Listening to Eartha Kitt in Late-Stage Empire

• In Event: Resisting with/for/as the non/Human in Late Stage American Empire

Abstract

From the earliest days of her career as a dancer-turned-vocalist, Eartha Kitt’s cosmopolitanism polarized audiences, alternately interpreted as a disavowal of her Blackness and a brilliant adaptation to various national styles. Kitt developed her cosmopolitan repertoire alongside her trademark form of vocal delivery often described as a feline purr. Kitt’s hybrid performance style was hotly debated in 1954 by two critics in The Chicago Defender, with one critic applauding her affective and technical range, and the other dismissing her as a mere “song stylist,” rather than a singer, due to her oversexualized manner of performance. This debate is representative of larger trends and tensions present in Kitt’s reception history that alternately lauded and disregarded her vocal talent on the basis of her performance style.

In this paper, I examine Kitt’s vocality by way of her “animalistic” vocal signature, which I theorize as her distinct vocalizations—her “purring” manner of singing and her feline vocal effects—as well as the attendant qualities of tone, timbre, and phrasing in her musical performances. A vocal signature, as described by Alexander Weheliye (2023), represents a performer’s unique “sound.” Like a handwritten representation of one’s name, it is often stylized, both in the sense that it is mannered and that it represents one’s individual style. Expanding upon Weheliye’s description, I argue that Kitt’s performance style and feline vocal signature were indelibly connected to historical and philosophical notions of animality that were particularly racialized and gendered. These connections impacted the politics of listening to Kitt—how her voice was (mis)interpreted and (mis)understood by listeners as non/American and non/Human in the Cold War era. Ultimately, this paper is a meditation on how we might (re)hear Kitt today, situating her in a continuum of Black women artists who reappropriated stereotypes of animality to emancipatory ends.

Author

• Elea Proctor, Ohio State University-Main Campus