Black Celebrity: Contemporary Representations of Postbellum Athletes and Artists by Emily Rutter

About the Book

Publication: 2021
Publisher: University of Delaware Press
A revealing exploration of how contemporary Black writers reimagine historic Black celebrities by illuminating the complex inner lives behind their public personas.

This post is part of the Books in Brief series, which features concise conversations with scholars about their books in African American literary studies.

1. What inspired you to pursue the lines of research and writing that resulted in this book?
Black Celebrity was in many respects an extension of my first two books, which examine representations of blues icons (The Blues Muse) and Black baseball (Invisible Ball of Dreams: Literary Representations of Baseball behind the Color Line), demonstrating the unique capacity of imaginative literature to capture the emotional texture and terrain of the past. We have also been living through an era that appeared on the verge of a third reconstruction and now appears to be in another sociopolitical nadir (with echoes of the late nineteenth century), so Black Celebrity grew out of these longstanding research interests as well as the contemporary structure of feeling, which invites us to consider the throughlines between the postbellum era and our own time.

2. What surprised you most during your research or writing process?
I don’t know if these are surprises or just teachable moments, but I always learn a great deal in the process of writing a book about a subject I think I am already well-versed in. For example, I knew about some of the figures in the cast of characters invoked in Tyehimba Jess’s tour-de-force collection Olio but certainly not all, and it was a pleasure to be introduced to Sissieretta Jones and Christine and Millie McKoy, among others. Learning about them as virtuoso artists with tremendous life stories was an education in and of itself, and again this is the transformative power of literature to raise epistemological questions about how we know what we know and why some figures continue to be heralded (or remain notorious) and others are cast into the dustbin of history (lying in wait for a brilliant poet to invoke them anew!).

3. What was the hardest decision you had to make while writing this book?
With every book, the question is where to stop—where, in other words, to say this is the final chapter. One could always keep going, finding new material and continuing to write and examine. The choice comes down to what I am trying to achieve. Am I trying to produce a comprehensive survey of all the contemporary African American poetry collections or novels that, in this case, have taken up postbellum, pre-Harlem Renaissance artists and athletes, or am I examining these particular works as case studies to make a broader set of claims about what literature contributes to our understanding of history and its residue in the present? These are the questions I ruminated on as I made hard decisions about which chapters to include and which material to leave for another article or monograph.

4. What's one lesson you learned while producing this book that you'll carry into future projects?
If I had to write this book anew, I would deploy a more nuanced structure in the chapters and would worry less about adhering to more traditional literary analysis and theoretical structures. The scholarship I gravitate toward these days (and am producing more of as well) integrates literary analysis, auto-theoretical reflections, and theoretical frameworks into a more fluid reading experience that does not announce itself as scholarship (capital “S”) but is making important claims with significant stakes. Perhaps this is a style swerve more than anything, but with every new research project I think more about the how as it connects to the what and why.

5. If any come to mind, are there books in African American literary studies that you see your work in conversation with?

Annette Debo’s The Necessary Past: Revising History in Contemporary African American Poetry
Saidiya Hartman’s Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals
Kevin Quashie’s The Sovereignty of Quiet: Beyond Resistance in Black Culture
Ryan Sharp’s Another Throat: Twenty-First-Century Black U.S. Persona Poetry and the Archive

As an aside, I’m always in conversation with The Honeyfish Collective scholars and poets: Sequoia Maner, darlene anita scott, Sharon Lynette Jones, Leah Milne, and Katy Didden. They are the ever astute and encouraging voices in my head as I am writing and thinking (friends of my mind, as Morrison might say).