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Music, muscle, and masterful arts : Black and Indigenous performers of the circus age / Sakina M. Hughes.
Hughes, Sakina M., author.
2025
GV1803
Available Online
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Title
Music, muscle, and masterful arts : Black and Indigenous performers of the circus age / Sakina M. Hughes.
Author
Hughes, Sakina M., author.
ISBN
9781469676296 (electronic bk.)
146967629X (electronic bk.)
9781469680750 (electronic bk.)
1469680750 (electronic bk.)
9781469676289
1469676281
9781469680743 (electronic bk.)
1469680742 (electronic bk.)
9781469676265
1469676265
9781469676272
1469676273
Published
Chapel Hill : The University of North Carolina Press, [2025]
Copyright
©2025
Language
English
Description
1 online resource (xiv, 207 pages) : illustrations
Call Number
GV1803
Dewey Decimal Classification
791.3089/96073
Summary
"Before the heyday of the Chitlin Circuit and the Harlem Renaissance, African American performing artists and creative entrepreneurs--sometimes called Black Bohemians--seized their limited freedoms and gained both fame and fortune with their work in a white-dominated marketplace. These Black performers plied their trade in circuses, blues tents, and Wild West Shows with Native Americans. The era's traveling entertainments often promoted the 'disappearing Indian' myth and promoted racial hierarchies with Black and Native people at the bottom. But in a racial economy rooted in settler-colonialism and legacies of enslavement, Black and Indigenous performers found that otherness could be a job qualification. Whether as artists or manual laborers, these workers rejected marginalization by traveling the world, making a solid living off their talents, and building platforms for political and social critique. Eventually, America's popular entertainment industry could not survive without Black and Native Americans' creative labor. As audiences came to eagerly anticipate their genius, these performers paved the way for greater social, economic, and cultural autonomy. Sakina M. Hughes provides a conceptually rich work revealing memorable individuals--laborers, artists, and entrepreneurs--who, faced with danger and discrimination, created surprising opportunities to showcase their talents and gain fame, wealth, and mobility"-- Provided by publisher.
Bibliography, etc. Note
Includes bibliographical referfences and index
Source of Description
Online resource; title from PDF title page (viewed April 7, 2025).
Available in Other Form
Music, muscle, and masterful arts.
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List of illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction
A circus world: 1870s-1920s America
For good treatment, equal justice, and sure salary, Give me the circus: Black musicians reinvent the circus from the inside out
His skin is dark, but he will come out on top . . . or know the reason why: Black labor in and out of the tent
But simply a man normal in his environment: indigenous Americans, wild west shows, and taking on the vanishing race narrative
Hidden in plain view: the circus towns of Columbus, Ohio, and Peru, Indiana
Conclusion. The big Black boom
Notes
Bibliography
Index.

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