Featuring: Dianne Rocheleau (Clark University); Laura Ogden (Florida International University);Carolyn Finney (University of California Berkeley); Melanie DuPuis (University of California Santa Cruz); Sharlene Mollett (University of Toronto at Scarsborough); and Rebecca Lave (Indiana University)

1. Cosmopolitan Minstrelsy: Race, Gender and Trans-Atlantic Theatre (Dr. Zakiya Adair)

Reacting to American racist policies and post WWI access to international travel a flourish of African Americans migrated to Paris and London in the early 1920s. African American women entertainers found particular success in the genre of vaudeville. Josephine Baker, Mabel Mercer, Aida “Bricktop” Smith and Adelaide Hall are just a few of the popular African American women entertainers who became successful performing in trans-Atlantic vaudeville. As a form of popular entertainment, vaudeville had a long history in the United States and Europe. Originating in the late nineteenth century, vaudeville gained in popularity by featuring white women in both the male and female roles. However early incarnations of vaudeville in the United States did not feature African American performers and did not offer any radical challenges to constructions of race. Boarding ships bound for Europe, African American musicians, singers, dancers and artists made use of the modern availability of international travel and increased European interest for the consumption of American culture during the early twentieth century. The trans-Atlantic vaudeville that African American women performed in in the twentieth century was a composite of nineteenth century variety, blackface minstrelsy and burlesque.

            The difference with trans-Atlantic black vaudeville or what I term, cosmopolitan minstrelsy was that the productions relied on colonial racial and gender tropes and constructions of nation in this vein trans-Atlantic vaudeville became a vehicle for transporting images of blackness. African American women performers were the main drivers of the genre and their popularity illuminates the significance of vaudeville to constructions of various identities. In 1925 Josephine Baker appeared in Caroline Dudley Reagan’s La Revue Negre in Paris, France and in 1928 Adelaide Hall appeared in Lew Leslie’s the Black Birds Revue in New York and Paris. Both of these productions became very popular in large part due to the theatrical spectacle created by Baker and Hall.

My goal with this essay is to map the development of theatrical constructions of black women both on the stage and in the iconography associated with their performances (playbills, advertisements, posters). 

This paper will examine black American artists and their migration to Europe in the genre of early expressive culture. This paper will provoke a lively discussion on black internationalism and African American women’s negotiations of race, gender and class. Additionally this paper will deconstruct masculinist tendencies within scholarship on African American cultural history and performance.

2. New Directions: Madness, Politics Issues, and Aesthetic Practices in African American Literature in the 21^st Century (Dr Therí A. Pickens)

In Victor Lavalle’s The Devil in Silver, the main protagonist, Pepper, must navigate daily life within the strictures of a mental institution after he is unjustly placed there as a way for local police officers to avoid the paperwork necessary for processing him traditionally. As he adjusts to the microcosmic world of the hospital, he begins to understand the relativity of craziness as defined by societal norms, on the one hand, and the inmates’ embodied realities, on the other. In this paper, I question the way madness informs the novel’s political and aesthetic practice.

Lavalle’s novel fits somewhat easily, though not neatly, into a black speculative fiction tradition, which deploys similar themes and aesthetic practices as mainstream (read: white) science fiction, horror, and alternative futurities. Often critics note the way these novels comment on or critique the current social and political issues that seep inside the porous boundary between book and world. I focus on the way Victor Lavalle’s Devil in Silver comments on the relationship between madness and the nation-state. Mad people are not allowed to be part of the citizenry. Yet, Pepper chooses to remain in the institution, in effect relinquishing his citizenship. The loss of his ability as property bears implications not only for how we understand the worth of citizenship, who desires it, and to whom it is available. Pepper’s decision challenges the teleological enterprise of the novel since he does not reach toward a resolution, but rather certain chaos.

Suffering Bodies, Dance and Transcendence in Caribbean Literature, Jacqueline Couti (University of Kentucky)
In Gisèle Pineau's Macadam Dreams, through the shifting metaphors of the drum and the cyclone, which signify not only sexual crime but also purification and healing, the instable identity of Creole subjectivity emerges. Many characters are in pain. Yet, in the mighty drumbeat of the tambour-ka lurks a power that can make an old and broken woman dance as if her life depended on it. This presentation examines the motif of the dancing body and explores dance as a contemporary site of resistance and healing in traditional and contemporary genres such gwo-ka. Such an approach intends to constitute an archeology of representations of dance and dancers as the expression of creolization and awareness of self in in French and Francophone Caribbean Studies.


Liminality of the Dancing Suffering Body, Gladys M. Francis (Georgia State University)
Liminality of the Dancing Suffering Body is an analysis of painful lived experiences expressed through Caribbean traditional dance performances that present cultural, political and memorial strategies, in addition to interpersonal relations. This presentation focuses on the works of contemporary Black Diasporic filmmakers who challenge traditional gendered spaces and politics while contextualizing the body's states of loss, its displacements, methods of transmission and resistance through innovative representations of the dancing body in pain. "Liminality of the Dancing Suffering Body" introduces the gwo-ka and bigidi dance aesthetic, both explored as a counter-point of history and a Maroon space of (modern) history. It is through the dancing body that I will expose transgressional identities shaping cartographies of pain that distort the perceptions of cultural formations, Creolization and globalization, and problematize notions of self-dependence, self-organization, choice, autonomy, and agency through class, gender, race, and locality.

Dr. Shlossberg’s work documents contemporary danzas, such as the pastorelas, and related masking customs in central Michoacan. His work also examines how knowledge about masks and masking is often falsified in popular and scholarly work through the repetition of colorful myths that envelop the craft and the disavowal of items produced for the tourist and curio markets as inauthentic and low-grade. Debates over the authenticity of tourist and curio arts shed light on how popular and elite, indigenous, mestizo, and Anglo actors in central Michoacan construct and contest relations of class, race, and inequality as they negotiate the meanings of “tradition,” “ethnic authenticity,” “globalization,” and “cultural change.”

El trabajo del Dr. Scholossberg se enfoca en documentar danzas, pastorales y mascaradas el territorio de Michoacán. Su trabajo busca traer cociencia al público sobre cómo las máscaras y bailes han sido glorificados y falsificados a través de mitos coloríficos que buscan atraer atención turística. Como consecuencia, varias máscaras a la venta suelen ser falsas y no piezas de arte. Varios debates han surgido sobre las diferentes perspectivas tomadas entre las imitiaciones y el verdadero arte curio. Schlossberg busca enseñar como la élite social, los indígenas, mestizos y los Anglo actores de Michoacán construyen, mantienen y negocian relaciones de clase social, raza e inequalidad a través de la tradición, auntenticidad étnica, globalización y cambios culturales en el arte.

African American & Africana Studies Social Science Speaker Series. 

Tracy Fisher is currently a Visiting Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Pitzer College in Claremont, California. Her teaching, research, and activist-scholar commitments are situated at the intersections of Women’s, Gender and Feminist studies, critical Race and Ethnic studies, African Diaspora studies, and critical Anthropology. She has published several articles in edited volumes and in journals such as, Small Axe, Social Justice, and Critical Sociology. She has also received fellowships and grants from the Rockefeller Foundation and the Mellon Foundation. Professor Fisher is the co-editor of Gendered Citizenships, Transnational Perspectives on Knowledge Production, Political Activism, and Culture (Palgrave Macmillan 2009). Her book, What’s Left of Blackness: Feminisms, Transracial Solidarities, and the Politics of Belonging in Britain, was published in the Comparative Feminist Studies Series by Palgrave Macmillan Publishers in 2012. 

Fisher explores 1970s Britain by specifically drawing attention to the ways in which black women in Britain understood their experiences, identities, and social activism in relation to other black women throughout the African diaspora and to other women of color within and outside of Britain. By extension, black women created new solidarities and engaged in an active political struggle—one grounded in the material reality of entrenched forms of discrimination and exclusion.

Co-sponsored by AAAS and Anthropology

Revisiting Rock Fences of the Bluegrass