Abstract
The pathbreaking 1908 musical The Red Moon, written by J. Rosamond Johnson and Bob Cole, with contributions from James Weldon Johnson and James Reese Europe, was a landmark in Black musical history, albeit one whose exploration of Indigeneity and racial uplift presents a more complicated legacy than scholars have previously recognized. Proceeding from an archival reconstruction of the theatrical production and its reception, this essay offers a reconsideration of the musical’s significance that stresses two particularly salient contexts: contemporary debates on the racial character of nationalist aesthetics and the function of the “vanishing Indian” trope in Black expressive culture of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It concludes by considering the issues raised by the musical in light of recent theoretical and methodological debates regarding the respective projects of Black, Native, and settler colonial critique.
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