Contending discourses of black autobiography: respectability, authenticity, and masculinity

After historicizing the politics of racial representation in the slave narrative, this article considers how race, gender, and class intersect historically in the autobiographical production of Black men in the United States. At the dawn of the Jim Crow era, Black autobiography conformed to a cultural politics of racial synecdoche, which avowed that racial progress depended on the respectability of esteemed individuals. Dominated by aspirational figures who presented themselves as racial emblems, Black autobiography became closely aligned with the imperatives of Black middle-class formation, actuating a discrete form of racial publicity that erected disciplinary boundaries around Black self-presentation and silenced disreputable figures. With the emergence of criminal and sexual self-reference, whether subtle or striking, in the narratives of Black men, autobiographers like boxer Jack Johnson, scholar J. Saunders Redding, and writer Claude Brown, disrupted the class-bound constraints that had determined Black autobiographical production, staging an internecine class struggle over the terms of racial representation—that is, between contending discourses of racial respectability and racial authenticity

An Inconvenient Black History of British Musical Theatre

A radically urgent intervention, An Inconvenient Black History of British Musical Theatre: 1900 - 1950 uncovers the hidden Black history of this most influential of artforms. Drawing on lost archive material and digitised newspapers from the turn of the century onwards, this exciting story has been re-traced and restored to its rightful place. A vital and significant part of British cultural history between 1900 and 1950, Black performance practice was fundamental to resisting and challenging racism in the UK. Join Mayes (a Broadway- and Toronto-based Music Director) and Whitfield (a musical theatre historian and researcher) as they take readers on a journey through a historically-inconvenient and brilliant reality that has long been overlooked. Get to know the Black theatre community in London’s Roaring 20s, and hear about the secret Florence Mills memorial concert they held in 1928. Acquaint yourself with Buddy Bradley, Black tap and ballet choreographer, who reshaped dance in British musicals - often to be found at Noël Coward’s apartment for late-night rehearsals, such was Bradley’s importance. Meet Jack Johnson, the first African American Heavyweight Boxing Champion, who toured Britain’s theatres during World War 1 and brought the sounds of Chicago to places like war-weary Dundee. Discover the most prolific Black theatre practitioner you’ve never heard of, William Garland, who worked for 40 years across multiple continents and championed Black British performers. Marvel at performers like cabaret star Mabel Mercer, born in Stafford in 1900, who sang and conducted theatre orchestras across the UK, as well as Black Birmingham comedian Eddie Emerson, who was Garland’s partner for decades. Many of their names and works have never been included in histories of the British musical - until now.

Bad Boy for Life: Hip-Hop Music, Race, and Sports

P Diddy’s Bad Boy for Life video provides a strategic point of departure in the quest for values and community, sui generis, in SportsWorld. This study poses an interruption to the “ideological” articulations of discourse on the relationship between hip-hop music and sports by providing an examination of empirical and scientific data inside of SportsWorld. There is a carefully crafted narrative about the coexistence among Black American athletes, SportsWorld, and hip-hop music. From the beginning of Black athletes’ entry into the White spaces of the so-called level playing field of sports—from National Association of Stock Car Racing to the National Hockey Association to Major League Baseball to National Basketball Association—this integration upsets the norms of both civility and history; because for many in White America, the belief persists that these same athletes were not then and should not be today in those sacred spaces. From Jackie Robinson to the Williams Sisters to Jack Johnson to Tiger Woods to Althea Gibson to Fritz Pollard and, of course, Muhammad Ali—all of these pioneers suffered the indignities of racial discrimination. As Smith argues in his 2014 book Race, Sport and the American Dream, fast forward, deep inside the second aught of the 21st century, it is often assumed that the addition of hip-hop music to the pregame and half-time entertainment at ballparks, basketball arenas, stadiums, and ice hockey arenas signals a welcoming to the Black Athlete and their fans. Using a Marxian lens, this study argues that both these assumptions are no more than the ideology of beliefs that Marx describes as “fantasies and illusions” or more straightforward a “phantasmagoria.” These fantasies and illusions show up as a laterna magica projecting images on society and in SportsWorld, where these can be described as commodity fetishism. Through the authors' empirical analysis of data on segregation and integration in SportsWorld, they demonstrate that things are not always as they seem.

But Some of Us Are Strong Believers in the Samson Myth

The African American women discussed in this chapter use the Black Samson tradition to focus on the complex intersections of race and gender. From the Harlem Renaissance to the Black Arts movement, the major artistic and literary movements that helped shape African American culture throughout the twentieth century involved women who found something in Samson’s story that resonated with them deeply. One might think that the story of a hyper-masculine biblical hero would not provide much material for reflections upon the intersections of race and gender in America. Yet, from the playful audacity of Christina Moody’s claim that she could defeat Jack Johnson to the painful predictions from Gaza in Lucille Clifton’s poem dedicated to Ramona Africa, the twentieth century witnessed African American women claiming a place within the Black Samson tradition.

The Black Comic Sensibility

African Americans, by and large, were largely excluded from the empowering forms of the comic sensibility. Yet the works of George Herriman and James “Jimmy” Swinnerton display a distinctly black comic sensibility that drew on visual and literary conventions originating in the minstrel tradition and further developed and replicated in burlesque and vaudeville. Focusing on Swinnerton’s Sam and His Laugh (1905—1906) and Herriman’s strips depicting black boxers Jack Johnson and Sam Langford, this chapter shows how these two artists multiplied irony through a sensitive awareness and exploitation of DuBoisian double-consciousness, making their readers laugh even as they deftly undercut white supremacist attitudes.