A Cultural History of the 1950s Calypso Craze in the United States

FAIN: FA-58240-15

Shane Vogel
Trustees of Indiana University (Bloomington, IN 47405-7000)

This project will be the first book-length cultural history of the "calypso craze" that swept the United States in the late 1950s. "Black Performance and the 1950s Calypso Craze" tracks the popularity of calypso across different types of postwar middlebrow entertainment, including sound recordings, nightclub acts, television broadcasts, Broadway musicals, and films. Across these media, I ask how black performers used the professional, historical, and musical opportunities afforded by this mass cultural event to expand African American history and deepen its relationship to diasporic consciousness. This monograph will introduce original research and analysis that contributes to humanistic inquiry by illuminating the calypso craze as a complex cultural formation and an important moment of mid-century African American performance.

Associated Products

Stolen Time: Black Fad Performance and the Calypso Craze (Book)
Title: Stolen Time: Black Fad Performance and the Calypso Craze
Author: Shane Vogel
Abstract: In 1956 Harry Belafonte’s Calypso became the first LP to sell more than a million copies. For a few fleeting months, calypso music was the top-selling genre in the US—it even threatened to supplant rock and roll. Stolen Time provides a vivid cultural history of this moment and outlines a new framework—black fad performance—for understanding race, performance, and mass culture in the twentieth century United States. Vogel situates the calypso craze within a cycle of cultural appropriation, including the ragtime craze of 1890s and the Negro vogue of the 1920s, that encapsulates the culture of the Jim Crow era. He follows the fad as it moves defiantly away from any attempt at authenticity and shamelessly embraces calypso kitsch. Although white calypso performers were indeed complicit in a kind of imperialist theft of Trinidadian music and dance, Vogel argues, black calypso craze performers enacted a different, and subtly subversive, kind of theft. They appropriated not Caribbean culture itself, but the US version of it—and in so doing, they mocked American notions of racial authenticity. From musical recordings, nightclub acts, and television broadcasts to Broadway musicals, film, and modern dance, he shows how performers seized the ephemeral opportunities of the fad to comment on black cultural history and even question the meaning of race itself.
Year: 2018
Primary URL: https://www.worldcat.org/title/stolen-time-black-fad-performance-and-the-calypso-craze/oclc/1050282135&referer=brief_results
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9780226568300
Copy sent to NEH?: Yes

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