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.

Cultural history of African American women's popular performance between 1890 and 1945

About the Author

Jayna Brown is Assistant Professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Riverside.

Reviews
"Babylon Girls is a brilliant book. Consistently pushing multiple fields in new directions, Jayna Brown reveals the centrality of black female performance culture in the making of transatlantic modernity. Her incredibly valuable book demonstrates how African Americans moved in resilient and unpredictable ways-both geographically and performatively-during the early twentieth century."-Daphne A. Brooks, author of Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Performances of Race and Freedom, 1850-1910
"The most exciting piece of scholarship that I've read in ages, Babylon Girls succeeds as an extremely ambitious, meticulously researched, brilliantly theorized cultural history. It is a landmark contribution to jazz studies, dance and performance studies, black women's history, studies of minstrelsy, and theories of cross-cultural exchange."-Sherrie Tucker, author of Swing Shift: "All-Girl" Bands of the 1940s
"[A]n original, exciting, and ambitious study of black women performers in the early decades of the twentieth century. . . . In a book filled with fascinating and valuable insights and information, the discussion of white female minstrelsy is one of the most interesting and original. . . . Artists such as the women about whom Brown writes deserve to have their lives and work studied and attended to-as Brown does, providing brilliant analysis of and insight into the meanings embedded in them." -- Farah Jasmine Griffin * Women's Review of Books *
"This is a fascinating subject. Jayna Brown's study of well-known, little-known, and unknown African American female performers-from minstrels to 'coon cantatrices,' from dancers to jazz trumpeters-in the first half of the twentieth century offers us ways to understand the multilayered significance of their appearance and forms of expression on stages in the United States and Europe." -- Maureen E. Montgomery * Journal of American History *



Book Information
ISBN 9780822341574
Author Jayna Brown
Format Paperback
Page Count 360
Imprint Duke University Press
Publisher Duke University Press
Weight(grams) 522g