African American Theatre and The S Street Salon
This article is adapted from a presentation given at the London Arts and Humanities Partnership postgraduate conference, 21st January 2022 During the Harlem Renaissance period, 1461 S Street, Washington D.C., the home of Georgia Douglas Johnson (1877-1966), represented an important hub of creativity and community for African American women writers. ‘Saturday nighters’ at the S Street Salon, as they came to be known, inspired and informed landmark literary works of the period. The salon established what scholar Treva B. Lindsey describes as ‘an African American women-centred counterpublic,’ also highlighting the under-acknowledged role that Black women in Washington D.C. played in energizing and shaping the Harlem Renaissance period as a whole.[i] While celebrated male writers of the early twentieth century such as W.E.B Du Bois and Countee Cullen certainly participated, these sessions represented a critical space where African American women playwrights such as Marita Bonner, Mary Burrill, and of course the host, Georgia Douglas […]
Continue ReadingThe People v. Ossian Sweet
In the first decades of the twentieth century, no northern city drew more southern migrants than Detroit, ‘City of Tomorrow’.[i] As one Free Press reporter noted in 1917, ‘Detroit’s unexampled prosperity is the lodestone that is attracting thousands of Negroes’.[ii] Between 1910 and 1920, Detroit’s Black population increased almost eightfold, and then threefold again between 1920 and 1930.[iii] Over the same two decades, however, the geographical area into which these migrants were herded, ‘a densely populated, sixty-square-block section of the city’s Lower East Side’ called Black Bottom, did not grow at all.[iv] Those who lived in this segregated slum were crowded into dilapidated housing, and they suffered the ill-health that such conditions typically produce. According to the same Free Press reporter, residences in Black Bottom were ‘unspeakably vile’.[v] While the wages new migrants earned at Ford and other factories were relatively high, few had the means to challenge the deepening […]
Continue ReadingBlack Girl Magic, Community and Celebration in Contemporary American Culture
This article is adapted from the keynote presentation given at BAAS Postgraduate Symposium, 4th December 2021. The ‘Black Girl Magic’ movement is an opportunity both to celebrate what is means to be a Black woman and also challenge the oppressional practices and contemporary issues that affect them and their community. In her 2016 speech at Essence Festival, American filmmaker Ava DuVernay stated that “Black Girl Magic is a rallying call of recognition” and suggested that “embedded in the everyday is a magnificence that is so easy to miss because we’re so mired in the struggle and what society says we are”.[i] Black Girl Magic has created the opportunity to celebrate the heritage and achievements of Black women that are often ignored or rendered invisible within wider Western society. The movement first began on social media in 2013 when Twitter user CaShawn Thompson tweeted that “black girls are magic”. […]
Continue ReadingBroadway, Hollywood, and the Problem with The Prom
Among all the necessary and welcome debates around identity in contemporary culture, few have been more pronounced in theatre and film than that of who should be cast to play characters of marginalised identities. From gender identity and religious beliefs to nationality and disability, this issue is occurring with increasing regularity. Eddie Redmayne has called his portrayal of Lili Elbe, who underwent sex reassignment surgery in the early 20th century, in The Danish Girl (2015) “a mistake”[i], which reflects a wider trend of studios and casting directors rightly taking more care when selecting actors for certain roles. It should be said, though, that this is not an entirely new phenomenon – over 40 years ago Vanessa Redgrave, an outspoken critic of Israel’s actions in Palestine, was attacked when chosen to portray musician and Holocaust survivor Fania Fénelon in Arthur Miller’s television film Playing for Time (1980)[ii]. And while this centred […]
Continue ReadingMending Fences: The Broken Bond between Theatre and Film
Play to film adaptations have fallen in prestige and numbers in recent years, and one of the main reasons for this is the decline in popularity of plays that can be adapted. For example, A Streetcar Named Desire was the 5th highest grossing film of 1951[i] while Fences was the 91st highest grossing film of 2016[ii]. As film technology has improved in the intervening years, so has the public interest in stage works that are not comedies or musicals declined. From a culture of regular and successful stage to screen adaptations to one in which it is vanishingly rare, this article will reflect on how and why these changes have come about. One notable facet of this decline is the relative scarcity of actors moving from the stage to film. Whereas in previous decades actors struggling to find work in film could earn equal prestige on stage, it is now […]
Continue Reading“Where is Thy Sting?”: Clifford Odets and the Problem of Audience
On September 6th 1936, The New York Times went to print with an article entitled: “Odets, Where is Thy Sting?”[i] Reflecting on the recent reception of Clifford Odets’s The General Died at Dawn (1936), Frank Nugent described the enthusiasm of the audiences who had come to see the Broadway playwright’s first Hollywood feature: “[T]hey had come to hear their prophet of social reform in his first sermon from a cinema pulpit. They were prepared to cheer, they were anxious to cheer, and, by every soapbox from Union Square to Columbus Circle they did cheer”.[ii] But they soon fell silent, however, upon realising that the film offered them very little to cheer about. While many hsad come with the hopes of catching a glimpse of the sharp political edge which had made Odets’s plays something of a sensation, it quickly became apparent that the film offered very little in the way […]
Continue ReadingDrama and Cinematic Adaptation: USSO Special Series
The adaptation of plays into films has been a core part of Hollywood’s output in the 95 years since the introduction of sound into cinema. In this time a huge number of the cinema’s finest and best-regarded works have begun life on the stage, Broadway or otherwise. Despite this close relationship, though, the movement of works from the stage to the screen has rarely been straightforward, and is often tinged with controversy, disappointment, and inequality. This special series has sought to examine any and all facets of this relationship, and given that we have had almost two years with minimal attendance at cinema and theatres, it will hopefully illuminate the historic, current, and possibly future challenges faced by theatre artists. Playwrights have made vast contributions to American culture, but it is often only when these works are filmed, from Glengarry Glen Ross (1992) to Grease (1971) that they attain […]
Continue ReadingWilla’s Maternal Ethics of Care in Gloria Naylor’s Linden Hills
This article is adapted from a presentation given at BAAS Postgraduate Symposium, 4th December 2021. Among the many subplots in Gloria Naylor’s 1985 novel Linden Hills is the story of Willa, who finds herself imprisoned in the basement of her house with her son because her husband, Luther Needed, is convinced the child is not his. After the child dies and she prepares his body for a funeral, she unearths the forgotten stories of the previous Mrs. Neededs. Portraying Willa’s mourning practice, based upon a responsiveness to the needs of others and an understanding of autonomy as a capacity to reshape and cultivate new modes of relations, or what I term her ‘maternal ethics of care,’ Naylor’s novel not only humanizes black lives. [i] It also rewrites our ‘genre-specific’ (i.e., Western bourgeoise) narrative of the human as a bio-economic subject, providing a way to unthink the ontological constraints that […]
Continue ReadingGatekeeping Country: An Ethnographic Study of Female Country Music Performers in the 21st Century
This article is adapted from a presentation given at BAAS Postgraduate Symposium, 4th December 2021. In December 2021, I was delighted to have the opportunity to present a paper on my ongoing PhD research at the BAAS Postgraduate Symposium. Sitting at an intersection of ethnomusicology, American studies, and the sociology of music, my PhD is the first ethnomusicological study of female country performers in the 21st century. It examines how gender, or the perception of gender, has shifted in the genre, and how it has been influenced by socio-economic and technological advancements since 2000. In this short article, I will provide an overview of my approach and of the historical background and contemporary developments which have led me to embark on this important study. Gender roles in country music are long established, with ‘a rigid male/female binary’.[i] Gendered double standards are common, with male managers ignoring ‘indiscretions’ by their […]
Continue ReadingTowards an intersectional theory of news selection in US-based broadcast journalism
This article is adapted from a presentation given at BAAS Postgraduate Symposium, 4th December 2021. This paper argues that by re-thinking ideas of how journalists decide what is and is not news through an intersectional lens, scholars will be better placed to evaluate journalism’s ability to accurately represent the communities it covers and serves, using US-based broadcast journalism as an example. Recent research indicates that American television newsrooms have grown more diverse in over the last three decades in respect to both race and gender identity, but broadcast journalism still faces growing criticism from anti-racist campaigners who argue that it typically fails to accurately represent and serve people of colour. Viewing journalism through an intersectional lens may then also allow us to evaluate and demonstrate the actual value of diversity initiatives, and begin to determine best practice for decolonising our newsrooms. News Values News selection is often described using a […]
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