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A deep dive into racial politics, Hollywood, and Black cultural struggles for liberation as reflected in the extraordinary life and times of Sammy Davis Jr.
Through the lens of Sammy Davis Jr.'s six-decade career in show business—from vaudeville to Vegas to Broadway, Hollywood, and network TV—Dancing Down the Barricades examines the workings of race in American culture. The title phrase holds two contradictory meanings regarding Davis's cultural politics: Did he dance the barricades down, as he liked to think, or did he simply dance down them, as his more radical critics would have it?
Davis was at once a pioneering, barrier-busting, anti–Jim Crow activist and someone who was widely associated with accommodationism and wannabe whiteness. Historian Matthew Frye Jacobson attends to both threads, analyzing how industry norms, productions, scripts, roles, and audience expectations and responses were all framed by race against the backdrop of a changing America. In the spirit of better understanding Davis's life and career, Dancing Down the Barricades examines the complexities of his constraints, freedoms, and choices for what they reveal about Black history and American political culture.
Through the lens of Sammy Davis Jr.'s six-decade career in show business—from vaudeville to Vegas to Broadway, Hollywood, and network TV—Dancing Down the Barricades examines the workings of race in American culture. The title phrase holds two contradictory meanings regarding Davis's cultural politics: Did he dance the barricades down, as he liked to think, or did he simply dance down them, as his more radical critics would have it?
Davis was at once a pioneering, barrier-busting, anti–Jim Crow activist and someone who was widely associated with accommodationism and wannabe whiteness. Historian Matthew Frye Jacobson attends to both threads, analyzing how industry norms, productions, scripts, roles, and audience expectations and responses were all framed by race against the backdrop of a changing America. In the spirit of better understanding Davis's life and career, Dancing Down the Barricades examines the complexities of his constraints, freedoms, and choices for what they reveal about Black history and American political culture.
Price: $29.95
Pages: 344
Publisher: University of California Press
Imprint: University of California Press
Publication Date:
07 February 2023
Trim Size: 9.00 X 6.00 in
ISBN: 9780520391802
Format: Hardcover
"Davis was caught between warring views of what it meant to be Black in a racist U.S. Jacobson is one of the subtlest commentators on what it means to be caught in such a cultural bind. . . . A subtle, insightful book likely to be on many readers’ radar for its nuanced look at the consequences of a racial divide with roots that, as Jacobson makes clear, are longstanding, systemic, and institutional."
Author of seven books on race and US political culture, Matthew Frye Jacobson is Sterling Professor of American Studies and History at Yale University.
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Author's Note
Preface: The Long Civil Rights Era
1 • Star Rising at Twilight: A Childhood in Vaudeville
2 • "A Concentrated Bunch of Haters": War Time in Wyoming
3 • The All-Negro Cast, and Other Black Spaces
4 • The Vegas Strip, Network TV, and Other White Spaces
5 • "Division Is Not Our Destiny": Interracial Romance and Golden Boy
6 • Writing Wrongs in Yes I Can
7 • "The Skin Commits You": Civil Rights Itinerary
Coda: What Is the "Post" of "Post-Civil Rights"?
Notes
Index
Acknowledgments
Author's Note
Preface: The Long Civil Rights Era
1 • Star Rising at Twilight: A Childhood in Vaudeville
2 • "A Concentrated Bunch of Haters": War Time in Wyoming
3 • The All-Negro Cast, and Other Black Spaces
4 • The Vegas Strip, Network TV, and Other White Spaces
5 • "Division Is Not Our Destiny": Interracial Romance and Golden Boy
6 • Writing Wrongs in Yes I Can
7 • "The Skin Commits You": Civil Rights Itinerary
Coda: What Is the "Post" of "Post-Civil Rights"?
Notes
Index