Aisha Jackson on the Broadway Musical Stage: An <i>Afro-Fabulative</i> Embodiment of Princess Anna in <i>Frozen: The Broadway Musical</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The 2018 original cast of Frozen: The Broadway Musical included Black performer Aisha Jackson as the alternate for the role of Anna. I argue that Jackson’s live performances as Anna, from 2018 to 2020, celebrate Black artistry and Black girlhood, enabling Black fan communities to see themselves mirrored in a Disney Princess, even one not originally written as Black. The significance of spotlighting Jackson’s embodiment of Princess Anna grows from the extended invisibilization of Blackness in youth narratives. Jackson’s performances as Anna allow for a Black main character and a Black artist/creator to be visibilized in the Frozen franchise. This article strives to centre and archive Black performance and contextualize Frozen: The Broadway Musical as an afro-fabulative affiliate of Black Broadway. I turn to Tavia Nyong’o’s articulations of afro-fabulation to read Black performance through Black performance scholarship, and I understand afro-fabulation’s insistent presencing of Blackness as an example of bringing the dark fantastic onto centre stage and into the spotlight.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.013 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 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".