A SCHOLARLY BOOK REPOSITORY
"James F. Wilson uncovers fascinating new material on the Harlem Renaissance, shedding light on the oft-forgotten gay and lesbian contributions to the era's creativity and Civil Rights. Extremely well researched, compellingly written, and highly informative."
---David Krasner, author of A Beautiful Pageant: African American Theatre, Drama, and Performance in the Harlem Renaissance, 1910-1927
Bulldaggers, Pansies, and Chocolate Babies shines the spotlight on historically neglected plays and performances that challenged early twentieth-century notions of the stratification of race, gender, class, and sexual orientation. On Broadway stages, in Harlem nightclubs and dance halls, and within private homes sponsoring rent parties, African American performers of the 1920s and early 1930s teased the limits of white middle-class morality. Blues-singing lesbians, popularly known as "bulldaggers," performed bawdy songs; cross-dressing men vied for the top prizes in lavish drag balls; and black and white women flaunted their sexuality in scandalous melodramas and musical revues. Race leaders, preachers, and theater critics spoke out against these performances that threatened to undermine social and political progress, but to no avail: mainstream audiences could not get enough of the riotous entertainment.
Many of the plays and performances explored here, central to the cultural debates of their time, had been previously overlooked by theater historians. Among the performances discussed are David Belasco's controversial production of Edward Sheldon and Charles MacArthur's Lulu Belle (1926), with its raucous, libidinous view of Harlem. The title character, as performed by a white woman in blackface, became a symbol of defiance for the gay subculture and was simultaneously held up as a symbol of supposedly immoral black women. African Americans Florence Mills and Ethel Waters, two of the most famous performers of the 1920s, countered the Lulu Belle stereotype in written statements and through parody, thereby reflecting the powerful effect this fictional character had on the popular imagination.
Bulldaggers, Pansies, and Chocolate Babies is based on historical archival research including readings of eyewitness accounts, newspaper reports, songs, and playscripts. Employing a cultural studies framework that incorporates queer and critical race theory, it argues against the widely held belief that the stereotypical forms of black, lesbian, and gay show business of the 1920s prohibited the emergence of distinctive new voices. Specialists in American studies, performance studies, African American studies, and gay and lesbian studies will find the book appealing, as will general readers interested in the vivid personalities and performances of the singers and actors introduced in the book.
James F. Wilson is Professor of English and Theatre at LaGuardia Community College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.
—David Krasner, author of A Beautiful Pageant: African American Theatre, Drama, and Performance in the Harlem Renaissance, 1910-1927
Presenting thirteen essays, editors James C. Wilson and Cynthia Lewiecki-Wilson unite the fields of disability studies and rhetoric to examine connections between disability, education, language, and cultural practices. Bringing together theoretical and analytical perspectives from rhetorical studies and disability studies, these essays extend both the field of rhetoric and the newer field of disability studies.
The contributors span a range of academic fields including English, education, history, and sociology. Several contributors are themselves disabled or have disabled family members. While some essays included in this volume analyze the ways that representations of disability construct identity and attitudes toward the disabled, other essays use disability as a critical modality to rethink economic theory, educational practices, and everyday interactions. Among the disabilities discussed within these contexts are various physical disabilities, mental illness, learning disabilities, deafness, blindness, and diseases such as multiple sclerosis and AIDS.
These stories focus on a uniquely southern view of Vietnam. In terms of numbers the South shouldered more than its share of human cost—31 percent of Americans who served came from one of the eleven states of the old Confederacy, and 28 percent of the dead were southerners. Southerners also brought to Vietnam certain shared cultural tastes and a particularly southern heritage of honor in military service stemming from the Civil War. For many, as their testimony reveals, a sense of patriotism was tested and questioned by the horrors of war, and for others that patriotism was a continued source of strength.
Individually and collectively, however, these oral histories make up a picture of war that prevents us from forgetting the truth as one veteran put it: “Vietnam was not one war, but a thousand little nasty wars.”
In a society which has made "urban crisis" a phrase peculiarly its own, it is strange how many different meanings are assigned to those two words. The theme of this book is that it is more important to disentangle and analyze the various problems which are indiscriminately referred to by this phrase than simply to issue a call to arms. To paraphrase the editor of The Metropolitan Enigma, James Q. Wilson, not everything about cities constitutes a problem and not all problems to be found in cities are distinctively "urban." This book seeks to explore the complexities and clear away the easy generalizations that prevent an understanding of the human problems of an urbanizing nation.
The essays in this book were written by Daniel P. Moynihan (Poverty in Cities), Bernard J. Frieden (Housing and National Urban Goals), Edward C. Banfield (Rioting Mainly for Fun and Profit), and other perceptive students of American society. Some of the papers reveal unexpected findings; others take an unusual perspective; each provides a fresh and lucid treatment of a difficult subject. No effort has been made to produce a work animated by a single point of view. A central idea of The Metropolitan Enigma is that there is no all-embracing strategy that can be put forward as an effective solution for the "urban crisis." Directed to everyone who is interested in the future of the American city, this is an important and valuable book.
The volume was first published in a soft-cover edition by the Task Force on Economic Growth and Opportunity of the United States Chamber of Commerce in 1966. The Joint Center for Urban Studies of M.I.T. and Harvard commissioned the articles. Each of the contributors has had an opportunity to revise his paper, and several essays have been substantially rewritten. Edward Banfield's essay appears here for the first time.
THS is a member of the Council of Editors of Learned Journals and is included in the MLA Directory of Periodicals. THS is indexed in Humanities Index, Humanities Abstracts, Book Review Index, MLA International Bibliography, International Bibliography of Theatre, Arts & Humanities Citation Index, IBZ International Bibliography of Periodical Literature, and IBR International Bibliography of Book Reviews. Full texts of essays appear in the databases of both Humanities Abstracts Full Text as well as SIRS
From published reviews
“This established annual is a major contribution to the scholarly analysis and historical documentation of international drama. Refereed, immaculately printed and illustrated . . . . The subject coverage ranges from the London season of 1883 to the influence of David Belasco on Eugene O’Neill.”—CHOICE
“International in scope but with an emphasis on American, British, and Continental theater, this fine academic journal includes seven to nine scholarly articles dealing with everything from Filipino theater during the Japanese occupation to numerous articles on Shakespearean production to American children’s theater. . . . an excellent addition for academic, university, and large public libraries.”—Magazines for Libraries, 6th Edition
The patrolman has the most difficult, complex, and least understood task in the police department. Much less is known of him than of his better publicized colleague, the detective. In this important and timely book, James Q. Wilson describes the patrolman and the problems he faces that arise out of constraints imposed by law, politics, public opinion, and the expectations of superiors.
The study considers how the uniformed officer in eight communities deals with such common offenses as assault, theft, drunkenness, vice, traffic, and disorderly conduct. Six of the communities are in New York State: Albany, Amsterdam, Brighton, Nassau County, Newburgh, and Syracuse. The others are Highland Park, Illinois, and Oakland, California.
Enforcing laws dealing with common offenses is especially difficult because it raises the question of administrative discretion. Murder, in the eyes of the police, is unambiguously wrong, and murderers are accordingly arrested; but in cases such as street-corner scuffles or speeding motorists, the patrolman must decide whether to intervene (should the scuffle be stopped? should the motorist be pulled over?) and, if he does, just how to intervene (by arrest? a warning? an interrogation?). In most large organizations, the lowest-ranking members perform the more routinized tasks and the means of accomplishing these tasks are decided by superiors, but in a police department the lowest-ranking officer—the patrolman—is almost solely responsible for enforcing those laws which are the least precise, the most ambiguous. Three ways or “styles” of policing—the watchman, the legalistic, and the service styles—are analyzed and their relation to local politics is explored.
In the final chapter, Mr. Wilson discusses if and how the patrolman’s behavior can be changed and examines some current proposals for reorganizing police departments. He observes that the ability of the patrolman to do his job well may determine our success in managing social conflict and our prospects for maintaining a proper balance between liberty and order.
Story-telling is foundational to the forms of the fine arts, but it is no less foundational to human reason. Human life in turn constitutes a specific kind of form—a story form. The ancient conception of human life as a pilgrimage to beauty itself is one that we can fully embrace only if we see the essential correlation between reason and story and the essential convertibility of truth, goodness and beauty in beauty. By turns a study in fundamental ontology, aesthetics, and political philosophy, Wilson’s book invites its readers to a renewal of the West’s intellectual tradition.
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