Disintegrating the Musical

Arthur Knight is Associate Professor of American Studies and English at the College of William & Mary. He is coeditor of Soundtrack Available: Essays on Film and Popular Music, published by Duke University Press.

• Acknowledgments Introduction: Disintegrating the Musical 1. Wearing and Tearing the Mask: Blacks on and in Blackface, Live 2. “Fool Acts”: Cinematic Conjunctions of White Blackface and Black Performance 3. Indefinite Talks: Blacks in Blackface, Filmed 4. Black Folk Sold: Hollywood’s Black-Cast Musicals 5. “Aping” Hollywood: Deformation and Mastery in The Duke is Tops and Swing! 6. Jammin’ the Blues: The Sight of Jazz Coda: Bamboozled? Notes Bibliography Index

“African American influence on American music is legendary, but not until Arthur Knight’s Disintegrating the Musical have African American contributions to the Hollywood musical been put in the spotlight. Finally, we have a first-rate book offering a new slant on everything from blackface and Paul Robeson to the film version of Porgy and Bess.”-Rick Altman, University of Iowa “Knight’s fine book is compelling reading that takes black cinema scholarship into new unmapped issues and territories. Notable is Knight's thoroughly innovative and nuanced discussion of ‘blackface’ (and its ‘whiteface’ counterpoint) and how blacks deployed forms of ‘black blackface,’ to discover pain, pleasure and irony in its complexities. Importantly, Knight charts the power of black musical performance, illuminating the schizophrenic disjuncture between the pervasive influence of the black Jazz sound and the simultaneous erasure, segregation, or devaluation of the African American musician's visual presence in mainstream cinema. Disintegrating The Musical casts its arguments in bold, lucid strokes, standing out as a solid contribution to the fields of cinema and performance studies and Jazz scholarship.”-Ed Guerrero, New York University