Stolen time : black fad performance and the Calypso craze / Shane Vogel.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Vogel, Shane, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Calypso (Music)--History.

Calypso (Music).

Popular music--United States--1951-1960--History and criticism.

Popular music.

Popular music--Caribbean, English-speaking.

Calypso musicians.

Musicians, Black--Caribbean, English-speaking.

Musicians, Black.

African American musicians--Hisotry--20th century.

African American musicians.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (267 pages) : illustrations

Place of Publication:

Chicago : The University of Chicago Press, 2018.

Summary:

In 1956 Harry Belafonte's Calypso became the first LP to sell more than a million copies. For a few fleeting months, calypso music was the top-selling genre in the US-it even threatened to supplant rock and roll. Stolen Time provides a vivid cultural history of this moment and outlines a new framework-black fad performance-for understanding race, performance, and mass culture in the twentieth century United States. Vogel situates the calypso craze within a cycle of cultural appropriation, including the ragtime craze of 1890s and the Negro vogue of the 1920s, that encapsulates the culture of the Jim Crow era. He follows the fad as it moves defiantly away from any attempt at authenticity and shamelessly embraces calypso kitsch. Although white calypso performers were indeed complicit in a kind of imperialist theft of Trinidadian music and dance, Vogel argues, black calypso craze performers enacted a different, and subtly subversive, kind of theft. They appropriated not Caribbean culture itself, but the US version of it-and in so doing, they mocked American notions of racial authenticity. From musical recordings, nightclub acts, and television broadcasts to Broadway musicals, film, and modern dance, he shows how performers seized the ephemeral opportunities of the fad to comment on black cultural history and even question the meaning of race itself.

Contents:

Frontmatter

CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

INTRODUCTION. This and That, or, Swiped Calypsos

ONE. Stolen Time: The Ontology of Black Fad Performance

TWO. The Calypso Program: Technology, Performance, Cinema

THREE. Carnivalizing Jazz: Duke Ellington's Calypso Theater and the Diasporic Instant

FOUR. Surfacing the Caribbean: Black Broadway and Mock Transnational Performance

FIVE. Working against the Music: Geoffrey Holder's Elsewhen

CONCLUSION. Don't Stop the Carnival

NOTES

INDEX

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 22. Okt 2019)

ISBN:

9780226568584

022656858X

OCLC:

1044767725