A Beautiful Pageant: African American Theatre, Drama, and Performance in the Harlem Renaissance, 1910-1927 (review)

The second installment in his chronological study of African American theatre and performance history, David Krasner's A Beautiful Pageant explores ten significant and representative moments in the African American theatre, dance, and performance culture between the years 1910 and 1927. These moments include the Jack Johnson-Jim Jeffries boxing match in 1910, the dance style of Aida Overton Walker and Ethel Waters, W.E.B. Dubois's short-lived production of The Star of Ethiopia, an analysis of Angelina Grimke's Rachel and Zora Neale Hurston's Color Struck, a discussion of the Washington D.C.-based society of Georgia Douglass Johnson and Willis Richardson, Marcus Garvey's street parades in Harlem, Charles Gilpin's performances of Brutus Jones in The Emperor Jones, the development of the Little Theatre Movement, and a revisionist reading of Eubie Blake's Shuffle Along. The author's decision to dwell on the specific allows him to create an in-depth investigation of select moments of African American performance culture that is rigorously researched, intelligently written, and highly insightful.

Krasner bases his analyses on archival work performed at all of the major and several of the lesser known archives of African American culture; he offers close readings of rare and difficult-to-access primary materials; and he contributes to the ongoing discussion of black modernity, primitivism, and the "New Negro." Along the way, he makes several important contributions to African American theatre and performance scholarship. He reads sports, specifically the Johnson-Jeffries match, as performance and chronicles the manner in which racial stereotypes were both reflected in and refuted by the boxing style of the fighters within the ring. He later introduces the Baltimore-Washington corridor as the region that, in 1920, had "the largest concentration of black people in the United States" and the place where many of the leading figures of the Harlem Renaissance either lived or frequently visited (134). The author notes that this corridor influenced the writings of Georgia Douglass Johnson, Willis Richardson, Alain Locke, Jean Toomer, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hur-ston, and James Weldon Johnson, among others. Elsewhere, Krasner contends that Charles Gilpin's "social awareness" prompted the actor to replace the word "nigger" with a series of "less offensive terms [such as] 'black baby,' 'Negro,' or 'colored man'" in many of his 1,500 performances of The Emperor Jones (190).

The strength of A Beautiful Pageant rests in Krasner's acknowledgement of the varying, and often contradictory, aspects of African American performance culture. He embraces these differences and uses them to develop the guiding theme of the book: paradox. In the introductory chapter, he writes, "Competing influences within African American performance took on the aura of paradox. By paradox I mean a set of goals or ideals that, when enacted concurrently, are contradictory" (3). In showcasing these "competing influences," he introduces and discusses the achievements of African Americans whose politics radically differed. Within the book, as they existed within the period, prominent individuals such as Jack Johnson, Zora Neale Hurston, W.E.B. Dubois, Marcus Garvey, and Alain Locke appear alongside one another. The result of this inter-mixture is a seam-filled text that appears to refute the very things it itself says. For example, in one chapter, Krasner discusses how black musicals repeated the stereotypical images of minstrelsy and how black drama was needed to rehabilitate those images. In another, he looks at the musical Shuffle Along and spotlights "the progressive elements that countered some of the minstrel traditions" (248). In shifting his argument from chapter to chapter, Krasner creates a deliberately jarring text that often leaves its reader off balance. The unease that the book generates repeatedly reminds the reader that African American performance culture is neither singular nor seamless. It is multiple, variable, and inconsistent.

The theme of...