Brown Jayna Brown

Babylon Girls (eBook, PDF)

Black Women Performers and the Shaping of the Modern

• Format: PDF

Produktbeschreibung

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 "e;New Woman"e; 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 "e;picaninny choruses"e; 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.

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Duke University Press
• Seitenzahl: 354
• Erscheinungstermin: 19. September 2008
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9780822390695
• Artikelnr.: 54924886

Autorenporträt

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

Inhaltsangabe

Acknowledgments ix
Abbreviations for Libraries and Archives xiii
Introduction 1
1. "Little Black Me": The Touring Picaninny Choruses 19
2. Letting the Flesh Fly: Topsy, Time, Torture, and Transfiguration 56
3. "Egyptian Beauties" and "Creole Queens": The Performance of City and
Empire on the Fin-de-Siecle Black Burlesque Stage 92
4. The Cakewalk Business 128
5. Everybody's Doing It: Social Dance, Segregation, and the New Body 156
6. Babylon Girls: Primitivist Modernism, Anti-Modernism, and Black Chorus
Line Dancers 189
7. Translocutions: Florence Mills, Josephine Baker, and Valaida Snow 238
Conclusion 280
Notes 285
Bibliography 313
Index 333