Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Hollywood Imagines Revolutionary Haiti: The Forgotten Film Lydia Bailey (1952), Judith E. Smith

American Studies Faculty Publication Series

This essay explores the history of Lydia Bailey, the only US studio-made film to depict the Haitian Revolutionary period. It asks why, in the late 1940s and early 1950s, such an unlikely project might have seemed commercially promising enough to justify a significant production budget. The essay draws on private studio memos as well as public press discussions to shed light on the high stakes in debates over racial representation and colonialism/decolonization in the late 1940s and early 1950s, and to illuminate everyday assumptions of white supremacy as these shaped the making of the film and its promotion. Production files …

Maroon Colonies And New Orleans Neutral Grounds: From A Protosuburban Past To A Postsuburban Future, Lynnell L. Thomas

American Studies Faculty Publication Series

This essay examines New Orleans maroon colonies as a precursor to the postsuburban constellations that shape the contemporary urban landscape. These communities served as the original neutral grounds where Africans, Afro-Creoles, and Native Americans created spaces beyond the purview of slave owners and government authorities. These protosuburban enclaves anticipated the vibrancy and prolificacy of the “global urban periphery” that Roger Keil describes in his research. They also inform twentieth- and twenty-first-century efforts by black New Orleanians to carve out their own urban neutral grounds: spaces resistant to the hegemonic forces of neoliberalism and neo-Bourbonism, as manifested in the traditions of …

“It Is Time For Artists To Be Heard”: Artists And Writers For Freedom, 1963–1964, Judith E. Smith

American Studies Faculty Publication Series

In The Black Arts Movement: Literary Nationalism in the 1960s and 1970s, James Smethurst writes that “Black arts cultural nationalism draws on a long history.” He describes the cultural nationalist stance we associate with Black Arts as involving a concept of liberation and self-determination that entails some notion of the development or recovery of a “true” national culture,” conveying “an already existing folk or popular culture,” often relying on recognizable African elements. Black arts cultural nationalism expressed the linkages between Black Arts and Black Power even before they were specifically named and identified. In particular, Black arts cultural nationalism …

The Rape Of Recy Taylor [Film Review], Judith E. Smith

American Studies Faculty Publication Series

Nancy Buirksi’s documentary The Rape of Recy Taylor centers on a brutal sexual assault in Abbeville, Alabama in 1944. A 24-year-old African American wife and mother, coming home from a sanctified church service with a friend and her son, was forced into a car at gunpoint, and gang raped by six young white men. The beating heart of the film is the on-screen testimony of Taylor’s younger brother, Robert Corbitt, and her younger sister, Alma Daniels, who convey the unspeakably cruel and vicious character of the attack: Corbitt repeats the perpetrators’ directions to Recy: “They said they wanted her to …

The Making Of A Raisin In The Sun, Judith E. Smith

American Studies Faculty Publication Series

Lorraine Hansberry’s play A Raisin in the Sun premiered on the Broadway stage in January 1959 just as the edifice of national segregation was cracking open. Response to the momentous 1954 Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Bd. of Education included both the important early challenges to long-accepted practices of white supremacy and the intensified mobilization of widespread white defiance to the ruling. Black Bus boycotters in Montgomery, Alabama, and their young minister leader, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Black high school students attempting to attend Little Rock’s Central High and their families faced organized harassment and dangerous forms …

Neutral Ground Or Battleground? Hidden History, Tourism, And Spatial (In)Justice In The New Orleans French Quarter, Lynnell L. Thomas

American Studies Faculty Publication Series

In 2017, the city of New Orleans removed four monuments that paid homage to the city’s Confederate past. The removal came after contentious public debate and decades of intermittent grassroots protests. Despite the public process, details about the removal were closely guarded in the wake of death threats, vandalism, lawsuits, and organized resistance by monument supporters. Workers hired to dismantle the monuments did so surreptitiously under the cloak of darkness, protected by a heavy police presence, with their faces covered to conceal their identities. The divisiveness of this debate and the removal lay bare the contestation over public space, historical …

Finding A New Home In Harlem: Alice Childress And The Committee For The Negro In The Arts, Judith E. Smith

American Studies Faculty Publication Series

Alice Childress’s performing career in the 1940s was primarily associated with the American Negro Theater, a collectively run professional theater company with a mission to nurture black talent and create compelling theater for Harlem audiences; as Childress would later comment, “We thought we were Harlem’s theater.” ANT made use of all available resources to accomplish this mission; producing plays written by black and white playwrights, hiring white teachers, and accepting white actors and technicians committed to its goals.

Civil Rights Gone Wrong: Racial Nostalgia, Historical Memory, And The Boston Busing Crisis In Contemporary Children’S Literature, Lynnell L. Thomas

American Studies Faculty Publication Series

On May 14, 2014, three white Boston city councilors refused to vote to approve a resolution honoring the sixtieth anniversary of Brown v. the Board of Education because, as one remarked, “I didn’t want to get into a debate regarding forced busing in Boston.” Against the recent national proliferation of celebrations of civil rights milestones and legislation, the controversy surrounding the fortieth anniversary of the court decision that mandated busing to desegregate Boston public schools speaks volumes about the historical memory of Boston’s civil rights movement. Two highly acclaimed contemporary works of children’s literature set during or inspired by Boston’s …

“Calypso”—Harry Belafonte (1956), Judith E. Smith

American Studies Faculty Publication Series

Harry Belafonte, the Harlem-born son of poor undocumented Jamaican immigrants, an untrained singer whose heart was set on becoming an actor, made music history with “Harry Belafonte: Calypso.” This record was the very first by a solo performer to sell a million copies, holding the top spot on “Billboard’s” pop album charts for an unprecedented 31 weeks (in addition, 58 weeks in the top ten, 99 weeks among the top 100). The higher-ups at RCA had doubted the commercial potential of a thematically unified recording of “island and Calypso songs,” but the “Calypso” record, released at the end of May …

Literary Radicals In Radio’S Public Sphere, Judith E. Smith

American Studies Faculty Publication Series

Radio was THE emerging medium in the middle decades of the twentieth century, and radio historians have helped us understand some of the myriad ways it influenced the public sphere and created new forms of cultural consciousness and multivocal formulations of national community. Michele Hilmes has argued that radio was “significantly different from any preceding or subsequent medium in its ability to transcend spatial boundaries, blur the private and public spheres, and escape visual determinations while still retaining the strong element of ‘realism’ that sound—rather than written words--supplies.” Jason Loviglio has analyzed the techniques and implications of radio’s creation of …

New Orleans Revisited: Notes Of A Native Daughter, Lynnell L. Thomas

American Studies Faculty Publication Series

“Best Culinary Destination.” “Best City for Night Owls.” “Best NFL City to Party In.“ “Best City for Girlfriend Getaways.” “Top National Halloween Destination.” “Best Destination in the US and World for Nightlife.” “America's Favorite City.” And on. And on. The list of tourist destination rankings and accolades have mounted in the 10 years since Hurricane Katrina threatened to decimate New Orleans's tourism industry and, quite possibly—as some predicted and others hoped for—New Orleans itself. Things are different now. Recently, the New York Times proclaimed that New Orleans was “resilient and renewed, a decade after Katrina.” Listing New Orleans as one …

Bessie [Film Review], Judith E. Smith

American Studies Faculty Publication Series

Bessie opens with an arresting shot of Queen Latifah as singer Bessie Smith, dressed in the white costume familiarized by a widely reproduced photograph, with blue tones emphasizing both interiority (her eyes are closed, and the music viewers hear is playing in her head), and the blues genre associated with her. When the shift to every day colors returns viewers to the movie’s present (1927), an unsmiling Bessie walks through an adoring backstage crowd, press cameras flashing, into a waiting car. Rachel Portman’s score suggests foreboding; the next long shot shows Bessie framed in a doorway as she calls out …

Ruby Dee, 1922-2014, Judith E. Smith

American Studies Faculty Publication Series

Ruby Dee was a marvelously expressive actor, and a lifelong risk-taking radical committed to challenging racial and economic inequality. She made history as part of an extraordinary group of Black Arts radicals — including Paul Robeson, Lorraine Hansberry, Harry Belafonte, John O. Killens and Julian Mayfield, as well as her husband Ossie Davis — who actively protested white supremacy and thought deeply about the political implications of conventional racial representations, creating new stories and introducing new Black characters to convey deep truths about Black life.

In small parts and choice roles, Dee’s presence lit up stage and screen. In her …

Urban Culture, Judith E. Smith

American Studies Faculty Publication Series

Encyclopedia entry on "Urban Culture" submitted for inclusion in the Oxford Encyclopedia of American Cultural and Intellectual History, ed. by Joan Shelly Rubin (NY: Oxford University Press, 2013) 516-522.

Makers: Women Who Make America [Film Review], Judith E. Smith

American Studies Faculty Publication Series

The three-hour documentary MAKERS: WOMEN WHO MADE AMERICA, promises to tell “how women have helped shape America over the last fifty years…in pursuit of their rights to a full and fair share of political power, economic opportunity, and personal autonomy.” However, rather than provide a historical analysis of the reemergence of feminism as produced by social movements and social change, MAKERS, according to the film’s press release, focuses on “unforgettable moments in history” told through stories of “exceptional women whose pioneering contributions continue to shape the world in which we live… stories of women who led the fight, those who …

'People Want To See What Happened': Treme, Televisual Tourism, And The Racial Remapping Of Post-Katrina New Orleans, Lynnell L. Thomas

American Studies Faculty Publication Series

Occupying the space between cultural reproduction and theatrical production, the HBO series Treme offers an important vantage point from which to analyze the intersection of race, class, culture, and media representation animating New Orleans’s post-Katrina tourist identity. Treme illustrates the tension between the welcome recognition and celebration of New Orleans black expressive culture and its spectacularization and commodification. The resuscitation of tourist tropes and an emphasis on jazz and heritage music in the series often render the city’s history of racial conflict and injustice invisible or subordinate to new narratives of cross-racial unity among Katrina survivors and paternalistic actions by …

Civil Rights, Labor, And Sexual Politics On Screen In Nothing But A Man (1964), Judith E. Smith

American Studies Faculty Publication Series

The independently made 1964 film Nothing But a Man is one of a handful of films whose production coincided with the civil rights insurgency and benefited from input from activists. Commonly listed in 1970s surveys of black film, the film lacks sustained critical attention in film studies or in-depth historical analysis given its significance as a landmark text of the 1960s. Documentary-like, but not a documentary, it offers a complex representation of black life, but it was scripted, directed, and filmed by two white men, Michael Roemer and Robert Young.

This essay argues that the film’s unusual attention to labor …

Amelia [Film Review], Judith E. Smith

American Studies Faculty Publication Series

What is the cultural terrain staked out by Amelia, the recent Hollywood-distributed biopic about intrepid flyer Amelia Earhart? The quick shots that precede the opening credits direct attention to the particular themes that Producer Ted Waitt, director Mira Nair, and screenwriters Ron Bass and Anna Hamilton Phelan have emphasized in their 2009 feature about the flyer. Her airplane taking off into the dark gestures to the mystery of her last flight and disappearance without a trace. Her celebrity status is indicated by cheering crowds, radio interviews, and photographs, fusing seamlessly with her status as an object of heterosexual adoration once …

Judy Holliday's Urban Working Girl Characters In 1950s Hollywood Film, Judith E. Smith

American Studies Faculty Publication Series

A Jewish-created urban and cosmopolitan working girl feminism persisted in the 1950s as a cultural alternative to the suburban, domestic consumerism critiqued so eloquently by Betty Friedan in The Feminine Mystique. The film persona of Jewish, Academy Award-winning actress Judy Holliday embodied this working girl feminism. Audiences viewed her portrayals of popular front working girl heroines in three films written by the Jewish writer and director Garson Kanin, sometimes in association with his wife, the actress Ruth Gordon, and directed by the Jewish director George Cukor in the early 1950s: Born Yesterday (1950), The Marrying Kind (1952), and It …

'Roots Run Deep Here': The Construction Of Black New Orleans In Post-Katrina Tourism Narratives, Lynnell L. Thomas

American Studies Faculty Publication Series

This article explores the emergent post-Katrina tourism narrative and its ambivalent racialization of the city. Tourism officials are compelled to acknowledge a New Orleans outside the traditional tourist boundaries – primarily black, often poor, and still largely neglected by the city and national governments. On the other hand, tourism promoters do not relinquish (and do not allow tourists to relinquish) the myths of racial exoticism and white supremacist desire for a construction of blacks as artistically talented but socially inferior.