Anndretta Lyle Wilson, PhD Faculty Profile
Anndretta Lyle Wilson, PhD
Assistant Professor
Department of Ethnic Studies
- E-mail: anndretta.wilson@csueastbay.edu
- Office: MI 4095
- Office Hours: Tuesdays 10:00AM - 12:00PM By Zoom Appointment
Wilson's current manuscript, “Labor, Pleasure, and Possession through Transnational Black Musical Performance” traces US Black American subterranean performances from community spaces where practitioners embodied African retentions to public commercial spaces where derivative performances have been feminized, racialized, and backgrounded in service to popular music globally. The study considers precarity, authorship, mastery, and mobility for Black performers through spaces within the US and circulating transnationally across technologies and geographies. A primary figure is former domestic worker Marion Williams whose forty-year career began in Pentecostal churches in the 1930s and extended to service as a US State Department musical ambassador across Africa and Europe. The study concludes with ethnography of contemporary francophone African performers in Paris who perform gospel concerts advertised as “Black American” for international tourists in Catholic cathedrals.