..".engaging, richly illustrated, and well-reserached.... Part anthology, cultural studies, history, journalism and political science, it... manages to consistently engage the reader..." - African Studies Review

"Lindfors's book shows how the 'edutainment' of the 19th century perpetuated an ignorance of Africa that makes it easy for whites to stay racist and difficult for blacks to gain an accurate and dignified understanding of their heritage.... an unusually strong, readable collection." Boston Book Review

Ethnological show business that is, the displaying of foreign peoples for commercial and/or educational purposes has a very long history. In the 19th and 20th centuries some of the most interesting individuals and groups exhibited in Europe and America came from Africa, or were said to come from Africa. African showpeople (real as well as counterfeit), managers and impresarios, and the audiences who came to gape are the featured attractions here how they individually and in concert helped to shape Western perceptions of Africans."

Every year in downtown Las Vegas, often called "Old Vegas", The Burlesque Hall of Fame reunion brings together members of the former League of Exotic Dancers, one of the earliest unions for women in exotic entertainment, to perform their half-century-year- old routines. In this annual tradition, performers from the golden age of Las Vegas burlesque rally counter-culture neo-burlesque fans who both keep the tradition alive and add new meaning to it. Over the past five years, documentarian Kaitlyn Regehr and photographer Matilda Temperley have embedded themselves within this communitya group, which like Old Vegas itself, continues to survive and thrive sixty years past its supposed prime. Here, in a smoky, off-strip casino, they found women, at times well into their 80s, subversively bumping and grinding away preconceptions about appropriate behavior for a pensioner. This collection of interviews and photographs is drawn from the backstage dressing rooms, homes, and lives of this aging burlesque community, as well as the young neo-burlesque community who adore them. Through a range of experiencesfrom discussing struggles for wage equality, to helping stabilize an 85 year old as she steps into a sequined g-stringthe authors describe the complexity of the lives of these performers and the burlesque history from which they come. Regehr and Temperley present multidimensional portraits of this relatively untold womens history and conclude that they are at their most vital when read with all the nuances, troubles, trials, and triumphs that they formerly and currently experience.

Adoption allows families to modify, either overtly or covertly, what is considered to be the natural order. Cures for Chance explores how early modern English theatre questioned the inevitability of the biological family and proposed new models of familial structure, financial inheritance, and gendered familial authority. Because the practice of adoption circumvents sexual reproduction, its portrayal obliges audiences to reconsider ideas of nature and kinship. This study elucidates the ways in which adoptive familial relations were defined, described, and envisioned on stage, particularly in the works of Shakespeare and Middleton. In the plays in question, families and individual characters create, alter, and manage familial relations. Throughout Cures for Chance, adoption is considered in the broader socioeconomic and political climate of the period. Literary works and a wide range of other early modern texts - including treatises on horticulture and natural history and household and conduct manuals - are analysed in their historical and cultural contexts. Erin Ellerbeck argues that dramatic representations of adoption test conventional notions of family by rendering the family unit a social construction rather than a biological certainty, and that in doing so, they evoke the alteration of nature by human hands that was already pervasive at the time.

This volume traces the distinct cultural languages in which individual and collective forms of trauma are expressed in diverse variations, including oral and written narratives, literature, comic strips, photography, theatre, and cinematic images. The central argument is that traumatic memories are frequently beyond the sphere of medical, legal, or state intervention. To address these different, often intertwined modes of language, the contributors provide a variety of disciplinary approaches to foster innovative debates and provoke new insights. Prevailing definitions of trauma can best be understood according to the cultural and historical conditions within which they exist. Languages of Trauma explores what this means in practice by scrutinizing varied historical moments from the First World War onwards and particular cultural contexts from across Europe, the United States, Asia, and Africa - striving to help decolonize the traditional Western-centred history of trauma, dissolving it into multifaceted transnational histories of trauma cultures.

Bruce Forsyth is known across four generations as the face of family entertainment classics such as The Generation Game, Play Your Cards Right and The Price is Right. His is an amazing story that spans more than two thirds of the twentieth century. In the late 1950s, over half of Britain would tune in to Sunday Night at the London Palladium, making Bruce a star in a few weeks. But it had been a long slog since his debut as a fourteen-year-old 'Boy Bruce the Mighty Atom' in 1942, then wartime work for the Red Cross and National Service, and playing every theatre, concert party, summer season, double act and review known to man. Bruce's first-ever account of his whole life is chock full of anecdotes, honest appraisals of tough times, failed marriages and affairs, comments on entertainment and what it took to be a comedian at the height of his powers. 'In the gameshow of life, Brucie hasn't just won the TV, the golf clubs and the hostess trolley. He's won the cuddly toy as well' Mirror

Open from 1942 until 1945, the Hollywood Canteen was the most famous of the patriotic home-front nightclubs where civilian hostesses jitterbugged with enlisted men of the Allied Nations. Since the opening night, when the crowds were so thick that Bette Davis had to enter through the bathroom window to give her welcome speech, the storied dance floor where movie stars danced with soldiers has been the subject of much U.S. nostalgia about the "Greatest Generation." Drawing from oral histories with civilian volunteers and military guests who danced at the wartime nightclub, Sherrie Tucker explores how jitterbugging swing culture has come to represent the war in U.S. national memory. Yet her interviewees' varied experiences and recollections belie the possibility of any singular historical narrative. Some recall racism, sexism, and inequality on the nightclub's dance floor and in Los Angeles neighborhoods, dynamics at odds with the U.S. democratic, egalitarian ideals associated with the Hollywood Canteen and the "Good War" in popular culture narratives. For Tucker, swing dancing's torque--bodies sharing weight, velocity, and turning power without guaranteed outcomes--is an apt metaphor for the jostling narratives, different perspectives, unsteady memories, and quotidian acts that comprise social history.

In her day, Eva Tanguay (1879 1947) was one of the most famous women in America. Widely known as the "I Don't Care Girl" named after a song she popularized and her independent, even brazen persona Tanguay established herself as a vaudeville and musical comedy star in 1901 with the New York City premiere of the show My Lady and never looked back. Tanguay was, at the height of a long career that stretched until the early 1930s, a trend-setting performer who embodied the emerging ideal of the bold and sexual female entertainer. Whether suggestively singing songs with titles like "It's All Been Done Before But Not the Way I Do It" and "Go As Far As You Like" or wearing a daring dress made of pennies, she was a precursor to subsequent generations of performers, from Mae West to Madonna and Lady Gaga, who have been both idolized and condemned for simultaneously displaying and playing with blatant displays of female sexuality.

In Queen of Vaudeville, Andrew L. Erdman tells Eva Tanguay's remarkable life story with verve. Born into the family of a country doctor in rural Quebec and raised in a New England mill town, Tanguay found a home on the vaudeville stage. Erdman follows the course of her life as she amasses fame and wealth, marries (and divorces) twice, engages in affairs closely followed in the press, declares herself a Christian Scientist, becomes one of the first celebrities to get plastic surgery, loses her fortune following the Wall Street Crash of 1929, and receives her last notice, an obituary in Variety. The arc of Tanguay's career follows the history of American popular culture in the first half of the twentieth century. Tanguay's appeal, so dependent on her physical presence and personal charisma, did not come across in the new media of radio and motion pictures. With nineteen rare or previously unpublished images, Queen of Vaudeville is a dynamic portrait of a dazzling and unjustly forgotten show business star."

Jack Cardiff tells the story of his life in films, first as a cameraman and then as a director. He was one of the first to use the Technicolor film camera, and the book provides a record of how colour cinematography developed in Britain. He also provides a humorous account of his days on the music-hall circuit during the 1920s and '30s, and anecdotes about his experiences photographing actresses such as Ingrid Bergman, Audrey Hepburn, Ava Gardner, Sophia Loren and Marilyn Monroe.

This is a book about a stage and screen enigma of the past. Gypsy Rose Lee was an early vaudeville, stage and screen star about which little truth has been written. This book provides a more in-depth and factual account of the well-concealed life of a legend.

A revealing portrait of Gypsy Rose Lee, the "Striptease Intellectual" of 1930s burlesque A true icon of America at a turning point in its history, Gypsy Rose Lee was the first-and the only-stripper to become a household name, write novels, and win the adulation of intellectuals, bankers, socialites, and ordinary Americans. Her outrageous blend of funny-smart sex symbol with the aura of high culture-she boasted that she liked to read Great Books and listen to classical music while taking off her clothes on-stage-inspired a musical, memoirs, a portrait by Max Ernst, and a species of rose. Gypsy is the first book about Gypsy Rose Lee's life, fame, and place in America not written by a family member, and it reveals her deep impact on the social and cultural transformations taking shape during her life. Rachel Shteir, author of the prize-winning Striptease, gives us Gypsy's story from her arrival in New York in 1931 to her sojourns in Hollywood, her friendships and rivalries with writers and artists, the Sondheim musical, family memoirs that retold her history in divergent ways, and a television biopic currently in the making. With verve, audacity, and native guile, Gypsy Rose Lee moved striptease from the margins of American life to Broadway, Hollywood, and Main Street. Gypsy tells how she did it, and why.

When Groucho Marx and Charlie Chaplin were born, variety entertainment had been going for decades in America, and like Harry Houdini, Milton Berle, Mae West, and countless others, these performers got their start on the vaudeville stage. From 1881 to 1932, vaudeville was at the heart of show business in the States. Its stars were America's first stars in the modern sense, and it utterly dominated American popular culture. Writer and modern-day vaudevillian Trav S.D. chronicles vaudeville's far-reaching impact in "No Applause - Just Throw Money". He explores the many ways in which vaudeville's story is the story of show business in America and documents the rich history and cultural legacy of our country's only purely indigenous theatrical form, including its influence on everything from USO shows to "Ed Sullivan" to "The Muppet Show" and "The Gong Show". More than a quaint historical curiosity, vaudeville is thriving today and Trav S.D. peels back the curtain on the vibrant subculture that exists across the United States - a vast grassroots network of fire-eaters, human blockheads, burlesque performers, and bad comics intent on taking Vaudeville into the its second century.

The period between the Second World War and the mid-1960s saw the American music industry engaged in a fundamental transformation in how music was produced and experienced. Tim Anderson analyzes three sites of this music revolution: the change from a business centered around live performances to one based on selling records, the custom of simultaneously bringing out multiple versions of the same song, and the arrival of in-home high-fidelity stereo systems.
"Making Easy Listening" presents a social and cultural history of the contentious, diverse, and experimental culture of musical production and enjoyment that aims to understand how recording technologies fit into and influence musicians', as well as listeners', lives. With attention to the details of what it means to play a particular record in a distinct cultural context, Anderson connects neglected genres of the musical canon--classical and easy listening music, Broadway musicals, and sound effects records--with the development of sound aesthetics and technical music practices that leave an indelible imprint on individuals. Tracing the countless impacts that this period of innovation exacted on the mass media, Anderson reveals how an examination of this historical era--and recorded music as an object--furthers a deeper understanding of the present-day American music industry.
Tim J. Anderson is assistant professor of communication at Denison University.

Music and performance provide a unique window into the ways that cultural information is circulated and perceptions are constructed. Because they both require listening, are inherently ephemeral, and most often involve collaboration between disparate groups, they inform cultural perceptions differently from literary or visual art forms, which tend to be more tangible and stable. In Yellowface, Krystyn R. Moon explores the contributions of writers, performers, producers, and consumers in order to demonstrate how popular music and performance has played an important role in constructing Chinese and Chinese American stereotypes. The book brings to life the rich musical period of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. During this time, Chinese and Chinese American musicians and performers appeared in a variety of venues, including museums, community theaters, and world's fairs, where they displayed their cultural heritage and contested anti-Chinese attitudes. A smaller number crossed over into vaudeville and performed non-Chinese materials. Moon shows how these performers carefully navigated between racist attitudes and their own artistic desires. While many scholars have studied both African American music and blackface minstrelsy, little attention has been given to Chinese and Chinese American music. This book provides a rare look at the way that immigrants actively participated in the creation, circulation, and, at times, subversion of Chinese stereotypes through their musical and performance work.

This captivating book presents a uniquely comprehensive cultural history of cabaret, where the most radical of artists, poets, writers, musicians, and theater directors have gathered since 1881. Lisa Appignanesi takes us to the original cabaret--the smoke-filled rooms of the Chat Noir in Paris that served as a meeting place for the avant-garde and a laboratory of subversion against the establishment. She then follows the journey of the cabaret across Europe and to the United States, tracing each development in cabaret history to the present day.
This much revised and updated edition of Appignanesi's classic work is enriched with materials that have become more accessible in the post-Soviet era. It also features a variety of new illustrations from both East and West. The book provides a lively look at all aspects of cabaret, where art and entertainment join to mock and provoke, and where radical artistic, literary, and political ideas have found expression for more than 120 years.

The late-Victorian discovery of the music hall by English intellectuals marks a crucial moment in the history of popular culture. Music Hall and Modernity demonstrates how such pioneering cultural critics as Arthur Symons and Elizabeth Robins Pennell used the music hall to secure and promote their professional identity as guardians of taste and national welfare. These social arbiters were, at the same time, devotees of the spontaneous culture of \u201cthe people.\u201d In examining fiction from Walter Besant, Hall Caine, and Henry Nevinson, performance criticism from William Archer and Max Beerbohm, and late-Victorian controversies over philanthropy and moral reform, scholar Barry Faulk argues that discourse on music-hall entertainment helped consolidate the identity and tastes of an emergent professional class. Critics and writers legitimized and cleaned up the music hall, at the same time allowing issues of class, respect, and empowerment to be negotiated. Music Hall and Modernity offers a complex view of the new middle-class, middle-brow, mass culture of late-Victorian London and contributes to a body of scholarship on nineteenth-century urbanism. The book will also interest scholars concerned with the emergence of a professional managerial class and the genealogy of cultural studies.

Lawrence J. Quirk delves into every personal and professional aspect of Bob Hope's long, complex and dramatic life; rising by sheer dint of will to great wealth and fame. Why did Hope become so identified with sponsoring the Vietnam War? What's the real scoop on his relationship with Bing Crosby? How far astray did Hope's frankly oversexed nature lead him from the marriage he successfully maintained with Dolores for over sixty years? Quirk writes about Hope based on long experience. He knew and interviewed Bob Hope while serving as an army seargeant during the Korean war and later as entertainment editor, and interviewer of top stars for over forty years. Quirk approaches his subject with original observations born of years of studying this most celebrated, yet in some ways most mysterious of entertainment giants.

In this comprehensive study of women in vaudeville, Alison Kibler reveals how female performers, patrons and workers shaped the rise and fall of the most popular live entertainment at the turn of the century. She focuses on the role of gender in struggles over whether high or low culture would reign in vaudeville, examining women's performances and careers in vaudeville, their status in the expanding vaudeville audience, and their activity in the vaudevillians' labour union. Alison Kibler demonstrates that respectable women were key to vaudeville's success, as entrepreneurs drew women into audiences that had previously been dominated by working-class men and recruited female artists as performers. But, although theatre managers publicly celebrated the cultural uplift of vaudeville and its popularity among women, in reality their houses were often hostile both to female performers and to female patrons and home to women who challenged conventional understandings of respectable behaviour. Once a sign of vaudeville's refinement, Kibler says, women became associated with the decay of vaudeville and were implicated in broader attacks on mass culture as well.

On the night of Sunday, April 23, 1961 Judy Garland made history. That's no hyperbole. Surrounded by a throng of ecstatic fans (3,165 to be exact), the legendary performer delivered a concert in Carnegie Hall the live recording of which became, upon release, an unlikely pop cultural phenomenon. Judy at Carnegie Hall, the two-disc set that captured all 25 numbers she performed that night, went on to spend more than 70 weeks on the Billboard charts, win four Grammy Awards--including Album of the Year (making it the first live music album and the first album by a female performer to win the category)--and become, in the process, the fastest-selling two-disc set in history. What the recording highlights, and what's made it an enduring classic in a class of its own, is the palpable connection between the songstress and her fans. "Indeed," The New York Times reported in its review of the evening's proceedings, "what actually was to have been a concert--and was--also turned into something not too remote from a revival meeting." By looking at her song choices, her stage banter, the album's cultural impact, and her place in the gay pantheon, this book argues that Judy's palpable connection with her fans is precisely what her Capitol Records' two-disc album captured.

Open from 1942 until 1945, the Hollywood Canteen was the most famous of the patriotic home-front nightclubs where civilian hostesses jitterbugged with enlisted men of the Allied Nations. Since the opening night, when the crowds were so thick that Bette Davis had to enter through the bathroom window to give her welcome speech, the storied dance floor where movie stars danced with soldiers has been the subject of much U.S. nostalgia about the "Greatest Generation." Drawing from oral histories with civilian volunteers and military guests who danced at the wartime nightclub, Sherrie Tucker explores how jitterbugging swing culture has come to represent the war in U.S. national memory. Yet her interviewees' varied experiences and recollections belie the possibility of any singular historical narrative. Some recall racism, sexism, and inequality on the nightclub's dance floor and in Los Angeles neighborhoods, dynamics at odds with the U.S. democratic, egalitarian ideals associated with the Hollywood Canteen and the "Good War" in popular culture narratives. For Tucker, swing dancing's torque--bodies sharing weight, velocity, and turning power without guaranteed outcomes--is an apt metaphor for the jostling narratives, different perspectives, unsteady memories, and quotidian acts that comprise social history.

An engaging history of Ghana s enormously popular concert party theatre.

..". succeeds in conveying the exciting and fascinating character of the concert party genre, as well as showing clearly how this material can be used to rethink a number of contemporary theoretical themes and issues." Karin Barber

Under colonial rule, the first concert party practitioners brought their comic variety shows to audiences throughout what was then the British Gold Coast colony. As social and political circumstances shifted through the colonial period and early years of Ghanaian independence, concert party actors demonstrated a remarkable responsiveness to changing social roles and volatile political situations as they continued to stage this extremely popular form of entertainment. Drawing on her participation as an actress in concert party performances, oral histories of performers, and archival research, Catherine M. Cole traces the history and development of Ghana s concert party tradition. She shows how concert parties combined an eclectic array of cultural influences, adapting characters and songs from American movies, popular British ballads, and local story-telling traditions into a spirited blend of comedy and social commentary. Actors in blackface, inspired by Al Jolson, and female impersonators dramatized the aspirations, experiences, and frustrations of their audiences. Cole s extensive and lively look into Ghana s concert party provides a unique perspective on the complex experience of British colonial domination, the postcolonial quest for national identity, and the dynamic processes of cultural appropriation and social change. This book will be essential reading for scholars and students of African performance, theatre, and popular culture.

Catherine M. Cole is Assistant Professor in the Department of Dramatic Art at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She has published numerous articles on African theatre and has collaborated with filmmaker Kwame Braun on "passing girl; riverside," a video essay on the ethical dilemmas of visual anthropology.

June 2001
256 pages, 26 b&w photos, 3 maps, 6 1/8 x 9 1/4, notes, bibl., index
cloth 0-253-33845-X $49.95 L / 38.00
paper 0-253-21436-X $19.95 s / 15.50"

Glasgow has always been known for its live music, and at the heart of any music community it is the live venues and buildings that are important, and play host to local and touring acts. One of the main reasons for Glasgow's continued blossoming as a cultural capital is the infrastructure of clubs and buildings available for live performances. This book in glorious colour throughout tells the history of the city's music through Glasgow's famous landmark buildings by people best placed to tell those stories - music writers and journalists and historians. This book is a collection of memories and stories about the buildings that hosted stars such as Michael Jackson, Joan Armatrading, Joy Division, among many thousands more - ranging from the Apollo to the Pavilion, Piping Centre, Sub Club and King Tut's.

The late-Victorian discovery of the music hall by English intellectuals marks a crucial moment in the history of popular culture. Music Hall and Modernity demonstrates how such pioneering cultural critics as Arthur Symons and Elizabeth Robins Pennell used the music hall to secure and promote their professional identity as guardians of taste and national welfare. These social arbiters were, at the same time, devotees of the spontaneous culture of \u201cthe people.\u201d In examining fiction from Walter Besant, Hall Caine, and Henry Nevinson, performance criticism from William Archer and Max Beerbohm, and late-Victorian controversies over philanthropy and moral reform, scholar Barry Faulk argues that discourse on music-hall entertainment helped consolidate the identity and tastes of an emergent professional class. Critics and writers legitimized and cleaned up the music hall, at the same time allowing issues of class, respect, and empowerment to be negotiated. Music Hall and Modernity offers a complex view of the new middle-class, middle-brow, mass culture of late-Victorian London and contributes to a body of scholarship on nineteenth-century urbanism. The book will also interest scholars concerned with the emergence of a professional managerial class and the genealogy of cultural studies.

The commercial explosion of ragtime in the early twentieth century created previously unimagined opportunities for black performers. However, every prospect was mitigated by systemic racism. The biggest hits of the ragtime era weren't Scott Joplin's stately piano rags. "Coon songs," with their ugly name, defined ragtime for the masses, and played a transitional role in the commercial ascendancy of blues and jazz.In "Ragged but Right," now in paperback, Lynn Abbott and Doug Seroff investigate black musical comedy productions, sideshow bands, and itinerant tented minstrel shows. Ragtime history is crowned by the "big shows," the stunning musical comedy successes of Williams and Walker, Bob Cole, and Ernest Hogan. Under the big tent of Tolliver's Smart Set, Ma Rainey, Clara Smith, and others were converted from "coon shouters" to "blues singers."Throughout the ragtime era and into the era of blues and jazz, circuses and Wild West shows exploited the popular demand for black music and culture, yet segregated and subordinated black performers to the sideshow tent. Not to be confused with their nineteenth-century white predecessors, black, tented minstrel shows such as the Rabbit's Foot and "Silas Green from New Orleans" provided blues and jazz-heavy vernacular entertainment that black southern audiences identified with and took pride in.

Traces the history of the European cabaret, discusses the types of entertainment that developed in cabarets, and explains their connection with avant-garde movements.

(Limelight). "This is a riotous story which is reasonably mad and as accurate as a Marx brother can make it. Despite only a year and a half of schooling, Harpo, or perhaps his collaborator, is the best writer of the Marx Brother. Highly recommended." Library Journal "A funny, affectionate and unpretentious autobiography done with a sharply professional assist from Rowland Barber." New York Times Book Review