Moving Performances: Divas, Iconicity, and Remembering the Modern StageFabulous yet fierce, imperious yet impetuous, boss yet bitchy—divas are figures of paradox. Their place in culture is equally contradictory, as they are simultaneously venerated and marginalized, hailed as timeless but then frequently forgotten or exhumed as cult icons by future generations. Focusing on four early twentieth-century divas—Aida Overton Walker, Loïe Fuller, Libby Holman, and Josephine Baker—who were icons in their own time, Moving Performances considers what their past and current reception reveals about changing ideas of race and gender. Jeanne Scheper examines how iconicity can actually work to the diva’s detriment, reducing her to a fetish object, a grotesque, or a figure of nostalgia. Yet she also locates more productive modes of reception that reach to revive the diva’s moving performances, imbuing her with an affective afterlife. As it offers innovative theorizations of performance, reception, and affect, Moving Performances also introduces readers to four remarkable women who worked as both cultural producers and critics, deftly subverting the tropes of exoticism, orientalism, and primitivism commonly used to dismiss women of color. Rejecting iconic depictions of these divas as frozen in a past moment, Scheper vividly demonstrates how their performances continue to inspire ongoing movements. |
Contents
Introduction Divas Iconicity Remembering | 1 |
Chapter 1 The Color Line Is Always Moving Aida Overton Walker | 22 |
Chapter 2 Transnational Technologies of Orientalism Loïe Fullers Invented Repertoires | 61 |
Chapter 3 Voices within the Voice Aural Passing and Libby Holmans DeracinatedReracinated Sound | 93 |
Chapter 4 Much Too Busy to Die Josephine Bakers Diva Iconicity | 127 |
Conclusion Diva Remains | 158 |
Notes | 173 |
191 | |
201 | |
About the Author | 211 |
Other editions - View all
Moving Performances: Divas, Iconicity, and Remembering the Modern Stage Jeanne Scheper Limited preview - 2016 |
Moving Performances: Divas, Iconicity, and Remembering the Modern Stage Jeanne Scheper No preview available - 2016 |
Moving Performances: Divas, Iconicity, and Remembering the Modern Stage Jeanne Scheper No preview available - 2016 |
Common terms and phrases
aesthetic African American afterlives Aida Overton Walker archive argues artists Bandanna Land Bert Williams black female black performers black women blackface blues cakewalk career Chicago Defender choreographer circuits colonial color line contemporary craze critical critique dancer disidentification diva iconicity diva’s effects embodied Ethel Waters famous fantasies feminist femme fatale figure film forms gender genre Harlem House for Josephine identity imagined imitation innovator Japanese Josephine Baker Josh White Kawakami legacy LHCF Libby Holman Loïe Fuller Loos’s Madame Satã mances minstrelsy mobility modern modernist movement Moving Performances narrative Negro numbers onstage orientalist persistence play political postcard practices primitivism Princess Tam Tam produced queer race racial racist reception repertoire retroactivation revue role Sadayakko Salomania Salome Salome dance Santos scandal sexual singing social sound space spectacle star technologies theater theatrical tion torch singer torch song transnational tropes troupe vaudeville Venus voice white audiences Williams woman