![Sample our Humanities journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5939/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Humanities.jpg"})
Abstract
This article investigates mid-century singer/dancer/actor Eartha Kitt’s ambiguous racial aesthetics, which ran the gamut from Eastern and Western Oriental sound and embodiment in dance, Afro-Latina voicings in song, and feline impersonation. Borrowing a figure from music theory, the author calls this performative aesthetic strategy “racial modulation.” She argues that while Kitt’s staged modulations of the black/white “yella gal” into “international” registers subverted white audiences’ assumed access to Kitt’s performing body, it also forged intimacies and associations with Asia and Latin America – geographies that, at the height of Kitt’s career, were implicitly linked to both U.S. Cold War imperialism and Third World decolonizing movements.
Acknowledgments
My thanks to guest editor Uri McMillan for including this essay in the special issue, and for the generous feedback of anonymous reviewers and editorial collective readers. In addition, I thank Ramón Rivera-Servera, Joshua Chambers-Letson, and Rhaisa Williams for their substantive feedback on earlier versions of the manuscript.
Note on contributor
Colleen Kim Daniher is a Center for Humanistic Inquiry Fellow at Amherst College. Her teaching and research interests include critical race studies, visual cultural studies, and Asian diasporic theatre and performance. She holds a Ph.D. in Performance Studies from Northwestern University, and was a Presidential Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Theatre Arts and Performance Studies at Brown University. She is currently completing a book manuscript that investigates how racial ambiguity came to be both an aesthetic strategy and a performative mode of racialized sight in twentieth-century transnational American culture. Her research has been supported by fellowships from the American Society for Theatre Research, the Social Sciences and Research Council of Canada, and the American Theatre and Drama Society. Recent and forthcoming publications include writing in emisférica, Theatre Journal, Modern Drama, and Canadian Theatre Review.
Notes
1 Notable exceptions to this include a chapter devoted to Kitt in Royster (Citation2012) and Daphne Brooks’s article on Kitt and Nina Simone in Cornbread and Cuchifritos (Citation2011).
2 In contrast, see Shane Vogel’s theorization of Horne’s impersona in The Scene of Harlem Cabaret: Race, Sexuality, Performance (Citation2009) and Anne Anlin Cheng's articulation of Baker’s surface enactments of skin in Second Skin: Josephine Baker and the Modern Surface (Citation2011).
3 For more on the critical transnational (or “internationalist”) thrust of this history, see Dudziak (Citation2000) and Eschen (Citation1997).
4 Although “Uska Dara” was not featured in the original Broadway staging of New Faces, it had been part of Kitt’s cabaret repertoire since 1951 and inspired some of the references and sounds in her other solo number, “Monotonous,” which was written especially for Kitt and became her breakout song in the show. As two important prongs in Kitt’s 1952–54 multi-format rise to international fame across cabaret, stage, radio, and film, both “Monotonous” and “Uska Dara” played critical roles in her stardom. For more on Kitt’s time in Turkey and the impact of these travels on her subsequent cabaret act, see her autobiographies (Citation1956b, 216, 225), (1976, 168–204), and (1989, 94–110, 111–120). See also Williams (Citation2013, 119–125).
5 Indeed, Kitt’s Arabesque costuming in the film would recur in her cabaret act and was memorably captured in George Silk’s 1955 shoot of Kitt live in performance for LIFE Magazine.
6 Ideas of the veil and veiling circulate throughout Kitt’s body of work, from her 1954 appearance in the televised version of Oscar Wilde’s Salomé to her 1978 appearance in Timbuktu, discussed here. Much has been written about the significance of the veil as a theorization of double consciousness within African American culture. See Du Bois (Citation2009 [1903]) and Brooks’s chapter, “Divas and Diasporic Consciousness: Song, Dance, and New Negro Womanhood in the Veil” (Citation2006, 281–348).
7 During a performance of the song in 2008 at the Cheltenham Jazz Festival, Kitt tells this story: “Some of you might know that when my daughter Kitt was three years old, I took her to Japan with me on a tour … for about three or four or five months. And I came across an entertainer who translated Rosemary Clooney songs … and Eartha Kitt songs … into Japanese” (Kitt Citation2008). The singer Kitt is likely referring to is Eri, whose English pop covers and 1952 hit version of “Come-On-a-My-House” would have been well known in Japan the 1960s. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v = 061SMKe5WzY&list = RD061SMKe5WzY#t = 59.
8 This point grapples with studies by Carby (Citation1999, 7–21) and Griffin (Citation2001) of the blues genre, and white audience’s expectations that it report on the unmediated ‘truth’ of black working-class women’s experience. See also Brown’s chapter (Citation2008, 189–237) on primitivist modernism, anti-modernism, and the repudiation of black chorus-line dancers.
9 Comparing the iconography of Saartjie Bartman and Afong Moy, Cheng writes: “The primitive black woman is all about exposed nakedness, while the ‘Oriental’ woman is all about sartorial excess, the excessive covering and ornamentation that supposedly symptomizes the East’s overly developed, effeminized, corrupt, and declining civilization” (Citation2011, 150–151).
10 In addition to Brooks’s formulation of “afro-alienation” in Bodies in Dissent, we could include Vogel’s im-persona, Cheng’s second skin, and Uri McMillan’s embodied avatars. Historian Darlene Clark Hine’s notion of black women’s “cultures of dissemblance” offers a slightly different, but important, perspective (Citation1989, 912–920).
11 This performance reconstruction is based on a series of YouTube videos of Kitt’s television appearance on “Festival” (Kitt Citation1970). Kitt’s order of appearance is evident by tracking her costume changes and stage continuities from entrance to final exit.
12 I make this claim not to universalize listening audiences, but to situate the 1953 recording within the conversation about Kitt and the multilingual novelty song I have already made. On RCA Victor Presents, “Angelitos Negros” is one of six other non-English songs bookended by an opening and closing song in English. Moreover, within the white, Anglo U.S.-American listening market for “exotica” (see Adinolfi [Citation2008]) the “Latin craze” played significant role.
13 The story tells the tale of a pair of single mothers – one black and one white – and each of their daughters. The white mother, Bea, is a recent widow who employs Delilah, the black mother, as a live-in housekeeper while Bea builds a career to care for her family. Bea’s daughter, Jessie, and Delilah’s daughter, Peola, grow up side-by-side, and eventually, the “light-skinned” Peola rejects her mother to pass as a white woman. In typical tragic mulatta narrative fashion, Peola’s decision brings tragic consequences: a heartbroken Delilah dies, and Peola realizes too late what her mother meant to her. In 1934, Imitation of Life was turned into a film starring Claudette Colbert as Bea, Louise Beavers as Delilah, and Fredi Washington as Peola (Stahl Citation1934); another film adaptation appeared in 1959, starring Lana Turner, Juanita Moore, and Susan Kohner (Sirk Citation1959). For an analysis of passing in Imitation of Life, see Smith (Citation1994).
14 Kitt recounts that the album was actually recorded at the Chi Chi Club in Palm Springs, but was renamed by RCA since the Plaza (and Kitt’s longstanding affiliation with the Persian Room) was better known.
15 My thanks to the anonymous reader who pushed me to clarify this point and the ones that follow.
16 See Adinolfi (Citation2008, 116–117) for a whole section devoted to Kitt.
17 “Waray, Waray” is a Tagalog folk song Kitt sings earlier in her set, and therefore already familiar to her audience at the Chi Chi by the time it returns again orchestrally at the very end of “How Could You Believe Me.”
18 I do not use these categories lightly; Kitt’s appearance as Catwoman in the original television Batman and later 1980s reinvention as a disco club queen cements her status as a pop/camp figure. For more on Batman and the relationship between pop and camp, see Sasha Torres (Citation1996, 238–255). On the assumed white gay maleness of camp artifice, see McMillan (Citation2014).
19 The politics of transfiguration “emphasizes the emergence of qualitatively new desires, social relations, and modes of association within the racial community of interpretation and resistance and between that group and its erstwhile oppressors. … This is not a counter-discourse but a counterculture that defiantly reconstructs its own critical, intellectual, and moral genealogy in a partially hidden public sphere of its own” (Gilroy Citation1993, 37–38).