Stolen Time: Black Fad Performance and the Calypso Craze by Shane Vogel, and: Race and Performance after Repetition ed. by Soyica Diggs Colbert, Douglas A. Jones, Jr., and Shane Vogel (review)

Early in the first chapter of Shane Vogel's remarkable, counterintuitive book on the calypso "craze" in the late 1950s US, he crisply lays out the work of performance studies as a philosophy of Black aesthetics and Black life, asking "how the ontology of black fad performance—the existential condition of racialized performance when a performer knows she is performing her own obsolescence—both constrained and unlocked possibilities for black performers" (33). Vogel shows his interdisciplinary hand as Stolen Time traverses historical, performance, media, sexuality, American, ethnic, critical theory, diaspora, and Black studies. The book is striking in its redeployments of the middlebrow, the mass cultural commodity, and the inauthentic as vehicles for Black performative self-making and for understanding race itself differently. Stolen Time argues that Black performance is a distinct way of knowing the world and elucidates this in its analysis of US Black and US-based Afro-Caribbean performers and their "affirmative, performative repossession of fad time and its conditions of skepticism in order to realize a different understanding, value, truth, and world" (52).

In every chapter, Stolen Time bears out this provocative and ambitious call to the "savvy" production of diasporic blackness within a cultural fad that has been largely dismissed as co-optation and commodification. From its opening salvo considering superstar Harry Belafonte's disavowals of the genre that thread beautifully throughout the book's text, Stolen Time moves to the economy of the fad itself, digging deep into how fad commodity fetishism operates to reconsider Black fad as modern cycles of racialization and racial reckoning—endless loops that performers like Josephine Premice rupture, exploit, and steal back in their work. In an extended reading of Premice's reperformance of a classic calypso song that is characteristic of each chapter—be it of a standout filmic performance of Maya Angelou, the singular Broadway turn of Lena Horne, an underappreciated album and television special by Duke Ellington ("A Drum is a Woman"), or of modern dance performances of Geoffrey Holder—Vogel parses the combined effect of vocal, gestural, and mediated performance to argue for counterreadings of "savvy virtuosity" where there seems only to be analytical room for "voyeuristic violation" (57). Rather than assuming it is smarter than either the performances or the period it covers, Stolen Time locates Black performative challenges to more readily accessed modes of reading race for and through injury, antagonism, and recognizable resistance.

Stolen Time also pushes against methodological boundaries of its overlapping fields, doing so most prominently in its insistence on not privileging live performance over mediated or captured performances (e.g., cinematic, televisual, recorded, etc.). In chapter two on calypso fad films that meta-stage the fad within their scripts, for instance, Vogel argues that "[t]he performer in collaboration with the apparatus turns the technology against itself and slows the smooth functioning of the ethnographic program" (74). Stolen Time here "bring[s] our attention to the apparatuses that make the performance legible—the screen, projection, lighting, and film itself—" (92) to show how even on its very surface, Black performance cannot fully be captured by technologies of racialization.

In chapter three, Vogel reads calypso performance through histories of "jazz diplomacy" and televisual blackness of the Cold War era by marking Ellington's US Steel-sponsored TV spectacle "A Drum is a Woman" as less an embarrassing corporate co-optation of the calypso fad and more of an insistence on and homage to global Black identity. In the special, jazz is figured as an embodied Black woman who circumnavigates the Black world to pick up aesthetic and sonic inspiration that places "jazz in a diasporic rather than a national history, especially through dance" (109). Reading against the grain...