Stealing the Show: African American Performers and Audiences in 1930s Hollywood by Miriam J. Petty (review)

Miriam J. Petty’s impressive book examines the complex social positions and legacies of a constellation of African American stars during Hollywood’s Golden Age. With fine writing and significant archival research, Petty explores how African American actors pressed the boundaries of their limited stardom, in performances that challenged the stereotyped and marginalized roles assigned to them. The main body of the book is divided into four chapters devoted to the cases of Hattie McDaniel, Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, Louise Beavers and Fredi Washington, and Lincoln “Stepin Fetchit” Perry. Recognizing the ways these ambivalent performances risked reinforcing stereotypes, the book nevertheless explores the transformative potential of marginalized black actors as they influenced contemporary viewers and an ensuing generation. It traces the often controversial impact of these performers on the movie-going public, focusing especially on receptions by black audiences.

The book’s title, Stealing the Show, comes to represent different receptions and responses to these African American stars. On the one hand, performers might use marginal and stereotyped roles—such as Hattie McDaniel’s Mammy in Gone With the Wind (1939)—to outshine their costars, drawing attention to their characters and to their skill as actors. On the other hand, the very term “stealing the show,” used so frequently to describe these performances, reifies notions of white ownership and black theft. In a wonderful introductory gambit, Petty connects the idea of “stealing the show” to an often-repeated story from the nineteenth century about an enslaved African American caught stealing a pig from his master for sustenance. The enslaved man justifies the theft because the master has not technically lost anything but has merely enriched one form of property at the expense of another. As Petty notes, numerous writers, from Frederick Douglass to the historian Lawrence Levine, have retold this burlesque joke. When Toni Morrison draws on the anecdote in Beloved (1998), she uses an archaic but historically accurate term for the pig, calling it a “shoat” (4). This phrase, “stealing the shoat,” then becomes a “shadow figuration for the potentially affirming notion of stealing the show” (172). While black performers may sustain themselves and gain strength through the act, this subversion is haunted by the restrictions of a white marketplace. Petty’s study offers compelling readings of such African American performances in 1930s Hollywood.

The chapters themselves combine analyses of particular scenes, of the contextual dynamics of fandom and studio production, and of the discourse of performance and reception as evidenced in popular reviews and interviews. For instance, the first chapter considers McDaniel’s Academy Award-winning work in Gone with the Wind, arguing that the actor’s performance, especially in the so-called staircase scene, functions as a “dynamic, medium-specific mammy monument” (29). The language of monuments and landmarks suffuses the chapter, and not simply because McDaniel was the first African American to be recognized with an Oscar. Petty shows how, in the wake of the Civil War, white southern women in groups such as the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) sought to memorialize the Confederacy using the figure of the mammy, a cipher that helped them reimagine the slave plantation as a familial community. Indeed, the UDC led a twenty-year campaign to construct monuments of the mammy figure in every state and in the nation’s capital. While these efforts were not successful, the campaign points to the significant power of Hattie McDaniel’s role as Mammy and helps to account for its popularity among southern white viewers. The chapter goes on, however, to consider McDaniel’s attempts to complicate this reception in public appearances and interviews, naming her influences as Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, and Charity Still. Petty connects McDaniel’s language in these instances to that of African American clubwomen in groups such as the National Association of Colored Women (NACW). The competing visions of the UDC and...