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

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Rutter, Emily Ruth, author.

Series:

Performing celebrity.

Performing celebrity

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

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

American literature.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (257 pages)

Place of Publication:

Newark : University of Delaware Press, [2021]

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:

Frontmatter

CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

INTRODUCTION: Portraits of Black Fame, or, The Past as Blueprint for the Present

1. “MY BLACK BODY THROWN FREE

2. “MORE OF A MAN THAN YOU”

3. “THE STING OF RACE AND SPORT”

4. “THE OVERWHELMING EVIDENCE OF HIS ARTISTRY”

5. “BLIND TOM, MUSICAL PRODIGY OF THE AGE”

6. “LET THIS BELTING BE OUR UNBINDING”

NOTES

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

1-64453-246-8

1-64453-247-6

OCLC:

1273001334