Black Celebrity: Contemporary Representations of Postbellum Athletes and Artists

by Emily Ruth Rutter

Overview

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.     

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781644532447
Publisher:	University of Delaware Press
Publication date:	11/22/2021
Series:	Performing Celebrity
Pages:	256
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.70(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Emily Ruth Rutter is an Associate Professor of English at Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana. She is the author of Invisible Ball of Dreams: Literary Representations of Baseball behind the Color Line and The Blues Muse: Race, Gender, and Musical Celebrity in American Poetry, as well as co-editor of Revisiting the Elegy in the Black Lives Matter Era. 

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments vii

Introduction: Portraits of Black Fame, or, The Past as Blueprint for the Present 1

1 "My Black Body Thrown Free": The Legacy of Jack Johnson in Kevin Young's To Repel Ghosts: The Remix from the Original Masters 29

2 "More of a Man than You": The Many Faces of Jack Johnson in Adrian Matejka's The Big Smoke 58

3 "The Sting of Race and Sport": Revivifying Isaac Burns Murphy in Frank X Walker's Isaac Murphy: I Dedicate This Ride 86

4 "The Overwhelming Evidence of His Artistry": Wiping Away the Minstrel Mask in Caryl Phillips's Dancing in the Dark 112

5 "Blind Tom, Musical Prodigy of the Age": Unrecoverability in Jeffery Renard Allen's Song of the Shank 139

6 "Let This Belting Be Our Unbinding": Reconceptualizing Black Entertainment in Tyehimba Jess's Olio 166

Notes 197

Bibliography 225

Index 241