From Classical Pianist to R&B Icon: Intersectionality in “What Happened, Nina Simone?”

A theme in the documentary that I found particularly interesting was the tension between Nina Simone’s early identity as a classical pianist and her later role as a blues and soul singer wrestling with the ideas raised in the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s. This invokes the same tension that Brown discussed in her metaphor of historians having to shift their focus from classical composition - and history as an isolating and singular narrative - to jazz, a more chaotic but more real representation of historical narratives. In both cases, an individual has to let go of a way of thinking that, though it comes with its own set of difficulty and complexity, enables one to focus on one set of complexities, to pick up a frame of mind that requires even more complex intersections between a myriad of issues that are difficult to wrestle even in isolation. This idea also ties into our discussion in lecture about intersectionality, and how it is difficult to think of ideas such as race, gender, class, and sexuality as interconnected, but that it is necessary to do so in order to reflect the actual experiences and problems individuals face. This post only scratches the surface of this issue, but I thought the documentary helped reify the ideas we discussed earlier in the day.