Babylon Girls: Black Women Performers and the Shaping of the Modern - Brossura

Brown, Jayna

Brossura

ISBN 10: 0822341573 ISBN 13: 9780822341574

Casa editrice: Duke University Press, 2008

Riassunto

Babylon Girls is a groundbreaking cultural history of the African American women who performed in variety shows—chorus lines, burlesque revues, cabaret acts, and the like—between 1890 and 1945. Through a consideration of the gestures, costuming, vocal techniques, and stagecraft developed by African American singers and dancers, Jayna Brown explains how these women shaped the movement and style of an emerging urban popular culture. In an era of U.S. and British imperialism, these women challenged and played with constructions of race, gender, and the body as they moved across stages and geographic space. They pioneered dance movements including the cakewalk, the shimmy, and the Charleston—black dances by which the “New Woman” defined herself. These early-twentieth-century performers brought these dances with them as they toured across the United States and around the world, becoming cosmopolitan subjects more widely traveled than many of their audiences.

Investigating both well-known performers such as Ada Overton Walker and Josephine Baker and lesser-known artists such as Belle Davis and Valaida Snow, Brown weaves the histories of specific singers and dancers together with incisive theoretical insights. She describes the strange phenomenon of blackface performances by women, both black and white, and she considers how black expressive artists navigated racial segregation. Fronting the “picaninny choruses” of African American child performers who toured Britain and the Continent in the early 1900s, and singing and dancing in The Creole Show (1890), Darktown Follies (1913), and Shuffle Along (1921), black women variety-show performers of the early twentieth century paved the way for later generations of African American performers. Brown shows not only how these artists influenced transnational ideas of the modern woman but also how their artistry was an essential element in the development of jazz.

Su questo libro

Recensione:

"Babylon Girls is a brilliant book. Consistently pushing multiple fields in new directions, Jayna Brown reveals the centrality of black female performance culture in the making of transatlantic modernity. Her incredibly valuable book demonstrates how African Americans moved in resilient and unpredictable ways--both geographically and performatively during the early twentieth century." --Daphne A. Brooks, author of Bodies in Dissent: Performing the Transatlantic Imaginary

"Jayna Brown's Babylon Girls: Black Women Performers and the Shaping of the Modern is a remarkable cultural history of African-American performance from 1890 to 1945. Drawing on archival research, historical documents, literary texts and travelogues, Babylon Girls brings to life the performers of the era and situates them in their complex sociopolitical contexts, thus performing an important act of cultural restitution. The work covers a wide range of theatrical phenomena, from variety shows and female minstrelsy to practices of racial mimicry and the burlesque. At the heart of the text are the multifaceted ironies that stand behind black performance in the modern period... While remaining attentive to the violent social and sexual practices in which modern African-American performance is embedded, Brown opens up a broad vista of black female experience and, in considering black women's experiences as urban citizens, expressive artists and world travellers, shows the ways in which African-American women were both agents and subjects of history. In her attention to female subjectivity in all its complexity, Brown demonstrates how African-American performers were crucial to the formation of a modern urban sensibility... This book is at once a celebration and a lament. The most powerful aspects of the work lie in the disturbing connections drawn between history, histories and representation... Through this dense historical lens, Brown draws a portrait of dance that is both poignant and powerful. Performance here is at once a forum for satire, stereotype, artistic expression, reclamation and celebration...Brown's richly researched work makes an invaluable contribution to the burgeoning field of performance studies. It is of interest to cultural and dance historians, literary scholars, ethnic and gender studies specialists, dancers and performers and the general public alike. --Times Higher Education, 22nd Jan 09

"The most exciting piece of scholarship that I've read in ages, Babylon Girls succeeds as an extremely ambitious, meticulously researched, brilliantly theorized cultural history. It is a landmark contribution to jazz studies, dance and performance studies, black women's history, studies of minstrelsy, and theories of cross-cultural exchange." --Sherrie Tucker, author of Swing Shift: "All Girl" Bands of the 1940s

L'autore:

Jayna Brown is Assistant Professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Riverside.

Su questa edizione

• Editore: Duke University Press
• Data di pubblicazione: 2008
• ISBN 10: 0822341573
• ISBN 13: 9780822341574
• Rilegatura: Copertina flessibile
• Numero di pagine: 354