Stolen Time

Black Fad Performance and the Calypso Craze

Shane Vogel

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780226568447, 9780226568300
• eBook ISBN: 9780226568584
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

In 1956 Harry Belafonte's Calypso became the first LP to sell more than a million copies. For a few fleeting months, calypso music was the top-selling genre in the US—it even threatened to supplant rock and roll. Stolen Time provides a vivid cultural history of this moment and outlines a new framework—black fad performance—for understanding race, performance, and mass culture in the twentieth century United States. Vogel situates the calypso craze within a cycle of cultural appropriation, including the ragtime craze of 1890s and the Negro vogue of the 1920s, that encapsulates the culture of the Jim Crow era. He follows the fad as it moves defiantly away from any attempt at authenticity and shamelessly embraces calypso kitsch. Although white calypso performers were indeed complicit in a kind of imperialist theft of Trinidadian music and dance, Vogel argues, black calypso craze performers enacted a different, and subtly subversive, kind of theft. They appropriated not Caribbean culture itself, but the US version of it—and in so doing, they mocked American notions of racial authenticity. From musical recordings, nightclub acts, and television broadcasts to Broadway musicals, film, and modern dance, he shows how performers seized the ephemeral opportunities of the fad to comment on black cultural history and even question the meaning of race itself.

Index

Page numbers in italics indicate illustrations.

Abrahams, Roger, 127

Abyssinia (Williams and Walker musical), 139–41

Adam (Holder), 172

Africa: mock transnationalism and, 35, 139–41, 153, 233n19; Negro vogue and, 139; self-determination movement, 39

Africana (Heywood), 140, 233n19

Afro-Asian Bandung Conference (1955), 21

Afro-Caribbean diaspora: alienation effects, 153–54, 187–88; calypso craze’s relationship to, 7–8, 178–79, 208; in England, 8, 28–30; in Paris, 38; portrayed in Ellington’s A Drum Is a Woman, 103–7, 116–31; in the United States, 39

Ahye, Molly, 178, 236n9

Aida (Verdi), 163, 167, 170–71, 173, 194

Ailey, Alvin, 122, 142, 159

“All Coons Look Alike to Me” (Hogan), 34, 36, 37, 44

Alleyne-Dettmers, Patricia, 173

Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre, 159

Ameche, Don, 110

American Society of African Culture Writers’ Conference (1959), 21

Amsterdam, Morey, 10

Anderson, Marion, 114

Andrews Sisters, 9, 10, 13, 62, 148

Angelou, Maya, 19, 22, 41, 111, 205; autobiography of, 98–100, 161; cinematic appearance in Calypso Heat Wave, 72, 82, 88, 89, 90–91, 91–101, 94, 95, 202; in Holder’s Caribbean Calypso Festival, 201, 202; nightclub performances of, 98–99; spotlight in film and, 89, 90–91, 91, 94–95, 95; spotlight in theater and, 98–100

Apollo Theater (New York), 39

appropriation and borrowing, 9–11, 58–59, 61, 84, 144–45, 185, 208–9

Arbus, Allan, 174–75, 175

Arbus, Diane, 174–75, 175

Arlen, Harold, 132, 141, 144–45

Atilla the Hun, 62, 240n90

Atkinson, Brooks, 152–53

“Atomic Energy Calypso” (Sir Lancelot), 150

“Atomic Nightmare” (Talbot Brothers), 150

Austin, J. L., 5–6, 213n9, 226n47

Bailey, Ozzie, 104, 122, 130

Bailey, Pearl, 142

...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• introduction / This and That, or, Swiped Calypsos
• one / Stolen Time: The Ontology of Black Fad Performance
• two / The Calypso Program: Technology, Performance, Cinema
• three / Carnivalizing Jazz: Duke Ellington’s Calypso Theater and the Diasporic Instant
• four / Surfacing the Caribbean: Black Broadway and Mock Transnational Performance
• five / Working against the Music: Geoffrey Holder’s Elsewhen
• conclusion / Don’t Stop the Carnival
• Notes
• Index