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Jun. 30 | 2012 Bode-Pearson Prize
Nominations for the 2012 Bode-Pearson Prize for Outstanding Contributions to American Studies due
Jun. 30 | 2012 Mary C. Turpie Prize
Nominations for the 2012 Mary C. Turpie Prize for Outstanding Contributions to American Studies Teaching, Advising, and Program Development due
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Resources: Abstracts of American Studies Dissertations
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Forbes, Camille F. "Performed Fictions: The Onstage and Offstage Lives of Bert Williams," Harvard University, January 2002.
Bert Williams was a leading black comedian of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He performed with partner George Walker in black musical theatre, and when Walker retired in 1909 after contracting syphilis, Williams performed solo in vaudeville, as a featured act in Florenz Ziegfeld’s Follies, and later as the star of his own show, Under the Bamboo Tree. This work is a historical narrative in which I describe Williams’s solo career, discussing this onstage and offstage lives as performances. I utilize theories of performativity to analyze the embodied (onstage) and discursive (offstage) interventions in which Williams engaged. I illustrate that Williams’s performative interventions evidence his efforts towards self-definition as he resisted what I term the oppositional discourses of minstrelsy and representation with the white and black societies, respectively. His interventions were a means of establishing a degree of control over this image while responding to the demands of his disparate publics.
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