"The Last "Darky"" establishes Bert Williams, the comedian of the
late nineteenth century and early twentieth, as central to the
development of a global black modernism centered in Harlem's
Renaissance. Before integrating Broadway in 1910 via a
controversial stint with the Ziegfeld Follies, Williams was already
an international icon. Yet his name has faded into near obscurity,
his extraordinary accomplishments forgotten largely because he
performed in blackface. Louis Chude-Sokei contends that Williams's
blackface was not a display of internalized racism nor a submission
to the expectations of the moment. It was an appropriation and
exploration of the contradictory and potentially liberating power
of racial stereotypes.
Chude-Sokei makes the crucial argument that Williams's
minstrelsy negotiated the place of black immigrants in the cultural
hotbed of New York City and was replicated throughout the African
diaspora, from the Caribbean to Africa itself. Williams was born in
the Bahamas. When performing the "darky," he was actually
masquerading as an African American. This black-on-black minstrelsy
thus challenged emergent racial constructions equating "black" with
African American and marginalizing the many diasporic blacks in New
York. It also dramatized the practice of passing for African
American common among non-American blacks in an African
American-dominated Harlem. Exploring the thought of figures such as
Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. Du Bois, Marcus Garvey, and Claude
McKay, Chude-Sokei situates black-on-black minstrelsy at the center
of burgeoning modernist discourses of assimilation, separatism,
race militancy, carnival, and internationalism. While these
discourses were engaged with the question of representing the
"Negro" in the context of white racism, through black-on-black
minstrelsy they were also deployed against the growing
international influence of African American culture and politics in
the twentieth century.
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