Description
Book SynopsisFabulous yet fierce, imperious yet impetuous, boss yet bitchy - divas are figures of paradox. Focusing on four early twentieth-century divas - Aida Overton Walker, Loïe Fuller, Libby Holman, and Josephine Baker - who were icons in their own time,
Moving Performances considers what their past and current reception reveals about changing ideas of race and gender.
Trade Review"This well-researched and carefully conceptualized study establishes a crucial connection between women artists' cultural production and the political economy in which they worked. Rich and complex,
Moving Performances will make a notable and distinct contribution to the existing scholarship." -- Mae Henderson * author of Speaking in Tongues & Dancing Diaspora: Black Women Writing and Performing *
"This innovative study rethinks the racialized gendered subjectivities of women who not only remade themselves and forms of performance through modernism but relocated race, colonialism, and sexuality through their very bodies." -- Eileen Boris * author of Caring for America: Home Health Workers in the Shadow of the Welfare State *
"The diva exudes singularity: whether she sings arias or popular songs, dances the ballet or the cakewalk, she always performs herself. This may explain why studies of female performers consider them so often in iconic isolation rather than as part of a broader celebrity culture.
Moving Performances: Divas, Iconicity, and Remembering the Modern Stage remedies this problem with its analysis of four divas of early twentieth-century popular performance." * Theatre Survey *
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments
Introduction: Divas, Iconicity, Remembering
1. The Color Line Is Always Moving: Aida Overton Walker
2. Transnational Technologies of Orientalism: Loïe Fuller’s Invented Repertoires
3. “Voices within the Voice”: Aural Passing and Libby Holman’s Deracinated/Reracinated Sound
4. “Much Too Busy to Die”: Josephine Baker’s Diva Iconicity
Conclusion: Diva Remains
NotesBibliographyIndex
