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The Last Darky: Bert Williams, Black-On-Black Minstrelsy, and the African Diaspora

The Last Darky: Bert Williams, Black-On-Black Minstrelsy, and the African Diaspora

Hardcover

Series: John Hope Franklin Center Book

Black American StudiesGeneral SociologyTheater History

Currently unavailable to order

ISBN10: 0822336057
ISBN13: 9780822336051
Publisher: Duke University Press
Published: Jan 16 2006
Pages: 288
Weight: 1.25
Height: 0.90 Width: 5.80 Depth: 9.40
Language: English
The Last Darky establishes Bert Williams, the comedian of the late nineteenth century and early twentieth, as central to the development of a global black modernism centered in Harlem's Renaissance. Before integrating Broadway in 1910 via a controversial stint with the Ziegfeld Follies, Williams was already an international icon. Yet his name has faded into near obscurity, his extraordinary accomplishments forgotten largely because he performed in blackface. Louis Chude-Sokei contends that Williams's blackface was not a display of internalized racism nor a submission to the expectations of the moment. It was an appropriation and exploration of the contradictory and potentially liberating power of racial stereotypes.

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Black American Studies