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Black Celebrity examines representations of postbellum black athletes and artist-entertainers by novelists Caryl Phillips and Jeffery Renard Allen and poets Kevin Young, Frank X Walker, Adrian Matejka, and Tyehimba Jess. Inhabiting the perspectives of boxer Jack Johnson and musicians "Blind Tom" Wiggins and Sissieretta Jones, along with several others, these writers retrain readers' attention away from athletes' and entertainers' overdetermined bodies and toward their complex inner lives. Phillips, Allen, Young, Walker, Matejka, and Jess especially plumb the emotional archive of desire, anxiety, pain, and defiance engendered by the racial hypervisibility and depersonalization that has long characterized black stardom. In the process, these novelists and poets and, in turn, the present book revise understandings of black celebrity history while evincing the through lines between the postbellum era and our own time.
Black Celebrity examines representations of postbellum black athletes and artist-entertainers by novelists Caryl Phillips and Jeffery Renard Allen and poets Kevin Young, Frank X Walker, Adrian Matejka, and Tyehimba Jess. Inhabiting the perspectives of boxer Jack Johnson and musicians "Blind Tom" Wiggins and Sissieretta Jones, along with several others, these writers retrain readers' attention away from athletes' and entertainers' overdetermined bodies and toward their complex inner lives. Phillips, Allen, Young, Walker, Matejka, and Jess especially plumb the emotional archive of desire, anxiety, pain, and defiance engendered by the racial hypervisibility and depersonalization that has long characterized black stardom. In the process, these novelists and poets and, in turn, the present book revise understandings of black celebrity history while evincing the through lines between the postbellum era and our own time.
Introduction: Portraits of Black Fame, or The Past as Blueprint for
the Present
Chapter 1: “my black body / thrown free”: The Legacy of Jack
Johnson in Kevin Young’s To Repel Ghosts: The Remix from the
Original Masters
Chapter 2: “More of a man than you”: The Many Faces of Jack Johnson
in Adrian Matejka’s The Big Smoke
Chapter 3: “The Sting of Race and Sport”: Revivifying Isaac Burns
Murphy in Frank X Walker’s Isaac Murphy: I Dedicate This Ride
Chapter 4: “the overwhelming evidence of his artistry”: Wiping Away
the Minstrel Mask in Caryl Phillips’s Dancing in the Dark
Chapter 5: “Blind Tom, Musical Prodigy of the Age”:
Unrecoverability in Jeffery Renard Allen’s Song of the Shank
Chapter 6: “Let this belting be our / unbinding”: Reconceptualizing
Black Entertainment in Tyehimba Jess’s Olio
Bibliography
Endnotes
Index
EMILY RUTH RUTTER is an associate professor of English at Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana. She is the author of Invisible Ball of Dreams: Literary Representations of Baseball behind the Color Line and The Blues Muse: Race, Gender, and Musical Celebrity in American Poetry, as well as co-editor of Revisiting the Elegy in the Black Lives Matter Era.
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