The Scene of Harlem Cabaret: Race, Sexuality, Performance
"Evocative, elegant, and engrossing are words that characterize this lively study that resurrects the lush, smoke-filled atmosphere of Harlem cabarets. Reading the contested space of the cabaret as material to compose and perform alternative narratives of race and sex, this study makes visceral the queer intimacies of cabaret's everynight life and analyzes the lives of performers from Lena Horne, Bricktop, and Ethel Waters, poetic works by Claude McKay and Langston Hughes, and embodied movements of audiences. Scholars in performance studies, history, literary modernism, and queer theory have much to learn from this excellent book." --Jennifer DeVere Brody, Duke University"In The Scene of Harlem Cabaret, Shane Vogel combines performance studies and literary studies with deftness, acuity, and prescience, looking boldly to the future of the field. His illuminating thesis about the generative experiences produced by these jook-joint, honky-tonk, sin-cellar, concert-saloon night spots--small enough for 'public intimacy,' large enough for social 'breathing space' and 'wiggle room'--reimagines the works of the 'Cabaret School' in a new light, proving not that life is a cabaret, but that cabaret was a life for some the greatest American artists of the twentieth century--vital, risky, and transformative." --Joseph Roach, Yale University"At the turn of the last century, W. E. B. Du Bois took up what he called 'the problem of amusement' with prescience as well as reticence. That problem is now taken up again by Shane Vogel with the kind of rigorous critical imagination that would disturb and, finally, gratify Du Bois, forcing him literally and figuratively to attend (to) scenes he might otherwise strenuously have avoided. Vogel illuminates and amplifies in too many ways to count the singular cultural politics of the scene of Harlem cabaret. Happily, he gives us occasion once again to consider how the terrible ruses and potential reconstruction of democracy in America are marked, on the one hand, and initialized, on the other, in our ludic underground." --Fred Moten, Duke University