"Babylon Girls" is a groundbreaking cultural history of the African
American women who performed in variety shows--chorus lines,
burlesque revues, cabaret acts, and the like--between 1890 and
1945. Through a consideration of the gestures, costuming, vocal
techniques, and stagecraft developed by African American singers
and dancers, Jayna Brown explains how these women shaped the
movement and style of an emerging urban popular culture. In an era
of U.S. and British imperialism, these women challenged and played
with constructions of race, gender, and the body as they moved
across stages and geographic space. They pioneered dance movements
including the cakewalk, the shimmy, and the Charleston--black
dances by which the "New Woman" defined herself. These
early-twentieth-century performers brought these dances with them
as they toured across the United States and around the world,
becoming cosmopolitan subjects more widely traveled than many of
their audiences.
Investigating both well-known performers such as Ada Overton
Walker and Josephine Baker and lesser-known artists such as Belle
Davis and Valaida Snow, Brown weaves the histories of specific
singers and dancers together with incisive theoretical insights.
She describes the strange phenomenon of blackface performances by
women, both black and white, and she considers how black expressive
artists navigated racial segregation. Fronting the "picaninny
choruses" of African American child performers who toured Britain
and the Continent in the early 1900s, and singing and dancing in
"The Creole Show" (1890), "Darktown Follies "(1913), and "Shuffle
Along" (1921), black women variety-show performers of the early
twentieth century paved the way for later generations of African
American performers. Brown shows not only how these artists
influenced transnational ideas of the modern woman but also how
their artistry was an essential element in the development of
jazz.
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