Babylon Girls

Reviewed by: Babylon Girls: Black Women Performers and the Shaping of the Modern Emily Lordi Brown, Jayna . Babylon Girls: Black Women Performers and the Shaping of the Modern. Durham: Duke UP, 2008. The title of Jayna Brown's Babylon Girls—an important cultural history of African American women stage performers from 1890 to 1945—comes from the 1936 film adaptation of Marc Connelly's play, The Green Pastures. In one of the play/film's many heavy-handedly moralistic scenes, three black women dancers entertain the King of Babylon. As the women shimmy to a blasphemously swinging rendition of "Go Down, Moses," the king declares that "Nobody in the world can squirm like those Babylon girls!" (qtd. in Brown 236). The scene, as Brown reads it, signals a cultural shift: while black female performers had embodied the promises of modern mobility and agility in the first decades of the twentieth century, by the 1930s they had come to figure the corruptive seductions of urban life. This is a figuration we inherit, and Brown's study aims to correct it—not by representing these artists as heroically resilient and resistant, but by historicizing changing responses to their work. While it's easy to see how shows with names like A Trip to Coontown [1898] could be considered shameful objects of African American cultural history, recent scholarship has sought to reveal the subversive comic potential of seemingly self-denigrating black performance, and Brown's study partakes of this revisionist trend.1 What makes Babylon Girls unique is Brown's contention that black women dancers, who traveled internationally from the turn of the century, popularized new experiences of bodily habitation that were both raced and gendered. In engaging, intensely eloquent prose, Brown asserts that black women's performances therefore shaped transatlantic articulations of modern selfhood. Her work thus challenges the male bias and American-centrism native to most studies of blackface minstrelsy and the formation of vernacular culture. To describe the dancers' artistry, Brown appropriates Walter Benjamin's concept of the flâneur, who must "glance in all directions" to navigate the modern city street. The notion that black women performers "glance in all directions" is meant to amend the paradigm of black consciousness as solely double. According to Brown, double-consciousness fails to account for African American women's uniquely complex "relationship to racial and national belonging" (17). While this is a compelling point, Brown's study does not offer a substantive case for understanding black female performers as flaneurs. Such an argument depends on readings of artists' specific choreographic or performative choices, and Brown rarely performs such analyses. It may not be possible to recover these artists' ideas about their work; Brown's archive yields few of these women's names, much less their voices. Still, it is not necessary to recover interiority in order to make claims about artistic intentionality; an artist's choices are intentional, in that they could have been otherwise, and thus they carry meanings that may be read. Yet readings of specific dance movements [End Page 1027] are largely absent from Babylon Girls. Again, the archive's limits may explain this lack: very little footage of these shows remains. What Brown successfully proves is that black women's stage performances must be read as "multiply signifying" (15). This is an argument for a particular kind of critical practice: one that understands the meanings of black performance as more than double (sell-out vying with subversion), and as always contingent on context. If Brown is short on information about dancers' artistic practices, she is well attuned to how their movements moved. Tracing her subjects through Britain, Europe, Russia, and various theaters in Manhattan, Brown demonstrates how conventions like the picaninny chorus, roles like Topsy, and dances like the cakewalk traveled to various performance sites and bodies, and invariably changed meaning in transit. Babylon Girls begins with a chapter called "'Little Black Me': The Touring Picaninny Choruses." Here Brown discusses the troupes of black child performers who toured Britain and Europe over the turn of the century, and whose mixture of "grotesquery and grace" would inform the dances of women performers for the next few decades (246). What

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