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

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    Issue Date
    2012-05-31
    Author
    Williams, Megan E.
    Publisher
    University of Kansas
    Format
    267 pages
    Type
    Dissertation
    Degree Level
    Ph.D.
    Discipline
    American Studies
    Rights
    This item is protected by copyright and unless otherwise specified the copyright of this thesis/dissertation is held by the author.
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    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.
    URI
    http://hdl.handle.net/1808/10317
    Collections
    • American Studies Dissertations and Theses [52]
    • Dissertations [4454]

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    Contact KU ScholarWorks
    785-864-8983
    KU Libraries
    1425 Jayhawk Blvd
    Lawrence, KS 66045
    785-864-8983

    KU Libraries
    1425 Jayhawk Blvd
    Lawrence, KS 66045
    Image Credits
     

     

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