Performing Lena: Race, Representation, and the Postwar Autobiographical Performances of Lena Horne
Issue Date
2012-05-31Author
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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Show full item recordAbstract
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.
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