Performing Black Womanhood

Adjoa Osei is a PhD Researcher of Brazilian Studies at the University of Liverpool, funded by the AHRC and the Duncan Norman Scholarship.  She was a fellow at the John W. Kluge Center at the Library of Congress, resident from October 2018 until April 2019.  She completed an MPhil in Portuguese Studies at the University of Oxford, funded by the Ertegun Scholarship in the Humanities, achieving a Distinction. Prior to this, she completed a BA in Portuguese and Brazilian Studies at King’s College London, University of London achieving a First-Class Honours.  

The twentieth century was an exciting moment of avant-garde artistic and intellectual innovation.  While the likes of Igor Stravinsky, Béla Bartók, Mario de Andrade, Miles Davis and John Coltrane were thinking about new ways of representing sound, artists such as Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dalí and Emiliano de Cavalcanti were thinking about new ways of representing the figure.  Within this moment of…