BAR Book Forum: Shane Vogel’s “Stolen Time”

Roberto Sirvent, BAR Book Forum Editor

10 Apr 2019

The 1950s calypso craze provided black performers with new occasions to intervene in the public sphere as well as new creative and financial opportunities.

“Calypso craze performers appropriated the fleeting time of the fad to alter some of the conditions of black labor in entertainment and artfully perform counternarratives of black history and diaspora.”

In this series, we ask acclaimed authors to answer five questions about their book. This week’s featured author is Shane Vogel. Vogel is the Ruth N. Halls Associate Professor of English at Indiana University, Bloomington. His book is Stolen Time: Black Fad Performance and the Calypso Craze.

Roberto Sirvent: How can your book help BAR readers understand the current political and social climate?

Shane Vogel:In Stolen Time, I tell the history of the calypso craze, a fleeting moment inthe late 1950s when middle-class US consumers made calypso music the top selling genre in the nation. While white calypso acts were unsurprisingly complicit in a kind of imperialist theft of Trinidadian music and dance, I argue that black calypso craze performers enacted a different kind of theft: They appropriated not Caribbean culture itself, but the US fad for it.In doing so they surfaced deep histories of African American and Afro-Caribbean cultural change and exchange. As we have seen in fad cycles of mass culture, performers took advantage of the media-at-hand to facilitate black creativity and advance a diasporic tradition in the face of damaging cultural representations and their own imminent obsolescence. Among other things, I hope that this history can enable us to think creatively about how performance can be utilized in the dizzying temporality of a fad cascade, an accelerated and exhausting news cycle, or the relentlessness of social media. And I also hope that it can remind us of the varied and unexpected ways that the arts have been incubators for solidarity, organization, and resistance.

What do you hope activists and community organizers will take away from reading your book?

I have much more to learn from the work of activists and community organizers than they do from reading my book, but I do hope to contribute to the ongoing history of political mobilization and activist strategies in and through the arts, even—perhaps especially—in the compromised forms of popular culture. While all of the performers I look at in Stolen Time had to negotiate the constraints of mass media, they also turned those conditions into limited but significant opportunities to alter representational and material histories of blackness during the quickening of the civil rights movement. The professional and social networks that developed behind the scenes and in backstage relations of the calypso craze were as important as the recordings and nightclub acts that most audiences consumed. Actor and activist Ossie Davis, for example, described the political function of seemingly inane commercial theater as a crucial space of contact and organization: “At the end of a performance every night,” he recalled, “somebody would say ‘let’s go over to so-and-so’s, they’re raising funds to defend William McGee,’ or somebody had been lynched in the south, or some atrocity had happened.” Lena Horne used her position in a calypso musical to compel the integration of stage labor, threatening not to open the show unless the defiant stagehands’ union hired black workers; her success included the employment of Broadway’s first black stage manager, Charles Blackwell. Duke Ellington, Billy Strayhorn, and Carmen de Lavallade, to take another example, used a live primetime broadcast on CBS to musically and choreographically insist upon the transnational, diasporic element of jazz at a time when it was being promoted as a homegrown American phenomenon.These calypso craze performers appropriated the fleeting time of the fad to alter some of the conditions of black labor in entertainment and artfully perform counternarratives of black history and diaspora.

We know readers will learn a lot from your book, but what do you hope readers willun-learn? In other words, is there a particular ideology you’re hoping to dismantle?

The calypso craze is one instance of a recurrent cycle of race and mass culture in the Jim Crow era that I describe as “black fad performance.” Like other such fads in which black performance was marketed for middle-class white consumption—the ragtime craze of the 1890s and the “Negro vogue” of the 1920s are two well-known examples—the 1950s calypso craze provided black performers with new occasions to intervene in the public sphere as well as new creative and financial opportunities. Black studies has shown us the crucial aesthetic innovations and freedom dreams of the black radical tradition, especially in its underground and subversive materializations. The calypso craze reminds us that the “upperground,” too, can be an unexpected location of experiments in race and nation (or even just that this spatial metaphor itself is misleading, even if it is often effective). Fad culture and the middlebrow, while seemingly treating black culture as disposable and ephemeral material for consumption, have provided occasions for performers to expand black cultural forms despite the culture industry’s fetishization and exploitation of their labor.

Who are the intellectual heroes that inspire your work?

The biggest intellectual heroes that inspired this book are the performers I write about—Josephine Premice, Maya Angelou, Lovey Gilman, Beryl McBurnie, Lena Horne, Ossie Davis, Harry Belafonte, Lord Invader, Duke of Iron, Macbeth the Great, Duke Ellington, Billy Strayhorn—who theorized blackness and diaspora in the idiom of performance. In a scholarly sense, this work was propelled by Édouard Glissant on the Caribbean as a space of errantry and Relation; Saidiya Hartman on “innocent amusements” as technologies of subjection; Stuart Hall on black popular culture and diaspora; José Esteban Muñoz on minoritarian performers’ endless capacity for creativity in a majoritarian public sphere; Daphne Brooks on black women performers’ philosophical innovations and everyday resilience; and Fred Moten on the fugitive sociality of black music.

Two figures in particular were touchstones as I worked on Stolen Time. I spent time with the modernist dancer Carmen de Lavallade, who generously shared her experiences of this mid-century moment of black artistic innovation within and against dominant forms of media. Her moral commitment to the arts and her political righteousness continually calibrated my scholarly and ethical compass. My understanding of black performers in mass culture begins with theorist Hortense Spillers’s description of the black female performer in the United States: she embodies a“dance of motives, in which the motor behavior, the changes of countenance, the vocal dynamics, the calibration of a gesture and nuance in relationship to a formal object—the song itself —is a precise demonstration of the subject turning in fully conscious knowledge of her own resources toward her object. In this instance of being-for-self, it does not matter that the vocalist is ‘entertaining’ under American skies because the woman, in her particular and vivid thereness, is an unalterable and discrete moment of self-knowledge.” This understanding of performance, gender, and blackness offers a method with which to approach and value black fad performance.

In what way does your book help us imagine new worlds?

The calypso craze invited new ways to hear and see cultural work that is often dismissed as shallow, manufactured, inauthentic, unsophisticated, kitschy, corporate, trivial, or unpolitical. A deeper understanding of this cultural phenomenon might help us attune ourselves to the liberatory and radical performances embedded within the mire of mass culture. Such performances not only activate our aesthetic mode and open worlds of new beauty and knowledge but also (as Spillers suggests) offer crucial material for the kinds of self-knowledge and psychic survival that can counter the toxic worlds currently faced and provide blueprints for the future.

Roberto Sirventis Professor of Political and Social Ethics at Hope International University in Fullerton, CA. He also serves as the Outreach and Mentoring Coordinator for the Political Theology Network. He is co-author, with fellow BAR contributor Danny Haiphong, of the book, American Exceptionalism and American Innocence: A People’s History of Fake News—From the Revolutionary War to the War on Terror.

COMMENTS?

Please join the conversation on Black Agenda Report's Facebook page at http://facebook.com/blackagendareport

Or, you can comment by emailing us at [email protected]

COMMENTS?

Please join the conversation on Black Agenda Report's Facebook page at http://facebook.com/blackagendareport

Or, you can comment by emailing us at [email protected]

Black American Culture

Do you need and appreciate Black Agenda Report articles. Please click on the DONATE icon, and help us out, if you can.