<div dir="ltr"><div>All,</div><div>Please find below and attached Emily Rutter's <i>Black Celebrity, </i>reviewed by Phil Wedge.</div><div>Thanks,</div><div>Duncan</div><div><br></div><div>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in 0in 10pt;line-height:115%;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><i><span style="font-size:12pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"Times New Roman",serif">Black
Celebrity: Contemporary Representations of Postbellum Athletes and Artists.<span></span></span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in 0in 10pt;line-height:115%;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><span style="font-size:12pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"Times New Roman",serif">Reviewed by Philip Wedge, University of Kansas<span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in 0in 10pt;line-height:115%;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><span style="font-size:12pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"Times New Roman",serif"><span> </span>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). <i>Black Celebrity</i>
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.<span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in 0in 10pt;line-height:115%;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><span style="font-size:12pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"Times New Roman",serif"><span> </span>Rutter
dedicates a chapter to each creative work: two poetry collections focused on
Jack Johnson, Kevin Young’s <i>To Repel Ghosts: the Remix from the Original
Masters</i> (2005) and Adrian Matejka’s <i>The Big Smoke</i> (2013); Frank X.
Walker’s poetry collection <i>Isaac Murphy: I Dedicate This Ride</i> (2010);
Caryl Phillips’s novel <i>Dancing in the Dark</i> (2005); Jeffrey Renard
Allen’s novel <i>Song of the Shank</i> (2014); and Tyehimba Jess’s poetry
collection <i>Olio </i>(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 <i>Invisible Ball of
Dreams: Literary Representations of Baseball behind the Color Line</i> (2018).<span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in 0in 10pt;line-height:115%;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><span style="font-size:12pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"Times New Roman",serif"><span> </span>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). <span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in;line-height:115%;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><span style="font-size:12pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"Times New Roman",serif"><span> </span>Later in her chapter on Young’s <i>To Repel
Ghosts</i>, 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 <i>Shut Up and Dribble</i> (Rutter 37). Similarly,
in examining Matejka’s poetic portraits of Jack Johnson and his lovers and
wives in <i>The Big Smoke</i>, 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). <span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in;line-height:115%;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><span style="font-size:12pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"Times New Roman",serif"><span> </span><span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in;line-height:115%;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><span style="font-size:12pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"Times New Roman",serif"><span> </span>I particularly enjoyed reading Rutter’s
insightful analysis of Tyehimba Jess’s <i>Olio</i> in the concluding chapter of
<i>Black Celebrity</i>, “Let This Belting Be Our Unbinding.” Rutter explores
how, for example, in his poem “Millie McKoy & Christine McKoy Recall
Meeting Blind Tom, 1877,” <span> </span>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: “<i>Blind Tom never saw my
two bodies<span> </span>He could only hear the way
we were joined” </i>(Rutter 173-175).<span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in;line-height:115%;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><span style="font-size:12pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"Times New Roman",serif"><span> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in;line-height:115%;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><span style="font-size:12pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"Times New Roman",serif"><span> </span>Over the course of <i>Black Celebrity</i>
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.<span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in;line-height:115%;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><span style="font-size:12pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"Times New Roman",serif"><span> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify;margin:0in 0in 10pt;line-height:115%;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><span style="font-size:12pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"Times New Roman",serif">Emily Ruth Rutter. <i>Black Celebrity: Contemporary
Representations of Postbellum Athletes and Artists. </i>University of Delaware.
2022.<span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in;line-height:115%;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><span style="font-size:12pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"Times New Roman",serif">Philip Wedge<span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in;line-height:115%;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><span style="font-size:12pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"Times New Roman",serif">University of Kansas<span></span></span></p>
</div><div><div><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_signature" data-smartmail="gmail_signature">Remember to smell the roses as you recumber past<br><br>Duncan R. Jamieson, Ph. D.<br>Professor of History<br>Book Review Editor<br><i>AETHLON: The Journal of Sport Literature</i><br>Ashland University<br>Ashland, OH 44805<br>USA<br></div></div></div></div>