Shane Vogel is assistant professor of English at Indiana University.
"An artful intersection of literary and performance studies, The
Scene of Harlem Cabaret combines rich readings of the so-called
Cabaret School of Harlem Renaissance writers with an innovative
study of the cabaret itself. . . . Vogel 'reads' the cabaret both
as an object of literary imagination and as a social text, a method
that affords him new approaches to the evanescent evidences of the
queer, black, and underground."--Tavia Nyong'o "American
Quarterly"
"Vogel's best passages are brimming with arresting ideas and
brilliant observations. He has mined some very recondite archives
to illuminate the conditions of the cabaret's alterity and
resistance. Few scholars have trawled through the voluminous but
elusive material of the cabaret, largely because few scholars have
Vogel's knack for making poignant sense of what occurs in
late-night enclaves. This is groundbreaking work, telling a rarely
told tale both compassionately and powerfully."--
"Modernism/modernity"
"At the turn of the last century, W. E. B. Du Bois took up what he
called 'the problem of amusement' with prescience as well as
reticence. That problem is now taken up again by Shane Vogel with
the kind of rigorous critical imagination that would disturb and,
finally, gratify Du Bois, forcing him literally and figuratively to
attend (to) scenes he might otherwise strenuously have avoided.
Vogel illuminates and amplifies in too many ways to count the
singular cultural politics of the scene of Harlem cabaret. Happily,
he gives us occasion once again to consider how the terrible ruses
and potential reconstruction of democracy in America are marked, on
the one hand, and initialized, on the other, in our ludic
underground."--Fred Moten, Duke University
"Evocative, elegant, and engrossing are words that characterize
this lively study that resurrects the lush, smoke-filled atmosphere
of Harlem cabarets. Reading the contested space of the cabaret as
material to compose and perform alternative narratives of race and
sex, this study makes visceral the queer intimacies of cabaret's
everynight life and analyzes the lives of performers from Lena
Horne, Bricktop, and Ethel Waters, poetic works by Claude McKay and
Langston Hughes, and embodied movements of audiences. Scholars in
performance studies, history, literary modernism, and queer theory
have much to learn from this excellent book."--Jennifer DeVere
Brody, Duke University
"In The Scene of Harlem Cabaret, Shane Vogel combines performance
studies and literary studies with deftness, acuity, and prescience,
looking boldly to the future of the field. His illuminating thesis
about the generative experiences produced by these jook-joint,
honky-tonk, sin-cellar, concert-saloon night spots--small enough
for 'public intimacy, ' large enough for social 'breathing space'
and 'wiggle room'--reimagines the works of the 'Cabaret School' in
a new light, proving not that life is a cabaret, but that cabaret
was a life for some the greatest American artists of the twentieth
century--vital, risky, and transformative."--Joseph Roach, Yale
University
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