Stolen Time: Black Fad Performance and the Calypso Craze

Stolen Time by Eric Vogel explores the 1956 calypso music craze in the US, which became the first LP to sell more than a million copies. It was a moment of cultural appropriation, encapsulating the culture of the Jim Crow era. Black calypso craze performers enacted a different kind of theft, appropriating the US version of Caribbean culture and mocking American notions of racial authenticity. Vogel shows how performers seized the fad to comment on black cultural history and question the meaning of race itself.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 272 pages
Publication date: 22 August 2018
Publisher: The University of Chicago Press

In 1956, Harry Belafonte's Calypso became the first LP to sell over a million copies, marking a significant milestone in the music industry. For a brief period, calypso music surged in popularity, rivaling rock and roll as the top-selling genre in the United States. This phenomenon, documented in Mark Vogel's book "Stolen Time," offers a captivating cultural history of this era. Vogel proposes a novel framework called "black fad performance" to understand race, performance, and mass culture in the twentieth century United States. He situates the calypso craze within a broader cycle of cultural appropriation, including the ragtime craze of the 1890s and the Negro vogue of the 1920s. These cultural movements encapsulated the culture of the Jim Crow era. Vogel delves into the fad's evolution, tracing its journey from an attempt at authenticity to a shameless embrace of calypso kitsch. While white calypso performers were indeed involved in a form of imperialist theft of Trinidadian music and dance, black calypso craze performers engaged in a distinct and subtly subversive form of appropriation. They appropriated not Caribbean culture itself but rather the American version of it, mocking American notions of racial authenticity. Through various forms of media, including musical recordings, nightclub acts, television broadcasts, Broadway musicals, film, and modern dance, Vogel showcases how performers capitalized on the fleeting opportunities of the fad to comment on black cultural history and even question the very essence of race itself. "Stolen Time" provides a rich and nuanced exploration of this fascinating period, shedding light on the complex interplay between culture, performance, and race in the United States.

Weight: 420g
Dimension: 225 x 151 x 15 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780226568447