[ARETE] Review of Emily Rutter, Black Celebrity

[Duncan Jamieson]

All,
Please find below and attached Emily Rutter's *Black Celebrity, *reviewed
by Phil Wedge.
Thanks,
Duncan

*Black Celebrity: Contemporary Representations of Postbellum Athletes and
Artists.*

Reviewed by Philip Wedge, University of Kansas

   Emily Ruth Rutter has written a fascinating monograph as part of the
“Performing Celebrity” Series from University of Delaware Press, which is
publishing works in “the emerging field of celebrity studies” (Rutter
ii). *Black
Celebrity* examines six contemporary creative works of poetry and fiction,
three of which focus on post-bellum sports stars, two on boxer Jack Johnson
and one on jockey Isaac Murphy; and three of which focus on performing
artists, including pianist Thomas Greene Wiggins (“Blind Tom”), stage
artists Bert Williams and George Walker, and other black performers of the
Postbellum era.

   Rutter dedicates a chapter to each creative work: two poetry collections
focused on Jack Johnson, Kevin Young’s *To Repel Ghosts: the Remix from the
Original Masters* (2005) and Adrian Matejka’s *The Big Smoke* (2013); Frank
X. Walker’s poetry collection *Isaac Murphy: I Dedicate This Ride* (2010);
Caryl Phillips’s novel *Dancing in the Dark* (2005); Jeffrey Renard Allen’s
novel *Song of the Shank* (2014); and Tyehimba Jess’s poetry collection *Olio
*(2016). In each chapter, Rutter examines how these creative works allow
contemporary writers to interrogate past representations of these
postbellum celebrities and to explore aspects of their inner lives,
motivations, and relationships that writers of that time—journalists,
novelists, biographers, and archivists— did not have access to or chore to
ignore. Rutter’s approach to these texts through textual analysis with
reference to archival representations is similar to her excellent approach
to literary works on Black baseball players in her important *Invisible
Ball of Dreams: Literary Representations of Baseball behind the Color Line*
(2018).

   As Rutter explains in her introduction, “Portraits of Fame, or, The Past
as Blueprint for the Present,” she utilizes Jacques Rancière’s conceptions
of heresy and dissensus to “read these poets’ and novelists’ juxtapositions
of archival materials with imaginative representations of historical
artists and athletes” (Rutter 12). But she also weaves into her discussion
a wide range of writers as well as recent sports and artistic Black
celebrities, to interrogate how much and how little white
readers/spectators continue to view/consume black performers through racist
lenses. In Young’s poem, “Black Jack (B. 31 March 1887),” for example,
Rutter observes that Young inverts “the white gaze in order to voice
Johnson’s imagined understanding of the multiple and conflicting ways he is
seen and understood: . . .. ‘I am black & they /won’t let me forget it.’”
(Rutter 34). According to Rutter, Young has captured “what W. E. B. Dubois
terms ‘double consciousness’” and “implies Johnson’s deep awareness of the
denigrating stereotypes projected on him” (Rutter 34).

   Later in her chapter on Young’s *To Repel Ghosts*, Rutter compares Jack
Johnson’s experiences facing “Great White Hope” Jess Willard and others in
the ring to Lebron James’s own “awareness of the double-edged nature of
Black athletic success” when he faced ridicule from “the right-wing media”
because he used his “celebrity platform to amplify the concerns of the
Black Lives Matter movement” and responded by launching his three-part
Showtime series *Shut Up and Dribble* (Rutter 37). Similarly, in examining
Matejka’s poetic portraits of Jack Johnson and his lovers and wives in *The
Big Smoke*, Rutter asserts, “In creatively recuperating Johnson alongside
his wives and lovers, Matejka suggests the ways in which his postbellum
experiences laid the blueprint for the experiences of today’s Black male
athletes” (Rutter 78).



   I particularly enjoyed reading Rutter’s insightful analysis of Tyehimba
Jess’s *Olio* in the concluding chapter of *Black Celebrity*, “Let This
Belting Be Our Unbinding.” Rutter explores how, for example, in his poem
“Millie McKoy & Christine McKoy Recall Meeting Blind Tom, 1877,”  Jess
invites readers, to read juxtaposed lines in different ways—vertically,
horizontally, and diagonally—to develop multiple meanings and add depth to
the reader’s understanding of the poem’s speakers, conjoined twins
exploited, like “Blind Tom ” by white managers to perform for white
audiences: “*Blind Tom never saw my two bodies   He could only hear the way
we were joined” *(Rutter 173-175).



   Over the course of *Black Celebrity* Rutter effectively connects the
creative representations of postbellum athletes and artists such as Jack
Johnson, Thomas Greene Wiggins, and the McKoy sisters with the experiences
of Black athletes and artists of more recent times, from athletes such as
Muhammad Ali, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, and Tiger Woods to artists such as
Beyoncé, Lil Naz X, and Donald Glover. Rutter’s ability to weave textual
and cultural analysis into her examination of these literary texts makes
her one of today’s most important scholars of sport literature and popular
culture.



Emily Ruth Rutter. *Black Celebrity: Contemporary Representations of
Postbellum Athletes and Artists. *University of Delaware. 2022.

Philip Wedge

University of Kansas
Remember to smell the roses as you recumber past

Duncan R. Jamieson, Ph. D.
Professor of History
Book Review Editor
*AETHLON: The Journal of Sport Literature*
Ashland University
Ashland, OH  44805
USA
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