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Stolen Time: Black Fad Performance and the Calypso Craze

2019; Oxford University Press; Volume: 106; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1093/jahist/jaz633

1945-2314

Paige A. McGinley,

Caribbean history, culture, and politics

The calypso craze of the 1950s is so associated with a single megastar—Harry Belafonte—that it is not surprising that Shane Vogel's virtuosic Stolen Time opens with Belafonte's disavowal of a fad that was forever attempting to place him at its center. Vogel's book likewise stages a disappearing act for Belafonte, though his presence remains keenly felt. In doing so, Vogel allows lesser-known though no less significant performers to occupy center stage, including the nightclub and Broadway star Josephine Premice, the painter and choreographer Geoffrey Holder, and the dancer and actor Carmen de Lavallade. Also offered for reappraisal are illustrious performers whose forays into calypso have been comparatively neglected, including Duke Ellington, Maya Angelou, and Lena Horne. Moving from backstage to the Broadway stage to the sound stage, Stolen Time deftly explores calypso across a range of media forms, mining the fad for the ways the “avowal of inauthenticity” allowed black performers to disrupt “the epistemological grounds of colonialism and Jim Crow” (p. 5). Vogel's transmedial analysis is a refreshing corrective to the disciplinary gulf between media studies and performance studies—a field that, despite a thoroughgoing deconstruction of “liveness,” has been tentative about incorporating mass cultural forms into its analyses. Building on the work of Alexandra T. Vazquez, Fred Moten, and Rebecca Schneider, among others, Vogel productively considers “what possibilities for thought can occur when such oppositional and exclusive thinking [between “live” and “mediated” performance] is momentarily suspended” (p. 17).