Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: In 1965, Frank Sinatra turned 50. In a Las Vegas engagement that year at the Sands Hotel, he made much of this fact, turning the entire performance—captured in the classic recording Sinatra at the Sands (1966)—into a meditation on aging, artistry, and maturity (“You Make Me Feel So Young,” “The September of My Years,” “It Was a Very Good Year”). Not only have few commentators noticed this, they haven’t noticed either that Sinatra’s way of negotiating the reality of age depended on a series of masks—blackface mostly, but also street Italianness and other guises. Though the Count Basie band backed him on these dates, Sinatra deployed Amos ‘n’ Andy shtick (lots of it) to vivify his persona; mocking Sammy Davis Jr. even as he adopted the speech patterns and vocal mannerisms of blacking up, he maneuvered around the threat of decrepitude and remasculinized himself in recognizably Rat-Pack ways. This talk will discuss how Sinatra’s Italian accents depended on an imagined blackness both mocked and ghosted in the exemplary performances of Sinatra at the Sands.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: Despite the prevalence of investigations into the condition of African Americans in the media, few analyses have been done of the radio medium, and even less of the representations of Black females on the radio. This paper endeavors to fill both these voids in scholarship by exploring how radio programming (fictional) of the first half of the 20th century created and presented Black females to its audiences. Using as its text the controversial Amos n’ Andy radio show, the preeminent and definitive program that aired between 1929 and 1945, the treatise examines the ways in which Black women were constructed in the years between WWI and WWII. I argue that Black women were depicted as hybrids, and as possessing features of liminality, as bodies “out of order.” They were thus established as symbols of the age, and therefore potential outlets for the frustrations and anxieties that characterized the time. The arguments presented in this paper are informed by the works of Fredric Jameson who contextualizes cultural texts in history, and Mary Douglas who perceives discourses about the human body as metaphor for occurrences in the societal body.