The Scene of Harlem Cabaret: Race, Sexuality, Performance (review)

In this bracing and keenly observed book, Shane Vogel examines Harlem Renaissance cabarets in order to illuminate gay and lesbian history. He uses the cabaret’s sexual openness as a prism by which to view his theoretical template: the “Cabaret School.” The cabaret school, Vogel contends, is an alternative history to the generally perceived idea of the Harlem Renaissance as “Racial Uplift.” Both the cabaret and the racial uplift schools of thought sought to reshape the narrative of black identity, cutting against the grain of minstrelsy by highlighting new perceptions of blackness in popular consciousness. However, according to Vogel, gay and lesbian activists used the cabaret “to critique the racial and sexual normativity of uplift ideology and to imagine alternative narratives of sexual and racial selfhood” (3). To queer the Harlem Renaissance, Vogel stresses the cabaret as a social and literary scene “where lines of sexual and racial identifications might be frustrated or undone and new social and psychic alignments made possible; spaces and practices that exceed and expand identity, rather than contract it” (22).

During the Harlem Renaissance black homosexuals faced enormous obstacles, not the least of which were legal sanctions and social labeling beyond racism. Living required imaginative means of self-expression, and one key outlet was the cabaret. “Cabaret” surfaced in the early twentieth century as an overarching rubric for afterhour clubs, jook joints, and other illegal oases flourishing below the radar. Afterhours clubs, then as now, yield a sexually egalitarian environment. Vogel looks to the history of this scene not in order to document who was there and how often performers succeeded, but rather, as he puts it, “to outline a provisional understanding of cabaret performance that can address the conventions of intimacy that have shaped its historical experience, [and] to deepen our understanding of the role that performance and public intimacy plays in black and queer cultural histories” (41). Each chapter has a specific focus: the cabaret’s rise in popularity; the cabaret writings of Nella Larson’s Quicksand (1928), Zora Neale Hurston’s “How It Feels to Be Colored Me” (1928), and Wallace Thurman’s The Blacker the Berry (1929); Langston Hughes’s subterranean, blues poetry; Claude McKay’s sociological writings; and Lena Horne’s restrained cabaret performances.

Chapter one surveys cabarets broadly, where the “word nightclub was itself a neologism that gained currency in the 1910s as a clever loophole used to circumvent in the statutory regulations on closing time,” and describes “not only those large nightclubs with elaborate revues but also the speakeasies, basement dives, and improvised cabarets that honeycombed Manhattan and provided small ensembles, the occasional singer, and space for social dancing” (56). Time and space take on new meaning in these illegal clubs (indicated by the very term “afterhours”), where darkness and defiance surround the spectator and performer in acts of transgression against the law and bourgeois respectability. The modality of performance in afterhours clubs brings the performer into intimate contact with the audience, making the shared space tight, contentious, and exotic. For Vogel, “It is this interplay of closeness and distance, acceptance and refusal, connection and disconnection, concentration and distraction that shapes the cabaret as an intimate formation, the perpetual disorganization and reorganization of sound, bodies, sightlines, and feelings as the performer competes with the audience itself for attention” (70). In chapter two, Vogel establishes several binaries that foreground the cabaret’s uniqueness. The book’s principal comparison is between the cabaret and the uplift school of literature and performance, while also taking into account segregated versus all-black cabarets. Each coexists in what Vogel calls a dialectical relationship, which provided Harlem Renaissance performers, writers, and artists with ways of negotiating racism. But Vogel quickly adds that when these categories become “fixed or cease functioning generically, they foreclose a nuanced understanding of the multiplicity of racial performances that shaped both of these spaces and obscure the dynamic that occurred within and between them” (89).

Chapters three and four analyze “how the...