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The
"Last Darky": Bert Williams
Black-on-Black Minstrelsy, and the African Diaspora
By
Louis Chude-Sokei
Book
Description
The Last “Darky” establishes the
late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century comedian Bert
Williams as central to the development of a global black
modernism centered in Harlem’s Renaissance. Before integrating
Broadway in 1910 via a controversial stint with the Ziegfeld
Follies, Williams was already an international icon. Yet his
name has faded into near obscurity, his extraordinary
accomplishments forgotten largely because he performed in
blackface. Louis Chude-Sokei contends that Williams’s
blackface was not a display of internalized racism nor a
submission to the expectations of the moment. It was an
appropriation and exploration of the contradictory and
potentially liberating power of racial stereotypes.
Crucially, Chude-Sokei argues that Williams’s minstrelsy
negotiated the place of black immigrants in the cultural hotbed
of New York City and was replicated throughout the African
Diaspora, from the Caribbean to Africa itself. Williams was born
in the Bahamas. When performing the “darky,” he was actually
masquerading as an African American. This black-on-black
minstrelsy thus challenged emergent racial constructions
equating “black” with African American and marginalizing the
many diasporic blacks in New York.
It also dramatized the practice of passing
for African American common among non-American blacks in an
African American dominated Harlem. Exploring the thought of
figures including Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. Du Bois, Marcus
Garvey, and Claude McKay, Chude-Sokei situates black-on-black
minstrelsy at the center of burgeoning modernist discourses of
assimilation, separatism, race-militancy, carnival, and
internationalism. While these discourses were engaged with the
question of representing the “Negro” in the context of white
racism, through black-on-black minstrelsy, they were also
deployed against the growing international dominance of African
American culture and politics in the twentieth century.
Reviews
Louis
Chude-Sokei's innovative study not only brings overdue attention
to Bert Williams. It deepens our understanding of black
modernity and redirects the study of minstrelsy as well. A rich,
wide-ranging book, it is filled with resonant insights and
brilliant collocations.
—Nathaniel Mackey
“With theoretical verve and archival aplomb,
Louis Chude-Sokei explores an open secret that we too often have
preferred to ignore: the central role of black minstrelsy in the
origins of the Harlem Renaissance. Starting with the simple fact
of Bert Williams's Caribbean origins, he finds the multiple
layers of masquerade in any performance of 'race.' A timely,
often profound portrait of the dynamics of intraracial
difference in diaspora.”
—Brent
Hayes Edwards, author of The
Practice of Diaspora posted 28 January 2006 |
