Description
Book SynopsisBlack Celebrity examines representations of postbellum black athletes and artist-entertainers by novelists Caryl Phillips and Jeffery Renard Allen and poets Kevin Young, Frank X Walker, Adrian Matejka, and Tyehimba Jess. Inhabiting the perspectives of boxer Jack Johnson and musicians “Blind Tom” Wiggins and Sissieretta Jones, along with several others, these writers retrain readers’ attention away from athletes’ and entertainers’ overdetermined bodies and toward their complex inner lives. Phillips, Allen, Young, Walker, Matejka, and Jess especially plumb the emotional archive of desire, anxiety, pain, and defiance engendered by the racial hypervisibility and depersonalization that has long characterized black stardom. In the process, these novelists and poets and, in turn, the present book revise understandings of black celebrity history while evincing the through-lines between the postbellum era and our own time.
Table of ContentsIntroduction: Portraits of Black Fame, or The Past as Blueprint for the Present
Chapter 1: “my black body / thrown free”: The Legacy of Jack Johnson in Kevin Young’s
To Repel Ghosts: The Remix from the Original Masters Chapter 2:
“More of a man than you”: The Many Faces of Jack Johnson in Adrian Matejka’s
The Big Smoke Chapter 3: “The Sting of Race and Sport”: Revivifying Isaac Burns Murphy in Frank X Walker’s
Isaac Murphy: I Dedicate This Ride Chapter 4: “the overwhelming evidence of his artistry”: Wiping Away the Minstrel Mask in Caryl Phillips’s
Dancing in the Dark Chapter 5: “Blind Tom, Musical Prodigy of the Age”: Unrecoverability in Jeffery Renard Allen’s
Song of the Shank Chapter 6: “Let this belting be our / unbinding”: Reconceptualizing Black Entertainment in Tyehimba Jess’s
Olio Bibliography
Endnotes
Index
