The Scene of Harlem Cabaret: Race, Sexuality, Performance, and: The Amalgamation Waltz: Race, Performance, and the Ruses of Memory (review)

Performance studies finds itself in unlikely yet productive places in Shane Vogel's The Scene of Harlem Cabaret: Race, Sexuality, Performance and Tavia Nyong'o's The Amalgamation Waltz: Race, Performance, and the Ruses of Memory. Both books participate in an ongoing trans-Atlantic turn in black performance studies exemplified in books such as Daphne A. Brooks's Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Performances of Race and Freedom, 1850-1910 (2006), an important consideration of 19th century trans-Atlantic black performance, and Jayna Brown's Babylon Girls: Black Women Performers and the Shaping of the Modern (2008), a significant examination of modern black dance history's international dynamic. Exploring the ways performances reshape locations and offer modes of social, class, and racial stratification, Vogel's book leverages the term "cabaret" to evoke both particular places, "from the bohemian streets of Paris to the jook joints of the Deep South before finally settling in Harlem," and a specific tradition, the "Cabaret School" of artists and writers associated with the Harlem Renaissance: "a queer literary tradition that is deeply embedded within performance practices and culture" (43, 6). Through the flexibility of the term "cabaret," Vogel's book asserts the political power of a bastardized space. Working similarly along the edge between the material and the symbolic, Nyong'o's book refashions Michel Foucault's motif of the fold. As Nyong'o explains, "This fold, as reduplication, is both an operation of discourse and a historical event" (18). The fold is used to designate both discursive and social practices. Adapting Foucault's term for black diasporic purposes, Nyong'o's book explores "the circum-Atlantic fold" which "names the period and the problematic that appears between the potential and the performance of emancipation" (18). Without naming a particular location, The Amalgamation Waltz uses the spatial resonance of the term "circum-Atlantic" to comment on historiography and the ripples in the circum-Atlantic fold's unfolding. Similarly, Vogel examines the cabaret as a place and as a source of imaginative possibility.

The Scene of Harlem Cabaret is divided into three parts. The first part—the book's introduction—lays the theoretical ground for the study, which draws from queer theory, performance studies, and literary analysis. The second part (chapters one and two) considers the cabaret as a trans-Atlantic space with a thwarted political history for black artists in the US who saw it as a source of inspiration, even as they had to contend with proponents of "racial uplift" ideology who derided the after-hours establishments as bastions of moral deviance. The third section (chapters three, four, five, and the afterword) offers case studies of artists associated with the Cabaret School, including Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, and Lena Horne. Moving deftly between the physical spaces of the social clubs and the artistic innovation they inspired, Vogel argues that "the theatrical form of cabaret—including its modes of address, architecture and spatial practices, manipulation of sightlines, and choreographic rearrangements—is productive of public intimacy and intimate formations that provide the affective framework for the Cabaret School's critique of normative uplift and possibilities for queer-of-color world making" (33). The Scene of the Harlem Cabaret considers how the social intimacy found in the cabarets and nightclubs of Harlem—and in their representation in literature—fostered a mode of political collectivity that resisted the normative mandates of early 20th-century racial uplift protocols.

After tracing the genealogy of the cabaret from 1880 through 1940 and demonstrating the formal innovations—such as "its mode of address, architecture and spatial practices, manipulation of sightlines, and choreographic rearrangements"—that the space of the social clubs inspired, Vogel intervenes in the ongoing debates surrounding Langston Hughes's sexuality...