Black Celebrity

EMILY RUTH RUTTER is an associate professor of English at Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana. She is the author of Invisible Ball of Dreams: Literary Representations of Baseball behind the Color Line and The Blues Muse: Race, Gender, and Musical Celebrity in American Poetry, as well as co-editor of Revisiting the Elegy in the Black Lives Matter Era.

• Introduction: Portraits of Black Fame, or The Past as Blueprint for the Present       Chapter 1: "my black body / thrown free": The Legacy of Jack Johnson in Kevin Young's To Repel Ghosts: The Remix from the Original Masters                Chapter 2: "More of a man than you": The Many Faces of Jack Johnson in Adrian Matejka's The Big Smoke                                         Chapter 3: "The Sting of Race and Sport": Revivifying Isaac Burns Murphy in Frank X Walker's Isaac Murphy: I Dedicate This Ride                            Chapter 4: "the overwhelming evidence of his artistry": Wiping Away the Minstrel Mask in Caryl Phillips's Dancing in the Dark                            Chapter 5: "Blind Tom, Musical Prodigy of the Age": Unrecoverability in Jeffery Renard Allen's Song of the Shank                                     Chapter 6: "Let this belting be our / unbinding": Reconceptualizing Black Entertainment in Tyehimba Jess's Olio                                      Bibliography                                              Endnotes                                              Index