Babylon Girls: Black Women Performers and the Shaping of the Modern (review)

Reviewed by: Babylon Girls: Black Women Performers and the Shaping of the Modern Lori Harrison-Kahan Jayna Brown . Babylon Girls: Black Women Performers and the Shaping of the Modern. Durham: Duke University Press, 2008. Pp. xi + 339, illustrated. $23.95 (Pb). From Langston Hughes's poem "Jazzonia," in which "a dancing girl whose eyes are bold/ lifts high a dress of silken gold" (lines 5–6) to the light-skinned chorines who "wiggle and twist" (44) their way through Sterling Brown's "Cabaret (1927, Black & Tan Chicago)," black female performers have been culturally fraught figures in the modern African American male imagination. Describing the swaying "perfect, half-clothed body" of a "Harlem Dancer" in his sonnet of that name, Claude McKay concludes, The wine-flushed, bold-eyed boys, and even the girls,Devoured her shape with eager, passionate gaze;But looking at her falsely-smiling face,I knew her self was not in that strange place. (11–14) In Babylon Girls: Black Women Performers and the Shaping of the Modern, Jayna Brown moves us well beyond that eroticizing gaze. Promising access to the "self" beneath the "falsely-smiling face," Brown's study divines the stories of the real-life women who were at once celebrated as primitivist icons of black vernacular culture and derided as anti-modern symbols of Babylonian decay. Brown carefully reads bodies and performances in order to construct a cultural history of black women on the variety stage. Spanning the period from the 1890s through World War II, Babylon Girls extends the inquiries begun by Daphne Brooks in Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Performances of Race and Freedom, 1850–1910 (Duke University Press, 2006). Joining other recent books such as Karen Sotiropoulos's Staging Race: Black Performers in Turn of the Century America (Harvard University Press, 2006) and Louis Chude-Sokei's The Last "Darky": Bert Williams, Black-on-Black Minstrelsy, and the African Diaspora (Duke University Press, 2006), Brown's scholarship makes an important contribution to the burgeoning field of African American performance studies. Taken together, these studies uncover a rich and varied tradition of black performance that intersects with and runs counter to the well-studied traditions of white blackface minstrelsy and the vaudeville [End Page 490] circuit. Babylon Girls is further notable for providing a long-awaited feminist critique of the male biases dominating scholarship on minstrelsy produced by Eric Lott, W.T. Lhamon, and David Roediger. While Babylon Girls sheds new light on familiar figures such as Josephine Baker, its greatest value lies in the introduction it offers to a number of lesser-known and equally fascinating women, from dancer Ida Forsyne to the still-nameless chorus girls who appeared in black burlesque shows and musical revues. Chapter one, for example, examines the phenomenon of black child performers, known as "picaninny choruses," who accompanied black and white lead singers on tours of Britain and continental Europe in the early twentieth century. Brown convincingly reads the "picaninny" as a figure of imperial subjugation, standing in for the "childlike races" and serving to remind audiences of their obligations to their colonial subjects (55). One of the strengths of Babylon Girls is its transnational span, and the first chapter deftly explores the relationship between onstage movement and the transatlantic and intercontinental travels of performers. Reading dance in conjunction with travelogues and fiction, Brown herself moves back and forth, adeptly, between theatrical performance and literature. Her interdisciplinary range is especially evident in chapter two, which examines the iconography of Topsy. With the growing popularity of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, Topsy emerged as one of the most popular female blackface roles for black or white women. Focusing on Ida Forsyne, who was famed for her Topsy dances, Brown demonstrates how black women mobilized Stowe's plantation stereotype, transforming her into "a symbol for black female unruliness" (58). In the chapters that follow, Brown takes us from black burlesque shows (chapter three) to the cakewalk craze (chapter four) and from the Darktown Follies (chapter five) to Harlem cabarets and Jazz Age Broadway (chapter six) in order to explore how black female bodies and dance forms became foundational to urban mass entertainment. She presents a compelling analysis...

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