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Louis Chude-Sokei. The Last "Darky": Bert Wtlliams, Black-OnBlack Minstrelsy, and the African Diaspora. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2006. Pp. ? + 278. $22.95.
Louis Chude-Sokei titles his study after Bert Williams, the famed-and infamous-symbol of blackface minstrelsy in America. But The LastDarkyis not a biography; rather, Chude-Sokei explores a range of materials from and about the Harlem Renaissance, within which he consistently locates Williams as an influence. Chude-Sokei argues that Williams, who was born in the West Indies, retained an offstage identity outside of and in contrast with both his African American colleagues and the "real coon" he portrayed onstage. From this multiply-identified position, in Chude-Sokei's reading, Williams both observed and embodied the "emergent black counterglobalization that was panAfricanism" (8). In his partnership with George Walker and throughout his history-making appearances with the Ziegfield Follies, WiUiams wore the blackface mask that won him the scorn of later generations who equated his stage image with the mechanisms of oppression. Chude-Sokei finds in this mask a more complex space of subversive play, and it is this subversive quality that he feels influenced Booker T. Washington, W E. B. Dubois, Marcus Garvey, Ralph Ellison, and numerous other political and artistic figures for decades after Williams's death. The Last "Darky" presents a series of theoretical explorations of the New Negro movement(s), followed by close readings of the WalkerWilliams production In Dahomey and the writings of (arguably Williamsinfluenced) Jamaican novelist and poet Claude McKay.
In eschewing the structure of traditional biography, Chude-Sokei declines to present linear narratives either of Williams's life, his career, or of the Harlem Renaissance. In fact, the book begins with an evocation of Williams's debut performance with the Ziegfield Follies in 1915, and its penultimate chapter focuses on the 1902 production of In Dahomey. Throughout the book, these two theatrical moments are evoked, partially unpacked, and...