Description
Book SynopsisPresents a cultural history of the African American women who performed in variety shows - chorus lines, burlesque revues, cabaret acts, and the like - between 1890 and 1945. This book describes the strange phenomenon of blackface performances by women, both black and white, and considers how black expressive artists navigated racial segregation.
Trade Review“
Babylon Girls is a brilliant book. Consistently pushing multiple fields in new directions, Jayna Brown reveals the centrality of black female performance culture in the making of transatlantic modernity. Her incredibly valuable book demonstrates how African Americans moved in resilient and unpredictable ways—both geographically and performatively—during the early twentieth century.”—
Daphne A. Brooks, author of
Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Performances of Race and Freedom, 1850–1910“The most exciting piece of scholarship that I’ve read in ages,
Babylon Girls succeeds as an extremely ambitious, meticulously researched, brilliantly theorized cultural history. It is a landmark contribution to jazz studies, dance and performance studies, black women’s history, studies of minstrelsy, and theories of cross-cultural exchange.”—
Sherrie Tucker, author of
Swing Shift: “All-Girl” Bands of the 1940s“[A]n original, exciting, and ambitious study of black women performers in the early decades of the twentieth century. . . . In a book filled with fascinating and valuable insights and information, the discussion of white female minstrelsy is one of the most interesting and original. . . . Artists such as the women about whom Brown writes deserve to have their lives and work studied and attended to—as Brown does, providing brilliant analysis of and insight into the meanings embedded in them.” -- Farah Jasmine Griffin * Women's Review of Books *
“This is a fascinating subject. Jayna Brown’s study of well-known, little-known, and unknown African American female performers—from minstrels to ‘coon cantatrices,’ from dancers to jazz trumpeters—in the first half of the twentieth century offers us ways to understand the multilayered significance of their appearance and forms of expression on stages in the United States and Europe.” -- Maureen E. Montgomery * Journal of American History *
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments ix
Abbreviations for Libraries and Archives xiii
Introduction 1
1. "Little Black Me": The Touring Picaninny Choruses 19
2. Letting the Flesh Fly: Topsy, Time, Torture, and Transfiguration 56
3. "Egyptian Beauties" and "Creole Queens": The Performance of City and Empire on the
Fin-de-Siecle Black Burlesque Stage 92
4. The Cakewalk Business 128
5. Everybody's Doing It: Social Dance, Segregation, and the New Body 156
6. Babylon Girls: Primitivist Modernism, Anti-Modernism, and Black Chorus Line Dancers 189
7. Translocutions: Florence Mills, Josephine Baker, and Valaida Snow 238
Conclusion 280
Notes 285
Bibliography 313
Index 333
