Behind the Screen: Tap Dance, Race, and Invisibility During Hollywood's Golden Age

Outdated racial content, specifically blackface minstrelsy, was allowed to thrive during the 1930s and 1940s despite rigid motion picture censorship laws. This book introduces a new theory of covert minstrelsy, revealing how Hollywood capitalized on the Africanist aesthetic at the expense of Black lived experience. It examines how Hollywood utilized covert guises and subterfuges to distract censors and audiences from seeing the ways in which they were being fed a nineteenth-century White narrative of Blackness. Through close analysis of films, the book uncovers a half-century of blackface application and recuperates the stories of Black artists whose labor was abused.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 392 pages
Publication date: 12 May 2023
Publisher: Oxford University Press Inc

Despite the strict motion picture censorship laws that were in place during the 1930s and 1940s, outdated racial content, particularly blackface minstrelsy, was not only permitted but also allowed to thrive. This book presents a novel theory of covert minstrelsy, shedding light on Hollywood's practice of capitalizing on the Africanist aesthetic at the expense of Black lived experience. Through a close examination of the musicals produced during this period, the book demonstrates how Hollywood employed a series of covert guises or subterfuges, further masked by a film's narrative framing and novel technology, to distract censors and audiences from recognizing the ways in which they were being fed a nineteenth-century White narrative of Blackness.

Drawing on the annals of Hollywood's most popular and extremely rare films, Behind the Screen uncovers a half-century of blackface application by delicately removing the individual layers of disguise through close analyses of films that portray tap dance, swing, and other predominantly Africanist forms in a negative light. This book goes beyond the image of recognizable White performers such as Al Jolson, Eddie Cantor, Fred Astaire, and Eleanor Powell, exploring the high cost of their onscreen representational politics.

Furthermore, the book recuperates the stories of several Black artists whose labor was abused during the choreographic and filming process. Some of the many newly documented stories include those of The Three Chocolateers, The Three Eddies, The Three Gobs, The Peters Sisters, Jeni Le Gon, and Cora La Redd. By stripping away the various disguises involved during Hollywood's Golden Age, Behind the Screen recovers the visibility of Black artists whose names Hollywood omitted from its narratives.

Weight: 576g
Dimension: 155 x 235 x 29 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780197553107