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BULLDAGGERS, PANSIES, AND CHOCOLATE BABIES: PERFORMANCE, RACE, AND SEXUALITY IN THE HARLEM RENAISSANCE. By James F. Wilson. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010; pp. 262.
On any given Saturday night in the early 1920s, frequenters of Harlem's rent-party circuit might find jazz pianist and composer Thomas "Fats" Waller perfecting his skills as an entertainer at one of the many private residences hosting fêtes for profit. As James Wilson documents in his carefully researched and cogently written Bulldaggers, Pansies, and Chocolate Babies: Performance, Race, and Sexuality in the Harlem Renaissance, for Waller and many of the revelers who attended them, Harlem's rent parties proved to be significant sites of rehearsal: notably, for transgressing and subverting the boundaries of race and class, as well as gender and sexuality. Indeed, in this study, Wilson turns to the putative Harlem Renaissance to investigate the ways that "depictions of blackness and whiteness, male and female, homosexual and heterosexual, highbrow and lowbrow merged and coalesced in the theater and performances of the 1920s and 1930s" (3). It is, in part, a project of recuperation that focuses on plays-including Edward Sheldon and Charles MacArthur's Lulu Belle (1926) and Wallace Thurman and William Jourdan Rapp's Harlem (1929)-and figures-such as the inimitable performer Gladys Bentley-that have previously received little critical attention. Effortlessly blending historical, cultural, and performance analyses with biographical information, Wilson also offers fresh insights into more notable performers and events like Florence Mills, Ethel Waters, and the Hamilton Lodge's and Rockland Palace's drag balls. Across...