Staging race: Black cultural politics before the Harlem Renaissance, 1893--1915.
Item
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Title
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Staging race: Black cultural politics before the Harlem Renaissance, 1893--1915.
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Identifier
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AAI9959234
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identifier
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9959234
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Creator
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Sotiropoulos, Karen.
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Contributor
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Adviser: David Nasaw
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Date
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2000
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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History, Black | History, United States | Theater
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Abstract
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This dissertation studies a generation of black artists who struggled to make art, to make money, and to advance racial interests in the years between the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893 and World War I. Although they worked within America's racist commercial culture, these African-American artists struggled to address black audiences as well as white. They managed to use turn-of-the-century conventions of popular amusement both to play to white desire for racist stereotype and to forge a space for black politics with their black audiences.;Ironically, the strange world of Jim Crow amusement made it possible to work toward both these goals. As long as whites felt secure in the relative privacy of orchestra seating, they Rocked to see real African Americans portray white-determined representations of blackness. African-American performers responded to this market demand for stereotype and catapulted themselves into stardom by playing the role of the "darky." Paradoxically, because of segregated seating, African-American performers were also able to target a collective black audience, literally and often times figuratively, "over the heads" of white patrons in orchestra seating.;African Americans used the segregated balcony space, the African-American press, and the hotels and saloons in New York's black neighborhoods to develop modern social identities---personas that resisted then dominant ideologies of racial hierarchy. Significantly, black performers produced shows that addressed the post-Reconstruction interest in emigration to Liberia and the turn-of-the-century pride in Ethiopia's independence during Europe's "scramble for Africa.";An urban black middle class at first participated in modern commercial culture in an effort to distance themselves from a nineteenth-century African-American elite mired in Victorian values. African-American popular performers actually contributed to the development of a modern middle-class sensibility. This new black middle class developed codes of respectability that rested more in the manner of dress and department than in use of stereotyped imagery or in participation in popular amusements. With the onset of World War I, the new black middle class faced increasing numbers of newer migrants and became increasingly attached to notions of respectability that would categorically denigrate popular amusements and working-class black performers.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy Restricted.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.