Babylon Girls: Black Women Performers and the Shaping of the Modern (review)

The idea of Black women's bodies in motion on stage in the early twentieth century may conjure a host of images: the minstrel performer, the chorus line girl, the cabaret singer, and the one-woman showmanship of Josephine Baker, Florence Mills, and Ada Overton Walker. A relationship between these Black women's bodies, economic capital, as well as the transatlantic circulation of culture that enabled these performative images to come to fruition, is the subject of Jayna Brown's Babylon Girls: Black Women Performers and the Shaping of the Modern. Black female performance in the United States, the Pacific, and Europe constitute Brown's "Babylon girls," that is, the audacious well-known and nameless Black women of the stage. These women, she argues, used dance as a "creative response to shared and individual experiences of dislocation and relocation," while at the same time negotiating geographical spaces for which they might begin to "call home." (16) The book's arguments engage with the experience of exile for these women and the contradictory aesthetic of luxury, sensuality, vice, and corruption that marked 20th century variety shows. More than a cultural history and finely-formulated theoretical analysis of the well-known names of Black female performance, Brown demonstrates how lesser-known performers, such as Belle Davis, Stella Wiley, and Valaida Snow employed a complex mixture of racial mimicry, Black expressive culture, and Black dance vocabularies to communicate a gendered and diasporic representation of Blackness. As this groundbreaking book illustrates, Black women performers are not exceptions to or peripheral to the story of citizenship and nation making in these multiple geographic sites; they are central to the story of 20th century performance and to understanding the underlying grammars of spectacle.

Brown begins with a discussion of children in "picaninny choruses." For audiences, the young bodies in picanniny choruses were nostalgic reminders of folk consciousness and they were objects used to fulfill colonialist cravings for racialized performance. This dual mixture of bodies for entertainment, and bodies as a restorative narrative, not only referred to picanniny choruses, but also referred to the performances of the top billing Black women such as Bell Davis and Ida Forsyne. The latter serves as Brown's example of how Black female performers exercised conscious performance strategies even within the seemingly limiting genre of minstrelsy. Brown acknowledges and historicizes the opinions of critics, especially the Black intelligentsia, who viewed Forsyne's Topsy performance as "the quintessential symbol of black artistic denigration and humiliation." (76) Critics notwithstanding, Brown argues that Forsyne's "breathtaking act references historical memory" (61) and her "performance of the contortions of time" (89) allowed her to "transform herself in the trappings of colonial wealth," thereby "reclaiming her body." (91)

Babylon Girls departs from (although it returns to) the "take me back" plantation performances to analyze the burlesque inspired and urban-themed performances of Dora Dean, Bell Davis, and Stella Wiley, and the chorus girls in Black revues such as Shuffle Along. Additional shows such as Oriental America, The Octoroons, and The Creole Show reveal how Orientalist fantasies of Asian Pacific Islander women were made possible by way of light-skinned, Black women's bodies. Audiences viewed colored chorus girls in a multiplicity of ways: as hopeful figures of migration, and as symbols of sexual depravity because of their light skin color, seemingly rootless, and un-married status. The book's discussion of cross racial performance bears additional intellectual fruit, by pointing out how Black female performers such as Stella Wiley's rendition of Irish Liz Leary, and the blackface performance of the white female vaudevillian May Irwin's "Louisiana Lize," represent racial crossing with commonalities and differences. Wiley's Irish song and dance girl and Irwin's tragic mulatta both addressed female autonomy, but "Black women's acts also acknowledged the irony of Black women's exclusion from national belonging, having been so recently literally belongings" (121).

The last chapter may seem to cover familiar ground with its discussion...