racial masquerade
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Anna May Wong and Cross-Racial Masquerade
The Chinese-American star, Anna May Wong, regularly appeared in films in roles that were non-Asian but always racialized. I am currently obsessed with how often imagery linked her with blackness, as in this Paramount Studio photograph by Eugene Robert Richee:
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F. Holland Day, Imperial Masculinity, and the Intimacy of Photography
Originally posted on The Photographic Situation: Shawn Michelle Smith reflects on F. Holland Day’s exotic look and intimate looking In the spring of 1901, F. Holland Day arrived unannounced at Frederick Evans’s studio in London, wearing a burnoose. Evans invited him in to be photographed, and the two collaborated in making a series of intimate portraits…
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Musings on Mr. Bojangles
In honor of Mr. Davis’s birthday, I present this comparison that I have been pondering since I stumbled across this image of Davis (top) on the web. Mr. Davis performing Mr. Bojangles here is an intriguing counterpoint to my discussion of Fred Astaire’s “Bojangles in Harlem” number in Swing Time (1936). [Props to Elizabeth Abel’s…
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The Congo (1914)
Quintessential example of white modernists’ appropriation of blackness: The Congo by Vachel Lindsay, a poem from 1914
CAMARA DIA HOLLOWAY 