African American Book Reviews

2010-09-07T09:25:00.001-07:00

Tap Dancing America: A Cultural History. By Constance Valis Hill.

Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, January 2010. Cloth: ISBN 978-0195390827, $39.95. 464 pages.

Review by Douglas C. Macleod, State University of New York, Albany

On May 9^th, 2010, actress and singer Lena Horne died at the age of ninety-two. In an ironic twist, it was on that same day that I was reading about Ms. Horne and Bill “Bojangles” Robinson in Constance Valis Hill’s comprehensive encyclopedia of tap dance entitled Tap Dancing America: a Cultural History. In her work, Hill talks about a then-twenty-six-year-old Horne performing in Stormy Weather, a 1943 musical that contains what some may consider one of the greatest tap sequences of all time: “Jumpin’ Jive.” Here is a segment of Hill’s description of that scene:

Dressed in tailcoats, they [the Nicholas Brothers] jump table to table, then over the railing and onto the stage floor. Stepping and sliding across the floor, they follow [Cab] Calloway to center stage and begin their tap dance (their A section). Spins, cramp rolls, turns, and crossover steps are woven into an intricate pattern of sound and movement, as the brothers spin out backsliding rhythms that slip them smoothly from place to place on the stage. In the second A section, they repeat and vary their step patterns in alternating solos and duets. Then, with a back-slide split that springs up into a jump-split, they land on the platform where a row of musicians are seated. (136)

As one can clearly ascertain from the passage above, Hill is not only an accomplished tap dance historian (and performer), but an extremely descriptive and passionate writer; she is able to paint a colorful and dynamic picture for her reader, which is an arduous task when writing about a visual and aural art-form.

In fact, that is what makes Tap Dancing America: a Cultural History such a compelling read. Obviously, her knowledge of the subject is substantial; but, with the material she is covering, she could have easily slipped into just providing her reader with a list of names, dates, movies, and scenes. Instead, Hill shows the reader the dance sequences she writes about using specificities and fine detail. This helps prove Hill’s claim that tap dance is a people-filled, tangible form of entertainment that is “intercultural and interracial” and is all “inclusive to men and women, soloists and choristers, sister acts and two-man teams, producers and choreographers” and to “proselytizers and preservationists” (xiii).

Hill also successfully proves her claim by taking the reader back in time, to the early days of tap. Starting with the mid-1600’s to 1900, she delves deeply into the roots of modern-day American tap dance, which stem from a fusion of Irish American jig and sean-no dancing and Afro-American jig and gioube dancing, as well as turn of the century buck-and-wing dancing, which in and of itself stemmed from Appalachian clog dancing (22). She takes her time to provide to her reader a rich and layered history of tap, a history filled with many different racial and cultural dance styles. She then takes her reader on a decade-by-decade journey, writing on filmed and un-filmed dance sequences, and memorable and less-than-famous tap dancers like: Jack Donohue, Bert and Baby Alice, and George Primrose (1910s); James Barton, Buddy Bradley, and Fredi Washington (1920s); Buck and Bubbles, Edith “Baby” Edwards, Louise Madison, Fred Astaire, and Bill “Bojangles” Robinson (1930s); Betty Grable, Ann Miller, The Brothers Condos, Ray Bolger, and Gene Kelly (1940s); Little Teddy Hale, Leon Collins, Jimmy Slyde, Donald O’Connor, and Clayton “Peg Leg” Bates (1950s); Bunny Briggs and Charles “Cholly”Atkins (1960s);The Hines Brothers (Maurice and Gregory), Brenda Bufolino, and Honi Coles (1970s); Lynn Dally, Linda Sohl-Donnell, Diane Walker, and Savion Glover (1980s); Roxanne “Butterfly” Semadini, Baakari Wilder, and Ayodele Casel (1990s); and, Chole Arnold, Dormeshia Sumbry Edwards, Derrick K. Grant, and Sarah Petronio (present day). All of these tap dancers (amongst scores of others Hill writes about) have influence not only in the decade in which she spotlights them in, but also within the decades when the old timers intentionally or unintentionally stepped out of that spotlight to allow younger hoofers to continue on the path to tap dancing greatness.

Not only does Hill provide her reader with a significant (almost too much, in some instances) amount of physical detail, but she intertwines that physical detail with her thoughts and observations on the cultural significance of the dance. Her section on Ada (Aida) Overton Walker, for example, is one of her strongest:

Mourned as the foremost African American female stage artist, Overton Walker’s interest in both African and African American indigenous material and her translation of these to the modern stage anticipated the choreographic work of modern dance pioneers Katherine Dunham and Pearl Primus. Both in her solo work for women and in the unison and precision choreographies for the female chorus, she claimed a female presence on the American theatrical stage. She also gave presence to black rhythm dancing, thus opening the prime-time, public professional space for tap performance, which had been previously restricted to post-show-time, late-night buck-and-wing contests. By negotiating the narrow white definitions of appropriate black performance with her own version of black specialization and innovation, Overton Walker established a black cultural integrity onstage that established a model by which African American musical artists could gain acceptance on the professional concert stage. (41)

Very much like Lena Horne after her and in her own way, Aida Overton Walker was foundational and set the standard high for future dancers; and, Hill certainly gives Overton Walker recognition because of it. Overton Walker broke major misogynistic barriers, although it was (and in some ways still is) prominent some sixty or seventy years after she first set foot on stage. Hill’s strength is certainly in her ability to recognize the importance of women in a medium that never fully appreciated dancers like Overton Walker, Bufolino, and Dally.

I must admit that it was extremely difficult to get through Tap Dancing America not because of its sheer length, nor because of its abundance of information, but because, after reading sections of Hill’s book, I felt compelled to go to YouTube to see many of the acts she alludes to. Bunny Briggs, Brenda Bufolino, Honi Coles, Gregory Hines, Jimmy Slyde: simply amazing clips, all of which are readily available for everyone to see. Just type in each name, and watch how sweet it is.

And, yes, the Nicholas Brothers in “Jumpin’ Jive” is definitely one of the greatest tap dance sequences ever filmed; but the best: debatable.

2010-07-28T17:51:00.000-07:00

Terror in the Heart of Freedom: Citizenship, Sexual Violence, and the Meaning of Race in the Postemancipation South. By Hannah Rosen.

Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, January 2009. Cloth: ISBN 978-0-8078-3202-8, $65; paper: ISBN 978-0807858820, $24.95. 424 pages.

Review by Robin Dasher-Alston, American Historical Association

Reconstruction was a period when former slaves attempted to create new lives for themselves following the Civil War, and when the whites who occupied the cities, towns, and hamlets where these newly freed men and women settled were faced with the challenge of attempting to reconceptualize their perceptions of race and the racial hierarchy that had heretofore dictated their interactions. In 1865, Memphis, Tennessee was one of the many cities and towns that experienced an influx of former slaves from the surrounding countryside and other parts of the south. Recently freed blacks were drawn to Memphis, located in former Confederate territory, in part because of the strong presence of the Union Army and access to a local Freedmen’s Bureau. Of particular importance was the presence of black Union soldiers, who aided the federal government’s efforts to protect and provide for these newly freed slaves.

The former slaves embraced their newfound freedom, establishing schools, churches, and benevolent societies with such speed and vigor that local white communities were shocked by the sense of urgency associated with those efforts. Freed slaves did not hesitate to seek ways to exercise their rights as citizens, and quickly began to explore the opportunities associated with their new status as free men and women. Black women in particular sought the protection of law as administered by the local Freedman’s Bureaus. One former slave sued her employer for unpaid wages, and another filed a complaint against a former slave owner who refused to release her children. By virtue of such actions, these former slaves were redefining racial boundaries and their status in the public sphere—efforts to integrate and fully participate in every aspect of society as emancipated citizens—that had previously been denied them. Prior to this period, the very definition of citizenship was associated with being male and white.

What occurred in Memphis was, in many ways, illustrative of the struggles and conflicts that escalated as previously enslaved men and women sought political and social equality in realms that had been the preserve of whites. The Memphis Riot of 1866 and the brutal violence that followed was an example of how violence was tactically used to preserve black subjugation. For black women, rape and the threat of rape was used to intimidate, and to force them into submission. The presence of armed black Union soldiers, along with the accelerating tensions between those soldiers and the white city police provided the impetus by the white citizenry to correct perceived wrongs by Union troops. The events that led to the Memphis Riot were in were in many respects a violent collision between the established political order, with its historic racial hierarchies, and the demand for the rights and opportunities associated with citizenship by the previously enslaved.

Hannah Rosen reveals, through careful research and insightful analysis, that the violent response by white southerners against the push by former slaves to gain status in the political, social, and economic spheres served to unite whites across social and economic boundaries that had previously divided them. While wealthy white males may have initially resisted the economic implications associated with freed men and women seeking fair wages for their labor, immigrant whites understood the implications in terms of the potential loss their growing political power and a threat against the promise of enhanced economic status. The white citizens of Memphis were now united across class lines with a common goal and against a common target. While the goal was to suppress any actions by black men and women that would enable them to assert political, economic, or social independence or power in the public sphere, or to claim any notion of equality in the social sphere, black women were often targeted. The author reveals that the Memphis Riot was an attempt by the local white citizenry and the police to regain the control that they saw slipping away.

Rosen establishes that sexual violence against African American women enabled the rioters to reestablish the dominance of white over black, to reinforce racial differences and to assert racial and gender inferiority. The actions of the Memphis rioters were supported and, in some cases, even encouraged by local politicians and the press as an assertion of white manhood—protectors of not only the public spheres but also the private spheres of the home, hearth, and family. Not surprisingly, the riot erupted with a violent confrontation between black Union soldiers and white city policeman, followed by rumors of a planned attack by the black soldiers against the white community in general.

As Rosen asserts, the press often characterized blacks as disorderly and criminal, perceptions that black women, regardless of their status, were prone to sexual promiscuity and lewdness. These blatant mischaracterizations only served to heightened fear and anxiety amongst the white citizens who increasingly viewed the black community in Memphis as dangerous and out of control. During the riot, at least 48 blacks were killed, many were wounded, and at least five black women reported that they had been raped. Of the two white men who died, one succumbed to a self-inflicted gunshot.

Rosen presents the documented testimony of individuals—both black and white—both the perpetuators and victims of the violence of the Memphis Riot. Yet, most compelling is the testimony of the black women who were raped. The testimony of these women in itself was extraordinary because it revealed that they believed that the congressional committee that received their testimony would accept their statements as truthful, and that the law would recognize their rights as victims. To wit, their testimony challenged the perceptions of black women as immoral, incapable of being virtuous and honorable.

Among the many strengths of Rosen’s deeply engaging and penetrating book is that she uses the emergence of these formerly enslaved men and women into the social, political, and economic arena, as well as the Memphis Riot and its aftermath, as a way to examine and assess the radical shifts and disruptions that began to appear after emancipation. Rosen reveals, how, in an all-too-brief moment in history following emancipation, blacks sought to exercise their rights as citizens, and black women defied both racial and gender hierarchies as they sought to redefine those socially defined constructs.

2010-02-28T12:35:00.000-08:00

African Culture and Melville's Art: The Creative Process in Benito Cereno and Moby-Dick.
By Sterling Stuckey.

New York: Oxford University Press, November 2009. Paper: ISBN: 0195372700, $27.95. 154 pages.

Review by Babacar M’Baye, Kent State University

American Culture and Melville’s Art: The Creative Process in Benito Cereno and Moby-Dick examines the relations between Melville’s aesthetics and African culture. While the critical literature about Melville is abundant, it usually eschews the significance of African traditions in the work of this complex American writer. American Culture and Melville’s Art focuses on three major books of Melville: Redburn: His First Voyage (1849), Moby-Dick (1851), and Benito Cereno (1855). According to Stuckey, interpreting these works’ relationships with African art will demonstrate that Melville was “a far more subtle and inventive writer than even the most fervent admirers” of these works “claim” (3-4).

Stuckey has always been interested in the connections between Africa and North America, as was apparent in the numerous times in which he hinted at them in his previous works such as Slave Culture: Nationalist Theory and the Foundation of Black America (1987) and Going through the Storm: the Influence of African American Art in History (1994). For instance, while discussing the African influence in Thomas Wentworth Higginson’s Army Life in a Black Regiment (1870), Stuckey suggests, in Slave Culture, Higginson’s fascination with the pervasive and ineradicable African-inflected “ring shout,” chants, rhythms, and feet and hand movements that blended with the Christianity of the Sea Island blacks during the Civil War (83-84). Discussing these Africanisms, Stuckey writes: “It should not surprise us that the same people constructed African huts in which they shouted and, as Higginson demonstrates in a passage that recalls Herman Melville’s Redburn, brought African sensibility to bear on Christianity” (84). A similar connection between Melville and African culture is apparent in Going through the Storm in which Stuckey reveals the ties between the African American folk figure Brer Rabbit and the character of Babo in Herman Melville’s 1855 tale Benito Cereno, whom he represents as a Senegalese. He writes: “The play of irony that informs Babo’s activities on board the San Dominick is precisely that adopted by Brer Rabbit in his African American expression . . . What is certain is that Babo is so much like Brer Rabbit that it is perfectly logical that he should have come from Senegal, a thriving center for tales of the African hare, Brer Rabbit’s ancestral model” (165).

Further connections between Melville and African traditions are also apparent in African Culture and Melville’s Art when Stuckey discussed how Melville’s knowledge of Africa mainly derived from the nineteenth-century philosophical and ideological scholarships about Africa that he read. In an attempt to refute the critic Edward Margolies’ argument that “Melville did not know blacks well” (37), Stuckey writes: “On the contrary, because he knew them well, Hegel was very useful as Melville imagined Don Benito’s dependence on Babo” (37). Stuckey continues: “Melville was almost waiting for Hegel to provide the philosophical terms for what he had long thought and espoused. Melville ties the slave trade to the wealth of England in Redburn, informing us that the wealth of Liverpool derived mainly from the slave trade, which underscore his command of the economics of master-slave relations” (37). As Stuckey argues, Melville’s knowledge of African culture is also evident in a passage in Benito Cereno in which a group of six enslaved Africans dance like “delirious black dervishes” (39). According to Stuckey, this example suggests “Melville’s recognition of abstruse aspects of Ashantee culture in [Captain] Delano’s account—the dance and music of the women” and “the best of his knowledge” of this culture (39).

Yet the strongest quality of Stuckey’s African Culture and Melville’s Art lies in the interdisciplinary methodology that he uses to suggest the links between Melville’s writings and Africa. This method is based on the use of the scholarship that might have influenced Melville before or as he was writing Moby-Dick, Redburn, and Benito Cereno. Drawing from this scholarship, which was usually and unarguably racist, Stuckey nonetheless shows its significance in the study of early African influences in early American writings which would have been difficult to corroborate without such historical documents. Two examples of such Africanisms appear in Stuckey’s analysis of Melville’s representations of non-Europeans in Benito Cereno and Moby-Dick. Discussing Benito Cereno, Stuckey refers to the personae of Atufal, Babo’s lieutenant, whose characterization was influenced by Joseph Dupuis’s description of Ashantee warriors in his Journal of a Residence in Ashantee (1824). Stuckey writes: “As we know, the royal gold, in Melville’s hands, became Atufal’s iron. The ‘iron collar’ about Atufal’s neck was derived from Dupuis’s reference to [Ashantee] warriors ‘armed and equipped in their full military habits; some with iron chains suspended round the neck’” (47).

In a similar vein, Stuckey shows that Melville’s description of “the carvings of flesh from the backs and thighs of Africans in Redburn” was an image that was initially reported in Captain Amasa Delano’s book A Narrative of Voyages and Travels in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres: Comprising Three Voyages Round the World; Together With a Voyage of Survey and Discovery, in the Pacific Ocean and Oriental Islands (37).

This book was first published in 1817 under the authorship of Amasa Delano, an American sea captain who was Born in Duxbury, Massachusetts, and served in the American Revolution as a soldier at fifteen and later as a “privateersman.” Stuckey includes this entire narrative in the last segment of African Culture and Melville’s Art, providing current scholars with an important text that can help to better understand the background that influenced Melville’s imagery of Africa in his writings, and his portrayal of the character of Captain Delano in Benito Cereno.

Additionally, Stuckey suggests the relations between Melville’s descriptions of the character of Atufal in Benito Cereno with his portrayal of the character of Daggoo in Moby-Dick. Stuckey writes: “Melville uses similar language in describing them—Atufal: ‘a gigantic black,’ ‘colossal form’; Daggo: ‘a gigantic, coal-black negro,’ ‘colossal limbs. . . . Daggoo’s ‘hearse-plumed head’ and Atufal’s death song, however, seal the argument” (48). By providing us with these parallels between Melville’s African and non-European characters, Stuckey suggests the strong impact of Africa in mid-nineteenth century American literary imagination. In this sense, African Culture and Melville’s Art compliments Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1993), which also examines the representation of Africans in nineteenth-century American culture. In her book, Morrison explores the intricacies of White imagination of Blackness through her concept of “American Africanism,” that is, the study of the origins, literary uses, and constructions of the “African like (or Africanist) presence or persona” in the United States and “the imaginative uses this fabricated presence served” (6). In a similar vein, Stuckey explored the imagination of Africans in Melville’s writings and its derivation from the wider tradition of European ethnography of Africans that influenced it.

Another way in which Stuckey demonstrates the intricate relationships between Melville and Africa is through his analysis of the linkages between Moby-Dick and the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglas (1845). According to Stuckey, a major element in Douglas’s narrative is its allusion to slave dance and music that were heavily influenced by African traditions (82). As Stuckey suggests, the lyrics that Douglas heard on Colonel Lloyd’s Maryland plantation without largely referring to them were blues-like songs that “predated conventional spirituals” and “were difficult to grasp—perhaps owing to improvised, African-inflected song[s] intensified by the sheer agony of the slavery experienced” (82). As Stuckey points out, the shades of “sadness” and “joy” that Douglas reveals in the dance and music of the enslaved blacks might have influenced Melville’s representation of art in Moby-Dick (84). According to Stuckey, “Melville takes particular notice” of Douglas’s simultaneous expression of cheer and gloom in musical tones,” by “Using ‘gloomy,’ and ‘jolly’ as Douglas uses ‘sadness’ and ‘joy,’ to describe both music and the social condition that it reflects on the Pequod” (84). In this sense, Stuckey reveals the impact of both the slave narrative and African art in mid-nineteenth-century American literature.

Stuckey’s American Culture and Melville’s Art is a very important contribution to interdisciplinary scholarship because it establishes major connections between African culture and Melville’s Redburn: His First Voyage, Moby-Dick, and Benito Cereno. These influences demonstrate the pervasive imagination and representations of Africa in nineteenth-century American and European travel writings which provided Melville with the prism through which he learned about Africa. By considering these writings as vital historical and anthropological sources, Stuckey suggests the important role that interdisciplinary scholarships can have in the study of the relations between Africa and its parental cultures in the United States. As Stuckey points out, “the soul of the [American] nation is tied to that of black Africa” (82).

2009-11-29T15:14:00.000-08:00

For the Freedom of Her Race: Black Women and Electoral Politics in Illinois, 1877-1932.

By Lisa Materson.

Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, February 2009. Cloth: ISBN 978-0-8078-3271-4, $42. 352 pages.

Review by Jason Hostutler, Mount Mary College, Wisconsin

In For the Freedom of Her Race, Lisa Materson makes an important contribution to our understanding of the role of African-American women within Jim Crow era politics. Materson tells the story of black women activists in the context of the Illinois political system, working in favor of the Republican Party agenda that supported the use of federal authority to protect the constitutional rights of black citizens. Separated from the influence of Southern white supremacists, these women strove to make a positive political impact for those black Americans facing disenfranchisement and terror in the American South. Individually, these women-activists were of diverse social, economic, and educational backgrounds. However, each had migrated to Illinois from the recently “redeemed” and increasingly racist South, and each possessed a zealous drive to assist the embattled Southern black community in any political way possible. Initially these political opportunities were very limited for Illinois women, but gradually increased alongside expanding suffrage. Women in Illinois won the right to vote in school elections in 1891, and for municipal and federal offices in 1913; they were finally granted full franchise in 1920. Materson convincingly makes the case that even when the outlets for political expression were limited, these African-American activists represented those in the South who had lost their political voice “by proxy,” and encouraged African American men in their communities to do the same. Over time these activists began to lose faith in the Republican Party, as Republican politicians failed to make good on promises to assist their black constituents with anti-lynching legislation. In this manner, the origins of the African-American embrace of the Democratic Party are visible years before the 1932 election of Franklin Roosevelt.

Materson provides numerous case studies to convincingly demonstrate the high level of engagement of Illinois black Republican women in the years 1877-1932. The author describes these decades as the “nadir” and “crucible” of black life in America. Activists such as Ella Elm, Jennie Lawrence, and Alice Thompson Waytes rose to the challenge and actively engaged local, state, and eventually national politics with a zeal fueled in part by the racial injustices occurring in the southern states. Materson’s examination of these women provides much-needed detail to a political drama that in previous historiography has been overshadowed by the story of the black reformer Ida B. Wells. Wells is mentioned only as a side note to allow lesser-known actors to take center stage. The stories of these women make Materson’s study a colorful and fascinating read. Still, the author’s treatment of the specific activities of these women can be at times too superficial. When lacking specific evidence to detail the exact words and activities of her subjects, Materson relies on generalizations based on the overall social climate of the era to imply what the women should have been thinking or doing at the time. Furthermore, the author is also vague about the specific accomplishments of the black activists, especially with regard to their impact on the lives of the Southern black community they are supposedly representing. While these issues are troubling, they do not detract from the quality of this study overall. For the Freedom of Her Race sheds new light on a previously under-examined topic in the political history of the Jim Crow era. The accessibility of this study is due in no small part to Materson’s clean and precise writing style and vibrant storytelling. Her research, most notably in Chicago-area archives, is meticulous.

2009-10-30T12:26:00.000-07:00

Near Black: White-to-Black Passing in American Culture.

By Baz Dreisinger.

Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, November 2008. Paper: ISBN 978-1-55849-675-0, $24.95. 224 pages.

Review by Jackie R. Booker, Winston-Salem State University

Recently, scholars have witnessed an outpouring of works concerning racial passing in American society: for example, George Hutchinson’s excellent biography, In Search of Nella Larsen: A Biography; Martha A. Sandweiss’s Passing Strange: A Gilded Age Tale of Love and Deception Across the Color Line; and now Near Black: White-to-Black Passing in American Culture by Baz Dreisinger.

In five succinct chapters, Dreisinger takes readers through the various mechanisms in which whites have used to imitate black culture. Her thesis, that some whites “chose blackness or brownness merely as a way to escape the stigma of whiteness and to avoid responsibility for owning whiteness is still very much an act of whiteness” (149). She also argues that whites seldom give attention to or pay respect to the very blacks they seek to emulate or copy. She wants whites, as self-identifiers, to be cognizant of the historical perspective in which they operate, to recognize it for its validity and give credit where it’s due—to black culture—rather than prostitute black culture, that is, earn money from appropriating black culture.

Dreisinger uses a number of filters through which to describe near-passing. Some novels and historical texts that cover slavery and Reconstruction, for instance, include William Wells Brown’s Clotel and Ellen Craft’s Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom. In these works, Dreisinger describes the physical passing from white to black. In chapter two, she turns to whites who make an effort to become black through various means, including tanning or oil-skin dyeing. Chapter three continues the theme of some whites who pass for black via physical means, but Dreisinger also addresses how some white women pass. According to the author, passing on the part of white women usually occurs through interracial sex. Here, she uses narratives about interracial relationships but exhibits her best analysis through films. In Jungle Fever, Zebrahead, Save the Last Dance, and Black and White, she clearly demonstrates how and why these unions take place. Although she explores music and how some white women seek out black musicians for passing, this filter in chapter three is not as useful as her analysis of films. Nevertheless, her point is persuasive: some white women operate as “passers” to acquire sex from black men in a way that shocks and challenges white culture.

Chapter four moves the analysis to American music, especially jazz, rock-and-roll, rap, and hip-hop. Here, Dreisinger presents her strongest case for racial passing. Beginning with examples from the 1920s, she shows how whites initially referred to jazz as uncivilized music but as its popularity grew, some white jazz artists crossed over. Two prominent examples were Mezz Mezzrow and Johnny Otis, both of whom not only passed as black men in their music but also in their written works. Dreisinger does miss a key point when she fails to discuss bebop. Black jazz musicians developed this form of music to protect it from whites. Although she analyzes Elvis Presley as a passer, she did not elaborate on his interracial affair resulting in a bi-racial child. This section would have also benefited with a discussion of Alan Freed, the white disc jockey during the 1950s who coined the phrase rock-and-roll and played black music for white audiences.

The author brings out her best in an analysis of rap and hip-hop music. Born in the streets of Brooklyn and Harlem, rap personifies black masculinity and sexuality, so powerfully that once congressional hearings were held to discuss its impact on American culture. White rappers, among them Vanilla Ice, Fred Durst, Boss, and Eminem all embraced this genre of music when it became more socially accepted and whites in suburbs became the major consumers of rap and hip-hop. Quick to seize on the lucrative genre, some white rappers turned out to be frauds. Boss, for example, a female rapper from Los Angeles, came from a wealthy suburb and did not possess the authentic linkage of black rappers from rough areas like Watts and Compton. In addition, while white male rappers sometimes have sexual affairs with black women that help them in passing, it is more important for white male rappers to have links to black male rappers. Thus, white rappers like Fred Drust, Paul Walls, and Paul Barman have found “blackness” in collaborations with Method Man, Chamillionaire, and Prince Paul of De La Soul respectively. Some readers of Near Black may quibble about its unbalanced nature: for instance, its lack of discussion of Mick Jagger, a rocker known for racist comments but one who appropriates black music. Some may also question Dreisinger’s focus on mostly white male passers with less emphasis on white women as crossovers. Her use of the concept “post-racial society” also presents a problem. Racism remains a deep societal ill, despite the election of the nation’s first black president.

Overall, Near Black is a good read and highly recommended for scholars and lay persons alike. It would also make a good text in most American culture courses. Finally, the book makes a significant contribution to the growing genre of works focusing on racial passing.

2009-07-16T14:53:00.001-07:00

Foundation: B-Boys, B-Girls, and Hip-Hop Culture in New York

By Joseph G. Schloss. New York: Oxford University Press, March 2009. Cloth: ISBN 978-0195334050, $74; paper: ISBN 978-0195334067, $19.95. 192 pages.

Review by Tara Jabbaar-Gyambrah, State University of New York, Buffalo

Joseph G. Schloss’s Foundation: B-Boys, B-Girls, and Hip-Hop Culture in New York brings new, invigorating, exciting, and much-needed in-depth analysis of hip-hop culture’s ethnic origins specific to b-boying. By examining the historical and cultural elements of b-boying and b-girling in New York City between 2003 and 2008, Schloss highlights the significance of the transmission of cultural ideas from one place to another by mapping the experiences of dancers in the field . While hip-hop has been labeled a “problem” by mainstream popular culture, Schloss posits that one of its cultural forms, b-boying, embodies a plethora of cultural traditions such as Afro-diasporic competitive dance, battle tactics, acrobatic power moves, and martial arts that live in the Afro-Caribbean, African American, and Latino communities today. He posits that “hip-hop’s strength lies precisely in the diversity of its concepts and practices” (7). In other words, Schloss suggests that hip-hop cannot be understood in terms of “good” versus “bad,” but each of its components should be viewed as representing an artistic flair that should be examined more specifically through ethnographic methods. One of the reasons he cites that b-boying has been often overlooked in scholarship is because it operates “within the framework of literary analysis and culture studies” (8). It is not theory alone that assists in the full understanding of b-boying and b-girling culture, but it is the voices of the dancers themselves that should be a part of scholarship. Moreover, Schloss suggests that if scholars immerse themselves within the communities in which b-boying has emerged and continually transforms over time, they will be more engaged and create research that represents the reality of the culture itself. In the end, literary and culture studies alone cannot holistically represent the voices of the people; however, when it is combined with ethnographic methodology, the voices of the people shine through and create a remarkable presence.

The book’s title, Foundation: B-Boys, B-Girls, and Hip-Hop Culture in New York, focuses on its core by illuminating the definition of foundation as “a term used by b-boys and b-girls to refer to an almost mystical set of notions about b-boying that is passed from teacher to student” (12). With a total of 8 chapters Schloss eloquently situates b-boying as its own unique cultural form within hip-hop by analyzing the philosophies, practices, and experiences of b-boys and b-girls. In chapter 2, “The Original Essence of the Dance: History, Community, and Classic B-Boy Records,” the author examines the relationship between music and dance. The premise is that a relationship between music and choreography exists that allows b-boys and b-girls to transfer historical associations of the music to their dance movements (38). One of the remarkably interesting ideas that materialize in this chapter is that b-boys and b-girls make almost spiritual connections to classic songs such as “Apache” and “Give It Up or Turnit Loose” as a principle that brings to light the bond shared between “modern proponents and the historical essence of the dance, giving strength, energy, and legitimacy to modern devotees” (39). Essentially, b-boying and b-girling becomes a venue by which culture and history meet, sort of like a spaceship traveling in time.

The next chapter, “Getting Your Foundation: Pedagogy,” builds on this idea by solidifying the foundation of b-boying as the combination of the artist’s mentorship, mental approaches, philosophies, attitude, rhythm, style, and character, as well as b-boys’ and b-girls’ ability to recognize another’s dance lineage from his/her style (51). Although it may be assumed that b-boys and b-girls are from a specific geographic area, they are not; b-boying is a collaborative culture that reaches across states and cities. In the words of Schloss, “a b-boy or b-girl is representing a relationship between dance and musical form (a ‘boy’ or ‘girl’ who dances on the ‘break’ or to the ‘beat’ of a record), a reaction to the psychological stress of poverty (one who ‘breaks,’ emotionally), symbolism of the dance over commercialism (b-boy versus breakancers) a commitment to dance over other aspects of hip-hop (as in the Source Manifesto), and a sense of geographical and class pride (‘Bronx-boy’ versus, presumably, ‘Manhattan-boy’)” (64). Despite the fact that there are contradictions in the way that b-boying is defined, for example, “breakdancing” is not seen as “authentic” b-boying culture, as it is connected to commercialism. Furthermore, what is even more intriguing is the idea of b-boying as an expression of gender identity. One of the female artists, Seoulsonyk, describes what she does as b-boying; but male dancers will never call what they do “b-girling.” Schloss suggests that at times, this contradiction can force b-girls to be at odds with their identity. This brings up the idea of masculinity not just in b-boying but hip-hop in general as a representation of male standards. In his film Hip-Hop Beyond Beats and Rhymes, Byron Hurt posits that hip-hop is a reflection of American society’s view on gender roles, wherein men’s roles are pushed to the forefront more often. Even though the author tackles the idea of masculinity and femininity somewhat in this chapter, I believe that there is room for a more focused study on gender roles within “b-girling” culture.

Chapter 4, “We Have to Be Exaggerated: Aesthetics,” integrates the aesthetic principles of b-boying as an art form that provides insight into the communities’ abstract understanding of, and approach to, those conditions. What I loved most about this is that it builds on the idea of locality and/or space, which is called by b-boys and b-girls “cipher” – a circle that encapsulates the dancers while they perform. Not only is this space a sacred entrance into the world of b-boying, but in many instances, it is a place where b-boys and b-girls are given their code names.By and large, Schloss’s book Foundation is a wonderful masterpiece that outlines the historical and cultural experiences of b-boys and b-girls in New York. I highly recommend this book as required reading for scholars in the field of popular culture (i.e., hip-hop) and for students in the classroom.

2009-06-25T12:54:00.001-07:00

Living as Equals: How Three White Communities Struggled to Make Interracial Connections during the Civil Rights Era

By Phyllis Palmer. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, July 2008. Cloth
[illustrated]: ISBN 978-0826515964, $69.95; paper: ISBN 978-0826515971, $27.95.
318 pages.

Review by Barclay Key, Western Illinois University

Scholarship on the civil rights era has been shaped in significant ways by white southerners from religious families who witnessed the injustices of the Jim Crow system during childhood and subsequently published books that reflected upon and interpreted their experiences. Timothy Tyson’s Blood Done Sign My Name and Charles Marsh’s The Last Days are just two examples of this compulsion to explain what now seems inexplicable. In the introduction to Living as Equals, Phyllis Palmer describes her similar background and, we might assume, comparable desire to explore the complexities of race and religion in recent history.

Living as Equals is not a memoir, but it does qualify traditional narratives of the civil rights era which focus attention on the recalcitrance of whites whose resistance to racial equality marks popular memory. However, Palmer reminds her readers that most white Americans were not violent racists, nor were they avid supporters of the civil rights movement. Historians have recently begun examining the actions and attitudes of the majority of whites who located themselves between these two poles, and Palmer’s work belongs in this discussion because it explores the efforts of “white Americans who responded hopefully to the civil rights era’s promise of a freer and more equitable nation” (6). If most white Americans did not actively participate in a civil rights movement, then “civil rights inspired some white Americans to become new kinds of white people” (13). Palmer aims to trace how and why these changes occurred.

Most whites did not respond as hopefully as Palmer’s subjects, but these three organizations, or “communities” as she calls them, warrant careful consideration for understanding the changing dynamics of race from the 1950s through the 1980s. Chapters 1 and 2 assess the National Conference of Christians and Jews’ (NCCJ) Brotherhood Camps. Inspired by religious imperatives of community and equality, these summer camps brought together teenagers from a variety of racial and religious backgrounds. Campers inevitably experienced a variety of “encounters,” as they shared living quarters, discussed current events, and pursued romances. Palmer emphasizes that camp leaders “had a more radically democratic ideal in mind than opening up a white world to a few nonwhites who could assimilate” (35). NCCJ counselors organized activities and discussions which facilitated interracial cooperation and dialogue in an environment where campers did not feel threatened. About twenty-five thousand young people participated in camps that were conducted in New York City, Newark, and Los Angeles between 1951 and 1974.

Chapters 3 and 4 evaluate Neighbors Inc. (NI), an organization composed of residents from four neighborhoods in Washington, D.C., which sought to “preserve the area as a first-class community of good Americans regardless of race and religion,” according to its founding document (98). NI included 175 households by the end of 1958, the year it was established. Homeowners who participated focused on three objectives. First, they actively opposed the convention of labeling real estate as “colored” in advertisements listed in the Washington Post and Washington Evening Star. The newspapers quietly dropped the descriptor in 1960. Second, NI worked to maintain open communication among residents by establishing and distributing a monthly newsletter. Third, NI marketed their interracialism, creating what Palmer calls “a narrative of middle-class, family oriented, multiracial achievement and security to compete with the idyll of white suburbia” (105).

Readers of the SJC might be most interested in Chapters 5 and 6, in which Palmer analyzes multiracial community organizing in San Antonio, focusing upon the quest by Mexican American and African American groups for greater political power. Early efforts to address the immediate needs of racial minorities were largely confined to the city’s Roman Catholic diocese, particularly Archbishop Robert Lucey, whose appeals to Anglo charity resulted in “acquiescence to policies that offered a bit of relief and left intact the racial norm: white people controlling public life” (181). The foundation of Communities Organized for Public Service (COPS) in 1974 challenged this norm to such an extent that the 1977 city council elections resulted in victory for five Mexican Americans and one African American.

These three disparate narratives are loosely held together by several themes. Many figures who sought interracial connections were motivated in part by religious faith. Another theme involves the assertions of racial pride and consciousness in the late 1960s. Such expressions provided special challenges to the NCCJ’s efforts at facilitating racial harmony among teenagers, for example, while COPS ultimately benefited from greater Chicano consciousness. Palmer also makes concerted efforts to emphasize the roles of specific individuals in these stories, an objective made possible by her extensive use of oral histories. She notes that the organizations in her study enabled white Americans to cultivate new relationships and undergo “intellectual and emotional shifts” (12). Palmer contends that these new associations and perspectives were transformative and crucial for understanding how some whites awakened to the possibilities of interracial cooperation in the civil rights era.

2009-04-29T12:19:00.000-07:00

Screening a Lynching: the Leo Frank Case on Film and Television

By Matthew H. Bernstein. Athens: The University of Georgia Press, February 2009. Cloth: ISBN 978-0820327525, $69.95; paper: ISBN 978-0820332390, $24.95. 400 pages.

Review by Nathan G. Tipton, University of Memphis

The very concept of lynching provokes in most people a profound sense of discomfort combined with an almost morbid fascination, a dualism that becomes further problematized when the visual elements of lynchings are brought to the fore. Matthew Bernstein’s book Screening a Lynching: the Leo Frank Case on Film and Television confronts this dualism through a thorough, cogent review of the visual and historical record surrounding the especially troublesome lynching of Leo Frank. Taking his cue from historian Hayden White and film history scholar Dudley Andrew, Bernstein explains that filmmakers advance interpretations of historical events not merely to tell a tale, but also to show how and why historical events unfolded as they did. In fact, while Screening a Lynching often reads more as a history book than a film criticism text, the sensational events and unanswered questions surrounding the Leo Frank/Mary Phagan case provide Bernstein with fitting examples for how and why filmmakers consider it irresistible material for dramatic, narrative films.

Indeed, the Leo Frank case has all the trappings of a perfectly rendered murder mystery. On the night following Confederate Memorial Day, April 26, 1913, Frank, a Jewish pencil factory supervisor in Atlanta, Georgia, was accused of strangling 13-year-old factory worker Mary Phagan. Frank, who was originally from Brooklyn, New York, endured a merciless “rush to convict” by overzealous Fulton County police and a rapacious Atlanta press corps that branded him, among other things, a greedy Yankee carpetbagger and a sexual pervert who allegedly molested and murdered Phagan after she, widely portrayed as an innocent flower of Southern girlhood, resisted Frank’s advances. Frank’s legal fate was ultimately sealed—in an ironic twist given the trial’s Southern setting and prevailing racial conventions—by the perjured testimony of black factory janitor Jim Conley, and Frank received a death sentence. However, this sentence was commuted to life imprisonment in July 1915 by Georgia governor John M. Slaton, who, on reviewing details of the case, decided that grounds for reasonable doubt existed as to Frank’s guilt. An incensed public reacted swiftly, and the ensuing backlash effectively ended Slaton’s political career while setting in motion events that would ultimately lead to Frank’s grisly death on August 16, 1915. Frank was abducted from his prison cell at Milledgeville State Prison by twenty-five “Knights of Mary Phagan” who drove him to Marietta, Georgia (Mary Phagan’s birthplace) and lynched him.

Bernstein usefully deploys these historical details as a contextual jumping-off point for his discussions of four filmic treatments of the Frank-Phagan saga. These treatments include two feature films, Oscar Micheaux’s Murder in Harlem (1936) and Mervyn LeRoy’s They Won’t Forget (1937), and two television programs, the NBC documentary Profiles in Courage: John B. Slaton and the 1988 NBC miniseries The Murder of Mary Phagan. With each chapter, Bernstein shows how each filmmaker wrestled with, and often flouted, the historical record surrounding the infamous case.

For the most part, Bernstein’s filmic discussions generally shine. His explications of the two television shows, for example, show how television producers valued the foregrounding of historical accuracy and verisimilitude over portraying the more sensationalized aspects of the case. Bernstein’s filmic interpretations, however, clearly comprise the strongest critical portions of the book, with his reading of the 1937 “Hollywood Message Movie” They Won’t Forget providing a narrative center to the text. The chapter on They Won’t Forget explores how noted filmmaker Mervyn LeRoy chose to adapt and transform a historical atrocity into what Bernstein calls “a morally acceptable, sellable narrative” for the screen (62). This section is particularly compelling due in large part to Bernstein’s exploration of the arduous, almost torturous, process LeRoy and his writers underwent in order to bring They Won’t Forget to fruition. Bernstein notes that even before film production began, Joseph Breen and the Production Code Administration (PCA) unambiguously declared that the film could not be made at all because the script violated so many provisions of the Production Code, including police brutality, excessive drinking, and the suggestion of mob violence and a lynching.

Breen’s objections seem utterly absurd given that They Won’t Forget was clearly influenced by the Frank-Phagan case. However, Bernstein wisely defers commenting on the PCA’s actions in favor of conveying LeRoy’s dogged conviction to tell the story as accurately as possible while also conforming to, and working within, the PCA’s strict guidelines. This conviction is brilliantly illustrated by how LeRoy ingeniously, if indirectly, depicted the lynching of “Robert Hale” (the cinematic stand-in for Leo Frank) through the use of a mailbag which is snatched up by an oncoming train. Bernstein explains that the mailbag symbolically and imagistically represented a lynching, providing a metonymic displacement of screen violence that was both imaginative and shrewd, while also falling well within the PCA Code’s bounds of good taste.

While Bernstein’s incisive reading of They Won’t Forget is quite successful, his discussion of Oscar Micheaux’s Murder in Harlem (1936), is the book’s weakest chapter. Although Murder in Harlem was released only one year before They Won’t Forget, Micheaux’s film is marred by conflicting storylines that haphazardly incorporate elements of the Frank case, poor cinematography, and uniformly bad acting. Murder in Harlem also curiously, if conspicuously, avoids any mention of lynching, unlike the other three films discussed by Bernstein. From an historical standpoint, the inclusion of Murder in Harlem is understandable given Micheaux’s position as an innovative early black filmmaker working in an overwhelming white industry. Nevertheless, Murder in Harlem provides at best a mere tangential connection to the Frank case, making it a problematic entry into an otherwise illuminating compendium of film studies. As well, it seems almost ironic that of the four films included in Screening a Lynching, Micheaux’s film is the only one still in circulation. Thus, while Bernstein offers a wonderfully instructive text on a historically vexing and fascinating case, Screening a Lynching is difficult to fully appreciate without having access to the films that are discussed within its pages.

2009-02-11T15:00:00.000-08:00

Frederick Douglass: Race and the Rebirth of American Liberalism

By Peter C. Myers. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, February 2008. ISBN 978-0700615728, $34.95. 272 pages.

Review by Debbie Clare Olson, Oklahoma State University

Peter C. Myers offers a timely exploration (particularly in light of the recent election of Barack Obama as the first African American President of the United States) into the ongoing conversation about race, politics, and natural rights liberalism. Myers revisits numerous perspectives from the Slavery era with a sharply insightful blend of objectivity and penetrating perception. The primary focus of Myers study is the slavery-era argument over racial equality and natural rights. Douglass was a staunch supporter of the belief in natural rights’ being embodied in natural law. Douglass “conceive[d] of the moral laws of nature as self-executing or naturally sanctioned[;] he held that in the nature of human affairs, justice and other virtues tend to be rewarded whereas injustice and other vices tend to be punished. . . .persistent virtue generally receives powerful reinforcement and persistent violations of the moral law generally prove self-defeating” (15). For Douglass, the Declaration of Independence’s doctrine that all men were created equal, was not just a politically based position, but was instead a universal Truth, a “moral prescription and sanctioned as moral law” (196). Myers’s book details the historical trajectory of natural law liberal philosophy in Douglass’s abolitionist discourse.

Chapter one explores the nature of slavery and the questions of black humanity as considered by both slavery supporters and abolitionists. Myers revisits a number of slave-holders’ philosophical perspectives, which are effectively followed by Douglass’s counterarguments to those ideals. For example, a letter published in the North Star in 1850 by W.G. Kendall protested slave accounts of brutal treatment by their masters as “so highly colored, as not to be recognizable” and that slavery was a “great blessing to the black race” (33). Another similar argument was that abolitionists merely sought an unrealistic “utopia” that threatened to destroy the black race by urging them to leave the protective paternal umbrella of the slave-holders (34). A further position was that slavery was a “natural” condition in black evolution towards their eventual emancipation. Douglass passionately responded to such positions by pointing out that though there had been some humane acts towards slaves, those few acts are not representative of the “true nature of the regime” of slavery. As Myers explains, Douglass maintained that slave-holders as a class are not capable of establishing “paternal character” because as a “natural rule” they cannot exercise “irresponsible power benignly” (37).

Chapter two begins with Dred Scott and the anti-slavery cause. For Douglass, his “invincible hopefulness” was at odds with his peers’ pessimism at the legal victory for slave-holder power. But Douglass truly believed that moral rightness will overcome slavery, that “Truth is mighty, and will prevail.” His adamantine conviction in the “laws of Nature and of Nature’s God”(49) gave fodder to his critics who charged that he “suffered from excessive idealism, closely linked to his excessive faith in the receptiveness of Americans to racial reform” (11).

Chapters 3 and 4 interrogate Douglass’s affirmation of the Constitution’s Natural Rights law and its support for anti-slavery views. Myers maintains that Douglass, who early on was heavily influenced by the militant abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, (founder of the American Anti-Slavery Society), was later horrified by the growing extremism and calls for violent revolution within the Garrisonian camp (83-84). Myers argues it was Douglass’s aversion to Garrison’s radicalism that motivated his staunch advocacy of non-resistance as a way to garner change; change which he knew would come through natural moral law: “As natural moral law required the support of human positive law, so the efficacy of natural law in America required the support of American law” (85). Douglass found support for this view in George Comb’s The Constitution of Man, a work which gave Douglass “the idea of a self-executing law of nature” (15). For Myers, “Douglass’[s] remarkable hopefulness concerning the demise of slavery and white supremacy in America was not naively or obtusely idealist but was instead marked by a substantial moderation and realism” (12). It is perhaps Douglass’s faith in the ultimate goodness of humanity that helped bolster some antebellum attempts at moral reform. As Myers points out, it is through America’s laws, based on the Natural Rights doctrine, that effect momentous change. In the book’s conclusion, Myers touches on Douglass’s influence upon other significant periods of changing attitudes towards race, such as WWII and the 1960s’ Civil Rights Movement (198-99).

There are many rich historical dialogues within Myers’s text; lively feints and thrusts between abolitionists and slavery proponents fill each chapter. However, at times Myers prefers to safely dance around the more intricate complexities of power matrices within slavery culture—titillating the reader with insights, but then stopping short of a deeper excavation. For example, he states that Douglass believed that the slave-holder Aaron Anthony may not “by nature” be a morally deficient man, but the fact that he had “grown accustomed” to the social “exercise of irresponsible power” had robbed him of his natural virtue (37). This case would seem to raise questions about the extent of social influences within antebellum power structures, and of Douglass’s seemingly paradoxical use of nature as an argument in defense of a slave owner’s culpability while at the same time arguing that a human’s “good nature” would eventually prevail. But aside from these periodic dead-ends, Myer offers a richly textured and compelling look at the evolution of Natural Rights, an evolution of thought most evident in our first African American President, Barack Obama, whose own belief in the inherent goodness of the American People reflects a fitting echo of Douglass’s own hope for humanity.

2009-02-11T14:52:00.000-08:00

Black Feminism in Contemporary Drama

By Lisa M. Anderson. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, November 2008. Cloth: ISBN 9780252032288, $35.00. 142 pages.

Review by Elizabeth Johnson, Governors State University, Illinois

In Black Feminism in Contemporary Drama, Lisa Anderson gives a history of black feminism in the United States from the nineteenth to the twenty-first centuries and what role black feminism plays in the lives of women today. Anderson, an associate professor in women’s studies and theatre at Arizona State University, looks at the position of theorists, artists, and black feminist aesthetic to critique fourteen plays by black playwrights. Few books explore the development and principles of black women's plays and feminism; therefore, both academicians and thespians will find Anderson’s book valuable. Black female playwrights’ work is for the most part hidden from mainstream attention, and the critique of black feminist theatrical dramas is almost nonexistent (13).

How does one critique black feminist drama? Anderson explains that she examined each play by how they bring to light histories that have remained buried in dominant society. Such burials hide the challenges to the lives of young women today. Anderson’s descriptors and dissection of the characters in each of the plays allows the reader to truly visualize the image of black women’s pains, joys, hurdles, and triumphs throughout the history of the U.S. Anderson shows that black feminist dramas are not only instructing and entertaining viewers, but more importantly, provoking the audience to conscious action. Readers should be moved to consciously act on communicating awareness they’ve gained regarding the complex lives of African American women in American society, past and present. Students of theatre can benefit from the primary and secondary sources of the first, second, and third waves of feminist movements, which positioned women as speaking subjects in the theater as opposed to just submissive objects for visual consumption. Anderson’s concept of black feminist aesthetic involves the image of black women, the history of black women across the diaspora, violence against black women, homophobic fears and alienation, and other identities (14). Anderson investigates nine black female playwrights through the foundation of black feminist scholars and helps the reader understand how these playwrights all had a range of components that constitute black feminist drama. A few of these components are: confronting racist imaging of black men, abuses that black women suffer at the hands of all men of all races, the importance of reproductive freedom for black women, oral folk or oral culture, and the impact of institutional racism.

Anderson does what few works of scholarship have attempted: she exposes the commonalities in plays that tackle black feminism and black nationalism. Anderson is very successful in showing how the plays were situated, constructed, shaped, and informative of the politics of black feminism. The playwrights Anderson selected represent different writing styles; this serves as a strong asset for the book. The major strength of this book is showing how black female identities can be and are reinvented to exclude negative stereotypes but still are impacted by race, class, and gender oppression.

The first playwright examined is Pearl Cleage and three of her plays. The dramatic review of these plays all shared the obstacles that black women faced in the late 1880s, 1930s, and 1960s. The next playwrights are Breena Clarke and Glena Dickerson, for their play Re/Membering Aunt Jemima: A Menstrual Show. This play is examined as a parody of minstrel shows, commingling recent and contemporary contacts with historical ones (53). For example, the story of how plantation miscegenation during enslavement was political for the offspring, is commingled with the tragic life of mulatto actress Dorothy Dandridge, whose acting career was hampered by her neither “black enough” nor, because of her black blood, “white enough.” Most importantly, this play shows the complexity of womanhood, and how black women are dishonored, through the main character Aunt J (Aunt Jemima). Three plays by Suzan-Lori Park, a new up-and-coming artist, are explored: Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World, Venus: A Play, and In the Blood. Anderson gives a dramatic commentary on the victimization of women in each play.

The chapter “Signifying Black Lesbians: Dramatic Speculations,” as its title indicates, counters the general tendency to keep the history of black lesbian and gay history buried. The last playwrights in this chapter, Kia Corthron and Shirley Holmes, self-identify as lesbians. Their plays tackle sexual orientation and acceptance/rejection within the black community. Anderson makes known how identification as a black lesbian is political, and black lesbians’ relationships are often challenged: they are often considered not truly black and at the same time not truly lesbian, because acceptance of such lifestyles is (questionably) viewed as a white, middle-class issue (98). This chapter may be for many an eye-opener, as it promotes understanding the history of black lesbian identity in the black community, which for the most part was invisible in black plays until the 1960s (97). The plays selected, overall, are a valuable addition to the field of black feminist theatrical criticism because they bring to readers’ attention the works of a number of overlooked black feminist playwrights and provide a language to recognize and discuss black feminist drama (126).

2009-02-11T13:19:00.000-08:00

Becoming King: Martin Luther King Jr. and the Making of a National Leader

By Troy Jackson. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, October 2008. Cloth: ISBN 978-0813125206, $35.00. 248 pages.

Review by William Sturkey, Ohio State University

Troy Jackson’s new book Becoming King explores the various influences that impacted Martin Luther King Jr. during his development as a civil rights leader. Jackson, a pastor and historian, has built upon his experiences working with the King Papers at Stanford to take a closer a look at King’s sermons and essays in exploring King’s intellectual development. Jackson argues that the people of Montgomery, such as E.D. Nixon and Jo Ann Robinson, played a larger role in King’s development than more prominent social activist intellectuals, such as Reinhold Niebur and Mahatma Gandhi, who are most often credited with influencing King’s philosophies. The author further contends that King provided spiritual leadership for the Montgomery Bus Boycott, but that his oratory power contributed to his inability to sustain a mass movement in Montgomery after the bus boycott ended. Jackson maintains that “the bus boycott did more for King and the emerging national civil rights movement than it did for the broader African American community in Montgomery” (7), and that these implications can teach us more about the strengths and weaknesses of King’s civil rights leadership.

Becoming King aptly opens with a discussion of Montgomery activism prior to King’s arrival in the city often referred to as the Cradle of the Confederacy. Jackson shows that African American civil rights organizations had been active in the city as early as 1888. Jackson’s discussion of pre-King activism in Montgomery is comprehensive and includes numerous organizations and individuals who laid the foundation for a mass movement during the years prior to the boycott, but who also had trouble activating the black community. Jackson appropriately credits E.D. Nixon, Rosa Parks, Jo Ann Robinson, and Vernon Johns for laying the groundwork required for later activism.

The next section of the book delves into King’s background. Jackson notes early influences on King before showing the impact that Morehouse President Benjamin Mays had on the young college student. Mays, according to Jackson, first introduced King to Gandhian philosophies after meeting Gandhi in 1948. Jackson’s narrative then tracks King to Montgomery while neglecting King’s experiences in graduate school at Crozer Theological Seminary and Boston University on the way. The remainder of the book focuses on King in Montgomery and how the city’s established black leadership propelled King into national prominence. Jackson uses King’s sermons in the late 1950s to illuminate the intricacies of his burgeoning civil rights leadership in Montgomery before concluding with a brief discussion of King’s post-boycott activism, which was focused on the national level, thus hindering the potential of local activism.

Jackson’s argument about the influence of Montgomery’s black leaders on King is compelling, but he loses momentum by dismissing the importance of King’s experiences in graduate school. King’s experiences at Crozer are summed up in a single paragraph, while his development in Boston is discussed in two pages. Jackson argues that “King’s time at Crozer was a season of development and growth rather than one of activism” (46). It is curious that Jackson does not further explore this development. Furthermore, looking solely at Crozer limits the potential impact that living in Chester, Pennsylvania had on King. Chester is one of the oldest bastions of racial justice advocacy in the United States. Its residents played important roles in the abolition movement through the civil rights movement, and King’s immersion into this community must have had some sort of impact on him. Taylor Branch has discussed King’s experiences at Crozer in greater detail, and Jackson would have been wise to reciprocate or at least explore possible influences. The same can be said for King’s experiences in Boston.

Jackson also underplays the importance of Vernon Johns. The two men had a relationship, and Johns impacted King’s development in a number of different ways. If nothing else, Johns provided an important foundation at Dexter for civil rights activism. By 1954, much of the congregation at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church expected political activity from the pulpit. Furthermore, Johns’s radicalism opened a space for King to be seen as moderate even if he was involved in civil rights activities.

The most intriguing part of Jackson’s book is his discussion on class in Montgomery. Jackson poignantly observes that Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, where many boycott activities were organized, was a middle-class black church, while First Avenue Baptist Church, where Ralph Abernathy preached, was more working-class. This dynamic was important to the boycott, as most of the people who quit riding the bus were working-class people who probably did not attend Dexter. Jackson, however, does not fully explore the issues of class that surround the boycott, but this is an important observation.

Ultimately, Becoming King is an interesting read filled with several new layers of information. The book benefits heavily from Jackson’s work at the King Papers project in Stanford. Jackson effectively uses King’s words to provide a boycott narrative that illuminates several aspects of the famous civil rights leader’s ideological development and how King was able to inspire the working class of Montgomery to sacrifice their only means of transportation. This book could have benefitted from a further discussion of King’s influences prior to Montgomery, but it is an intriguing look into the development of the civil rights movement’s most visible figure.

2008-11-16T15:55:00.001-08:00

In Search of the Black Fantastic: Politics and Popular Culture in the Post-Civil Rights Era. By Richard Iton. New York: Oxford UP, June 2008. Cloth: ISBN 978-0-19-517846-3, $29.95. 416 pages. Review by Debbie Clare Olson, Oklahoma State University
from SJC post 2 (10/13/08)

Richard Iton traces the complex connections between black popular culture, black political landscapes, the Diaspora, and black identity within the context of socially entrenched racism and the pursuit of the American ideal. He examines the question of a post-civil rights modernity and the “progressive assumptions and hierarchical designs” (14) within its relation to blackness, popular culture, and politics. The concept of the fantastic, for Iton, lives in the “joints” of the “politics/popular culture matrix” (17) and functions to disturb dominant power structures and traditional thinking within a society whose notions of modernity are determined by the exclusion of non-whites from any meaningful participation in both the public sphere and the political. Iton argues that the anxiety about African American exceptionalism framed the actual domains of post-civil rights political activity and cultural expression, which are united in a multitude of intricate ways (13). For Iton, the desire to assimilate into mainstream spaces entails “accepting alienation and subordination as the price of the ticket” (13).
The book begins with the Red Scare era (1945-1965) within black popular culture and the efforts to form a black identity that paralleled the “borders and ambitions of the modern American project” (28). Iton offers an in-depth look at the negotiations of Adam Clayton Powell, Paul Robeson, Dizzy Gillespie, Louis Armstrong, and many others, with the fear of being blacklisted or deemed a “red” during a time of heavy American propaganda intended to persuade an overseas audience that race relations in the US were harmonious and affable. In response to questions of contradiction between the US fight for democracy and its Jim Crow practices, the US government took advantage of the popularity of Jazz to export a black image that would quell any ideas of American domestic divisiveness. For the US, the Jazz ambassadors, including Dizzy Gillespie and Louis Armstrong, played an important role in shaping foreign opinions about US race relations, which in turn bolstered the US political image abroad. Iton argues that this government-controlled exportation of Jazz served to create a black identity that charmed non-domestic audiences yet did not follow the radical “diasporic paths” set out by Paul Robeson, Du Bois, Marcus Garvey, and others. Iton draws important cultural connections between Franz Fanon, the overseas Jazz tours, Aime Cesaire, Richard Wright, James Baldwin, and other iconic black artisans, extending into the Cold War era and beyond to shape the current black political landscape.
The Cold War era, Iton argues, marked a shift in cultural pressures to separate formal politics from popular culture and creative expression. He examines black popular support for artists during the Red Scare and how that support broke along class lines. Support for Paul Robeson, as for W.E.B. du Bois, for instance, was heaviest among the working class while the black middle class were reluctant to oppose any government attempts at censorship. Such breaks in class lines of support for those who extended their artistic space into the political space continued throughout the Cold War era. Examples of such resistance include Harry Belafonte and Sidney Poitier, who were active in opposing government attempts at censorship while fighting for more dignified roles for black actors.
The notion of the political becomes central to the spaces within which, Iton argues, the black identity operates. From the Civil Rights movement, Pan Africanism, the Harlem Renaissance to Reggae, Hip Hop, and Rap, what defines the “political” is important to black mobilization in light of the dominant cultural conception of a politics-of-exclusion based on the subaltern spaces whites perceive as inhabited by blacks. For instance, Iton calls out Hip Hop’s reference to poor black communities as “fabulous,” as such references in popular culture tend to render the economically disadvantaged “invisible” (170). For Iton, key to the struggle for black political inclusion are the intersections between black aesthetics, identities, and the black public sphere to generate a political landscape that challenges and destabilizes the dominant hegemonic notion of politics. But according to Iton, this challenge, instead of bringing autonomy to the black political sphere, makes “hegemonic” the notion of a politics that rejects cultural spaces and, in opposition, works to continue and reinforce colonial and hierarchical norms within the “constructions and expressions of contemporary black politics.” Such cultural expression merely appear as resistance but rather function to reinforce attitudes of black difference that work to continue the politics of exclusion. Iton believes that the cultural and political “silence” on coloniality is a result of its internalization in order to achieve a “modernity” that is sustainable both inside and outside the borders of blackness (287).
Though Iton provides a unique and wide-sweeping probe into the historical and social complexities of black cultural/political matrices, much of the scope of his analysis is lost to an overabundance of unnecessarily dense language. So much so, that the chapters rather lack meaningful connections between them, thus impeding any sense of a chronological trajectory, and blinding his historical vision within a fog of academese. Jargon aside, his study does flesh out a number of interesting questions about how a cultural identity can be articulated through its aesthetic expressions, yet still be unconsciously enfolded into the dominant political arena contrary to its perceived resistance to that dominance. According to Iton, “blackness and the Fantastic” work both “separately and in tandem” to discombobulate notions of colonialism and the modern, a process that continues to negotiate the stubborn social discords of racism, imperialism, and separate-but-equalness that sit quietly on the shoulder of modernity (287).

2008-10-13T20:15:00.001-07:00

Lynching to Belong: Claiming Whiteness through Racial Violence. By Cynthia Skove Nevels. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, October 2007. Cloth: ISBN 978-1585445899, $24.95. 208 pages.
Review by John Barnhill, Ph. D.

Whiteness was so valued by immigrants in east central Texas and, perhaps, elsewhere, that during the nineteenth century they threw over the civilization they had brought with them in order to escape from subordinate status and gain admission into the white over-class, even though that class was built on racism and racial violence. So contends Cynthia Skove Nevels in a short but well-argued examination of three instances of immigrant involvement in lynching during the late nineteenth century.For some time a fashionable approach to understanding the incorporation of immigrants into the dominant society has been “whiteness studies.” The emphasis is on the ways in which immigrants adapt to make themselves palatable to white society, to lighten themselves into acceptability. One argument is that the white population initially classifies newcomers as non-white, and in a black-white society the only non-white is black. Asians, South Europeans, Irish, Germans—all were initially black to the dominant “white” society that rejected or marginalized them. And black was not a color that anyone wanted to be, for black meant bottom of the pile, mudsill, convenient scapegoat, marginally human perhaps. Definitely, black was bad, and immigrants were quick to realize that if they wanted to move out of the “black” category into some sort of whiteness they had to take on traits of the dominant society. Germans and Irish have been for a long time fully white, while Asians still stand somewhat outside the door but safely away from the black mudsill. Nevels uses a whiteness studies approach in her study of immigrants and lynching in east central Texas during the late nineteenth century.Before dealing with the lynchings themselves, she has to develop the context, and she does so at relative length, devoting several chapters to discussing the economic and social development of the region, particularly the rise of a black-white culture that had no place for those of uncertain color. She discusses the founding of various towns, their economic progress or lack of same, the black towns and the white with black neighborhoods. And she notes, accurately, that lynching, particularly of blacks by whites, was common (as it was to continue to be after the period in question, when there was no longer an issue of the status of immigrants with unfamiliar background.) Thus, lynching became a component of white culture that immigrant groups assumed to acquire whiteness—as well as a sign on the part of the white majority that the immigrant group had moved into whiteness or at least a step away from blackness.In one case the victim was an Italian immigrant. Her attacker was lynched, but only in conjunction with those accused in a later attack on a white girl. Her attacker languished in jail, and her retribution remained irrelevant for months, Nevels says, because Italians had not yet crossed the line into whiteness, a line that separated inviolate white women from other females, who were considered less honorable and were thus less likely to be avenged for having their honor besmirched. In another instance, an Irish man provided the key evidence against an accused black man, becoming white by helping the white community in a critical time. And, of course, there were the immigrant communities that accepted if not abetted the necessary lynching that their white neighbors performed against black malefactors.Nevels notes the newspaper coverage of immigrant groups, pointing out the tendency to hyphenate descriptions of foreigners: Italian-American, Bohemian-American, and Irish-American, for instance. This classification by ethnicity, she contends, is comparable to the practice of identifying blacks but not whites by race. A more benign interpretation is that the editors and the readership were mostly “American,” with no knowledge of what hyphen might apply to their ancestry. Perhaps they added the prefix to make a distinction between newcomer ethnic and old settler. A hyphen is not necessarily offensive anyway. There were more than enough really offensive slang terms in common use, had the editors truly intended to degrade the Czech- or Irish-Americans in the community.Nevels writes well, and she provides solid context for the examples she uses to argue her position. Her documentation is solid, and illustrations help to clarify what is a relatively brief work. However well-documented and argued, Lynching to Belong is not by any means a final answer to a difficult and controversial question. One case study, no matter how thoroughly documented, cannot be definitive, particularly one that addresses only a handful of cases out of the hundreds of available lynchings.The field of whiteness studies has its critics. Aside from having difficulty with establishing what whiteness might be and who owns it, whiteness studies seems to offer glib answers to a complex set of issues. And it slights class, religion, and other differences that separate groups. Rednecks are not considered white in some circles because they lack the dominant culture. To some critics the whiteness interpretation boils down to “to get along, go along.” That seems a bit light to account for acceptance or participation in an act of violence that flies in the face of most ethical and moral constraints that in theory apply to civilized behavior.Nevels makes a valiant effort but falls slightly short, as have other practitioners of whiteness studies. Still, she brings a fresh perspective to the perplexing issue of what causes virulent crowd behavior such as lynching. When she and other young scholars find additional examples that substantiate her argument and that have no effective alternative explanation, then she will earn the distinction of originating a new interpretation. In the meantime, she has created a solid work that the scholarly community should not ignore.

2008-08-17T18:26:00.000-07:00

from University Press of Kentucky

Freedom's Main Line: The Journey of Reconciliation and the Freedom Rides

by Derek Charles Catsam
under review by Rhonda D. Jones, North Carolina Central University

2008-08-17T18:22:00.000-07:00

from University Press of Kansas

Frederick Douglass: Race and the Rebirth of American Liberalism

by Peter C. Myers

under review by Debbie Olsen, Oklahoma State University

2008-08-17T18:14:00.001-07:00

from Oxford University Press, USA

Laughing Fit to Kill: Black Humor in the Fictions of Slavery
by Glenda Carpio
under review by Ahati N. N. Toure, Delaware State University

2008-08-17T18:09:00.001-07:00

from Palgrave Macmillan

The Funk Era and Beyond: New Perspectives on Black Popular Culture
by Tony Bolden
under review by Meida Teresa McNeal, Brown University

2008-08-17T18:04:00.000-07:00

from Vanderbilt University Press

Living as Equals: How Three White Communities Struggled to Make Interracial Connections During the Civil Rights Era
by Phyllis Palmer
under review by Barclay Key, Western Illinois University