A Black Sherlock Holmes (1918): A Case Study in Racebending

Adaptation ◽  
2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ann McClellan
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Black People ◽  
Sherlock Holmes ◽  
Racial Change ◽  
Blackface Minstrelsy ◽  
Reconstruction Era ◽  
Dime Novel

Abstract With hundreds of Sherlock Holmes screen adaptations, the silent all-Black-cast A Black Sherlock Holmes (1918) remains an under-researched anomaly. The essay provides an overview of colourblind and colour conscious casting practices, ultimately advocating for adopting fan studies approaches to ‘racebending’. Racebending involves alternately ‘racing’ canonical characters from white to Black Minority Ethnic. After briefly reviewing representations of African Americans in blackface minstrelsy and early twentieth-century race films, the essay argues that A Black Sherlock Holmes highlights the ways in which race filmmakers were trying to reimagine new ways for African Americans to become part of dominant literary culture. In reimagining Sherlock Holmes as an African American, the film (re)inscribes Black people into prominent literary and cultural history. Because Knick Garter is doubly descended from two notable fictional detectives, America’s Nick Carter of dime novel fame as well as Britain’s legendary Sherlock Holmes, his very existence posits a new world where famous Black characters are as much a part of the American literary landscape as canonical characters from Hawthorne, Poe, and Twain. Viewing A Black Sherlock Holmes in light of the possibilities the film offers, rather than its limitations, allows viewers today to see the ways literary history, film, and race coalesced to highlight the possibilities of radical racial change in the post-Reconstruction era at the beginning of the twentieth century.

scholarly journals Survey Essay 1. Periodizing and Historicizing German Afro-Americanophilia: From Antebellum to Postwar (1850-1965)

2015 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Moritz Ege ◽  
Andrew Wright Hurley
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Black People ◽  
Time Frame ◽  
German Culture ◽  
Black Germans ◽  
Power Differentials ◽  
History Of ◽  
Post War

In this first essay, we delve into significant moments in the history (and pre-history) of twentieth century Afro-Americanophilia in Germany. We establish a periodisation stretching from the nineteenth century until the mid-1960s (from which point our second essay will continue), and take in the pre-colonial, the colonial, the Weimar, the Nazi; and the post-war eras.  We draw out some of the particularly significant moments, ruptures, and continuities within that time frame. We also identify some of the salient ways scholars have interpreted ‘Afro-Americanophilia’ during the period.  Focusing on a variety of practices of appropriation, communicative media, actors and forms of agency, power differentials, and sociocultural contexts, we discuss positive images of and affirmative approaches to black people in German culture and in its imaginaries. We attend to who was active in Afro-Americanophilia, in what ways, and what the effects of that agency were. Our main focus is on white German Afro-Americanophiles, but—without attempting to write a history of African Americans, black people in Germany, or Black Germans— we also inquire into the ways that the latter reacted to, suffered under the expectations levied upon them, or were able to engage with the demand for ‘black cultural traffic.’  

Collins, Janet (1917–2003)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yaël Lewin
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Full Time ◽  
Metropolitan Opera ◽  
Racial Tension ◽  
American Cultural History ◽  
Concert Dance ◽  
Dual Identities

Magical on stage, elusive off stage, Janet Collins was an enigmatic and complex presence in twentieth-century dance. As the first full-time African American ballerina at the Metropolitan Opera in 1951, she broke the color barrier and generated international headlines—no small feat in an era when racial tension and discrimination continued to prevail. This celebrated achievement placed her in the pantheon of pioneering African Americans and became the triumph for which she was most remembered. Yet Collins also succeeded as a unique concert dance soloist and choreographer, fusing disparate techniques and influences in her creations—an approach that was in keeping with modernist experimentations and set her apart from many of her dancing peers. As a result of these dual identities, she serves as a pivotal figure in the lineage of African American cultural history, and as one of the distinguished women of her generation who helped propel the evolution of American dance.

Hollywood Shuffle and Bamboozled

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Terrence T. Tucker
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Television Shows ◽  
Black Films ◽  
Blackface Minstrelsy ◽  
Art Forms ◽  
Mainstream Society ◽  
Black Actors

On the heels of the expansion of comic rage into art forms beyond literature and stand-up, this chapter examines the presence of comic rage in films directed by African Americans. After the Blaxploitation Era and the surge of black films and television shows in the 1990s, these films critiqued the problematic representations of blackness that have been imbedded in two of the most popular mediums of the second half of the twentieth century. While Hollywood Shuffle castigates the limited roles African Americans are given in film, Bamboozled exposes the virtual return to blackface minstrelsy that black actors are expected to accept in an allegedly more diverse TV landscape. Both works wrestle with questions of authenticity that are imposed by mainstream society or blindly adopted by African Americans responding with simplistic “real” yet destructive counter-representations.

“From Slave to Citizen”

2019 ◽  
pp. 71-94
Author(s):  
Martin Summers
Keyword(s):  
Mental Illness ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Black People ◽  
Black Families ◽  
New Era ◽  
Important Resource ◽  
Reconstruction Era ◽  
Medical Professions ◽  
Psychiatric Profession

This chapter covers Saint Elizabeths during the post-Reconstruction era and examines the medical professions’ changing ideas about black mental illness and black Washingtonians’ interactions with the hospital in a new era of limited citizenship. A postemancipation discourse emerged among physicians in the 1880s and 1890s that fundamentally differed from the antebellum medical consensus that insanity was rare among black people. Instead physicians began to attribute a perceived increase of black insanity to freedom itself. What the psychiatric profession—which now included individuals trained in neurology—could not agree upon was whether blacks’ new susceptibility to madness was a result of their cultural or biological underdevelopment. Despite this new consensus that associated black mental illness with freedom, this chapter argues that the increased admissions of African Americans to Saint Elizabeths in the 1890s was more the result of black families assertively using the federal institution as an important resource.

Black Politics but Not Black People: Rethinking the Social and “Racial” History of Early Minstrelsy

2013 ◽  
Vol 57 (2) ◽  
pp. 21-37 ◽  
Author(s):  
Douglas A. Jones
Keyword(s):  
African Americans ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Black People ◽  
Early Period ◽  
Black Politics ◽  
The Social ◽  
Blackface Minstrelsy ◽  
Racial History ◽  
History Of ◽  
New Race

Although American blackface minstrelsy in its early period (1829–1843) esteemed the anti-authoritarian potentiality of black alterity, the form's performers and most influential public (the white working class of the urban northeast) spurned actual black people. In minstrelsy they fashioned “blackness,” a new “race” with which to distinguish themselves from socioeconomic elites as well as African Americans.

A Modest Proposal

2016 ◽  
pp. 250-263
Author(s):  
Clarence Walker
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Black People ◽  
Economic Change ◽  
Coalition Building ◽  
Japanese Americans ◽  
Modest Proposal ◽  
History Of

This chapter calls for a revision of history and argues that one of the barriers to coalition building among subordinated groups results from a fragmentation of history. It locates part of this in something that might be described as black exceptionalism, stating that the history of black people during the 1865–1965 period of political, social, cultural, and economic change remains largely exceptional, treated as different from the history of Chinese, Mexican, and Japanese Americans during the last third of the nineteenth century and the first six decades of the twentieth century. The chapter asserts that to have a more complete and accurate idea of their own history, African Americans must study their connections to other racialized groups.

Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-4
Author(s):  
Darius J. Young
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Black People ◽  
Political Activity ◽  
The Political

This chapter outlines the book’s mission to serve as a lens into the political activity of African Americans during the first half of the twentieth century by focusing on the strategies that Robert R. Church Jr. used to organize and empower black people through the vote. The book argues that the activism of Church and his colleagues served as the catalyst for the modern civil rights movement. This chapter also seeks to answer the question how historians know so little about someone who accomplished so much.

scholarly journals Du Bois and Brazil

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-16
Author(s):  
Juliana Góes
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Black People ◽  
Historical Event ◽  
Du Bois ◽  
Racial Democracy ◽  
International Solidarity ◽  
Historical Relationship ◽  
Transnational Solidarity

Abstract In this article, I discuss Black transnational solidarity and liberation in the Americas by analyzing the historical relationship between W. E. B. Du Bois and Brazil from 1900 to 1940. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Du Bois was studying, writing, and publishing about Brazil. He was interested in creating international solidarity and cooperation among Black people. However, Du Bois (as well as other African Americans) promoted the idea that Brazil was a place without racism, a racial paradise. This idea served as a basis for a theory that oppressed Afro-Brazilians—the myth of racial democracy. In this article, I explore Du Bois’s relationship with Brazil, highlighting possible reasons why Du Bois engaged with the myth of racial democracy. In addition, I argue that this historical event teaches us that an Afro-diasporic liberation project must seriously consider global and material inequalities among Black people.

The Nostalgic Imagination

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stefan Collini
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Historical Change ◽  
Central Feature ◽  
English History ◽  
History Of ◽  
Raymond Williams

This unusual book explores the historical assumptions at work in the style of literary criticism that came to dominate English studies in the twentieth century. Stefan Collini shows how the work of critics renowned for their close attention to ‘the words on the page’ was in practice bound up with claims about the nature and direction of historical change, the interpretation of the national past, and the scholarship of earlier historians. Among the major figures examined in detail are T. S. Eliot, F. R. Leavis, William Empson, and Raymond Williams, while there are also original discussions of such figures as Basil Willey, L. C. Knights, Q. D. Leavis, and Richard Hoggart. In the period between Eliot’s The Sacred Wood and Williams’s The Long Revolution, the writings of such critics came to occupy the cultural space left by academic history’s retreat into specialized, archive-bound monographs. Their work challenged the assumptions of the Whig interpretation of English history and entailed a revision of the traditional relations between ‘literary history’ and ‘general history’. Combining close textual analysis with wide-ranging intellectual history, this book both revises the standard story of the history of literary criticism and illuminates a central feature of the cultural history of twentieth-century Britain.

Espionage and Exile

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Phyllis Lassner
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Political Engagement ◽  
The Political ◽  
International Crises ◽  
Popular Entertainment ◽  
John Le Carre ◽  
The Cold War

Espionage and Exile demonstrates that from the 1930s through the Cold War, British Writers Eric Ambler, Helen MacInnes, Ann Bridge, Pamela Frankau, John le Carré and filmmaker Leslie Howard combined propaganda and popular entertainment to call for resistance to political oppression. Instead of constituting context, the political engagement of these spy fictions bring the historical crises of Fascist and Communist domination to the forefront of twentieth century literary history. They deploy themes of deception and betrayal to warn audiences of the consequences of Nazi Germany's conquests and later, the fusion of Fascist and Communist oppression. Featuring protagonists who are stateless and threatened refugees, abandoned and betrayed secret agents, and politically engaged or entrapped amateurs, all in states of precarious exile, these fictions engage their historical subjects to complicate extant literary meanings of transnational, diaspora and performativity. Unsettling distinctions between villain and victim as well as exile and belonging dramatizes relationships between the ethics of espionage and responses to international crises. With politically charged suspense and narrative experiments, these writers also challenge distinctions between literary, middlebrow, and popular culture.

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