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Full-Text Articles in African American Studies
Shaking The Closet: Analyzing Johnny Mathis’S Sexual Elusiveness, 1956-1982, Vincent L. Stephens
Shaking The Closet: Analyzing Johnny Mathis’S Sexual Elusiveness, 1956-1982, Vincent L. Stephens
Vincent L Stephens
Though pop crooner Johnny Mathis inadvertently revealed his homosexuality in a 1982 “off-the-record” interview his sexuality had long been an open secret prior to this disclosure. “Shaking the Closet” argues that the notion of “the closet” is insufficient for understanding Mathis’s career and those of many other seemingly “closeted” queer public figures. The presentation suggests that the non-threatening sexual image Mathis presented in the 1950s was an overt commercial strategy intended to appease white audiences and adhere to an imperative for public respectability, an enduring theme within African-American cultural politics. Despite these seeming compromises close critical attention to his musical …
Embodying Black Experience: Stillness, Critical Memory, And The Black Body, Harvey Young
Embodying Black Experience: Stillness, Critical Memory, And The Black Body, Harvey Young
Harvey Young
In 1901, George Ward, a lynching victim, was attacked, murdered, and dismembered by a mob of white men, women, and children. As his lifeless body burned in a fire, enterprising white youth cut off his toes and, later, his fingers and sold them as souvenirs. In "Embodying Black Experience," Harvey Young masterfully blends biography, archival history, performance theory, and phenomenology to relay the experiences of black men and women who, like Ward, were profoundly affected by the spectacular intrusion of racial violence within their lives. Looking back over the past two hundred years---from the exhibition of boxer Tom Molineaux and …