Babylon Girls

Babylon Girls is a brilliant book. Consistently pushing multiple fields in new directions, Jayna Brown reveals the centrality of black female performance culture in the making of transatlantic modernity. Her incredibly valuable book demonstrates how African Americans moved in resilient and unpredictable ways--both geographically and performatively--during the early twentieth century. Daphne A. Brooks, author of Bodies in Dissent: Performing the Transatlantic Imaginary The most exciting piece of scholarship that I've read in ages, Babylon Girls succeeds as an extremely ambitious, meticulously researched, brilliantly theorized cultural history. It is a landmark contribution to jazz studies, dance and performance studies, black women's history, studies of minstrelsy, and theories of cross-cultural exchange. Sherrie Tucker, author of Swing Shift: All Girl Bands of the 1940s Jayna Brown's Babylon Girls: Black Women Performers and the Shaping of the Modern is a remarkable cultural history of African-American performance from 1890 to 1945. Drawing on archival research, historical documents, literary texts and travelogues, Babylon Girls brings to life the performers of the era and situates them in their complex sociopolitical contexts, thus performing an important act of cultural restitution. The work covers a wide range of theatrical phenomena, from variety shows and female minstrelsy to practices of racial mimicry and the burlesque. At the heart of the text are the multifaceted ironies that stand behind black performance in the modern period... While remaining attentive to the violent social and sexual practices in which modern African-American performance is embedded, Brown opens up a broad vista of black female experience and, in considering black women's experiences as urban citizens, expressive artists and world travellers, shows the ways in which African-American women were both agents and subjects of history. In her attention to female subjectivity in all its complexity, Brown demonstrates how African-American performers were crucial to the formation of a modern urban sensibility... This book is at once a celebration and a lament. The most powerful aspects of the work lie in the disturbing connections drawn between history, histories and representation... Through this dense historical lens, Brown draws a portrait of dance that is both poignant and powerful. Performance here is at once a forum for satire, stereotype, artistic expression, reclamation and celebration...Brown's richly researched work makes an invaluable contribution to the burgeoning field of performance studies. It is of interest to cultural and dance historians, literary scholars, ethnic and gender studies specialists, dancers and performers and the general public alike. -Times Higher Education, 22nd Jan 09