Black celebrity : contemporary representations of postbellum athletes and artists / Emily Ruth Rutter.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Rutter, Emily Ruth, author.

Series:

Performing celebrity

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

African American athletes in literature.

African American entertainers in literature.

African Americans in literature.

American literature--African American authors--History and criticism.

American literature.

American literature--African American authors.

American literature--21st century--History and criticism.

Racism in literature.

Genre:

Criticism, interpretation, etc.

Physical Description:

viii, 246 pages ; 24 cm.

Place of Publication:

Newark : University of Delaware Press, [2022]

Summary:

"Black 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"-- Provided by publisher.

Contents:

Machine generated contents note: 1. "My Black Body Thrown Free": The Legacy of Jack Johnson in Kevin Young's To Repel Ghosts: The Remix from the Original Masters

2. "More of a Man than You": The Many Faces of Jack Johnson in Adrian Matejka's The Big Smoke

3. "The Sting of Race and Sport": Revivifying Isaac Burns Murphy in Frank X Walker's Isaac Murphy: I Dedicate This Ride

4. "The Overwhelming Evidence of His Artistry": Wiping Away the Minstrel Mask in Caryl Phillips's Dancing in the Dark

5. "Blind Tom, Musical Prodigy of the Age": Unrecoverability in Jeffery Renard Allen's Song of the Shank

6. "Let This Belting Be Our Unbinding": Reconceptualizing Black Entertainment in Tyehimba Jess's Olio.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9781644532454

164453245X

9781644532447

1644532441

OCLC:

1245472625

Publisher Number:

99989843804