So-Fire-Town: The representations of a translucent urban Black femininity in the Black press through the signatures of Dolly Rathebe in the 1950s

Abstract

abstract This focus reads the multiple selves of Dolly Rathebe as represented in popular cultural discourse, particularly in Drum magazine during the 1950s. Black translucent femininity is a conceptual tool, I argue, with opacity and obscurity; afforded is the opportunity to engage Dolly Rathebe and her various representations with complexity, elasticity and multiplicity. This conception of translucent Black femininities allows room for reckoning with selves that would ordinarily not be considered complex and contradictory. I analyse the representations of Rathebe as situated within the popular cultural discourse structured by a white capitalist and heteropatriarchal prism contoured by Black masculinity. I explore pseudonymity as a tool of (re)creating a self and the layered selves of Dolly Rathebe. The self-fashioning of Rathebe displayed in various representations opens the possibility of depicting layered selves, and I intend to show the elasticity of the figure of Rathebe by reading these representations alongside each other. In this way I illustrate the layered and multiple selves that stretch from the primary self of Rathebe – particularly the self-fashioning of the figure of the romantic advice column ‘Dear Dolly’ which appeared in Drum. It is also in the navigation of the various traces of the name Dolly, derivative of the name Dorothy, that I expand on the multiplicity and translucence of urban Black femininity represented by Dolly Rathebe. This informs expansion from singular and flat stereotypical representations to multiple and translucent representations, thus illustrating the elasticity of urban Black femininity as depicted in popular cultural discourse.