In spite of the long-acknowledged presence of calypso in nightclubs and on records in the United States, scholars of the music such as Ray Funk and Donald Hill argue that the calypso craze owed its sudden success to the work of Harry Belafonte, the American-born child of Jamaican immigrants. Belafonte's success subsequently allowed many more opportunities for other black creatives, though not without difficulty. What was it about Belafonte that fostered this unprecedented breakthrough into mainstream culture, though? How did a music that was once a subculture, marked by its association with blackness, suddenly and seemingly become an overnight rage?
Stolen Time is an impressive book that addresses the artistic and expressive responses of black performers toward the commodification of calypso music during the 1950s. Critically, however, this study is not an exploration of tropes of authenticity or mimicry. Nor does it focus on issues surrounding the cultural appropriation of calypso during this period. What Vogel presents, instead, is a new (generative and celebratory) way of conceiving of the calypso craze—not merely as racial kitsch, but as a platform through which black performers could renegotiate multiple senses of agency. The concept of “stolen time” thus represents the ways that black fad performers were able to resist and challenge existing structures amid the complexities of the Jim Crow era even as they operated from within the constraints of the fad cycle.
Emerging from his analysis of the earlier black fad cycles of ragtime and the Negro vogue, Vogel identifies several “recurrent patterns” of these crazes: the impact of technological transformations on black fad performance, the formation of collaborative networks among black performers, and the challenging of the color line, which created space for discussions of authenticity and inauthenticity (41). Vogel uses these patterns to demonstrate how black fad performers “stole time” through nightclub acts, recordings, film, television, theatre, and dance. Although it may seem like a large undertaking to address so many art forms, one of Vogel's primary aims is to demystify the tension in the field of performance studies between live and mediated, real and not real performance. Thus, rather than merely writing about specific performative moments, Vogel also examines the ways that these performative acts have themselves been mediated.
The book is as much a critical intervention into the discourse on blackness in 1950s American popular culture as it is about black fad performance cycles and the reclamation of power through stolen time. Vogel demonstrates the plurality of blackness—blackness as difference—by emphasizing critical, yet often overlooked, histories of African American popular culture in the United States. The author always presents this analysis in immediate relation to the tensions and resolutions the performers faced in negotiating tropes of authenticity and inauthenticity. For instance, Vogel centers much of the introductory chapter on Harry Belafonte in relation to the calypso craze. By so doing, he demonstrates how Belafonte's image “based on a dignified, suave, and—most importantly—unthreatening masculinity” (21) contributed tremendously to the “middlebrowification of blackness” (20) and by extension the growth of the calypso craze. Issues of authenticity and inauthenticity in this text, therefore, do not reflect notions about replication. Rather, they explain how black fad performers contended with the middlebrow desire for the authentic, and furthermore the complexities of fulfilling this desire when considering the multiplicity of blackness.
The book, therefore, not only focuses on African American performers but also places the Caribbean at the forefront of the calypso fad. Belafonte's stardom, for instance, was related in complex ways to the fact that he was neither Caribbean-born nor Trinidadian. Vogel's critical intervention of blackness as plurality can also be seen in his work on Trinidad-born dancer Geoffrey Holder during the calypso craze. Vogel demonstrates the ways that Holder navigates the demands of the fad as an Afro-Caribbean man who must perform a version of blackness that is in itself already a performance of another, distinctly curated blackness. In this way, the book adds significantly to the documentation on the cultural contributions of Caribbean, and specifically Trinidadian, peoples, highlighting often overlooked histories of the entanglements of African American cultural forms with Afro-Caribbean forms as well as stories of exchange and collaboration between African American and Afro-Caribbean performers.
Stolen Time, as text and concept, performs a call to arms to scholars of various fields to engage in more collaborative research that is neither defined by nor confined to disciplinary boundaries. As we see in his exploration of the plurality of blackness, such work has great implications for future research in black studies, Caribbean studies, Afro-diasporic studies, performance studies, and more.
