The Circumstances of Colour: The Jim Crow Translation of <i>Jonny spielt auf</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article examines the American premiere of the German opera Jonny spielt auf as a form of what I call Jim Crow translation. As originally written and composed by Ernst Krenek, the opera centres on Jonny, a Black jazz musician, who disorders the logic of European cultural superiority. Although thoroughly modern in its original German staging, using stereophonic radios and film projectors, Krenek’s appropriation of Blackness relied on blackface baritones to play Jonny. When the opera came to New York’s Metropolitan Opera, the history of minstrelsy and the legal system of Jim Crow haunted the production. While Jonny was depicted as thoroughly cosmopolitan and modern in Krenek’s conception of the opera, the American production, under the management of Giulio Gatti-Casazza, attempted to turn Jonny into a white vaudevillian in blackface, a publicity stunt that brought the opera further attention under the guise of protecting American morals against a narrative of interracial sexual desire. Though Krenek created an opera based on the value of Black modernity, Gatti-Casazza displayed American racial anxieties through the opera’s promotion. The proposed revisions to the text, through which racialist regimes demonstrated their power over cultural production, reflect the role that translation can play in reinforcing the colour line.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".