cruz, Venus and Serena Williams, Diana Ross, Lena Horne, and Patti LaBelle. Paredez reveals the diva quality of Rita Moreno's performance as Anita in West Side Story; the "trauma and triumph" of Tina Turner's voice in "Proud Mary"; and the power of Divine, drag alter-ego of Harris Glenn Milstead, who showed her that divas "live out loud what our true selves are like on the inside." A diva, Paredez writes, "teaches us how to indulge our wildest appetites." In a seminar on divas that she has taught since 2009, she and her students have found that talking about these women has brought up issues that transcend their stature as entertainers. Issues of "difference and artistry and belonging and power and style and race and girlhood and discipline and gender and fantasy and survival and capitalism and sexuality and freedom" recur throughout Paredez's spirited celebration of divas. A close, personal, well-informed examination of powerful women and their artistic work.

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April 5, 2024

Part memoir, part critical study, Paredez's (writing program, Columbia Univ.; Selenidad: Selena, Latinos, and the Performance of Memory) discourse about what it means to be a diva restores the word's true definition and the concept to its rightful place. She describes a diva as a woman in the spotlight, every eye fixed upon her fabulousness, every ear attuned to her voice. Paredez pays tribute to Tina Turner, Aretha Franklin, Jomama Jones, and many others. Her book notes that in later 20th century and early 21st century, divas in the United States were subjected to commodification; even the word itself took on a derisory connotation. But part of the point of the diva is that she is superlative; she requires no adjectives, no introductions, and certainly no arguments in her favor. Allusions to the classical definition of a hero are sprinkled throughout the book, for a diva achieves her own kind of apotheosis. VERDICT A poetic and inspiring treatment of the diva. Best paired with a discography and a playlist of music by the profiled divas.--Genevieve Williams

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