American Minstrel Research Articles

Пьесы Б. Джейкобс-Дженкинса: традиции мелодрамы и этнически нейтральный кастинг

The article concerns with the plays An Octoroon and Gloria by contemporary American playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins. The dramaturgy of one of the most notable authors, writing for the US theatre at the present time, is thematically varied; besides, it includes both Jacobs-Jenkins’ original works (e.g., Gloria, 2015) and his adaptations of plays by other authors and/or other epochs. Among the adaptations there is the most famous of Jacobs-Jenkins' plays so far — An Octoroon (2014), which is the author's treatment of 19th century melodrama The Octoroon (1859) by Anglo-Irish dramatist Dion Boucicault. Working with the play of the 19th century, which reveals the problems of slavery in a simplified, melodramatic form, allows the contemporary playwright to actualize the consideration of racial conflicts and to reconstruct/deconstruct the generic model of melodrama. The author of the article draws attention to the reception of the minstrel tradition in the play An Octoroon, both at the level of interaction of D. Boucicault's work with American minstrel show coinciding with it in time, and in connection with the comprehension and overcoming of the “minstrel archetypes” by B. Jacobs-Jenkins. The question of casting is very important to Jacobs-Jenkins, the playwright puts forward his requirements for ethnic conformity between actors and roles in his plays, and this brings together An Octoroon and Gloria, though the works are diverse in genre and subject matter. The cultural context for the works of the American playwright is, first of all, the drama and theater of the United States throughout their development. For further studies it also seems interesting to consider B. Jacobs-Jenkins’ plays in connection with folklore traditions or, e.g., in the context of sacred genres.

Sounding Slavery in the Victorian Drawing Room: The ‘Blackface’ Ballads of Philip Klitz

Abstract In 1847, Southampton’s Philip Klitz (1805–1854) added two ‘blackface’ ballads to a cultural craze reflecting that year’s British tour by the white American minstrel troupe, the ‘Ethiopian Serenaders’, and their imitators, the ‘Ethiopian Harmonists’. I show how Klitz and his fellow composers reflected and fed a potent stereotype, circulating songs in the bourgeois home that adversely affected the British perception of African Americans by sustaining racist themes and images in the popular-cultural imagination. Notwithstanding the negative impacts for black residents and visitors in Britain at the time, minstrelsy is also widely understood to have exerted considerable cultural influence throughout the nineteenth century. Among investigations of how the Victorian arts constructed race, few give music the significance it holds in this interpretation of how black caricature functioned in a post-abolition British context through the medium of music and musical orientalism in Victorian drawing-room ballads. This case study of previously neglected musical repertoire details an important episode in the history of ‘blackface’ minstrelsy, showing how racial attitudes formed within British domestic spaces during the late 1840s were affected by those of the popular stage in ante-bellum America.

“Good Business in Missouri”: Minstrelsy, Violence, and the Case of Louis Wright

This article contextualizes the professional life and traumatizing lynching death of African American blackface minstrel Louis Wright in New Madrid, Missouri, in 1902. It unearths the physical dangers of “entertaining while Black” in early twentieth-century America. Wright’s life serves as a window into the racialized, gendered world of the American minstrel stage, which is gleaned from advertising information, entertainer biographies, and the early twentieth-century theatrical press. The essay highlights the mid-nineteenth-century origins of African American blackface minstrelsy, chronicles obstacles unique to Black traveling performers, and investigates contradictory reporting in African American and White newspaper media accounts of white supremacist violence. Ultimately, the Wright case and the persistence of racial violence were among the motivating factors in the pursuit of autonomous Black traveling theater in American entertainment during the nadir.

Going “There”: Black Visual Satire

Going “There”: Black Visual Satire

«Монтаж аттракционов» в «Бесплодной земле» Т.С. Элиота

The article deals with the importance of the music hall for The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot. This form of entertainment art, at first glance, does not fit well with the deep religious and philosophical message that is traditionally seen in the poem, but it is attracting more and more attention from researchers. The term “music hall” in the article refers to a type of theater that was represented by the English music hall, the American minstrel shows, vaudeville and musical comedy of Eliot's youth, the Parisian variety theater which he came to know intimately in the early 1910s, and revue. The English music hall was chosen to refer to the phenomenon because it was the one that occupied Eliot's imagination at the time when The Waste Land was being written. The article describes T.S. Eliot as a music hall habitué in the 1910s — early 1920s, his essays on the music hall in the magazines Dial and Tyro are analyzed. The author proves that the importance of the music hall song for The Waste Land is not limited to the usage of the rhythm and any kind of musical technique. The songs are not important in themselves, but as part of the performance. The fragment that opens the first version of the poem is a striking revelation of the music hall. The fragment is read as representing the music hall performance, starting with the motive of a “hot night” and ending with quotes from various music hall songs. From the same point of view, the original title of the poem is analysed. The presence of the music hall in the final version of The Waste Land is shown in connection with the characters from the working class and the image of Tiresias. The general principle on which the artistic whole is built in The Waste Land is presented as reproducing the structure of a music hall performance; the author takes the name “montage of attractions” for it from S. Eisenstein.

위기의 시대 구원의 시학 - 라틴아메리카 음유시 전통의 계승과 새로운 정체성 모색 -

본고는 구술 전통과 라틴아메리카 음유시 전통의 계승이라는 주제로 1950년대 이후 진행된 ‘새노래 운동’과 최근의 라틴아메리카 원주민 문학운동의 일환으로 진행된 구술문자문학 (oraliture)을 주목하였다. ‘새노래 운동’은 민요 가락을 다시 소환하고 원주민 악기를 사용하는 등 사라진 음유시의 전통을 복원하고 계승하고자 하는 움직임이며 ‘구술문자문학’ 운동은 오늘날 문자문화 중심의 삶 속에서 사라진 구술성을 환기시키며 원주민 문화의 풍요로운 구술 전통을 복원하고 나아가 알파벳 글쓰기의 한계를 극복하고 다양한 매체를 활용하여 의사전달을 모색하는 움직임이다. 이는 문화적으로 라틴아메리카 고유의 색을 찾는 정체성 모색의 움직임이자 지적 자주권에 대한 선언으로 새롭게 조명할 필요가 있다.

At the Foot of the Racial Mountain: Pauline Hopkins's Literary Exodus in Peculiar Sam, or The Underground Railroad

At the Foot of the Racial Mountain:Pauline Hopkins's Literary Exodus in Peculiar Sam, or The Underground Railroad Rod Taylor George S. Schuyler denied that black art existed separate from white art in his 1926 essay "The Negro-Art Hokum." Working within the vibrant New Negro movement, he asserted that Because a few writers with a paucity of themes have seized upon imbecilities of the Negro rustics and clowns and palmed them off as authentic and characteristic Aframerican behavior, the common notion that the black American is so "different" from his white neighbor has gained wide currency. (97) Schuyler controversially argued that since the social, political, and economic conditions of the United States were similar for both white and black Americans, it did not create the conditions for a distinctly African American literary and cultural aesthetic. Instead, he believed that African American art and culture were subsumed in the American mainstream. Decades prior, at almost twenty years old, Pauline Hopkins wrote Peculiar Sam, or The Underground Railroad (1879). It is a drama that weaves popular minstrel tropes with subtle commentary against the legacy of slavery and the current social state of African Americans. It employs song, dance, stock characters, and African American minstrel stars such as the famed Sam Lucas to present a message that differed from most nineteenth-century minstrelsy to challenge the reductive forms of depiction that had come to sully the imaginations of theater-goers in the United States.1 Because of Hopkins's dramatic work, [End Page 423] Schuyler's assumptions fall flat: her use of rusticity and the legacy of slavery as the locus of her content gave credence to a separate culture with its own complex histories that shaped her career as a writer in the early twentieth century. Hopkins is best known for her literary endeavors that engaged with the progressive representations of African Americans in the postbellum moment. Her 1900 novel Contending Forces: A Romance Illustrative of Negro Live North and South receives the lion's share of critical attention, but she was also prodigious in her production of essays, short fiction, and serialized novels such as Hagar's Daughter, Winona, and Of One Blood that appeared in the Colored American Magazine between 1900 and 1904. In Peculiar Sam, however, Hopkins was able to develop progressive ideas that subsequently emerged in her later fictions of race. In "Reinventing Slavery, Family, and Nation in Peculiar Sam" (2019), Marvin McAllister refers to both W. E. B. Du Bois's and David Blight's historical visions from Black Reconstruction (1935) and Race and Reunion (2001), respectively, to express how Hopkins "advanc[ed] progressive African-American modernity as a model for a nation in the process of rebuilding" to liberate her enslaved characters (394). I slightly deviate from McAllister on what Hopkins is attempting to liberate. I suggest that in Peculiar Sam, Hopkins desires to free her content from the constraints of the plantation and, instead, lay a foundation for the literary and cultural style that came to be associated with the Harlem Renaissance. For instance, Hopkins wrote Contending Forces in 1900, entirely abandoning the southern landscape as a setting in favor of a racially progressive Boston. Hazel V. Carby asserts in The Magazine Novels of Pauline Hopkins (1988) that Hopkins's writing in the Colored American Magazine would create "a black renaissance in Boston" (xxxi). For Hopkins, Boston is a setting where African Americans can safely advance politically, socially, and economically, removed from the watchful and oppressive eye of Jim Crow by showing that any place other than the South is acceptable. This literary work was also evident in Hopkins's later fiction. Still, the groundwork for Hopkins's black renaissance began on the stage before the ideologies of Du Bois and Washington had a chance to influence black intellectual thought. According to James V. Hatch in his introduction to The Roots of African American Drama (1991), Hopkins wrote Peculiar Sam "for her [End Page 424] family's troupe, the Hopkins' Colored Troubadours; she employed the current minstrel dialect as well as song and dance to engage her audience in the serious subject of emancipation" (31). An examination of Hopkins's musical...

Identity as a construct: reading blackness in Eugene O’neill’s the emperor jones.

This paper aims to explore how racialized identities are typified as a modernist construct in Eugene O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones (1920). To this end, the notion of whiteness is identified as a mediated construct and contextualized in the proliferation of American minstrel shows. This popular entertainment projected to white audiences the racial means of differentiation from black caricatures and clichés at the time of segregation. The echoes of minstrel shows and modernists’ instrumentalization of 1920s primitivism serve to initially address the characterization of blackness in Brutus Jones’ identity. Assessed through this in-between construction of symbolic borderlands in which the protagonist is both colonizer and colonized, his blackness becomes a metaphorical mask of otherness while his whiteness shapes the colonial performance of material whiteness. Although he envisions the white ideal in his systematic practices in the Caribbean island, his fragmented identity and his hybridity subject him to a primeval racialized past, to primitivism and atavism.

Debussy's Paris: Piano Portraits of the Belle Époque by Catherine Kautsky

Reviewed by: Debussy's Paris: Piano Portraits of the Belle Époque by Catherine Kautsky Mark DeVoto Debussy's Paris: Piano Portraits of the Belle Époque. By Catherine Kautsky. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2017. [xxix, 223 p. ISBN 9781442269828 (hardback), $38; ISBN 9781442269835 (e-book), $36.] Music examples, illustrations, notes, bibliography, indexes. The piano was Claude Debussy's instrument, and we know from numerous contemporary sources that he was an outstanding pianist, even though he seldom performed in public. Beginning in the mid-1890s, and especially with the composition of the three orchestral nocturnes, Debussy, like Robert Schumann sixty years earlier, began to give descriptive or extramusically suggestive titles to his works, eventually to the point that titles became "impressionist" in the manner of the works of French painters—and this as much as any other factor influenced his being identified as an "impressionist composer." Characteristic titles appear in La mer and in his piano music, beginning with the Estampes and two series of Images and becoming exaggerated in the two books of preludes. Catherine Kautsky, a pianist who teaches at Lawrence College, spent a year in Paris doing on-the-scene research for this new book, which examines the artistic and intellectual environment within which Debussy's extensive output of piano music came to birth—"to view [Debussy] through the lens of his piano music and the city he so fully embraced" (p. xvii). Previously, other authors made comparable efforts, notably Edward Lockspeiser (Debussy: His Life and Mind [2 vols. (London: Cassell, 1962–65)]), who explores especially Debussy's aesthetic against the background of literature. Kautsky is more concerned with the visual arts and popular theater. Her text is amplified by more than fifty reproductions [End Page 96] of paintings, feuilletons, posters, and book illustrations. All of these make a strong case for the sources of Debussy's inspiration in the exotic, popular culture, and entertainment: vaudevilles, the cabaret, circuses, acrobats, children's books, commedia dell'arte, and icons of classical antiquity. Relatively little in the book deals with specific analyses of music; there are eighteen music examples pointing to musical influences and details of style, less often to structure. Merely listing some of Debussy's titles shows how some subjects became recurring themes in his work: "Clair de lune" (a single movement from the Suite bergamasque as well as two different vocal settings of a Verlaine text); "La terrasse des audiences du clair de lune" (Preludes, bk. 2, no. 7); "Et la lune descend sur le temple qui fut" (Images, 2nd ser., no. 2). Another recurring theme is the African Negro as an element of popular theater, such as in imported American minstrel shows ("Minstrels" [Preludes, bk. 1, no. 12]) and in toys ("Golliwogg's Cake-Walk," from Children's Corner; La boîte à joujoux, a children's ballet incorporating an earlier short piece, "Le petit nègre")—realizations that today would be considered socially insensitive but which Debussy always treated with wit and affection. Kautsky examines this subject in chapter 4, "The Cakewalk Wars," using illustrations from posters and offering an analysis of the cakewalk as a popular style of dance. "Fair-haired Maidens" forms the topic of chapter 11, with "La fille aux cheveux de lin" (Preludes, bk. 1, no. 8) at the forefront, but there are also the various treatments of Pierre Louÿs's Chansons de Bilitis, as well as the moment that everyone remembers in act 3, scene 1 of Pelléas et Mélisande, when Mélisande's "longs cheveux" (long hair) tumbles out of her tower window, inspiring Pelléas to tousle her tresses into the adjacent willow branches. The book includes a rarely reproduced frontispiece by Maurice Denis from the original edition of Debussy's La damoiselle élue (Paris: Librairie de l'art indépendant, 1893). Kautsky sees a parallel with an earlier painting by Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, Jeunes filles au bord de la mer (1879), and Aubrey Beardsley's Salomé (1893), a symbolist foreshadowing of art nouveau; perhaps her pursuit of this relationship is exaggerated, but Debussy's Prélude à l'aprèsmidi d'un faune, a quintessential art nouveau actualization in music, comes from just that time, in...

Sweeney Agonistes in noh mask: T. S. Eliot, Japanese noh, and the fragments of world drama

The expansive reach of the ancient Japanese noh theater as it influenced modernist performance and poetics took in T. S. Eliot as well as Ezra Pound and W. B. Yeats, the more commonly recognized noh aficionados. Pound and Eliot attended the premiere of Yeats’s noh-inspired retelling of Irish legend, At the Hawk’s Well, in 1916. This essay considers the influence of that production on Eliot’s later work, discussing his review of Pound’s translations of noh plays based on drafts by Ernest Fenollosa and focusing on two productions of Eliot’s dramatic fragment Sweeney Agonistes. Incorporating influences from noh, classical tragedy, and American minstrel performance, among others, Sweeney Agonistes is an example of world drama. But, Eliot’s play is best served by a definition of world drama that does not oppose national theatrical traditions, one that recognizes the emergence of world drama from a critical practice that focuses on global allusion and inspirations and the transnational exchange of performance ideas and techniques.

Winner of the William M. Jones Best Graduate Student Paper Award at the 2018 Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association Conference: The “Amusement Economist:” J.H. Haverly and the Modernization of the American Minstrel Show

Winner of the William M. Jones Best Graduate Student Paper Award at the 2018 Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association Conference: The “Amusement Economist:” J.H. Haverly and the Modernization of the American Minstrel Show

‘Mungo Everywhere’: How Anglophones Heard Chattel Slavery

This article re-engages with the performance history of the character of Mungo, an enslaved servant from Isaac Bickerstaff and Charles Dibdin's comic opera The Padlock (1768), which premiered at London's Drury Lane Theatre during David Garrick's tenure there. In dialogue with nearly a century of criticism that has misread Mungo as solely a caricature prefiguring the codified racism of the American minstrel show, this article examines contemporary periodicals, libretti, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau's writings on music to posit that the opera's musical representation offered a more nuanced alternative to print's black and white representations of racial and status difference.

Blackface and Critique. From T. D. Rice to Frederick Douglass

While stage appearances of the comic figure in the European commedia tradition potentially reflect the act of giving a face, the grotesque mask of white actors in American minstrel shows can be determined as a specific performative defacement othering African Americans to invent whiteness. But how does popular theatre as a potentially reflexive mode of performance become translated into these racist practices? Against the backdrop of the Black Atlantic, the transatlantic slave trade and the global history of racism, my paper focuses on the aesthetics of European and North American popular theatre of the early 19th century from a comparative perspective. I will look at theatrical forms predating our notions of blackface minstrelsy in order to determine specific relations between marking and masking on stage. The objective of my paper is to contribute to the current German-speaking debate on performances in blackface by extending our focus to hitherto under-researched historical and geographical questions.

Advertising empire: race and visual culture in imperial Germany

At the end of the nineteenth century, Germany turned toward colonialism, establishing protectorates in Africa, and toward a mass consumer society, mapping the meaning of commodities through advertising. These developments, distinct in the world of political economy, were intertwined in the world of visual culture. David Ciarlo offers an innovative visual history of each of these transformations. Tracing commercial imagery across different products and media, Ciarlo shows how and why the 'African native' had emerged by 1900 to become a familiar figure in the German landscape, selling everything from soap to shirts to coffee. The racialization of black figures, first associated with the American minstrel shows that toured Germany, found ever greater purchase in German advertising up to and after 1905, when Germany waged war against the Herero in Southwest Africa. The new reach of advertising not only expanded the domestic audience for German colonialism, but transformed colonialism's political and cultural meaning as well, by infusing it with a simplified racial cast. The visual realm shaped the worldview of the colonial rulers, illuminated the importance of commodities, and in the process, drew a path to German modernity. The powerful vision of racial difference at the core of this modernity would have profound consequences for the future.

"No legs, no jokes, no chance": a history of the American musical theater

Written by one of American theater's most avid and knowledgeable proponents, Legs, No Jokes, No Chance traces the American musical from its rich and varied beginnings in European opera, American minstrel shows, and vaudeville through its many permutations to its current state - from, as Sheldon Patinkin puts it, La Boheme to Rent. Minstrelsy, burlesque, revue, dance, and choreographers, the texts of musical theater so often overlooked by its historians, finally receive due consideration in this thorough and thoroughly entertaining book about how American musical theater came to be and developed into what it is today. Patinkin writes about the infancy of the musical - the revues, operettas, and early musical comedies, as well as the groundbreaking shows like Oklahoma! and Show Boat that brought the form to its golden age during World War II. With insightful references to how history, literature, theater, fashion, popular music, and movies influenced musical theater generally and certain shows in particular, he traces a direct lineage from older forms to contemporary musicals. The result is a broad, clear, and detailed picture of American musicals within both an aesthetic and a historical context. Patinkin conveys the pleasure of the ever-changing forms of musical theater even as he gives readers the analytical tools and terms to understand and better appreciate this uniquely American art. The book features a selection of black and white photographs from historical musical productions, and each chapter includes suggestions for materials to watch and listen to at home or in the classroom.

Dvorak to Duke Ellington: A Conductor Explores America's Music and Its African American Roots (review)

Reviewed by: Dvořák to Duke Ellington: A Conductor Explores America’s Music and Its African American Roots Susan Key Dvořák to Duke Ellington: A Conductor Explores America’s Music and Its African American Roots. By Maurice Peress. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. [viii, 254 p. ISBN 0-19-509822-6. $30.] Music examples, illustrations, index, bibliography, discography. In the afterword to Dvořák to Duke Ellington: A Conductor Explores America's Music and Its African American Roots, Maurice Peress sums up his point of view: "All the stories in my book are about the transfer of the center of creative power from Europe to America, Dvořák being the prophet and Ellington its fulfillment" (p. 191). This formulation may strike some readers as both overreaching and, in its focus on the importance of African American music, obvious: it is surely no great insight that American music owes much to African and African American sources. Nor that American music has been shaped by crossover styles that have sometimes infuriated the American musical establishment. Nor that Antonín Dvořák inspired a significant cultural dialogue. Yet Peress's book makes a fair claim to originality in the way it exposes the number and strength of the connections between the Bohemian symphonist and the American jazz icon, along the way filling in a number of blanks in both musical and cultural history. Peress is well situated to write such an account; he is both a conductor and a researcher whose credits include working with Duke Ellington and Leonard Bernstein as well as reconstructing historical concerts from the early twentieth century. The importance of this role is highlighted in the book's subtitle: "a conductor explores." All the major figures he discusses—Antonín Dvořák, James Reese Europe, George Gershwin, Will Marion Cook, George Antheil, Leonard Bernstein, and Duke Ellington—are ones whose music he worked on, and whose debts to African American musical roots shaped his perspective. His conducting also informs his specific approach: "I was often struck by the conscious search for, and development of, an African American instrumental voice" (p. 199). The process by which African American style was translated into western instrumental ensembles beyond the European symphony orchestra is one that Peress clearly understands from direct experience. Peress's involvement with the music he discusses yields a book very different from most musicological works, as he also turns to fellow performers—conductors, orchestrators, band members, etc., to enhance his analysis. A particularly effective example is Peress's analysis of a recording of George Gershwin conducting a tryout session of orchestrations for Porgy and Bess (p. 75). Or his insights into Rhapsody in Blue gleaned from reconstructing the original performance (pp. 94–96)—including instrumental timbres and the effect of contemporary sound systems on style. Perhaps his experiences in the musical world are also responsible for Peress's sensitivity to the connections among people—students, copyists, orchestrators, etc., and the sometimes-unintended effects these relationships have for larger trends in music. His work on Dvořák's African American students is intriguing, as is the way he links nineteenth-century African American minstrel James Bland directly to David Mannes, founder of the Mannes School of Music. There are many more: the plethora of connections Will Marion Cook had in both classical and [End Page 1025] popular worlds. Or the "nuts and bolts" details of putting together Bernstein's Mass. Dvořák to Duke Ellington is organized in two parts, both roughly chronological. First is Peress's self-described "idiosyncratic take on African American music and musicians from the first half of the twentieth century, with Dvořák as splendid guide" (p. 79), exploring the question he poses at the beginning: "Are the main themes of America's black music history—the slave gatherings, camp meetings, minstrelsy, and jubilees—connected by some common thread?" (p. 10). Then he takes the reader through his experiences with the music he researched and prepared for concert performance: Paul Whiteman's 1924 Aeolian Hall concert during which Rhapsody in Blue was premiered; James Reese Europe's 1912 Clef Club concert at Carnegie Hall; George Antheil's 1927 Carnegie Hall concert featuring Ballet...

One Summer in the Week of Itke K.

One Summer in the Week of Itke K. (Insel Verlag, 1971) is the first of Jeannette Lander's German-language novels. The year is 1942; the central character is fourteen-year-old Itke Kovsky, whose Polish-Jewish immigrant parents run a grocery store in a black section of Atlanta, Georgia. Translated here are the novel's opening chapter, which introduces Itke and her environment, and the penultimate chapter, which depicts Itke's estrangement from her family and culminates in a riot precipitated by the violent deaths of several members of the black community. Drawing on traditions of the American minstrel show and Yiddish theater to frame the chapters, Lander also uses poetic language, word-coinages, and a complex narrative strategy to emphasize the constructedness of the several worlds ("circles") that Itke inhabits. Itke's fascination with her black neighbors, especially the Kovskys' former housemaid Jimmie Lee, is often described by means of stereotypic images of African-Americans prevalent at the time. Another influence from outside the inner circle is Itke's Jewish cousin Sonny, visiting in Atlanta while on leave from the US Army. For a detailed and insightful analysis of this novel, see Leslie A. Adelson, Making Bodies, Making History: Feminism and German Identity (Nebraska, 1993), chapter 4, "Jews and Other 'Others': On Representations and Enactments." (JC)

The Minstrel Show Goes to the Great War: Zora Neale Hurston's Mass Cultural Other

Zora Neale Hurston's known historical antagonism for commercialized folk music has implications for current understanding of Hurston's idea of folk and their tall tales, signified in her 1937 novel Their Eyes Were Watching God by Hurston writes: Everybody indulged in talk. He [the mule] was next to Mayor in prominence, and made better (50). character Janie, who loved conversation and sometimes thought up good stories on mule in an independent spirit that leads her into conflict with her husband mayor, Joe Starks (50-51), allegorizes Hurston's own need to oppose apparently monological discourse of commercialized forms of popular culture. In this manner Hurston's art reminds us of oppositional relation between some modernisms and their sometime Other, cultural commodity (Huyssen 21). Her known differences with left revolutionary politics of era in which her major novel was published diminish somewhat when one takes stock of common cultural enemy for African American intellectuals as divergent as W.E.B. Du Bois and Hurston, who shared a desire to articulate a sense of African American dignity in midst of a dominant social order offering through imposition of color line numerous oppressive indignities, including a variety of ways of caricaturing African Americans and their culture through new technology of media. As Hazel Carby notes, Hurston's 1934 essay Spirituals and Neo-Spirituals posits idea of inauthenticity of commercial culture's representation of African American culture in race records (31). One implication of Hurston's situating rural folk against mass culture is that literary and historical meaning of talk--both tall tales told on porch of Joe Starks's store in Eatonville of Their Eyes Were Watching God, and Florida porch she mentions in her 1942 autobiography Dust Tracks in Road (46-47)--should then be understood in relation to its mass cultural other, revived blackface minstrelsy and popular music gaining prominence in form of sheet music and new medium of radio. If talk in Eatonville of Their Eyes Were Watching God makes town's `talkers the center of world (60), one might well ask what assumed place of imagined cultural center until talking began. Hurston was concerned to establish authenticity in representation of popular forms of folk culture and to expose disregard for aesthetics of that culture through inappropriate forms of representation ... people she wanted to represent she defined as a rural folk, and she measured them and their cultural forms against an urban, mass culture. (Carby 31) Yet this urban, mass culture was itself often devoted to a certain nostalgia for rural culture of folk. Like Jean Toomer, a figure prominent in early stages of Harlem Renaissance who greatly admired folk music of south and lamented how black folk were taking to commercial music rather than to their own musical traditions, Hurston, emergent toward end of Renaissance, was a partisan in culture wars dividing respective identities of city and country. As Carby says, The of a discourse of `folk' as a rural people in Hurston's work in twenties and thirties displaces migration of black people to cities (31). Thus Hurston herself was drawn into some of dehistoricizing practices of culture industry that she attempted to exorcise. Carby's critique, one reminiscent of Alain Locke's historic criticisms of Hurston's dependence on stock formulas for her characters (Lott 236), foregrounds author's creation of a folk who are outside of history (Carby 32). Yet according to Robert Hemenway's characterization of her literary strategy, Hurston's purportedly extra-historical was a narrative fiction defined more specifically as adversarial to the racist stereotype of folk experience in American minstrel tradition and historical neglect of folk arts by black people themselves (ZNH 52). …

Rock Eras: Interpretations of Music and Society 1954–1984 by Jim Curtis

TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 343 jazz from the airwaves without taking racism into account. Individual radio stations, and later the networks, consciously avoided black music and performers for fear of alienating white listeners, exactly as happens on MTV today. The same lack of insight mars Douglas’s discussion of “Amos ’n Andy.” Without an understanding that this important early program emerged from the American minstrel tradition, a racist entertainment form stealing its ideas from AfricanAmericans and repaying them with degrading portrayals, “Amos ’n Andy” makes no sense. Finally, the text is too sparsely footnoted. While the bibliography is complete and current, many chapters have fewer than five footnotes, most of them citations to earlier, romanticized histories. Douglas discusses the important events, personalities, and trends in radio broadcasting of the 1920s, but gives the reader few clues about where he obtained his information. Students could find little help with research projects here. Teachers need a short history of radio broadcasting for use in colleges and high schools, but deficiencies in scope and content, a lack of historical vision, and poorly documented research make Douglas’s book unsuitable for this purpose. Susan Smui.yan Dr. Smit.v.-w, an assistant professor in the Department of American Civilization at Brown University, is writing a book on the commercialization of American broadcast radio. Recently she was a National Science Foundation Fellow at the National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution. Rock Eras: Interpretations of Music and Society 1954 — 1984. By Jim Curtis. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1987. Pp. 363; notes, index. $33.95 (cloth); $16.95 (paper). Jim Curtis has written an impressive account of the social and cultural significance of rock music. Profoundly influenced by Mar­ shall McLuhan’s Understanding Media, the author thematically chron­ icles the complex history of rock prior to its popularization by Elvis Presley and through the ensuing three decades. Curtis maintains that the combination of charismatic rock musicians and technological innovations forged an irrepressible tandem of societal influence in post-World War II popular culture, particularly in the United States and Great Britain. Rock Eras is one of the first scholarly treatments of the rock culture and industry. Curtis succeeds admirably in his analysis of rock’s symbiotic relationship with conventional society, especially as it existed in America. Because musical styles and tastes were evolving and transforming so rapidly during the thirty years Curtis examined, he divided the era into separate, five-year segments for scrutiny. Not­ 344 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE withstanding this piecemeal approach, Curtis accurately emphasizes the weight of such momentous events as the civil rights movement or Vietnam and rock’s connection with them. Curtis’s ruminations concerning rock’s effect are enlivened with provocative historical considerations. European immigration, reli­ gious versus secular input, Winthrop’s covenant theology, Turner’s frontier thesis, and Jefferson’s agrarianism are all explored. Curtis fails, however, to describe adequately the actual equipment that facilitated the electronic wizardry essential to rock’s flourishing and sustenance. Rock is brimming with examples of technological devel­ opments and refinements: electric guitars, amplifiers, synthesizers, improved drum kits, advanced recording techniques, music videos, and light shows testify to the crucial importance of technology. Unfortunately, Rock Eras does not sufficiently examine this decisive aspect of rock music. (One glaring sin of bibliographical omission is the absence of Rock Hardware, edited by Tony Bacon, which describes the nuts and bolts of rock technology.) Perhaps the most serious flaw of Rock Eras is the total dearth of oral interviews with those who actually made the music, many of whom are still living. The author’s heavy reliance on secondary sources is regrettable. Another limitation is the complete lack of photographs and illustrations that could have shown some of rock’s colorfully vivid performers and concerts, as evidenced in The Art of Rock by Paul Grushkin. Despite its shortcomings, Rock Eras is an important contribution to both the historiography of contemporary American history and rock music itself. Whether portraying Beatlemania or the mindless noise of some heavy metal groups, Curtis diligently depicts the various musi­ cians in question and their import. He is to be commended for his thoughtful approach to the...

The Early Days of Radio Broadcasting by George H. Douglas

342 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE fully, he argues, that, “By 1870, the photographic image was par with the printed word in human communication” (p. 273). Only Helena Wright’s paper focuses on photography as an art, examining how 19th-century American landscapes were produced, packaged, and sold by artist-entrepreneurs, many of whom hrst worked for the railroads or government surveying parties. Using the three Bierstadt brothers as a case study, she illuminates the complex relations between painting, engraving, and changes in photographic processes, partic­ ularly the Albertype. Her work admirably illustrates Jenkins’s conten­ tion that “the theories of science and the products of technology are reflections of their historical contexts and are expressions of the values, attitudes and conceptions of their society and culture” (p. 23). Unfortunately, few of the other essays provide much insight into the relations between photography and society. The volume as a whole is a useful record of technical developments of interest to specialists. David E. Nye Dr. Nye is an associate professor at Copenhagen University. He edited A Catalogue of the General Electric Photographic Archives, 1890-1940, and is the author of The Invented Self and image Worlds: Corporate Identities at General Electric. His most recent book, Electrifying America, is published by MIT Press. The Early Days ofRadio Broadcasting. By George H. Douglas. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland (Box 611 28640), 1987. Pp. viii + 248; illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $25.95+ $ 1.50 handling. George Douglas, in The Early Days ofRadio Broadcasting, attempts an “informal history” of American broadcast radio in the 1920s. Unfor­ tunately, a historically naive and nostalgic approach mars a book that might otherwise have been especially useful as a classroom text. Because Douglas poorly explains the underlying causes and effects of the events he describes, students would be left with information about, but little understanding of, broadcasting’s first decade. Doug­ las’s work embodies the shortcomings of narrative history without providing the virtues of a well-told story. The reader finds out what happened but not why, since the author fails to make sense of the chronology he outlines. This approach becomes critical in the discus­ sion of evolving radio technology. Douglas lists the technological changes that occur but presupposes a technical knowledge most people lack. In addition, he never talks about the interaction between the technological developments and the form taken by radio broad­ casting. The book presents little historical context for many of the events described. Douglas’s treatment of racial issues particularly suffers from this lack of historical framework. He discusses the absence of TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 343 jazz from the airwaves without taking racism into account. Individual radio stations, and later the networks, consciously avoided black music and performers for fear of alienating white listeners, exactly as happens on MTV today. The same lack of insight mars Douglas’s discussion of “Amos ’n Andy.” Without an understanding that this important early program emerged from the American minstrel tradition, a racist entertainment form stealing its ideas from AfricanAmericans and repaying them with degrading portrayals, “Amos ’n Andy” makes no sense. Finally, the text is too sparsely footnoted. While the bibliography is complete and current, many chapters have fewer than five footnotes, most of them citations to earlier, romanticized histories. Douglas discusses the important events, personalities, and trends in radio broadcasting of the 1920s, but gives the reader few clues about where he obtained his information. Students could find little help with research projects here. Teachers need a short history of radio broadcasting for use in colleges and high schools, but deficiencies in scope and content, a lack of historical vision, and poorly documented research make Douglas’s book unsuitable for this purpose. Susan Smui.yan Dr. Smit.v.-w, an assistant professor in the Department of American Civilization at Brown University, is writing a book on the commercialization of American broadcast radio. Recently she was a National Science Foundation Fellow at the National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution. Rock Eras: Interpretations of Music and Society 1954 — 1984. By Jim Curtis. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1987. Pp. 363; notes, index. $33.95 (cloth); $16.95 (paper). Jim Curtis has...