Black Celebrity

As I was reading Emily Ruth Rutter’s Black Celebrity: Contemporary Representations of Postbellum Athletes and Artists, an unfolding media story threw into sharp relief the wide applicability and timeliness of this work. In March 2022, The New York Times erroneously published a photograph of tennis superstar Venus Williams alongside a feature about her sister Serena. Although Rutter analyzes literary representations of celebrities who lived between 1865 and 1919—that “liminal postbellum period” that “tentatively” extended “the promise of meritocratic advancement” (93) to some Black athletes and artists—she does refer to the Williams sisters and other twenty-first-century Black celebrities. Her monograph elegantly works toward “[c]ollapsing timelines and disrupting” (194) illusions that American history progressively and teleologically advances toward idyllic equality. Fundamentally, Rutter argues that the postbellum epoch is “pivotal to understanding the disjuncture between the American rhetoric of meritocracy and the realities of racial stratification, both within and beyond athletic and entertainment arenas” (2). The Times’s misidentification exemplifies Rutter’s argument: that postbellum discourse developed a societal script of paradoxical “racial hypervisibility and personal invisibility” that has “characterized” discourse around Black celebrity “ever since” (23). Her brilliant critical tapestry, which shows persuasively why literary fascination with postbellum Black celebrities emerged simultaneously to facile proclamations of a post-racial America, thus proffers literary and sociological frameworks for understanding both that era and our own.

Aesthetics · Art · Literature · Meritocracy · Rhetoric · Rutter · Sociology · Superstar · American Sports and Literature · Gender Studies · History · Law · Philosophy · Psychology · Sport and Mega-Event Impacts · Sports, Gender, and Society