The scene of Harlem cabaret : race, sexuality, performance / Shane Vogel.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Vogel, Shane.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Race relations.

History.

Homosexuality--Social aspects.

Performing arts--Social aspects.

Music-halls (Variety-theaters, cabarets, etc.)--Social aspects.

Music-halls (Variety-theaters, cabarets, etc.).

African American entertainers.

Harlem (New York, N.Y.)--Social life and customs--20th century.

Harlem (New York, N.Y.).

New York (N.Y.)--Social life and customs--20th century.

New York (N.Y.).

National Book Committee.

Manners and customs.

Harlem Renaissance.

African American entertainers--New York (State)--New York--History--20th century.

Music-halls (Variety-theaters, cabarets, etc.)--Social aspects--New York (State)--New York--History--20th century.

Performing arts--Social aspects--New York (State)--New York--History--20th century.

Performing arts.

Homosexuality--Social aspects--New York (State)--New York--History--20th century.

Homosexuality.

African Americans--Intellectual life--20th century.

African Americans.

African Americans--Intellectual life.

African Americans--Politics and government--20th century.

African Americans--Politics and government.

United States--Race relations--Political aspects--History--20th century.

United States.

New York (State)--New York.

Physical Description:

xiii, 257 pages : illustrations, maps ; 23 cm

Place of Publication:

Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 2009.

Summary:

Harlem's nightclubs in the 1920s and '30s were a crucial location for testing society's racial and sexual limits. Normally tacit divisions were made spectacularly public in the vibrant, but often fraught, relationship between performer and audience. These cabaret scenes, Shane Vogel contends, also played a key role in the Harlem Renaissance by offering alternatives to the politics of sexual respectability and racial uplift that sought to dictate the proper subject matter for black arts and letters. Writers, performers, and spectators expanded the possibilities of blackness and sexuality in America, resulting in a queer nightlife that flourished in music, in print, and on stage. The Scene of Harlem Cabaret brings this rich moment in history to life and insists upon the role of nightlife performance as a definitive touchstone for understanding the racial and sexual politics of the early twentieth century.

Contents:

Introduction: Against uplift : performance, literature, and the queer Harlem Renaissance

American cabaret performance and the production of intimacy

The scene of Harlem cabaret : 1926 and after

Closing time : Langston Hughes and the queer poetics of Harlem nightlife

Rereading Du Bois reading McKay : uplift sociology and the problem of amusement

Lena Horne's impersona

Afterword: Irrealizing the queer Harlem Renaissance.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 227-243) and index.

ISBN:

9780226862514

0226862518

9780226862521

0226862526

OCLC:

231947544