|
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 * * *
* *
|
Louis Chude-Sokei
Education: B.A., University of California, Los
Angeles, English; Ph.D., University of California, Los Angeles,
English
Dissertation: The Infinite Rain of Stars: Black
Modernism, Black Diaspora.
Thesis Advisor: Vincent Pecora, Professor of English,
University of California, Los Angeles |
 |
Research Topic: The Incomprehensible Rain
of Stars: Black Modernism, Black Diaspora. The invention of
"Africa" in the black diaspora literary/cultural
imagination.
Mentor: Abdul JanMohamed, Professor of English,
University of California, Los Angeles
Academic Interests: Modern and
contemporary African-American literature; Caribbean and West
African literatures; post-colonial literature and theory;
modernism; Black diaspora cultural studies; popular culture
Current Position: Louis Chude-Sokei, Associate Professor of
Literature, University of California, Santa Cruz, (831)
459-4150,
locsokei@ucsc.edu* * *
* *
Bill Moyers and James Cone (Interview) /
A Conversation with James Cone
* * *
* *
John
Coltrane, "Alabama" /
Kalamu ya Salaam, "Alabama"
/
A Love Supreme
A Blues for the Birmingham Four
/ Eulogy for the Young Victims
/ Six Dead After Church
Bombing
* * *
* *
* * *
* *
*
* * * *
|
Greenback Planet: How the Dollar Conquered
the World and Threatened Civilization as We Know It
By H. W. Brands
In Greenback Planet, acclaimed historian H. W. Brands charts the dollar's astonishing rise to become the world's principal currency. Telling the story with the verve of a novelist, he recounts key episodes in U.S. monetary history, from the Civil War debate over fiat money (greenbacks) to the recent worldwide financial crisis. Brands explores the dollar's changing relations to gold and silver and to other currencies and cogently explains how America's economic might made the dollar the fundamental standard of value in world finance. He vividly describes the 1869 Black Friday attempt to corner the gold market, banker J. P. Morgan's bailout of the U.S. treasury, the creation of the Federal Reserve, and President Franklin Roosevelt's handling of the bank panic of 1933. Brands shows how lessons learned (and not learned) in the Great Depression have influenced subsequent U.S. monetary policy, and how the dollar's dominance helped transform economies in countries ranging from Germany and Japan after World War II to Russia and China today. He concludes with a sobering dissection of the 2008 world financial debacle, which exposed the power--and the enormous risks--of the dollar's worldwide reign. The Economy |
 |
* *
* * *
|
|
Sex at the Margins
Migration, Labour Markets and the Rescue Industry
By Laura María Agustín
This book explodes several myths: that selling sex is completely different from any other kind of work, that migrants who sell sex are passive victims and that the multitude of people out to save them are without self-interest. Laura Agustín makes a passionate case against these stereotypes, arguing that the label 'trafficked' does not accurately describe migrants' lives and that the 'rescue industry' serves to disempower them. Based on extensive research amongst both migrants who sell sex and social helpers, Sex at the Margins provides a radically different analysis. Frequently, says Agustin, migrants make rational choices to travel and work in the sex industry, and although they are treated like a marginalised group they form part of the dynamic global economy. Both powerful and controversial, this book is essential reading for all those who want to understand the increasingly important relationship between sex markets, migration and the desire for social justice. "Sex at the Margins rips apart distinctions between migrants, service work and sexual labour and reveals the utter complexity of the contemporary sex industry. This book is set to be a trailblazer in the study of sexuality."—Lisa Adkins, University of London |
* *
* * *
posted 28 January 2006
|
