EIHS Lecture: Pop after Empire: Disco, Decolonization, and the Re-Making of a Music Industry

In this talk, Kira Thurman investigates the rise of Black Europeans in popular music since WWII. After the collapse of European empires, European popular music industries turned to the musical labor of former colonial subjects to reinvent themselves in an increasingly global and English-speaking marketplace. Interpreting many Black European pop stars such as Boney M or Milli Vanilli as Black Americans, however, transatlantic listeners often failed to recognize the musicians performing in front of them as belonging to European history. How, then, do we account for both the overwhelming presence—and discursive absence—of Black Europeans in modern history? This talk seeks to illuminate how musical producers, performers, and their audiences sought to make sense of—and occasionally reject—the category of ‘Black Europe’ in the wake of a newly emerging post-imperial Western Europe.

Kira Thurman is an associate professor of History at the University of Michigan, with affiliations in Germanic Languages & Literatures, Musicology (School of Music, Theatre, and Dance), and AfroAmerican and African Studies. Her research explores Europe’s contemporary and historical relationship with the Black diaspora. Her first book, "Singing like Germans: Black Musicians in the Land of Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms" (Cornell University Press, 2021) won seven awards, including the George Mosse Prize in European Intellectual and Cultural History from the American Historical Association and the Judy Tsou Critical Race Studies Award from the American Musicological Society. NPR selected it as one of their favorite books of 2021.

This event presented by the Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies. It is made possible in part by a generous contribution from Kenneth and Frances Aftel Eisenberg.