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Celestial bodies: Black women, Hollywood, and the fallacy of stardom

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Celestial bodies: Black women, Hollywood, and the fallacy of stardom

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Content Celestial Bodies:
Black Women, Hollywood, and the Fallacy of Stardom
by
Philana E. Payton
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
Cinematic Arts
(Critical Studies)
August 2020

ii

--For Mom
(My Profound Illumination)

iii
Acknowledgments

I truly believe that my blessings and accomplishments are merely a reflection of the love,
support, and prayers of my community—near and far; earthly and ancestral; past, present, and
future; known and unknown. I remain humbled and grateful.

When I began to think about getting my PhD, I envisioned the kind of dissertation committee
that I wanted. In real life, my actual committee far surpassed anything I could have imagined and
I could not be more fortunate. Thank you Dr. Kara Keeling, Dr. Todd Boyd, Dr. Christine
Acham, and Dr. Francille Wilson for guiding me through this program and project. I am so
thankful for your flexibility and, most of all, your care. Individually, each of you have affirmed
your belief in me and my work in ways that I never knew I needed. Your unyielding confidence
in my capabilities have sustained me and pushed me to work harder. I hope to continue to make
you all proud.

Thank you to the many colleagues, students, and professors that I have encountered over the last
seven years who, in their own ways, affirmed my presence as unique and necessary. Thank you
to all of the Black SCA students that I have been able to witness grow and learn. There is always
more work to be done, however you all have made a difference and it was a privilege to be a part
of that process. To everyone who supported the African American Cinema Society and the SCA
Diversity Council—thank you and never stop. Thank you to my LA day ones: Ariana Andrade
and Kieran Medina—even though we never got the tattoo, I will never forget (barely) surviving
our exams united. The MA would have been so wack without you two! Thank you to the many
incredible USC graduate students who I have organized and shared space with—the number is
small but incredibly powerful. Thank you for trusting me. Thank you BLK MKT Vintage for
helping me establish my archive. Thanks #WritingBlackness for the accountability and to my
friends in Amsterdam for helping me develop a healthy work/play residency routine.

Thank you to my professors and peers at Claflin University who believed in me and gave me
room to grow. Special thanks to the Mass Communications Department, Dr. Melissa Pearson,
Dr. Stephanie Spaulding, and Mrs. Tisdale. Also, my undergraduate experience would not have
been as epic without my hearts—Ashley Davis, Fierra Staley, and Jourdan Peters-Solee. Special
thanks to my Lambda fam, the ladies of the Gammu Nu Chapter of Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority,
Darniqua Washington, and Kendall Sutton. Thank you to my MLK and Mount Zion family.

It will take a full length book to describe my journey as a doctoral student, however for now I
want to thank all of the folks who showed up for me and supported me in various ways over the
last seven years. For those I forget, please charge my head and not my heart—you are invaluable.

TBA, #CMB, #WeAllWeHad—Jheanelle Brown, Rachel Summers, Lishan Amde, Janice
Duncan, Sophia Allison, Merawi Gerima, Darol Kaye, and Russell Hamilton—I am so grateful
for our communion and the vision we created that I believe continues to impact the work we all
bring forth. I feel blessed to have been a part of something so special and I am so excited for
what the future holds for y’all. Never forget: The voice we sing is an echo.

iv
Where would I be without my SQUAAAAAAAD?!?! Definitely not here and in one piece. To
Brooklyne Gipson, Courtney Cox, Marissiko Wheaton, and Jasmin Young words cannot express
how tremendously grateful and lucky I feel to have you all. I admire you all so much and am
appreciative of the love and support I have received so consistently. Your brilliance is absolutely
unmatched and academia IS NOT READY! Love you all forever!

Thank you Tiffany Fuller for your consistent love and vulnerability—you have stories the world
needs. Thank you Mahaliyah O for your beautiful spirit and creative energy that continues to
keep me on my toes—when the revolution arrives, include me in your plans. Thank you Halima
Lucas for the unsolicited, yet extremely necessary humor and unending care—you inspire me
and don’t forget to contractually require a PLUS TWO always. Thank you to the beautiful people
I have connected with in LA. Special thanks to Jamilah Shabazz and Toyin Akintujoye for being
perfect at the perfect time.

Thank you to my family, near and far, who have never stopped believing in me. All my folks in
Georgia, Beloit, and Milwaukee—I pray this work makes you proud. Thank you to ALL of my
mom’s friends who have celebrated with me my entire life—you all are a necessary part of this
journey. Thank you Malika Harris for being the best friend I never knew I needed—your
friendship has been crucial to my growth. Love you shawty. Thank you to Aaliyah Waajid and
the Waajid Family for your never-ending kindness and support.

I have been blessed with the most incredible siblings! Thank you Brandon Payton-Carrillo for
pouring invaluable knowledge and creativity into me very early—you made space for me in your
world and I was forever changed. Thank you Desiree Miller for the jokes and genuine love—the
safety I feel with you has shaped my conception of love and it’s something I never want to be
without. Thank you Khalia Payton for being both my headache but also my whole entire heart—
we will never be without each other. Thank you Dad for your constant motivation and
affirmation of my purpose—I’ve heard you and will always love you. Thank you Grams for
being my #1 from Day 1—the lessons you have taught me remain my most essential knowledge.

Thank you my clutch shooter, who came through like Cheryl Miller in ‘83, Arda Mohamed—I
have no words to describe how much you mean to me. Although we’ve known each other for
lifetimes, this go-round is something special. I know how much God loves me because I know
you, and I am in awe. You are such a blessing and I only hope that I am able to return the favor
100 times over. XOXO.

Lastly, this work is dedicated to my mother—Kendall Johnson. I still cannot believe that I have
to experience this life without your physical presence. Everything that I am—the writer, scholar,
activist, lover, fighter, artist, friend, colleague, teacher—is because of you. Like the women in
this text and their mothers, I did not realize how you indelibly shaped my relationship to the
world and equipped me with the tools to achieve my dreams, but I am forever indebted. In your
physical absence, I have been changed. Nonetheless, I am strengthened and encouraged that my
living will never be in vain. Thank you Mommy—this is for you and all of the women you
carried with you. “To whom much is given, much is required.” Bet.

v
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments ........................................................................................................................ iii
Abstract ......................................................................................................................................... vi
Introduction ................................................................................................................................... 1
Chapter 1: Lena/Dorothy ........................................................................................................... 32
Chapter 2: Dorothy/Eartha ........................................................................................................ 70
Chapter 3: Eartha/Diahann ..................................................................................................... 113
Chapter 4: Whitney .................................................................................................................. 169
Coda: The Ghosts of our Mothers ........................................................................................... 226
Bibliography .............................................................................................................................. 240

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Abstract

“Celestial Bodies: Black Women, Hollywood, and the Fallacy of Stardom,” interrogates
the relationship between Black women performers and the Hollywood entertainment industry.
My central argument is that the strategies of attaining fame and the methods of survival once
inside the industry for Black women were/are antithetical to the statutes that define stardom,
according to the field of star studies. Subsequently, I propose an alternative epistemological
framework, attuned to the experiential specificities of Black leading women in Hollywood.
Rather than being stars, I contend that Black leading women exceed the traditional star
framework, and are instead, Supernovae. The application of the Supernovae framework is
contingent on three interdependent aspects. First, how leading Black women chose to write
themselves into history, whether through autobiography or interviews, and situate themselves
within narratives contingent on their experiences as racialized beings. Second, their assertion of
cultural allegiance through various capacities, despite the many ways Hollywood sought to
regulate their public and privates lives by means of structural racism. And lastly, how they
leveraged performance as a means of self-fashioning, negotiation, and/or survival through
methods that were expressed on, but not limited to, the stage and screen.
In this project, I compare and contrast the lives and careers of Nina Mae McKinney, Lena
Horne, Dorothy Dandridge, and Eartha Kitt and discuss the personal and professional
performance tactics they necessarily developed during the height of the studio system era. I then
suggest that these methods span across time and bodies, so I conclude with analyses centering
Diahann Carroll and, finally, Whitney Houston as exemplary models of the Supernova
framework. The introduction and chapter one offer a historical contextualization of Hollywood
stardom, based on its definition and development as a key factor in the sustainability and

vii
profitability of the Hollywood film industry. McKinney, Horne, and Dandridge serve as case
studies to illustrate the inapplicability of stardom’s primary characteristics to describe their
experiences working as leading performers in Hollywood. Chapter two conducts several in depth
textual analyses of screen performances by Dandridge and Kitt to demonstrate their respective
performative responses as a result of limited role availability and confining tropes, despite their
mainstream popularity. Chapter three explicates how Kitt and Carroll challenged dominant
assumptions that deemed them apolitical because of their mainstream acceptability and beauty,
by explicitly asserting their cultural allegiance through activism and role intentionality. Chapter
four delineates how Whitney Houston attempted to adopt the performative strategies of the
aforementioned women later into her career, and the subsequent retaliation by mainstream
audiences and the entertainment industry to deter these efforts. The conclusion explores the
theoretical and practical implications of Black women as Supernovae and their contribution
towards creating alternative ways of being that promote wellness and futurity, despite the
constant threat of disenfranchisement and premature death. Overall this work addresses the
historic undertheorization of Black women in the field of cinema and media and asserts a
necessary reevaluation of theoretical concepts and terminology that have been proven as
fundamentally insufficient.

1
Introduction

In 1929, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) produced the all-Black musical Hallelujah
directed by King Vidor. Nina Mae McKinney played the film’s lead female character Chick, a
wayward opportunist looking to strike it rich primarily by means of seduction. For decades, this
film has been used to discuss early Hollywood’s unimaginative renderings of Black images and
their reliance on stereotypes that perpetuated false generalizations of Black folks as lazy, prone
to criminality, fanatically religious, and/or uncontrollably hypersexual. Although this film
unquestionably exemplifies Hollywood’s investment in flat, monolithic characterizations of
blackness, the conversation centering stereotypes and the impact of “positive/negative” images
has by now been addressed ad nauseam. More recent Black film scholarship has dispelled the
need to propagate the kind of dichotomous relationship that often eliminates the complexity of
the human condition and, in the case of Black images, upholds the falsities associated with the
politics of respectability. Instead, I argue that the legacy of Nina Mae McKinney, and her
Hollywood career, bring to bear new questions regarding stardom, Black women, and the
Hollywood film industry.
Described by Donald Bogle and Charlene Register as the first black actress in a leading
role produced by a major studio, Nina Mae McKinney is typically regarded as one the first Black
Hollywood Stars.
1
As a result of colorism, her light skin and European features mostly excluded
her from being easily relegated to minor roles like that of a domestic, which was most common
for Black women featured in Hollywood films at the time. As Nicole Fleetwood asserts,

1
Donald Bogle, Bright Boulevards, Bold Dreams: The Story of Black Hollywood, Reprint
edition (New York: One World, 2006); Charlene B. Regester, African American Actresses: The
Struggle for Visibility, 1900–1960 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010).

2
“colorism cannot be divorced from the institution of slavery,” therefore Hollywood’s persistent
adaptation of this logic reinforces how skin complexion determines value.
2
Fleetwood explains
these implications further, stating, “The terror of colorism as a visual regime is rooted in the
history of white rape and torture of black bodies and a larger racial structure of subjugating
blacks as cheap and replaceable laboring bodies.”
3
As a Black woman, McKinney was
automatically situated in opposition to white womanhood and relegated as an Other according to
Hollywood’s allegiance to racial hierarchy. Her blackness rendered her fungible and without
much value. However, her light-skinned complexion also disrupted the supposed fixity of that
hierarchy; since colorism was the result of miscegenation under chattel slavery, it inherently
complicated the idea that desirability was only reserved for white bodies. The intracommunal
aspect of colorism is also significant for the ways in which white supremacy intentionally
reserved certain means of access and privilege for Black people with lighter complexions, as a
mechanism to encourage competition, dissension, and envy. Upon entering Hollywood,
therefore, McKinney was considered “exceptional” because she was unable to occupy the
subservient roles that had historically been reserved for darker skinned Black actors; nevertheless
she was also prohibited from roles where she could have been mistaken for white or
“accidentally” deemed desirable by white co-stars and/or audiences.
Following her leading role in Hallelujah, McKinney’s career would be relatively
unremarkable by comparison to Hollywood’s standard for stars. Equally unremarkable and
unfortunate would be her very early death. After receiving accolades for her role as Chick in
Hallelujah, McKinney was offered a five-year contractual agreement with Metro-Goldwyn-

2
Nicole R. Fleetwood, Troubling Vision: Performance, Visuality, and Blackness (Chicago:
University Of Chicago Press, 2011), 75.
3
Ibid., 75.

3
Mayer which, according to Richard Dyer’s Hollywood economic model, was standard protocol
for studios interested in making someone into a star. In McKinney’s case however, she would go
on to only appear briefly in one other studio film between 1928 and 1935. In 1936 she performed
in two shorts alongside The Nicholas Brothers, and the rest of her career was relegated to
nightclub performances in the U.S. and overseas and a few relatively notable race films. By the
end of the 1940s she had aged past her youthful desirability and, therefore, became legible and
subsequently cast in a few small, mostly unbilled, Hollywood domestic roles. Eventually
McKinney disappeared from films entirely and upon her death at the age of 54, the certificate of
death stated her occupation as a “domestic to private families.”
The known details of McKinney’s personal and professional life are marked by her
existence in the world as a Black woman. She was born in Lancaster, South Carolina and raised
by family members who, for generations, worked as domestics for Col. LeRoy Springs and his
family.
4
As an early adolescent she joined her parents in New York and soon began her career in
entertainment as a chorus line dancer for the stage show Blackbirds. Ironically, McKinney’s
photo currently hangs in the Lancaster courthouse alongside other “noteworthy” Lancaster
residents like, former President, anti-abolitionist, and signer of the Indian Removal Act, Andrew
Jackson, Dr. J. Marion Sims, the “father of modern gynecology” who experimented on enslaved
Black women without anesthesia, and Col. Elliot White Springs, a descendent of the same
Springs family McKinney and her family worked under for generations.
5
Even in death,
McKinney is marked and enshrined amongst those who avidly denied the humanity of her
existence. To be “marked,” emphasizes Black female subjectivity as both psychologically and
physically entangled within dispossession and fungibility. Adeptly explained in Saidiya

4
Regester, African American Actresses, 41.
5
Ibid., 42.

4
Hartman’s latest work Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social
Upheaval,
Two-and-a-half centuries of being used, taken, broken, and loved by white folks in
whatever manner they decided and by whatever means that suited their fancy, with blows
or lashes, with gifts of the mistress's cast-offs or promises of manumission, with curses
and sweet talk, with threats and whispers of love in the night--this intimate history of
slavery--had indelibly marked black women…
6

Nina Mae McKinney’s experience in the entertainment industry, and later in Hollywood, was
emblematic of the institution’s inability to address and contend with the history of chattel slavery
and its commitment to the politics of Jim Crow. Furthermore, her relationship to Hollywood and
its economic model bring the supposed universal logics of the star system into immediate flux.
McKinney’s inability to access the privileges of stardom became indicative of the Black
leading woman’s experience in Hollywood. Also, her relative absence within the archival ledger
further legitimizes the systematic erasure of her experience from record. By the early 1940s,
Lena Horne would emerge as Hollywood’s first official attempt at creating a Black star. Dorothy
Dandridge would follow behind her in the fifties after the success of Carmen Jones (Otto
Preminger, 1954). Still, despite their mainstream name recognition, these women never actually
embodied “Hollywood stardom.” McKinney, Horne, Dandridge and many other leading Black
women performers reside in a performative genealogy where their physical bodies come to
recognition by way of usage and production but never investment. By considering this basic
standard of operation within early Hollywood, as well as the tenants that grew what became
known as the Hollywood Studio System, this analysis problematizes the applicability of the term
“stardom” for Black women through a reconsideration of how the afterlife of slavery and

6
Saidiya Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social
Upheaval, 1 edition (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2019), 52.

5
Hollywood’s allegiance to capitalism impacted their ability to access the privileges and benefits
therein.
Essentially, the term stardom, as it has come to be practiced, maintained, and currently
theorized in the field of star studies, completely lacks in scope and practice to the lived
experiences of Black women screen performers. The insufficiency of the current star framework
presupposes the experience and privilege of whiteness. McKinney’s experience is notable
because of how, as one of the first Black leads in a feature Hollywood film, she attempted to
make a life for herself in the industry, despite being unable to access the resources, industrial
support, and care that had come to define the nature of Hollywood stardom. A Black feminist
framework along with theories in Black studies, film studies, and performance studies support
the argument that a necessary re-evaluation of the star framework must consider the stringent
process through which Black women had to initially prove themselves worthy of being deemed a
star by Hollywood, to then only be denied the access and privileges thereof. And despite
common notions of perceived physical exceptionalism, McKinney, and succeeding leading Black
women performers like her, belong to a legacy in which the impact of slavery and its visual
resonance is lasting and firmly connected to their bodies in a unique and specific way, making
the statues of stardom insufficient. Therefore, this project’s primary argument is that rather than
being stars, leading Black women performers exceed this framework so much that they are,
instead, Supernovae.
Understood simply, a Supernova is the explosion of a star. Upon occurrence, Supernovae
are known to briefly outshine entire galaxies and radiate more energy than the sun. According to
NASA, a Supernova occurs when there is an elemental change in the core of a star that causes its
fuel to deplete and internal matter to collapse resulting in the star’s death. As this occurs it

6
outwardly appears as if the star is growing and becoming more radiant; however, its core is
actually shrinking to the point of internal combustion.
7
Metaphorically speaking, this process is
akin to the professional careers of many Black women performers, based on a pattern of
explosive mainstream success quickly followed by professional and/or actual death. As it
currently stands, the star model has been historically developed and molded to assume
Hollywood stars as traditionally white, cisgender women and men. Unsurprisingly, most of the
scholarship within the fields of film and star studies use the term liberally, despite its
configuration being based on a particular sociological experience. The Supernova metaphor on
the other hand, more aptly considers the specificities of Black women performers who achieve
Hollywood recognition for a brief period of time, and soon after are discarded by mainstream
institutions in a manner that impacts their ability to survive. The process in which a Supernova is
visually stunning but internally collapsing, mimics the lives of many early Black women
performers who were lauded by vast audiences for leading performances in studio films, yet
internally succumbing to the detrimental effects of racism, sexism, and the pressures of
respectability politics.
Advancing this metaphor even further, occasionally, following the celestial implosion of
a massive supernova, rather than dispersing into elements across the galaxy, the core of the
supernova collapses into itself and becomes what is understood to be a black hole. There is still a
lot that is unknown about Black holes since they cannot be seen, however they are characterized
by their extreme density which prevents light from entering or escaping their gravitational fields.
Also, because black holes are not visible, observers can only identify them based on how
surrounding elements are impacted by their presence. In her critique of the insufficiencies within

7
“Supernovae Information and Facts,” Science & Innovation, December 2, 2016,
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/space/universe/supernovae/.

7
gay and lesbian and/or queer theory to address the experiential specificities of Black lesbians,
science historian Evelynn Hammonds proposed that black holes offer a comparative metaphor
for thinking about the socio-political complexities involved within the intimate relationships
between Black women. She suggests that, like black holes, intimate relationships between Black
women have been significantly undertheorized and consequently engender similar
phenomenological questions. Although Hammonds focuses specifically on the under-
theorization of queer relationships between Black women, I extend her queries to address Black
women performers as sub-group that is similarly under-theorized. She inquires, “how do you
deduce the presence of a black hole? And second, what is it like inside of a black hole?”
8

Hammonds answers the first question by referring to the ways in which black holes impact
surrounding elements, like stars, by distorting their shape and their subsequent relationship to the
space they occupy. This relationship to theoretical and actual space suggests that, even following
combustion/death, Supernovae fundamentally transform the environment/culture they initially
occupied. In addressing her second question, Hammonds explains that, “Rather than assuming
that black female sexualities are structured along an axis of normal and perverse paralleling that
of white women, we might find that for black women a different geometry operates.”
9
Echoed
similarly in the work of Hortense Spillers, the suggestion of a necessarily different geometry
and/or grammar when considering how Black women define life for themselves, irrespective of
whiteness, reinforces the expediency of the Supernova framework.
10
In this project, Lena Horne,
Dorothy Dandridge, Eartha Kitt, Diahann Carroll, and Whitney Houston serve as the exemplary

8
Evelynn Hammonds, “Black (W)Holes and the Geometry of Black Female Sexuality,”
Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 6, no. 2–3 (Summer-Fall 1994): 126–45.
9
Ibid.
10
Hortense Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” in
Black, White, and in Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture. 1 edition. Chicago:
University Of Chicago Press, 2003.

8
case studies for illustrating this framework. Their shared experiences as leading Black women
performers illustrate Hollywood stardom’s incapacity, while they also offer survival tools for
contemporary Black women performers attempting to prolong their own celestial implosion.
Star Studies Defines Hollywood Stardom
To clarify, although imperative to the field, the work of Richard Dyer, Christine Gledhill,
Richard de Cordova, and several other heavily cited star studies theorists has often generalized
the construction and evolution of the Hollywood star in a way that posits the primary logics of its
statutes as universal, despite Black women performers having markedly different experiences as
supposed “stars.” The obsession with stardom and the celebrity, gradually shifted over the course
of the 20th century primarily due to technological advancements and the ways in which
audience’s proximity to performers shifted as a result. In “The Assembly Line of Greatness:
Celebrity in the Twentieth Century,” Joshua Gamson tracks the evolving relationship between
celebrities and audiences beginning just prior to silent film and into television.
11
He explains that
the star formula has been redefined and reconfigured since the advent of celebrity culture,
however the twentieth century obsession with moving pictures completely transformed the
sociological significance of the celebrity turned Hollywood star. He claims that as the star
system developed, it transitioned from the idea that stars naturally occur because of obvious
gifts, to a reclamation of the star by the studio, as manufactured and crafted for the pleasure of
mainstream audiences. The latter development emphasized that, although talent was a necessary
qualification of the star, determination and hard work made it possible for “chosen” individuals
to be discovered. Citing “fame meritocracy” as characteristic of modernity and consumerism in

11
Joshua Gamson, “The Assembly Line of Greatness: Celebrity in the Twentieth-Century,”
Critical Studies in Mass Communications 9 (March 1992): 1–24.

9
the late twenties, the advent of sound in the Hollywood film industry shifted the model by which
fame was allotted and emphasized merit as the defining quality of those deemed stars.
The problem with merit is that it ignores the function of heteropatriarchal, white
supremacy as an active and dominating force in how merit is accessed, which systematically
relegates the best resources and opportunities to those who reside within a specific sociological
position. Gamson’s observation is supported by Hollywood’s obvious commitment to producing
and promoting white performers as the very epitome of the star. The advent of sound in film
unquestionably impacted the interest in Black performers in guest starring roles, most often
playing themselves and performing a musical number. The increasing mainstream popularity of
Big Band and Blues records made their integration into predominantly white casts films less
controversial. However, at the same time, studios were seemingly uninterested, and admittingly
unqualified, in producing films with predominately Black casts, centering on Black everyday
life. Instead, Black performers were mostly relegated to domestic roles. Thus, as becoming a star
gained prominence as the signifier for mainstream Hollywood success, Black performers, and for
this study Black women specifically, were immediately occluded from this process.
By the late 1920s and early 1930s, Hollywood was experiencing a violent shift that was
in line with the economic downturn happening in the country as a result of the Great Depression.
The “Big 5” studios, which consisted of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM), Paramount, Warner
Brothers, Columbia, and RKO, were vertically integrated companies, meaning they controlled
production, distribution, and exhibition of their films. Although these studios had been operating
and producing consistently since the teens, the Great Depression called for a reassessment of
their operations in an effort to stay afloat during the sudden financial crisis. And although most
of the country had been debilitated by the Depression, the movies offered a form of escapism for

10
citizens grappling with financial strain. Many of the most popular entertainers of the time were
signed to long-term contracts by major Hollywood studios during this time, including: Ginger
Rogers, Fred Astaire, Clark Gable, Shirley Temple, and Bette Davis. These stars were defined by
their star text, which was formulated and distributed by the studio through which the star was
under contract. The term “star text” encompasses the range of mediums through which the
performer in question can be consumed widely by audiences. Whether that be film, radio,
television, newspaper, magazines (and contemporarily the internet and social media), stars are
formulated in the public imaginary through these various outlets. To various degrees scholars,
Francesco Alberoni, Barry King, and Richard Dyer have outlined the conditions from which
stars emerge and the ways in which stardom as a phenomenon is maintained. I am particularly
interested in the intentionality on the part of the studio to create a star and then profit from their
creation.
Leading star studies scholar, Richard Dyer has spent years dissecting and redefining the
characteristics of stardom by analyzing how stars function in society. His germinal text simply
titled Stars, conducts a literature review of the field as it stood in 1979 and juxtaposes previously
understood characteristics of stardom with the contemporary stars of the time.
12
He continues to
advance the field and offer new insights that are attuned to how marginalized communities can
be incorporated into the dominant epistemological strongholds of film studies. In many cases,
brief but poignant asides in his work attempt to dispel generalizing theory as insufficient in
grappling with the experiences of both marginalized performers and stars. For this project, I
extend many of Dyer’s concepts that center the definition and maintenance of stardom alongside
Hollywood’s reliance on capitalism. However, this extension also confronts the very stability

12
Richard Dyer and Paul McDonald, Stars, 2nd ed. 1998 edition (London: British Film
Institute, 1998).

11
stardom’s application to Black women performers because of their historically fraught
relationship with capitalism. I contend that even within Dyer’s work, the characteristics that
define stardom have been so unattainable to Black women performers, that those who achieved
some level of mainstream popularity significantly exceed the qualities through which a star is
defined. By dissecting capitalism and the qualities of stardom that have been generally accepted
within the field of star studies, I disrupt the way Black women performers have been
insufficiently placed within this stifling and unsuitable theoretical framework by fully examining
the complex process through which Black women traversed to Supernovae.
Put simply, capitalism is a socio-economic system based on the assumption that private
ownership in addition to labor exploitation creates capital and a “free market.” Theorized
alongside the Hollywood Studio System, Dyer asserts that stars were essential to the Hollywood
economic model based on capital, investment, outlay, and the market. He concludes that stars are
indeed capital based on their contractual responsibility to labor for their respective studio.
Although the success of a film was/is not guaranteed based on the appearance of a certain
performer, studios invested in the potentiality of a star through salary and several forms of
outlay. A multitude of publicity, promotion, and advertising were budgeted to draw the attention
of mainstream audiences. Joshua Gamson details, "Through testing and molding, studios
designed star personalities; through vehicles, publicity, promotion, public appearances, gossip,
fan clubs, and photography, they built and disseminated the personalities; through press agents,
publicity departments, and contracts, they controlled the images."
13
Growing popularity and
demand for certain stars also shifted power in the sense of salary and the ability to then negotiate
for higher pay. Once again, this is in line with the investment into a particular star, based on the

13
Joshua Gamson, “The Assembly Line of Greatness: Celebrity in the Twentieth-Century,”
Critical Studies in Mass Communications 9 (March 1992): 5.

12
assumption and expectation that their presence would positively impact box office numbers.
Thus, as a major part of the overall Hollywood market, once generally recognizable, stars were
used as an essential piece of their respective film’s promotional material. Studios essentially sold
many films by way of the lead actors who had the ability to garner interest from audiences
widely. As I will detail below, although this was Hollywood’s model for star creation, racism
and sexism disallowed the same kind of effort and intentionality for Black women performers
during the height of the studio system.
Based on this model of star production, once a star has reached a level of recognizability
amongst mainstream audiences they are deemed valuable as a source of profit for the studio. To
be deemed valuable by the entertainment industry is the result of the amount of money and
notoriety a star is able to acquire for themselves and on behalf of the studio. This is a complex
model since stars are marketed, in some way, as “themselves,” but also as the characters they
play in films, which also have the potential to become how they are read by audiences. Dyer
states that,
This means that they serve to disguise the fact that they are just as much produced
images, constructed personalities as ‘characters’ are. Thus the value embodied by a star is
as it were harder to reject as ‘impossible’ or ‘false’, because the star’s existence
guarantees the existence of the value s/he embodies.
14

He goes on to make clear that he does not believe that audiences are completely gullible in their
acceptance of the star text as it is being delivered, but that the construction of the star image as
well as the fiction of the characters the stars portray, are marketed and sold in such a way that
these factors influence the overall star’s image and become widely accepted as their persona.
Historically speaking, value is reserved for bodies that are recognized as human and deserving of

14
Richard Dyer and Paul McDonald, Stars, 2nd ed. 1998 edition (London: British Film
Institute, 1998), 20.

13
attention, care, and investment by institutions that adhere to a value-system constructed under
white supremacy. In contrast, dispossessed and rendered first, as property during chattel slavery
and then as human but not-quite-citizen post the nonevent of emancipation, Black women have
never been deemed valuable on account of their humanity, but rather for their capability to labor
and produce as property. To go further, the Hollywood star system makes a distinction between
those who are deemed valuable based on their humanity, citizenship, and proximity to
mainstream whiteness versus those who can be exploited for labor and production with minimal
investment and immediate financial gain. Black women represented a chasm in the labor politics
in the Hollywood studio system since they contained no inherent human value, yet as
property/not-quite-citizens, could have their talents extracted and exploited through labor.
Early star studies scholars also spent significant time considering the function of ideology
within the Hollywood film industry and its subsequent impact on the performance of stars and
how they were received by mainstream audiences. It is generally understood that “ideology helps
us to analyse how a particular set of ideas comes to dominate the social thinking of a historical
bloc” and the process of its maintenance and further development in alignment and in opposition
to the ideological hegemonic order.
15
Dyer notes that many of his star studies predecessors
concluded that stars simply reinforced dominant ideologies. He summarizes their position on
ideology as,
stars, by virtue of being experienced (that it they are a phenomenon of experience not
cognition) and individuated (embodying a general social value/norm in a ‘unique’
image), and having an existence in the real world, serve to defuse the political meanings
that form the inescapable but potentially offensive or explosive point of departure of all
media messages.
16

15
Stuart Hall, “The Problem of Ideology,” Journal of Communication Inquiry 10, no. 2
(1986): 28–44.
16
Dyer and McDonald, Stars, 27.

14
In some cases, Dyer acknowledges this to be true, however he also emphasizes the prominence
of negotiated engagement, which considers the ways marginalized communities subvert
meanings in order to (dis)identify with screen images. His analysis diverged from general
arguments of the field at the time as it related to who was receiving the images and how ideology
worked to enforce their sociological and economic positionality within the dominant order. He
also argues against the depoliticization of a star image and asserts that the personal is indeed
always political in the case of stars since “they are experiential, individual living embodiments of
those politics” and “convey the implications of those politics in terms of, for example, sex roles,
everyday life, etc.”
17
In his later text, Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Society, Dyer mobilizes
this politicization through his analysis on Marilyn Monroe, Paul Robeson and Judy Garland and
how their star text translated through racialized, gendered, and sexual lenses.
In many ways, I align this study with Dyer’s discussion of ideology, however I also
contend that although he firmly acknowledges the nuances that are necessary when considering
marginalized performers, his analysis falls short in several instances. For example, Paul Robeson
meets his qualifications for that of a star since his image was read as exceptional by both the
white and Black press of the time. However, it is when Robeson’s racialized body becomes
vocally politically that Dyer discontinues his analysis, focusing instead on the years when
“Robeson was a cross-over and major star” and “when the politics are less explicit and
explosive”(emphasis mine).
18
Understandably, this may have been the result of time constraints
and the inability to cover Robeson’s entire biography in a single chapter. However, by
compartmentalizing his film stardom from his political image, Dyer is able to safely place

17
Ibid., 28.
18
Richard Dyer, Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Society (London : Houndmills,
Basingstoke, Hampshire: Macmillan Press, 1992), 66.

15
Robeson within a star context that his inherent politicized blackness actually disrupts and
exceeds. This also falsely assumes that there was a break in Robeson’s career that was
inconsistent to the excess his blackness always already assumed. Additionally, the only time
Dyer applies theories of stardom to a Black woman in Heavenly Bodies is in the introduction
where he alludes to Lena Horne’s conscious negation of Hollywood’s constructed star formula.
Dyer states that although rare, some performers recognized the industry’s hand in crafting
celebrities to fit a certain mold and were vocal in exposing the machine behind the star image.
What Dyer dismisses is that Horne’s insight and skepticism was rooted in her experience as a
Black woman and her firm understanding of how power structures operate to continuously
oppress marginalized people in both new and old ways. This project picks up where Dyer’s
analysis of Horne ends by taking an approach to star studies that is attentive to Hollywood’s
alignment with white supremacy and the myriad of ways Black women, specifically, have over
time exceeded the star text and emerged as Supernovae.
More recent star studies texts have attempted to address the complexities of stardom by
looking at how specificities related to ethnicity, gender, age, and skin color have usurped many
of the most prominent generalizations within the field. In Revisiting Star Studies: Cultures,
Themes, and Methods, editor, Sabrina Qiong Yu uses the introduction to problematize the way
star studies has, more often than not, prioritized Hollywood stardom as quintessential to
understanding how stardom functions across the globe. She proposes replacing the term national
stardom with local stardom, to encourage a polycentric approach to the study that more
adequately analyzes cultural and regional differences beyond the constraints and ideological
tenants of the imagined community of a nation. Yu indicates that as the editor of this latest
anthology her goals for inclusion prioritized: “first, a destabilising and deconstruction of the

16
notion of stardom associated with glamour and desirability by highlighting the performativity of
stardom; and second, a decentering and de-dichotomising of traditional star studies tailored for
the study of Hollywood stars by introducing the new critical mode of local/translocal stardom.”
19

Many of the chapter contributions extend this approach by focusing on specific regional film
cultures throughout the world, however, Black diasporic audiences are critically absent in this
text. The one chapter that addresses blackness attempts to haphazardly define racial authenticity
by juxtaposing the career of Diana Ross with Beyoncé to identify how these Black women have
adhered to and/or rejected their own commodification, by situating Black authenticity as always,
already in opposition. This analysis fails to complicate outdated assumptions that equate
“whiteness to artificiality (‘style’) and blackness to authenticity (‘substance’ and ‘essence’),” by
simply repurposing such generalizations within contemporary issues centering
commodification.
20
Also, by ignoring audience specificity, it becomes unclear who is evaluating
these artists, and their performative acts, as artificial and/or authentic. As the latest anthology to
expansively reconsider star studies, it unfortunately leaves Black diasporic scholars and
audiences completely absent. Similarly, in Emily Carman’s text Independent Stardom: Freelance
Women in the Hollywood Studio System, Black women’s experiences in Hollywood, although
consistently impacted by the complication of contractual independence, are relegated to a single
paragraph in which Hattie McDaniel is offered as the sole example of her theoretical
application.
21
Accordingly, Black women scholars and Hollywood performers continue to be
marginalized and/or erased from mainstream star studies texts.

19
Sabrina Qiong Yu and Guy Austin, eds., Revisiting Star Studies: Cultures, Themes and
Methods, Reprint edition (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018): 19.
20
Ibid., 110.
21
Emily Carman, Independent Stardom: Freelance Women in the Hollywood Studio System
(Austin: University of Texas Press, 2015).

17
Black Stars Do Not Shine
Since Dyer’s groundbreaking contribution to star studies with Stars and Heavenly Bodies,
several scholars have extended his work towards the means of explicating the uniqueness of
Black stardom. By outlining the scholars and works that this project is in conversation with, I
seek to provide a thorough overview of the ways Black women have been incorporated within
the field in interesting and generative ways. Before that however, I want to acknowledge the
contribution of early Black writers who engaged in film criticism and offered insightful analyses
on Black representation with concern for the social impact, like that of James Baldwin and
Lorraine Hansberry. Both Baldwin and Hansberry exist intellectually and politically within the
legacy of, what Cedric Robinson termed the Black Radical Tradition.
22
Committed to
challenging the oppressive politics of the times, they used cultural critique, political
commentary, and literary creativity to engage with some of the most important themes
concerning Black Americans of the twentieth century.
In James Baldwin’s 1976 text The Devil Finds Work, he narrates his life alongside his
experiences with cinema. He details the forming of his consciousness through his
dis/identification with the plots and characters of some of the most prominent films of the thirties
and forties. His analysis is prescient in that, as an adult spectator reflecting on his experience as a
child spectator he is able detail the impact of many of the images he consumed and their
relevance to the formation of himself as a Black American man. His commentary on his

22
Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (Chapel
Hill, N.C: The University of North Carolina Press, 2000). Defined using centuries of historical
accounts of the ways Black people have resisted enslavement, colonization, and different forms
of oppression inspired by capitalism, Robinson describes the Black Radical Tradition as, “the
continued development of a collective consciousness informed by the historical struggles for
liberation and motivated by the shared sense of obligation to preserve the collective being, the
ontological totality.”

18
relationship with Hollywood stars is also extremely profound, and one could also say, one of the
earliest formal studies of stardom and blackness. Baldwin noted that, “the distance between
oneself—the audience—and a screen performer is an absolute, masquerading as intimacy.”
23

Predating many of the aforementioned star studies text, Baldwin calls attention to the façade that
is stardom and the illusion of proximity to those considered stars. Coming from the perspective
of a Black man, this declaration astutely prioritizes the perspective of the marginalized and shifts
the ways in which film criticism had continuously ignored the perspective of the Black
community. To this end, one of his most profound observations is his understanding that:
One does not go to see them [stars] act: one goes to watch them be…no one, I read
somewhere, a long time ago, makes his escape personality black. That the movie star is
an ‘escape’ personality indicates one of the irreducible dangers to which the moviegoer is
exposed: the danger of surrendering to the corroboration of one’s fantasies as they are
thrown back from the screen.
24

Here he presents the dilemma Black audiences confront in their relationship to the cinema.
Despite their own fascination and attachment to certain white stars, since the majority of the
films of the time only featured white performers, there is a process of detachment that must
occur in an effort to escape and find pleasure. Baldwin does not belabor this point and moves
forward in discussing a myriad of other films, however his criticism and relationship to stardom
is enormously influential in the development of what would become the subfield of Black star
studies.
Similarly, Lorraine Hansberry was extremely vocal during her unfortunately short
lifetime on the critical nature of the arts and, in particular, the influence of cinema on the
sociological position of Black people. In 1959 Hansberry appeared on Irv Kupicent’s weekly

23
James Baldwin, The Devil Finds Work, International edition (New York: Vintage, 2011),
51.
24
Ibid., 52.

19
television show, At Random, alongside Otto Preminger and proceeded to relay the problems in
attempting to represent the Black American experience in film without regard for the social and
political implications of such work. Displeased with Variety’s coverage of the exchange,
Hansberry followed up the article titled “Lorraine Hansberry Deplores ‘Porgy’” with a “Letter to
the Editor” accusing the “liberated kind of Americans” with “a peculiar kind of thoughtlessness”
when considering the correlation between cinematic representations of blackness and racial
violence in the country.
25
In discussing Black performers of the time she clarifies her support of
their art with a series of rhetorical questions posed to the publication, “Does anybody really think
that Negroes don’t want their artists to work? That we do not enjoy fine entertainment as much
as other people? That the impulse, in fact, is to be grateful rather than critical when or stars
appear in major productions? Please.”
26
Hansberry keenly explicates the complexity of the Black
spectator’s engagement with Hollywood’s manufacturing of Black images during a time of
catastrophic racial unrest and the struggle for civil rights. Her creative writing, speeches, essays,
and film criticism are crucial to the intellectual development of Black film and star studies.
Out of this intellectual genealogy, scholars have attempted to piece together fragments of
canonical theories and characteristics within film and star studies to justly and critically dissect
Black “stardom” in a manner that acknowledges the social and political struggles of attaining
filmic recognition and the difficulty in sustaining it—professionally and personally. This project
benefits from the intellectual rigor and epistemological resituating of blackness within the field
by such scholars and builds from their valuable critiques. In Mia Mask’s Divas on Screen: Black

25
Jack Pitman, “Lorraine Hansberry Deplores ‘Porgy,’” Variety, May 27, 1959, 63/28,
Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture; Lorraine Hansberry, “Letters to the Editor,”
The Theater, August 1959, Lorraine Hansberry Collection, Schomburg Center for Research in
Black Culture.
26
Ibid.

20
Women in American Film, she conducts a cross-generational study on the lives and careers of
specific Black women performers with special attention to the intertextual and extradiegetic
components of their star text. Mask cites Dyer as well as Max Weber’s theories on charisma in
her formulation of the Black star. Divas intervenes in the field of star studies through her
attention to Black audiences and their contribution to creating stars. As I will later detail, this is
where many scholars attentive to Black performers form their various interventions, however
Mask’s work is generative for its apt interdisciplinarity and consequent application. Her
mobilization of feminist theory alongside cultural studies and traditional film studies and history
provide a holistic approach to considering the careers of Black women performers.
In her chapter on Dorothy Dandridge, she considers the influence of 1950s culture—with
its focus on domesticity, family life, and piety—onto the iconicity that Dandridge would
embody. Specifically turning to the quaint, yet influential Black middle class of the fifties, Mask
notes that “Nineteen-fifties black audiences connected with Dandridge because she was a symbol
of success in a society that allowed blacks few opportunities for advancement, much less
‘conspicuous achievement.’”
27
Her survey of the Black press, which included several personal
accounts from Black spectators and their relationship to screen images, connects Dandridge’s
performance style and roles to the function of charisma amongst Black audiences. My argument,
however, diverts from Mask’s analyses of Dandridge’s relationship with middle-class Black
audiences by focusing intensely on Dandridge’s relationship with herself and that relationship’s
impact on her performative engagement with audiences. Mask states that for Black audiences,
“Her celebrity mitigated segregationist notions of black inferiority…her image of bourgeois
womanhood progressively challenged white supremacy and racial subjugation. Dandridge’s

27
Mia Mask, Divas on Screen: Black Women in American Film, 1 edition (Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 2009), 25.

21
entrance into mainstream consciousness as a film personality—even with compromised roles—
signified a change in the American cultural landscape.”
28
I want to interject in this teleological
reading of uplift mobility and forward progress based on Dandridge’s exceptionalism by
examining Dandridge’s assessment of her own career and its impact. Although Dandridge’s
celebrity may have been influential to Black audiences, I argue that this had no direct impact on
mainstream consciousness and that Dandridge’s treatment by the Hollywood industry
exemplifies her inability to fall in line with white supremacist standards for Black women. Put
another way, Dandridge’s beauty and “star” charisma did not protect her from Hollywood’s strict
mandates for how Black women were to function on screen. Therefore, her image only
reinscribed her positionality as beautiful because of her light-skin and European features, but
ultimately still Black and unqualified to attain the privileges and access that stardom supposedly
allowed.
In “Star Dances: African-American Constructions of Stardom, 1925-1960,” Arthur
Knight examines early Hollywood Black stardom as inherently problematic due to the popularity
of films amongst Black audiences that contained questionable, if not insulting, representations of
blackness in a myriad of different circumstances and forms. Subsequently, he suggests that
certain Black performers participated in a kind of “star dance” where they coexisted in
segregated worlds but maintained a performatively distinct relationship with Black audiences
that asserted cultural loyalty and mutual respect, regardless of the characterizations associated
with their mainstream success. He acknowledges that this practice was difficult for performers
like Lincoln “Stepin Fetchit” Perry and Hattie McDaniel though, due to their type of mainstream
popularity. He states that, “the Hollywood Black supernumeraries were stable enough onscreen

28
Mask, 25–26.

22
figures that they verged on being minor Hollywood stars—certainly regular, recognizable, credit
line–worthy character actors.”
29
Moreover,
The Hollywood Blacks, however, were not moving. They were neither true “motion
picture stars” nor, more importantly, circulating Black stars who kept in touch with their
Black audience through live performance and touring. They had not quite crossed over—
passed into white culture—and they would not come back, and this made an increasing
number of Black viewers feel vulnerable. Roles that, ten years earlier, had seemed like
opportunities and then types and then stereotypes were now becoming laminated to a
limited number of ossified Black performers.
30

Knight identifies these screen performers as occupying a unique and complex position within
racially segregated communities but falls short in defining how these minor Hollywood actors
conceptualized their celebrity in relation to blackness and American racism. Nevertheless, in
Stealing the Show: African American Performers and Audiences in 1930s Hollywood, Miriam
Petty moves Knight’s analysis forward and foregrounds this group of Black screen performers of
the 1930s. She discusses their reputation as “scene stealers” despite their minor role status in
mainstream Hollywood films. Hattie McDaniel, Bill Robinson, and Lincoln “Stepin Fetchit”
Perry are just a few of the performers whom she recognizes as occupying the same “problematic
stardom” where they were “regularly cast and highly visible despite their usual narrative
marginalization, [and] significantly well known for a limited and stereotyped set of
performances.”
31
Petty, however, complicates common dismissals and readings of these
performers by conducting a thorough examination of their different diegetic and extradiegetic
performances of agency and self-actualization. She argues that it was in these moments, where

29
Arthur Knight, “Star Dances: African-American Constructions of Stardom, 1925-1960,” in
Classic Hollywood, Classic Whiteness, ed. Daniel Bernardi (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2001), 404.
30
Knight, 404.
31
Miriam J. Petty, Stealing the Show: African American Performers and Audiences in 1930s
Hollywood (Oakland, California: University of California Press, 2016), 6–7.

23
they asserted themselves as artists dedicated to perfecting their craft, irrespective of Hollywood’s
attempts to confine them within simple, flat characters.
Furthermore, Petty begins her text by acknowledging that the subjects of her study, “were
rendered spectacular by the visual, cultural, and mythic significance of racial difference, and
simultaneously deprived of the full benefit of their visibility, which instead accrued to the white
performers they supported and the studios that employed them.”
32
She describes them as existing
in a kind of liminal position within the Hollywood economic model and later refers to them as
“protostars.” Following this line of flight, if the minor Black actors in her study are positioned as
“not-quite-stars,” then leading Black women like McKinney, and those that would follow, who
attained mainstream popularity, despite not obtaining equitable star treatment, are not-quite-
Hollywood-stars either, but something much greater. This is where the Supernova framework
becomes apropos. The typical career trajectory of these Black women required that they initially
prove themselves as profitable within their own communities, in other words, become
local/communal stars, usually as nightclub performers, prior to receiving a leading opportunity in
Hollywood. Therefore, by the time they actually attained Hollywood fame, they were typically
already recognized and respected performers amongst nightclub audiences, and significantly
more so in Black communities due to regular Black press coverage. Once they attained a leading
role in a Hollywood film, they were considered anomalies for mainstream audiences, which
galvanized interest. At the same time, they were already lauded performers amongst Black
audiences and finally getting mainstream recognition. Essentially, this resulted in them acquiring
the attention equal to that of a Hollywood veteran, sans the financial compensation or respect
afforded to their white Hollywood peers.

32
Ibid., 23.

24
Framing the Supernova
In addition to applying and extending theories from cinema and media studies, this
project is equally inspired by scholars in the fields of Black and performance studies. The
interdisciplinarity of the Supernova framework relies on the ways in which concepts and
terminology from different fields, overlap to engender new ideas. This observation encouraged
the overall organization and methodological priorities for this project. Subsequently, rather than
discussing Horne, Dandridge, Kitt, and Carroll individually, I chronologically contextualize their
experiences in pairs. By organizing the chapters in this way, I am able to articulate how patterns
of systemic oppression, as well as tactics to combat this violence are translated across time and
bodies. Furthermore, the Supernova framework was built utilizing a few theories and texts that
are foundational to its application and show up at different points throughout the entirety of the
work. The first comes from Frantz Fanon’s prolific text, Black Skin, White Masks and more
specifically his chapter, “The Fact of Blackness/The Lived Experience of the Black Man.”
33
In
this chapter he describes the violence of colonization and decolonization as a cycle that the
colonized must endure over and over again. Upon being recognized and named as an Object,
Fanon uses the metaphor of “exploding” to explicate what it is like to endlessly “experience his
being for others.”
34
This concept has been rearticulated, reimagined, and extended across various
disciplines towards different means, but what remains a constant point of influence is his
articulation of violence as cyclical and cause for an explosion that is always “too early… or too
late.”
35
I detail this concept’s application to the Supernova framework more thoroughly in

33
Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Richard Philcox, Revised edition (New
York : Berkeley, Calif.: Grove Press, 2008).
34
Ibid., 89.
35
Ibid., xi.

25
chapter two, however for now, the basic congruence between Fanon’s explosion and a
Supernovic implosion relies on the temporal aspect of combustion that always includes a period
“in wait,” or as discussed in the work of Kara Keeling, in “the interval.”
Equally as integral to the Supernova framework is Saidiya Hartman’s formulation
describing the “afterlife of slavery.” In Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave
Route, Hartman describes the ways in which our present reality remains impacted by the
establishing order of capitalism that was foundationally secured and maintained by chattel
labor.
36
She explains that “because black lives are still imperiled and devalued by a racial
calculus and a political arithmetic…entrenched centuries ago” the afterlife of slavery is made
knowable through “skewed life chances, limited access to health and education, premature death,
incarceration, and impoverishment.”
37
The Supernova subjects in this project all attempted to
deploy performative tactics, both professionally and personally, in an effort to escape the
tangible realities of the afterlife of slavery. This sometimes came in the form of acquiring fame
and wealth or vocally speaking against segregation and supporting Black liberation movements.
However, although continuously rendered exceptional, their physical bodies bound them to the
afterlife of slavery from which they could never truly escape. By merging Hartman’s work with
Cedric Robinson’s discussion of the reinforcement of racial hierarchization and domination in
the film industry, as well as Kimberly Juanita Brown’s excavation of literary and visual culture’s
implementation of “slavery’s resonance,” the Supernova framework presupposes these

36
Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route, Reprint
edition (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008).
37
Ibid., 6.

26
conditions as longstanding and without much respite.
38
As such, by conducting multiple
performative close-readings and cross-platform textual analyses, the following chapters labor to
expose the fallacy of stardom by suggesting a framework that more aptly considers the
circumstantial precarity of Black women’s shared experiences in the entertainment industry.
By beginning with a discussion of Nina Mae McKinney as the first Black woman in a
leading Hollywood feature film, I trace the histories of Black women who acquired similar
opportunities in Hollywood as a result of their phenotypic privilege. Aside from beauty privilege,
it is important to note that the women included in this study also share professional and personal
commonalities that served as the qualifications for their inclusion. All of them began their
careers in the music industry and then transitioned to leading roles in film and/or television, if
only briefly. Consequently, I excluded performers who were primarily trained and practicing
actors as well as performers who were mostly musicians such as Ruby Dee and Hazel Scott.
Their filmographies also had to include multiple leading roles in Hollywood studio films to allow
for multiple close-reading options. This is by no means an exhaustive study of Black women
performers, as there are women who met these qualifications but are not included due to time
and space limitations. Rather, this project focuses on a select number of twentieth century
women in an effort to draw parallels between systemic violence enacted in the entertainment
industry and Black women artists.
In chapter one, I parallel the lives and careers of Lena Horne and Dorothy Dandridge in
order to illustrate the relationship between racialized childhood trauma and performance. Using
archival material, such as newspaper/magazine interviews, and their respective autobiographies,

38
Cedric J. Robinson, Forgeries of Memory and Meaning: Blacks and the Regimes of Race
in American Theater and Film before World War II, New Edition (Chapel Hill: The University
of North Carolina Press, 2007); Kimberly Juanita Brown, The Repeating Body: Slavery’s Visual
Resonance in the Contemporary (Durham: Duke University Press Books, 2015).

27
I locate their individual voices and trace how their performative tactics were influenced by their
experiential and inherited knowledge. Citing Darlene Clark Hine and her formulation of the
“culture of dissemblance,” I argue for the recognition that despite perceived exceptionalism, both
Horne and Dandridge were victims of various forms of assault, which they respectively
attempted to mask via tactics of denial and/or disassociation.
39
Also by analyzing their individual
relationships with their mothers, this chapter invokes the operation of memory and inheritance as
inextricably bound to embodied performance and the afterlife of slavery. Diana Taylor and
Joseph Roach’s scholarly engagement with performative knowledge production and cultural
memory work in tandem to offer a different approach to reading stage and screen performances
that is more attentive to how race, class, gender, and sexuality impact the relationship between
the performer and their audiences.
40
Finally, by focusing on Lena Horne’s narration of her
experience in Hollywood, and a specific incident involving her first leading feature-film role in
Stormy Weather, I am able to identify and track the origins of the phenomenological emergence
and implosion of the Supernova. I conclude this chapter by suggesting that because of her
unapologetic approach to asserting her blackness and protecting herself from the violence of
white supremacy, Horne serves as the unofficial narrative for the less vocal, but equally
implosive, Supernovae that emerged in her wake.
Continuing where I left off with Dorothy Dandridge, chapter two methodologically
prioritizes a close reading of her performance in the 1958 film, Porgy and Bess. Using a series of
archival documents and script drafts, I contend that Dandridge’s desperation for Hollywood

39
Darlene Clark Hine, “Rape and the Inner Lives of Black Women in the Middle West,”
Signs, Common Grounds and Crossroads: Race, Ethnicity, and Class in Women’s Lives, 14, no.
4 (Summer 1989): 912–20.
40
Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the
Americas, Second Printing edition (Durham: Duke University Press Books, 2003); Joseph
Roach, Cities of the Dead (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996).

28
stardom, and subsequent refusal to imagine anything beyond it, is visualized through her
performance of Bess. Linking behind the scenes photos, various anecdotes from the production
set, and scenes featuring Dandridge, this reading reveals how non-verbal communication and ad-
libs function to inconspicuously relay cultural memory and trauma. Dandridge’s autobiography,
Everything and Nothing: The Dorothy Dandridge Tragedy, also provides a glimpse into the ways
that she began to reconcile her desperation for Hollywood stardom with the limits ascribed to
blackness, just prior to her premature death. Additionally, by juxtaposing Dandridge’s
performance as Bess alongside a close reading of Eartha Kitt in Anna Lucasta, I argue that prior
to their implosion, Supernovae experience a period “in wait” where they are forced to confront
stardom’s illusiveness. Theorizing this waiting period using the work of Kara Keeling and Mary
Ann Doan, I suggest that prior to their inevitable implosion, Supernovae must contend with time
spent in “the interval.”
41
Therefore, rather than succumb to despair, as was the case for
Dandridge, Kitt approached her professional and personal in a manner that prolonged her
implosion for time spent in “the interval.” Instead of offering herself, vulnerably, to the ways of
Hollywood, Kitt created an alter-ego that she sustained throughout the entirety of her career;
functioning as a performative protection. As the film’s titular character in Anna Lucasta, and as a
nightclub performer, Kitt showcased her talent by both appealing to, and challenging the
proscriptions tethered to the performing Black woman’s body. She embraced notions of
hypersexuality and infantilism by adopting a persona that was read as allusive and exotic by
mainstream audiences. Meanwhile, she published four separate autobiographies over the course
of her life where she maintained that her strategic detachment from Eartha Kitt, the persona, was

41
Kara Keeling, The Witch’s Flight: The Cinematic, the Black Femme, and the Image of
Common Sense (Durham: Duke University Press Books, 2007); Mary Ann Doane, The
Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the Archive, n edition (Cambridge,
Mass: Harvard University Press, 2002).

29
an intentional protective strategy. By pairing Dandridge and Kitt, chapter two examines the ways
in which Supernovae are forced to performatively experiment in order to strive for some
semblance of a livable life.
Eartha Kitt’s life-long commitment to self-fragmentation signified an alternative
approach to the culture of dissemblance. Her ability to strategically animate her persona to
capitalize off the assumptions and tropes held by mainstream audiences also allowed Kitt to
direct energy towards Black liberatory politics, relatively unnoticed. Very early in her career Kitt
was involved in fundraising for the Civil Rights Movement and throughout most of her career
she also provided dance classes in low-income communities, yet much of this remained
relatively overshadowed by her fantastical performative image. Nevertheless, a visit to the White
House in 1968 for a luncheon purposed to discuss juvenile delinquency quickly unveiled her
political leanings as more radical than most people expected. Chapter three, therefore, discusses
how Kitt’s performative exterior complicated her relationship with Black audiences and also put
her career in jeopardy during the social unrest of the sixties and early seventies. Comparing her
experience with Diahann Carroll’s provides a compelling juxtaposition since, like Kitt, Carroll
also created a persona that was far removed from the political struggles of the time. Unlike Kitt,
however, Carroll’s image relied on glamour and respectability. She was known within the
nightclub scene and within Hollywood for her elegant and statuesque manner, reminiscent of
Horne’s early career. Nonetheless, when Carroll became more vocal regarding issues of social
justice, she realized that she was also driving a wedge between her and mainstream audiences.
Thinking about Kitt and Carroll’s political engagements alongside the emergence of Black
feminist politics and Black nationalism, this chapter analyzes the advantages and disadvantages

30
that Supernovae face when publicly asserting their allegiance to social justice, and more
explicitly to Black liberation.
In the final chapter of my dissertation, I compile the narratives and performative
strategies discussed in the previous chapters in order to support Whitney Houston’s inclusion
within the Supernova legacy. As one of the most contemporary examples of a premature
Supernovic implosion, I begin by analyzing the construction and reception of Houston’s star text
prior to her ascent to a Supernova, following her Star-Spangled Banner performance at Super
Bowl XXV. I contend that her image aligned with the Black middle-class politics of
respectability during the height of the Ronald Reagan administration, which unfortunately
distanced her from low-income Black communities and the rise of the New Black Aesthetic.
Upon entering the nineties, Houston had a contentious relationship with the shifting signs of
blackness as hip hop became a cultural phenomenon and she struggled to be recognized within
this milieu. In order to explicate Houston’s Supernova ascent, I conduct a close reading of her
performance of the National Anthem as well as her feature film debut, alongside Kevin Costner
in The Bodyguard. By contextualizing these media events within their socio-political climate, I
am able to assert the ways in which Houston became the ultimate Supernova, predestined for
premature implosion.
Although ending this project with Houston might initially feel melancholic, I propose that
whether premature or extended, a Supernovic implosion enables possibility beyond our current
understandings. Similar to the current mysteriousness of a Black Hole, I argue that upon
implosion, Supernovae create a space of limitlessness that is accessible to those attuned to the
inherent possibilities of blackness. Just as Eartha Kitt learned from Lena Horne and Whitney
Houston learned from Eartha Kitt, the legacy of the Supernova relies on cultural memory and

31
embodied inheritance. I conclude this dissertation by offering an alternative vision for Black
women performers that prioritizes protection and survival gleaned from their own inherited
knowledge. Delving into the metaphoric capabilities of a Black Hole, I assert that upon
implosion, Black women performers offer new ways of being in the world that is a culmination
of the lessons learned over generations. Although less tangible, futurity relies on the ability to
imagine otherwise and trust in ancestral knowledge. This dissertation honors the lives of past
Supernovae in order to imagine worlds of their own making, shielded by the infinite blackness
amongst and beyond the stars.

32
Chapter 1: Lena/Dorothy

For these grandmothers and mothers of ours were not Saints, but Artists; driven to a numb and
bleeding madness by the springs of creativity in them for which there was no release.
—Alice Walker, In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens

What does it mean to be the hope and dream of your ancestors? To bear the weight of
unfulfilled desires and previously unavailable opportunities is the burden and promise of the
descendants of a historically disenfranchised and dispossessed people. Alice Walker’s essay “In
Search of Our Mothers Gardens” questions and explores the creative “what could have been” for
generations of Black mothers, grandmothers, great-grandmothers and so forth who, due to
structural oppression, abuse, and familial responsibility, were unable to commit to living as the
artists they may have desired to be.
1
She imagines the talents and creative endeavors that were
likely stifled by the inability to conceive a life unbound to the need to work in order to provide
and survive. However, Walker also suggests that despite asphyxiating conditions, Black women
nevertheless found ways to subtly create and also cultivate their own dreams of a different life
into the generations they birthed and raised. As such, hope for some kind of freedom was not
necessarily lost, but planted, sewn, and observed like one who waits for the fruit of a garden to
manifest in its proper season. The generation of Black women of the early twentieth century,
born post-emancipation, could be regarded as the first fruit of the garden sewn by the enslaved
Black women who lived and dreamed before them. Although still extremely limited, the
opportunities to perform on stage, and later on screen, represented a life seemingly disconnected
from the toil of the plantation and the drudgery of domestic labor in the homes of white people.
This is not to say that to live as an entertainer was the ultimate mark of success and freedom, but

1
Alice Walker, In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Prose (Open Road Media, 2011).

33
to suggest that performance offered an occupational alternative to the manual labor Black
women were historically relegated to.
In this chapter, I consider the ways in which centuries of chattel slavery and its
enforcement of matrilineal inheritance, both subtly and blatantly, impacted the lives and careers
of select Black women performers of the early twentieth century. The emergence of film
technology and Black women’s eventual incorporation into the industrialized production of
motion pictures created a new set of logics intrinsically still tied to histories of dispossession and
fungibility. Subsequently, many of those Black women grappled with the supposed promises of
freedom and opportunity, espoused by older generations, while facing the reality of Jim Crow’s
omnipotence. Hollywood was thus no exception and offered no solace to the various Black
women who attempted to manifest inherited dreams of freedom by way of stardom. Lena Horne
and Dorothy Dandridge are exemplary figures to foreground this analysis for the ways in which
they respectively contended with the unfulfilled artistic dreams of their mothers, all the while
experimenting with various modalities of performance. I argue that for Black women,
performance functions as a necessary tool for combating structural oppression. Therefore, I
assert that Horne and Dandridge reconciled with the fallacy of Hollywood stardom by heavily
relying on performance, and what it afforded Black women unable to escape the afterlife of
slavery.
Prior to their mainstream Hollywood recognition, Horne and Dandridge were already
recognized and respected performers, specifically amongst Black audiences, because of their
nightclub popularity.
2
For Black performers entering the film industry in the thirties, there was
no defined blueprint that existed which supported the creation and promotion of a Black star.

2
Al Monroe. “Monroe Says,” The Chicago Defender (National Edition). ProQuest Historical
Newspapers: LA Sentinel (April 7, 1951): 20.

34
Consequently, Horne and Dandridge were not created by Hollywood, like many of their white
counterparts. The methodological choice to then turn to cultural formations and Black audiences
when assessing Black “stardom,” as Miriam Petty does in Stealing the Show, is necessary to
properly contextualize their social and political significance. As nightclub performers, Horne and
Dandridge had already proven themselves as talented and capable of drawing large audiences in
segregated nightclub spaces.
3
Their ability to eventually crossover into mainstream Hollywood
was therefore catalyzed by their cultural popularity and significance, and later bolstered by their
proximity to whiteness and the privileges typically afforded to light-skinned Black women who
met European standards of beauty. These factors influenced what Richard Dyer calls their
Hollywood “star text,” and what I perceive as their ascent to Supernova status.
To conduct this analysis, the inherent problems of using institutional archival resources
when undertaking research on Black women must be acknowledged and methodologically
addressed. One reason is because I adhere to the claim that Black women entertainers have
always operated within a “culture of dissemblance,” as coined by Darlene Clarke Hine. In
discussing the ways in which Black women have been required to adjust to quotidian violence in
the form of sexual assault, Hine formalizes the method through which survival became possible.
She argues that in order to function in their daily lives, despite the constant threat of rape and
assault within chattel slavery and post-emancipation, Black women intentionally refused
vulnerability in order to protect, what they may have considered, their true personhood. She
states that, “the dynamics of dissemblance involved creating the appearance of disclosure, or
openness about themselves and their feelings, while actually remaining an enigma.”
4
Although

3
Ibid.
4
Darlene Clark Hine, “Rape and the Inner Lives of Black Women in the Middle West,”
Signs, Common Grounds and Crossroads: Race, Ethnicity, and Class in Women’s Lives, 14, no.
4 (Summer 1989): 915.

35
she mostly discusses this cultural response as a tool for “ordinary,” or working-class Black
women, I contend that dissemblance is an inherited and embodied memory for Black women of
all social classes that, for this project, operates twofold. Firstly, I consider how dissemblance
was bound to the lessons learned in childhood and adolescence that were specific to early
twentieth century Black girlhood, which often entailed neglect, poverty, and abuse. Both Lena
Horne and Dorothy Dandridge explain their childhood struggles in great detail in their respective
autobiographies, drawing parallels between their complex relationships with their mothers, the
resulting experiences those relationships facilitated, and the consequent impact of these things on
their adult lives. Secondly, their subsequent performance strategies, also discussed at length in
both their autobiographies and biographies, were intrinsically tied to a cultural history of secrecy
for the purpose of protection which, I suggest, was unconsciously passed down in childhood,
developed into adulthood, and then translated, once again unconsciously, through bodily
performance, now available within archival narratives. I consider how these Black women were
consistently forced to confront the myriad of ways racism was/is embedded within Hollywood,
and how their respective responses were inherently rooted in Black women’s historical
relationship to violence and oppression. Further, I argue that for many Black women entertainers,
the lack of systematic support and exposure to harm and violence (physical and emotional), as a
result of their politicized identities, disallowed the kind of professional and personal longevity
that is now associated with their white counterparts.
Subsequently, when attempting to locate and decipher archival traces for the women in
this study, I considered their relationship with and response to the operation of Hollywood as an
ideological structure. One of the primary reasons that I have decided to include Lena Horne in
this study, despite there being a generous amount of scholarship on her already, is because of the

36
fact that throughout her career she asserted her need to maintain possession of her true self, amid
her own commodification. Beginning in very subtle ways, she theoretically separated from
Hollywood as an institution recognizing, “I’m in Hollywood, but not OF Hollywood, because
I’m a Negro.”
5
Explicitly referencing her positionality as a racialized and gendered performer,
she makes no attempt to haphazardly assimilate into Hollywood just because she was a light-
skinned Black woman and deemed acceptable by white audiences. Also in doing so throughout
her career, and significantly so in later years, she leaves archival traces that give insight into not
just her life, but the lives of other Black women performers who weren’t as vocal but existed in
the same visual and professional genealogy. Aside from penning autobiographies, Horne used
interviews as a site of narrative resistance. By locating her voice within various trade papers and
mainstream and Black press sources, I am able to get a fairly cohesive and sustained aural
presence from her as a marginalized performer. This is especially important, since unlike many
of Horne and Dandridge’s white counterparts, there are no institutional collections that contain a
significant amount of their personal papers. Even the Lena Horne/Horne Family Collection at the
Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture contains mostly papers and memorabilia from
Horne’s career after her experience in Hollywood. I hypothesize that although this may not have
been a conscious decision for Horne, Black women have historically had to be extremely
conscious and vigilant regarding the ownership and maintenance of their image. As a result,
many were not keen to the idea of their vulnerabilities, in the form of personal papers and
ephemera, being accumulated by institutions, like archives, which have ignored and/or
misrepresented the experiences of Black women. Additionally, as representative figures of uplift
Black women performers were subject to the scrutiny and judgement of white audiences, who

5
Earl Wilson, “It Happened Last Night,” LA Daily News, June 2, 1947.

37
had preconceived notions of their sexuality, and Black audiences, who were mostly committed to
the politics of respectability at the height of Jim Crow and the Civil Rights Movement.
Dorothy Dandridge is crucial to this project because she is placed in the same
performative genealogy as Horne without having the same archival presence. After reviewing
several thousand articles written between 1950-1960, the height of her career, most do not
include extensive quotes from Dandridge and are simply reprints of studio press releases. I
hypothesize that this is the result of several factors that are instinctively tied to her identity as a
Black woman performer. One of those reasons being her existence within Black women’s culture
of dissemblance. After analyzing Dandridge’s autobiography and biography, it becomes clear
that during her childhood and adolescent years she was taught that secrecy was a necessary part
of survival. Although summaries of her early life vary across publications, there are a few
storylines that are constant. Dandridge’s mother, Ruby Dandridge left her husband Cyril
Dandridge, the father of her two children (Dorothy and Vivian), shortly after Dorothy was born
and spent years relocating to make a life for herself while also attempting to escape Cyril’s
pursuits and claims to custody of Vivian and Dorothy. Ruby had aspirations of stage and
Hollywood stardom, and according to Dandridge’s biographer Donald Bogle, she moved her
family around Cleveland’s east side many times and eventually to Memphis, Chicago, and
finally Los Angeles in pursuit of fame. As young children and adolescents, Dorothy and Vivian
also began traveling the south as the duo, The Wonder Children—singing, dancing, and
performing acrobatics. During this same time, Ruby introduced Geneva Williams, who would
become her long-term partner and Dorothy and Vivian’s caretaker while Ruby worked and
traveled. According to Bogle, Ruby’s queerness was an unspoken but understood fact later in
Hollywood, but also within her family. As a result, Dandridge learned at a young age, the

38
importance of privacy and performativity at a time when queer relationships were not to be
discussed and racial violence was a part of the quotidian. Throughout this project I emphasize the
multiple logics of performance and the many ways it shows up differently for Black women
performers. In this case, Dandridge learned it was necessary to perform heteronormative
respectability despite her familial non-normativity and instability, which she later asserts
impacted her professional and social relationships.
Dorothy Dandridge’s autobiography Everything and Nothing: The Dorothy Dandridge
Tragedy was posthumously released in 1970. Co-written with Earl Conrad prior to her 1965
death, the text vividly details Dandridge’s life beginning with the circumstances of her birth until
her last days, where she eerily discusses death as eminent. The circumstances surrounding her
childhood, where she and her sister Vivian were raised by their mother Ruby and Geneva
Williams, called Auntie Ma-ma, is marked by poverty, neglect, and abuse. Dandridge has the
foresight to keenly narrate her early life in an effort to later emphasize its impact on every facet
of her adult decision making. For this chapter, I will use Dandridge’s autobiography alongside
Lena Horne’s 1965 autobiography, Lena, to explicate the ways in which Black girlhood evinces
a racialized and gendered performativity, distinctive to Black womanhood. Put another way, I
note how their childhoods and maternal relationships shaped their understanding of themselves
and, in turn, defined survival by way of violence, neglect, fear, and performance.
In choosing to analyze their autobiographies alongside other archival documents, such as
press releases and interviews, I am making a methodological decision that situates the voices of
Black women at center, rather than in the margins. Historically, the autobiographies of Black
women have been criticized and dismissed based on the presumption that these narratives are
exaggerated, fabricated and/or lack substantiated “proof.” This has been the case from the time

39
of slave narratives like that of Harriet Jacobs and Phyllis Wheatley to the searing anti-lynching
journalistic endeavors of Ida B. Wells during reconstruction and beyond. In Kwakiutl L.
Dreher’s Dancing on the White Page: Black Women Entertainers Writing Autobiography, she
challenges this stigma by focusing solely on these autobiographical projects despite this structure
of non-belief. She states,
For the celebrity, the threat of being accused of constructing a story to feed the ego is
accompanied by the dreadful implication that the story of her experience as she says it
was lived is not accepted as definitive or authoritative. Considering the black female
celebrity's interpretation of her life experiences, it is not so much a question of the truth
as it is an evaluation of a truth. What these black women see, as well as experience, in the
entertainment industry creates histories that expose the complexity of black life as lived
therein.
6

Subsequently, the present project is invested in destigmatizing the narratives of Black women
performers by listening to their voices and acknowledging that the ways they have chosen to tell
their stories are legitimate and worthy of serious engagement. Thus, Horne and Dandridge offer
thoughtful and critical evaluations of the ways that Jim Crow America shaped their
understandings of themselves and the world around them.
Another aspect of engaging with the autobiographies of Black women is the act of
reading between the lines and being attune to the silences and gaps that may be hidden in plain
sight. Keeping in mind Darline Clark Hine’s work on the culture of dissemblance, I acknowledge
and mobilize the literary strategies practiced by Black women scholars who confront the biases
of institutional archives as well as Black women’s complex engagement with literary
transparency. Toni Morrison calls this practice, “literary archaeology” where “on the basis of
some information and a little bit of guesswork you journey to a site to see what remains were left

6
Kwakiutl L. Dreher, Dancing on the White Page: Black Women Entertainers Writing
Autobiography (Albany: Suny Press, 2008), 24.

40
behind and to reconstruct the world that these remains imply.”
7
These autobiographies and the
various archival material construct a narrative that must be interrogated and deconstructed in a
manner that pays attention to the complexity of Black women’s relationships to institutions that
remain fully encapsulated within white supremacy and capitalism. By this I mean to recognize
opacity and discretion as necessary tools of survival that undoubtedly seep into their
autobiographies, interviews, and archival material. Scholars Saidiya Hartman and Sarah Haley
have pushed the limits of academic writing to explore the “remains left behind” by Black women
through their use of speculation as a means of historical excavation.
8
They consider the limits of
the archive but also Black women’s decisions to withhold information that may have left them
vulnerable to some form of violence—whether that be structural or intracommunal. Following
suit, I consider what is said and what is unsaid in these autobiographies. What is alluded to and
what may have been left out. I engage in the Black feminist practice of confronting dominant
epistemologies that have historically ignored and erased Black women, while also considering
the cultural and political ramifications of vulnerability.
Be a Good Girl: Abuse and the Formation of a Culture of Dissemblance
Although generally perceived and accepted as a daughter of “one of the first families of
Brooklyn,” Lena Horne’s childhood deviated from middle class respectability in many ways.
9

Her early life was spent in the care of her middle class grandparents in a large brownstone in

7
Toni Morrison, “The Site Of Memory,” in Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of
Memoir, ed. William Zinsser, 2nd ed. (Boston; New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1995): 92.
8
Saidiya Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social
Upheaval, 1 edition (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2019) and Sarah Haley, No Mercy
Here: Gender, Punishment, and the Making of Jim Crow Modernity (Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 2016).
9
Lena Horne and Richard Schickel, Lena, First Printing, November 1966 (New York: Signet
Books, 1965): 9-10.

41
Brooklyn, however Lena’s mother, Edna Louise Scottron had showbusiness aspirations of her
own and wanted to provide a different life for her daughter. A young Lena experienced a series
of temporary, but extended custody visits with her mother while she traveled the northeast and
south in search of stardom. Over the course of only a few years, Scottron moved herself and her
young daughter several times, bouncing from Philadelphia to Miami and then Jacksonville, FL,
Birmingham, AL, Ohio, and multiple cities in the state of Georgia. At times Lena would
occasionally be returned to the stability of her grandparents’ Brooklyn home while her mother
searched for her next big break in a new city, to which she would then bring Lena. Subsequently,
as a traveling performer Edna would often leave Lena in the care of family and friends in most of
these cities while she looked for work and/or performed with a traveling theatre troupe, forcing
Lena to learn how to accommodate quickly to new environments. As a light-skinned young
Black girl, living a nomadic life primarily in the Jim Crow south she learned to deal with the
teasing that resulted from colorism amongst the Black children, while also coming face to face
with the threat of imminent violence and death that Black folks experienced daily in the south at
the hand of white terrorists. Referring to this time in her life Horne states, “It was a mood of
loneliness and self-protectiveness, broken occasionally by the hope that somehow I might finally
be allowed to settle down in one place permanently—and occasionally, by some act of kindness
or cruelty that stands out from the gray tones of the background.”
10
Consequently, kindness
and/or cruelty consumed the climate in which she developed her relationship with performance,
herself, and the world around her.
Similarly, Dorothy Dandridge details her own development as a young Black girl
traveling the deep south, performing with her sister as The Wonder Children. Coming to terms

10
Ibid., 25.

42
with her own abuse as well as the circumstances of poverty, Dandridge describes herself as
having a “crying childhood.”
11
Several times in the first two chapters of her autobiography, with
incredible self-reflexivity, she names particular circumstances and interactions that she
understood to have shaped different aspects of her adult personality. As stated earlier, Ruby
Dandridge moved their family around Cleveland before they eventually relocated to Memphis,
then Chicago, and finally Los Angeles, all while Dorothy and Vivian toured the Chitlin Circuit.
This was also in the midst of the Great Depression which visibly worsened the conditions of
already impoverished Black folks around the country. Traveling around the country, Dandridge
witnessed the impact of financial disparity and wrestled with her own responsibility to provide
for her impoverished family even as a very young entertainer. She notes that the impact of
watching her mother deal with the welfare system and general financial instability contributed to
her anxiety in later years. She admits that “the mark of the Depression remained, as if hardship
was the way life is, as if it couldn’t be otherwise or shouldn’t be, as if the pattern of decline and
defeat was an organic thing always lurking outside our door.”
12
Economic hardship combined
with familial instability allowed Dandridge to draw conclusions about her life’s trajectory which
she clarifies throughout the text.
During these times in their lives, both Horne and Dandridge also detail the abuse they
endured from adults charged to protect them. During an extended stay with a hired caretaker,
Horne describes being routinely beaten for the smallest of infractions. Referring to this caretaker
as a particularly “strange, sick women,” Horne recalls that “…on Wednesday night and Saturday
night, after I had undressed for my bath, I would be punished for all my transgressions of the

11
Earl Conrad and Dorothy Dandridge, Everything and Nothing : The Dorothy Dandridge
Tragedy (New York: Harper Paperbacks, 2000), 18.
12
Ibid., 36

43
previous days. She would cut switches from the trees and come to me and I would stand, wet and
naked, and be beaten.”
13
Horne is later sexually assaulted by another acquaintance of her
mothers, while staying in this person’s home. Similarly, Dandridge suffers consistent abuse at
the hands of her mother’s partner, Geneva Williams. She recalls the physical abuse being nearly
a routine aspect of her day-to-day as a child. Dandridge’s ascent into her teenage years is also
marked by sexual assault, perpetuated by Geneva. Witnessing, first-hand, the disappointment and
precariousness of the entertainment industry through their mothers also likely shaped, in
decidedly different ways, their outlook and expectations of their own relationship with the
industry. Consequently, not only did these circumstances admittingly impact Horne and
Dandridge’s growth into adulthood, abuse and neglect was then intertwined with their
relationships with their mothers. However, as recalled in their autobiographies, neither Horne nor
Dandridge faulted their mothers for the conditions that allowed for such abuse, rather they pitied
them for their obvious lack of discernment. Both describe how despite these circumstances, they
tended to be overly protective of their mothers in different ways.
Horne mentions multiple times that in the midst of her abuse she felt unable to tell her
mother primarily out of concern and protection. Even as a child, her justification for her silence
was, “I knew how hard she worked to get this place and hire this woman, and to tell her that it
was the worst treatment I had ever had seemed too cruel. I had already learned to protect my
mother from unhappiness and from the pressure of responsibility for me.”
14
Protecting her
mother meant that Horne had to learn to disguise her emotions and perform a kind of
contentment for the sake of what she understood as her mother’s feelings. This practice
undoubtedly impacted Horne’s relationship with performance, self-preservation, as well as her

13
Horne and Schickel, 35.
14
Ibid., 36

44
conceptions of trauma and secrecy. Dandridge also excuses her mother’s neglect through the
justification that Ruby relied on Geneva to help raise her and her sister—so much so that Ruby
dismissed Dandridge’s assertions of abuse. Dandridge’s biographer Donald Bogle further
substantiates these claims and suggests that this abuse and neglect caused Dandridge “to
withdraw into a comfort zone of fantasies; a world filled with the most personal of dreams where
nothing could touch or harm her, where nothing could dispel a little girl’s hope for happiness.”
15

For Dandridge, self-preservation looked like a detachment from reality through isolation and,
once again, performance.
Specific aspects of Horne and Dandridge’s accounts of their own childhood abuse
underscore the ways in which systemic violence resolutely impacted their understanding of
performativity. As mentioned above, the culture of dissemblance relies on the induction of Black
women into the shared understanding that respectability requires the denial of trauma and asserts
that secrecy and privacy are adequate forms of coping. Therefore, even as children, Black girls
are initiated into this culture based on the prominence of institutional violence alongside poverty
and dispossession. This violence is perpetuated in many forms, however in their case,
intracommunal and domestic abuse indicate the depth and ferocity of quotidian violence in the
lives of Black women. Moreover, despite the perpetuation of this abuse by fellow members of
the Black community, I contend that what Horne and Dandridge experienced and their
subsequent performative responses are a direct result of hierarchization and the ways in which
white supremacy, patriarchy, and the politics of respectability are engrained within the
consciousness of the perpetrators and the victims. Horne and Dandridge both inherited and
developed performative knowledges that were rooted in self-preservation. The necessity to adapt,

15
Donald Bogle, Dorothy Dandridge, 1st edition (New York, N.Y: Amistad, 1999), 22.

45
respond, and protect, despite continued oppression, characterizes the history of domination and
the victimization of Black women, which began during chattel slavery.
In a similar way, the need and/or desire to protect loved ones in the midst of chaos and
violence returns me back to Horne and Dandridge’s relationships with their mothers. I argue that
even as children, they recognized their mothers as victims of institutionalized oppression thus,
they sacrificed their own bodies and well-being to protect them from further harm. Their
respective narratives are tied together through the cultural logic of goodness vs. badness, as
associated with Christian religiosity, respectability, and patriarchy. Horne’s assessment of this
moral code and its impact on childhood abuse reinforces its prominence and the natural
development of the culture of dissemblance during Black girlhood. She states,
I guess from time immemorial little girls have had to run away from dirty old men…
Somehow you know what he’s trying to do is wrong. All you know is that if somebody
touches you it’s bad. Back in Macon, those good women had told me and told me: “Don’t
be a bad girl. Don’t be a bad girl. Don’t let a little boy touch you.” But you haven’t been
told whether you’re to blame or its the other person’s fault. Also this was a man whose
hospitality my mother was accepting.
16

Horne’s conception of her own abuse is echoed in the narratives of Black women across class
and geographical divides. Dandridge’s perceptions of what it meant to be good was bound to the
Christian morals she learned while traveling and performing across the south and the abuse she
continuously suffered at the hands of Geneva Williams. In “Understanding Patriarchy,” bell
hooks recognizes this practiced code of conduct and silence as the result of deeply embedded
patriarchy. In order for patriarchal culture to be maintained, hooks identifies the function of
“subjugation, subordination, and submission” by the ruler/authority figure who then also
enforces a “rule of silence,” thus promoting an overall denial of the system at work. Horne and

16
Horne and Schickel, 34-35.

46
Dandridge’s personal and professional performance practices were, therefore, birthed and shaped
by the childhood abuse they suffered as a result of patriarchy. Their respective experiences and
responses to this abuse were also historically informed by cultural practices that were tied to
chattel slavery and transferred via subjugated knowledges and embodied memory. The weight
and significance of these factors unquestionably distinguished them from fellow white
performers who could seamlessly be incorporated into Hollywood as stars, unencumbered by the
limitations inherently embedded into institutional belonging.
Ancestral Memory and Embodied Knowledge
To believe that bodies inherit the talents and qualities of their ancestors is to also open up
to the idea that bodies inherit memory, which can be joyous, traumatic, and everything in
between. The performances by Horne and Dandridge, both on screen and on stage, are
undoubtedly tied to their own relationships to their bodies and all of the knowledges and
memories it contained. Diana Taylor cogently details the relationship between performance, the
body, and memory in her short work, simply titled, Performance. She insists that,
“…performance offers a way to transmit knowledge by means of the body” and goes on to add
that, “Performance is a practice and an epistemology, a creative doing, a methodological lens, a
way of transmitting memory and identity, and a way of understanding the world.”
17
Performance
is therefore a multivariate and complex means of existing and adjusting to space, specifically for
Black women forced to acquiesce to the myriad forms of oppression that are enacted by
perpetuators indoctrinated by white supremacy. It is through this lens that I read and render
Black women’s performing bodies in relation to the history of subjugation, practiced during

17
Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the
Americas, Second Printing edition (Durham: Duke University Press Books, 2003), 36, 39.

47
chattel slavery.
Accordingly, performance, in and of itself, has a complex historical tie to Black women’s
bodies primarily as the result of chattel slavery. As Saidiya Hartman has explained, Black
women were consistently forced to “perform” their racialized and gendered roles for the captor
in ways that emphasized their objecthood and ontological non-beingness. Within the confines of
enslavement, performance worked as means of abuse towards and sustainability of the
objectified Black being. A complex nexus of power and acquiescence, performance justified
enslavement while also functioned as a survival tactic within a hierarchal society. In Scenes of
Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America, Saidiya Hartman
states,
Therefore, 'performing blackness' conveys both the cross-purposes and the circulation of
various modes of performance and performativity that concern the production of racial
meaning and subjectivity, the nexus of race, subjection, and spectacle, the forms of racial
and race(d) pleasure, enactments of white dominance and power, and the reiteration
and/or rearticulation of the conditions of enslavement.
18

Performance was thus a necessary tool for survival by enslaved people in the quotidian, while
also functioning as definitive proof of their inferiority for their captors. Engaging this concept
with Taylor’s, reinforces the theory that Black women’s bodies have unconsciously inherited the
habits and tools necessary to survive brutal conditions by way of adaptive behavior and
sociological transmogrification.
Subsequently, these memories function as a performance because of the ways in which
bodies participate in rituals that are tied to the written and unwritten traditions that have enabled
survival. The repetition of these rituals act are intimately tied to the lived experiences of both

18
Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-
Century America, 1 edition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 57.

48
ancestors and descendants. In Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance, Joseph Roach
expounds upon the interrelatedness of memory and performance through a historical analysis of
the mobility and function of performance within the circum-Atlantic slave trade system. He
tracks the ways in which both old and developing societies co-created memories through the
exchange and imposition of cultural memory and its consequent enactment through different
forms of performance. Roach asserts the prominence of the body’s relationship to memory and
inheritance, stating,
Performance genealogies draw on the idea of expressive movements as mnemonic
reserves, including patterned movements made and remembered by bodies, residual
movements retained implicitly in images or words (or in silences between them), and
imaginary movements dreamed in minds, not prior to language but constitutive of it, a
psychic rehearsal for physical actions drawn from a repertoire that culture provides.
19

Roach’s conceptualization of the body’s ability to remember, despite the passage of time and the
means of space, prove generative in analyzing past and contemporary performances by Black
women. It can be argued that Black women consciously and subconsciously inherit
psychological and bodily strategies purposed for survival based on the way domination reappears
within institutional practices. Therefore through the performing bodies of Horne and Dandridge,
who traversed the stage and screen, I consider how their conscious understanding of their
blackness and their subconscious embodied practices ultimately impacted and informed their
relationship to Hollywood stardom.
Horne’s very candid interviews give insight into many of the problems she faced as a
Black woman performer working in Hollywood. In Dandridge’s autobiography, where the first
chapter titled “From the Abyss” indicates her depressive state, she also provides clarity regarding
her own eventual acceptance of how racial discrimination thwarted her potential success. Their

19
Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 26.

49
physical bodies were legible to mainstream audiences because of their light skin and European
features, while at the same time still marked and read through their blackness. Put another way,
although they were both widely considered beautiful, neither of them could actually transcend
the limitations associated with anti-Black discrimination. Horne’s candidness throughout her
entire life and career is exceptional for the ways that it provides narration for the careers of many
of the Black women who came after her, including Dandridge. Also, because of Dandridge’s
short life and career, I will later explore where their careers diverge. I suggest this is due to
Dandridge’s inability to accept never accessing the benefits and privileges of actual stardom,
while Horne’s rejection of the politics of Hollywood very early in her career prepared her for the
disappointments that awaited. This seemingly subtle distinction is crucial to this analysis for the
ways in which it ultimately impacted how they individually coped with their misalignment with
Hollywood stardom.
Prior to officially entering Hollywood, the Black press had followed Dorothy
Dandridge’s career from childhood into her teenage and early adult years. Attuned to the
appearance of Black performers in both major and minor roles, several Black publications
recognized Dandridge while she was still singing, dancing, and touring with the Dandridge
Sisters. In 1939, the teenage trio were highlighted as sensations already making their mark
globally after finishing their run in the Cotton Club and setting sail for engagements in Europe.
20

By 1941, Black publications had followed Dandridge into her solo career as a budding actor and
gave her small headlining features. The Atlanta Daily World featured her in a small section on
the front page of a 1941 issue with the headline, “Petite Beauty Tells How She Crashed
Hollywood.” She begins the self-authored section professing, “Lady luck has certainly been my

20
“Cleveland Born____They Sail for Europe,” Cleveland Call and Post, June 8, 1939,
ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

50
pal ever since I came to California ten years ago as a kid.”
21
Her optimism was catalyzed by
early recognition and accolades by Black audiences and press that seemingly placed their hope in
the possibility of her success in the industry. In this article she is also performing the
respectability and discretion expected of her, as any mention of her childhood poverty and abuse
would have been culturally unacceptable and narratively inappropriate.
When she was a Cotton Club performer Dandridge began noticing the necessary shifts
that needed to occur when performing for majority white audiences. According to Bogle, she had
to reconsider her legibility as a performing Black woman in front of majority white audiences,
because she knew they held “a different set of cultural expectations and references.”
22
He calls
attention to the ways in which Dandridge intentionally deployed or withheld gestures that had
distinct cultural meanings for Black audiences while being illegible or perverse for white
audiences. Most prominently however, Dandridge learned during this time that “with a White
audience [she] could never let any feelings of cultural dislocation or isolation affect a
performance.”
23
As she perfected her nightclub performance style and gained popularity by
touring across the United States and Europe, she learned how she was received by white
audiences and the adjustments that were necessary in order to be accepted by those audiences.
Speaking of these performances in her autobiography she states,
Sometimes it is how you go about your entrances and exits that counts. If you move
gracefully, hold your head up, keep your dignity, and act as if you are not doing anything
forbidden—which in essence it shouldn’t be—there is a telepathy between yourself and
the white. There is a human transfer that gets you across. It must be that I have this, for
I’ve gone almost everywhere into forbidden jimcrow zones and have just gone on

21
Dorothy Dandridge, “Petite Beauty Tells How She Crashed Hollywood!,” Atlanta Daily
World, April 1, 1941, 13.308 edition, ProQuest Historical Newspapers.
22
Bogle, 64.
23
Idid., 64.

51
through.
24

The choice of phrasing “act as if you are not doing anything forbidden” is insightful as well as
strategic. Dandridge essentially acknowledges that her very beingness was a symbol of
something forbidden, and part of her performance was acting as though this was not a vital
component of her existence. Historically speaking, Dandridge’s body is representative of the
forbidden act of miscegenation. Her light skin and European features are crucial to her
mainstream desirability while also indicative of the race mixing practiced during chattel slavery,
into Jim Crow, and beyond. By “not doing” she is indeed still forbidden flesh, performing for the
captor/white audience. Using her autobiography as a site of narrative resistance and self-
actualization, Dandridge subtly reveals her awareness of the symbolic resonance of her body for
white audiences and the importance of performance to her well-being.
Similarly, reflecting back on her own experience as a nightclub performer for segregated
audiences in a 1963 self-authored piece for Show Magazine, Lena Horne stated that, “Even as a
performer I sensed that the white people in the audience saw nothing but my flesh, and its color,
onstage.”
25
Horne’s admonition and Dandridge’s documented bodily and performative
adjustment reveal the ways in which Black women performers were unquestionably aware of
how their bodies were read by non-Black audiences. Horne’s employment of the term “flesh” in
this recollection is particularly salient, as she performatively and narratively separates her body,
from her flesh, which scholar Hortense Spillers defines as “that zero degree of social
conceptualizations that does not escape concealment under the brush of discourse, or the reflexes

24
Dandridge and Conrad, 109-9.
25
Lena Horne, “I Just Want to Be Myself,” Show Magazine, September 1963, Schomburg
Center for Research in Black Culture.

52
of iconography.”
26
Spillers elaborates on the existence of the flesh as a demarcation of “total
objectification.”
27
Horne’s ability to distinguish between her “humanity” and the performance of
Black flesh “for the captor” was incredibly insightful and ground-breaking. Shane Vogel’s, The
Scene of Harlem Cabaret: Race, Sexuality, Performance discusses Horne’s particular
performance practice in magnificent detail and makes an important methodological move by not
“dismissing Horne’s negative affect or looking past it to her true self beneath, but in recognizing
her aloofness as a key strategic mode of black performance developed and inhabited in different
ways by a number of women nightclub performers in the twentieth century…”
28
I contend that
just like Horne enacted strategies of self-protection in her cabaret performances, she intentionally
repurposed similar practices in her film performances. Horne, in particular, recognized her
sociological positionality as a Black women and prioritized self-preservation over dreams of
stardom. Perhaps unknowingly, Horne also narrated the collective experience of Black women as
performing objects, unable to escape slavery’s afterlife and indicative of slavery’s visual
resonance.
Welcome to Hollywood
The “Supernova” concept I have developed considers the ways in which childhood
trauma, temporality, and capitalism coincide to destabilize the applicability of stardom for Black
women entering into mainstream Hollywood. As previously mentioned, from the early onset of
Black women attaining leading roles in Hollywood films, beginning in the late twenties and early
thirties, their experiences were drastically different from the ways that film and star studies

26
Hortense J. Spillers, Black, White, and in Color: Essays on American Literature and
Culture, 1 edition (Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 2003), 67.
27
Ibid., 68.
28
Shane Vogel, The Scene of Harlem Cabaret: Race, Sexuality, Performance (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2009): 169.

53
scholars have sought to define stardom. As I will detail, the treatment Black women received by
Hollywood studios is unequivocally connected to the structural oppression that Black women
experience widely, as a result of centuries of chattel slavery. In this context, Horne and
Dandridge sought to envision and mold a life for themselves as Black leading women, despite
the advantages of stardom remaining mostly out of reach throughout their tenure in Hollywood.
Prior to Horne and Dandridge’s respective leading-role arrival, Hollywood had an
established and scripted function for Black actors in minor roles.
29
As detailed in the work of
Arthur Knight and Miriam Petty, Black Hollywood actors were mostly relegated to minor roles
alongside white leads during the early studio system. For this reason, they had to create ways of
exerting performative agency both diegetically and extradiegetically. Before their mainstream
success, Horne and Dandridge briefly belonged to this cadre of performers as well. Horne had
found moderate fame amongst mostly Black audiences and nightclub aficionados in the thirties
as a singer and had become acquaintances with some of the most popular stage and screen
performers of the time like Cab Calloway and Duke Ellington. Prior to being signed by MGM
she had a leading role alongside Ellington in The Duke is Tops (which was later re-released as
The Bronze Venus). Dandridge played several minor role characters in the late thirties and
forties, which were consistently promoted by Black publications but went relatively unnoticed in
the mainstream trades. It was not until they were proven and “discovered” by the white
entertainment world and Hollywood studios that they were set apart from what had become the
standard.
Though Knight and Petty explore definitions of stardom as it was lived and experienced
by different Black performers, I argue that the performers within their respective case studies

29
Gender neutral usage of “actors”

54
never actually embodied stardom. Rather, appearances in Hollywood films, general popularity,
and the acquisition of wealth were simply perks of fame as opposed to qualifications of stardom.
This is because one of the foremost requirements of star creation, as defined by Dyer (1998) and
other star studies scholars, is an investment in the creation and promotion of a particular
performer.
30
The Hollywood economic model discussed by Dyer was fashioned by the presumed
success of capitalism and relied on the ways labor, and its exploitation, ultimately produce
capital. One of the ways Hollywood attempted to predict a film’s potential profit was by
manipulating aspects of a film based on regional interests and codes of conduct. “The myth of
the Southern box office,” whereby studios self-censored to mitigate possible censorship issues
that could unsettle Southern exhibitors, was an aspect that significantly influenced the roles that
were available for Black performers.
31
This was even more stringent in films with predominantly
white leads and Black minor characters, as the Black performer had to undoubtedly occupy a
place of subservience, if not invisibility, when appearing in scenes alongside white actors to
placate racist spectators. A film like Showboat (James Whale, 1936), featuring Hattie McDaniel
and Paul Robeson, is just one example of how Hollywood intentionally stifled the talent of Black
actors through the reinforcement of racist caricatures, which ensured the perpetual supremacy of
whiteness and the insignificance of blackness . This was the primary reality for the subjects of
Knight and Petty’s projects, consequently occluding them from the most foundational aspect of
star creation, which requires intentional brand management and financial investment by means of

30
Richard Dyer and Paul McDonald, Stars, 2nd ed. 1998 edition (London: British Film
Institute, 1998), 10–13.
31
“According to Cripps, box office in the South was notoriously low…increased black
patronage would have offset any falling off of the Southern white audience opposed to films
treating blacks fairly.” Karen Alexander, “Fatal Beauties: Black Women in Hollywood.”
Christine Gledhill, ed., Stardom: Industry of Desire, 1 edition (London ; New York: Routledge,
1991): 50-51.

55
publicity and promotion.
Based on this model, upon entering Hollywood Lena Horne was substantially impacted
by this already fully formed and operating system of discrimination and oppression. Connecting
Black leading women to Hollywood’s exhibition practices, Karen Alexander’s contribution to
Christine Gledhill’s anthology, Stardom: Industry of Desire, assesses the impact of “the myth of
Southern box office” stating,
Selling the commodity is a question of exhibition, and in the light of the frequent claims
that Hollywood studios depended on exhibition in the racist South for their profits, it was
difficult to imagine a black female star performing well enough in that market-place to
bring a return on the studio’s initial investment.
32

Hollywood’s assessment that Black women were not worth the investment translated onto the
careers of Horne and Dandridge, who were initially assumed to be exceptional, according to the
Black press and even some mainstream trades. Several sources however, suggest that Lena
Horne was skeptical of her “exceptionality” prior to signing her seven-year contract with MGM,
despite the insinuation that a contract represented Hollywood’s investment in star creation. In a
questionnaire provided by MGM that was likely used in early press releases and fan magazines,
Horne is asked if she has any superstitions and her response is, “Never hope too hard—never
pans out,” signaling to her distrust of the industry.
33
In her autobiography, she also details that
her hesitancy in working with Hollywood studios prompted her to consult not only her father,
who she brings to meet the president of MGM, Louis B. Mayer, but also Walter White of the
NAACP. Horne had long been associated with the NAACP through her family ties to Brooklyn’s
elite, Black upper class, so it is very likely that White was also interested in leveraging his

32
Ibid., 50.
33
MGM Biographical Information, 1942. Lena Horne Digital Collections. AMPAS,
Margaret Herrick Library. Beverly Hills, CA.

56
relationship with Hollywood through his existing relationship with Horne. In any case, White
used Horne to symbolize a “new Hollywood,” where Black actors were to be given opportunities
to play full, actualized characters as opposed to servants and jungle savages. This, of course, did
not go over well with many of the performers who had made their living as extras in Hollywood
films and were concerned with their own job security. Interestingly, Horne found allyship in an
unlikely source—Hattie McDaniel, whom the NAACP had a contentious relationship with,
particularly following her role as Mammy in the 1939 film, Gone with the Wind (Victor Fleming,
1939). McDaniel was sympathetic to Horne’s cause and attempted to mediate productive
dialogue between the “old guard” and Horne. By the time Horne began acquiring mainstream
attention from Hollywood, McDaniel was seemingly the preeminent “Black star” according to
Hollywood standards, having won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress in her role as
Mammy. McDaniel’s support of Horne thus symbolized the welcoming of a new era where
Black performers had the opportunity to transcend minor roles and become Hollywood stars, or
so they may have hoped. Eventually however, it would become clear to all parties, that Horne’s
initial exceptionalism and promising seven-year contract with MGM, did not exclude her from
racial prejudice and Hollywood’s inability to imagine otherwise.
Accordingly, although Horne would arrive into mainstream consciousness via her two
back-to-back leading roles in the all-Black cast films Cabin in the Sky (Vincente Minnelli, 1943)
and Stormy Weather (Andrew Stone, 1943), her relationship with MGM and the Hollywood
industry would remain contentious throughout her seven-year agreement tenure. As Horne later
states, “They didn’t make me into a maid, but they didn’t make me anything else, either. I
became a butterfly pinned to a column singing away in Movieland.”
34
Using the excuse of the

34
Horne and Schickel, 106.

57
“southern box office,” MGM refused to cast Horne in significant narrative roles so that when the
films were played in the South, her parts could be easily excised, without disturbing the narrative
plot. Journalist and screenwriter Frank Nugent explicated this point further in a 1945 feature
article on Horne in Liberty Magazine. He argues that Horne’s physique disallowed her from
fitting into the “music and plantation motif” that primarily employed Black performers during
the time and declared “any experiment along other lines inevitably would cause a ruckus not
merely in the South but in those metropolitan areas where racial friction is still a problem.”
35

Based on Horne’s initial skepticism and her general distrust of white people (stemming from
traveling the Jim Crow south as a child), I want to emphasize that these industrial circumstances
likely did not surprise Horne but proved what she had been preparing for throughout her entire
life. Stemming from the instability she experienced as a child, the abuse she suffered during the
time spent with her mother, and the tools she inherited via cultural memory and that were then
developed using performances of respectability and “goodness,” I am suggesting that Horne’s
experiences were invariably shaped by her identity as a Black woman, first and foremost.
Therefore, her candid discussions regarding racial oppression were not solely isolated to her
autobiography, where it is generally understood and common for folks to refashion themselves to
appear more intuitive and conscious in hindsight than what the past actually reveals. Rather, in
subtle and not so subtle ways, at the height of her career as a screen performer, Horne seemingly
used hidden transcripts and strategic performative practices to enable her own survival in an
industry proficient in exploiting and demoralizing Black talent.

35
Frank Nugent, Liberty Magazine. April 7, 1945. Lena Horne Digital Collections. AMPAS,
Margaret Herrick Library. Beverly Hills, CA.

58
Stormy Weather
Frank Nugent tells an interesting story in his 1945 feature article on Horne that is retold
by Horne in her autobiography years later. I recount this situation to illuminate how Horne’s
practice of self-protection through performance was not only enacted as a singer in her cabaret
performances, but was also integral to her relationship with Hollywood and subsequent screen
performances. It involves an incident on the set of Stormy Weather (Andrew Stone, 1943)
between Horne and white director, Andrew Stone. Here is how Nugent and Stone relay the story:
“We were shooting the title number,” Mr. Stone recalls. “Lena sang it all right, but there
was no warmth, no emotional quality. I tried everything I could to break her down. I
spoke to her about her mother, her kids. No go. Well, we shot it, but when I saw the
rushes I knew it was bad. No emotion. So next day I tried again, tried for hours, still
getting nowhere. Then Cab [Calloway] came over. ‘What’s the matter?’ he asked. I told
him. He said, ‘Leave it to me.’ He walked up to Lena, whispered two words! I never saw
such a change in a person. She was wonderful! Real tears in her eyes, a sob in her voice.
When she finished the number, she had hysterics, cried for ten minutes. Naturally I asked
Cab what he had said. He wouldn’t tell me. I still don’t know.” Lena won’t tell either.
“Cab just said something to tease me,” she says. “He got me mad, that’s all.” But she
won’t say what it was. It’s still a mystery.
36
(Emphasis mine)
Nugent quotes Stone saying, “I tried everything I could to break her down.” What could it have
looked like for a white man, with no relationship to Horne, a Black woman, to try and “break her
down” in the United States of America in 1943? What did he expect from her? What did he
know about her mother or her children? What emotional buttons did he try to press? There is no
indication that Stone and Horne had any prior relationship before the filming of Stormy Weather,
yet Stone’s whiteness and position of power automatically gave him license to assume things
about Horne’s identity without invitation or consent. Horne’s 2009 biographer James Gavin
repeats the telling of this story with additional context from Alice Key, a dancer in the film. Key

36
Frank Nugent. “She’s Nobody’s Mammy.” Daily News Sunday Magazine. (New York,
April 7, 1945)

59
asserts, “He was the wrong one to do Stormy Weather… He didn’t know how to work with black
people.”
37
Gavin adds, “Horne disliked him on sight, and didn’t welcome his prodding her to
‘feel it’ in blues fashion.”
38
Considering Horne’s acute awareness of the many faces of racial
discrimination, she undoubtedly recognized Stone as just another iteration of the white terrorism
she had grown to recognize and protect herself from. In her words, “[he] seemed to me to
represent the rockbound coast of Maine. He simply couldn’t pull any emotion out of me and I
could not respond to him.” There are several aspects of this particular incident that, for me,
distinguishes Horne’s experience from just another Hollywood altercation between a “star” and
the director.
First, is that Stone asserts his assumed mastery and control over her body and expects full
access to her personal life for his own gain. As a white man, Stone’s interaction, and eventual
retelling of the story, reinforces the racial and gendered power dynamics in operation on the set
of this film. He understands his directorial obligation to include eliciting emotions and
vulnerability from his actors in order to extract the best possible performance. However, even in
his retelling, he feels entitled to use what he thinks he knows about Horne to make her emotional
without any consideration to their lack of familiarity. I want to situate this experience as
exemplary to the ways that Hollywood knowingly implemented patriarchy and racial domination
as practiced and maintained since chattel slavery, which simply reinforced the slave master’s
absolute dominion over the enslaved. Thus, Horne’s function as a commodity was two-fold.
Bound contractually to MGM, she was now engrained within the Hollywood economic model as
a supposed star, which assumed investment by the studio with the expectation of capital return

37
James Gavin, Stormy Weather: The Life of Lena Horne. (New York: Atria Paperback,
2009): 132.
38
Ibid., 132.

60
via box offices. However, her star commodification was also intrinsically tied to her physicality
as a Black woman. Borrowing from Cedric Robinson and his cogent film text, Forgeries of
Memory and Meaning: Blacks and the Regimes of Race in American Theater and Film before
World War II, I contend that Hollywood’s allegiance to capitalism firmly relies on the operation
and efficiency of exploited labor classes. As Robinson asserts, “With the collapse of the slave
system, a different racial regime was required, one which adopted elements from its predecessor
but was now buttressing the domination of free labor.”
39
Therefore, following Robinson’s
analysis, Hollywood was able to successfully grow as an industry through the appropriation of
elements fundamental to slavery, such as the maintenance of racial hierarchy, domination, and
the exploitation of labor, which in this case, was that of Black performers like Horne. So
although slavery was officially abolished years prior, Black performers, like Horne, were
essentially still relegated and treated as objects, as opposed to human beings with the potential to
become stars. In this context, I return to Saidiya Hartman’s (1997) assessment of the commodity
and its function within the institution of chattel of slavery as a way to contextualize how racial
domination is reinforced through the director (master)/actor (slave) relationship. She states,
the fungibility of the commodity makes the captive body an abstract and empty vessel
vulnerable to the projection of others' feelings, ideas, desires, and values; and, as
property, the dispossessed body of the enslaved is the surrogate for the master's body
since it guarantees his disembodied universality and acts as the sign of his power and
dominion.
40

Although not captive in the sense of shackles and unpaid hard labor, Horne’s blackness confined
her to the captivity of white supremacy’s power and control via her MGM contractual mandates.

39
Cedric J. Robinson, Forgeries of Memory and Meaning: Blacks and the Regimes of Race
in American Theater and Film before World War II, New Edition (Chapel Hill: The University
of North Carolina Press, 2007), xv.
40
Hartman, 21.

61
Andrew Stone’s directorial power secured his access and dominance over Horne’s body and
appropriated the kind of master/slave relationship demonstrative of slavery’s afterlife. As such,
Horne does not separate her experience and interaction with Stone from the historical necessity
for Black women to protect themselves from white violence by way of performance and
shielding vulnerability.
This unequal power dynamic and its associative properties also contribute to Stone’s
subsequent characterizations of the Black, female body as Horne describes. She is admittedly
disturbed and offended by Stone’s assumption that she is capable of performing the title song in
a “blues fashion,” despite obviously not being a blues singer. Horne had gained notoriety and
fame from touring nightclubs around the country which primarily consisted of segregated white
venues. Though the blues, primarily sung by Black women, had gained tremendous popularity in
the twenties, it’s Black, working class origins prevented the genre from acquiring mainstream
legitimization and recognition. Therefore, the Blues was not performed in the “respectable”
white establishments that Horne frequented, and she had no association with it, aside from the
fact that she was a Black woman. Nevertheless, Stone’s assumption that she perform the song
“Stormy Weather” in a blues fashion further emphasizes his lack of familiarity with Horne as a
performer and his general assumptions regarding Black women. His flippant disregard for the
supposed “star” of the film is seemingly anchored by the established hierarchy that places value
on whiteness and categorically devalues blackness, no matter its nuances. Also, her reference to
him in her autobiography as a representation of the “rockbound coast of Maine” signifies the
distance and disconnect she felt between this very white man and herself.
Lastly, the primary reason I find this exchange so allegorical is because of the role that
Cab Calloway plays in the ordeal. To help illustrate the significance of this particular incident as

62
emblematic of the unique experiences Black women have in Hollywood I want to introduce and
briefly engage with Christina Sharpe’s text In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. Sharpe’s
theory and method galvanizes the metaphoric capacities and multiple meanings of “the wake,”
“the ship,” “the hold,” and “the weather.” She uses the rupture of the middle passage and its
contemporary impact on Black life to analyze and deconstruct quotidian anti-black violence, as
well as communal care.
41
I will detail the ways in which these material conditions show up in the
lives of Black women performers later in this text, but for now I will focus on the importance of
care, or what Sharpe classifies as “an ordinary note of care.”
42
She asserts,
Living as I have argued we do in the wake of slavery, in spaces where we were never
meant to survive, or have been punished for surviving and for daring to claim or make
spaces of something like freedom, we yet reimagine and transform spaces for and
practices of an ethics of care (as in repair, maintenance, attention)…
43

In every account of the incident between Horne and Stone, Cab Calloway’s intervention reads as
that “ordinary note of care” despite the atmosphere of anti-black violence, that is Hollywood.
The specific details of his contribution vary across archival platforms, but what remains
consistent is that he has an intimate conversation with Horne that conjures the performance Stone
had failed to inspire.
By 1941, Calloway had established his celebrity and had crossed over into mainstream
popularity through his mastership as a musician and Big Band leader. He was regularly featured
in Hollywood films, primarily orchestrating and playing himself and his role in Stormy Weather
was no different. Horne and Calloway had been friends for years, which in this moment allowed
for a kind of intimacy that could only have been cultivated by shared experiences and mutual

41
Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, Reprint edition (Durham: Duke
University Press Books, 2016).
42
Ibid., 130.
43
Ibid., 130.

63
respect. Stone, as outsider/overseer and witness to this performative transmogrification and
Nugent as outsider and translator, together find this situation incomprehensible. Nugent’s
conclusory statement, “It’s still a mystery” suggests to [white] readers the presence of an
unknowable magic within Black kinship. Historically speaking, this is the type of intimacy that
was practiced in secret amongst enslaved Black people that white slave holders attempted to
dismantle through means of violence, blackmail, and strategic encroachment.
44
Nevertheless, the
documentation of this event, in all of its iterations, reinforce Calloway’s intercessory act as more
than “a whispered two words” but a recognition of solidarity and communal support, a sounding
of care, within the oppressive climate of the Hollywood studio.
In contrast to Stone’s comments, indicating that following her performance of the title
song, “Stormy Weather,” Horne was in “hysterics” and “cried for ten minutes” after the cut, it is
reasonable to assume that to be an exaggeration, if not a complete fabrication, upon analyzing
the scene in question. The aforementioned disconnect between Stone and Horne combined with
the need to promote the film likely resulted in Stone attempting to galvanize interest in the film
by exploiting Horne’s image and emotional ties to the production. However, Calloway’s
intervention along with Horne’s admittedly protective performative exterior, speaks to the extent
to which Horne, up until that point, had learned to successfully deceive white audiences and
simultaneously connect with Black audiences non-verbally. For witnesses on-set to observe
Horne’s discomfort during shooting, as mentioned by Gavin, also indicates that her temperament
was familiar to her fellow Black castmates, who were also used to “performing” for the
captor/white audiences.
The performance of “Stormy Weather” lasts approximately eight minutes in total with a

44
Hartman, 65-70.

64
dance sequence break beginning halfway through by the Katherine Dunham Dance Group. It is
staged as a diegetic concert performance in front of an audience and accompanied by an
orchestra. Interestingly, it is actually Cab Calloway who orchestrates the big band in which
Horne performs the title song. Hence not only did Calloway provide her with the behind-the-
scenes emotional support necessary to deliver an adequate performance, he was also physically
present on stage with her throughout the song’s entirety.
In the film, as Calloway begins conducting the downstage orchestra, the curtain of the
elevated stage opens to Horne longingly staring out of a constructed set window at an apparent
rain storm, enhanced by visual effects. The Dunham Dance group is superimposed beyond the
view of the window where the camera later returns for their dance routine. Horne turns away
from the window, towards the audience, and solemnly begins singing the opening lines, “Don’t
know why there’s no sun up in the sky… Stormy Weather.” Her movements are theatrical, using
her hands and facial expressions for thematic emphasis, while her singing and wardrobe are
composed and pristine. She slowly descends the steps and notices the presence of her onscreen
ex-beau (Bill Robinson), whom she left earlier in the film, to pursue her singing career. Upon
making eye contact with Robinson, Horne’s affect becomes slightly more emotional as a single
tear falls from her eye and lands on her cheek. She maintains eye contact with Robinson while
singing, until the dance performance break of the song is indicated by intense flashing lighting,
wind, and thunder effects. Horne runs back up the steps onto the elevated stage and peers out the
window, through which the camera zooms in on what becomes the poetically, ethereal dance
break. It is performed in an imagined non-space that transitions from an outdoor, urban street
scene to a wistful staged ballet and then back to the thunderous street scene, with Katherine
Dunham at center throughout. Following the end of the dance performance, the camera zooms

65
back out to Horne spotlighted at center-stage. Before the curtain closes and the scene ends,
Horne performs the chorus one last time, slightly more boisterous and dramatic but also
perceivably less emotional than she appeared prior to the dance break.
The most remarkable aspect of the entire scene is the dance performance by the Dunham
group. However, it is Horne’s retelling of her experience in Hollywood, many years later, that
makes this particular scene and the rest of her film career an exemplary Supernova case study. In
1981, at the age of sixty-four she debuted her one-woman show on Broadway, Lena Horne: The
Lady and her Music. Initially scheduled to run for only four-weeks, due to its popularity the
show stayed open for over a year, finally closing after three-hundred and sixty-six total
performances. The premise of the stage-play centered Horne’s career, with each monumental
moment accompanied by a song from her extensive discography. Like her autobiography, Horne
is consistent with her critique of Hollywood and the industry’s inability to make her into a star.
Although the success of her Broadway show evinces qualities of stardom, Horne is very clear
that her Hollywood career was lackluster and that she attributed her contemporary success to her
willingness to protect herself and survive, despite Hollywood’s contrary efforts. When
discussing her initial arrival to California and the experience of learning to act for film, she
details the racialized suggestions that she received that were meant to make her less soulful, or
by Hollywood’s understanding, less Black. These particular aspects of her career and her own
recollection of these instances further support the insufficiency of the term “star” to encapsulate
the ways in which she was forced to exceed its parameters and ascend into a Supernova.
Furthermore, when discussing the kind of insensitive comments she received upon her
arrival in Hollywood, Horne is unabashedly forthright. In the play she visualizes this aspect of
her career when she attempts to perform a song but an omnipotent voice, symbolizing

66
Hollywood, continuously interrupts her to remind her that film is different from the stage, and
that she must remember her posture and to find the key light. Horne makes the scene comical by
making exaggerated facial expressions and exhibiting bodily discomfort meant to indicate her
confusion and frustration with the instructions. One of the most humorous sequences between
Horne and the voice-of-God commentator is when he states, “Ms. Horne try not to open your
mouth so wide when you sing… try to sing with a pretty mouth… you know like Jeanette
McDonald.” She registers this as an obvious insult but proceeds to shrivel her mouth and sing in
a manner that is exaggerated and barely intelligible. A stage hand then gives her an elaborate fur
shawl to drape around herself. She attempts to acquiesce to the ridiculous instructions being
provided to her while also completing the song number. Overall, the segment hyperbolizes her
relationship with Hollywood by emphasizing the ways in which Hollywood was unequipped to
fully incorporate her into the star schema because of how her blackness translated to mainstream
audiences. It also highlighted the contradictory expectations placed on her performance style. For
example, as mentioned above, Stone expected Horne to perform “Stormy Weather” in a “blues
fashion,” while Hollywood studio executives were invested in suppressing performative
characteristics that may have been associated with blackness. In her 1965 autobiography, Horne
draws her own conclusion regarding this conflicting existence. She states, “As for the white man,
he either advised me to forget the basic fact of my color and to pass or he urged me to exploit it,
to be an exotic sexual symbol. Rarely did he try to find out who I was, what my talents and
desires were. He, too, was the prisoner of his preconceived ideas about what a Negro woman
should be.”
45
As such, her mere existence as a Black woman inherently rendered her excessive
and/or “too-much” for stardom’s very limited and contradictory framework for Black women.

45
Horne and Schickel, 219.

67
Altogether, Horne performs the song “Stormy Weather” two different times during the
course of her one-woman show. The first time occurs during the segment of the show when she
is discussing her experience in Hollywood. Thematically, this portion of the performance
emphasizes her contentious relationship with Hollywood, which was highlighted by the
performative suggestions already mentioned, the casting of a white actress as the biracial lead in
Showboat—a role she prepared for and hoped to attain—and her eventual relegation to film roles
where she only performed a song or two that could easily be cut during Southern exhibitions
without disrupting the narrative plot. When she performs “Stormy Weather” at this point in the
show, in an all-white, angelic-like dress, it is relatively similar to the film version as it relates to
musical composition, tone, and her general composed disposition. There are a few additional ad-
libs and some riff experimentation but overall she performs it in a way that is familiar. Later,
however, she concludes the show with a second drastically different performance of the song,
wearing a bright red dress, accented with a metallic, gold long-flowing jacket, emphasizing her
fierce independence and passion.
The story arch of the play consists of Horne’s life, career, and evolution into the
confident, self-actualized woman and performer she had emerged as by 1981. Therefore, her
final performance of the song she had become most known for, emphasized her agency and her
complete ownership of the song, as well as her body and voice. She offers a brief prelude to the
song, stating, “It’s taken me forty-some-odd years to grow comfortable with this song. My skin
has grown around it. And no matter where it came from or how I got it, I’m allowed to sing it the
way I feel.” She then offers another brief interlude and extended riff of the word “I” before
belting out the first verse of “Stormy Weather.” This time the musical composition is remixed
into a jazz version, eliminating its original big band orchestra format, for a piano, light-drum,

68
and saxophone led opus. Horne outwardly rejects the formulaic method of performance she was
forced to submit to by Hollywood years prior. Instead this version is exuberant and riotous,
invoking a soulful and improvisatory method similar to “the blues sound” that was once
antithetical to her image and subsequent popularity. She is also sure to assert full agency of her
body and sound by singing with her mouth open widely and allowing the music to penetrate and
direct her movement on stage. Horne’s final performance of “Stormy Weather” is a boisterous
pronouncement of her sovereignty, unencumbered by the limitations that characterize stardom.
Her sound and body language labor to intentionally reject the proscriptions Hollywood had
developed to suppress and minimize her talent. Lena Horne: The Lady and Her Music ultimately
functioned as an acknowledgment of the various obstacles she confronted that were all explicitly
bound to her existence as a Black woman navigating an entertainment industry unwilling to
invest in making her a star. It also, however, was a reclamation of the self she had admittingly
forfeited early in her career as a way to protect herself from Hollywood’s detrimental treatment.
Performance was therefore not only reserved for the stage and screen but remained the
precondition through which survival was historically predicated for Black women, and thus
inherited by Horne.
Through Horne’s performative practices that were perfected on the stage and later
implemented on screen, Horne’s strategic performative engagement is an exemplary case study
in understanding how the Supernova framework emerged out of Black women’s historical
insistence to survive, despite chattel slavery and its subsequent resonance. Her determination to
remain distant from her white audiences onstage indelibly marked her relationship and
interaction with the Hollywood screen later. In Horne’s words, “They got the singer, but not the

69
woman.”
46
In the next chapter, I pick up where I left off with Dorothy Dandridge by analyzing
and interrogating her particular approach to onscreen performances and its divergence from that
of Horne’s. Methodologically moving towards a primarily textual analysis approach, I explore
the ways in which Dandridge, and later Eartha Kitt, mobilized their childhood trauma and
Hollywood’s discrimination to work within the “bad girl” roles they became known for. I also
continue to consider how their bodies represented the afterlife of slavery in a way that
unquestionably impacted their professional and personal lives. With Horne as the narrator,
Dandridge and Kitt follow this performative genealogy in both similar and contrasting ways,
further supporting their ascension into Supernovae.

46
Horne and Schickel, 150.

70
Chapter 2: Dorothy/Eartha

Some of us thrived; some of us died. All of us had a taste.
—Toni Morrison, Sula
Dorothy waited. After being the first Black woman nominated for an Academy Award for
Best Actress for her leading role in Carmen Jones in 1954, she waited. After signing a coveted
three movie contractual agreement with Twentieth Century Fox in 1955, she waited. After
turning down the role of Tumptim in The King and I, Dorothy waited. Dorothy waited for
stardom that never arrived. Scholar Kara Keeling indicates that, “waiting can connote not only
expectation or anticipation but also a sense of enduring without something expected or promised,
as well as a type of service-oriented labor where one is indefinitely bound to meet the needs of
another.”
1
Keeling’s discussion of “waiting” is prompted by Frantz Fanon’s formulation of what
it looks and feels like as a Black man existing in a racially confounding cyclical arrangement in
anticipation of the violence of decolonization, which emerges as always already “too early… or
too late.”
2
She names and theorizes “waiting” as the spatio-temporal location of the interval and
explores the (im)possibilities afforded to those, specifically Black women, who reside within.
Discussions of the interval vary within film studies; however, I am mostly interested in the ways
Keeling and Mary Ann Doane (The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the
Archive) contend with the interval as a physical and theoretical location that indicates what is
unseen cinematically. Simply put, when looking at an actual thirty-five-millimeter film strip, the
interval would be the lined spaces between each frame where images cannot mechanically exist.

1
Kara Keeling, The Witch’s Flight: The Cinematic, the Black Femme, and the Image of
Common Sense (Durham: Duke University Press Books, 2007): 38.
2
Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Richard Philcox, Revised edition (New
York : Berkeley, Calif.: Grove Press, 2008): xi.

71
This literal space has been theorized figuratively as a realm of cinematic possibility that has
revelatory potential for historically marginalized and (in)visible characters. Keeling posits that,
“The challenge that the experience of the interval provides entails opening thought to ‘the
unforeseeable, the unanticipatable, the non-masterable, non-identifiable.’ Perhaps a whole other
reality—one that we do not yet have a memory of as such—opens up.”
3
I argue that Dorothy
Dandridge, and in different way Eartha Kitt, existed and experimented within the interval for
most of their professional careers; hopeful for the promises of stardom and laboring to meet the
needs of a seemingly insatiable Hollywood industry, all the while respectively realizing and
accepting the reality that stardom was always already foreclosed to Black women performers.
The interval represents the space and various modalities Black women performers of the early
twentieth century experimented within while waiting for the promises of an unreachable
stardom. Using archival research and textual analysis, I illustrate the socio-political climate
Dandridge and Kitt attempted to navigate by way of their performance tactics, which at different
moments influenced the marketing and reception of their actual bodies and their films. An
exploration of the interval and the ways these Black women experimented within it, reconsiders
the possibilities available through performance as not just a means to an end, but a meditative
existence unbound to an expected arrival. Put another way, I suggest that although Dandridge
and Kitt desired stardom, they both, at different points in their careers, distinctly performed with
the realization that it may not arrive. Subsequently, they respectively experimented with
performance as a mode of rumination and self-fashioning unencumbered by stardom’s absence.
Often when discussing Black cinematic representation, there is a particular interest in
performative agency and locating moments of authorship where Black entertainers surprisingly

3
Keeling, 40.

72
outperform in roles that lack complexity and depth. This kind of analysis has been generative
when considering the number of Black performers in cinematic history who were never given
leading and/or multifaceted roles in Hollywood films yet found opportunities to flex their
creative energy in unexpected ways.
4
My analysis, however, is interested in exploring
performance as a multidimensional and indefinite form of experiential creative expression. I
consider how Black women experimented with performance out of necessity and, at times,
hopelessness which in turn, challenges revisionist assumptions of agency. In Habeas Viscus:
Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human, Alexander
Weheliye suggests an epistemological shift that challenges the traditionally predetermined
response to subjection as solely sovereignty and autonomy, and instead postulates the imagining
of otherwise. He proposes,
As modes of analyzing and imagining the practices of the oppressed in the face of
extreme violence—although this is also applicable more broadly—resistance and agency
assume full, self-present, and coherent subjects working against something or someone.
Which is not to say that agency and resistance are completely irrelevant in this context,
just that we might come to a more layered and improvisatory understanding of extreme
subjection if we do not decide in advance what forms its disfigurations should take on.
5

Thinking beyond assumptions of agency is a productive concept that illuminates the inherent
complexities often glossed over when exploring marginalized communities at-large, let alone
Black women and their relationships with oppressive institutions. Agency is rooted in the
assertion of one’s humanity, and in that right to humanness, to then be free to make decisions
that are independent and self-directed. Historically, scholars have attempted to redress the
actions and decisions enslaved people performed and characterize them as intentional assertions

4
See Miriam J. Petty, Stealing the Show: African American Performers and Audiences in
1930s Hollywood (Oakland, California: University of California Press, 2016).
5
Alexander G. Weheliye, Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black
Feminist Theories of the Human (Durham: Duke University Press Books, 2014), 2.

73
of their humanity and “free will” in a conscious effort to resist slavery. However, to assert
slavery’s impact and the many forms it persists in its afterlife, is also to acknowledge that Black
people have primarily been considered as property, chattel, and objects rather than as sentient
human beings.
6
Objecthood as an ontology would then rely on a different set of logics that may
not necessarily prioritize the assertion of humanity, but an experimentation within non-
humanness that is not bound to acts of resistance and agency. In this vein, to then assume that
Black women performers were solely invested in performative agency, is to diminish the
possibilities available within the interval as objects. A prolonged existence in the interval makes
performative experimentation particularly appealing, interesting, and possibly unavoidable for
Black women performers reckoning with their own coherency in the face of multiple forms of
violence. For audiences witnessing these performances, there is something similar to Roland
Barthes’ formulation of the “punctum” in a photograph that stimulates intrigue. Something that
pricks the viewer and generates an affective response that remains, even after the subject/object’s
disappearance.
As Dandridge waited for Hollywood to craft a Black leading role for her, she receded
deeper into feelings of placelessness, impacting her performative motivations. I will expound on
this further below, but I am suggesting that prolonged involuntary idleness (as she
conceptualized it) restructured Dandridge’s approach to and performance of later roles through a
rumination on her own objecthood, imagery, and hyper/invisibility. Similarly, but prompted by
different circumstances, Eartha Kitt’s time in the interval is characterized by performative
vulnerability, opacity, and excess. I will detail later how Kitt relied on performative excess while

6
This definition of agency has been inspired by Walter Johnson’s proposal to reconsider
agency and its application to the experiences and actions of enslaved Africans historically. See:
Walter Johnson, “On Agency,” Journal of Social History 37, no. 1 (Autumn 2003): 113–24.

74
also confronting limited film role availability in Hollywood, leaving her to ruminate on her own
trauma in a way that was cinematically rendered both subservient and excessive. In both cases,
this chapter analyzes the multidimensionality of performance and the many ways Black women
performers, in waiting, explored the possibility therein
“Nobody to Help Me”
In 1958, Dorothy Dandridge was cast as Bess in the George Gershwin folk-opera, film
adaptation of Porgy and Bess. Despite being initially uninterested in the role, by 1958
Dandridge’s film career had plateaued and she was desperately attempting to revive her post-
Carmen popularity. Interviews detail that she was initially concerned with being type-cast in
hyper-sexual, seductress roles, hence her hesitancy to play Bess. In a quote from The New York
Post in 1954, Dandridge rejects the idea of playing Bess in her next leading role stating, “I don’t
want to be typed. People who’ve seen me as Carmen have suggested that I should do ‘Porgy and
Bess,’ but I don’t think that’s for me now…I know I can play other parts.”
7
Despite this
assertion, Dandridge had only secured two co-lead roles post-Carmen and with the influence of
former-lover and director Otto Preminger, Dandridge conceded to performing opposite Sidney
Poitier, Pearl Bailey, Sammy Davis Jr., and a host of other prominent Black performers.
Dandridge’s reluctance to play Bess, her eventual performance of the role, and both the
mainstream and Black press’ evaluation of the film offer a layered and complex history worthy
of significant analysis. I argue that one of the reasons that Dandridge was consistently
renegotiating her conceptions and expectations of star treatment was because of how both the
mainstream and Black press evaluated her role at Bess. This analysis also considers the ways that

7
Nancy Seely, “The Road Ahead for ‘Carmen,’” NY Post, November 7, 1954, Schomburg
Center for Research in Black Culture.

75
Black critics attempted to balance their admiration of Dandridge with their adherence to the
politics of respectability and the racial problems with Porgy and Bess as a story. Dandridge’s
performance of Bess and the dialogue surrounding the film, exemplify the complexity of Black
women’s relationship to Hollywood stardom. Attempting to straddle the line between
expectations of respectability and sex-appeal, Dandridge struggled with the impossibility of
trying to please disparate audiences with markedly different standards of how Black women
should behave in public.
Once Dandridge resolved to playing Bess, archival interviews and articles reveal the
ways in which she attempted to distinguish Bess as “anything but a simple primitive, like
Carmen” and redeem the character as justifiably damaged rather than just “a woman of loose
morals.”
8
Burdened by the representational responsibilities associated with the politics of
respectability of the time, Dandridge was seemingly caught between her financial
responsibilities, her desire to work, and the pressure to represent Black people in a positive
light—no matter what. Even prior to playing Carmen in 1954, she struggled with this pressure
and in her autobiography she explains,
The Negro community is plagued by fears of its image; it has been so much the
victim of stereotypes that it has developed an understandable sensitivity about
what will be done with the Negro theme in any of the arts…I had the fear I
might displease the Negro community. I couldn’t bear to think I might turn in a
performance that would be injurious to that perennial spectre, race pride, the
group dignity.
9

Although she went on to play Carmen and receive positive reviews from Black and white
publications, there was an underlying theme across Black press coverage that is perfectly

8
Donvan Pedalty, “Dandridge Turns on Her Talent,” Picturegoer, February 22, 1958. and
Porgy and Bess Files, Motion Picture Association of America. Production Code Administration
Records. Margaret Herrick Library, Digital Collections.
9
Dandridge and Conrad, 168-169.

76
captured in a review from the Atlanta Daily World. Writer Marion Johnson ends their mostly
positive review with this final caveat: “It is not everything that social progress demands with its
All-Negro cast yet it is radiantly beautiful and wonderfully acted.”
10
The official start of the
Civil Rights movement is generally regarded as 1954 beginning with the Brown v. Board of
Education Supreme Court decision, which lawfully ended racial segregation in schools. The
following year, Emmett Till was murdered and Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to vacate
her seat for a white passenger, leading to the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Justly, the climate of
1954 and the years to follow were thick with the anxieties, fears, and pain of Black people
around the country desperately trying to prove their humanity and demand full citizenship.
Dandridge was undoubtedly attuned to these conversations and events and hoped to use her
platform to model racial progress and respectability, despite accepting the role of Carmen (and
later Bess). Nevertheless, her autobiography reveals that she later came to realize that she was
actually confined in the hold with the rest of Black America simply dreaming of “fantasies of
flight.”
11

As mentioned previously, Christine Sharpe’s text In the Wake: On Being and Blackness
metaphorically engages with the conditions of the Black experience through the mobilization of
the “the wake, the ship, the hold and the weather.”
12
She uses the various etymological
renderings of these terms to engage and extend the implications of Saidiya Hartman’s
conceptualization of the “afterlife of slavery.” By focusing on “the hold” and “the weather” and
considering the application of these concepts onto the lived experiences of Black women

10
Marion E. Johnson, “Carmen Jones Is a Saga of Coquetry.” Atlanta Daily World,
November 4, 1954.
11
Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study
(New York: Minor Compositions, 2013).
12
Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, Reprint edition (Durham: Duke
University Press Books, 2016).

77
performers, like Dandridge, I am unsettling the assumptions that characterize them as apolitical
and marked only by exceptionality and beauty. Put simply, “the hold” re/presents and
contemporizes the hold of the slave ship used to transport Africans across the Middle Passage
and its subsequent impact on the everyday violence experienced by Black people who remain
confined within the literal and figurative asphyxiating conditions leading to premature death.
13

“The weather” is the atmospheric condition of anti-blackness that characterizes Black life in the
quotidian. For Dandridge in particular, despite the tragedy of her life and subsequent premature
death, she has been historicized in a manner that asserts a teleology of progress and opportunity
rather than violence and dispossession. This is not to disregard the historical significance of her
role in Carmen Jones, however it is to acknowledge that her body remained marked by her
blackness and that she was reminded continuously of the structural limitations of such an
existence. She explains in her autobiography, that although white audiences considered her
“purportedly beautiful, passable, acceptable, talented…” there remained a barrier that she could
not overcome. With this in mind, what did it then look like for Dandridge to perform in the hold?
How does the reality of antiblackness as total climate impact performance? What performative
possibilities exist within the hold? How does recognition and concession to the realities of the
hold and the weather impact performative motivation and subsequent experimentation?
Several different biographical sources note that Dandridge experienced targeted and
particularly cruel verbal abuse by her former lover and director of the film, Otto Preminger,
while shooting Porgy. The film was initially to be directed by Rouben Mamoulian, however pre-
production disagreements with producer Samuel Goldwyn led to him being controversially
replaced at the last minute by Preminger. By 1958, Preminger and Dandridge’s romance had

13
Moten and Harney, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study

78
ended and once on set, it became clear to Dandridge, the crew, and cast that she would receive
the brunt of Preminger’s infamous onset cruelty and abuse, which she had been spared during the
filming of Carmen Jones. She recalls in her autobiography that Preminger’s rage and insults
were “now heaped upon me, telling me I was doing this wrong, that wrong. Now I was an
idiot.”
14
Several cast members, including her co-star Sidney Poitier later discussed Preminger’s
verbal attacks and Dandridge’s obvious inability to cope with the cruelty. A young Nichelle
Nichols, who was a dancer on set, remembered that Preminger “berated Dorothy in between
takes. He did it loudly and in front of everyone until she was just totally incapable of doing re-
takes. He took delight in destroying her because she’d crumble.”
15
The power dynamic described
on this set is narratively comparable to the hostile and abusive working conditions consistently
described by Black women domestic workers in white households. In a majority of those cases,
Black women were/are unable to challenge their abusers for the sake of maintaining their own
livelihood. Although Dandridge and Preminger had some form of a consensual relationship at
one point, his onset abuse and general disrespect of his Black cast and crew epitomized the
structural persistence of racial hierarchy maintained under capitalism. Therefore, this treatment,
in addition to her already fragile disposition due to her dissatisfaction with her personal and
professional life, completely engulfed Dandridge within the atmosphere of “anti-blackness as
total climate,” otherwise simply referred to as “the weather.”
16

The character of Bess, as performed on stage and screen was originally described as
“dissolute,” and a prostitute, requiring “a nigger of Crown’s proportions to satisfy her.”
17

Narratively, she is scripted as multifaceted due to her obvious desire to be accepted and loved in

14
Dandridge and Conrad, 202.
15
Bogle, 414.
16
Sharpe, 104-105.
17
Porgy and Bess, MPDAA Files, Herrick Digital Collections

79
the traditional sense while still being haunted by the temptations associated with crime and
promiscuity. Crown, played in the film by Brock Peters, is Bess’ former lover, and later rapist.
He is a “swaggering, burly, brawling stevedore” known for his drunken antics and affinity for
violence.
18
Throughout the play and film Bess is continuously lured by Sammy Davis Jr’s
character, Sportin’ Life who peddles a drug nicknamed “happy dust.” In opposition to Bess,
Crown, and Sportin’ Life the “beloved Porgy,” described as “handsome and sensitive in the
face” is played by Sidney Poitier.
19
Set in a 1912 segregated tenement in Charleston, South
Carolina known as “Catfish Row,” the story attempts to present an American folk opera of good
versus evil, dedicated to visualizing a simpler time that was absent of the civil unrest occurring at
the time of its cinematic release. During its Broadway run, Porgy was fairly criticized by the
Black press, who were concerned with how the writers of the play, Dubose and Dorothy
Heyward, consistently regarded the story as a true and thoughtful depiction of southern Black
life in America. Described as propaganda and “a glorified minstrel show” even before Samuel
Goldwyn acquired the rights to produce it as a film generally summarizes the Black press’
sentiments toward the work.
20
Nevertheless, during its many stage runs and even following its
theatrical release, Black critics remained cognizant of the fact that, despite the story’s content, its
production provided work for some of the best theater and film performers of the time, which
could not be ignored.
21
Black spectators often had to then reconcile their allegiance to

18
Ibid.
19
Ibid.
20
“Outlaw the Primitives,” The Baltimore Afro-American, ProQuest Historical Newspapers.
(May 9, 1953)
21
Nick Ford, “If Uncle Same Kept ‘Tobacco Road’ Out of Europe Why Did It Send ‘Porgy
and Bess.’” Baltimore Afro-American (1893-1988). ProQuest Historical Newspapers: The
Baltimore Afro-American. (April 4, 1953): A9 and A.S. Doc Young. “The Big Beat, And Now:
Porgy and Bess.” Los Angeles Sentinel (1934-2005). ProQuest Historical Newspapers: Los
Angeles Sentinel. (July 9, 1959): C2.

80
respectability politics with their desire to witness and enjoy talented Black performers in film.
Porgy and Bess therefore typified the chasm between Hollywood and the socio-political
aspirations of the concurrent Civil Rights agenda of 1959.
Accordingly, while “stereotypes reproduce and insist on certain structures of visibility,”
many Black performers experimented, in small and large ways, within these confines out of
necessity.
22
In other words, performative experimentation in the hold was not only relegated to
minor roles, forced to “steal the show,” but also in the leading roles that reflected Hollywood’s
commitment to dominant ideology, masked as the familiar.
23
As mentioned previously,
Dandridge suffered through the verbal and emotional abuse of Preminger throughout the entire
production. Witnesses agreed that she was consistently left in tears following his tirades and, in
some cases, when time did not allow for her to return to her dressing room to recuperate, she was
forced to continue working the scene. Consequently, despite Bess being written to suit the
assumptions and fantasies of its white writers, Dandridge performs Bess by accessing her real
life despair. By 1958, she had become debilitated by what she understood as her responsibility to
the Black community. In addition to feeling that pressure, she was disappointed with her career
and personal life, which caused overwhelming emotional suffering. The multi-dimensionality of
Dandridge’s Bess, thus, begs to consider the ways in which she translated and performed
quotidian violence as experienced diegetically through Bess and extra-diegetically as Dandridge.
In Embodied Avatars: Genealogies of Black Feminist Art and Performance, Uri
McMillan considers the different ways Black women artists mobilized tactics that characterized

22
Diana Taylor, Performance (Durham: Duke University Press Books, 2016): 34.
23
Miriam Petty uses the concept of “stealing the show” to capture how minor role Black
performers in the 1930s “expressed agency and negotiated ideas about their lives and identities
through acts of performance and discourse that incorporated and exceeded the cinematic frame.”
Stealing the Show. (Oakland, California: University of California Press, 2016): 7.

81
the experience of enslavement in various artistic performances historically and contemporarily.
McMillan posits that through their art, Black women become objects.
24
However in continuing to
consider the afterlife of slavery and its resonance I maintain that Black women are already
objects, therefore performing objecthood is simply an ontological act, rather than a decision. Put
another way, objecthood was a foundational tenant to the establishment of the enslaved as
chattel. Even despite the abolitionist campaign to assert the humanity of the enslaved, Black
people continued to be rendered disposable and without feeling. For Black women, many of the
distinguishing aspects of slave labor in relation to duty, bodily access, and upward mobility
remain a functioning logic in both public and private spaces. Therefore, Dandridge’s
performance of Bess can subsequently be read as a performative reconciliation with the reality
her own objecthood.
The particular circumstances surrounding Porgy and Bess and its production already
made for an intense and violent on-set environment. With Samuel Goldwyn removing Rouben
Mamoulian very late into pre-production, a fire that burnt down the original “Catfish Row” set
days before shooting, and Otto Preminger being named director, despite his own controversial
relationship with Black audiences after Carmen Jones, the filming of Porgy and Bess got off to a
very rough start. The screenplay was adapted by N. Richard Nash, a white writer and playwright,
who corresponded extensively with Goldwyn and Mamoulian between 1957-1959 over the
screenplay revisions.
25
In these documents, housed at the Wisconsin Historical Society, the three
of them are primarily engaged in conversation on the particular adjustments that were necessary

24
Uri McMillan, Embodied Avatars: Genealogies of Black Feminist Art and Performance
(New York: NYU Press, 2015).
25
Correspondence with Samuel Goldwyn and others regarding revisions of screenplay, 1957-
1959. “N. Richard Nash Papers, 1925-2000,” n.d., N. Richard Nash Papers, 1925-2000; Box 34,
Folder 5, Wisconsin Historical Society.

82
in adapting Porgy from stage to screen. Primarily these included set changes that film
productions allow that the static sets of theater disallow, along with an interest in character
revisions that considered the particular talents of the actors—mostly as it related to Pearl Bailey
as Maria and Sammy Davis Jr. as Sportin’ Life. Bess, as a character, is mentioned surprisingly
infrequently despite being a main character. There is also no particular written interest in
modifying the character to fit Dorothy Dandridge’s style and acting, which would later be
reviewed and critiqued extensively in the press. With the lack of attention to her character
throughout pre-production and in the screenplay, Preminger ultimately became responsible for
developing Bess to fit Dandridge, which proved disastrous.
One of the most crucial sequences in the film occurs after Bess resolves to remain with
Porgy following Crown’s departure and incorporates herself into the “Catfish Row” community.
Despite initially being shunned and openly judged by many of the residents in the community,
Bess revels in the stability and domesticity provided within the confines of Porgy’s shack. Nash,
Goldwyn, and Mamoulian agreed that Bess was characterized by her desperation and “heartfelt
need for the love and devotion of a good man.”
26
It seems her integration into the community is
confirmed when she is invited by Maria, the “proprietress of Catfish Row,” to the community
picnic.
27
Although initially hesitant to leave Porgy, she is coaxed into attending and seemingly
assimilates easily into the festive mood of the gathering. All seems to have gone well by the
picnic’s end as she helps gather the remaining supplies and hurries to join the other attendees on
the boat back to Catfish Row. Unfortunately, she falls too far behind the crowd for it to be

26
Comments on Revised Screenplay from meeting with Samuel Goldwyn with Mamoulian's
notes from Night Letter dated February 7, 1958. “N. Richard Nash Papers, 1925-2000,” n.d., N.
Richard Nash Papers, 1925-2000; Box 34, Folder 5, Wisconsin Historical Society.
27
Porgy and Bess, MPDAA Files, Herrick Digital Collections

83
noticed that she has been apprehended by Crown, who apparently had been watching the
festivities from the brush and plotting on Bess. Crown proceeds to rape Bess and when she
finally reappears back in Catfish Row after being missing for two days she is obviously
traumatized and experiences symptoms associated with what is now known as Post-Traumatic
Stress Disorder (PTSD). Throughout these scenes Bess’ gestures, facial expressions, and
repetitious speech relay anguish, despair, and ultimately, resignation. What is eerily upsetting
about these scenes is the fact that in the majority of the behind the scenes photographs taken
during the production, which feature Dandridge and Preminger, Dandridge’s mannerisms almost
entirely mimic Bess’ discomfort and misery. Bess and Crown’s violent reunion cinematically,
visualizes the off-screen assault that Dandridge endured on-set with Preminger, while also being
equally reminiscent of the violence Black women have contended with historically. It is through
Dandridge’s performing body, archived on film, that spectators bear witness to the manifestation
of how inherited and contemporary traumas remain actively present for Black women in the
quotidian.
The behind the scenes photographs taken by Gjon Mili were meant to be published in
Life Magazine in June of 1959, however only one photo appeared in the intended issue. It cannot
be verified as to why the film did not get a multiple page spread featuring the brightly colored
photos, however upon viewing several of the photos, they seem to reveal more information than
what was likely considered necessary for the time. Dandridge’s pained face and distressed
gestures are consistent both onscreen and off, but particularly consistent in nearly every candid
photo with her and Preminger in the frame. Bess is of course characterized by her desperation for
love and stability, however Dandridge’s own personal struggles ultimately usurp her character
entirely, making her own pain and sadness indistinguishable from the written character.

84
Throughout the rape scene, Crown grabs and tosses Bess around demonstrating his own prowess
over her frailty. There is a moment in which as he asserts his physical dominance with a single-
handed grip of her arm, Bess/Dandridge grips her dress with her free hand to brace herself for the
ensuing force of Crown’s physical acumen. This quick bracing gesture is subtle, however when
juxtaposed side-by-side with one of the most disturbing behind-the-scenes photos of Preminger,
Poitier, and Dandridge, this visual cue becomes less about the scene and more about Dandridge’s
instinctual bodily response to harm. The photo in question frames Preminger reaching across the
body of Poitier, who, because of Porgy’s disability is kneeled at least a foot below Preminger.
Preminger is forcefully grabbing Dandridge’s writhing wrist. Dandridge is pulling away, with
her back propped against a wooden beam that is attached to the set and bracing herself. Caught
between the two, Poitier seems to be attempting to withdraw Preminger’s grip from around
Dandridge’s very small wrist with both of his hands on their respective arms. Preminger’s face is
contorted by the force in which he must hold onto to her against Poitier’s rescue effort.
Dandridge’s face is downcast, her mouth in a tight wince, and her other hand grips her garment.
The gripping of the garment is reactive and habitual. It is instinctual. It is also a gestural
encounter that reflects the precarity of performing while occupying the space of the interval. To
assess something as both instinct and performance can seem antithetical, however analyzing
Dandridge’s performance within the context of the ways in which memory and embodiment are a
part of the “repertoire of performance” opens up her possibly unconscious gesture, to an analysis
of cultural memory and embodied trauma. A performative “repertoire” is defined by Diana
Taylor as “those acts usually thought of as ephemeral, [or] non reproducible knowledge” enacted
through “embodied memory.”
28
Taylor argues that cultural memory instinctively informs

28
Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the
Americas, Second Printing edition (Durham: Duke University Press Books, 2003): 20.

85
performance because of how the body inherits and stores a sense of identity, knowledge, rituals,
and trauma. Although undertaken as a performance, Bess’ rape and its subsequent impact on her
emotional and mental stability converge with the history of Black women being rendered
property and the subsequent rape and abuse that was foundational to chattel slavery. This, along
with Dandridge’s personal experience of sexual assault and abuse, is invariably present in her
body and visualized cinematically through Bess. When Dandridge grips her garment to brace
herself in anticipation of Preminger’s oncoming assault, it is the same grip she instinctually
performs when Bess braces her body for Crown’s assault in the film. Dandridge’s grip
“compensate[s] a loss of memory” of both, a time before and after her that remains a part of an
ontological inheritance indicative of Black women’s moving bodies.
29

Once Bess is back safe in Porgy’s shack, her week-long delirium unsettles the residents
of Catfish Row. As she wrestles with nightmares audibly, with no cognition of Porgy or the
community’s physical presence, she unconsciously repeats, “no one here to help me, no one to
help me.” Her trauma is eventually prayed away by the local evangelist, Serena. At the same
time, Porgy is well aware that Bess’ hysteria is the result of an encounter with Crown that will
haunt the both of them for the rest of the film. The film version of Porgy is also less explicit
about Bess’ sexual assault despite her consistent refusal and thwarted attempts to free herself
from Crown’s embrace and run away. Nevertheless, Bess’ resulting psychological instability is
epitomized by her audible exclamations of abandonment and desperation. In a script draft labeled
as the “Fourth Revised Screenplay” and dated June 12, 1958, Bess’ lines were written as:
Eighteen mile to Kittiwah!
Eighteen mile to trabble, Lord!
What a long road, ain’t nobody
to help me! Ain nobody to help

29
Giorgio Agamben, Means Without End: Notes on Politics, trans. Vincenzo Binetti and
Cesare Casarino, First edition edition (Minneapolis: Univ Of Minnesota Press, 2000): 58, 9.

86
me!
30

These lines connote that Bess is referencing a journey either to or from Kittiwah Island, where
the picnic was held and where her subsequent rape occurred. It is possible that this short set of
lines were written to further emphasize Bess’ delirium since it is unclear in which direction this
eighteen-mile voyage is being traveled. Interestingly however, in the film the only audible lines
that Bess exclaims repeatedly are a version of the last two lines, “no one here to help me, no one
to help me.” In these moments and within the spaces of these lines, we hear Bess and Dandridge
simultaneously. In his analysis of the performing object, Fred Moten proclaims that, “Sound
gives us back the visuality that ocularcentrism had repressed.”
31
Although Crown is placed as the
cause of Bess’ suffering, Dandridge’s own loss, hurt, and despair resounds from these lines in a
performance that resonates in and through objecthood. Put another way, Dandridge conjures the
asphyxiating anguish of the hold by repeating and remixing Nash’s scripted language and uses
sound to bypass the shortsightedness of Bess’ visual representation. Her existence within the
interval allowed her to recognize the conditions of “the weather” and the subsequent need to
evoke ancestral knowledge. By performatively experimenting with conjuring sound as means of
ontological expression she simultaneously voiced an ancestral echo. Her declaration that there is
“no one here to help me” resounded past the circumstantial characterizations of Bess and called
to Dandridge’s/Black women’s present and past conditions of suffering as objects unable to
escape the hold.
Bess’ story (and the film) ends with her abandoning Catfish Row and following her drug
pusher, Sportin’ Life, to New York, prompting Porgy to pursue a foolish and impossible rescue

30
“Fourth Revised Screenplay.” “N. Richard Nash Papers, 1925-2000,” n.d., N. Richard
Nash Papers, 1925-2000; Box 34, Folder 5, Wisconsin Historical Society.
31
Fred Moten, In The Break: The Aesthetics Of The Black Radical Tradition, 1 edition
(Minneapolis: Univ Of Minnesota Press, 2003): 235.

87
mission from South Carolina to New York on the back of goat cart. Already an addict and in
pursuit of happiness in the form of lovers, it can be presumed that the life that falls outside of the
cinematic frame is characterized by fugitivity, criminality, and experimentation in the creation of
livable life in early twentieth-century America. Informed by the stories relayed in Saidiya
Hartman’s Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Stories of Social Upheaval, the
trajectory of Bess’ cinematic life assumes a life plagued by the ability to imagine freedom to then
only encounter a structure of absolute impossibility. Similarly, Dandridge’s professional and
personal life is marred by institutional limitations and barriers that made freedom unattainable.
Her contractual agreement with Twentieth Century Fox in hindsight was a nonevent that kept
stardom at bay. Personally, her mentally disabled daughter and failed romances and marriages
left her hopeless and inconsolably depressed. After Porgy and Bess, she attained only one more
leading role in the film Malaga (Laslo Benedek, 1960) and five years after its release, she was
found dead in her apartment at the age of forty-two.
The tragedy of Dandridge’s life and career is not so much the culmination of unfulfilled
potential due to discrimination, but her own witnessing of and, eventual resignation to the reality
of her “not-yetness.”
32
The consistently reoccurring theme throughout her autobiography is her
reconciliation with the barriers and limitations that were placed on her body and that impacted
every facet of her life and career. She metaphorically described herself as a “haunted house”
where “weird winds howl inside me… chains clank inside me, echoing my success and failures;
corridors of hope and despair creak; and there is a daily sobbing as if someone inside is
desperately hurt.” The visuality of this metaphor only pales in comparison to the amplified sonic
resonance of this analogy. Her mobilization of terms like “howl, clank, creak, echo, and sob”

32
In her autobiography (165), Dandridge uses the term “not-yetness” to describe the feeling
of receiving global recognition, yet still experiencing career barriers because of her race.

88
create a distinct and reverberating chorus that was materialized in her autobiographical words
and performances. Her tragedy is characterized by the phonic and ocular (re)production of her
incessant melancholy and disappointment, cinematically materialized through her performance
of Bess. Dandridge’s resignation to the unacheivability of the stardom that was promised to her
is made clear in her autobiography when she states, “America was not geared to make me into a
Liz Taylor, a Monroe, a Gardner. My sex symbolism was as a wanton, a prostitute, not as a
woman seeking love and a husband, the same as other women.”
33
Later in her autobiography she
explicitly connects her experiences to that of Black women at-large historically and in the
present sense stating, “I learned the same thing applied to me as to any good-looking
washwoman or houseworker in Mississippi… Nothing that I had—beauty, money, recognition as
an artist—was sufficient to break through the powerful psychological bind of racist thinking.”
34

Dandridge intentionally disrupts the narrative of exceptionalism that characterized her career by
rooting her experience in Black American life and the reality of anti-blackness as the total and
all-consuming climate. Her later performance strategies were thus a result of this acceptance and
recognition and a meditation on the “not-yetness” that categorized her life and film career.
Dorothy waited and waited. Then she just performed while waiting. Never arriving. Always
waiting.
“I’d like to be found/I never want to be found”
The Chicago Defender called it “The Battle of the Sexsationals.” In 1956, Dorothy
Dandridge and Eartha Kitt headlined two different clubs on the same night, in the same city.
Dandridge was still enthralled in the excitement and commercial success of Carmen Jones, while

33
Dandridge and Conrad, 196.
34
Ibid., 221.

89
Kitt had established herself as a Katherine Dunham successor, a talented sex siren of the
European nightclub scene, and the theater protege of Orson Wells. But aside from being Black
women entertainers, the two performers had wildly different performance styles and overall
onstage and offstage personas. Dandridge was known to have a sultry and charming nightclub
delivery, while Kitt experimented with eroticism mostly through her mastery of different
languages and tonal modulations, but in 1956 Dandridge and Kitt seemed to represent the
promise of the Black star. It was expected that Dandridge would continue to make waves in
Hollywood following her role as Carmen, and Kitt’s cosign by Orson Wells intrigued Hollywood
despite having no film experience yet. As their similarities were discussed both in mainstream
and Black press, Kitt, however, methodically distinguished herself early in her career. When she
was sixteen Kitt joined Katherine Dunham’s dance company and began touring the world as a
dancer before leaving the troupe and establishing herself as a nightclub performer in Paris. By
1956, at the age of only twenty-nine years old, having traveled the world, Eartha Kitt established
herself as an international performer and published her first autobiography, Thursday’s Child.
Kitt’s decision to own her narrative through the publication of an autobiography set an early
precedent for the career she hoped to shape for herself. Over the course of her decades long
career and life, she would go on to publish a total of four different autobiographies. From a
symbolic standpoint, this can be read as an assertion of her right to control and distribute her
narrative beyond the allowances of the entertainment industry, and later Hollywood. However,
her early autobiographies also reveal the ways in which Kitt mobilized and committed to
performance as a means of sustainability and survival both professionally and personally.
A consistent thread in Kitt’s autobiographies and interviews over the course of her life
was the impact that childhood abuse and poverty had on her conceptualization of herself and her

90
place in the world. Born Eartha Mae Kitt (or Keith depending on the source) in North, South
Carolina, she detailed the experience of growing up in extreme poverty to a single-mother. She
maintained that her experience as a Black girl being raised in the south during the depression was
intensified by the fact that she did not know her father, who was rumored to be white. Like the
women previously mentioned, the afterlife of slavery is manifested through Kitt’s physical body
because of her skin complexion and European features. Her light-skin marked her as a particular
kind of Other amongst her darker family members, prompting her to develop dissociative
tendencies that, I later argue, impacted her overall relationship to selfhood and blackness. Over
the course of her adolescence she was also forced to reconcile with abandonment on several
different occasions because her mother was unable to take care of her for a multitude of reasons
and left her with abusive family members. When her mother passed away suddenly she was sent
to New York to live with her Aunt who inconsistently provided for Kitt, causing her to
eventually run away. Her career in entertainment began when she auditioned for and joined
Katherine Dunham’s dance company at the age of sixteen and began touring the world as a
dancer before establishing her solo career as a nightclub singer. Similar to both Horne and
Dandridge, Kitt was explicit about the ways her childhood trauma manifested in and through her
performances. Interestingly, Kitt revealed how performance was not simply reserved for the
stage and screen, but that it was the very essence that was Eartha Kitt.
35
In Thursday’s Child, she
introduces this concept when she reveals how the sight of her name on a marquee was a
confrontation with a phenomenon that she was distanced from. She explains,
Whenever I drove under it or saw it from a distance, a proudness came up in me, tinged
with fear. That name really did not belong to me. It belonged to a friend of mine,
someone I loved and wanted only the best for, someone for whom I'd want everything

35
Eartha Kitt from this point forward connotes the performative character created by Eartha
Mae. All unitalicized references to Kitt refer to the person.

91
that I'd want for me. I had not yet obtained it, she had. There was no real connection with
that name and me.
36

By making a distinction between the performer Eartha Kitt, whose name appeared on the
marquee, and the person witnessing, Kitt is asserting that there is a difference between who
spectators understand to be Eartha Kitt and her true self. Reminiscent of the ways in which
Horne discussed her intentional performance practice of separating her true self from her
audience, Kitt extends and reanimates her own objecthood as a strategy beyond the stage and
screen. Subsequently, she asserts that Eartha Kitt, as presented to the public, was a complete
performance.
Her recognition of Eartha Kitt as an entity separate from her true beingness (later
discussed as Eartha Mae), remains a consistent thread throughout her life and manifests itself in
many unique aspects. The very last paragraph of Thursday’s Child is revelatory for the ways in
which Kitt essentially conceptualizes stardom as a destination achieved by someone that is not
her. After her successful run in the Broadway stage play New Faces and then Mrs. Patterson, the
memoir ends with Kitt confronting stardom. She describes being overwhelmed to the point of
feeling “numb,” following her performance as Teddy Hicks in Mrs. Patterson. When she finally
reads the remarkable reviews of her performance she declares that the reviews are talking about
Eartha Kitt. Providing more clarity, she states, “I felt less connected with her now than at any
other time. But it seemed really true that Eartha Kitt had become a star.”
37
By dislocating her
beingness from stardom in Thursday’s Child, Kitt severs her ontological selfhood from the
performance that is Eartha Kitt. Put another way, Kitt’s declaration and commitment to
fragmentation at the age of twenty-nine indelibly alters her relationship with herself and her

36
Eartha Kitt, Thursday’s Child, 1st edition (Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1956): 232-3.
37
Ibid., 250.

92
experience in Hollywood as a raced and gendered performer. In her second autobiography, Alone
with Me, published in 1976, she is even more clear about the distinction between Eartha Kitt and
her true self. After a jarring incident following a performance at Carnegie Hall, where an
estranged family member calls her Eartha Mae, she has a visceral and violent reaction. She
explains in the memoir,
My child is Eartha Mae: ugly, unloved, unworthy, and therefore a loner. The adult I've
molded is Eartha Kitt: self-reliant, afraid of nothing, even defiant. Ironically, I think of
Eartha Kitt as practically nothing. True. She is so very far removed from the basic nature
of Eartha Mae that I can--and do--think of her in the third person. She's she, not me. She's
a name on a marquee. I'm curiously detached from her and yet suspended within her and
totally dependent upon her for my survival. She has some of my better qualities, as a
loving mother and as a friend to those who accept Eartha Mae, but I have none of hers.
And until that evening at Carnegie Hall, no one ever got to Eartha Mae through Eartha
Kitt. Never…Eartha Mae psyches herself up to become Eartha Kitt for public
appearances; she wears an impenetrable metal armor. And it was Eartha Kitt who
appeared at Carnegie Hall and stepped from the dressing room that evening. But the
woman who called herself my step-sister asked Eartha Kitt if she remembered Eartha
Mae, and I was really torn. I was thrown into being both personalities at one time, and
there was a tremendous conflict as to who I was.
38

Kitt’s recollection of this event is wildly introspective and insightful. Her own recognition that
the root of her disassociation is bound to her childhood trauma explicates the extent to which she
had learned to disassociate and perform. As Kwakiutl Dreher assesses from Kitt’s
autobiographies, “Kitt’s childhood narrative charges slavery’s legacies as the major influences
on the behaviors Eartha Mae’s relatives act out.”
39
Subsequently, by mobilizing childhood
traumas that required disassociation as a survival tactic, and instrumenting that same technique
performatively, Kitt was able to experiment in ways that were both familiar and unfamiliar to
Black women performers and their audiences.

38
Eartha Kitt, Alone with Me: A New Autobiography, 1st Edition (Chicago: H. Regnery Co,
1976): 4-5.
39
Kwakiutl L. Dreher, Dancing on the White Page: Black Women Entertainers Writing
Autobiography (Albany: Suny Press, 2008): 101.

93
Not at all by coincidence, the familiar aspects of Kitt’s performance practices were
strategies very much rooted in the histories of Black women performers, prior to film. In Bodies
in Dissent: Spectacular Performances of Race and Freedom, 1850-1910, Daphne Brooks
analyzes instances of fantastical performances by Black entertainers, who utilized their bodies to
directly intervene and challenge the proscriptions of blackness during the late nineteenth and
early twentieth century. Brooks remixes Bertolt Brecht’s “alienation” theory with Black feminist
theory to introduce a performance strategy enacted by Black entertainers that she calls “afro-
alienation.”
40
She describes afro-alienation acts as those performances “encoded with the
traumas of self-fragmentation resulting from centuries of captivity and subjugation” but
reclaimed and “made strange” as a means of critiquing the oppressive conditions of Black life.
41

She uses cases like that of Henry “Box” Brown, who mailed his self to freedom in 1849 and then
continued to perform the “escape act” for audiences internationally, and the life and career of
Adah Isaacs Menken, who deployed her own racial ambiguity as a means of narrative
experimentation and theatrical subterfuge, to demonstrate the extent to which insurgency was
creatively made possible for Black performers. In addition to afro-alienation acts, and to borrow
from scholar Colleen Kim Daniher, Kitt’s strategic use of “racial modulation” as an aesthetic
performative practice situates her within a Black feminist genealogical tradition.
42

Kitt can also be most closely compared to her predecessor Josephine Baker as it relates to
her relationship with international audiences and her reclamation of exoticism. Both performers
utilized their physicality as a means to challenge and disturb constricting racial discourse around

40
Daphne A. Brooks, Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Performances of Race and Freedom,
1850-1910 (Durham: Duke University Press Books, 2006).
41
Ibid., 5.
42
Colleen Kim Daniher, “Yella Gal: Eartha Kitt’s Racial Modulations,” Women &
Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory 28, no. 1 (January 2, 2018): 16–33.

94
Black women’s bodies. In “Embodied Fictions, Melancholy Migrations: Josephine Baker’s
Cinematic Celebrity,” Terri Francis poses innovative and thoughtful ideas that consider Baker’s
persona and performance strategies in relation to the celebrated Black expatriate experience in
Paris that frequently neglected the French colonialist relationship to primitivism and non-
American blackness.
43
Francis puts Baker in conversation with Nella Larson’s novel Quicksand
to further discuss the complex ways that Black Americans during the Harlem Renaissance
envisioned international freedom, specifically in Europe, while also confronting Europe’s
problematic principles concerning colonialism. Similar to Baker and Menken, Kitt’s international
popularity as a nightclub performer and theatrical actress was unquestionably tied to the
preconceptions associated with Black women’s bodies, but also to the elasticity of her ethnicity.
Leveraging Eartha Kitt as a persona that embodied exoticism and sex appeal early in her career,
Kitt replicated Baker’s aesthetic and performative spectacularity which translated familiarly to
international and domestic audiences. Francis concludes that “Baker’s complicated performances
provide an occasion to point out that one of the ways racial discourse works is to make some
bodies more available than others to a certain type of display.”
44
Kitt’s subsequent sexy
cinematic portrayals were then complimented by equally suggestive and sensual marketing
campaigns that capitalized off of the ability to monetize this “certain type of display.” Therefore,
by insisting on the chasm between her ontological self and Eartha Kitt—the performance—Kitt
inserts herself within a radical genealogical tradition of performative survival. Eartha Kitt
essentially becomes a character able to detach fame and privilege from an internalized
investment in the nonexistent sincerity of the institution. Put another way, I posit that Kitt was

43
Terri Francis, “Embodied Fictions, Melancholy Migrations: Josephine Baker’s Cinematic
Celebrity,” MFS Modern Fiction Studies 51, no. 4 (2005): 824–45.
44
Ibid., 831.

95
able to disassociate her true beingness from the performance of Eartha Kitt in a way that
prevented emotional investment and attachment to the fallacy of stardom. If, as she said, “Eartha
Kitt had become a star,” then when that stardom proved counterfeit, Eartha Mae, who was a
product of slavery’s afterlife and thus recognized the reality of Jim Crow America, was
unbothered and not surprised.
In turn, Kitt’s life and career proves instrumental in understanding Black women’s
relationship to the entertainment industry and Hollywood specifically. As already mentioned,
both mainstream and Black press sources consistently discussed Eartha Kitt in relation to Horne
and Dandridge, even before appearing in her first studio film. However, upon gaining popularity
following her theater success and collaboration with Orson Welles, she was quickly
differentiated from her aforementioned peers. Consistently described as “sexy,” “risqué,” and
“exotic,” Kitt’s nightclub performance style and public persona, with an emphasis on her
speech/dialect and language mastery, seemed to both intrigue and startle spectators. In a review
of Mrs. Patterson, LA Times writer Walter F. Kerr praises Kitt’s performance as the saving grace
of the play and says she, “seethes with threatening energy, writhes, slithers and plunges across
the stage like an animated warning of impending high winds.”
45
Her movements and facial
expressions were often commented on as deliberate and captivating through the usage of terms
that were typically associated with animals. Her mastery of multiple foreign languages and
repertoire of songs in those languages became significant to Eartha Kitt’s star quality. Upon
making her mainstream Hollywood debut in the 1958 Paramount film St. Louis Blues, appearing
alongside Nat King Cole playing composer and musician W.C. Handy, Kitt translated many of
these same performative acts onto the big screen. Thus, Kitt’s performance style was something

45
Walter Kerr. “Eartha Kitt Nearly Saves Ms. Patterson from Ruin.” Broadway in Review.
LA Times. December 12, 1954. ProQuest Historical Newspapers: E4.

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familiar, yet, as Brooks notes, purposely made strange.
Kitt’s performative experimentation, although intriguing, also tended to ostracize
audiences, as discussed in several Black publications between 1953 and 1959. One of the most
explicit examples of this was the cover story of the December 1954 issue of Ebony titled, “Why
Negroes Don’t Like Eartha Kitt.” The six-page spread gives several supposed first-hand accounts
of Kitt demonstrating rude or disagreeable behavior, particularly towards Black spectators,
which the writer asserts as a snub towards the entire race. They also, however, acknowledge that
“Eartha is neither aloof nor a snob but a very complicated, much-misunderstood personality.”
46

Their description of her as a personality unconsciously alludes to the performative aspect of
Kitt’s persona, while also recognizing the complexity of her emerging public image. The unique
nature of her voice, tethered to an already-coded Black, female body became even more
spectacular because of the ways in which she chose to mobilize excess. Once again returning to
Brooks, as well as to the work of Nicole Fleetwood, I posit that Kitt’s performative
experimentation modulated between forms of spectacular opacity and excess both in her public
projection of Eartha Kitt and in her onscreen Hollywood performances.
47
Her 1959 appearance
as the title character in the film Anna Lucasta brings these performative strategies to bear in
fascinating ways. I will analyze how Hollywood sought to exploit the image and persona of
Eartha Kitt by offering her body as a means to advertise and entice mainstream audiences by
capitalizing on its representational politics and social connotation. The complexity of the
character’s circumstance is visually heightened by the way Kitt plays on the “star” persona of
Eartha Kitt while simultaneously meditating on the ontology of Black womanhood. In doing so,

46
“Why Negroes Don’t Like Eartha Kitt.” Ebony. Vol. 10, Number 2. (December 1954): 29.
47
Brooks, Bodies in Dissent; Nicole R. Fleetwood, Troubling Vision: Performance,
Visuality, and Blackness (Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 2011).

97
Kitt used her onscreen character as a conduit for further experimentation, not explicitly tied to
the experiences of the fantastical Eartha Kitt, or even Eartha Mae, but as a meditation on existing
in the in-between, or as previously discussed, in the interval.
Originally written in 1936 for the stage and centering a Polish family, Philip Yordan’s
Anna Lucasta tells the story of a troubled familial unit navigating trauma, greed, and love. Its
controversial subject matter made it a difficult sell to most mainstream theater production
companies; however, in 1944 the American Negro Theater began performing the play in the
basement of a Harlem library. Eventually, Lucasta made it to Broadway and in 1949 was
acquired by Columbia Pictures for a feature length film based on the original script featuring
white actors. It was later adapted again in 1959 with an all-Black cast produced by United Artists
(UA). The film’s title character Anna is a sex worker who returns home after years of exile. Her
brother has plotted to marry her off to a visiting family friend, rumored to be financially well-off
and presumably dense. However upon arrival, it is quickly realized that the intended victim is
actually well-educated and not easily cajoled. Nevertheless, he and Anna fall in love, wed, and
begin planning a life together, but Anna’s father tries to sabotage the union out of unnatural
jealousy. During that same time one of Anna’s former lovers/customers coerces her to return to
the promise of an exciting life with him rather than pursuing mundane domesticity. Anna briefly
abandons her new spouse only to return by the film’s end to discover her father on his death bed.
The film concludes by inferring that her obvious grief and devastation will be remedied through
respectable heterosexual coupling with her new husband. What is impossible to explicitly state,
due to censorship by the Motion Picture Production Code (MPPC), is that Anna’s complicated
relationship with her obviously jealous father is the result of past incestual acts. Her career as a
sex worker is also left to the insight of intuitive audiences, as this is never made explicitly clear

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but meant to be gathered from her “unsavory” company and frequent inebriation.
Based solely on the film’s plot, the elements regarding incest and sex work made Anna
Lucasta a controversial endeavor for censors to approve as well as for United Artists to market
and release. All-Black cast films were still relatively new territory for major studios in 1958, but
following the success of Carmen Jones, there seemed to be a brief renewed interest. This interest
also had a lot to do with Eartha Kitt and her already infamous stage presence and general
popularity. Her character in the 1958 film St. Louis Blues was meant to represent the sinful
temptations of the secular music industry and the sexual antithesis to W.C. Handy’s wholesome
fiancé, played by Ruby Dee. The film and its marketing however, avoided any controversial
elements, consequently requiring Kitt’s bodily presence to simply allude to sexuality as opposed
to relying on any written elements in the actual script. Alternatively, Anna Lucasta’s promotional
material, alongside its already provocative plot, intentionally capitalized on Eartha Kitt’s persona
by offering her body as proof of the film’s hypersexual appeal. By this I mean that, the studio
accentuated the controversial nature surrounding the film by advertising these elements
pictorially using illustrations of Eartha Kitt’s body and complimented them with equally
suggestive taglines to match. This is a significant point to make as it concerns Kitt’s iconography
and her subsequent “star” treatment because it was seemingly bound to the sexual assumptions
historically placed onto the bodies of Black women, and more particularly, Black women who
looked like her. This analysis is therefore two-fold—on one hand, I assert that United Artists
leveraged the hegemonic assumptions about Black women’s bodies as abject, accessible, and
hypersexual to promote and market Anna Lucasta; and on the other hand, I argue that Kitt
embodied and enacted “excess flesh,” as defined by Fleetwood, as a performative tool and
survival tactic, both onscreen and off.

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Nicole Fleetwood theorizes excess flesh as a framework crafted to explore the ways
Black women artists have confronted the regimes of visibility and representation through forms
of reclamation that both challenge the politics of respectability and reject proscriptions of the
white gaze. She asserts that
To enact excess flesh is to signal historical attempts to regulate black female bodies, to
acknowledge black women’s resistance of the persistence of visibility, and to challenge
debates among black activists and critics about what constitutes positive or productive
representation of blackness, by refusing the binary of negative and positive…
48

As demonstrated in the 1954 Ebony article, Kitt’s complex relationship with Black audiences
was rooted in accusations of racial disloyalty and widespread cultural disengagement. Black
publications spoke candidly about her seeming embrace of white, male romantic partners and
advocacy for humanist acceptance rather than what they determined to be signs of racial
allegiance, undoubtedly impacting her persona. But despite these kinds of accusations, Kitt
remained steadfast in dismissing these narratives and used her autobiographies and interviews to
assert the cause of her ambition and determination to succeed. By continuing to affirm the
significant impact that poverty and racism had on her conceptualization of herself and her place
in the world, Kitt asserted her upbringing within a very particular and familiar Black experience.
However, she also simultaneously enacted a kind of performative excess that relied on severing
these experiences from her fantastical public image, I.e. Eartha Kitt v. Eartha Mae.
Subsequently, the characteristics that became synonymous with Eartha Kitt like exotic, earthy,
risqué, etc., can be read as subversive performative tools meant to trouble the visual economy of
Black womanhood as it related to assumptions of sexual deviance and availability. The fact that
these acts of afro-alienation and excess also proved profitable for Hollywood complicates Kitt’s
enduring legacy.

48
Fleetwood, Troubling Vision: 112.

100
As already mentioned, the underlying plot elements in Anna Lucasta involving incest and
sex work made the film difficult to pass through the Production Code Administration. However
by 1958, the code was becoming significantly less influential as a result of the film’s industries
competition with the growing popularity of television, and United Artists seemingly attempted to
capitalize off of the disagreements. Both The Hollywood Reporter and Variety published articles
detailing the issues between UA and the code following the rejection of ads for the film.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, “The MPAA claims the nixed ads blatantly portray the
femme lead as a prostitute and the art ‘emphasizes her posterior.’” Producer Sidney Harmon
followed up to assure readers that he would comply with the code to prevent the film from losing
its seal. However according to Variety, following a compromise between the two entities,
Lucasta’s seal remained at risk. In an article dated November 18, 1958, approximately one week
after The Hollywood Reporter’s article, Variety reported that, “UA's original ‘Lucasta’ ads were
turned down by the Code. There followed a compromise on an appeal. Then, however, the Code
again refused to okay follow-up ads which UA wanted to run in Chicago. Reasoning here was
that the Code prohibited publicity pegged on censorship.” Subsequently, rather than ceding to the
PCA’s warnings, UA designed ads that further emphasized the controversial elements of the film
through illustrations and taglines centering the title character, Anna.
A quick scan of the Anna Lucasta press book reveals that the primary means through
which UA attempted to market and sell the film was through Eartha Kitt’s/Anna Lucasta’s
feminine body. Across a total of eight different quarter page ads, the focal imagery of each is a
close-up of a feminine body. Most of these images are illustrations of her body from behind with
an emphasis on her voluptuous physical assets. In that same set of eight advertisements, there are
only two ads that feature minor photos of Kitt and/or Sammy Davis Jr.’s face, with the

101
illustration of the woman’s body the most pronounced image. It’s important to also note that
these advertisements emphasize Eartha Kitt and Sammy Davis Jr. as the starring performers in
the film, therefore it is a rightful assumption that the featured feminine body is supposed to
represent that of the title character Anna, played by Kitt. Other ads in the press book feature
another image of a woman sprawled on what might be assumed to be a bed, draped in a sheet
with her legs and arms exposed. One of her hands clutches her face and the other rests
underneath her head, which could be read as either a posture of distress or one of submission.
The commodification of Eartha Kitt’s actual body is thus the primary means through which
United Artists tried to appeal to mainstream audiences. Once again, just as Terri Francis
described Josephine Baker’s corporeal relationship to “a certain kind of display,” Kitt’s
iconography allowed for the monetization of a similar “certain kind of display” that was not
appropriate in the imaging and cinematic portrayal of white womanhood.
In addition to the sensual imagery, United Artists paired the poster art with equally
suggestive taglines that ranged from subtle connotations to nearly explicit. Some of the milder
taglines include: “It's that red-hot picture about that night-time girl!,” “There never was a play--a
woman--or a picture like Anna Lucasta,” “The Most Notorious Member of a Notorious Walk of
Life!,” and “The most famous sinner of them all.” This marketing is drastically different from
the first cinematic rendition of the film released in 1949 starring Paulette Goddard. Although
PCA influence and control had shifted dramatically by 1958, it is important to note that the
original posters were primarily of Goddard from the waist up with taglines that mostly referred
to its theatrical origins. By focusing solely on Goddard as Anna, the marketing strategy for the
original film was selling the lead’s overall star text as opposed to her sexuality. For Kitt’s Anna,
some of the taglines even explicitly referred to her as a tramp such as, “The Blistering story that

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undresses the heart of a tramp!” and “Meet Anna--whose father threw her out because she was a
tramp!” By making these direct comparisons I am attempting to illuminate the ways in which
United Artists utilized a significantly different approach to marketing this film. I argue that
Eartha Kitt’s presence allowed for UA to exploit the assumptions that were attached to Black
women’s bodies regarding sexuality in ways that were not associated with the bodies of white
women. Kitt’s sexuality is assumed to be wretched, dominate, and assertive rather than natural,
innocent, and “dumb” like her contemporary Marilyn Monroe.
Comparatively speaking, Monroe is interesting because of the way she was also
discussed as a sex symbol during the same decade, but with very different language and imagery.
The film posters and advertisements for her 1959 film Some Like it Hot, also produced by United
Artists, prove to be an exemplary comparison. Despite Monroe’s sexual persona and its
immediate tie to the infamous Playboy spread, which she never consented to, the posters from
Some Like It Hot do not overly emphasize her sexuality or her known curvaceous body. She is
centered primarily between her two co-stars, Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon, who are dressed in
drag with only the top half of Monroe’s body unobscured. In some of the ads, her breasts are
more or less emphasized, depending on the color contrasts of the particular advertisement,
however overall the ads remain less sexually assertive than any of the Lucasta advertisements.
Richard Dyer explains this difference by asserting that Monroe’s sexual image relied on the
gaze’s assumption of innocence and naivety in conjunction with how her specific white,
blondeness represented the ultimate figure of desirability. He proclaims that white women are
“not only the most prized possession of white patriarchy,” but that they are also “the symbolism
of sexuality itself.”
49
He goes on to assert that “Christianity associates sin with darkness and

49
Richard Dyer, Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Society (London : Houndmills,
Basingstoke, Hampshire: Macmillan Press, 1992): 42.

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sexuality, virtue with light and chastity.”
50
For Monroe to represent “the ultimate embodiment of
the desirable woman” then the abject Black woman’s body is the precondition upon which
Monroe’s desirability, and consequent stardom, is made possible.
51
Thus the imagery of
Hollywood film posters emphasized white women’s bodies as sexually desirable, while Black
women’s bodies—like Kitt’s—had to be regulated as obscene and egregious.
In 1960, Lorraine Hansberry, one of the most prolific scholars and playwrights of the
time, assembled a list of the things she liked, hated, and were “bored to death with” in her
journal. Overall, the list is an intimate glimpse into her personal and professional interests and
motivations that ranged from deeply political to light and humorous. What I find intriguing about
it, is her notation of Eartha Kitt multiple times across the document. She concludes that she
“likes” “Eartha Kitt’s looks” as well as “Eartha Kitt,” which she noted on two separate lines. She
also included Eartha Kitt’s name under the “I AM BORED TO DEATH WITH” category.
Hansberry’s decision to reference Kitt multiple times throughout the document I think speaks to
a general sentiment about Kitt across Black audiences specifically. By 1960, her crossover
popularity and controversial, yet still popular, persona amongst Black audiences is encapsulated
by Hansberry’s notations. Kitt had successfully created the character known and recognized as
Eartha Kitt and her cinematic portrayals only reinforced her mystery and sensuality.
Kitt’s performance as Anna is an interesting point of analysis for the ways that the factors
mentioned above interconnect to impact the spectator’s consumption of the text. As stated, by
1958 Kitt had already established her public persona by capitalizing on strategies made popular
with international audiences by Josephine Baker in the twenties and thirties. Her reclamation of
exoticism and sensuality translated domestically and went on to define what it meant to be

50
Ibid., 42.
51
Ibid., 40.

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Eartha Kitt, despite her autobiographical revelations in Thursday’s Child that Eartha Kitt was
indeed only a performance. As the character Anna, Kitt enacted strategies of spectacular opacity
and excess flesh to portray a character that reflected the in-betweenness she existed within as
both Eartha Kitt and Eartha Mae. Her performance is complex and embodies both vulnerability
and excess in a way that is antithetical to the homogenous images and taglines that United Artists
utilized to market the film. Anna is by no means the “shameless sinner who blistered the stages
of the world” in the 1958 version. Scholar, Colleen Kim Daniher theorizes that Kitt’s stage
performances, “challenge and evade well-rehearsed regimes of white sexual and scopic
entitlement to black women’s performing bodies.”
52
Kitt’s performance of Anna similarly
challenged Hollywood’s attempt to exploit the aesthetic assumptions mainstream audiences held
about her, while also functioning as a tool for her to experiment with public redress.
Shot in black and white, the opening scene introduces Anna through both sound and
background setting. She walks through the port city of San Diego with the only illuminating
lights coming from the neon-signs she passes. Her face is consistently cast in shadow however
her near white, cinched at the waist dress and accompanying figure nearly glows against the
blackened city backdrop. The long shots of her walking towards the camera are sure to capture
the “Day Hotel” sign on the building she seems to be walking from and the “3 Market Liquors”
sign she then walks past. Before entering the bar that would become one of the primary settings
throughout the film, Anna walks past boats and water to ensure the audience that she frequents
an area associated with maritime transience. The visual cues of a woman walking alone through
the city at night are clearly meant to insinuate a disreputable lifestyle, however if that is unclear
then the accompanying lyrical score is more explicit and straightforward. Written by Sammy

52
Colleen Daniher, 18.

105
Cahn and performed by fellow leading actor, Sammy Davis Jr., the lyrics to the title song “That’s
Anna” serve as a warning to spectators about women like Anna. Beginning by calling her “a
child of the night” and “a passing delight” the song’s consistent refrain, “that’s Anna,” affirms
the qualities necessary to recognize a woman like her. The song continues describing her in ways
that indicate she is both wild and composed but ultimately impossible to control or attain. It ends
by warning listeners to run to avoid becoming lost in her, based on the song narrator’s claims to
have forgone the same advice.
To be lost, remains a theme through the entirety of the film as all of Anna’s suiters, as
well as her deranged father, are pictorialized as spell-bound and nearly helpless in her presence.
However, Anna’s relationship to her own feelings of being lost and found resonate as an
underlying theme that Kitt seemingly explores independently through forms of non-verbal
communication. Anna’s utilization of her body to intentionally manipulate the men in the film is
situated as the film’s primary plot focus, nevertheless it is Anna who must constantly adjust to fit
into the body that other people’s imagination have created out of her. The film establishes her
character in the opening scene beginning with her walk through the city and then with the
different occurrences that transpire upon arriving at Noah’s Warf Cafe, where it is made clear
that she is a regular. Upon entering the bar, Anna is immediately accosted by a police officer,
solicited by a pimp to join his brothel, and eventually reunited with her favorite customer Danny
who implores her to move-in with him sans marriage. Just before Danny’s arrival, Anna’s
acquaintance and fellow sex-worker, Blanche poses the question, “Do you think there is a reward
for finding lost articles?” in a humorous reference to a pair of binoculars she had stolen. To this
Anna replies, “I’d sure like to be found,” which goes completely unacknowledged by Blanche.
Anna’s gaze is fixated offscreen when she recites this line, as though she is imagining an

106
alternative existence in the distance but following a beat, she subtly shakes herself back to her
lonesome reality. Her relationships with the men in the film are in different ways inflicted with
the desperation of acquiring a life different from the one she has. Primarily illustrated through
her interactions with her father Joe, her lover Danny, and her respectable suiter, and eventual
husband Rudolph, Anna’s emotional malleability is performed to both acquiesce and juxtapose
her corporal schema.
A full half hour passes before Anna and Joe have their first scene together despite their
relationship being crucial to the film’s plot. The following scene is only the second time in which
they are within physical proximity of each other and rather than Anna embodying the alluring
vixen featured in the marketing material, she instead assumes a child-like innocence and naivety
in his presence. There are multiple confrontations that occur both diegetically and extra-
diegetically that reveal the ways in which Kitt’s performance style directly impacted the film’s
general reception. In one way, spectators are forced to disentangle the marketing of “shameless
sinner” and “tramp” with the deeply vulnerable portrayal of Anna onscreen. Secondly, there is
also a break between audience expectations of Eartha Kitt, the exotic sex symbol, and her
performance as the timid Anna, particularly in the scenes with Joe. Lastly, I contend that Kitt
uses the role of Anna to performatively experiment with characteristics that define the interval
between Eartha Mae and Eartha Kitt.
As previously mentioned, the relationship between Anna and her father Joe, played by
Rex Ingram, was written to indicate a past marked by incest and its subsequent familial impact.
However, in accordance with the Motion Picture Production Code it was suggested that Joe’s
derangement be the result of him being “possessive in nature” rather than being filled with

107
“incestuous desire.”
53
The production code was less restrictive by 1958, so instead of replacing
the incest storyline, the film simply alluded to it in not so subtle ways. Joe’s behavior ranges
between mania and delirium for most of the film due to his incessant inebriation. In the presence
of Anna, his emotional instability is heightened in a way that makes it clear that his antics result
from suppressed desire and frustration. After Anna is coerced into returning to her family home
she enters the living room carrying Joe’s old hymn book. When he realizes what she has, he
takes it from her and immediately becomes nostalgic and begins singing a hymn he remembers
hearing his father and grandfather sing. As he walks across the living room, Anna follows
alongside him, hands clutched at the waist and looking up at him with her eyes while the rest of
her body is downcast in a child-like manner. As he continues to reminisce her eyes and
expression seem to indicate that she is almost looking past him in a daydream like manner but
brought back to reality when her brother brashly interrupts Joe’s soliloquy. Anna attempts to
recover the nostalgic mood by proposing a dance with her brother, who immediately refuses, and
then with Joe. Joe is startled back into his mania quickly after Anna approaches him swaying and
gazing intensely into his eyes while humming a tune softly.
The film’s premise would make you believe that Anna is intentionally tempting her father
out of sexual desire and/or malice, but I contend that the use of wide and high angle shots during
this scene position Anna as inferior and powerless next to her father Joe. When they walk side-
by-side across the living room, the camera moves away as they approach keeping the frame wide
enough to see the space and to also juxtapose Anna and Joe’s stature. Anna’s conservative,
childish attire, subdued posture, and overall petiteness starkly contrasts against Joe’s haggled
seniority. There is a brief eye-level wide shot when Joe sits down in a chair while still

53
Letter to Philip Yordan from Geoffrey Shurlock. Anna Lucasta PCA Files. Margaret
Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences.

108
reminiscing, however Anna’s decision to stand behind the chair rather than next to him keeps her
in a position of submission and service. There is a brief medium close-up, once again
emphasizing their height difference, Anna’s youthful gaze, and Joe’s distraught demeanor. Upon
becoming quickly enraged following Anna’s proposal to dance there is a series of high and low
angle, close-ups alternating over the shoulders of Joe and Anna which, once again, reinforce
Joe’s dominance and Anna’s powerlessness. His manic rage is so abrupt and startling that it
almost feels as though it will turn violent and Anna will be the victim. The camera jerks to a
close-up of Joe’s pained face and immediately widens to the entire living room space to reveal
Anna, her brother Stanley, and Stanley’s wife Theresa stunned at Joe’s outburst. Joe exits the
house in a flurry, leaving Anna both weary and obviously frustrated and the rest of the family
frozen. Anna has a moment of pure emotion and slams her fists on the living room desks, but
then, in an off-putting manner, gathers herself and puts on her sensuality like one would put on a
hat.
Kitt’s performative depth and exploration as Anna complicate the assumptions made
about her, which were inherently tied to her Black feminine body and UA’s subsequent
marketing campaign. In discussing Adah Isaacs Menken’s strategic racial and gendered
performative tactics, Daphne Brooks affirms that, “…both the actress and the woman of color
were united by their perceived congruence with sexual availability and promiscuity.”
54
Likewise,
Kitt can be placed within the genealogical legacy that includes Menken and the racially
ambiguous/light-skinned Black women performers that followed her on the stage and screen who
were hyperaware of the presumptions associated with their bodies alone. In exquisite detail,
Brooks scours the archive to make the claim that Menken enacted strategies of spectacular

54
Brooks, 151-2.

109
opacity as a means of corporeal capitalization and social resistance. Kitt’s performance of Anna
similarly posits her body in juxtaposition to a performance that often elides the siren-like
qualities bound to her physicality. This is not to say that there are not scenes when Kitt fully
owns and embodies the seductive, mysteriousness associated with her public persona. There are
several moments in the film, particularly in scenes with her lover Danny and with her intended,
Rudolph, that her gaze pierces their masculine exterior for the benefit of her desires. However,
what is intriguing about this film is that Kitt sways between the excess associated with her
persona and a vulnerability unfamiliar to mainstream audiences gazing at Black women
performers. As Brooks notes, “the opaque performances of marginalized cultural figures call
attention to the skill of the performer who, through gestures and speech as well as material props
and visual technologies, is able to confound and disrupt conventional constructions of the
racialized and gendered body.”
55
The complexity of Anna, performed by Kitt, is defined by her
ability to engage spectators initially using corporeal familiarity, and then disrupting their gaze by
way of emotional reticence, seen mostly in the familial encounters, but also in the midst of what
is visually rendered as excessiveness.
Nicole Fleetwood’s utilization of “excess flesh” to describe a performative framework for
interrogating the visual economy of Black women’s bodies assists in identifying Anna as an
exemplary model for exploring this concept. The Eartha Kitt persona and the Anna Lucasta
marketing strategy worked in tandem to further exploit Kitt’s sex symbolism. However, Kitt’s
ownership of the performance that was Eartha Kitt as well as her investment in Anna as a
character, nuances this analysis because of the explicit intentionality of these equally fictive
roles. As “an enactment of visibility” meant to capitalize on both the body and visual

55
Ibid., 8.

110
presumptions of that body, the projection of “excess flesh” looks like Kitt as Anna Lucasta.
56

Particularly in scenes alongside her lover Danny, Anna leads with both her body and eyes,
controlling her movements in a way that implies sensuality and dominance. These scenes are
representatively in stark contrast to all of the scenes opposite her father Joe. Also, because
Sammy Davis Jr. and Kitt are relatively the same height, shots of them together do not typically
assert his masculinity by way of physical dominance, like Joe and Rudolph.
Near the film’s end Joe reveals he has blackmailed Anna and triggers her to abandon her
new spouse and run away with Danny. In the scene that follows, the film uses rapid cutting and
daydream-like inserts to over-emphasize secular chaos and errantry. Contrary to Anna’s assertion
at the beginning of the film when she states that she “would like to be found,” Danny poses,
amidst the dancing and excessive drinking, the seemingly rhetorical question, “Gettin good and
lost baby?” to which she responds, “I never want to be found.” The literal time and space
between these two declarations accentuate the figurative in-betweenness of the interval, which is
characterized by extreme emotional highs and debilitating lows. Anna/Kitt is able to enact what I
determine as a Black feminist performance strategy where she is “not only evacuating the self,
but… modulating the self” as has been theorized about her stage practices.
57
The performance of
Anna is less a projection of what the studio may have intended (based on the promotional
material) and more of Kitt’s staging of the character as neither one way or another. She exists
between both good and bad. Between vulnerability and strength. Between seduction as well as
innocence. She is Eartha Kitt, Eartha Mae, and the something in between the two. Kitt
capitalizes on her own symbolism as a tool of intrigue yet delivers a performance that is far more
complex and layered than the scripted Anna.

56
Ibid.
57
Daniher, 28.

111
Anna Lucasta ends with Anna returning home just in time to meet Joe on his death bed.
In his fading delirium he imagines Anna as a child and speaks to her with love and kindness.
Anna is stunned into silence as Joe calls her “Angel,” a childhood nickname, and proceeds to ask
her about school and visiting the zoo. Throughout the scene Anna is framed by the wall behind
her with a clear sign that reads “God is Love” to her left and a painting to her right. The most
pronounced camera angle prioritizes a medium close-up of Anna’s face, from mostly a lower
angle behind the shoulder of Joe. For the first time in the film, she is situated in a position of
dominance in relation to her father, yet her inability to speak still complicates their dynamic.
Anna is inconsolable when Joe finally passes away in front of her and she realizes she did not
offer any verbal acknowledgment to console him in his final moments. She and Danny non-
verbally abandon their plan of running away together with Rudolph’s money and he leaves just
in time for Rudolph and the rest of the family to arrive back home and find Anna. Joe’s death
seems to symbolically allude to the death of Anna’s own trauma and the life that it had
precipitated, which included Danny. As was typically the case for film’s deemed controversial
by the PCA, Anna is redeemed in the end and is promised a life of domesticity without the
haunting of her father and subsequent past.
Following the success of Anna Lucasta, Kitt continued to perfect her distinct stage
persona that translated across performance mediums. She solidified her own iconicity through
her reclamation of Catwoman in the Batman television series of the late sixties. She was also
featured on several variety television shows where she performed some of her most popular
songs like, “Santa Baby” (1953), “Uska Dara” (1953), and “C’est si bon” (1965), in her signature
sensual style. In interrogating Kitt’s live performance practices, Colleen Kim Daniher argues that
Kitt “engages in a form of strategic race play” that she identifies as “racial modulation.” She

112
goes further to suggest that racial modulation is just one aspect of the Black feminist
performance practices which include, but are not limited to, “tactics such as spectacular opacity
(Brooks), impersona (Vogel), second skin (Cheng), and performing avatar (McMillan).”
58
By
situating these concepts within a cinematic framework, I am also identifying the ways in which
these skills continued to be necessary enactments of survival for Black leading women working
in the film industry. For the Black women in this text, performance is not simply reserved for the
stage and screen, but a means of existing within institutions that promote racial hierarchy and
oppression. Kitt’s ability to recognize the function of the entertainment industry as just another
iteration of white supremacist domination is what evoked her creation and reliance on Eartha
Kitt. Her acknowledgement of the need to sever Eartha Kitt from Eartha Mae proved absolutely
beneficial; this becomes particularly obvious in the next chapter where I discuss her activism and
her decision to assert her political alignment with the Black liberation struggles of the time.
Subsequently, Eartha Kitt may have been exceptional and achieved stardom based on her
mainstream popularity and industry support. However for Eartha Mae, the Black woman born
into poverty in the deep south, stardom would always remain out of reach. Her own recognition
of this difference may have been what sustained her later in her career when she was abruptly
reminded that stars cannot disrupt business as usual, and should they attempt, they are at risk of
being extinguished. Eartha Mae never became Eartha Kitt, she simply wore her like both a mask
and armor—performatively and protectively. Thus stardom, as understood in Hollywood, may
have belonged to the performance that was Eartha Kitt. However, Eartha Mae would emerge as a
phenomenon much greater and ultimately more impactful. Eartha Mae survived and later died a
Supernova.

58
Ibid., 27.

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Chapter 3: Eartha/Diahann

somebody/anybody
sing a black girl’s song
bring her out
to know herself
to know you
but sing her rhythms
carin/struggle/hard times
sing her song of life
she’s been dead so long
closed in silence so long
she doesn’t know the sound
of her own voice
her infinite beauty
she’s half-notes scattered
without rhythm/no tune
sing her sighs
sing the song of her possibilities
sing a righteous gospel
let her be born
let her be born
& handled warmly
—Ntozake Shange,
For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide
When the Rainbow is Enuf
Thus far I have situated leading Black women performers within a legacy rooted in
survival, yet confined within the ideological principles that established and maintained
capitalism and its reliance on Black labor exploitation. Subsequently, Hollywood’s abiding
commitment to capital via labor exploitation seamlessly upheld the same racial hierarchies by
redesigning methods of abuse, misrepresentation, disenfranchisement, and neglect. As a result,
despite perceived exceptionalism and the global popularity of the Black women in this text, they
were nonetheless denied access to the opportunities, resources, and support that defined
Hollywood stardom. I maintain, however, that once fully aware of Hollywood’s allegiance to
white supremacy, artists like Lena Horne, Dorothy Dandridge, and Eartha Kitt crafted various

114
performance tactics in order to combat and challenge abuses of power. Their ability to forge
livable lives as leading Hollywood performers required them to disassociate their professional
and personal experiences from their initial expectations of stardom. When done successfully, as
was the case for Horne and Kitt, they found creative ways to maneuver through the industry that
ultimately contributed towards their longevity. On the other hand, Dandridge struggled to accept
the illusory nature of Hollywood stardom for Black women to her own detriment.
These experiences are addressed through the Supernova analytic, developed to analyze
and understand the circumstantial precarity that exists for leading Black women in Hollywood.
Black feminist theory is crucial to the Supernova framework for the ways in which its discourse
has historically addressed the various modes of oppression that Black women have experienced
over the course of history, as well as the multitude of tools they subsequently developed to
survive such treatment. Eartha Kitt’s professional and personal performance practices as well as
her specific enactment of Eartha Kitt, the performance/persona, allowed her to experiment with
different modes of existing that challenged definitions of blackness, gender, motherhood, etc., in
ways similar to some of the earliest conceptualizations of what would become a Black feminist
politic. As previously mentioned, Kitt’s autobiographical oeuvre consistently asserts her reliance
on self-fragmentation as a necessary survival tool. It is through her articulation of this practice in
her first autobiography, Thursday’s Child, and her subsequent socio-political engagement
throughout the sixties and into the seventies that contribute to this sustained Black and feminist
politic, which is further explicated in her second and third autobiographies, Alone with Me
(1976) and I’m Still Here (1989).
Kitt stands out as a Supernova for the ways in which self-fragmentation allowed her to
remain grounded in reality, despite fantasies of otherwise. Put simply, although rendered

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exceptional, and at times color-less, by mainstream audiences, she remained acutely aware of her
identity as a Black woman and asserted her politics in surprising, yet consistent, ways. This came
to a shocking head in 1968 when she was invited to a White House luncheon by First Lady,
Claudia “Lady Bird” Johnson where the intended topic of discussion was on juvenile
delinquency in America. Kitt later explained that she quickly grew frustrated with the frivolous
conversations that seemed to be monopolizing the time that she thought was intended for the
subject-at-hand. Consequently, she broached the subject by discussing conversations she had had
with young American soldiers and expatriates around the world and tried to relay their general
discontent with fighting in Vietnam. She also suggested that increased crime within urban
communities was a tactic to avoid being drafted into the military since a criminal record
exempted men from service. In the end, her words and disposition were not received well by the
First Lady and news quickly spread following the luncheon’s end that Kitt had brought the First
Lady to tears with her “outburst.”
1
According to Kitt, this incident caused her to be blacklisted
and impacted her career in the United States for many years.
I will return to this incident below, however for now I want to make clear that although
this moment remains one of the most infamous occurrences of Kitt’s career, I contend that in
actuality it was in alignment with the radical politics that Kitt had espoused throughout the
entirety of her career up until that point. As mentioned in the previous chapter, Kitt strategically
mobilized performance as a public engineering of the self. Her professional and personal
longevity relied on her ability to project a persona that was impenetrable to the quotidian
violence and abuse perpetuated by Hollywood and the entertainment industry at-large. The
excessive nature of this performance also rendered her somewhat harmless to mainstream

1
“Lady Bird in Tears As Singer Eartha Kitt Raps LBJ, War,” The Baltimore Afro-American,
January 20, 1968, ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

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audiences. Harmless in a sense that, her image was read as strange, fascinating, and/or
captivating rather than serious. By experimenting with excess, afro-alienation, spectacular
opacity, and other performative tactics historically used by Black women, Kitt reanimated
multiple forms of dissemblance, which inadvertently de-politicized her overall image.
2

Following the Lady Bird Johnson incident, however, Kitt was forced to reconcile with the limits
of stardom for Black women. Eartha Kitt, the star, had spoken too loudly and too much. In
consequence, the stardom that Eartha Kitt had acquired was proven counterfeit based on its
ability to be easily revoked once her politics impeded on the performance that was Eartha Kitt.
Nevertheless, her political actions in 1968 were merely the culmination of the Black radical
politics Kitt had come to envision for herself based on her own nontraditional conceptions of
love and freedom, as well her growing transnational solidarity against white supremacy and
imperialism.
Following further discussion of Eartha Kitt, I also turn to Diahann Carroll in this chapter
and the ways in which she asserted her Black radical politics during the same time period.
Similar to Kitt, Carroll was just as intentional about creating a public persona that correlated with
her stage/screen performance style. However, rather than capitalizing on the sex symbol image
that notoriously followed Black women performers, Carroll insisted on projecting an image more
closely associated with the Black bourgeoisie. A figure easily nestled within the Black middle-
class’ politics of respectability, she achieved and maintained mainstream popularity by
exhibiting an almost impenetrable shield of glamour and professionalism throughout the entirety
of her career. This public performance worked to her benefit and, occasionally, to her detriment,

2
Nicole R. Fleetwood, Troubling Vision: Performance, Visuality, and Blackness (Chicago:
University Of Chicago Press, 2011); Daphne A. Brooks, Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular
Performances of Race and Freedom, 1850-1910 (Durham: Duke University Press Books, 2006)

117
depending on the social political climate. This became particularly true during the late sixties and
early seventies as the Civil Rights Movement lost momentum and Black Power gained
popularity and began shifting the discourse surrounding Black film and television representation.
Her leading role in the network sitcom Julia would prove controversial for this very reason.
Nonetheless, despite the assumptions regarding Carroll’s personal politics as it related to her
image and her role as Julia, Carroll in actuality leveraged her celebrity to assert radical Black
politics. In this chapter, I complicate the function of performance for these Black women because
of the ways in which it allowed for a certain kind of visibility that disallowed overt political
action. I discuss Kitt and Carroll in tandem to think about the ways in which they subsequently
harnessed their respective persona’s to make critical political interventions in service of working-
class Black communities, irrespective of their perceived exceptionalism. By focusing on their,
often ignored, activism alongside their respective public performances of the self, I situate both
Kitt and Carroll firmly within the Supernova legacy.
The Complexity of Black Performance
Eartha Kitt’s relationship to performance provides an intriguing, yet complex, study on
the politics of visibility for Black women entertainers and the unstable relationship between
performance, public identity formation, and audience reception. As mentioned in the previous
chapter, Kitt’s relationship with both Black and white audiences early in her career varied
drastically. Captured in Ebony’s 1954 cover story, “Why Negroes Don’t Like Eartha Kitt,” her
cosmopolitan image and the unpredictability of her rumored actions did not allow her to be
neatly defined within the codes of morality. And although the title of the article alluded to what
could have been assumed as a demographically agreed upon character assessment, in actuality, it
was much more nuanced than the title inferred. As I discussed in greater detail in chapter two,

118
the article consciously recognizes the performative nature of Kitt’s excessive personality and
concludes it to be a racially non-discriminatory response to a difficult childhood. Kitt herself
later assessed that, “Most people probably didn't bother to read the story which was very
favorable, but they saw that very destructive title.”
3
As such, assumptions about Kitt’s life and
politics reflected the continuous conflation of Eartha Kitt, the performance, with Kitt’s own
conception of her true self and actual priorities.
Additionally, Kitt’s film, television, and nightclub career complicated discussions around
representational politics for the ways in which her fantastical performativity incidentally
undermined her political action. This is to say that although Kitt’s spectacularity increased her
visibility during a time when there were few Black leading women on screen, it also
depoliticized many of her intentional efforts to engage with low-income communities. In
thinking deeper about Kitt’s performativity and its impact on her professional and personal
evolution, I want to consider how her persona impacted her socio-political engagement prior to,
during, and after the White House luncheon debacle. According to scholar Peggy Phelan,
“Representation follows two laws: it always conveys more than it intends; and it is never
totalizing. The ‘excess’ meaning conveyed by representation creates a supplement that makes
multiple and resistant readings possible.”
4
In the case of Eartha Kitt, her body was inherently
politicized due to her race and gender, like the women mentioned in the previous chapters,
however by capitalizing on her public image as strange, other-worldly, exotic, etc., Kitt created
both an interesting and confusing nexus between racialization and political engagement during a
particularly heightened moment of civil unrest.

3
Lillian S Calhoun, “‘No Time’ For Love or Hate--Eartha,” The Chicago Defender,
December 19, 1964, National Edition edition, ProQuest Historical Newspapers.
4
Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance, 1 edition (London ; New York:
Routledge, 1993): 2.

119
Kitt’s Hollywood career commenced during a time when the emphasis on the appearance
of “positive” images of Black people on screen was still being championed, despite the failure of
some of the initial campaigns to hold Hollywood accountable for their continued use of
demeaning racial tropes. The initial campaign by the NAACP that placed Lena Horne and her
glamorous image at center had, by the late fifties, been proven insufficient since, although signed
to a seven-year deal with MGM, she was consistently relegated to small singing roles that
occluded her from the plot of the film. Dorothy Dandridge was the next most prominent Black
actress of the time but nearing the end of the fifties her career had stalled and she found herself
typecast as the “sexy siren” bound for tragedy, no matter the role. As already discussed, Horne
and Dandridge’s approach to performance, both onscreen and off, was determined by their
allegiance to the politics of respectability and the substantial weight that was placed on them as
representatives of Black womanhood. Their struggle to exist and work within the “virgin/whore”
paradigm, or more specifically because of their blackness, the “mammy/jezebel” trope, was
reflected in the popular press and Black press discourse and ultimately frustrated both performers
to the point of their respective implosion. Alternatively, Kitt’s leading Hollywood debut in St.
Louis Blues and her follow-up film, Anna Lucasta, alongside her nightclub performance
reputation, presents an alternative approach meant to capitalize and exploit the assumptions
made about the Black woman’s body.
Moving beyond her film representations, I assert that Kitt troubles the politics of
respectability by equally troubling the politics of visibility and representation. Peggy Phelan
notes that, “there are serious limitations to visual representation as a political goal” and it is
through Kitt’s life and career where these limitations are confronted.
5
Phelan continues by

5
Ibid., 6.

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asserting that, “Visibility is a trap” and explains that, “While there is a deeply ethical appeal in
the desire for a more inclusive representational landscape and certainly under-represented
communities can be empowered by an enhanced visibility, the terms of this visibility often
enervate the putative power of these identities.”
6
Whether considering the autobiographical
narratives detailing the brutal treatment and abuse received by formerly enslaved persons or
some of the earliest film productions by Black filmmakers invested in the politics of uplift, as
detailed in the work of Allyson Nadia Field, efforts to prove the humanity of the formerly
enslaved were routinely met with the assertion of racial dominance through structural
disenfranchisement and racial terror. As a formally impoverished, mixed-race child of the South,
Kitt’s awareness of the different ways violence can be enacted both intra- and inter-racially
informed her ideas around safety, protection, care, love, etc., which she shares in all four of her
autobiographies. Her subsequent response to this reality comes in the form of self-fragmentation
which she introduces in Thursday’s Child, but sustains and expounds upon years later in follow-
up accounts. In the last chapter, I provided a textual analysis of how Kitt incorporated self-
fragmentation within her onscreen film performance as Anna Lucasta. Her second
autobiography, Alone with Me, extends and elaborates upon many of the occurrences and
relationships introduced in the first memoir. She then details how her unconventional approach
to performance led to her White House invitation and the repercussions that followed. What
becomes clear in this account is that although she outwardly rejects rules of respectability
through her public performance style, offering her a kind of freedom unfamiliar to Black women
up to that point, her choice to then unapologetically align her image with Eartha Mae’s lived
political experience exceeded the bounds of stardom that were allowed for Eartha Kitt.

6
Ibid., 7.

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As the Civil Rights Movement gained traction in the fifties and moved centerstage into
the sixties, Kitt remained actively involved throughout its entirety, working specifically with the
leaders of the movement and using her celebrity within Hollywood to galvanize support and
funds. Several sources document Kitt’s involvement alongside celebrity-activists like Harry
Belafonte, Lena Horne, and Marlon Brando over the course of many years. Particularly, Emilie
Raymond’s book Stars for Freedom: Hollywood, Black Celebrities, and the Civil Rights
Movement, gives a detailed account of the movement’s primary celebrity benefactors and
spotlights the “Leading Six” as the primary leaders working within Hollywood for the cause.
According to Raymond, the “Leading Six” were an essential celebrity contingent that assisted in
spreading awareness and fundraising throughout the entirety of the movement and included:
Harry Belafonte, Dick Gregory, Sidney Poitier, Sammy Davis Jr., Ossie Davis, and Ruby Dee.
She historicizes their contributions alongside their respective careers and assesses their overall
influence on celebrity culture as it relates to political activism. Although incredibly engaging,
Raymond’s analysis marginalizes Black women’s contributions overall and when they are
mentioned, it is primarily as a collaborator to the men in the movement. Even Ruby Dee, a leader
in her own right, is mostly relegated to the efforts she organized in partnership with her husband
Ossie as opposed to recognizing Dee’s solo contributions.
Discourse regarding the Civil Rights Movement has often prioritized the leadership of
men and relegated women to the footnotes, however more recent scholarship has challenged and
proven this to be a false assessment. Similarly, I must assert that Black women performers were
heavily involved throughout the movement as leaders, as well as supporters. It is equally
important to make clear that many of these same Black women were also able to transition into
supporting leaders of the Black Power Movement, despite the shift towards armed resistance and

122
Black Power’s emphasis on hyper-masculinity by way of Black women’s continued
marginalization. In consequence, matters of race and gender have often prevented the
mainstream public from seeing their efforts beyond the traditional duties attached to the Black,
feminine body. It is for this reason that I conduct a directed analysis on how Kitt’s celebrity
persona uniquely interrupts and complicates assessments of her political activism.
One such example of this kind of dismissal remains a footnote across articles and full-
length books to this day. In September of 1957, President Dwight Eisenhower sent federal troops
to Little Rock, Arkansas to escort and protect nine Black students as they attempted to integrate
in the all-white Central High School. Although segregation had been ruled unconstitutional in
public schools following the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court case in 1954,
Arkansas governor Orval Faubus remained resistant to integration and made conditions
extremely uncomfortable for those who attempted to desegregate. However, before Eisenhower
sent in the National Guard, jazz musician Louis Armstrong was interviewed by a small
publication in North Dakota where he spoke candidly about the mistreatment of Black people in
the South and specifically addressed Eisenhower as cowardly for not stepping in. This was
shocking because Armstrong had, up until that point, made it clear that he did not get involved in
politics and had previously been criticized by activists for nonsensical comments and called an
“Uncle Tom” in JET magazine. Armstrong’s critique of American values prompted appearance
cancellations and calls to boycott his music, however Eisenhower did indeed provide federal
support for the Black students following the publication of the controversial statements.
This story made headlines and is still often referenced as one of the earliest major
interventions by a Black celebrity in the fight for Civil Rights, however what is still marginalized
following Armstrong’s comments was that Lena Horne and Eartha Kitt vocalized support for

123
Armstrong and the Little Rock Nine when very few celebrities had yet to enter the conversation.
Horne by that point had been in the industry for several years and was becoming extremely vocal
regarding Civil Rights by that point. Kitt, however, was still a relative newcomer in Hollywood
(she had been performing internationally for some time and had gained recognition from her
work in theater) and had just published her first autobiography, Thursday’s Child, the year prior.
Not yet thirty, Kitt may have recognized the importance of her platform and chose to
intentionally assert her support for Black liberation. Contrarily though, Kitt’s dissociative
tendencies may have impeded on her ability to recognize that attaching a political agenda to
Eartha Kitt, the persona, may have unforeseen consequences and repercussions. Either way, this
kind of early activism is seldom mentioned in publications centering celebrity involvement in the
movement. Even more interesting though is that over the course of her autobiographies,
interventions and actions, like this one, are rarely mentioned on her part either. I suggest,
therefore, that thinking through her multi-layered approach to performance and mediation offers
a compelling case study into the way leading Black women began employing performance not
just as a survival tactic, but as a nuanced way of being in the world that necessarily challenged
formulations of the public and private for Black women—in and outside of the entertainment
industry.
For the first almost 200 pages of Kitt’s second autobiography, she recounts with
additional detail nearly everything that was written in Thursday’s Child. That memoir ended
around 1954 after she received positive reviews for her performance as Teddy Hicks in the
Broadway play Mrs. Patterson, and had concluded that “Eartha Kitt had become a star.” In the
second autobiography, Alone with Me, Kitt includes a passage just prior to discussing her role in
Mrs. Patterson that helps to explain how she had begun to think about her own identity

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formation in relation to the public persona she had created and who she recognized as her true
private self, Eartha Mae. She posits,
Who was Eartha Kitt? When did she begin exerting influence on my life? In South
Carolina? In Harlem? In Europe? And what drove her? Was it a lack of something like
bread, or a mother and father? Lacking nothing, would there still have been the same
drive? And how much of it is luck? All questions and no answers. Eartha Mae only knew
that the South Carolina cotton picker would have to arise from her bed at the Garden of
Allah in a few short hours and drive down Sunset Boulevard, perhaps with Eartha Kitt’s
voice coming from the car radio, to Twentieth Century-Fox, where she was making a
film.
7

By posing this series of questions, Kitt forces the reader to, once again, confront their
assumptions about who they understand Eartha Kitt to be and to consider how socio-political
factors deeply impact identity formation for everyone. Furthermore, her contemplation of Eartha
Kitt’s emergence and development in relation to past and present geographical locations offers
the opportunity to think deeply about how space/place orient Black women in the world. In
Katherine McKittricks’ Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle, she
analyzes the historical relationship between geographical sites of domination and Black women’s
subjectivity. She makes an important interdisciplinary intervention that is applicable here in that,
“racism and sexism are not simply bodily or identity based; racism and sexism are also spatial
acts and illustrate black women's geographic experiences and knowledges as they are made
possible through domination.”
8
Kitt’s insistence on naming and inquiring into the influence of
South Carolina, Harlem, and Europe on her identity formation is insightful because of how each
of these geographical locations required a vastly different understanding of one’s self in relation
to the socio-political climate of the location’s past and present. South Carolina is the place of her

7
Eartha Kitt, Alone With Me. 203.
8
Katherine McKittrick, Demonic Grounds: Black Women And The Cartographies Of
Struggle, 1 edition (Minneapolis: Univ Of Minnesota Press, 2006): xviii.

125
birth but also representative of her earliest feelings of isolation, abandonment, and fear. In
Harlem, Kitt comes of age in an environment that required her to learn how to survive
independently and protect herself. Then in Europe, Kitt experiences feelings of freedom while
also contending with Europe’s unique way of praising Black artists while simultaneously
upholding structures that benefitted from colonization. Kitt continues with a description her
present reality, again, in relation to geographic locations—the Garden of Allah, Sunset
Boulevard, and the Twentieth Century-Fox studio—situates Kitt within spaces that exist
somewhat in opposition to those that formed Eartha Kitt, but nonetheless, rely on her existence
in order to survive.
In this same passage, she also tethers “the cotton picker” to South Carolina which is an
explicit reference to not only the years she spent performing this kind of manual labor, but an
acknowledgement of her ancestry and her existence as a descendent of the formerly enslaved.
This is an important declaration that Kitt affirms many times throughout her life, particularly
because of the way her performance style troubles the always already slippery definitions of
blackness. Although rendered knowable because of the historical accessibility of Black women’s
bodies to the public, Kitt’s travels and subsequent performance of internationalism complicated
monolithic characterizations of blackness. Another interesting aspect of this passage is that
Eartha Mae does not claim herself as the “cotton picker.” Here, Kitt also separates herself from
the role she is born into, which is not of her own choosing. Her existence as a Black girl in South
Carolina during the thirties automatically inducted her into a certain labor class, primarily
reserved for impoverished Black communities, requiring manual labor at an early age. “Eartha
Mae only knew the South Carolina Cotton Picker would have to arise from her bed,” suggests
that Kitt disidentified with that naming as well. As Jose Munoz asserts, “Disidentification is

126
meant to be descriptive of the survival strategies the minority subject practices in order to
negotiate a phobic majoritarian public sphere that continuously elides or punishes the existence
of subjects who do not conform to the phantasm of normative citizenship.”
9
By continuing to
reject the dominant ideological narrative that she was incapable of acquiring a life of her own
making, Kitt crafted a performative alter ego through her reliance on the practice of
disidentification. What Kitt’s autobiographies reveal is that her strategies of performance began
in her adolescence and took a unique shape into adulthood. She harnessed the performance
tactics inherited from her ancestors and also molded her public performance style through
experiential knowledge, influenced by her global travels. Furthermore, an analysis of Kitt’s
various performance strategies, and specifically in this chapter how it relates to her evolving
politics and her own subject-formation in the midst of social unrest, reveals “how geography is
socially produced and therefore an available site through which various forms of blackness can
be understood and asserted.”
10
The social production of geography as it relates to Black women
specifically, contribute to how Kitt weaves in and through periods of disidentification and
identification.
Before continuing this analysis, I want to make clear that this reading of Kitt’s
performative practices in relation to her social and political activism works across archival
material as well as Kitt’s autobiographies in an effort to examine the many levels of nuance Kitt
presented to the public. Her continued acknowledgement, but ever evolving, relationship with
her own racial identification reveals both uncanny continuity and extreme contradiction across
various sources. The mystery around the circumstances of her birth, particularly never knowing

9
José Esteban Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queers Of Color And The Performance Of Politics
(Minneapolis: Univ Of Minnesota Press, 1999): 4.
10
Katherine McKittrick, xix.

127
the identity of her biological father, and her mother’s untimely death, which she believed was
actually a murder, caused Kitt to wrestle with her identity prior to coming into the public eye.
Therefore, there are times when she struggled to articulate and grasp her own relationship with
blackness and the ways in which changing political times attempted to constrict blackness to
something fixed and recognizably “authentic.” I address this complication by affirming
blackness as always already expansive and limitless in its expression and presentation. This
comes up later in my discussion of soul, however I want to make it clear that my reading of
Kitt’s performative acts is rooted in the idea that Black expressive forms cannot be contained or
demarcated within bounds. As E. Patrick Johnson describes, “Often, it is during times of crisis
(social, cultural, or political) when the authenticity of older versions of blackness is called into
question.”
11
Thus, the Civil Rights Movement and the Black Power Movement presented and (at
times) demanded strict ideas of blackness that Kitt could not accept based on her own complex
relationship with race and performance. Consequently, rather than subscribing to such limiting
ideas, she at times rejected racial categorization all together and promoted a humanist
philosophy. Despite this claim however, Kitt still primarily dedicated her humanitarian efforts
towards the Black community, and later, other victims suffering under oppressive racial regimes
internationally. The White House incident also later served as a reminder to her “just how deeply
racial prejudice is rooted in the American national character,” which I will explicate further
below.
12
In consequence, I have directed my analysis towards her community philanthropy to
affirm how Kitt’s politics were consistently rooted in Black liberation, regardless of her

11
E. Patrick Johnson, Appropriating Blackness: Performance and the Politics of Authenticity
(Durham; London: Duke University Press, 2003): 2.
12
Eartha Kitt, “As Eartha Sees It: ‘This Is Too Much,’” LA Times, January 14, 1975,
Biography Clippings (1975-1989), Academy of Motion Pictures, Arts, and Sciences Margaret
Herrick Library.

128
occasional rejection of her “fit” within socially constructed definitions of blackness.
In 1973, JET Magazine did a feature cover story on Eartha Kitt entitled, “Eartha Kitt
Observes Seventh Year With Black Ghetto School.”
13
The author of the piece, Robert E.
Johnson, thought it was necessary to emphasize in the article title that Kitt had, indeed, been
instructing Black children specifically, from low-income communities for seven years, as
opposed to any other demographic. At this time, Kitt was still in the midst of suffering the
backlash from her White House Luncheon comments, however the incident seemed to spark
renewed interest in her from Black publications. For JET particularly, she had not been featured
as a cover story since 1965 where she discussed raising her four-year-old daughter Kitt as a
working single mother. The 1973 story however, emphasized Kitt’s community involvement in a
way that had not been discussed in the publication previously. According to the story, Kitt first
began teaching dance in 1953 at a Harlem YMCA where “she asked for nothing in return but
care and concern.”
14
This would mean that after Kitt finished dancing with the Katherine
Dunham Dance Troop and during her first Broadway residency as a feature performer in the
stage play New Faces, she was already attuned towards helping low-income Black communities.
Interestingly, there is no mention of these early volunteer efforts in any of her autobiographies. I
suspect that Kitt chose not to discuss her volunteer efforts while emerging as a crossover
performer to deflect attention away from what could have been read as a political agenda as
McCarthyism was finally beginning to lose traction. Kitt’s volunteer efforts in Harlem and, later,
in Watts indicate how she envisioned a lasting contribution to the Black community. Alongside
her public support of Louis Armstrong and the Little Rock Nine and her documented assistance

13
Robert E. Johnson, “Eartha Kitt Observes Seventh Year with Black Ghetto School,” JET
Magazine, June 14, 1973.
14
Ibid., 57.

129
throughout the Civil Rights Movement in the sixties, Kitt was also making direct contact with
community organizers and members. This is in spite of her perceived aloofness and bougie
demeanor that seemed antithetical to the mass movements centering the Black struggle
happening simultaneously. Based on the information provided in the previous chapter as well as
above, I am suggesting that Kitt purposely performed exoticism and nonchalance so boisterously
to strategically overshadow her actual commitment to Black radical politics.
This can be read in many ways, but what I want to consider is how Kitt’s method of
performative experimentation opened up new ways for Black women performers to envision a
public and private life of their own making. Unlike Lena Horne and Dorothy Dandridge who
were her predecessors, but also eventually her peers, Kitt chose to capitalize on the mainstream
assumptions bound to her body for profit while simultaneously engaging in efforts that were
directly related to her own experience growing up as a poor Black girl in South Carolina. This is
not to say that Horne or Dandridge were not politically active because that would obviously be
false. However their engagement differed in that they were both actively concerned with the
politics of respectability in a way that disallowed them from separating their politics from their
public performance. As discussed in chapter two, Dandridge mentioned on several occasions
throughout her autobiography and in interviews that she was concerned about being typecast,
even prior to her role in Carmen Jones. She admittedly feared disappointing the Black
community and contributing to the “perennial spectre” that haunted her career.
15
Her concern
over her public representation impacted her professional decision making so much that the
pressure to positively represent Black people on screen ultimately affected her ability to maintain
a livable life. Horne had similar concerns and for that reason stepped away from Hollywood

15
Earl Conrad and Dorothy Dandridge, Everything and Nothing : The Dorothy Dandridge
Tragedy (New York: Harper Paperbacks, 2000), 169.

130
following the end of her contract with MGM and focused on the nightclub circuit and recording
albums while being a vocal supporter of the Civil Rights Movement.
For Kitt, performance was both a means of protection and public engagement. This
method of interaction with mainstream audiences seems contradictory, however by capitalizing
on her visibility Eartha Mae is also able to remain somewhat unseen, or in Peggy Phelan’s
words—“unmarked.”
16
Because visibility has consistently been prioritized as a means towards
social and political equality, but has yet to disrupt structural modes of domination, I contend that
Kitt exploited her public visibility so that Eartha Mae, and her subsequent politics, remained
unmarked until a certain point. Phelan argues for “a different relation between the looking
subject and the image of the other.”
17
She suggests that, “This new relation between the looker
and the image of the other requires more attention to communicating nonvisible, rhetorically
unmarked aspects of identity….”
18
Kitt, as the other, relies on the conditional unrecognizability
of Black womanhood to project an image that is satisfyingly familiar and hypervisible for
mainstream audiences. This method of projection is so effective that, for Black audiences fixed
on respectability and the politics of visibility, Eartha Mae’s politics are overshadowed by Eartha
Kitt’s excess. And rather than choosing to reject such assumptions, Kitt exacerbated her public
performance of Eartha Kitt on the stage and screen, whilst supporting the Civil Rights
Movement and teaching dance classes in low-income Black communities—satisfyingly existing
within two drastically different worlds without much overlap.
The Space/Place of the White House
By January of 1968, Eartha Kitt had become a global sensation and household name. She

16
Peggy Phelan, 1993.
17
Peggy Phelan, 26.
18
Ibid.

131
was a regular contestant on several television celebrity game shows, had several hit recordings,
she performed internationally, and had reached pinnacle success as Catwoman on the Batman
television series. Although she only appeared in five episodes between 1967 and the very
beginning of 1968, her version of Catwoman is still one of the most recognized and acclaimed
renditions of the decades-long franchise. By ’68 she was also a divorcee and single mother to her
daughter Kitt McDonald. The lesser known aspects of Kitt’s life included her consistent support
of Civil Rights initiatives and her growing relationship with community organizers through her
dance school in Watts. She had also started the Kittsville Youth Foundation, which was a
privately financed camp purposed to educate disadvantaged youth. All of these seemingly
independent elements of her life collided unexpectedly, for all parties involved, on January 18
th

at the Woman Doers Luncheon hosted by Lady Bird Johnson at the White House. I say the
collision impacted everyone because, based on the attendee and public reaction, Kitt’s comments
and concerns startled a large majority of people who seemed mostly unfamiliar with Kitt’s
philanthropic priorities. Multiple accounts of day’s events, specifically the conversations that
transpired between Kitt and the other attendees, have been documented and reprinted across
countless publications. Nonetheless, in Alone With Me and I’m Still Here Kitt takes a significant
amount of time to recount her intentions and actions over the span of the days before and after
the event to provide context for her passionate energy and the circumstances that would follow.
Considering Kitt’s narratives in conjunction with the socio-political realities of the time period, I
aim to deconstruct Kitt’s trajectory from that of both the “unmarked” and the star to a Supernova
following the ordeal.
In hindsight, one could say that Eartha Kitt helped kick off what would be one of the
most explosive years in American history. When Kitt raised her concerns regarding juvenile

132
delinquency being related to the problematic war in Vietnam, it was not yet fully in vogue to
boisterously condemn the war. The Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) was
one of the earliest Civil Rights organizations to publicly condemn the War in Vietnam in 1966.
Following the release of their controversial statement, Martin Luther King Jr. followed suit and
delivered a speech entitled “Beyond Vietnam” in April of 1967 at Riverside Church in Upper
Manhattan, where is connected the inhumane assault on Vietnamese citizens to the injustices
experienced by Black communities in the States. Although Kitt merely echoed the sentiments of
these Civil Rights leaders, her decision to make such a statement within the walls of the White
House came with unexpected and drastic consequences. Also, as a Black woman invited as a
guest of the White House, Kitt was undoubtedly expected to perform respectability in a manner
that prioritized passivity and silence over individuality. Although this was not the first time a
Black woman had spoken candidly in the space and presence of a White House official and been
ridiculed, this incident was unique in that despite her previous social justice work, Kitt’s intellect
and commitment had clearly been underestimated. The public rhetoric following the luncheon as
well as Kitt’s own recollection and transcriptions of the event allow for a thorough consideration
of how the social construction of space delimits how Black women are policed to perpetually
comply with the structures of domination in an effort to forestall debilitating consequences.
Based on the significant amount of pages dedicated to recounting and expounding upon
the events and circumstances already published in Thursday’s Child, Kitt’s second
autobiography was seemingly written in order to provide further context of her character and her
own thorough account of the White House Luncheon and its aftermath. The immense amount of
press coverage that appeared almost immediately after Kitt’s departure from the White House
mostly framed Lady Bird Johnson as the helpless victim of Kitt’s assault on America and

133
democracy. Headlines across both mainstream and Black publications delivered a mostly similar
and damning tone: “Eartha Kitt Shouts in White House,” “Lady Bird in Tears: Eartha Scolds
Mrs. LBJ,” and “Johnson’s Regret ‘Discord’ Heard in Eartha’s Tirade.”
19
With the general
public emphasis placed on Kitt’s delivery as abrasive and inappropriate, despite the serious and
timely nature of the luncheon’s topic at hand, Kitt found herself on the defense against the U.S.
Government. Therefore, her second autobiography seemingly attempts to vindicate her character,
intentions, and public image for the sake of her own professional and personal survival.
It is clear from the first few pages of Alone with Me that Kitt’s tone is drastically different
from her first memoir. The acknowledgements section spans about four pages and, along with
naming several individuals and organizations, she begins first with The CIA who she states, “has
established my reputation with men who want to believe that I’m a nymphomaniac but who
should leave the writing of fiction to authors who don’t write it at the taxpayers’ expense.” Kitt
does not waste time with pleasantries and lets the reader know immediately that this memoir is
meant to provide clarity and assert her voice as the foremost authority of her narrative. She
continues thanking political leaders, family, and friends, however along the way she also
acknowledges:
Lady Bird Johnson, who made me remember that not all who ask questions seek
truth…Richard Nixon, who showed the world that if you want to be dishonest and get
away with it, take the White House… Hollywood, which made me realize that success
begins at home… My Country, which hasn’t allowed me to work here but which takes a
more than healthy chunk of my income because I refuse to be intimidated to leave it…
Me, who has learned that intelligence and sex are a difficult combination to handle.
20

19
“Eartha Kitt Shouts in White House,” The Irish Times, January 19, 1968, ProQuest
Historical Newspapers, “Lady Bird in Tears: Eartha Scolds Mrs. LBJ,” Boston Globe, January
19, 1968, ProQuest Historical Newspapers, and “Johnsons Regret ‘Discord’ Heard in Eartha’s
Tirade,” The Atlanta Constitution, January 20, 1968, ProQuest Historical Newspapers.
20
Eartha Kitt, Alone with Me. ix-xii.

134
Published in 1976, Kitt, at this point, was approaching her fifties and wrote with the maturity and
intention of someone who was both unapologetic and unafraid. The performance of Eartha Kitt
is still present throughout many of the pages, particularly as she reminisced on her travels and
the lovers she encountered along the way. In one way, she affirmed to readers that she was
indeed the affluent internationalist that fixated and perplexed audiences for decades. However, in
other moments, she inserted brief anecdotes that revealed her to be justifiably traumatized and on
a constant search for love and belonging, hence the fragmentation of Eartha Kitt and Eartha
Mae. Much of the additional context, not included in the first memoir, assists in building up to
the encounter at the White House. She has a chapter titled, “Before the Exile” that gives a quick
summation of her life and career in the sixties, touching briefly on her marriage, the birth of her
daughter, her divorce, and the multiple streams of income (film, television, touring, and records)
that were generously compensating her and her lifestyle through most of the decade. However, it
is in the next chapter, titled “The Washington Tea Party,” that Kitt gives her account of how and
why she received the initial invitation, the day’s events, and the immediate aftermath of her
statements. The final three chapters of the memoir introduced the reader to a version of Kitt that
had, for the majority of her career, been mostly obscured by performative excess. Incidentally,
the White House debacle finally forced Kitt to reconcile with the contradictory nature of Eartha
Kitt’s performative illegibility—masked as pseudo stardom, and Eartha Mae’s commitment to
defiant and radical Black politics.
According to Kitt, it was her work with the Washington D.C. based community
organization, Rebels with a Cause, that impressed Illinois Congressman Roman Pacinski enough
to recommend that she receive an invitation to the Woman Doers Luncheon hosted by the First
Lady. Their organization helped underprivileged youth gain education and trade skills in order to

135
find work. After being approached by the Rebels, Kitt successfully advocated for them to receive
government funding from an anti-poverty program, which garnered the attention of Congressman
Pacinski. It is in this same chapter that Kitt discusses her volunteer efforts—particularly her
dance workshops—for the first time (in either memoirs) to highlight her long-standing efforts of
contributing to low-income Black communities.
21
Despite frequently (re)turning to the Black
community to assist in these kinds of efforts, Kitt’s excessive public performance remained her
most remarked upon feature in Black publications. Specifically after her marriage to the white
real estate agent William McDonald, Kitt’s allegiance to the Black struggle was constantly in
question. She often addressed the discomfort she sensed from Black audiences in interviews with
Black publications like the Chicago Defender and the Baltimore Afro-American, yet it was not
until the encounter at the White House that Kitt’s loyalty was taken seriously.
22
Subsequently,
before going into the details of the luncheon she makes a conscious effort to assure readers that
she was not new to advocating for Black communities. In her words, “The Rebels with a Cause
episode wasn’t an isolated incident… I have been visiting ghettos and talking to people in every
city where I have worked… I keep in touch with people—particularly the young.”
23
It was not
until her encounter with the Johnson’s that the extent of Kitt’s self-fragmentation and
performativity was taken seriously and became publicly intelligible.
Prior to joining the other guests for lunch, Kitt describes that upon her arrival at the
White House she was taken to a room with three men who tape recorded her while asking

21
I have to make an intervention at this point to make note that this aspect of Kitt’s career
puts Arthur Knight’s “star dance” theory into question since as a touring singer and community
advocate, Kitt’s “star power” amongst Black audiences should have received more recognition.
22
See “‘Race Doesn’t Matter,’ Says Eartha: Bubbles as She Tells of Wedding,” The
Baltimore Afro-American, May 21, 1960, ProQuest Historical Newspapers. and Lillian S
Calhoun, “‘No Time’ For Love or Hate--Eartha.”
23
Eartha Kitt, Alone with Me. 239-240.

136
questions about her political affiliations and community activism. She would later find out that
the information she provided that day was added to her personal CIA dossier, which had
apparently been accumulating surveillance information on her since the fifties. When Kitt finally
joined the others for lunch she soon realized that the general environment and conversation
amongst guests lacked the seriousness that she felt the topic of addressing crime demanded. She
began to draw conclusions based on her observations:
…there were the television cameras, the newspeople. As a show business person, it was
obvious to me that the luncheon was being carefully staged for the president’s
appearance. And in my opinion, most of the people there were more concerned with the
decor, the television cameras and newspeople, and the prospect of seeing Lyndon
Johnson in person than they were in discussing crime in the streets. I was most definitely
getting upset. I hadn’t flown from Los Angeles to Washington D.C., to watch a show.
24

Kitt’s concern proved warranted when President Johnson’s arrival interrupted one of the first
speeches. According to multiple sources he welcomed the women and then spoke briefly about
the federal government’s role in fighting crime on the streets. He concluded that “the American
public did not actually want the federal government interfering in their affairs and suggested that
mothers should make efforts to prevent children from getting into criminal situations.”
25
When
Kitt proceeded to query how impoverished working parents could be expected to make such an
intervention while attempting to financially provide for their families, Johnson evaded the
question by suggesting that the women in attendance were there to work through those solutions.
Following his departure, there were presentations by women who were engaged in different
forms of organizing within neighborhoods around the country. Kitt recalled that one of the
presenters, an “upper class lady,” advocated that her city install better quality street lights as a

24
Ibid., 242.
25
Janet Mezzack, “‘Without Manners You Are Nothing’: Lady Bird Johnson, Eartha Kitt,
and The Women Doers’ Luncheon of January 18, 1968,” Presidential Studies Quarterly, Modern
First Ladies White House Organization, 20, no. 4 (Fall 1990): 748.

137
way to decrease crime. Kitt, of course, found this solution comical since, “Ghetto areas can’t
even get the cities to pave or repair their streets, let alone spend thousands or millions to light
them.”
26
Increased policing and botanical beautification projects were also discussed so
significantly that Kitt eventually took it upon herself to try and redirect the conversation towards
discussing the causes of crime, rather than discussing symptoms, which to her was the equivalent
of “putting a band-aid on cancer.”
27

When given the opportunity to speak, Kitt used her life experiences living in low-income
communities as well as her recent conversations with mothers and youth around the country to
support her argument. According to her, crime in the streets was directly tied to “the moral
climate of America and its seeming preoccupation with violence.”
28
Her concerns were specific
to the Black community due to her own awareness of how racial terror and injustice were a part
of the history of survival for Black people around the country. She made it clear that
marginalized communities were already vulnerable due to insufficient resources and aid,
therefore fighting a war abroad that people did not understand was nonsensical since they were
still fighting for equal rights on their own soil. In a sense she merely echoed the same sentiments
and concerns that SNCC and Martin Luther King Jr. had already expressed, however to do so in
the White House amplified the anti-war movement in a way that she likely did not initially
understand. Additionally, Kitt had, up until that point, publicly oscillated between identifying as
a race-less human being and as a Black woman, however, her understanding of her blackness,
and its subsequent limitations, became more obvious and finite the moment she upset Lady Bird
Johnson inside the White House.

26
Eartha Kitt, Alone with Me. 244.
27
Leonard Feather, “Eartha Kitt and the Aftermath of That White House Incident,” Los
Angeles Times, April 7, 1968, ProQuest.
28
Eartha Kitt (1976)., PG NUMBER.

138
Up to this point I have emphasized that Kitt’s performance style was captivating to
mainstream audiences for the ways she embraced sensuality and excess to the point of
depoliticization. Accordingly, her eccentricity relied on “Her ability to whip back and forth
between the familiar and strange, restless desire and pleasure, emotionless access and control”
making her mysterious and intriguing but also harmless, in a sense that if she made audiences
uncomfortable it was because of her exotic performance style, rather than her politics.
29
In her
third autobiography she explicitly remarks on the assumptions made about her and her actual
politics based on how people read Eartha Kitt. She states,
It's funny, but when you're considered a beautiful sex symbol, you're not supposed to be
intelligent enough to realize what's going on around you... No we are not all born equal,
that's a fallacy; some of us are born at a disadvantage, but that doesn't mean we should
not all have equal opportunities. All of us should have the chance to become equal, be it
in skills or in thinking; all of us should have the right not to be oppressed…
30

It seems that it was not until the White House incident that Kitt actually realized the extent to
which her fantastical persona had granted her the privilege of remaining unmarked, despite being
visible. The intentional fragmentation of Kitt v. Mae allowed for a particular kind of heightened
visibility that also shielded and protected the racialized labor and beliefs important to Mae.
However, the utilization of Lady Bird Johnson’s tears as proof of Kitt’s abrasiveness and anger
effectively erased the demarcation between the two identities and collapsed them into each other.
Consequently, although she entered the space as the intriguing, star Eartha Kitt, Eartha Mae
departed the White House a Supernova that needed to be reminded that implosion was inevitable.
Scholar Sarah J. Jackson conducted a quantitative analysis on the press coverage
surrounding the incident and accumulated data that revealed the various ways both mainstream

29
Francesca T. Royster, Sounding Like a No-No: Queer Sounds and Eccentric Acts in the
Post-Soul Era (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2012), 53.
30
Eartha Kitt, I’m Still Here, First Edition edition (London: Pan Macmillan, 1989): 165.

139
and Black publications framed Kitt’s comments. She concluded that,
…an overwhelming common characteristic in both the mainstream and black press was
the representation of Mrs. Johnson as a likable, sympathetic figure. While the mainstream
media primarily accomplished this by representing the First Lady as a victim under
attack, the black press accomplished the same by praising both Eartha Kitt for her truth-
telling and Mrs. Johnson for the poise with which she handled the situation. Thus,
journalists in the black press effectively minimized the raced binary definitions of
womanhood called upon in larger society for making sense of the event by demonstrating
that supporting Johnson did not necessitate denigrating Kitt.
31

Overall, this analysis is helpful for the ways in which Jackson comprehensively aggregates the
press data in a manner that assesses the overall sentiments of the content as either “positive,”
“negative,” or “neutral.” My engagement with the same data set uses a qualitative approach in
order to consider how both the mainstream and Black press assisted in marking Kitt using
essentializing racial and gendered discourse. By simply using terms like “angry,” “shouted,” and
“outburst” to describe Kitt’s behavior, while Lady Bird Johnson is described as “pale,”
“stunned,” “nervous,” and “shaking,” the rhetorical aftermath situates Kitt as the abusive
perpetrator and Johnson (and guests) as victim(s). As Jackson notes, the mainstream press
attempted to make sense of the event by suggesting that Kitt was either making a personal attack
against Johnson or that Kitt’s behavior was, plainly, inappropriate for the space and event. Both
of these conclusions actively work to negate the content of Kitt’s argument and provide
justification as to why she did not deserve to occupy the same space as the First Lady. In other
words, coded language was activated to rationalize the occlusion of Black women from
conversations that were of particular interest to their own families and well-being.
In a self-written article for the New York Times in 1974, Kitt essentially reintroduced

31
Sarah Janel Jackson, “‘An Ill-Bred Lady with a Great Big Chip on Her Shoulder’: Gender
and Race in Mainstream and Black Press Coverage of Eartha Kitt’s 1968 White House Dissent,”
Journal of Interdisciplinary Feminist Thought, Women and the Media, 5, no. 1 (2011).

140
herself with evolved insight. Entitled, “As Eartha Sees It: ‘This is Too Much,’” she recounted the
impact of her White House comments and placed them in context with the social justice efforts
occurring at the time, and particularly how her treatment could be compared to other celebrity
activists.
32
She noted that “scores of Hollywood, television, and music personalities…[had] been
more critical of America’s foreign and domestic policies” than she had. She also compared her
“little talk at the White House” and her consequent blacklisting to the actions of her white
celebrity peers, mentioning that Jane Fonda and Marlon Brando (among others) were not
punished to the same degree as she was despite being vocal anti-war supporters. In her own
words she acknowledged that the difference was that she was a Black woman. She continued
noting, “Because I am black, I had to be taught a lesson and put back into my place as a singing,
dancing, mindless automation who saw no evil, did no evil and, most importantly, publicly spoke
no evil.”
33

Kitt’s recollection of the event and its aftermath is also compounded with the revelation
that beyond the controversy resulting in the cancellation of contracts and performance
commitments, in 1974 the contents of her CIA dossier were shared—containing surveillance
accounts of her from as far back as 1956. By that time she understood that because of her
comments at the White House she had essentially been blacklisted in the United States by order
of the Johnson administration, however the CIA documents revealed the extent to which state
power worked in tandem with Kitt’s visibility. In Alone with Me, Kitt reproduces the CIA report
to juxtapose its contradicting narrative with her own autobiographical account. Harkening back
to Kitt’s Acknowledgements at the beginning of the text the report spends a significant amount

32
Eartha Kitt, “As Eartha Sees It: ‘This Is Too Much,’” LA Times, January 14, 1975,
Biography Clippings (1975-1989), Academy of Motion Pictures, Arts, and Sciences Margaret
Herrick Library.
33
Ibid.

141
of time describing Kitt’s sexual affairs. As quoted, “A confidential source… stated that Subject
had a lurid sex life in Paris and described her as a sadistic nymphomaniac.”
34
Accordingly, the
trap of visibility is revealed within the CIA’s fascination with Kitt’s sexual relationships and her
engagement in sexual activities. This “knowledge,” however, was not a threat and did not
intervene in her public visibility simply because their conclusions aligned with preconceived
ideas regarding Black women’s promiscuity. As always already accessible for pleasure through
their objecthood, Kitt’s Black womanhood was justification for how her persona was read and
translated as the natural order of things. Phelan also suggests that “the production and
reproduction of visibility are part of the labor of the reproduction of capital.”
35
As a fungible
commodity, Kitt had performed adequately for the captor until 1968, when she removed the veil.
No longer only a sexual object, Kitt’s White House appearance situated her within the
contemporary socio-political climate as Black and inherently a problem.
Accordingly, one of the most significant differences in her third autobiography, which is
nearly absent in the first two, is the amount of time she dedicates to connecting the evolution of
her politics to her global travels. Although there were times when she ascribed to being a race-
less global citizen, the publication of her 1989 autobiography affirmed her commitment to
identifying and combating racial injustice as a traveling Black woman. She dedicated multiple
chapters to discussing her experience as a Black woman visiting several countries and her
interactions with their leaders. In one particular chapter titled, “The Ways of the White Man” she
gave a history lesson on American colonization and enslavement and then connected those
tactics to global colonialism and disenfranchisement.
36
Her blacklisting also necessitated that she

34
Eartha Kitt, Alone with Me. 260.
35
Phelan, 11.
36
Eartha Kitt, I’m Still Here. 169.

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perform heavily overseas. While performing in South Africa Life Magazine published the article,
“Eartha Kitt as an ‘Honorary White,’” which, by its title, insinuated that Kitt reveled in celebrity
privilege, however upon reading the article’s contents it attempts to gloss over the fact that Kitt
and her daughter were turned away from a whites-only amusement park.
37
In recompense the
amusement park owner wrote her check large enough to build a school-room for Black children
in South Africa. The article also deemphasizes that Kitt deliberately chose to charge white
concert-goers higher admission fees than nonwhite attendees. She then donated much of the
proceeds to South African organizations that were raising funds to build schools for Black South
Africans and performed free concerts in the Black neighborhoods.
38

Subsequently, although she never actually distanced herself from blackness, as had been
rumored, following the White House incident Kitt was forced to recognize how her performative
spectacularity had operated as an entity separate from her lived experience as a Black woman.
Eartha Kitt allowed mainstream audiences to escape into an illusory world of fantastical Black
womanhood without the burden of suppressing guilt and/or obsession. Upon reminding those
same audiences that Eartha Mae was indeed Still Here, her commodification was realigned with
her inherited objecthood thus, affirming the precariousness of her stardom. Unlike her white
Hollywood peers, Kitt’s stardom was, and in reality had always been, illusory because of her
blackness—no matter the slipperiness of its ever-changing definition. And because blackness
“does not only reside in the theatrical fantasy of the white imaginary,” which Kitt was actively
envisioned within, it is important to recognize that blackness “is also the inexpressible yet
undeniable racial experience of black people,” “a way of knowing,” and for the Supernova, a

37
“Eartha Kitt as an ‘Honorary White,’” Life Magazine, May 2, 1972, Biography Clippings
(1968-1974), Academy of Motion Pictures, Arts, and Sciences Margaret Herrick Library.
38
Eartha Kitt, I’m Still Here. 243-252.

143
way of both publicly and privately performing, in certain and uncertain terms.
39
Therefore
inevitably, as E. Patrick Johnson makes clear, “blackness supercedes or explodes performance,”
as it did for Kitt and the Black women entertainers before and those that came after her.
40
This
explosion not only impacts the ways in which Black women navigate their professional
performances of the self publicly, but also their ability (or inability) to personally accept and
move forward following the internal implosion of a Supernova. Kitt’s White House performance
catalyzed the ex/implosion of the life she had crafted for herself within the entertainment
industry. However, in doing so, rather than collapse and dissipate, she proceeded fully aware of
the haunting of slavery’s afterlife and its propensity to reveal itself inconveniently. In her final
autobiography published in 2001 at the age of seventy-two, Rejuvenate!: (It’s Never Too Late),
she relays the following:
“Who is the real you?” someone once asked me. “The me who happens to be in front of
you at the moment, that’s the real me.” The more I surrendered to myself, to the self that
would not be limited and narrowly defined, the more glorious of a time I had with me and
with life.
41

Subsequently, rather than become disillusioned by stardom’s false promises, Kitt shifted her
relationship to self-fragmentation and purposed it in service of self-preservation, rather than
public consumption. Her survival post-implosion offered a new way of responding to structural
racism as a Black woman performer that, in her case, saved her from pre-mature death. She was
no longer beholden to whether it was necessary to perform Eartha Kitt or relieve Eartha Mae. By
surrendering to herself, she was not confined to the bounds of stardom that Eartha Kitt had to
submit to and was able to alter the cultural climate in which she existed. She was a Supernova

39
Johnson, 8.
40
Ibid.
41
Eartha Kitt and Tonya Bolden, Rejuvenate!: (It’s Never Too Late), First Edition edition
(New York: Scribner, 2001).

144
that imploded into (the) blackness and became limitless.
Diahann Carroll: Respectability and Sophistication, or Blackness
In the midst of the Kitt controversy, mainstream audiences were familiarized with
another Black woman entertainer who, from a distance, seemed like a politically safe choice.
Diahann Carroll was a well-known name in the late sixties, mostly for her success on Broadway
and nightclub touring. She made her Hollywood feature film debut in 1954 at the age of
nineteen, appearing alongside Dorothy Dandridge, Pearl Bailey and Harry Belafonte in Carmen
Jones. Her next film role featured Dandridge and Bailey as well in Preminger’s 1959 film
adaptation, Porgy and Bess. She played Clara, a young mother who loses her fisherman husband
during a hurricane. On Broadway, she gained attention as well as a Tony Award in 1962 for her
role in the stage play No Strings. Carroll would go on to be mostly known for her work in
television as the title character in NBC’s Julia, which premiered in 1968, however her
relationship with the Hollywood film industry, again, illustrates how Black women performers
have had to creatively respond to systemic occlusion. Film opportunities were few and far
between for Carroll, therefore, like the women discussed in the previous chapters, she relied
heavily on nightclub touring, theater, and eventually television for revenue.
Additionally, similar to Kitt but also strikingly different, Carroll was extremely consistent
with the projection of her public persona. But rather than engage with the tropes that were rooted
in the ideological assumptions of the mainstream, Carroll maintained a persona firmly invested
in respectability and Hollywood glamour. She credits this disposition to the moral teachings of
her working-class parents. “Respectability, achievement, hard work—those were the values my

145
parents lived by, and my mother worked hard to instill them in me.”
42
Under the direct influence
of her stay-at-home mother, Carroll detailed in her autobiography, Diahann: An Autobiography,
that she had a fairly comfortable home life as an adolescent and grew up feeling immensely
loved by her parents. As a child she often wrestled with feelings of being “different” from her
peers due to the way her parents insisted that she dress and behave in a manner consistent with
bourgeois respectability. However, at the same time, she admitted to witnessing on several
different occasions the threat of racial terror towards her family, despite their attempts to combat
the stereotypes associated with Black people like criminality, lasciviousness, and immorality,
which, she admits, caused her a great deal of confusion. Even as her parents enforced proper
behavior, Carroll recognized that for her and other Black people in the United States, conduct,
financial independence, fame, cleanliness, etc. did not protect against racism and violence. This
insight assisted in her own reconciliation with fame and popularity during the social unrest of the
late sixties and early seventies and can be analyzed through her political actions, as well as her
performance in the feature film, Claudine (John Berry, 1974).
For the rest of this chapter, I will continue to think with performance and the various
ways Black women, like Carroll, engaged with it on multiple levels. For Diahann Carroll
specifically, a persona that evinced respectability and congeniality was of extreme importance to
the crafting of her early public image. In her second JET magazine cover story in 1959 she was
not afraid to emphasize that despite her youth and the racialized assumptions about Black
women, she required that she be treated with respect and dignity.
43
In the issue, she told the story
of being disrespected by Humphry Bogart at a party in which she accompanied Marlon Brando.

42
Diahann Carroll and Ross Firestone, Diahann: An Autobiography, 1st edition (Boston:
Little Brown & Co, 1986): 9-10.
43
“Singer Diahann Carroll: Tomorrow’s Star Actress,” JET Magazine, December 3, 1959.

146
The magazine situated the incident by suggesting that Bogart’s comments reflected, “how some
males of the film colony regarded the aspiring Negro families' females.”
44
Bogart brashly
assumed that Carroll had to be sleeping with Brando and therefore would know “what makes
him tick?” In response Carroll, visibly angry yet fierce and composed, said to Bogart “You're as
rude, as uncouth and as ill-mannered as I've heard you to be. You want to know what Brando's
like? Well, I'll tell you this much--I know him to be a gentleman, which you're not.”
45
She
recalled the same story in her autobiography with slightly different wording but with the same
overall sentiment—Carroll was a lady and not to be disrespected. Anecdotes like this, coupled
with her consistently elegant and statuesque demeanor helped Carroll establish a persona akin to
royalty. Both mainstream and Black popular publications made it a point to remark on her
glamour and refinement on the stage and in her few early film appearances; so much so, that this
persona would prevent audiences from seeing her any other way.
As the sixties came to a close, the Hollywood film industry was barely remaining afloat.
Unable to keep up with the shifting socio-political demands and the massive ideological divides
happening across race, class, gender, and age, television enabled a platform that could address a
multitude of audiences in ways that a singular film production could not. Subsequently, after
attending an event in 1967 where NAACP director, Roy Wilkins, charged media executives to
use film and television to combat Black militant rhetoric with positive imagery, TV producer Hal
Kantor was inspired to respond to the call by creating the network sitcom, Julia, starring
Diahann Carroll. The show centered a widowed middle-class Black, single mother gracefully
raising her son and working as a nurse in a predominantly white community. In Revolution
Televised: Prime Time and the Struggle for Black Power, Christine Acham thoroughly engages

44
Ibid.
45
Ibid.

147
with the circumstances of Julia’s pre-production, production, and the printed public dialogue that
occurred between Carroll and audiences.
46
Despite the show presenting the first Black woman
lead in a network sitcom (not playing the role of a domestic), its plot and writing admittingly
lacked the political urgency that the time period inherently demanded. It was formulated and
written by an entirely white production staff and espoused the belief that hard work and kindness
were the solution to combatting discrimination. The storylines ignored the institutional and
systematic function of racism and focused on the shortcomings of individuals who could easily
be convinced to change their views. Julia was also rebuked for the absence of a Black male
figure in the household by Black critics. Both Civil Rights and Black Power leaders were
particularly concerned with the images, or the lack, of “positive” Black male role models in film
and television following Patrick Moynihan’s report on the pathology of Black-women led
households. As the show’s lead, Carroll received the majority of these critiques directly and was
forced to consistently speak for the show’s shortcomings, despite not having much influence in
the writer’s room. Acham methodologically employs James C. Scott’s investment in locating
“hidden transcripts,” by way of Robin D.G. Kelley’s Race Rebels, to address how Carroll chose
to use her platform to engage with the political topics that Kantor refused to incorporate in the
show. Reproducing Kelley’s interpretation of ‘hidden transcripts,’ Acham writes,
[D]espite appearances of consent, oppressed groups challenge those in power by
constructing a ‘hidden transcript,’ a dissident political culture that manifests itself in daily
conversations, folklore, jokes, songs, and other cultural practices. One also finds the
hidden transcript emerging ‘onstage’ in spaces controlled by the powerful, though almost
always in disguised forms.
47

46
Christine Acham, Revolution Televised: Prime Time and the Struggle for Black Power, 1
edition (Minneapolis: Univ Of Minnesota Press, 2005).
47
Robin D. G. Kelley, Race Rebels : Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class (New
York: Free Press, 1996): 8.

148
Acham then applies this method of communal dialogue to analyze the “way in which black
people used the mainstream venue of television to communicate with a wider black American
community.”
48
In the case of Diahann Carroll, Acham explores several instances where Carroll
used interviews with widely circulated publications to engage in political commentary that
affirmed her allegiance to Black radical politics. Aware of the ways in which her already
cosmopolitan persona and her role as Julia contributed to her reception as apolitical, occasionally
read as detrimental, Carroll attempted to utilize several different methods of engagement to
assert her alliance with and belonging within the movements for Black liberation. Following
Acham’s insightful engagement with Carroll’s ‘hidden transcripts’ during the production of
Julia, this analysis will examine how the cultural climate of the late sixties and early seventies
influenced Carroll’s decision to challenge public opinions by leveraging her popularity through
her performance as the title character in the 1974 film Claudine. Additionally, I employ archival
film criticism from both the mainstream and Black press to think about how Carroll’s public
persona impacted the reception of the film’s explicit political commentary. Overall, I am arguing
that despite Carroll’s strategic performance of respectability and glamour, her decision to
publicly affirm her alignment with Black radical politics using hidden transcripts and as
Claudine, destabilized the possibility of her acquiring Hollywood stardom and, instead,
facilitated her inauguration as a Supernova.
To provide a brief summary and background prior to conducting a comprehensive textual
analysis, Claudine was the first pet project produced by Third World Cinema in 1974. Founders,
Ossie Davis, Diana Sands, James Earl Jones, Rita Moreno, producer Hannah Weinstein, and
writers Piri Thomas and John O. Killens were interested in establishing, “a minority owned and

48
Christine Acham, 7.

149
operated company with the dual purpose of making feature films that combine broad commercial
appeal with pertinence to minority groups, and training minority group members for jobs in the
communication industries.”
49
They intended to capitalize off the popularity of Blaxploitation
films of the time, while simultaneously making an intervention in hegemonic film practices by
incorporating Black and Brown people at every stage of the production process. Although the
company would only go on to produce two films, their training program remained active for
many years. Claudine centered the circumstances of a single-mother of six negotiating the
realities of the welfare system, love, and the complication of maintaining the two. Produced on
the heels of Blaxploitation, the film strayed away from many of the dominant tropes of the time
by emphasizing a love story narrative complicated by the struggles of poverty. Most importantly,
however, the film used comedy and familiar cinematic images, associated with Black, urban
living, to unapologetically critique the American welfare system in the midst of severe economic
and cultural dissension galvanized by the 1968 election and 1972 re-election of republican
President, Richard Nixon.
The Political Emergence of the Welfare Queen
To understand the significance of Carroll’s critique of Julia and the importance of
Claudine’s critique of the American welfare system, it is necessary to discuss the evolution of
the American welfare system and its violent relationship with Black women. By 1974 the United
States was deeply entrenched in the aftermath of the Vietnam War, the Civil Rights Movement,
the assassination of several political figures, and nationwide protests across college campuses.
Concurrently, the infiltration of the Black Panther Party, Watergate, the revelation of illegal CIA

49
“Screening Program,” Diahann Carroll Papers (Collection PASC-M 260). UCLA Library
Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library, University of California, Los Angeles.

150
hyper-surveillance, and second-wave feminism were also a part of the daily news cycle. In
consequence to the rise in social movements and the mobilization of marginalized communities
at decades-end, the angst of conservative white Anglo-Saxon Protestants (WASPs) and the
expanding “silent majority” rose to political prominence. This conservative rebuttal led to the
election of Richard Nixon in 1968 and his re-election in 1972. One of the most discussed
campaign issues during Nixon’s elections was the American welfare system. Welfare was a topic
that stirred emotions on all sides and caused major disjunction in the Republican party, as
methods of address ranged from one extreme to the next. Decades of controversial welfare
reform led to Nixon’s proposed Family Assistance Plan as well as the associative myths
circulated by welfare opposers that stigmatized Black women as the primary perpetrators of
welfare fraud. This widely accepted narrative promulgated throughout the seventies and
continued into the eighties with the election of Ronald Reagan. Public assistance policies,
therefore, inherently influenced the lives of Black families both on and off welfare because of the
visual associations that continued to render blackness as a problem impacting the nation, and the
subsequent translation of that ideology onto mainstream film and television.
So although the American welfare system predates Richard Nixon’s election by decades,
a significant occurrence during the sixties played a key role in the rhetoric attached to public
assistance, which impacted his presidency along with the several decades after. In 1965,
Department of Labor aide Patrick Moynihan published a report titled, “The Negro Family: The
Case for National Action.” In this report he describes the state of the Black American family as
inherently damaged due to centuries of enslavement and the subsequent nonexistence of Black
male leadership in many households. He concludes that, “the Negro community has been forced
into a matriarchal structure which, because it is so out of line with the rest of the American

151
society, seriously retards the progress of the group as a whole, and imposes a crushing burden on
the Negro male and, in consequence, on a great many Negro women as well.”
50
Self-proclaimed
to have good intentions, Moynihan’s report further pathologized Black families as incapable of
contributing to society and effectively blamed Black women for their inability to properly
support and raise productive citizens. To make matters worse, Moynihan was later hired by the
Nixon administration to lead the charge in developing the Family Assistance Plan, or FAP.
The FAP bill died in the Senate, but not before it further exacerbated the rift between
welfare recipients and the many who opposed government assistance. Surprisingly liberal, FAP
was to offer “income supplements to those who were working but poor, as well as to everyone
who had been receiving benefits since the 1930s” and “would have added roughly 10 million
people to the assistance rolls.”
51
The primary problem with FAP was not the policy itself. It was
the extent to which those in opposition intended to discredit the poor and criminalize
communities most in need of the assistance. Increased investigations into welfare fraud and state
legislature became the primary method that detractors like Governor of California, Ronald
Reagan, championed in the late sixties and early seventies. By galvanizing middle-class
conservatives into believing that public assistance was the burden of the hard-working tax payer
and that recipients were all lazy and refused to work, welfare gradually became mythologized as
the problem of the working American and the crutch of the Black poor. This inherently marked
communities of color that were socially deemed the primary recipients of government assistance
despite the fact that welfare was originally created for white single-mothers and continued to
service a large majority of that population. Efforts to catch those committing welfare fraud were

50
Daniel Patrick Moynihan. “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action,” 1965.
51
Felicia Kornbluh. “Who Shot FAP? The Nixon Welfare Plan and Transformation of
American Politics,” The Sixties 1, no. 2 (2008): 125.

152
entangled with a history of occupying and criminalizing Black communities. Julilly Kohler-
Hausmann’s article “Welfare Crisis, Penal Solutions, and the Origins of the ‘Welfare Queen,’”
elaborates on this stating, “Assumptions about the social position of program beneficiaries were
embedded in policy, and administrators responded to the same behavior differently depending on
which population they served.”
52
Thus, with this stigmatization came the inability for welfare
recipients from urban communities to disassociate themselves from the welfare stereotypes that
were bound to ideas of greed and laziness.
By the early seventies, welfare was associated in the popular imaginary as a service
primarily assisting poor urban communities. Following the rejection of FAP and Nixon’s soon-
followed resignation, the relationship between Black families and public assistance was
contentious and wrought with assumptions that were tied to racist and sexist discriminatory
practices. As relayed by Ange-Marie Hancock in her book Politics of Disgust: The Public
Identity of the Welfare Queen:
It was not merely that they were single, or African American, or mothers, or poor; it was
because they were all of these simultaneously that they were denied assistance, funneled
into service-level job training, and subjected to ‘midnight raids.’ Notably, the events of
these years further hardened hierarchies among women when race- and class- privileged
women later became the overwhelming majority of social workers and social welfare
bureaucrats.
53

So, although Reagan would not publicly coin the term until his 1976 campaign for presidency,
the stigma of the “welfare queen” had already been established and working against Black
women during the years prior. Continuously subject to invasive home visits and questioning by
social services, the function of welfare case workers and the state worked to humiliate and

52
Julilly Kohler-Hausmann. “Welfare Crisis, Penal Solutions, and the Origins of the
‘Welfare Queen,’” Journal of Urban History 41, no. 5 (2015): 760.
53
Ange-Marie Hancock, Politics of Disgust: The Public Identity of the Welfare Queen (New
York: New York University Press, 2004), 38.

153
disenfranchise Black families while also shaming them for being poor. As had always been the
case for Black women, the line between public and private space was nonexistent and thus
always already accessible to the State. With this as the reality for Black families across the
country, film and television creatives began to translate these experiences onto both the big and
small screen. Claudine directly challenged the obviously problematic practices of the welfare
system by using Diahann Carroll’s likeable image as the conduit to reach a mainstream,
historically-resistant audience. Claudine can also be seen as representative of a conversation that
was happening amongst Black feminists of the time who, following the Moynihan Report, were
questioning the idea of “family,” in general, and its applicability to the ways in which the Black
community historically and contemporarily understood kinship.
Claudine, the Original “Welfare Queen”
Third World Cinema co-founder Diana Sands was responsible for pushing the production
of Claudine and was also originally cast as the film’s lead. Sands was primarily known for her
role in the film adaptation of Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun as Beneatha Younger, the
younger sister to Sidney Poitier’s character. Unfortunately, Sands was forced to publicize her
cancer diagnosis after collapsing during the first day of shooting Claudine. She died on
September 21, 1973, but prior to her passing she insisted that her friend Diahann Carroll replace
her as the title-character, Claudine. Director, John Berry, as well as producers and writers for the
film were skeptical of Carroll’s ability to shake her pristine and polished image to play a mother
on welfare with six kids, however Carroll was very vocal about being personally and
professionally ready for this role. In a Jet Magazine article titled, “Claudine: A Movie that
Blacks Can Relate to” she said,
I have been searching desperately for a role in a film that was not as a sophisticated, well-

154
dressed, educated lady which has been my image for the past 15 or 17 years. When the
opportunity comes, your mind must be receptive to the possibility of doing something
different. Claudine, with no make-up and nothing to rely on but my ability, was that kind
of opportunity. I can’t tell you how happy I was because the other image, at least for me,
has become one-dimensional and in many instances quite boring.
54

Given the opportunity, Carroll did not disappoint and received tremendous accolades from both
Black and mainstream press regarding her ability to break her “plastic” image and become
Claudine, despite some mixed reviews regarding the film itself. She was nominated for an
Academy Award for Best Actress and although she did not win, her nomination was only the
fourth time in history that a Black woman had been nominated in that category.
As previously discussed, the complication of the positive/negative image binary is its
deeply rooted belief in the politics of respectability and the false conception that for marginalized
communities to be seen as worthy of just treatment, Hollywood films must present uplifting
images of Black people. For many, Blaxploitation films reinforced myths of Black criminality,
lasciviousness, and promiscuity which was assumed to justify institutional racism and
disenfranchisement. Claudine, however, challenged this positive/negative binary by utilizing
familiar urban imagery to constitute its setting while also presenting what looked like tropes with
complexity and depth. Because the film starred Carroll, there was also immediate and direct
comparisons with her previous, more “respectable” roles, and Claudine. Many articles attempted
to address the film’s adherence to and/or deviation from Blaxploitation films and/or Julia. In a
review by Joseph Gelmis, he made it clear that Claudine was not Julia, stating, “I can assure you
that ‘Claudine’ is more realistic in its treatment of ghetto black life than anything you’re likely to
see on TV. The setting is Harlem and there is no glamour in the working-class apartments.”
55
In

54
“Claudine: A Movie that Blacks Can Relate to,” Jet Magazine, July 4, 1974, 59.
55
Joseph Gelmis, “Movies: Tough and Touching,” Diahann Carroll Papers (Collection
PASC-M 260). UCLA Library Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library,
University of California, Los Angeles.

155
an interview with Clarence Page, Carroll also attempted to distance the film from Blaxploitation
stating, “I hope this movie will be successful enough to do away with the stereotypes about what
a black movie ought to be…We can deal with black families and black situations without
producing rehashed versions of James Bond, movies designed only for escape. ‘Claudine’ is not
a violent movie, and sex played only a small, natural part of the love relationship.”
56
This ardent
concern for the need to combat stereotypes played out interestingly in the press for the simple
fact that, on the surface, Claudine is intertwined in a matrix of both familiar and unfamiliar
imagery.
Claudine opens with a scene of a woman walking with a group of young children and
teenagers before giving one of the young men some money prior to rushing off and catching the
bus. On the bus ride a group of Black women laugh and discuss the fact that despite their hard
work, a woman still has “needs” and that the woman who we follow unto the bus, Claudine,
needs to make sure she’s getting those needs met to properly function. Claudine jokingly
engages before disembarking the bus and rushing to the home of the rich, white family she works
for. The film makes the inner city setting of the previous scene remarkably different from the
clean, suburban neighborhood of the white family. Upon Claudine’s arrival into the home, her
white female employer is sure to comment on her tardiness while mindlessly chatting on the
phone, establishing early, the hostility and contrasting realities of these two women. Claudine
then purposely makes herself available to the Black sanitary workers, whom she spotted before
initially going into the house. Flirtations are exchanged between Claudine and, the more vocal of
the two workers, Roop, played by James Earl Jones, and the scene ends with Claudine and Roop

56
Clarence Page, “For Diahann, 1974 is a Winner,” Diahann Carroll Papers (Collection
PASC-M 260). UCLA Library Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library,
University of California, Los Angeles.

156
scheduling a date. The beginning of the film specifically emphasizes the distinction between the
working class, Black characters and the alternative reality in which they must attempt to still find
joy in, despite hostile and volatile working conditions. Similar to the Blaxploitation films of the
time, whiteness is exposed as an omnipresent and uncompromising power, directly oppressing
the Black working class.
When Roop arrives to pick Claudine up for their date, he is introduced to her six children.
The scene is intentionally loud and chaotic, to once more, establish Claudine’s living situation as
exponentially different from her white employers. Through flirtatious banter and comedic
exchanges between Roop and Claudine and Claudine and her children, it is revealed that she is
thirty-six, her children are the result of two failed marriages and two failed “almost marriages,”
and she is on welfare but is secretly working in order to make ends meet. Roop is a bachelor who
has three kids of his own that he does not see regularly, yet for whom he still provides some
financial support. The setting establishes Claudine as a representation of inner-city poverty and
includes familiar Blaxploitation imagery like the occasional sex worker and gambling.
White review writers of the film had a particularly difficult time navigating the balance
between familiar Blaxploitation imagery and Diahann Carroll’s mythology. Carroll’s glamorous
persona had been considered acceptable and safe for mainstream audiences uninterested in
engaging with social problems. Subsequently, it is likely that those same audiences assumed that
Claudine would be a role similar to the respectable Julia rather than an explicit critique of
structural racism and economic disenfranchisement. This worked to the film’s advantage since it
performed extremely well at the box office, however film critics struggled to reconcile their
image of Carroll with the topics introduced and addressed in Claudine. By 1974, the stigma of
the “welfare queen” was alive and well, and Claudine fit the bill, however Diahann Carroll as

157
Claudine elicited interesting commentary. Article titles about the film ranged from “Diahann
Carroll’s Plastic Time is Over'' to “‘Claudine’ A Moving Look at Poor Blacks” to “Fried
Chicken Romance.”
57
The mainstream press had some difficulty describing the film since it
seemingly contained “universal” conceptions of love and family, yet its predominantly Black
cast made it easily conflated with Blaxploitation films of the time. In Roger Ebert’s review from
the Sun-Times TWO he titled his article “A Joyous, Insightful Black Movie '' and attempts to
emphasize its inclusiveness by stating, “…it’s not really a ‘black movie’ per se. It transcends the
genre; it’s a movie about people with big problems, and how they face them with resiliency,
humor and occasional despair.”
58
Here, Ebert generously offers accolades to the film, yet his
confusion about the film’s “genre” is further exacerbated by his initial title labeling it as still a
“black movie,” which at the time, equated to Blaxploitation. In general, there was an obvious and
consistent conflation between Blaxploitation as a genre and movies that simply had a
predominantly Black cast, that may or may not have been a Blaxploitation film. Several other
articles also attempted the praise the film by detaching it from the Black experience in exchange
for claims of “universality,” which was a coded way of describing whiteness.
For some writers however, Claudine explicitly adhered to everything that was
problematic about Blaxploitation. Scenes of Roop’s apartment building incited interesting
commentary, as many times it is made clear that there are several “working women” who reside
in the building. There is also a scene with one of Claudine’s sons shooting craps and indicating
that he planned on dropping out of school. Imagery like this had such direct associations with

57
Roger Ebert, “Diahann Carroll’s Plastic Time Is Over,” Chicago Sun Times, May 17, 1974,
Diahann Carroll Collection, UCLA Special Collections, “‘Claudine’ A Moving Look at Poor
Blacks,” Chicago Today, May 10, 1974, Diahann Carroll Collection, UCLA Special Collections,
and, Richard Schickel, “Fried Chicken Romance,” Time, May 5, 1974, Diahann Carroll
Collection, UCLA Special Collections.
58
Roger Ebert, “A Joyous, Insightful Black Movie,” Sun Times TWO, May 10, 1974, 70.

158
Blaxploitation that some writers were unable to see beyond them. Margaret Hinxman’s review in
the Daily Mail is particularly harsh, noting:
While trying to appear plain and plumb weary, Diahann Carroll can never convince you
she is the mother of these six sassy kids. The children are stereotypes; the politically
committed elder son, the pregnant teenage daughter, the precocious boy and so on. James
Earl Jones overplays the funny nigger routine as a defence [sic] against his own
vulnerability.
59

Similarly, Richard Schickel’s review in Time concluded with this rebuke: “But what can you
expect of a movie about blacks in which the main love scene is preceded by a meal of fried
chicken? Thank heavens they did not have watermelon for dessert, but that is about the only
cliché of black life the film has avoided.”
60
Commentary such as these blatantly ignored how
even when these seemingly familiar tropes are presented, there were also moments of redemption
attached to the scene. The sex workers were never shown being abused, which was extremely
typical in Blaxploitation films and the craps scene turned into a lesson affirming that Claudine’s
son is obviously excellent at math and has no business quitting school. There is also an
extremely nuanced generational conversation that occurs between Claudine and her “militant”
son. Charles, played by Lawrence Hilton-Jacobs, is actively involved in a community
organization purposed to encourage and fight for employment opportunities rather than
dependence on public assistance. Over the course of the film, Claudine and Charles have
multiple exchanges where he attempts to explain why their cause is important to the liberation of
Black communities, while his mother remains justifiably worried about police violence. Rather
than attempting to make a film that could be easily described as “positive,” instead, Claudine
sacrificed one dimensionality for a kind of complexity that was still unfamiliar for audiences.

59
Margaret Hinxman. “After Godfather II, Reviewing the Other Releases,” Daily Mail, May
17, 1975.
60
Richard Schickel, “Fried Chicken Romance,” Time, May 20, 1974.

159
And although the welfare commentary is situated as the B Plot in the film, it remains one of the
most sophisticated visual renderings of the system to date.
By 1974, the stigma of the “welfare queen” was not only a political hot topic, but also the
subject of public scrutiny and debate within popular culture. Claudine’s depiction of the
struggles of being on public assistance was topical and controversial for those unfamiliar with
the ways in which the system operated. Likely believed to be a gross exaggeration, Claudine
offered a first-hand look at the inner-city poor in 1974 and the hurdles in place to keep Black
communities in an endless cycle of poverty. Essentially, I argue that the film’s actual antagonist
is the American welfare system. Claudine and Roop’s relationship is continuously thwarted by
the looming inevitability of welfare fraud. In the film, the white social worker, Miss Kabak,
makes unexpected home visits that require the family to constantly remain on guard. This is
visualized when one of Claudine’s sons’ spots Miss Kabak approaching the stoop and the family
performs a clearly routinized sweep of the home in which they hide items that could be
considered out of their welfare budget. By 1974, unannounced home visits in urban
neighborhoods were a part of the welfare system’s attempt to decrease the number of recipients
by targeting very specific demographics. Miss Kabak’s evasive questions and presumptive
behavior once again symbolically represented the overall disconnect between the Black and
white feminist movement; serving as ingeniously valid commentary at the height of the Second
Wave Feminist movement.
There are several more scenes in which Claudine articulates the difficulty in wanting to
provide for her family, while still being dependent on government assistance. In one of the most
iconic monologues of the film Claudine delineates, “Mr. Welfare. Makes me beg for them
pennies. Starvation money. If I can’t feed my kids. That’s child neglect. Go out and get myself a

160
little job on the side, If I don’t tell him. Then I’m cheatin. If I stay at home, then I’m lazy. You
can’t win.”
61
The number of children Claudine had, automatically stigmatized her within the
racist and sexist assumptions that followed Black women. Inherently understood as either
asexual or hypersexual, Claudine symbolized working-class Black women’s inability to reject
labels that had become institutionalized and reflected in policy.
Roop is also unable to shake the demands of poverty’s endless cycle. Early in the film
Roop makes it clear that he sends child support to the mothers of his children, however this does
not stop him from being served for child neglect and his wages eventually being garnished as a
result. As a sanitation worker he admits to being unable to survive bringing home less than what
he was already struggling to live off. The film’s release on the heels of the Moynihan Report
made the subject of masculinity and Black fatherhood a gigantic point of contention. Roop
discusses openly the temptation to abandon his responsibilities and simply disappear, as was
understood to be the realities pathologized about Black fathers. However, once again Claudine
complicates the conversation by presenting the many hardships and barriers that work to prevent
working class men from fulfilling their socially accepted gender roles. At one point in the film,
Roop seemingly desert’s Claudine and the kids when a joyous Father’s Day party is left somber
by his absence. Claudine’s oldest son Charles later finds an inebriated Roop and attempts to
assault him for hurting his mother. The scene ends with Roop overpowering and embracing a
clearly hurt teenage boy, and Charles storming off to prevent himself from breaking down. By
the end of the film, Roop returns to Claudine and the family and articulates his vulnerability
around his inability to “be a man” and is comforted by their love and support.

61
Claudine, directed by John Berry (1974; Beverly Hills, CA: 20
th
Century Fox), DVD.

161
The “Black Family” Implosion
The sophistication of the film’s commentary on poverty, family, patriarchy, and
blackness was merely a reflection of the Black feminist politics that emerged in the late sixties
following the Moynihan Report. This is not to say that Black women were not thinking and
writing prior to the report, but that by the end of the sixties, Black women were still being left
out of conversations regarding matters that impacted them directly which required them to
respond boisterously. In 1970, writer, scholar, activist Toni Cade Bambara edited and published
The Black Woman: An Anthology, which she noted “grew out of impatience.” She went on to
explain that among other things, “It grew out of an impatience with the half-hearted go-along
attempts of Black women caught up in the white women’s liberation groups around the country.
Especially out of an impatience with all the ‘experts’ zealously hustling us folks for their
doctoral theses or government appointments.”
62
Without directly naming Moynihan, Bambara
collected a series of essays, poems, and pros by Black women (and Women of Color allies) that
explicitly challenged centuries of assumptions, studies, and policies that maintained the
ideological axiom that Black women were indeed property, rather than sentient human beings.
The collection is candid yet extremely intellectual and concise, including contributions from
women known widely and those who may have been lesser known, but who were equally
engaging and insightful. And although discussions concerning the Black family were addressed
in a multitude of ways within the text, I turn specifically to Kay Lindsey’s essay “The Black
Woman as a Woman.” It argued for a reimagining of “family” based on the term’s origin and its

62
Toni Cade Bambara, ed., The Black Woman: An Anthology, Reprint edition (New York:
Washington Square Press, 2005): 5.

162
insufficient application towards the historical non-normativity of Black kinship.
63
Furthermore,
Claudine’s depiction of the Black family can be regarded as an inventive cinematic execution of
Lindsey’s proposed framework, as well as a conferral of Carroll’s performance as superfluous to
stardom’s statutes for membership.
Kay Lindsey’s argument that the concept of family was beholden to white supremacist
ideology was an extremely radical concept that, according to scholar Tiffany Lethabo King,
presented an abolitionist approach to the ways in which “the western notion of the family
functions as a site of violence and dehumanization that threatens to engulf Black sociality.”
64

The basis of Lindsey’s essay is reasonably built on the philosophy that, “Classifications and
categorizations of groups of people by other groups have always been for the benefit of the group
who is doing the classifying and to the detriment of the classified group.”
65
Accordingly,
Moynihan’s contribution to reforming the family as a two-parent household with certain
economic privilege assisted in solidifying that families who did not subscribe to that model, in
this case working-class Black communities, were non-normative and prone to increased
criminality and poverty. Lindsey also attempted to account for how the welfare system
contributed to this unfair comparison by creating “an artificial family, in which it, via the welfare
check, takes the place of the husband and can thus manipulate the ‘family’ more directly.”
66
In
the monologue discussed above, Claudine overtly describes her “unhappy marriage” to Mr.
Welfare. The scene is accompanied by the Curtis Mayfield produced track, “Mr. Welfare,”
performed by Gladys Knight and the Pips. The following song lyrics epitomized both Lindsey

63
Kay Lindsey, “The Black Woman as Woman,” in The Black Woman: An Anthology, ed.
Toni Cade Bambara, Reprint edition (New York: Washington Square Press, 2005), 103–8.
64
Tiffany Lethabo King, “Black ‘Feminisms’ and Pessimism: Abolishing Moynihan’s Negro
Family,” Theory & Event 21, no. 1 (January 2018): 70.
65
Kay Lindsey, 104.
66
Ibid., 107.

163
and Claudine’s assessment of public assistance:
(Keep away from me, Mr. Welfare)
They just keep on saying I'm a lazy women
Don't love my children and I'm mentally unfit
I must divorce him, cut all my ties with him
Cuz his ways they make me say
It's a hard sacrifice (hard sacrifice)
Not having me a loving man
Society gave us no choice
Tried to silence my voice
Pushing me on the welfare (on the welfare)
I'm so tired, I'm so tired of trying to prove my equal rights
Though I've made some mistakes for goodness sakes
Why should they help mess up my life?
67

All three texts (Lindsey’s essay, Claudine’s monologue, and Mayfield’s “Mr. Welfare”) vividly
describe the dehumanizing surveillance practices perpetuated by white social workers,
inescapable structural dependence, and the inability to pursue romantic relationships as a result
of welfare policies. As such, rather than calling to reform welfare—which would uphold the
normative constructions of the family within the paradigm of whiteness—both Lindsey and, I
would argue, Claudine propose the abolition of the “family” entirely.
Throughout the film there are several back and forth exchanges where different
characters ponder their conception of “family.” Whether this occurs between Roop and Claudine
or amongst the children, all of the characters seem to be wrestling with their inability to ascribe
to the formal definitions of “family.” Although eventually it becomes clear that Claudine and the
kids want Roop to officially commit to them and marriage is brought up, it never feels as though
that aspect is a requirement. Claudine, specifically, understands that marriage would lead to
Roop being swept into the welfare system in some way and is adamant about them simply
enjoying each other’s company until the relationship runs its course. As the film progresses Roop

67
Gladys Knight and The Pips, Mr. Welfare, Soundtrack, Claudine (Buddah, 1974).

164
develops individual relationships with the children that are firstly built off respect and then
transition into love, hence their visceral disappointment when Roop misses their Father’s Day
party. However, it is within the confines of Claudine’s home where audiences are encouraged to
imagine an alternative family-structure that looks like Claudine’s. Humor and laughter are
consistently a part of their communication style, which occurs indiscriminately at anyone’s
expense, while unconditional love is affirmed even in some of the most emotionally taxing
situations. Poverty guarantees a host of different obstacles, yet despite the struggle, there is an
infinite supply of care reserved uniquely for each member of the household that is palpable in
nearly every scene. In this regard, Lethabo King accurately suggests that it is in this moment,
post the rebellions of the sixties and amidst the anxieties expressed by the Moynihan Report and
the white silent majority, the Black Matriarch emerges as both a fugitive and a problem.
68

However, the Black Matriarch is not a problem for the ways that Moynihan suggests, but a threat
in a sense that despite conditions of dispossession, surveillance, and oppression—humor, love,
and care remain a source of survival and encouragement to imagine a life beyond captivity. Put
another way, “the matriarch’s domestic space extends into the ghetto and produces the rebellion
space that her children set on fire.”
69

The final sequence of the film unequivocally envisions the possibilities of Black alterity
as a threat to the structure of white capitalist patriarchy. As Roop and Claudine proceed to marry
in her home amongst friends and family, the scene is juxtaposed and intercut with a local
demonstration calling for access to fair employment, attended by Claudine’s oldest son Charles.
The demonstration quickly turns into a physical altercation with the police requiring the
participants to scatter and run. Just as the officiant is about to announce the marriage of Claudine

68
Tiffany Lethabo King, “Black ‘Feminisms’ and Pessimism.”
69
Ibid., 81.

165
and Roop, Charles bursts into the apartment and grabs a blazer from the closet in an attempt to
blend in with the crowd. The police charge into the space and try to grab Charles, however both
the wedding attendees and the newlyweds unanimously begin to fight back, despite not knowing
the reason that Charles is being apprehended. As the police attempt to arrest several individuals
and vacate the building the number of community members fighting back continue to swell into
the street. At some point during the shuffle Roop and Charles are apprehended and hauled into a
police van. Claudine and the rest of the children continue to hit the police to try and free
everyone being arrested but in the shuffle most of the family also get thrown into the police van.
As the van begins to pull off the rest of Claudine’s children run after the truck to join and are
scooped up by Roop into the van as well. Before the final credits run, audiences see the entire
clan headed to the police station in solidarity and collective rebellion.
It is the sight of the entire Black community, in kinship, joining together to disrupt police
violence that is the real threat to American values. As Lethabo King suggests, “the Black
matriarch disfigures the institution of the family and renders it a site of rebellion where the
orders of property and space implode.”
70
The implosion and abolition of the “family” is
symbolized by their collective rebellion against the system they have been battling the entire
film. By concluding the film in this manner, Claudine is able to reimagine alternative ways of
being in a community that resists the pressure of forming a nuclear family for a more liberating
alternative. It is also not just Roop who loves and cares for Claudine and the children, but the rest
of the community seems to be just as invested in protecting each other from the violence of the
system. As the credits roll, Claudine, Roop, and all of the children are reunited with the rest of
the community and, in strength and solidarity, walk the streets of Harlem holding hands and

70
Ibid., 80.

166
laughing to seemingly return to their home. And rather than walking into the sunset and the
camera following behind them, signaling a typical cinematic happy ending, they instead walk
towards a static camera beginning with everyone in full view, with Claudine as the last face you
see before the film fades to blackness. All things considered, there is no guaranteed happy
ending, however what can be inferred is that no matter what occurs, the Black matriarch
threatens the social order by creating a new “symbolic economy” where she and her children
continue to imagine collective liberation while living as “fugitives in flight.”
71

With Carroll as the lead in such a symbolically revolutionary film, with explicitly
political commentary, it is predicated that Hollywood stardom would evade her as well. In the
summer of 1976, she was given the opportunity to star in four one-hour variety specials in which
she was the main act— The Diahann Carroll Show. Her next major role would not come until
the eighties as Dominique Deveraux in the nighttime soap opera, Dynasty. Furthermore, most of
her film roles after Claudine were made-for-television films that remained relatively mild in
comparison to her role as the cinematic “welfare queen.” Similar to Dandridge before her, an
Academy Award nomination did not elicit leading film opportunities, as it would have for an
actual Hollywood star. In her book The Legs are the Last to Go: Aging, Acting, Marrying and
Other Things I’ve Learned the Hard Way she looked back on the cultural moment and her
persona during the time and stated candidly,
I was and always will be a chanteuse in the way I understand the term. That was hard to
reconcile with in the 1970s, an era of strident liberation. The only important film role I
played during those years was representative of where the cultural interest was—as a
welfare mother in the independent film Claudine. She was gritty, real, an honest black
woman working her tail off. It was a great part. But no other roles were forthcoming, so I

71
Ibid., 83.

167
continued to travel.
72

Carroll’s acknowledgment of her persona as a “chanteuse” in relation to the socio-political
demands of the seventies is insightful in that she understood that her performance of
respectability impacted her relationship to audiences, specifically Black audiences, in a way that
was significant. Despite continuously supporting the Civil Rights Movement, as well as the
Black Panther Party, it was not until she accepted the role as Claudine that she was able to
connect to the movement in a publicly meaningful way. At the same time, Claudine’s symbolic
“implosion” of the Black family signaled a shift in Carroll’s career as well. Even though she
attempted to affirm her political allegiance while shooting Julia, it was not until playing Claudine
that mainstream Hollywood was forced to recognize that she was also not necessarily “safe.” In
her autobiography she relayed that after Claudine she was reminded “that any success a black
actor finds in Hollywood is momentary.”
73

Subsequently, Carroll’s personal longevity came at the cost of necessarily detaching
herself from the Hollywood model of stardom that she already knew was unattainable. As she
aged, her performance of respectability and glamour was less about proving her worth and more
about enjoying the privilege of financial stability as a result of diversifying her performative
repertoire—mostly through the stage and television. Nevertheless, the thrill of life as a
Supernova is similar to the Black Matriarch in that, as a perpetual threat to white capitalist
patriarchy for her ability to nurture and encourage fugitivity, the Supernova’s inherent brightness
and reach presents an equally explosive threat to the climate of anti-blackness. Accordingly, in
this tradition, “To be willing to name oneself again and again to avoid capture, discursive or

72
Diahann Carroll, The Legs are the Last to Go: Aging, Acting, Marrying and Other Things
I’ve Learned the Hard Way (New York: Amistad, 2008), 25.
73
Diahann Carroll and Ross Firestone, 165.

168
otherwise, is nothing short of an [act] of fugitivity. Flight, becoming and renaming are the
‘language’ and ritual acts of the fugitive.”
74
The Supernova is not a reaction to displacement
and/or occlusion, but an inherited and necessary way of being in a world/industry unable to
accept that such luminescence cannot be captured or externally extinguished. And although the
Supernova’s eventual implosion is self-imposed and imminent, the conditions that follow—in the
form of a black hole, have the ability to alter the cultural climate in a way that offers a glimpse
into the limitlessness that blackness, first, imagines and then, engenders.

74
Tiffany Lethabo King, “Black ‘Feminisms’ and Pessimism,” 83.

169
Chapter 4: Whitney

She movement is energetic and excited almost like she blossoming fire from she chest with every
note. She is singing and she overcome the room with her soul, and I realize, she is in she own
universe.
—Junauda Petrus, The Stars and the Blackness Between Them

In 1991, Whitney Houston performed the Star-Spangled Banner for Super Bowl XXV in
Tampa, Florida. Performed, however, is a slight understatement when you take into
consideration the magnitude to which she elevated the song’s representational power. The United
States had just entered the Persian Gulf War and anxieties were high regarding the implications
of enlisting in the war. However, at the age of only twenty-seven, Houston had already released
three studio albums that had soared to the top of the charts and was the first artist in history to
have seven consecutive songs reach number one on the Billboard Hot 100 pop chart. She was
unquestionably the pop culture princess and was brought in to symbolize the nation’s
commitment to unity and nationhood. Scholar Daphne Brooks deems Houston “the voice of the
post-civil rights era” and concludes that Houston’s Super Bowl performance, “willed herself into
America’s narrative of freedom and democracy through the sheer crushing command of her
voice.”
1
Houston’s version of the Star Spangled Banner would go on to become a top-twenty hit
and remains one of the most iconic renditions of the song to date.
With such a monumental performance at a relatively early stage of her career, it might be
surprising that both commercial and scholarly sources struggle to contextualize this moment in
relation to Houston’s overall life and career. This is because in comparison to her very pristine
persona and pop culture fame in the eighties, the nineties introduced the world to a markedly

1
Daphne A. Brooks, “I’m Every Woman: Whitney Houston, the Voice of the Post–Civil
Rights Era,” The Nation, February 14, 2012, https://www.thenation.com/article/im-every-
woman-whitney-houston-voice-post-civil-rights-era/.

170
different Whitney Houston. Some scholars mark Super Bowl XXV, and the following year, as
the apex of Houston’s career and surmise everything after as “years of decline.”
2
While others
assess Houston’s career as a series of highs and lows that began following this performance, and
later impeded on her ability to maintain control of her image, and eventually her life.
3

Accordingly, I begin with Houston’s Star Spangled Banner performance to affirm its
representational importance, but also to disrupt notions of a teleological progression and/or
regression narrative that continues to be articulated in both academia and popular culture.
At this point, I want to clarify that the Supernova framework does not attempt to predict
the demise and/or triumph (in the various ways those words are defined) of leading Black
women performers. It more so alludes to the fact that Black women’s experiences working in the
entertainment industry are distinctly marked by their racial and gendered identities, which
inherently require them to negotiate their public and private performances in ways that are
attuned to these structural specificities. As illustrated thus far, this occurs in various ways and are
subject to the circumstances and relationships that impact their respective ability to define and
sustain a livable life. Houston’s life and career further supports the claim that, despite
mainstream popularity, Black women have continued to experience a targeted form of abuse and
neglect that persists from slavery onward. Even in death, Houston has consistently been
exploited and disrespected in ways that are almost unparalleled to any celebrity that reached her
level of fame but succumbed to personal vices. I will make these differences clear in the pages to
come, however I want to also assert that like in the previous chapters, I am attuned towards the
ways in which I can make my claims legible while also being particularly careful that I relay

2
Jaap Kooijman, “The True Voice of Whitney Houston: Commodification, Authenticity, and
African American Superstardom,” Celebrity Studies 5, no. 3 (2014): 305–20.
3
Brooks, “I’m Every Woman.”

171
traumas and abuses with care and understanding. Both in academic scholarship and mainstream
press, there is a general tendency to sacrifice delicacy and compassion for assertions of
“objectivity,” which often, in the case of Black women, further supports their dehumanization. In
the case of Whitney Houston, this approach becomes particularly imperative because of how her
legacy continues to be defined through the ways in which she chose to exercise freedom, to her
own detriment. Put differently, the Supernova framework prioritizes caring for Black women as
an act of disruption and defiance irrespective of academia’s false claims and contradictory
definitions of “objectivity.”
In accordance with this philosophy, in this chapter I will focus on particular moments that
had far-reaching impacts on popular culture that centered Whitney Houston, while she
simultaneously attempted to push against the limitations of stardom through different forms of
reclamation during the early 1990s. I will discuss the implications of these circumstances in
relation to herself, her relationship with the entertainment industry, and the conflicting reception
of these acts amongst demographically variant audiences. However, unlike the women in the
previous chapters, at this point there is no known autobiographical non-fiction texts that exist
beyond archival footage and published interviews, which remain subject to observational
skepticism. By this I mean that the majority of the information available to the public on
Houston’s life and career, in her own words, is translated via media forms that were initially
intended for the promotion and marketing of her albums and films, so there is a specific kind of
performativity meant to necessarily appeal to viewers. There are, however, recorded interviews
that she conducted in the later stages of her career that suggest general frustration and
indignation towards the press and media who had, by then, unapologetically proclaimed her life
and career a disappointment according to certain standards. Those resources offer a less censored

172
Houston, which productively contribute to how I have identified strategies of survival for
Supernovae. Other sources, including various family/friend biographies and post-humous
interviews remain subject to criticism and suspicion based on the circumstances surrounding
Houston’s final years, the death of her only-daughter shortly after her own, and the multiple
forms of exploitation that continue to be perpetuated by her estate. As such, I take precaution in
the reliance of these sources and attempt to honor Houston’s life and experiences using as much
of her own words, work, and voice as possible.
An analysis of Houston as a Supernova also brings to bear additional considerations that
may not have been factors in the lives of the women mentioned previously in this study. For
example, one of the most discussed aspects of Houston’s life centers her musical training under
some of the most talented Black women performers of the twentieth century. Her mother Cissy
Houston had a successful career as a background singer for Elvis Presley, Roy Hamilton, Aretha
Franklin and others. She was also a member of the group The Sweet Inspirations, prior to
establishing her solo career and releasing several gospel and soul albums. Cissy’s extensive
musical network allowed for Houston to be surrounded very early in life by legendary artists like
Aretha Franklin, Dionne Warwick (her cousin), Chaka Khan, and so many more. So in addition
to her experience singing in church, this is often cited as the primary origins of Houston’s
seemingly natural, but clearly heavily mentored, vocal ability.
Also, in relation to her career, Houston was signed by Arista Records when she was
nineteen years old, under the guidance and direct influence of label executive and producer,
Clive Davis. Since signing Houston, Davis has always been transparent about his vision for her
career being that of a crossover pop star. Her 1985 debut album and her follow-up in 1987 were
heavily influenced by Davis and Arista’s formulaic strategy to make her appeal to mainstream

173
audiences, and essentially make her into a star. This is important to address since it can be
monetarily proven that Arista very much invested in Houston’s star potential through various
forms of marketing, publicity, and opportunities. Like all of the women mentioned, Houston
emerged first as a singer (and model) which remains a consistent characteristic of the Supernova,
however her success prior to her Hollywood debut is definitely in alignment with the definitions
of stardom as it relates to her relationship with mainstream audiences via the music industry. My
inquiries, however, begin with her Star-Spangled Banner performance and the release of her first
feature film appearance in The Bodyguard (Mick Jackson, 1992). What I suggest is that in the
midst of these particular events and after, Houston began to intentionally assert her independence
in ways that were antithetical to the image and persona that her family, Arista, and Davis had
crafted and perfected. In consequence, as Houston attempted to experiment with modes of
freedom that asserted her cultural allegiance, the entertainment industry as a whole responded
accordingly by gradually withdrawing different forms of resources and support.
On another note, as a mainstream “success” Houston received an immense amount of
backlash from Black popular culture critics during the height of her singing career in the late
eighties and early nineties. Despite her popularity and award wins, Houston was infamously
booed at the 1989 Soul Train Awards. During that same time Al Sharpton, referring to her as
“Whitey” Houston, campaigned for Black people to boycott her music and accused her of selling
out.
4
Additionally, in writer Trey Ellis’ 1989 article, “The New Black Aesthetic,” he shared a
similar opinion regarding Houston’s career in relation to the shifts that were occurring in Black
popular culture with the emergence of explicitly Black content by Black creatives. He called her,

4
Steve Rose, “‘Not Black Enough’: The Identity Crisis That Haunted Whitney Houston,”
The Guardian, July 7, 2018, sec. Music, https://www.theguardian.com/music/2018/jul/07/not-
black-enough-the-identity-crisis-that-haunted-whitney-houston.

174
along with Lionel Richie, “cultural-mulatto, assimilationist nightmares,” and “neutered
mutations instead of thriving hybrids.” He goes on to say that in, “Trying to please both worlds
instead of themselves, they end up truly pleasing neither.”
5
In today’s context, Ellis’ overall
argument comes off idealistic, and at different points, extremely problematic, since he conflates
eclectic artistic taste with inaccurately defined racial genre origins. He also posits an “authentic
blackness” that is antithetical to those cultural formations he deems as white, however
champions another kind of middle-class sensibility that is highly educated (an assumed quality of
whiteness), but culturally engaged in sensibilities he marks as monolithically Black, like hip-hop
and Spike Lee films. Additionally, throughout most of the piece he names several male
filmmakers, artists, comediennes, and writers as contributors to this cultural shift, yet the only
woman artist that he consistently praises as influential to this aesthetic is Toni Morrison. Curator
and scholar Kellie Jones, artist, Lorna Simpson, and folk singer, Tracy Chapman are mentioned
very briefly amidst the multitude of Black male artists that Ellis recognizes. But despite these
flaws, Ellis’ critique, along with the opinions of Sharpton and the 1989 Soul Train Awards
audience, undoubtedly complicated Houston’s relationship with the eighties image she had come
to be defined by.
Part of this image centralized Houston’s seemingly middle-class origins and nuclear
family-unit, despite being born and raised in Newark, New Jersey during the sixties when the
Black residents of the city were becoming increasingly frustrated with the structural conditions
that relegated them to sub-par housing and constant police harassment and brutality. In 1967,
because of consistent disenfranchisement and systemic poverty the city erupted in one of the
deadliest uprisings of the time period. And even though her family later moved to the suburbs of

5
Trey Ellis, “The New Black Aesthetic,” Callaloo, no. 38 (Winter 1989): 242.

175
East Orange, Houston was never isolated from the problems that plagued the Black community
primarily because of her family’s active membership in explicitly Black communal spaces, like
that of the Black church. Even Houston’s attendance at a primarily white, Catholic school could
not have possibly shielded her from developing a consciousness shaped by the Black cultural
movements and artistry of the time. This is further supported by the fact that, according to
Houston herself, she spent a significant amount of time in the company of her mother and her
mother’s network of Black women performers, where she was able to observe and glean insight
from them and their consistent struggles within the entertainment industry. Cissy is even quoted
in a JET magazine article from 1988 saying that she makes it clear to Whitney, “that they build
you up to tear you down. I tell her she is never to drink the perfume, just to smell it.” The “they”
Cissy is indeed referring to is the notorious anti-blackness promulgated by the entertainment
industry as a whole, and the strategic utilization and exploitation of Black women’s talent that
she and her peers experienced first-hand. Despite undeniable talent, Whitney was assuredly
taught by her mother, Aretha Franklin, Dionne Warwick and others the looming perils of being a
Black woman in the industry. Consequently, unlike Trey Ellis, who in that same article admits to
growing up isolated from Black cultural production and community, Houston was entrenched in
and shaped by different aspects of Black life, despite the criticism and claims suggesting
otherwise.
Therefore, ironically, I argue that the Star-Spangled Banner performance, and Houston’s
burgeoning film career, inaugurates her transition from a star to a Supernova. Of course the irony
of such a claim hinges on the representational power of a Black woman becoming the conduit of
“freedom and justice for all” in an American context where no such liberty actually exists for
Black people. Scholar Farah Jasmine Griffin elucidates this point further, recalling that in this

176
performance, “Whitney Houston rallies the nation behind a war that has nothing to do with
democracy, behind an army made up of the poor, disproportionately poor blacks, whites and
Latinos who turn to the military because the nation denies them employment and educational
opportunities.”
6
Houston’s blinding performance combined with her well-crafted visual aesthetic
suggested she was a “safe” Black singer and created an instant association with patriotism and
freedom for mainstream audiences. For Black audiences however, her powerful voice functioned
in and across multiple registers of representation and meaning. As is the case for an actual
Supernova whose brightness has the potential to outshine the sun, in this moment Houston’s
performance functioned as a blinding phenomenon able to disrupt and reconfigure the visual
field of a spectator. Consequently, the force of Houston’s Star-Spangled Banner performance
created an impression, known as an afterimage, within the visual memory of audiences, binding
Houston to the memory and associated afterimage of this performance.
The central argument of this chapter is committed to thinking about Whitney Houston’s
life and career after this national performance of patriotism. I will analyze the ways in which her
performances, both on screen and off, can be contextualized and reconsidered through the lens of
the Supernova framework. By this I mean that I will place Houston within the legacy of the
aforementioned leading Black women performers and analyze how she mobilized the various
aspects of performance in an attempt to exercise her own definitions of freedom. I will pay
particular attention to her Star-Spangled Banner performance and the impact of its afterimage
onto the reception of her role in The Bodyguard (Mick Jackson, 1992). Over the course of the
1990’s, Houston got married, had a child, was featured in four Hollywood films, contributed

6
Farah Jasmine Griffin, “When Malindy Sings: A Meditation on Black Women’s Vocality,”
in Uptown Conversations: The New Jazz Studies, ed. Robert G. O’Meally, Brent Hayes Edwards,
and Farah Jasmine Griffin (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2004): 103.

177
towards the soundtracks of all four films, and toured intermittently throughout the decade. She
also released her fourth studio album, My Love is Your Love, in 1998 and followed it with a
world tour. Nevertheless, rather than discussing Houston in relation to the explosion of Black
creative production in the nineties, commercial and academic sources have consistently ignored
her contributions and relegated her as just a relic of Reaganism. I consider Daphne Brooks’
suggestion that, “we consider how the domestic squabbles popularized on the music charts
ultimately operate as allegories of the material and socioeconomic dissonance permeating urban
spaces in the post-civil rights era.”
7
Therefore in this study, I reconsider Houston within the
context of, not only being one of the greatest Black cultural figures of the nineties, but as a “post-
civil rights” Supernova unable to escape an afterimage shaped by the discord of the nineties
socio-political climate.
Reagan—Houston.
Whitney Houston’s emergence onto the popular culture landscape in the 1980’s is
ladened with the social and political ramifications of Ronald Reagan’s, Reaganism. Clive Davis’
vision for her career also rested on Houston’s ability to attain mainstream popularity through the
intentional packaging and distribution of a particular kind of eighties star text. Houston’s debut
self-titled album was released in 1985 and its singles “You Give Good Love to Me,” “Saving All
My Love For You,” “How Will I Know,” and “The Greatest Love of All” reached the top of the
Billboard pop charts. Her second album, released in 1987, performed similarly on the charts.
Houston’s immediate crossover success became emblematic of the socio-political climate that
could allow for her to translate across demographics. Herman Gray’s insightful contextualization

7
Daphne A. Brooks, “‘It’s Not Right But It’s Okay’: Black Women’s R&B and the House
That Terry McMillan Built,” Souls 5, no. 1 (2003): 43.

178
of Reaganism in his book, Watching Race: Television and the Struggle for Blackness, provides a
critical analysis of Ronald Reagan’s influence on what he calls the “sign of blackness.”
8
Houston
fits into this analysis for the ways in which Davis, Arista, and Houston, herself, leveraged her
beauty, talent, and image to confer a particular kind of “model minority” blackness that was
palpable for white audiences and complicated for Black ones.
In Gray’s text he is able to articulate how the representability of popular culture as a
phenomenon is dependent on the “social, economic, and political struggles operating in
society.”
9
Although he eventually turns his attention to how this translated onto television in the
eighties and early nineties, his comprehensive analysis sheds light on how other aspects of
popular culture, like film and music, were impacted by these factors as well. It is important to
note that in the 1980’s, the philosophies most central to Reaganism significantly impacted
communities across race, class, gender, and sexuality divides in various ways. The subsequent
responses and reactions produced by the cultural and political shifts that Reagan’s administration
introduced facilitated the formation of logics that were both in alignment with, and antithetical to
the political and discursive strategies of the time. Gray’s ability to concisely summarize the
function and ethos of Reaganism is so masterful that I want to quote it at length for optimal
clarity. He asserts that,
As a formation, Reaganism was built on desires to dismantle the welfare state, to curb an
intrusive government, to stimulate corporate growth through unrestrained market forces,
and (through key judicial appointments) to ensure a long reign of conservative authority
in key areas of public and private life. Rhetorically, on the one hand, Reaganism
depended on intellectual and philosophical foundations based in deep conservative
traditions and principles: an unfettered free market, emphasis on individual liberty, a
strong military, and antigovernment and anticommunist sentiments. On the other hand, its
symbolic and emotional appeal rested on the strategy of demonizing the (undeserving)

8
Herman Gray, Watching Race: Television And The Struggle For Blackness, 1 edition
(Minneapolis: Univ Of Minnesota Press, 2004).
9
Ibid., 2.

179
poor and simultaneously attacking the discourse of entitlement.
10

The structural ramifications of the policies concerning welfare, capitalism, and crime had an
immediate and long-term debilitating impact on low-income communities, and particularly so
within Black low-income neighborhoods. Unemployment, poverty, and drug-use skyrocketed as
the result of global industrial expansion, tax incentives that benefited the wealthy, police
militarization and occupation in urban communities, and Reagan’s facilitation of crack-cocaine’s
placement in Black low-income communities through the Iran-Contra affair.
11
However, equally
important, was Reaganism’s conservative rhetorical devices that “relied heavily on dramatic and
racialized media images of an isolated and pathological underclass trapped in a culture of
poverty.”
12
Discursive mechanisms that encouraged the criminalization of poor Black
communities and demonized Black welfare recipients as “lazy” opportunist looking for a hand-
out, helped reconfigure the “signs of blackness” in different reactionary ways.
Most obviously, this rhetoric deeply connected with voters who already valued
conservatism and republican ideals. Reaganism simply affirmed fears that were rooted in white
supremacy and aligned those principles with policy. What proved interesting, however, were the
ways in which Reaganism systemically shifted the discourse and political agenda of the
Democratic party, lending to the formation of neoliberal ideology. This resulted in the cross-
party demonization of the welfare system and an increased interest in finding ways to acquiesce
towards less federal government interference. An increased interest in controlling crime within

10
Ibid., 21-2.
11
Please see the following for more information on Reagan’s direct influence on the eighties
crack epidemic and its contribution towards mass incarceration: Gary Webb and Maxine Waters,
Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion, 2nd edition (New York,
NY: Seven Stories Press, 1999); Nick Schou, Kill the Messenger (Movie Tie-In Edition): How
the CIA’s Crack-Cocaine Controversy Destroyed Journalist Gary Webb, Revised edition (Bold
Type Books, 2014); Michelle Alexander and Cornel West, The New Jim Crow: Mass
Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: The New Press, 2012).
12
Gray, 23.

180
the inner city, situated as concern for the health and well-being of citizens who contribute
towards the public good, placed an unmistakable target on the backs of impoverished Black
constituents. Media outlets seemingly labored to affirm these concerns as valid by continuing to
associate Black imagery with crime and welfare fraud on nightly news programs. Additionally,
one of the most significant impacts of Reaganism was its assistance in supporting the bifurcation
of the Black community based on the realities of class differences, resulting in the Black middle
class’ increased disdain for the Black working class and/or the ghetto.
Reaganism purposely bolstered the visibility and representational impact of the Black
middle-class as a direct assault on the valid claims of structural disenfranchisement and
institutional oppression targeting Black communities. Consequently, the shifting signs of
blackness became increasingly fragmented, to the point of opposition, across various
communities. Following the seemingly natural transition of Richard Nixon’s promotion of the
“American Dream,” the Black middle-class maintained a similar “boot-strap” mentality,
boisterously affirming that if they could pull themselves from the ravages of the ghetto, anyone
could. This ideology fit particularly well within conservative ideals that claimed to “despise
racism,” but simply could not understand why Black people “refused” to work and were
obviously “lazy” and “preferred” living in the ghetto. For them, the Black middle-class served as
proof that anyone can work hard enough to achieve success without the help of government
assistant programs like welfare and affirmative action, proving their absurdity. Analogous to the
once popular ideals promoted by the NAACP during the Jim Crow era that championed
respectability as the reasonable approach to fending off white terror, Reaganism’s Black middle-
class supposedly validated this ideological myth. Gray explains the implications of this
fragmentation further by stating that, “In the material and cultural climate of the 1980s,

181
blackness emerged as a site of contested struggle over the very question of identity and
difference within America in general and black America in particular.”
13
Thus, the contrasting
images and definitions of blackness became political divides across communities, further
supporting the war being waged against the Black working class and poor.
On the other side of this rhetoric, were the voices of community organizers and public
intellectuals who attempted to combat Reaganism and shed light on the crisis occurring in Black
working-class communities around the nation. They insisted that conservative governmental
policies were at fault for the high unemployment rates and poverty within these neighborhoods.
Affirming that although Civil Rights rollbacks had begun well before Reagan, his administration
was responsible for carrying out efforts that ultimately debilitated inner-city populations. The so-
called “War on Drugs” declared by Reagan in 1982 became justification for over-policing in
Black neighborhoods, despite the fact that less than two percent of the American public viewed
drugs as a threat to civility at the time.
14
In The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of
Colorblindness, Michelle Alexander assesses the impact of Reaganism rhetoric also, stating,
“Central to the media campaign was an effort to sensationalize the emergence of crack cocaine in
inner-city neighborhoods—communities devastated by deindustrialization and skyrocketing
unemployment.”
15
She also clarifies that crack-cocaine did not officially enter communities until
1985, therefore substantiating the claims that the imagery and rhetoric promulgated by the
Reagan administration were an intentional effort to destroy Black communities far prior to the
instantiation of crack. Nearing the end of the eighties, hip-hop music and film began calling
attention to and outwardly reflecting the struggles within these communities, giving rise to an

13
Ibid., 42.
14
Michelle Alexander, 49.
15
Ibid., 50.

182
opposing sign of blackness deemed, “the new Black aesthetic.”
Subsequently it makes sense that one of the most popular and contested signs of
blackness emerged with the 1984 premiere and eight-season run of The Cosby Show. Herman
Gray along with several other television scholars have discussed the socio-political impact and
representational power of the show as indicative of Reaganism’s popular culture influence.
Created by Bill Cosby and positioned in contrast to Norman Lear’s Black situational comedies of
the seventies like Good Times, Sanford and Son, and The Jefferson’s, The Cosby Show’s
Huxtable family were meant to be “universally appealing” because they were a “middle-class
family that happen[ed] to be black.”
16
Subsequently, although the show centered the day-to-day
life of a Black family living in New York, it purposely avoided potentially controversial topics
like race and politics. Scholar Christine Acham notes that even in the later seasons, when they
attempted to introduce conversations around race and class, “the conclusions drawn in the
episode indicate an unwillingness to challenge the conservative dialogue on race, suggesting that
one’s class status is solely a matter of individual choice rather than the result of a systemic
problem.”
17
So although popular, appealing to mass audiences, the show also stood in direct
contrast to the experiences and issues facing the Black majority. Furthermore, its representational
power proved damaging since, as Acham explains, “conservatives manipulated the meanings of
The Cosby Show in their own agenda on race.” She gives an example of a government official
who not only referred to it in a speech on policy but also “suggested how it could in essence
replace federal programs for the poor—programs that were already in political jeopardy.”
18

What I want to suggest is that, like The Cosby Show, Whitney Houston’s fame, image,

16
Herman Gray, 80.
17
Christine Acham, “The Cosby Show: Representing Race,” in How To Watch Television,
ed. Ethan Thompson and Jason Mittell (New York: New York University Press, 2013), 109.
18
Ibid., 108.

183
and star power in the eighties were emblematic of the aesthetic that reflected the ideals and
principles of Black middle-class conservatism. As such, her “Huxtable-like” image seemingly
distanced her from the working-class realities impacting a large majority of the Black population.
The criticism she would soon face reflected the striking chasm between contrasting sensibilities
defining “authenticity” and blackness. There were three distinct narrative strategies that were
mobilized to assert Houston’s alignment with Black middle-class sensibilities, which also
contributed towards her mainstream appeal. First and foremost, was the intentional emphasis on
her familial musical lineage, which situated her as the protege of some of the most recognized
soul and pop singers in the industry. The second stressed her deeply religious background that
centralized her involvement with New Hope Baptist Church growing up, and her continued
reliance on her Christian faith as the source of her success and career longevity. Lastly, her
advertised middle-class upbringing situated her as the product of a suburban nuclear family unit
that valued class and respectability. These narrative threads helped to align Houston with
Reaganism and Black middle-class respectability, while also configuring her as the antithesis to
working-class Black life.
Crossing Over: Family, Class, and Christianity
Upon being signed by Arista Records and managed by Clive Davis, every early television
appearance and popular press appearance noted Houston’s musical lineage. She made her
television debut in 1983 on The Merv Griffin Show, where Clive Davis introduced her to the
world. Prior to performing, Davis described the nineteen-year-old as “elegant, sensuous,
innocent, and poised with a natural charm” as well as having “guts and soul.” He then declared
her as the rightful successor to Lena Horne and, her cousin, Dionne Warwick. During this
performance she sang “Home,” which was originally performed by Stephanie Mills in the

184
Broadway play The Wiz and then by Diana Ross in the 1978 film adaptation. Everything from
the verbs used to describe Houston, to the song choice, illustrated an overall commitment
towards crafting a palpable and safe persona. By placing her in conversation with cross-over
Black artists like Horne and Warwick, it is clear from the beginning that her appeal was meant to
transcend race. Years later, in an effort to dispel rumors that he created Houston’s pop music
image, Davis asserted that she actually performed “Home” and “The Greatest Love of All”
during her initial audition for him, situating herself as not just an R&B artist.
19
To this point, I
want to interject and clarify that although record labels tend to predominantly wield image
control when signing and promoting an artist, it is important to recognize that unlike most
performers, Houston was trained up by Black women performers with years of experience in the
industry. This is not to completely absolve the influence that Arista and/or Clive Davis had on
shaping a particular vision for her career, however her placement within this particular musical
lineage indelibly influenced every aspect of her performance style, prior to Arista’s involvement.
Taking this into consideration, there are aspects of the careers of Cissy Houston, Aretha
Franklin, and Dionne Warwick that offer insight into the type of advice and training Houston
may have received prior to acquiring fame. According to several interviews, Houston was around
twelve or thirteen when she officially decided that she wanted to become a professional singer
and thus began receiving formal training from her mother. In her own right, Cissy had
established herself in the music industry as a strong vocalist and back-up arranger from her years
of singing with the group, The Sweet Inspirations. By the time she began training Whitney she
had performed background singing for some of the most popular artists in music and had also

19
Dan Gilmore, “Music Legend Clive Davis on Whitney Houston, Sexuality, and the Secret
to His Success,” Vanity Fair, October 2, 2017,
https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2017/10/clive-davis-documentary-johnny-mathis-
whitney-houston-soundtrack-of-our-lives.

185
briefly pursued a solo career. As a Black woman performing throughout the fifties, sixties, and
seventies, Cissy’s insight and training was undoubtedly informed by the discrimination and
abuse she had experienced throughout that time. Cissy later discussed her anger with the music
industry for never offering The Sweet Inspirations the kind of industrial support she knew they
deserved, considering their on-going contributions to some of the most successful musicians
across several different genres. She also acknowledged that racism prevented her from achieving
mainstream opportunities because, “They [the record industry] wanted to keep black acts in a
tidy little box,” detailing further that the industry wanted “to make sure we didn’t get close to
that exclusive white club where only the Sinatra’s and Streisand’s were allowed to enter.”
20
It is
no wonder that Cissy concluded that, “Those ‘Black Music’ divisions are the clearest example of
all that racism alive and well in the music business” and therefore encouraged Houston to
develop a repertoire that transcended genre.
21
This philosophy further supports the claim that
Clive Davis was not solely responsible for Houston’s heavily pop oriented image. Her mother
understood the business and attempted to prevent her daughter from being confined within the
limitations that were in place for Black women performers.
In a similar way, Aretha Franklin and Dionne Warwick’s careers offered additional
lessons that likely informed Houston’s training. Like Cissy, both women worked in the music
industry for decades, achieving monumental success. Equal to their success, however, were the
ways in which they respectively had to address the music industry’s historical devaluation and
marketing incompetence when signing Black women artists. Dionne Warwick’s extensive
recording history and career offers insight into Houston’s training, and particularly insight into

20
Cissy Houston, Lisa Dickey, and Dionne Warwick, Remembering Whitney: My Story of
Love, Loss, and the Night the Music Stopped (New York: Harper Paperbacks, 2013), 86.
21
Ibid., 86.

186
one of the most significant decisions Houston made, which was to sign with Clive Davis and
Arista Records. In 1962, Dionne signed to Scepter Records and had her first hit single with the
song “Don’t Make Me Over.” From there she would go on to have several more hit records and
in 1968 was awarded a Grammy for “Best Contemporary Pop Vocal Performance, Female,” the
first year the category of “pop” was added by the Recording Academy. She continued to have
success and was known for her ability to defy genre conventions by fusing together pop, soul,
and gospel characteristics, however in the early seventies Dionne left Scepter Records and signed
a deal with Warner Brothers. Although it was expected that Dionne’s success would flourish at a
larger label, upon the release of her first album with them in 1972, Dionne, “Warner granted
minimal promotional support” and she would not have another hit until she signed with Clive
Davis and Arista in 1979.
22
A lot of the songs she recorded during her time with Warner would
be scrapped and released years later on a compilation album. Dionne’s time with Warner and her
immediate success under Davis is notable since on multiple occasions both Cissy and Whitney
affirmed that although she initially received offers from larger labels offering more money,
Houston ultimately signed with Clive Davis. Cissy later asserted that “We signed with Clive
because I trusted him to know what he was doing…”
23
Once again it is Cissy, as well as
Dionne’s experiences that helped to inform Houston’s professional trajectory very early in her
career.
Aretha Franklin also contributed to Houston’s training in ways that would reveal
themselves later. Over the course of her career Aretha was particularly protective of her privacy
regarding her family, childhood, and relationships. In her autobiography, Aretha: From these

22
Christian John Wilkane, “‘Still It Keeps Haunting You’: Thom Bell Revisits the Dionne
Warwick Sessions,” Popmatters, June 21, 2017. 4.
23
Houston and Dickey, 114.

187
Roots, she addresses her frustration with the press’ consistent speculation into and unauthorized
circulation of circumstances surrounding her private life.
24
For example, in June of 1968 Time
Magazine featured Aretha on their cover accompanied by the issue name, “The Sound of Soul.”
The content of the cover article sought to define “soul” for the masses and offer Aretha as the
reigning signifier for its presence, naming her the “Lady of Soul.”
25
However, in her
autobiography Aretha accused this particular article of catalyzing the rumors and historical
inaccuracies that would follow her for the rest of her life. She was particularly sensitive to the
claim that her mother had abandoned her family two years prior to her death, which Aretha
proclaimed as completely false. Nonetheless, articles such as this and the public intrigue into her
private life made her adverse to conducting interviews from that point forward. In From these
Roots she says, “For a long time I declined many interviews because I did not trust certain
journalists. I didn't want my words taken out of context; I certainly didn't want a false picture
painted of myself.”
26
As a lesson she learned early in her career, it would make sense that this
would also be something that she passed down to Houston over the course of her training. As
mentioned, the majority of the television and press interviews from the eighties consistently
assert the same three narrative elements, referencing Houston’s familial musical training, her
Christian church roots, and suburban, nuclear family upbringing, therefore alluding to a safe
formulaic interview strategy, from which she rarely diverted.
With this amount of talent and experience being the guiding force of Houston’s training
and early career decisions, it becomes even more clear how her sound and image came to
embody Reaganism’s particular middle-class respectability. In Richard Iton’s text, In Search of

24
Aretha Franklin and David Ritz, Aretha: From These Roots (New York: Villard, 1999).
25
“Lady Soul: Singing It Like It Is,” Time Magazine, June 28, 1968.
26
Franklin and Ritz, 124.

188
the Black Fantastic: Politics & Popular Culture in the Post-Civil Rights Era, he provides
extensive context regarding the pop cultural transition from the soul music, that defined the Civil
Rights and Black Power Eras, to the emergence of hip-hop and the commodification of explicitly
Black working-class visual narratives that came to define the late eighties/early nineties’ “New
Black Aesthetic.” Iton posits that this cultural shift made it difficult for soul artists “to establish
career longevity, and the latitude, audience loyalty, and company support, to innovate.”
27
And he
notes that for “those able and willing to produce and circulate ‘political’ texts (politics
understood in a narrow and conventional sense here) would also diminish in number” in the post-
civil rights era.
28
The careers of Aretha, Dionne, and Cissy were undoubtedly impacted by these
changing sensibilities since they represented the hey-day of soul music’s popularity. For
Houston, however, the release of her debut album in February of 1985 also marks the official
launch of the crack epidemic in low-income communities, beginning in Los Angeles and
spreading to urban cities around the country. Consequently, although assuredly well-meaning,
the training and preparation Houston received, intended to merge deep soul singing with
crossover appeal, was ultimately inadequate in many ways, considering the new social and
political formations that emerged in the mid-eighties.
Houston’s gospel roots were also central to her image in the eighties and contributed to
both her mainstream appeal and complex relationship with various Black communities. In her
first JET Magazine article appearance in June of 1985, Houston relays, “I think I got my emotion
from gospel singing, from my mom instilling it in me at an early age.” This sentiment would be
relayed in nearly every article and television interview for most of Houston’s career. The

27
Richard Iton, In Search of the Black Fantastic: Politics and Popular Culture in the Post-
Civil Rights Era, 1 edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 118.
28
Ibid., 118.

189
significance of Christianity and, more particularly, the Black church amongst Black Americans is
profoundly connected to the history chattel slavery and remains, symbolically, a sacred
communal space for many practicing and non-practicing Black Christians to this day, despite its
various contradictions. As a successor to Cissy and Aretha, Houston inherited strong ties to the
gospel traditions associated with the Pentecostal and Baptist Black Church. In Soul Babies:
Black Popular Culture and the Post-Soul Aesthetic, Mark Anthony Neal asserts the impact of the
Black church onto the sound of popular soul singers who transitioned into secular music yet
retained their gospel music sensibilities. He notes particularly that “styles of riffing that were
incubated in the black church became synonymous with soul music” and could be heard in the
music of artists like Aretha Franklin, Sam Cooke, and Al Green.
29
Narratively, Houston is placed
in direct succession to these artists by way of her heavy involvement with the New Hope Baptist
Church choir, where her mother also served as the choir director, and thus, gospel’s soulful
influence. Therefore, the continued emphasis on Houston’s Christianity and church choir origins
helped to cement her image within a paradigm that was meant to translate goodness, authenticity,
and soul.
The final element that helped to crystalize Houston’s safe image was the assertion of her
middle-class upbringing within a two-parent suburban household. Rather than associating
Houston and her family with the Newark, New Jersey inner-city and Black working-class, most
of the earliest articles introducing Houston noted that she was from the suburbs of East Orange,
NJ. As the fragmentation between the Black working-class and the Black middle-class continued
to widen as a result of Reaganism, Houston’s crossover appeal relied on her proximity to middle-
class respectability, as opposed to the inner city’s “amorality.” These early articles also often

29
Mark Anthony Neal, Soul Babies: Black Popular Culture and the Post-Soul Aesthetic, 1
edition (New York: Routledge, 2001), 159.

190
featured photos of her with her family, including singing with her brother and posing between
her parents. Additionally, despite the fact that her mother and father were separated by the time
Houston’s first album was released, they presented themselves narratively and at events as a
cohesive family unit. In the December 1985 issue of Ebony Magazine, Houston is situated as a
“princess” who relies on her family for her basic needs stating, “Even though she has her own
apartment, she talks to or visits her parents every day and gets homecooked meals when she's in
town. She says her mother makes ‘the best fried chicken,’ and her father, John Houston, a city
planning administrator in Newark, is also a great chef. ‘I just love my dad's macaroni and
cheese,’ she says. ‘He also makes great breads.’” Anecdotes such as this served to illustrate her
relatability to the “average American family,” which in the mid-eighties meant white, middle-
class suburban households, as well as the emerging Huxtable image, which premiered the same
year as Houston’s debut album.
For all of these reasons, Houston’s image in the eighties became antithetical to the
emerging Black aesthetic of the late eighties and nineties. Described as Black youth culture, hip
hop’s popularity moved into the mainstream following the success of MTV’s Yo! MTV Raps and
gained national recognition in ways that were both celebrated and vehemently rejected. Prior to
Yo!, MTV was criticized heavily for outwardly ignoring the music video contributions of popular
Black artists, with the exception of Michael Jackson, Tina Turner, and a few other Black artists
who had crossover appeal. Houston became one of those crossover artists that received semi-
regular rotation before the 1988 premiere of Yo!, originally hosted by Fab Five Freddy and later
Ed Lover and Dr. Dré. As a predominantly Black art form, hip hop seemingly emerged out of the
inner city and spoke to the struggles and hardships associated with the impoverished Black youth
who had been severely impacted by the war on drugs and its long-standing implications.

191
Therefore, despite Houston’s affiliation and rearing within both the middle-class and working-
class Black community and soul music training, her immediate crossover success and safe image
constituted her as antithetical to hip-hop and its assumed representation of authenticity.
Finding Soul in the Stars
By the time Houston performed her legendary rendition of the Star-Spangled Banner for
Super Bowl XXV in January of 1991 she was one of the most recognized performers in the
world. Her third studio album, I’m Your Baby Tonight, was released in 1990 with a markedly
different sound than her previous work yet still soared to the top of the charts. For this album
Houston and Davis solicited the production help of Kenneth “Babyface” Edmonds and Antonio
“L.A.” Reid, who had established themselves as two of the preeminent producers of the sound
that merged beats associated with contemporary hip hop with classic R&B/soul singing, creating
a distinctive formula that heavily contributed to the sound of early 90s R&B. It was not
coincidental that Houston was adamant about collaborating with L.A. and Babyface at a moment
when the criticism regarding a perceived “lack of soul” had reached its apex at the 1989 Soul
Train Music Awards. Houston was also parodied during the first season of In Living Color
(1990) in a skit titled, “Rhythmless Nation” where comedienne Kim Wayans sings off key and
dances exaggeratedly out of synch pretending to be Houston. In a 1991 Ebony cover story,
Houston admitted to being hurt and annoyed that she was being forced to publicly defend her
sound and blackness stating, “…don’t say I don’t have soul or what you consider ‘Blackness.’ I
know what my color is. I was raised in a Black community with Black people, so that has never
been a thing with me. Yet, I've gotten flak about being a pop success, but that doesn't mean that

192
I'm White... Pop music has never been all-White.”
30
Despite the accuracy of this statement,
Houston’s image and pop success was not aligned with the shifting sensibilities that affirmed hip
hop as the “authentic” representation of blackness by the start of the decade.
The Reagan administration’s War on Drugs and George H.W. Bush’s succeeding
presidency wreaked havoc on low-income communities nationwide, but particularly so on Black
populations living in the inner cities of America. By the mid-80s deindustrialization had
significantly impacted employment rates, while crack quickly spread across the country and
further debilitated already impoverished communities. Increased police occupation and
militarization accompanied harsher drug sentencing for crack users, further contributing to the
dramatic spike in prison populations around the country of mostly Black and Brown folks. Hip
Hop’s emergence and subsequent popularity erupted from residents of the cities most impacted
by the crack epidemic and told the stories of harsh living conditions, violence, and addiction.
Richard Iton makes a significant note that “Crack was the first drug that more women consumed
than men.”
31
Subsequently, as hip hop flourished in mainstream popular culture, particularly
gangsta rap coming from the west coast, so also did racialized and gendered images associated
with crack addiction, which primarily situated Black men as suppliers and Black women as
users. As had been the case throughout the Reagan era, news media images continued to further
perpetuate violence and addiction as synonymous with Black inner-city neighborhoods, however
hip hop and rap lyrics soon became a target for causation, rather than being symptomatic of
disenfranchisement and poverty.
Additionally, the release of Spike Lee’s second film, Do the Right Thing, in conjunction

30
Lynn Norment, “Whitney Houston Talks About The Men in Her Life--And the Rumors,
Lies, and Insults That Are the High Price of Fame,” Ebony Magazine, May 1991.
31
Richard Iton, 155.

193
with its accompanying soundtrack that included Public Enemy’s song “Fight the Power,” marks
the confirmation of a social and political shift. According to scholar Shana Redmond, “Fight the
Power” quickly became a Black cultural anthem for its boisterous declaration of Black solidarity
against the oppressive structures that had become apparent by 1989. She goes on to explain that,
“It is not surprising that this anthem speaks to the rapid decline of urban communities on a
national scale; the generation that the anthem marks felt the pressure of the crack cocaine
epidemic and its response—the prison-industrial complex—which began in earnest one decade
earlier but was by the end of the Ronald Reagan administration a multiparty issue that surveilled
and caged Black men and women by the thousands.”
32
Public Enemy’s second album, It Takes a
Million to Hold Us Back, was released in 1988 and catapulted the group from the margins to the
center of hip-hop’s emergence. Therefore their inclusion in Lee’s second film the following year
symbolically merged hip-hop’s political consciousness with the wave of Black working-class
centered films that continued into the 90s. “Fight the Power” as an anthem and communal
declaration became a symbol of defiance and rebellion against white supremacy that also served
as a politic for the youth generation introducing hip hop to the mainstream. Redmond notes that
“anthems require subscription to a system of beliefs that stir and organize the receivers of the
music,” which “Fight the Power” achieved sonically and visually—staged via protests in the film
and their music video, which was also directed by Lee.
33
Once again, although Black and Brown
women are present in both Lee and Public Enemy’s visual staging of community, political action
and leadership remain reserved for Black men in each case.
Thus, the criticism Houston received requires a reconsideration of how formulations

32
Shana L. Redmond, Anthem: Social Movements and the Sound of Solidarity in the African
Diaspora (New York: NYU Press, 2013), 266.
33
Ibid., 2.

194
around gender and misogyny were being restructured as well. Due to crack’s prominence and
subsequent translation into mainstream imagery, Black women were particularly targeted as both
the cause and the unfortunate product of the problems facing Black low-income communities.
Still reeling from the assertions of the Moynihan Report and fresh off the heels of Reagan’s
recirculation of the “welfare queen,” by the end of the 80’s and entering the 90’s, Black women
were once again forced to confront widely circulating images of crack-hos and crack-mothers
producing crack-babies. West coast gangsta rap group NWA released their most commercially
successful albums Straight Outta Compton in 1988 and Niggaz4Life in 1991. Both albums were
highly criticized by mainstream media and politicians, while simultaneously, just as highly
consumed by mainstream America’s white teenage population. Lyrics to many of their songs and
the accompanying music videos were set in some of Los Angeles’ most impoverished
communities and detailed the impact of growing up amongst gang violence, police harassment,
and crack. Included in their repertoire was also a consistent devaluation of Black women,
situated as inadequate lovers, mothers, and employees (as sex workers) underserving of respect.
These images were heavily present in hip hop lyrics and music videos but became even more
integral to Ellis’ “New Black Aesthetic” with the release of several popular films directed by
emerging Black directors.
In thinking about Houston’s iteration of the anthem it is worth returning to the
contentious debate regarding her relationship to “soul” music and Black women’s historic
relationship to labor. Within and outside of the academy there has been a considerable amount of
discussion regarding definitions of soul and its relationship to, what many scholars have defined
as, the post-soul, post-Civil Rights, and/or the New Black Aesthetic. These terms are mostly used
interchangeably and function to describe a generational shift in (Black) popular culture following

195
the end of the Civil Rights Era and Black Power Movement. Mark Anthony Neal defines the
post-soul aesthetic as,
contemporary black popular culture that at various moments considers issues like
deindustrialization, desegregation, the corporate annexation of black popular expression,
cybernization in the workforce, the globalization of finance and communication, the
general commodification of black life and culture, and the proliferation of black “meta-
identities,” while continuously collapsing on modern concepts of blackness and
reanimating “premodern” (African?) concepts of blackness.
34

The understanding is that hip hop emerged as a direct result of this post-soul/post-Civil
Rights/New Black Aesthetic era and essentially made certain characteristics of soul dated and
obsolete. These characteristics according to Emily Lordi, however, have always been in flux and
she asserts that soul, as a phenomenon, consistently rejects stagnant, immutable
conceptualizations of its recognizability. Lordi pays particular attention to the work of Aretha
Franklin, Nina Simone, and Audre Lorde in her article, “Souls Intact: The Soul Performances of
Audre Lorde, Aretha Franklin, and Nina Simone,” where she interrogates the dominant
definitions of soul that conceive of it as essentializing and limiting, rather than complex and
expansive.
35
By placing these Black women artists and their performances at center, she is able
to posit how their embodiment of soul translated past their particular eras and retain qualities that
have been used to define post-soul aesthetics. Also, by branding “soul as technique” rather than
its common understanding as “soul-as-object,” she discards the ability to own soul and considers
it more as an action able to be performed and/or summoned based on how “radicalized struggle
leads to [stylized] survivorship.” The equating of soul with survival and blackness harkens back
to my earlier chapters and discussions of those things that are inherited and embodied as a result

34
Mark Anthony Neal, 2.
35
Emily J. Lordi, “Souls Intact: The Soul Performances of Audre Lorde, Aretha Franklin,
and Nina Simone,” Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory 26, no. 1 (January 2,
2016): 55–71, https://doi.org/10.1080/0740770X.2016.1183981.

196
of slavery’s afterlife. Lordi’s ability to ground soul as a practice fully realized and enacted by
Black women is in alignment with how the women in the previous chapters used performance as
a means of survival. And like those women, Houston’s performance of soul, was not only
inherited but was also a trained practice and technique—belonging to no one—that she learned to
enact powerfully, as she did on January 27, 1991.
The subject of soul and whether or not Houston “had it” or not is important to this project
because of how her image and sound were consistently (mis)read by both mainstream and the
various Black audiences that attempted to silo her within asphyxiating categories like pop, white,
bougie, ghetto, hood, and/or a multitude of other contradictory labels. However, by following
Lordi’s lead, and extracting soul from ownership and tracing the themes and characteristics that
are associated with both the soul era and the post-soul/New Black Aesthetic, it becomes obvious
that Houston’s image, sound, and legacy resides within this murky, bidirectional popular culture
paradigm. One of the most generally agreed upon aspects of both the soul era and the post-soul
era is the influence and omnipresence of spirituality that is rooted in the traditions of the Black
church. Legendary soul singer Al Green once declared that, “the church is the mother of R&B
and the grandmother of rock & roll.”
36
As such, it can be inferred that the church would then be
great-grandmother (?) of post-soul genres like hip hop and neo-soul. Thus, Houston’s placement
within this dubious cultural timeline and her rearing in the Black church affirms her ability to
summon soul, which I argue she intentionally does in her stylized rendition of the Star-Spangled
Banner. Furthermore, to bear witness—both sonically and visually— to Houston’s
reinterpretation of America’s national anthem at this particular moment, attuned audiences to the
representational power this Black woman was able to conjure and translate, soulfully.

36
Mark Anthony Neal, 16.

197
To be specific, there are three prominent aspects of Houston’s national anthem
performance that shape her iconographic shift from eighties middle-class respectability to
nineties soul/post-soul recognizability. The first, and most obvious, is the visual gravity of
Houston’s body serving as a conduit for democracy and freedom “at home and abroad” in the
midst of both the Persian Gulf War and the War on Drugs. The significance of this imagery
harkens to the ways in which Farah Jasmin Griffin has historicized the relationship between
Black women’s vocality and the National Anthem in her article, “When Malindy Sings: A
Meditation on Black Women’s Vocality.” Griffin notes some of the most significant public
performances by Black women are those in which they are enlisted to aid national conversations
or ease communal worry using their singing voices in service to the masses. By taking account of
these moments, Griffin is able to interrogate and complicate the way Black women’s labor,
whether it’s via their bodies or sound, has historically symbolized freedom and survival, despite
collective circumstances that remain oppositional and/or contrary to those very ideals. She relays
that, “...this figure of the singing black women is often similar to the uses of black women's
bodies as nurturing, healing, life, and love giving for the majority culture. This representation of
the voice is in stark contrast to representations of that voice in the service of disenfranchised
black people, as a voice that poses a challenge to the United States revealing its democratic
pretense as a lie. And, yet, this image contains these possibilities.”
37
By grounding Black
women’s polyvocality as an inherently fundamental element to their sound, Griffin’s work helps
align Houston’s performance with how Black women’s image and sound have historically been
coopted to serve populations that typically do not include Black women. This would explain how
and why her performance translated differently across various audiences.

37
Farah Jasmine Griffin, 104.

198
Moreover, although “the singing black woman often has been used to suggest a
peacefully interracial version of America,” Houston’s physical presence represented otherwise
simply by way of the socio-political economy of the time.
38
Cited and compared by The New
Yorker as “the most influential performance of a national song since Marian Anderson sang ‘My
Country, ’Tis of Thee’ on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial on the eve of the Second World
War,” further disrupts the notion that her rendition was simply a sign of patriotism and support
for military action abroad.
39
The irony of Anderson’s noteworthy performance had everything to
do with being refused by The Daughters of the American Revolution access to perform at
Constitution Hall in Washington, DC, which they owned, because she was a Black woman. By
proceeding to instead perform at the Lincoln Memorial for over 75,000 people, Anderson let her
talent masterfully resound over the crowd while inherently mocking the lyrics “sweet land of
liberty,” as they obviously did not apply to either her or Black people across the nation. In a
similar way, Houston’s poise and middle-class respectable image still could not negate the fact
that a majority portion of the Black population were in the midst of a social, health, and/or
economic crisis. Nearly every Black person in the country was impacted by one, if not the
multiple, ills of the nation in the form of the AIDS crisis, the crack epidemic, gang violence,
and/or poverty. Therefore, Houston’s Newark, NJ origins along with her physical body, in

38
Ibid., 104.
39
Cinque Henderson, “Anthem of Freedom: How Whitney Houston Remade ‘The Star-
Spangled Banner,’” January 27, 2016, https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-
comment/anthem-of-freedom-how-whitney-houston-remade-the-star-spangled-banner. Also see
Jaap Kooijman, Fabricating the Absolute Fake: America in Contemporary Pop Culture
(Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2008). Kooijman makes the argument that Houston’s
performance, along with several other live renditions, “do not provide an invitation to question
the role of the nation-state USA in international politics, but instead justify its military action of
‘protecting freedom around the world’ by assuring the audience that the American flag is indeed
still there.” While this argument can possibly be made in relation to non-Black performers of the
anthem, Houston’s very blackness prevents the erasure of the historic and contemporary
injustices enacted by the US.

199
actuality visualized some of America’s founding principles: racism, disenfranchisement, and
injustice, as opposed to “the land of the free.”
The other two aspects of Houston’s performance that mark its personal and historical
significance returns me back to the topic of soul and how it is embodied, translated, and
received. As previously mentioned, soul is not an immutable quality that is owned and finite, but
rather a technique that is expansive and can be ancestrally conjured by folks who can stylistically
translate what it means to survive, despite all odds. Soul is also rooted in the traditions of the
Black church which often emphasize earthly transcendence by way of connection to God and the
grace bestowed upon those who honor, obey, and commit to the word of the Bible, no matter
their material circumstances. Gospel music functions as one avenue through which believers can
momentarily submit by offering their body and voice as a theoretical sacrifice in service of
connectivity with God. It is here that soul singers appropriate and experiment with many of the
techniques that are foundational to gospel, such as ad-libs, moans, shouts, movements, etc. that
“communicate meaning beyond words when they are no longer capable of rendering meaning.”
40

Houston’s rendition of the Star Spangled Banner borrows heavily from this tradition in the way
she commands ownership of the anthem by intentionally slowing down the tempo as it had not
been done before, allowing more time and space to flex her vocal prowess, and by offering her
body in submission to the song as seen in her movements and, what had become her signature
aesthetic, sweat secretion.
In all of the material written thus far about Houston, it is nearly impossible to locate a
piece that does not mention her 1991 national anthem performance. The iconicity of the
performance is not only in its symbolic representational power, but even more so because of its

40
Farah Jasmine Griffin, 108.

200
vocal virtuosity. Most people would agree that Houston was a great singer, however the grandeur
of her anthem rendition resides in, what Lordi describes as, “creative authorship.”
41
She goes on
to affirm that, “…authorship resides in inventive execution” and that Black women performers
deserve to be studied and recognized for their genius ability to insert meaning into simple words
and evoke intense emotion from listeners of all kinds.
42
For those who had the opportunity to
bear witness to Houston’s musicianship up close and personal during studio sessions and
rehearsals, many have recounted her uncanny ability to quickly identify the intricacies of musical
arrangements in a way that enabled her to compose her sound to perfectly compliment the music.
This, of course, speaks volumes about her training and intellect and rejects the assumption that
Black vocalist are just naturally gifted, as opposed to trained musicians deserving of proper
recognition and credit. Houston was a dedicated student of her craft and let music arranger,
Ricky Minor, know that “the only version of the song that she liked was Marvin Gaye’s
performance at the 1983 NBA All-Star game” and that she wanted to be able to take her time
through the song, as Gaye had done.
43

The decision to “take her time” is a direct homage to the distinctive “call-and-response”
tradition within the Black church, which “is a spontaneous verbal and nonverbal interaction
between speaker and listener in which the speaker's statements are punctuated by responses from
the listener(s).”
44
An extremely popular aspect within Black Pentecostal and Baptist churches,
call-and-response involves the congregations ability and willingness to vocally affirm their

41
Emily J. Lordi, Black Resonance: Iconic Women Singers and African American Literature,
None edition (New Brunswick, New Jersey ; London: Rutgers University Press, 2013), 10.
42
Ibid., 11.
43
Cinque Henderson, “Anthem of Freedom.”
44
Hamlet, Janice D. "Word! The African American Oral Tradition and Its Rhetorical Impact
on American Popular Culture." Black History Bulletin 74, no. 1 (2011): 27-31.
www.jstor.org/stable/24759732.

201
agreement with the pastor and/or choir, often with words like “amen,” “hallelujah,” “preach,”
and in many cases the phrase “take your time.” Houston’s assertion that she wanted to “take her
time,” just as she had likely been instructed many times while singing lead at New Hope Baptist
Church, influenced Ricky Minor’s decision to change the meter from the traditional 3/4-time
signature, to a slower 4/4 signature arrangement. In the words of writer Danyel Smith, “By
slowing it down, Team Houston and the Florida Orchestra—under the direction of Chinese
conductor Jahja Ling—not only increased the national anthem's level of technical difficulty, they
amplified its soul. They made it the blues."
45
What resulted from this arrangement was
Houston’s ability to pre-record her version of the Star-Spangled Banner in only one-take—the
same take millions of people heard around the world that day in 1991. By slowing down the
song, Houston is able to exert ownership over a song that was originally written to celebrate
freedom, to the exclusion of non-white American bodies like hers. However, by taking her time
and summoning a soulful vocal performance, Houston staged a kind of sonic rebellion that was
coded and in alignment with working-class Black folks whose patience with the United States of
America was rightfully running thin.
Finally, one of Houston’s characteristics, that continues to be parodied inappropriately,
yet affirms her commitment to offering her body as sacrifice, was her unrepentant willingness to
sweat. Like the soul singers before her, and those she was raised by, Houston’s relationship to
her body while performing was one of complete surrender. Still rooted within the gospel
tradition, the offering of the body in total praise is “a sign of intense contact between the divine
and the human,” which is ultimately conferred by the abandonment of ones faculties in service to

45
Danyel Smith, “When Whitney Hit the High Note,” ESPN The Magazine, February 1,
2016, http://www.espn.com/espn/feature/story/_/id/14673003/the-story-whitney-houston-epic-
national-anthem-performance-1991-super-bowl.

202
the Holy Spirit.
46
The sweat that results from this offering, thus signifies a kind of transcendence
from the realm of the flesh into that of the supernatural. The act of perspiring as a result of
abandoning one’s body in service to God is a form of sacred labor and exchange that gospel
singers, particularly, aspire to achieve. And by seeing themselves as vessels chosen to vocally
spread God’s glory, the act of sweating is recognized as a by-product of that effort. Accordingly,
“this performance of effort, both physical and vocal, is one of the major aesthetic contributions
that soul singers bring to R&B music from Baptist worship traditions.”
47
Houston learned early
that sweating was not only a sign of working hard, but a mark of honor that real singers were
unashamed of.
In Cissy Houston’s 2013 book, Remembering Whitney: My Story of Love, Loss, and the
Night the Music Stopped, she reprints a photo of her and a young Whitney singing on a small
stage. She is singing lead and her daughter is seated behind her watching. In Cissy’s right hand
she holds the microphone as well as a white handkerchief. Although Houston is seated behind
her mother with her hands crossed over her lap, she is also holding a white handkerchief. Cissy
captions this photo with, “Before she went solo, Nippy sang back up for me in some of my club
shows in New York City. I always performed with a handkerchief to wipe the sweat from my
face, and early on Nippy started doing the same thing.”
48
There are several times in these early
chapters that Cissy reiterates the extent to which Houston replicated her mother’s singing style
and stage manner. Whether all of these instances ring true is the subject of a much deeper
analysis, however it can be concluded that Houston was indeed a student of her mother’s

46
Anthony Pinn, “Sweaty Bodies in a Circle: Thoughts on the Subtle Dimensions of Black
Religion as Protest,” Black Theology 4, no. 1 (January 2006): 21,
https://doi.org/10.1558/blth.2006.4.1.11.
47
Emily Lordi (2016), 63.
48
Cissy Houston, Lisa Dickey, and Dionne Warwick, Remembering Whitney: My Story of
Love, Loss, and the Night the Music Stopped (New York: Harper Paperbacks, 2013).

203
teaching in many ways. Over the course of Houston’s professional career, her upper lip sweat
would become a recognized, or some might even say, a trademark symbolizing that she was
indeed conjuring a supernatural gift. Before the tabloids or any rumors began to circulate
regarding Houston’s drug use, her sweat signaled the effort of exerting her talent. And by the
time she hit the final note of the Star-Spangled Banner, the sweat was proof that she put what she
understood as soul into a song that only a few singers before her had ever summoned.
The significance of Houston’s performance of the national anthem at the top of 1991 is
strengthened by the ways in which her image and voice registered drastically different across
various audiences. Danyel Smith asserts that, “Super Bowl XXV is defined as much by the
launch of Desert Storm and Security Nation and by Whitney Houston as by the game itself.”
49
I
extend this assessment by arguing that Houston’s representational power was an amalgamation
of contradictory qualities that converged the moment she hit the final note of the anthem and
ultimately shifted the pop cultural landscape and her ability to sustain within it. Put another way,
I contend that Houston’s performance of the National Anthem is monumental, not just because
she did it well, but more so for how her image, identity, and widespread reception converged in
this moment to create a ripple effect that impacted various demographics differently. A
continuously nascent freedom haunts performances enacted by Black women and Houston’s
performance can be summarized in a manner similar to Lordi’s discussion of a particular Nina
Simone performance: “The understanding that the freedom Simone sings about emerges through
the act of performing itself--that it will not be waiting for her when she leaves the stage--makes
the stage a sacred space not only for Simone but also for her listeners,” subsequently isolating
the Star Spangled Banner’s assertion of freedom to a singular note, rather than the condition of

49
Danyel Smith, “When Whitney Hit the High Note.”

204
existence for Houston. Overall, the quality of her sound, birthed from soul singing, the
conservative socio-political climate that produced the Persian Gulf War and the crack epidemic,
and the context galvanizing hip hop’s prominence, and subsequent visual cues, can all be thought
about and reconsidered in relation to this very moment. It is at this moment in her career that
Houston is the brightest shining star in the entertainment industry, ultimately commemorating
her ascendance into a Supernova, but bound to a particularly stifling afterimage.
Welfare Queen and Black Lady Afterimages
Since Supernovae are characterized by the magnitude of their brightness—which has the
ability to outshine the sun in some cases—I want to consider the visual and psychological
implications of witnessing such brilliance. Similar to the act of staring at a bright light, I contend
that staring at a Supernova produces the comparable effect of an afterimage. In Krista
Thompson’s pivotal text Shine: The Visual Economy of Light in African Diasporic Aesthetic
Practice, she defines the afterimage as an optical illusion “that persist(s) in one's vision after
exposure to light or a visual stimulus.”
50
She goes on to apply the term to the way, “light from
photographic and videographic technologies sears itself into the retinal memory of viewers after
their exposure to a source of illumination has ceased.”
51
Thompson discusses the afterimage in
the context of the light from a camera that shines onto subjects, who are otherwise considered
invisible, to the point of hypervisibility. The resulting impact of which guides her discussion of
the many uses of photographic and videographic technology within the African diaspora.
Thompson’s simple definition of the afterimage is useful and informs my application of Mary
Ann Doane’s expansive exploration of the afterimage, in relation to cinema, as well as several

50
Krista A. Thompson, Shine: The Visual Economy of Light in African Diasporic Aesthetic
Practice (Durham: Duke University Press Books, 2015): 14.
51
Ibid.

205
other scholars who take on this ephemeral phenomenon. In the case of Houston, I argue that
between her Super Bowl performance in January of 1991 and the release of her feature film
acting debut as Rachel Marron in The Bodyguard at the end of 1992, Whitney Houston’s image
was both positively and negatively impacted by the array of characterizations centering Black
women at the start of the decade. Consequently, Houston’s afterimage following her Star-
Spangled Banner performance was significantly impacted by the various cultural discourses and
ideologies of the time.
According to Mary Ann Doane, an afterimage is the visual manifestation of a stimulus
strong enough to “impress itself upon the retina, causing actual physical changes often described
in terms of reminiscent or engraving, printing, or other processes of mechanical reproduction.”
52

The resulting effect temporarily impedes sight based on the way the eye remembers the
brightness, color, and shape of the stimulus even though it is no longer in view. Doane extends
this concept theoretically and therefore concludes that “what appears to us as instantaneous, as
without duration--as, precisely, the present--is riven by delay. For the human subject, the images
of past and present are inextricable, at a grounding, physiological level.”
53
This physical
intrusion of the past within the sight of the present metaphorically explains the impact of
prolonged visual engagement with a Supernova. Staring at an extremely bright phenomenon
fundamentally influences the spectator’s ability to see clearly, even if temporarily. Therefore,
because Whitney Houston’s ascension to Supernova status is marked by her 1991 Super Bowl
performance of the Star-Spangled Banner, which garnered a television audience of nearly eighty
million viewers, I contend that demographically variant spectators held afterimages that reflected

52
Mary Ann Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the
Archive, n edition (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2002): 74-76.
53
Ibid., 78.

206
the socio-political dissonance of the moment. As a result, spectators proceeded to engage with
Houston’s image and talent while still partially blinded by the afterimage caused by the
luminescence of her Super Bowl performance.
It is important to clarify that although witnessing the performance was a shared
experience that created the afterimage, it does not mean that it resulted in the same mental
impression for each spectator. The formation of an afterimage is firstly based on perspective.
Depending on the physical proximity to the stimulus, the angle of viewing, and/or the quality of
sight of the spectator, afterimages can take on a different quality, shape and/or position. As such,
an afterimage is equally as subjective as the witnessing and retelling of an event from different
perspectives. Additionally, spectators viewing Houston at the height of her popularity and vocal
prowess (according to some), were also influenced by their relationship to the site/sight of this
Black woman singing the national anthem at that particular moment in time. As mentioned in the
previous chapters, slavery’s afterlife is an ongoing confrontation between institutions bound to
the tenants of capitalism and those who remain dispossessed and fungible because of racial
hierarchy. Consequently, the afterimage that formulates for spectators is also impacted by their
memory and their respective sociological and political experiences and perspectives. For
example, by 1991 low-income Black communities were still facing the aftermath of the crack
epidemic, AIDs crisis, and the economic instability caused by Reaganomics, therefore their
commitment to American ideals of freedom and opportunity drastically differed from, say,
conservative middle-class, White people at the time. And although the quality of Houston’s
voice was undeniable, the relationship to the site and sight of her claiming Americanness at this
moment registered differently across these various demographics, impacting the formation of
their respective afterimages.

207
These various afterimages were also impacted by the conservative wave of policies and
propaganda that began in the late sixties, resulting in the election of Richard Nixon, and then
continued into the seventies and eighties, during the presidency of Ronald Reagan. The cultural
fragmentation in the United States in the early nineties was beyond tangible. This chasm has
been explored extensively within Hip Hop studies by scholars like Mark Anthony Neal, Tricia
Rose, Nelson George, and many others. In tracking the socio-historical origins of hip hop these
scholars have established frameworks that dispel the urge to either demonize or idealize hip hop,
but rather they take into consideration the nuances of the cultural phenomenon by exploring how
artists rendered formally ignored communities legible. Similarly, the overlap of hip hop into
Black films in the early nineties caused similar mainstream critiques and intracommunal class-
based dissonance. Popular culture scholar and writer, Todd Boyd succinctly clarifies how hip-
hop, initially a musical genre, evolved into a cultural movement that appeared in “film, music,
and literature, and involved multiple layers of society: communal, political, and corporate.”
54

Following the mainstream success of Yo! MTV Raps, hip hop was nationalized, and eventually
globalized, to a degree that regional specificities prominently emerged into the mainstream, like
that of West Coast Gangsta Rap. Moreover, Boyd writes, “ The contribution of cinema to
gangsta culture is indicative of the popularizing of the movement to a mainstream audience. Yet
it is the exchange of imagery between cinema and rap music that defines this culture as more
than simply a passing trend or an outdated genre.”
55
As such, the Black Gangsta films of the
early nineties broke representational barriers on screen as well as behind the scenes, with Black
directors like John Singleton and the Hughes Brothers cinematically translating the stark realities

54
Todd Edward Boyd, Am I Black Enough for You?: Popular Culture from the ’Hood and
Beyond, First Printing edition (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997): 91.
55
Ibid.

208
of many Black inner-city working class communities, devastated by economic
disenfranchisement, set to the soundtrack of Gangsta Rap. With the release of Boyz ’n’ the Hood,
New Jack City, and Jungle Fever in 1991, a new representational economy emerged that further
complicated the relationship between mainstream visibility and the evolving signs of blackness.
Houston’s image and career within the rapidly shifting cultural milieu of the early
nineties becomes a defining moment that, I assert, haunts her for the rest of her life. As
mentioned previously, one of the most distinctive aspects of the eighties crack epidemic was the
fact that the drug was used by more women than men. Richard Iton suggests that this resulted in
“a range of images and stereotypes that were sex specific--the crack whore, the crack mother, the
crack baby--and provide[d], for some, justification for writing off a cohort of women as
insatiable, addicted, and beyond salvation.”
56
Patrick Moynihan’s description of the pathology of
the Black family caused by single-Black mothers on public assistance, i.e. Reagan’s “welfare
queen,” was then easily rearticulated and further problematized following the introduction of
crack cocaine to impoverished Black communities. In consequence, Black women as crack users
and Black men as the suppliers are excessively visualized in all three of the Black Gangsta films
released in the Summer of 1991 (Boyz, New Jack, and Jungle). This saturation of imagery
coincided with the lyrical devaluation of Black women, particularly in West Coast Gangsta Rap
music, stemming from the same catalyst—crack. Although seemingly distant from the image of
Houston, I contend that for working class Black audiences the stigmatization of Black women
within hip hop culture at this time placed Black women into two distinct and harmful categories.
First, was that of the crack addict, which proliferated both news media and popular culture.
Houston would later confront this stigmatization when her rumored drug use became

56
Iton, 155

209
automatically associated with crack, despite there being no explicit indication of her drug of
choice. Alternatively, and seemingly on the opposite side of the spectrum, was the image of the
Black professional woman, or “The Black Lady,” which had slowly emerged in the late eighties
as the disparity between college educated Black women versus college educated Black men
widened exponentially.
57
Houston’s middle-class, respectable image was in complete alignment
with the “Black Lady” figure. This image of the Black professional woman also had many visual
iterations, including in music videos like that of Public Enemy’s 1988 video for “Night of the
Living Baseheads.” In this video a Black woman news anchor reports on the controversy
surrounding the rap group while being antagonized and eventually dismissed by Public Enemy’s
hype man, Flavor Flav. The news anchor is a minor character in the video’s overall narrative,
however when considering that rap music was, at that time, still emerging as a controversial art
form, the media served as a platform that exacerbated the rift between Black male artists and
mainstream America. By casting a Black woman in that role, she inherently served as a symbolic
representation of entities, like the news media, that were in opposition to the rise of hip hop,
which substituted for the socio-political advancement of Black men.
Furthermore, Anita Hill’s testimony during the Senate Judiciary Committee confirmation
hearings for Justice nominee, Clarence Thomas in October of 1991 is one of the most influential
events that cemented the image of the professional Black woman as a threat to, not only to Black
achievement, but to Black men directly. Thomas had been nominated to the Supreme Court by
President George H.W. Bush following the retirement of Justice Thurgood Marshall. Hill was a
law professor and former employee of Thomas who testified that during her tenure with the
Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) Thomas had made sexually explicit

57
Lisa B. Thompson, Beyond the Black Lady: Sexuality and the New African American
Middle Class, 1st edition (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2012).

210
comments towards her. The hearing sparked a range of contentious debates centering race, class,
gender, and sexuality that varied across demographics, however the discourse was particularly
complex for Black spectators committed to both race pride and justice. Problematic politics
aside, as a Black man Thomas symbolized success and the ability to achieve the American
Dream despite the obstacles specific to the Black American experience. For some folks, although
successful in her own right, Hill’s class privilege and education status nullified her racial loyalty
since her accusation threatened the advancement of a Black man. The legitimacy of Hill’s
testimony was compromised by the stronghold of patriarchy and the relentless devaluation of
Black women for the sake of upholding toxic forms of Black nationalism and masculinity. In a
much larger sense, Thomas’ confirmation also affirmed the racial and gendered logics implying
that Black women are inherently promiscuous and sexually accessible.
This confluence of competing images of Black women in addition to expectations
mandated by the politics of respectability and mainstream conservatism all respectively
influenced the post-Star-Spangled Banner afterimage of Houston. These conflicting ideologies
and pervading circumstantial narratives led scholar and writer Wahneema Lubiano to conclude
that, “Whether by virtue of not achieving and thus passing on bad culture as welfare mothers, or
by virtue of managing to achieve middle-class success via education, career, and/or economic
successes (and thus, I suppose, passing on genes for autonomous female success?), black women
are responsible for the disadvantaged status of African Americans.”
58
Lubiano drew this
conclusion in the immediate wake of the Hill-Thomas confirmation hearings without knowledge
that in April of 1992 the city of Los Angeles would justifiably implode from the discontent of

58
Wahneema Lubiano, “Black Ladies, Welfare Queens, and State Minstrels: Ideological War
by Narrative Means,” in Race-Ing Justice, En-Gendering Power: Essays on Anita Hill, Clarence
Thomas, and the Construction of Social Reality, ed. Toni Morrison (New York: Pantheon Books,
1992): 335.

211
low-income Black communities, who collectively rebelled against a series of unjust decisions
enacted by the State. As explained in the last chapter, in the aftermath of the Moynihan Report,
the Black matriarch, and invariably the welfare queen, threatened State power and ownership
relations by “disfigure[ing] the institution of the family and render[ing] it a site of rebellion.”
The 1992 LA Uprisings actualized the fears stoked by Moynihan and revealed the frustrations
and exasperation of low-income Black communities that had been ravaged by years of
conservative policies that actively disenfranchised and criminalized this very large population.
Ironically, in the midst of the LA Uprisings, The Cosby Show aired its final episode.
Subsequently, as impoverished Black and Brown residents of Los Angeles made a collective,
bold statement against the State, folks around the country watched them as well as, what can be
concluded as, a symbolic shift in Black popular culture. By 1992, the “Cosby Effect” had lost its
political and cultural power as impoverished communities around the country reckoned with the
fallacy of the American Dream and “bootstrap” mentality that had been championed and
propagated since the election of Richard Nixon.
Collectively, the various images and narratives specifically associated with Black
women that gained prominence between Houston’s Super Bowl performance at the top of 1991
and the release of The Bodyguard in November of 1992, substantially impacted how Houston
was critically and culturally received. Having already engaged with several media platforms in
defense of her authenticity and blackness, Houston became unavoidably trapped within the
predetermined imaginaries of critics and spectators. Whether thought of in high (or low) regard
by conservatives obsessed with Black, middle class respectability and the Huxtables or critically
rejected and deemed an “assimilation nightmare,” or simply just not-Black-enough for the New
Black Aesthetic, Houston’s celebrity status and image were deeply tied to the ideological shifts

212
of the early nineties. Her subsequent afterimages, therefore, consisted of the multitude of
assumptions and characterizations that all related to the ways in which Black women had come
to be identified and characterized. Subsequently, I argue that her role as Rachel Marron in The
Bodyguard deserves critical attention for how her image as a Supernova both conceded to and
pushed against the film’s overall plot and message. By considering The Bodyguard as a cultural
text that subtly revealed both the fears and assumptions of mainstream audiences about Black
women, I extend my analysis of Houston as a Supernova by way of juxtaposing her role in the
film and her early nineties image/afterimage with her eventual interpersonal and professional
relationships with the shifting signs of blackness, as determined by the New Black Aesthetic and
mid-to-late nineties Black popular culture as a whole.
The Bodyguard
Directed by Mick Jackson and written by Lawrence Kasdan, known for penning The Big
Chill (1983) and Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), The Bodyguard grossed $122 million at the box
office in North America and $411 million globally, making it the 2
nd
highest grossing film of
1992 behind Disney’s Aladdin. Originally purchased by Warner Brothers in the seventies, the
film’s leading roles were intended for Diana Ross and Steve McQueen (and later Ryan O’Neal),
however a series of stalls on the project eventually led to it being shelved and later picked up by
actor and producer, Kevin Costner. By 1992, Costner was most known for his leading role in
Dances With Wolves, which won the Academy Award for Best Picture in 1990. According to
several sources, Costner was determined to cast Houston as the film’s popstar co-lead, Rachel
Marron, and persistently asked her until she finally agreed, making it her Hollywood feature film
debut. The plot of the film centers the complex relationship between the famous Rachel, who is
oblivious to her life being in danger, and her hired bodyguard who also becomes her lover.

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Although Costner suggests in several press sources that the interracial romance aspect of the film
was unintentional and completely absent from the written narrative, its curious that even when
the film was originally casted in the seventies, the interracial romance aspect was still present.
Additionally, Costner’s character in the film, Frank Farmer, is crafted as the ultimate protector,
since it is revealed very early in the film that he served as a presidential bodyguard to Ronald
Reagan. When it is brought up that Reagan had indeed been shot during an assassination attempt,
Frank firmly clarifies: not on his watch. Similar to his character in Dances with Wolves, where he
reluctantly befriends a local Indigenous tribe and winds up saving them from his White peers (as
well as many of his later films), Costner has been resolute in his commitment to playing “White
Savior” roles. Subsequently, his character’s nobility and professional expertise are established in
the opening scene. Viewers hear a series of gunshots over black before Frank is revealed
kneeling, gun drawn, protecting a client from a seemingly innocent custodial worker who,
because of Frank’s keen sense of discernment, is soon confirmed as his client’s most immediate
threat. Overall, it is Frank Farmer’s protection of Rachel Marron and a series of distinct
character-interactions and plot points that strategically reflect the social and political fears and
ideologies of mainstream audiences in the late eighties/early nineties. This, in concert with
Houston’s inability to consistently conform to the various images and narratives that were
ascribed to Black women at this time, all eventually culminated in her Supernovic implosion.
The film’s primary plot revolves around Rachel Marron, a superstar pop singer and single
mother, who is initially unaware that she has been receiving a series of fan letters threatening her
life. Her seemingly well-meaning but clueless entourage attempt to protect her and her son by
not revealing the extent to which she has been threatened, and instead proceed to suggest and
then hire Frank Farmer as her bodyguard. Frank is presented as a solemn professional who is

214
unimpressed by celebrity glamour and excess, while Rachel is situated as a self-absorbed diva,
oblivious to her surroundings. When Rachel finally finds out the extent to which she has been
being stalked and threatened, her disposition becomes more acquiescent to Frank’s protective
measures; so much so, that they end up sleeping together. While witnessing the development of
their relationship, audiences are also gradually introduced to the person responsible for writing
the letters. In a brief scene, bookended between Frank accepting the job as Rachel’s bodyguard
and a quippy, yet problematic, conversation between him and Rachel’s chauffeur over guns,
spectators are introduced to an ominous, faceless character. The figure, played by Tony Pierce,
wears gloves as he intricately selects and glues onto a sheet of paper newspaper word cutouts to
form sentences. Rachel is heard singing and then pictured on a black and white television playing
a short distance away. Before zooming out to reveal the letter in full, audiences witness the
mysterious figure placing the final word “DIE” in place. The camera then zooms out to reveal
the letter, which reads:
MARRON BITCH
YOU HAVE EVERYTHING
I HAVE NOTHING
THE TIME IS COMING
WHEN YOU SHALL DIE

Aside from seeing the culprit’s hands in rubber gloves, the only other physical feature revealed at
this point is his platinum blonde hair. The rubber gloves also strangely blend in with his skin
suggesting a very pale, white complexion. Based on the format of the letter, it is meant to be
assumed that this is the same person responsible for the previously gathered threatening letters.
This same person is also supposedly responsible for an incident that Frank is informed of prior to
accepting the offer where someone broke into Rachel’s empty home, masturbated on her bed,
and left a threatening letter. Although a very minor character, with very little screen time this

215
person, whose name is never mentioned but credited as Dan, is initially suggested as the primary
threat against Rachel’s life, before the third act twist. By considering the way in which this
character is introduced to spectators and how he is framed through most of the text in relation to
Rachel, I make the claim that Dan is emblematic of a faction of the American population both
obsessed with and jealous of the evolving signs of blackness at this time.
The next time Dan momentarily appears in the film is during a particularly chaotic club
performance that Rachel insists on taking, despite Frank’s concern for her safety. While
performing her song, “Queen of the Night,” the stage is bumrushed by the club attendees and
Rachel is pushed off the stage into a nonconsensual crowd-surf. Frank comes to her rescue and
pulls her out of the crowd. While cradling Rachel in his arms he proceeds to physically kick past
several concertgoers—including one particular grimacing platinum, blonde-haired man that
intentionally steps in his path. Once inside their limousine, but prior to arriving to Rachel’s
mansion, the scene cuts back to the inside of the empty club, where the camera focuses on
someone picking up a piece of fabric that had obviously been ripped from Rachel’s outfit amid
the chaos. Once again, the scene focuses intensely on the person’s very pale hands as they, first,
caress the glittering fabric delicately, and then bring the piece of material to their obscured face
and deeply inhale its scent. The actions and movements of this figure are meant to be read as
suggestively ominous and also familiar. Therefore the next time these hands appear on the screen
and their face is revealed, it becomes clear that the pale, white hands have belonged to the same
person all along—Dan, the platinum, blonde-haired man from the club. A few scenes later, as
Rachel’s chauffeur waits outside while his limousine is run through the car wash, the camera cuts
to the same gloved-pale hands rummaging through the seats of the car and discovering a
publicity photo of Rachel in the crevices of the seats. Finally connecting the mysterious hands

216
with his face, Dan is shown opening what appears to be a work locker and gently placing the
newly acquired photo within his private Rachel Marron shrine, right alongside the previously
discovered piece of sparkling fabric. Dan’s locker shrine reveals that his obsessively fanatical
behavior is intertwined with his religious beliefs. The locker contains mostly newspaper and
magazine clippings pertaining to Rachel, however they are also overlaid with statements and
terms that reference Christian religiosity. Before footsteps approach startling him to close the
locker, the camera is sure to slowly capture Dan’s physical features—once again zooming in on
his pale hands as he removes the rubber gloves but then moving to extreme close-ups of his blue-
gray eyes and his long, mangled blonde hair surrounding his intensely melancholic white face.
It is in these scenes that Dan’s physical whiteness is framed against Rachel’s brown skin,
creating a stark and jarring juxtaposition. Dan’s obsessiveness becomes inseparable from the
imaging of his pale, white skin caressing photos of Rachel. His letters and locker also indicate
that his fanaticism is rooted in dogmatic Christian theology overly concerned with purity and
punishment. His threats of harming Rachel further suggest that he has both sexual and maternal
impulses driving his adverse fixation. In a later scene, Dan calls Rachel on the phone and
addresses her as “mommy” before hauntingly repeating “no” upon her questioning his identity.
With all of these characteristics under consideration and juxtaposed against Frank’s preferred
heroism, Dan seemingly represents a portion of the American population obsessed with
blackness and delusionally preoccupied with asserting their own power over those they consider
undeserving.
By alluding to the idea that Rachel has “everything,” and that he has nothing Dan’s
ideological motives reflect the racist, white conservative population’s argument against
affirmative action policies that helped bolster the economic advancement of the Black middle-

217
class during the Reagan era. For a certain population, Houston’s Star-Spangled Banner
performance and its popular circulation heightened their prejudice feelings against marginalized
communities. Seeing a Black woman become recognized globally as the sound of American
freedom undoubtedly fueled the frustrations of conservatives with already existing bias-led
afterimages. Critical Race Theory scholars recognize the decade of the nineties as “the beginning
of a vigorous offensive from the political Right” where conservative foundations and think-tanks
advanced policy initiatives and lobby-campaigns purposed to eliminate race-based equity
programs and de-regulate hate speech.
59
Dan’s fanatical behavior is cinematically presented as
unwarranted, however his foundational beliefs in racial hierarchy, good v. evil, and salvation
politically and morally align with the principles of this particularly vocal population.
Furthermore, the rapid spread of hip-hop as a cultural institution with a national (and soon
global) audience, galvanized irrational conservative communities to unite in different ways. Dan
is rendered strange and ultimately concluded as harmless, in the sense that he was only guilty of
obsessively stalking and threatening Rachel and not, what later turns out to be, attempted
murder. Additionally, his small frame and empty threats juxtaposed against Farmer’s masculinity
and nobility visualized an ideological metaphor between the myth of “harmless” white racists
and neo-liberal saviors. The afterimages of this population may seem inconsequential, like Dan,
however it has been proven that dismissing this rhetoric can lead to the galvanization and
empowerment of groups determined to stifle Black mobility indefinitely. In the end, as a
seemingly innocuous character, who is obviously no match against Frank, The Bodyguard (like
the Reagan administration) disregards someone like Dan as a distraction from Rachel’s true
threat—later revealed as her sister.

59
Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic, Critical Race Theory, 3 edition (New York: NYU
Press, 2017): 114.

218
Upon realizing that it is Rachel’s sister Nicki, played by Michelle Richards, who is
responsible for hiring a professional assassin to murder the popstar, Frank’s intellect and combat
skills are presented as Rachel’s only hope for survival. Nicki’s minor role status in the film is
narratively cohesive, based on the fact that despite being Rachel’s older sister, she functions as
her often dismissed personal assistant. From the very start of the film when she is first introduced
to Frank, she is seen only briefly before the camera is quickly directed back to a close-up of
Rachel’s face. Alternatively, when the introductions to the rest of her entourage are made, the
camera pauses on each person’s greeting prior to returning back to Rachel. Nicki is then sent
away by Rachel to retrieve a glass of orange juice for Frank. The next time Nicki is given screen
time with dialogue is after Frank agrees to work for Rachel and prioritizes rewiring the security
of her mansion and investigating the grounds, which includes the dance studio that Nicki
considers her space. In the dialogue between the two, Nicki dominates the conversation mostly
with self-deprecating references to herself in comparison to her sister. Frank remains mostly
stoic and observant but softens to allow Nicki to speak candidly which seems to ease the
awkwardness of the interaction. For the rest of the film Nicki remains a marginal character who
is often interrupted while speaking and shown enviously observing her sister and Frank from a
distance.
When the threat of Rachel’s mysterious harasser poses a more urgent concern, Frank
takes Rachel, her son Fletcher, and Nicki to his father’s cabin, located somewhere in the woods
and snow far from Los Angeles. Since Rachel by this point has finally accepted the magnitude to
which her life is in danger, she grants Frank complete control of her and her son’s safety.
Unfortunately, they are quickly informed that their supposed rugged winter haven has been
compromised when Fletcher is nearly killed by a boat explosion. Although they immediately

219
attempt to pack and leave the cabin, Frank discovers that their cars are dead and the telephone
lines have been cut making it unsafe for them to travel on foot and must instead leave the next
morning. Late that evening, the possibility of almost being responsible for the death of her
nephew impels Nicki to drunkenly confess to Frank that she hired someone to kill her sister and
that the person was not going to stop until the job was done. She also states that even though she
does not know who is responsible for the letters, the words reflect her thoughts because she does,
in fact, hate her sister. Frank does not seem completely shocked by her confession and proceeds
to inquire into all of the details of the hit. She answers his questions but also prompts him to ask
her why she did it. Frank’s intuitiveness does not require an answer, however, because the letters
provided him the simplest justification—“She has everything.” Soon after this conversation,
Nicki is murdered by the hitman she hired to kill her sister.
The fact that the most dangerous threat to Rachel ends up being her own sister, gets at the
underlying ideological motives of the film. It is not the crazed stalker who sends death threats
and obsessively follows Rachel that is dangerous, but the person closest to her. Although this
may seem like a cliché narrative that is present throughout film history, the socio-political
climate at the time of this film’s release in addition to the supposed color-blind casting of the
roles, makes this narrative more meaningful than scholars and critics have previously considered.
It is the character development and motivations of both Frank and Nicki in relation to Rachel that
intertwine most significantly to reflect the overall conundrum concerning popular culture and the
image of the Black woman at this time. Unlike many of the Black Gangsta film’s released earlier
that year, which, according to Richard Iton, “…naturalize[d] the deviance of a certain class of
Black women and mark[ed] them as unworthy or our investment and attention,” the premise of

220
The Bodyguard centered the protection of a Black woman.
60
Iton’s emphasis on a “certain class”
however, undoubtedly excludes Rachel from this image since, although a single-mother, her
obvious wealth aided in adequately caring for her son. Accordingly, Rachel’s protection was
contingent on her class privilege and subsequent access to resources, which significantly
distanced her character from the realities of low-income Black women, stigmatized as “welfare
queens.” Her relationship with Nicki also symbolized the tension between Black women of
drastically different social and economic classes. The way in which Nicki was consistently
dismissed and ignored by both Rachel and her entourage throughout the film, rendered her
invisible and unworthy of protection. Ultimately, this treatment confined Nicki to the class
equivalent of “the help,” and cemented her as worthless and irredeemable, in comparison to her
sister.
Furthermore, it is the relationship between Frank and Rachel that profoundly reflects the
ideological motives of The Bodyguard. From the very beginning of the film, Frank is positioned
as the hero sent to rescue Rachel from harm. Rachel is initially defined by her defiance to follow
anyone’s rules but is later postured in full submission to Frank as she becomes more fearful. In
one way, it is Rachel’s sexual availability to Frank that corresponds with a mythical aspect of the
“Black Lady” figure, in that, an interracial relationship, signals racial disloyalty. As mentioned
previously, the educational advancement of Black women in comparison to Black men in the late
eighties exacerbated an already precarious gender dynamic within various Black communities.
The lasting ideological impact of the Moynihan Report repeatedly showed up within both
popular culture discourse as well as political debates, intensifying the widening educational (and
eventual economic) gap. The simple fact that Rachel is only seen having sexual relationships

60
Iton, 155.

221
with white men throughout the film’s entirety, stabilizes the assumption that, although
statistically false, financially secure Black women prefer to date non-Black men. However, it is
also Rachel’s sexual liberation that firmly prevents this character from being easily relegated to
the “Black Lady” trope. In Beyond the Black Lady: Sexuality and the New African American
Middle Class, Lisa B. Thompson notes that “Conservative sexual behavior is the foundation of
the performance of middle-class black womanhood.”
61
Rachel is not modest or ashamed of her
desirability, and mostly asserts her sexual prowess on her own validity. By doing so, her
character falls outside the bounds of respectability and positions Frank as her only savior.
The film closes with Frank’s heroism and nobility saving Rachel’s life from the hired
killer. As the neo-liberal protector, Frank’s commitment to his job requires him to easily step in
front of a bullet for Rachel, despite discovering that the hired hitman was in fact one of his
colleagues of many years. After being shot, and amongst the chaos of a disrupted awards show,
Frank musters up the strength to locate the perpetrator in the crowd and still shoot him before he
is able to escape. Frank survives the attempted murder and is then able to nobly send Rachel off
with both a new, less-handsome bodyguard and a final kiss as Houston’s “I Will Always Love
You” begins in an asynchronous setting. The film closes with a sweeping slow zoom on Frank
standing, presumably on guard of a new client, in the wings of a stage behind a Reverend in
prayer. The camera proceeds to zoom in on the cross being held in the hand of the Reverend but
quickly rack-focuses to put Frank in focus while still leaving the blurry cross in view. The
camera pauses here, and the Reverend closes his prayer with “We all know in our hearts that
even though we might pass through the valley of the shadow of death, you are with us. Guiding
and protecting us. Amen.” The frame freezes at the end of the prayer, signaling the film credits

61
Lisa B. Thompson, 2,3

222
and the climax of “I Will Always Love You” before slowly fading to black. All together the final
song, prayer, and freeze frame indicate the deification of Frank as the ultimate guide and
protector—the White Savior. Concluding the film in this way makes it very clear that it was
indeed Houston that was an accessory to a story about the bodyguard and not the other way
around. It is Costner that is emboldened with final possibility, while Houston disappears beyond
the frame.
The Bodyguard’s overall message poignantly supports the narrative of the White Savior
as the ultimate hero and sacred protector of good. Although Costner insisted on marketing the
film as a colorblind narrative and attempted to remove racial subjectivity from the film, it
undoubtedly uplifted neo-liberal, whiteness as necessary and omnipotent. With the election of
democratic candidate Bill Clinton that same year, The Bodyguard effectively pushed a white-
heroism agenda at the representational expense of Whitney Houston. Richard Iton emphasizes
that “the most significant legacy of the Clinton era was the naturalization of the bifurcation of the
black body politic…”
62
Houston’s career following her Star-Spangled Banner performance
epitomized the widening of this cultural cleave and the impossibility of dwelling in both
simultaneously. The blinding spectacularity of her Super Bowl performance is impressed upon
the reception of the character Rachel Marron, as well as Houston’s real-life encounters with the
evolving signs of blackness. This became most significant in July of 1992 when Houston married
R&B singer Bobby Brown. Brown was the breakout member of the teen group New Edition and
had established his persona as the sexually explicit, bad-boy singer. Their marriage was
immediately scrutinized based on their seemingly opposing public images. Symbolically, their
marriage represented a union that was culturally at-odds—eighties, Black middle-class

62
Ibid, 184.

223
respectability and the nineties New Black Aesthetic. It was the occurrence of these separate
events, and their accumulating afterimages, that compacted together to create a dense and
perplexing public image of Houston that could not be reconciled with her ontological beingness.
Put another way, the public’s various assumptions and expectations of Houston began to
consistently clash following the release of The Bodyguard. The film was a global success and its
most popular single, sung by Houston, “I Will Always Love You,” became one of the top 5 best-
selling singles of all time worldwide, selling more than 20 million copies. However, it was
during the time between The Bodyguard’s success and the release of Houston’s next film role,
Waiting to Exhale, that the afterimages of mainstream audiences were unable to coalesce with
Houston’s shifting proximity to blackness. In an article published in 1995, Marla Shelton
concluded that the “…images, along with gossip trade magazines reporting the trials and
tribulations of her ‘rocky’ marriage, functioned to create a discourse of the family that Black
audiences could identify with.”
63
The assumption that it was the marital strife that connected
Houston to Black audiences, rather than because she married a Black man of a different class
(representing a common discourse amongst Black women at the time), indulges a foundational
aspect of Moynihan’s pathological Black family. And while I somewhat agree with Shelton that
various “representations accumulate[d] to place the Houston icon in an accusatory space,” I
contend that it was her inability to be categorized within this “accusatory space” that impeded on
the public’s ability to recognize Houston as she attempted to be seen.
64
Borrowed from Jacquie
Jones, the “accusatory space” is weaponized to place Black women within simplistic tropes that

63
Marla Shelton, “Whitney Is Every Woman?: Cultural Politics and the Pop Star,” Camera
Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies 12, no. 3 (September 1, 1995): 144.
64
Ibid., 148.

224
can then be used to further blame them for the social ills of their communities.
65
Houston,
however, defied easy categorization into the various demeaning tropes that stigmatized Black
women, as explained throughout this chapter, but was still, nonetheless, damaged by the inability
to be easily categorized.
In the end, Houston’s premature death in 2012 at the age of 48 was because of an
accumulation of densely compounded and conflicting images and afterimages that resulted in the
implosion of another Supernova.
66
Her career is marked by the previously mentioned leading
Black women who attempted to define their professional careers for themselves when the
expectations of stardom proved inefficient. Houston’s inability to prolong her implosion speaks
to the extent to which Black women remain a problem within dominant culture. Having spent her
initial years as America’s pop princess, there seemed to remain a general hope that she would
divorce Bobby Brown (falsely and continuously blamed as the cause of her addiction) and return
to the respectable, cross-ever star of the eighties. However, this perspective refuses to consider
that following her Super Bowl performance, Houston’s stardom had reached Supernovic
temperatures that continued to be fueled by the overexertion of her effort to be fully recognized
and accepted as a Black woman. The brilliance of her shine was unfortunately bound to
stardom’s insufficient support of her life as a Black woman and the legacy to which she
belonged. By only analyzing her Hollywood film debut as Rachel Marron, it can be determined
that the conflicting public afterimages and images would only continue to accumulate to the
point of exhaustion. It also must be acknowledged, that even in death, Houston’s career and

65
Jacquie Jones, “The Accusatory Space,” in Black Popular Culture, ed. Gina Dent (Seattle:
Bay Press, 1992), 95–98.
66
This chapter’s limitations are delineated by a current lack of time and space to extend this
analysis to include the rest of Houston’s film career as it transitioned into the rest of the nineties
and early two-thousands.

225
legacy continue to be defined and translated through the predetermined images and afterimages
of others. The confining narratives that haunted her during her lifetime continue to be animated
in digital spaces as reactionary gifs, comedically looping images and footage from when her
addiction seemed the heaviest. Other afterimages are placed on the cover of rap albums or
paraded on stage in the form of a performing digital hologram. One could say this is a reflection
of her past and remaining popularity, and in some way this is true. However, I argue that the
implosion of a Supernova lends itself to imagine an alternative space of authentic and complex
possibility that has yet to be properly examined since it in effect cannot be seen. It is here that the
lasting impact of Houston is both recognizable and authentic. A Black hole is what remains once
material density has been released into the atmosphere, radically altering the climate, yet
strengthened in its new, protected form. Therein lies the infinite possibilities of imagining
otherwise for Black women performers. So, to return to Hammond’s inquiry, “What is it like
inside of a black hole?,” I suggest, that knowledge is reserved for the next Supernova
empowered to manage her own implosion, and for the rest of us to never find out.

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Coda: The Ghosts of our Mothers

“I want this to be different from all the times I have written before. One with no lies, deceit or
pain. This book I will write eventually will be one of tears shed and one of happiness finally
found. In the end making it through will be the best testimony of all. I will be putting it all on
disk for future reference.
I just don’t have the time.
I will make the time to do it.”
—Kendall Johnson, A Milwaukee Memoir

This work is the result of a haunting. To live and breathe amongst Black women is to be a
witness to the ways in which the present remains inextricably tied to the past. In this dissertation,
I deconstruct Hollywood stardom to reveal it as an inadequate framework for understanding how
Black women have been historically exploited and discarded, despite exhibiting talents and
achievements that surpass their white peers. Instead, by removing Black women from this
standard Hollywood paradigm and contextualizing their lives and careers within the confines of
racial capitalism, they emerge as a phenomenon far more extraordinary than mere stars. The
Supernova framework equivocates the aesthetic and temporal conditions ascribed to the death of
a star to Black women performers, subject to massive fame and premature death. In this analysis
purposed to determine a new grammar to name and understand their experiences, it became clear
that a consideration of every-day Black women in relation to the Supernova remained crucial to
the strength of this theory’s application. Revealed through my own memories and musings of my
mother, I recognize that in writing about the implications of slavery’s afterlife, the culture of
dissemblance, and performance I am following the traces of those I have known and those I
continue to encounter daily—in the physical and spiritual realm.
As understood in the work of Avery Gordon, I have been haunted and am subsequently
writing ghost stories. Gordon describes this condition as follows:

227
To be haunted and to write from that location, to take on the condition of what you study,
is not a methodology or a consciousness you can simply adopt or adapt as a set of rules or
an identity; it produces its own insights and blindnesses. Following the ghosts is about
making a contact that changes you and refashions the social relations in which you are
located...It is sometimes about writing ghost stories, stories that not only repair
representational mistakes, but also strive to understand the conditions under which a
memory was produced in the first place, toward a countermemory, for the future.
1

It’s safe to say that I have been following ghosts most of my life. Revealing themselves
sonically, visually, haptically—I heard Billie; I saw Dorothy; I felt my mother’s touch. My
senses are both overwhelmed and caressed by what remains following the physical absence, yet
ghostly presence of those who continue to make themselves known. I began chapter one with an
epigraph by Alice Walker, honoring the “grandmothers and mothers who were not Saints, but
Artists,” who cultivated space for their daughters and granddaughters to dream. As mostly two or
three generations removed from chattel slavery, the women in this project were taught to
recognize and protect themselves from the reanimation of slavery’s primary logics. Therefore, it
is not a coincidence that all of them, at some point or another, acknowledge their devotion to
achieving the unattained dreams of their mothers. In spite of the valid reasons that contributed to
Horne and Dandridge’s strained maternal relationships, chapter one discusses how they
performatively refashioned themselves for the purpose of attaining opportunities that were
beyond their mother’s reach. By leaning into the ways in which cultural memory and subjugated
knowledges are embodied and performed, I conclude this project with less summary, in
exchange for further rumination on the nexus between Supernovae and their relationships to
matrilineality, haunting/ghosts, and Black futurity.
The complexity of Black motherhood remains bound to the history of captivity,
enslavement, and surveillance. However, Black motherhood is also deeply intertwined with

1
Avery F. Gordon and Janice Radway, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological
Imagination, 2nd edition (Minneapolis: Univ Of Minnesota Press, 2008): 22.

228
creativity, experimentation, and freedom-making. As discussed more extensively in chapter two,
the Black Matriarch, defined in Patrick Moynihan’s report, poses a threat to capitalism’s
expectations of property and production. Theorized using the work of Hortense Spillers, Kaye
Lindsey, and Tiffany Lethabo King, I extend the necessity to abolish the Black “family” in order
to read alternative models of Black kinship as a site of rebellion and revolution. And although I
introduce this work in chapter two, the Supernova framework refuses teleology by operating
within a non-linear spacetime continuum, or as Michelle Wright suggests, “Epiphenomenal”
time.
2
Wright proposes that Epiphenomenal time functions more appropriately within a Middle
Passage epistemology because it “takes into account all the multifarious dimensions of Blackness
that exist in any moment.”
3
Put simply, the “now” analyzed within each chapter is informed and
tangled with the perspectives and various dynamics of the past, present, and future. As such,
Horne and Dandridge, as well as Kitt, Carroll, and Houston, are all both the cause and the effect
of the rebellion engendered by Black matrilineality, therefore, are justifiably discussed
collectively.
Gleaning from approaches taken from several scholars across disciplines, but succinctly
summarized by Saidiya Hartman, this project prioritizes “thinking about young black women as
radical thinkers, which no one ever does, because they imagine that thought is only the capacity
of the educated, or the endowment of the elites.”
4
Hartman continues with the inquiry, “What is
it like to imagine a radically different world, or to try to make a beautiful life in a situation of

2
Michelle M. Wright, Physics of Blackness: Beyond the Middle Passage Epistemology, 1
edition (Minneapolis: Univ Of Minnesota Press, 2015).
3
Ibid., 20.
4
Saidiya Hartman, Saidiya Hartman on working with archives, interview by Thora Siemsen,
Web, April 18, 2018, https://thecreativeindependent.com/people/saidiya-hartman-on-working-
with-archives/.

229
brutal constraint?”
5
In chapter one, I spend a significant amount of time detailing biographical
information on Horne and Dandridge in order to reveal the ways in which Black girlhood has
historically been infused with lessons that are the result of slavery’s afterlife. Their respective
autobiographies also offered keen insight into how childhood circumstances related to poverty,
instability, neglect, and abuse impacted their relationship to performance. What unexpectedly
came up while conducting these close readings was how the aspirations of their mothers
drastically influenced their own conceptions of what was possible. Neither Ruby Dandridge nor
Edna Scottron ever acquired the fame and freedom that they desired, however they both
consciously and subconsciously embedded in their daughters the radical idea that a Black girl
could hope for more. For many Black women of the early 20
th
century—the children and
grandchildren of the formerly enslaved—entertaining constituted an act of refusal, where
“dancing and singing fueled the radical hope of living otherwise, and in this way, choreography
was just another kind of movement for freedom, another opportunity to escape service, another
elaboration of the general strike.”
6

As witnesses, victims, and occasionally perpetrators, of violence and trauma these Black
mothers also cultivated fugitivity. When discussing her and her mother’s relationship early in her
career, Horne admits in her autobiography, “I had not realized how desperately she had wanted
to make it until she turned her full attention to me.”
7
She then describes her as “my dreamy,
impractical, rather defeated mother.”
8
Horne’s recognition of her mother’s defeat and, therefore,
dreamy impracticality, is a sentiment that is nearly identically replicated in the reflections of

5
Ibid.
6
Saidiya Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social
Upheaval, 1 edition (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2019): 299.
7
Lena Horne and Richard Schickel, Lena, First Printing, November 1966 (New York: Signet
Books, 1965): 52-3.
8
Ibid.

230
every Supernova analyzed in this project. Dorothy Dandridge’s relationship with her mother was
extremely similar, since Ruby’s physical body limited her to mostly roles as domestics. Even
without providing detailed biographical accounts in the proceeding chapters, the lessons of
trauma and hope passed on from their mothers repeatedly assert their influence on these
Supernovae and, consequently, within these pages. Initially, my intentions were to simply
illustrate the idiosyncratic performative strategies and circumstances that continuously
distinguished Black women performers from their white counterparts. However, in doing so, it
became clear that these histories could not be disentangled from a legacy marked by a familiar
kind of haunting.
Eartha Kitt opens her third autobiography with the statement, “I often think of my
mother.”
9
Although the rest of the text is mostly a chronological retelling of her life and career
up to the 1987 marriage of her daughter Kitt, this opening line signals a thematic differentiation
that this version prioritizes. The next sentence reads, “Though I do not remember what she
looked like, I feel her presence with me all of the time.”
10
Kitt’s mother, Annie Mae Keith, died
when she was still a child, and with her, died unspoken histories and secrets that deeply affected
Kitt’s relationship to the world around her. Having never known her father or actual date of birth,
Kitt was assumingly born around 1927 in the deep South, making her either a second or third
generation removed from chattel slavery. Also, although never confirmed, she and her extended
family assumed that her father was white, contributing to Kitt’s complex relationship with race
and identity. Kitt’s memories of precarious transit are both vague and extremely detailed,
appearing across texts with sometimes more or less information. However, despite living and
traveling very briefly under the care of her mother and only remembering fragments of their time

9
Eartha Kitt, I’m Still Here, First Edition (London: Pan Macmillan, 1989): 1.
10
Ibid.

231
together, Kitt believed they shared an intimacy that seemingly transcended death. Prior to
officially learning that her mother had passed away, Kitt describes a spiritual encounter that she
regards as her mother’s farewell to her. She remembers,
So Moma had gone. Suddenly, as I gazed at the ceiling, I felt her presence over me. The
room was warm and serene in her comforting us. Pearl was asleep as usual. I did not want
to wake her, I wanted to have Moma’s presence all to myself. No one was ever to know
that she and I spent her last moment together before her long journey. I went back to
sleep, comforted.
11

Kitt’s description of this moment reveals the way in which a haunting has the potential to soothe
and bring peace amidst confusion and chaos. Her own assessment of her life is one of abuse,
neglect, and hardship overcome by her own persistence and belief in the possibility of freedom.
In chapters two and three, I primarily focus on Kitt’s consistent autobiographical assertion of her
self-fragmentation and its impact on her public performance, both on and off the stage/screen. I
assert, here, that this mechanism for survival was an inheritance as well as the result of a
haunting. Over the course of her autobiographical oeuvre, Kitt intermittently shares a mix of
unfinished stories passed on to her about her mother and the (re)membered pieces of their time
together, primarily homeless and in search of support from the kindness of strangers. Most of the
stories alluded to her mother’s desperation while trying to care for Kitt and her sister Pearl,
centering struggle, uncertainty, rejection, trauma, and abuse reanimated in the wake of slavery.
In speaking to this post-abolition climate, Avery Gordon remarks that although slavery has
technically ended, “something of it continues to live on, in the social geography of where people
reside, in the authority of collective wisdom and shared benightedness, in the veins of the
contradictory formation we call New World modernity, propelling, as it always has, a something

11
Ibid., 23.

232
to be done.”
12
Kitt also believed that her mother had been poisoned by her sister-in-law and then
left in a bed of voodoo ephemera to suffer until death. Subsequently, born into and raised within
such a seething presence of both material and spiritual resonances of slavery and trauma, I argue
that Kitt used both performance and literary means to confront, and then tend to, the “something
to be done.”
Furthermore, Gordon suggests that to be haunted and encounter ghostly matter, animates,
what Raymond Williams termed, “a structure of feeling,” represented by “those elusive,
impalpable forms of social consciousness which are at once as renascent as ‘feelings’ suggests,
but nevertheless display a significant configuration captured in the term ‘structure.’”
13
I assert
that it is their affective relationship to performance and survival that produce “a structure of
feeling” for Supernovae. By connecting Kitt to both Dandridge and Carroll, my aim was to
consider the various ways that Supernovae attend to this “structure of feeling” that innately
compounds a persistent matrilineal haunting with concurrent rearticulations of systemic violence
and oppression. Therefore, just as Dandridge’s performance in Porgy and Bess is weighted with
the historical and sociological realities for Black women, the analysis of Kitt and Carroll’s
activism and performative choices are equally impacted by those same systems. And although
Diahann Carroll’s performative exterior prioritized a respectable, middle-class set of logics, she
remained subject to Hollywood’s perpetuation of Black women as inherently fungible. As such,
her activism and performance in Claudine, for her, confronted and fulfilled the “something to be
done,” which functioned as “not a return to the past but a reckoning with its repression in the
present, a reckoning with that which we have lost, but never had.”
14

12
Avery Gordon, 139.
13
Ibid., 198.
14
Ibid., 183.

233
I approached the final chapter with the hopes that, even though it focuses solely on
Whitney Houston, it reads as a collective encounter between the past, the most recent present,
and the future. Her relationship with her mother, as well with various soul singers of previous
generations, connected her to ancestral memory and embodied knowledge in an explicit manner.
The subsequent mentorship she received from these relationships undoubtedly contributed to her
talents and business decisions, however having such immediate contact with these women also
made her susceptible to encountering the haunting that followed them as well. As mentioned in
chapter four, Houston proudly acknowledged the soul legacy to which she was trained under and
gleaned both professional and personal strategies as a result. Her mother Cissy Houston was
unquestionably the most influential resource for her, however, the lessons that she attained were
also inherently tethered to the ghostly matter that Cissy had yet to fully acknowledge.
In her book, Remembering Whitney: My Story of Love, Loss, and the Night the Music
Stopped, Cissy superficially grapples with the memories of her traumatic childhood by
bookending nearly every story with a version of “God doesn’t make mistakes.”
15
Whether one
truly subscribes to this mantra or not, in this text Cissy mobilizes these sentiments in a manner
that seemingly disregards her own pain and trauma. Cissy grew up in tenement housing in
Depression-era Newark. Her parents had migrated from Georgia in 1923 and went on to have 10
children, with Cissy being the last. She describes herself as always having a “harder shell” as a
result of things that happened to her family.
16
Even in this statement, it’s interesting to note that
she describes the trauma as something that happened to her family, rather than something that
happened to her. When she was just a small child, her mother suffered multiple strokes and

15
Cissy Houston, Lisa Dickey, and Dionne Warwick, Remembering Whitney: My Story of
Love, Loss, and the Night the Music Stopped (New York: Harper Paperbacks, 2013).
16
Ibid., 11.

234
required significant care from her and her siblings before she eventually passed away at the age
of only thirty-four (Cissy was eight). After her mother passed, a flash fire broke out in their
tenement building destroying everything they owned. Cissy talks about how her father instilled
in his children the importance of faith and church attendance no matter the circumstance, which
she attributes as the catalyst for her relationship with singing gospel music. Unfortunately, when
Cissy was eighteen her father passed away within a week of being diagnosed with stomach
cancer. Individually, these circumstances are extremely difficult, but to experience this level of
compounded catastrophe before the age of eighteen is beyond traumatic. And rather than
developing healthy coping mechanisms to tragedy, Cissy proclaims, “I learned very early on to
tamp down my feelings of sadness and just get on with life—because there really wasn’t any
other choice in the matter.”
17
In other words, Cissy was quickly and instinctively indoctrinated
within the “culture of dissemblance.” And it was through this method of survival that Cissy
became known as one of the most legendary background vocalists to ever sing and the progenitor
of one of the greatest vocalists to ever live.
Even in abbreviated detail, Cissy’s early life is marked by a kind of trauma that is
recognized as “the lingering inheritance” of slavery’s afterlife.
18
As the youngest child of
southern, Black migrant parents, living in tenement housing during the depression, and having
aspirations of attaining a successful music career, Cissy’s life illustrates a series of
confrontations with the impossibility of freedom for a Black woman, yet the determination to
dream of otherwise. There is also still so much to be gathered regarding the impact of dismissing
hauntings in order to prioritize survival. It can almost be regarded as a privilege to have the
insight to name your ghosts and take the time to find out what they are asking of you. For Black

17
Ibid., 19.
18
Avery Gordon, 139.

235
mothers, like Cissy, the urgency of the present disallowed her from, what could feel like, the
distractions of the past. Nevertheless, the distraction is, in fact, the haunting that can only be
inherited if permitted to linger unacknowledged. “The ghost… forces a reckoning: she makes
those who have contact with her, who love and need her, confront an event in their past that
loiters in the present.”
19
It would be unfair and irresponsible to place blame on women like Edna
Scottron, Ruby Dandridge, Annie Mae Keith, and Cissy Houston, who, in exchange for their
own dreams of stardom and freedom, unintentionally left their hauntings to be inherited (as was
the case for generations).
For the Supernovae in this project, burdened by the inherited weight of these hauntings,
they also became the proof of the nearly possible. I caveat the “possible” with nearly to make
clear that we (scholars, participants, spectators, fans, stars, etc.) have yet to encounter the
limitlessness that characterizes all that is possible within a black hole. However, focusing on
Supernovae in this project has provided a link between what Saidiya Hartman names in
Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments as, “the beauty of the chorus” and the inherent possibility
of the Black Hole.
20
In this most recent text, Hartman conducts a speculative historical project on
the lives of urban, early-twentieth-century Black women who tried to reject normative
conventions regulating them to domestic labor, in exchange for experimentations in freedom. By
simply asserting their desire to live according to their own volition was a radical act that, in
many cases, resulted in soul-crushing hardship and defeat. Most found themselves unjustly
imprisoned, dead, or, the ultimate humiliation, working under white people as a domestic. For
others who made it to the stage, many remained regulated to the chorus line, singing and dancing
in the background; never acquiring the fame reserved for the person at center-stage. However,

19
Ibid.
20
Saidiya Hartman, 297.

236
Hartman concludes this creative illustration with a reinterpretation of the beauty and possibility
inherent to the “chorus.” She proclaims,
The chorus bears all of it for us. The Greek etymology of the word chorus refers to dance
within an enclosure. What better articulates the long history of struggle, the ceaseless
practice of black radicalism and refusal, the tumult and upheaval of open rebellion than
the acts of collaboration and improvisation that unfold within the space of the
enclosure?
21

It is here that Hartman suggests that there is a crucial distinction to be made between the
members of the chorus and the few who gain center-stage recognition, arguing that “the chorus
propels transformation.” “The enclosure” maintained under white-supremacist capitalist
patriarchy limits the movements of the chorus, however, it is also “an incubator of possibility, an
assembly sustaining dreams of the otherwise.”
22
Edna Scottron, Ruby Dandridge, Annie Mae
Kieth, and Cissy Houston were chorus members who passed down dreams of the possible in their
daughters. Therefore, I suggest, that it is the chorus that begets the Supernova, and the
Supernova that begets, the space of infinite possibility known as a Black Hole.
Nonetheless, despite how this order of operations might suggest a teleological
progression narrative, a part of my intervention definitively relies on the function of
Epiphenomenal time. It is through my personal connection to this work, as well as Avery
Gordon’s appropriation of Walter Benjamin’s concept of a “profane illumination,” that I am able
to confidently challenge temporal linearity, and even the fixity of terminology. According to
Benjamin (by way of Gordon), a profane illumination describes an encounter with ordinary
material that, although regularly overlooked or disregarded, becomes “animated by the immense
forces of atmosphere concealed in them.”
23
I understand this to be the moment when something

21
Ibid., 347-8.
22
Ibid., 348.
23
Avery Gordon, 204.

237
or someone that you encounter regularly, suddenly becomes incredibly meaningful, inspirational,
and/or undoubtedly irreplaceable. Gordon suggests that a profane illumination “is a discerning
moment” where the encounter with a ghostly presence “initiates…a something to be done.”
24

This ghostly presence can become known in the form of an everyday object like a photo or a
coffee mug, however the “atmosphere concealed” within them whisper the story of “the lost
beloveds and the force that made them disposable.”
25
Gordon continues,
When you have a profane illumination of these matters, when you know in a way you did
not know before, then you have been notified of your involvement. You are already
involved, implicated, in one way or another, and this is why, if you don't banish it, or kill
it, or reduce it to something you can already manage, when it appears to you, the ghost
will inaugurate the necessity of doing something about it.
26

I imagine that at some point, the women in this project, as well as the generations of women who
came before them, all had to reckon with this kind of ghostly encounter. For Black women, the
afterlife of slavery is a haunting that cannot be “tapped down” or even buried. It returns
generation after generation in the form of social death, dispossession, mass incarceration,
generational poverty, surveillance, genetic predispositions, and premature death. Lena Horne and
Dorothy Dandridge followed their mothers around the country only to consistently witness the
disappointing impact of anti-black discrimination. Eartha Kitt roamed the country of South
Carolina holding her mother’s hand, homeless, in search of grace, but met with violence.
Diahann Carroll struggled with abandonment issues after her parents left her for over a year as
they attempted to gain stability in the North. Whitney Houston succumbed to her mother and the
public’s expectations to be both good enough and Black enough, to no avail. Yet for all of them,
witnessing their mother’s struggle also served as the profane illumination that required “the

24
Ibid., 205.
25
Ibid.
26
Ibid., 205-6.

238
necessity to do something about it.”
Similarly, this work is the product of my encounter with a profane illumination in the
form of my own mother. It is both a blessing and a curse to be raised by a woman as beautiful,
talented, and intelligent as my mother, yet live nearly everyday looking elsewhere for inspiration
just to realize, moments before it’s too late, that a profound illumination was in your midst all
along. My mother was an artist but prioritized maintaining a life that allowed for me to dream in
exchange for her own. She introduced me to music, film, and poetry by encouraging me to study
the material and then create the worlds that I imagined. She sacrificed her own aspirations of
writing and sharing with the world in order to cultivate a comfortable and loving space that
empowered me to never question my value or my capabilities to acquire all that desire. She
attempted to live freely, but when confined to the chorus, she imagined otherwise for me. And
even as her body weakened from the spread of an environmentally induced cancer that was
initially disregarded under the logic of medical apartheid, she insisted that I keep imagining other
worlds where Black women are cared for by systems not founded on our exploitation. In her
final moments, I became aware of the hauntings that she inherited and the ghostly matter that
made itself known. To finally recognize the extraordinary in what you considered ordinary is a
heartbreakingly profound illumination. My inheritance was her unaddressed haunting, but also
her vision that I could “do something about it.” This is what the chorus engenders…
The Supernova emerges as a profound cosmic illumination that, although tested by the
harshest climate extremities, prevails and momentarily shines brighter than what could ever be
imagined. The inevitability of their implosion does not diminish their luminescence but inspires
the worlds that can come after. It will continue to take, what Gordon calls, sensuous knowledge
to first, recognize the presence of a black hole, and then to actualize its potential as a resource for

239
those most vulnerable. Defined as “neither idealistic nor alienated,” sensuous knowledge is “an
active practice or passion for the lived reality of ghostly magical invented matters.”
27
Just as this
work is the product of an intimate reconciliation with ghostly matters along with passion in
practice, what is designed and cultivated from here, remains in the whispers of ghosts yet to be
known. What I know for sure is that the life and death of a Supernova, indelibly reconfigures
space in a way that requires a reevaluation of cinematic axioms. In 1949, Ralph Ellison declared,
“In the beginning was not the shadow, but the act, and the province of Hollywood is not action,
but illusion.”
28
This study reveals that Hollywood has historically produced not merely illusion,
but deliberately harmful and targeted action. Yet despite this action, Black women continue to
emerge brilliantly, radiant leaving behind a shadow, eagerly awaiting its revolutionary act.

27
Ibid., 205.
28
Ralph Ellison, “The Shadow and the Act,” The Reporter, December 6, 1949: 18.

240
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Abstract (if available)

Abstract “Celestial Bodies: Black Women, Hollywood, and the Fallacy of Stardom,” interrogates the relationship between Black women performers and the Hollywood entertainment industry. My central argument is that the strategies of attaining fame and the methods of survival once inside the industry for Black women were/are antithetical to the statutes that define stardom, according to the field of star studies. Subsequently, I propose an alternative epistemological framework, attuned to the experiential specificities of Black leading women in Hollywood. Rather than being stars, I contend that Black leading women exceed the traditional star framework, and are instead, Supernovae. The application of the Supernovae framework is contingent on three interdependent aspects. First, how leading Black women chose to write themselves into history, whether through autobiography or interviews, and situate themselves within narratives contingent on their experiences as racialized beings. Second, their assertion of cultural allegiance through various capacities, despite the many ways Hollywood sought to regulate their public and privates lives by means of structural racism. And lastly, how they leveraged performance as a means of self-fashioning, negotiation, and/or survival through methods that were expressed on, but not limited to, the stage and screen. ❧ In this project, I compare and contrast the lives and careers of Nina Mae McKinney, Lena Horne, Dorothy Dandridge, and Eartha Kitt and discuss the personal and professional performance tactics they necessarily developed during the height of the studio system era. I then suggest that these methods span across time and bodies, so I conclude with analyses centering Diahann Carroll and, finally, Whitney Houston as exemplary models of the Supernova framework. The introduction and chapter one offer a historical contextualization of Hollywood stardom, based on its definition and development as a key factor in the sustainability and profitability of the Hollywood film industry. McKinney, Horne, and Dandridge serve as case studies to illustrate the inapplicability of stardom’s primary characteristics to describe their experiences working as leading performers in Hollywood. Chapter two conducts several in depth textual analyses of screen performances by Dandridge and Kitt to demonstrate their respective performative responses as a result of limited role availability and confining tropes, despite their mainstream popularity. Chapter three explicates how Kitt and Carroll challenged dominant assumptions that deemed them apolitical because of their mainstream acceptability and beauty, by explicitly asserting their cultural allegiance through activism and role intentionality. Chapter four delineates how Whitney Houston attempted to adopt the performative strategies of the aforementioned women later into her career, and the subsequent retaliation by mainstream audiences and the entertainment industry to deter these efforts. The conclusion explores the theoretical and practical implications of Black women as Supernovae and their contribution towards creating alternative ways of being that promote wellness and futurity, despite the constant threat of disenfranchisement and premature death. Overall this work addresses the historic undertheorization of Black women in the field of cinema and media and asserts a necessary reevaluation of theoretical concepts and terminology that have been proven as fundamentally insufficient.

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Asset Metadata

Creator Payton, Philana Elysia (author)

Core Title Celestial bodies: Black women, Hollywood, and the fallacy of stardom

School School of Cinematic Arts

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Cinematic Arts (Critical Studies)

Publication Date 07/16/2020

Defense Date 05/21/2020

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag African-American studies,Black studies,cinema and media,classic Hollywood,Diahann Carroll,Dorothy Dandridge,Eartha Kitt,film studies,Lena Horne,Music,OAI-PMH Harvest,performance studies,queer,star studies,stardom,supernova,Whitney Houston,women's studies

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Keeling, Kara (committee chair), Acham, Christine (committee member), Boyd, Todd (committee member), Wilson, Francille (committee member)

Creator Email ppayton@usc.edu,ppayton46@gmail.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c89-333655

Unique identifier UC11664044

Identifier etd-PaytonPhil-8692.pdf (filename),usctheses-c89-333655 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-PaytonPhil-8692.pdf

Dmrecord 333655

Document Type Dissertation

Rights Payton, Philana Elysia

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 2810, 3434 South Grand Avenue, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, California 90089-2810, USA