New Books Network Daphne A. Brooks, "Blackstar Rising and the Purple Reign: The Sonic Afterlives of David Bowie and Prince" (Duke UP, 2026)
Apr 14, 2026
Daphne A. Brooks, Yale scholar and co-director of the Yale Black Sound and the Archive Working Group, discusses her edited collection on the legacies of David Bowie and Prince. She traces how grief sparked the project. She explores their ties across race, gender, place, experimental sound, performance, and the book’s hybrid forms like interviews and curatorial pieces.
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Project Born From Dual Grief
- Daphne A. Brooks initiated the project in a moment of collective grief after David Bowie and Prince died in 2016.
- A Yale conference planned for January 2017 became the nucleus for the decade-long edited volume that grew from those memorial events.
Black Radical Traditions Unlock Their Legacies
- Brooks frames Bowie and Prince through Black radical music traditions and Black feminist theory to reveal deeper political and aesthetic connections.
- She argues their sonic and performative experiments are rooted in multiple freedom struggles shaping late 20th- and early 21st-century culture.
Critical Karaoke As Intimate Analysis
- The book mixes formats: scholarly essays, interviews, and 'critical karaoke' pieces that pair short memoir-criticism with songs.
- Critical karaoke requires writing pieces no longer than the song and presenting them while the song plays, creating intimate, performative analyses.