The Royalty of Negro Vaudeville: The Whitman Sisters and the Negotiation of Race, Gender, and Class in African American Theater, 1900-1940

2001 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 134
Author(s):  
Michael Dinwiddie ◽  
Nadine George-Graves
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
American Theater

The Pekin

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Bauman
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Social Impact ◽  
Institutional History ◽  
Cultural Institutions ◽  
Stock Company ◽  
American Theater ◽  
Social Club ◽  
Original Musical ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Temple

In 1904, political operator and gambling boss Robert T. Motts opened the Pekin Theater in Chicago. Dubbed the “Temple of Music,” the Pekin became one of the country's most prestigious African American cultural institutions, renowned for its all-black stock company and school for actors, an orchestra able to play ragtime and opera with equal brilliance, and a repertoire of original musical comedies. A missing chapter in the history of African American theater, this book presents how Motts used his entrepreneurial acumen to create a successful black-owned enterprise. Concentrating on institutional history, the book explores the Pekin's philosophy of hiring only African American staff, its embrace of multi-racial upper class audiences, and its ready assumption of roles as diverse as community center, social club, and fundraising instrument. The Pekin's prestige and profitability faltered after Motts' death in 1911 as his heirs lacked his savvy, and African American elites turned away from pure entertainment in favor of spiritual uplift. But, as the book shows, the theater had already opened the door to a new dynamic of both intra- and inter-racial theater-going and showed the ways a success, like the Pekin, had a positive economic and social impact on the surrounding community.

Theater and Performance in the 19th Century

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Douglas Jones ◽  
Amadi Ozier
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
African Americans ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
New Negro ◽  
American Theater ◽  
Black Life ◽  
Theatrical Practice ◽  
And Performance ◽  
Free African Americans

Theater and performance of the long 19th century (1789–1914) is one of the most dynamic fields in African American studies today. Scholars have turned to these embodied practices to understand the achievements, hardships, and imaginaries of black life in this period because enslaved and free African Americans were often denied access to, or the wherewithal to use, the archivable materials we traditionally use for historical research. The field has devised innovative methodologies and reading practices to reimagine and theorize the aesthetics, affects, labor demands, and politics of African American theater and performance in this period. These critical strategies have helped to offset some of the challenges that hinder the study of all live performance. In spite of these limitations, generative observations of theatrical and performance cultures of the enslaved and free African Americans are available, albeit often beneath layers of condemnation, mockery, and scorn. This article focuses on primary works that document, and criticism that analyzes, the origins and evolution of African American theater culture from the late 18th century up to but not including the New Negro (or Harlem) Renaissance (c. 1920). It also offers representative studies of contemporaneous dance and music that help to contextualize black theatrical practice, but it leaves the bulk of that scholarship to other bibliographies. Major archival collections, canonical play texts, and a broad range of criticism clustered in major scholarly categories of African American theater and performance of the era are included here.

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