A View from the Balcony--Opera Through Womanist Eyes: PRAXIS for Developing a Balcony Hermeneutic of Restorative Resistance

In this theological work, readers are seated in a metaphorical balcony as a counter melody is composed within America’s operatic tradition. By using imaginary opera glasses, readers are invited to critically view American society and history. The most popular folk songs of white Southerners, Western settlers, and Northern elites were composed from chords of colonialism, white supremacy, patriarchy, hegemony, and xenophobia—forms of anthropological poverty. These songs were, and remain, the most discordant melodies heard by indigenous and enslaved persons in America. Indicting the “church” for its complicity in these oppressions, this work offers the reader a historical glimpse at the philosophical and religious underpinnings of systemic racism. A new healing hermeneutic, the balcony hermeneutic, enables the reader to view, critique, assess, correct, and reverse the devastating consequences of anthropological poverty. By taking a “reversed gaze” of traditional Western Eurocentric systems of knowledge production, through theomusicology, this work privileges the voices of indigenous scholars—philosophers, anthropologists, theologians, and performers—to sing a new song as we correct negative narratives and lyrics through resistance operatic performances.

The Reverend Jean Derricotte-Murphy, Ph.D., D. Min.

New Jersey native Jean Derricotte-Murphy is a Womanist scholar, ethicist, writer, vocal artist, and public theologian. She earned her Doctor of Philosophy in Theology, Ethics, and the Arts from Chicago Theological Seminary (Chicago, IL), her Doctor of Ministry from Ecumenical Theological Seminary (Detroit, MI), and her Master of Theological Studies, Magna Cum Laude from Drew Theological School (Madison, NJ). She presently serves as Associate Minister, Assistant to the Pastor, Director of Christian Education, and Director of the Worship and Arts Ministry at The Historic New Mount Zion Missionary Baptist Church in Detroit, MI. She is Vice President of Safe Sacred Space, a 501c3 ministry in Bloomfield Hills, MI. Using her voice and pen as a public theologian, she writes for the Midwest Business Journal, contributing opinion pieces on current political and social issues.

Derricotte-Murphy's research presents a Womanist remedy for the healing of cultural trauma and cultural amnesia within the African American community. Presented at the American Academy of Religion Meeting (2019), her paper "Rituals of Restorative Resistance: Healing Cultural Trauma and Cultural Amnesia through Cultural Anamnesis and Collective Memory" was published as an article in The Journal of Black Women and Religious Cultures (2021). At the 2023 AAR Meeting, she presented the paper "Beloved, Margeret Garner, and the Desperate Flight to Freedom: Crossing Dangerous Borders" to address and compare the crisis that now exists at American Southern borders with that of Blacks escaping to freedom in the Antebellum South.

Recipient of a publication grant from the Textbook and Authors Association, her book "A View From the Balcony: Opera Through Womanist Eyes" introduces a Balcony Hermeneutic that intersects Womanist Theology, Womanist Anthropology, and Black Performance Theory to trace the racist history of the United States through the development of minstrel shows and opera as acceptable genres of cultural entertainment. She situates African Americans--and other marginalized minorities forcibly consigned to the balconies of theaters and American society, culture, and institutions -- into positions of agency as they/we peer over metaphoric balcony railings to locate, excavate, and correct the historical underpinnings of Western philosophical and theological thought which seeded the racist ideologies that continue to disparage indigenous, Black, and Brown people in the names of God and Christianity.

Dr. J, as she is affectionately called, is a retired public school educator and has been an assistant and adjunct professor, lecturer, and instructor at Ecumenical Theological Seminary, Union Presbyterian Seminary, and the University of Mississippi. This wife, mother of five, and grandmother to fifteen is the daughter, granddaughter, and niece of Black Baptist pastors, preachers, and musicians. She is the first female in this family legacy to become ordained clergy and was inducted into the Martin Luther King Jr. Collegium of Scholars in 2024.

JoAnne Marie Terrell is Associate Professor of Ethics and Theology at Chicago Theological Seminary.