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

2009; Oxford University Press; Volume: 114; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1086/ahr.114.3.793

1937-5239

David Krasner,

American Sports and Literature

This book examines African American female performers—actresses, singers, vaudevillians, and comediennes—who revolutionized the theater and shaped modern black culture. Focusing on well-known performers (Florence Mills, Josephine Baker) and lesser-known artists (Aida Overton Walker, Ida Forsyne, Dora Dean), Jayna Brown analyzes the success of black women attempting to forge theatrical careers amid considerable obstacles during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The various times and places of the emerging vaudeville stage created opportunities for black resistance to racism; black farce and satire, Brown asserts, often subverted oppression and underscored “the fissures in hegemonic claims, revealing the ways hierarchies breed their own instabilities” (p. 5). The author aims to uncover the interiority of female performers by emphasizing their artistic agency. For Brown, dance gesture is a form of shifting hieroglyphic expression: “I argue emphatically that black movement is always multiply signifying. This means that the same dance phrase can be read differently by different people” (p. 15). Black vernacular dance grew out of the modern condition of disorientation, alienation, and movement; the mobility of black dance was influenced by the Great Migration to the North, which in turn defined its aesthetics. Dance also became one of the few acceptable forms of financial freedom for black women. There was considerable profit to be made in social dance, and the actresses in this study were the apotheoses of great entrepreneurs invested in Gilded-Age commercialism and individualistic enterprise. In addition to being gifted performers, they were adept self-promoters, capitalizing on the ephemerality of performance and the ability to appear as representatives of several concepts: sexual objects as well as controllers of their own destiny. They gave audiences what they wanted to see and hear (black sexuality and so-called rhythm) while simultaneously subverting stereotypes (Jezebel and Mammy), resulting in the creation of a whole new idiom of folk expression and business acumen. Cakewalking, for instance, was significantly more lucrative than the limited work available such as domestic service and teaching; ultimately, cakewalking becoming big business with black women the veritable CEOs of their artistry. Brown quotes the dancer Forsyne, who presciently said that cakewalking “was good because colored people got a job all those years and didn't have to scrub anything. Just prance around and smile” (p. 142).