| Harlem cabaret of the 1920s was, and continues to be, an overdetermined site of meaning, condensing a number of social anxieties of the post-World War I era into the image of black performance and the scene of urban nightlife. With its criminal and sexual associations, the cabaret figured prominently in debates over the proper subject matter for black literature and the terms of representation of black life and culture. This dissertation approaches narratives of the cabaret as a location of struggle over the knowledge of sexually dissident and criminal subjects and the "truth" of blackness. At the same time that the cabaret was employed in the white construction of a sexualized and criminalized knowledge of blackness, it was also a literary trope used by black writers of the Harlem Renaissance to index a structure of racial feeling and public intimacy. Against stereotypical images of exotic primitivism, depictions of the cabaret allowed for a writing of desire and sociality in Harlem Renaissance literature.;In the first three chapters, I look at the use of the cabaret in the work of specific Harlem Renaissance writers (Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Wallace Thurman, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Claude McKay) and read their work in relation to the development of Harlem's expressive nightlife culture, the history of American cabaret performance, the production of intimacy in performance, the use of the cabaret as a site of racialization, and the discursive construction of the black "underworld." In the fourth chapter I examine the autobiographies of performers Lena Horne and Ethel Waters. Writing about the cabaret from a vantage point decades later, I argue that these performers use the genre of autobiography to "critically remember" a queer racialized past in the cabaret. In conclusion, I consider Bricktop's, an African-American cabaret in Paris, in the context of the larger exportation of American culture in the 1920s. As a final point for further exploration, I discuss the contemporary work of Isaac Julien and Vaginal Davis, two contemporary culture-makers who find in the legacy of Harlem cabaret a "useable queer past."... |
