AMERICAN DIVA: EXTRAORDINARY, UNRULY, FABULOUS BY DEBORAH PAREDEZ Review by Catherine McNulty

AMERICAN DIVA: EXTRAORDINARY, UNRULY, FABULOUS BY DEBORAH PAREDEZ

Review by Catherine McNulty

Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company

Publication date: May 21, 2024

ISBN: 9781324035305

Pages: 239

The Divas Electric, Eclectic, Unapologetic

The sound of the diva’s voice was how I came to know my place in relation to others in the neighborhood. Which is to say how I came to know my place in relation to Americanness. In relation to others like me who are rarely invited to join the choruses of America’s anthems. —Deborah Paredez, American Diva

Deborah Paredez’s life is defined by divas. As a child, Vikki Carr’s voice centered her as both Mexican and American in her south Texas hometown. Rita Moreno’s role as Anita in West Side Story taught her to cross boundaries and take up space. Celia Cruz’s music brought together her cohort of grad school girlfriends and offered them relief from the whiteness of academia. 

In her book American Diva: Extraordinary, Unruly, Fabulous, Paredez, a poet/scholar and professor at Columbia University, studies and celebrates the diva. The title is singular, but Paredez’s pantheon of divas overflows. Part cultural study, part memoir, part appreciation, Paredez catalogues the life and impact of her divas from chart-topping juggernauts like Aretha Franklin and Tina Turner, to her own beloved Tía Lucia—whose style and outsized personality burn through the pages. Whitman sang of the body electric; Paredez revels in the diva eclectic. 

What a diva is haunts the book; the whole of it is a working definition. A diva is “a force of—or against—nature…”, “the embodiment of an unapologetically fierce, preternaturally gifted and charismatic, gender-troubling female (or outrageously feminine) performer…”, “simultaneously of their time and timeless…”. It’s excessive, Paredez’s continued defining, redefining and amending of who and what a diva is or isn’t, but then so is her subject. Because, as Paredez writes, “The diva was born. The diva was reborn. Over the last fifty years, the diva has gone from disco to discourse.” 

Part of that discourse is reckoning with the transformation of the word “diva,” from singular talent to a marketing term. The early 2000s saw the rise of the girl diva/girl boss era of mainstream feminism. As the decade progressed, the word “diva” was applied excessively to people, activities, and objects in a glut of capitalistic exuberance. There were Diva Girl Mad Libs, a diva surf camp, diva Happy Meal toys—it became yet another tepid feminist label used to sell merchandise, often to young white girls. The rules are different for girls—and women—of color. Diva is empowerment, until it is a slur. 

American Diva centers Black, Brown, and queer divas. Paredez shows the stakes are always higher for the inhabitants of these bodies. She writes, “Black women have often been labeled as divas—in an effort to diminish rather than applaud their discipline and talent, to mark their racial otherness and sexual excess, and to punish them for being so unapologetically good at what they do.” The boundaries a diva in a Black, Brown, or queer body crosses are wider, deeper, and more closely policed. Paredez is explicit: a diva like this “inspires our devotion not simply because of the ways she is like us, but because of the ways she shows us how to draw upon her difference as the very source of her power. It’s no wonder that those of us living on the social margins often turn to the diva as a guide for how to live along the fault lines that threaten our daily living.” Here diva worship is not merely relishing in another’s talent, it is a map of survival. 

Most of Paredez’s divas are singers and performers. However, in one riveting chapter, “Diva Girls”, she focuses on the Williams sisters, Venus and Serena. Tennis prodigies who dominated and transformed the game, the two also faced bald racism and double standards for much of their careers, from referees’ bad calls to the (mostly white) spectators heckling them with boos and racial slurs. For Paredez, the rise of the Williams sisters coincides with major changes in her life: a move to New York, marriage, the birth of her daughter. In the haze of early motherhood, Paredez witnesses the sisters on the court, haunted by how they are treated. This is the world she’s brought her daughter—a Brown girl—into, one that will label her a diva and punish her for demanding equal space within it. The Williams sisters are proof there need to be more divas on the court. Paredez ensures her daughter will be among them. 

As much as a diva can attract hatred from detractors, sometimes the biggest backlash comes from fans. Paredez never explores the weight of representation, how heavy it can be to hold the love and expectations of so many. Most of Paredez’s divas hit their full flower before the internet took over and laid bare how toxic fan culture can be, how love too easily curdles and warps into a perversity closer to possessiveness and loathing. Paredez understands popular culture and the power it wields; such a generous and expansive thinker must have thoughts on impossible standards and purity tests fans hold against their divas. Perhaps that is the work for the next generation of diva aficionados.

Whatever they face, famous divas have cushioning, be it money like the Williams sisters, or a name, like Tina Turner. Without fame or money to ease movement through the world, the consequences of living so unapologetically can be steep. Tía Lucia loses her car to gambling and her phone is often shut off. She refuses marriage proposals from men who blacken her eyes. But Tía Lucia is a woman whose “most important act of creation was self-creation” and she has a long and storied life. Jaime, a sweet gay friend from high school who introduces Paredez to the oeuvre of John Waters and teaches her to give good head, meets tragedy far too young. He dies just before Paredez leaves for college. She knows he cruised a strip of highway, but never learns what happened to him. Some divas burn hot and bright and only briefly. 

Some divas shine across the decades. The last chapter of the book finds Paredez deep in the locked down and lonely covid months in New York City, dreaming of the LaBelle performance at the Met Opera house from October 1974. LaBelle, formerly the Motown girl group led by Patti LaBelle, had reinvented themselves as an Afrofuturist disco trio who were in New York to promote their latest album, Nightbird. Here, when the city was on the verge of collapse in both timelines, is Paredez’s most sumptuous and hopeful chapter. Here, too, is where any reader should have LaBelle’s album queued up and ready to go. This is a party, everyone is invited (wear silver!) and the divas will deliver the soundtrack. 

Paredez wants us all to be held in diva exceptionalism, to bask in the hope of performance. Spinning out and dancing together to an impossibly long and high held note, this is how we find each other. “The sound of a diva’s voice is sometimes all we need to lead us through or to lead us out. And sometimes, the sound of a diva’s voice is what leads us back.” Back to ourselves, back to what endures, but also forward to a new place where a future can be built. 

In addition to American Diva, Deborah Paredez is the author of three books: the critical study Selenidad: Selena, Latinos, and the Performance of Memory (Duke 2009), and the poetry collections Year of the Dog (BOA Editions 2020) and This Side of Skin (Wings Press 2002). She won the 2020 Writers’ League of Texas poetry award. Her work has appeared in appeared in The New York Times, Los Angeles Review of Books, Boston Review, NPR, and elsewhere. She is the current chair of Columbia University’s School of the Arts Writing Program and the co-founder of CantoMundo, a national organization dedicated to Latinx poets and poetry.

Catherine McNulty is a writer from the bowels of Maryland who will someday finish one of the novels she is writing. 

19 February 2025