1920s
20th century
A01=Shane Vogel
african
Age Group_Uncategorized
Age Group_Uncategorized
america
american
appropriation
audio
Author_Shane Vogel
automatic-update
black
broadway
Calypso
caribbean
Category1=Non-Fiction
Category=AVG
Category=AVL
cinema
COP=United States
cultural
culture
dance
Delivery_Delivery within 10-20 working days
duke ellington
eq_art-fashion-photography
eq_bestseller
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_music
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
era
fad
film
genre
Harry Belafonte
imperialist
instrumental
jim crow
Language_English
lp
mass
movies
music
musical
musician
PA=Available
performance
performer
popular
Price_€50 to €100
PS=Active
race
racism
softlaunch
theatre
theft
time period
trend
trendy
trinidad
trinidadian
United States
usa
Product details
- ISBN 9780226568300
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 22 Aug 2018
- Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
- Language: English
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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.
