Performing Lena: Race, Representation, and the Postwar Autobiographical Performances of Lena Horne

Abstract

As a hypervisible black woman, whose overdetermined image was evoked by blacks and whites to represent racialized political interests on both sides of the color line throughout the long civil rights era, singer–actress Lena Horne was burdened with the requirement to perform blackness. In this dissertation, I explore Horne’s attempts to negotiate these performance expectations during the postwar, McCarthy, and civil rights eras. I contend that Horne self–fashioned a series of politicized black female personas that negotiated, challenged, and appropriated, with varied and often conflicting results, her Hollywood–manufactured glamour girl image in an effort to talk back to the dominant society and talk to her black audiences. Moreover, I argue that Horne’s autobiographical performances of politicized blackness reflect and shape the changing, always contested, definitions of black “authenticity” and radical protest politics between 1945 and 1965.