Faye Hammill
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- June 2013
- ISBN:
- 9781846312328
- eISBN:
- 9781846316111
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5949/UPO9781846316111
- Subject:
- Literature, Film, Media, and Cultural Studies
In an era obsessed with celebrity and glamour, ‘sophistication’ has come to be perceived as the most desirable of human qualities, but it was not always so. This book explores how a word that once ...
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In an era obsessed with celebrity and glamour, ‘sophistication’ has come to be perceived as the most desirable of human qualities, but it was not always so. This book explores how a word that once meant falsification and perversion came to be regarded as signifying discrimination and refinement. The author provides a literary, linguistic and cultural route from the Romantics, via the emergence of the Dandy and then of Modernism, to that most sophisticated of figures, Noël Coward, and on to the meaning of sophistication in the twenty–first century. Ranging widely across historical documents, magazines, adverts, films and novels, this book will be compulsory reading for sophisticates and scholars.Less
In an era obsessed with celebrity and glamour, ‘sophistication’ has come to be perceived as the most desirable of human qualities, but it was not always so. This book explores how a word that once meant falsification and perversion came to be regarded as signifying discrimination and refinement. The author provides a literary, linguistic and cultural route from the Romantics, via the emergence of the Dandy and then of Modernism, to that most sophisticated of figures, Noël Coward, and on to the meaning of sophistication in the twenty–first century. Ranging widely across historical documents, magazines, adverts, films and novels, this book will be compulsory reading for sophisticates and scholars.
Anthea Kraut
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- November 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780199360369
- eISBN:
- 9780199360390
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199360369.003.0003
- Subject:
- Music, Dance
This chapter offers a case study of Johnny Hudgins, an African American blackface comic pantomimist who was famous in his time but is virtually forgotten today. In 1924, the white producer of the ...
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This chapter offers a case study of Johnny Hudgins, an African American blackface comic pantomimist who was famous in his time but is virtually forgotten today. In 1924, the white producer of the all-black musical The Chocolate Dandies sued Hudgins for breach of contract. Whitney v. Hudgins alleged that Hudgins was “unique and irreplaceable,” reportedly the first time such a claim had been made about an African American performer. In his ultimately successful defense, Hudgins disavowed any originality, maintaining that he was an entirely ordinary and expendable commodity. Several years later, Hudgins took a different stance when he obtained a copyright in London on his repertoire of pantomime acts. Reading the lawsuit and the copyright claim together, and reading both alongside Hudgins’s blackface routine, the chapter argues that Hudgins’s copyright was an attempt to counter a history of commodification by asserting himself as a subject rather than object of property.Less
This chapter offers a case study of Johnny Hudgins, an African American blackface comic pantomimist who was famous in his time but is virtually forgotten today. In 1924, the white producer of the all-black musical The Chocolate Dandies sued Hudgins for breach of contract. Whitney v. Hudgins alleged that Hudgins was “unique and irreplaceable,” reportedly the first time such a claim had been made about an African American performer. In his ultimately successful defense, Hudgins disavowed any originality, maintaining that he was an entirely ordinary and expendable commodity. Several years later, Hudgins took a different stance when he obtained a copyright in London on his repertoire of pantomime acts. Reading the lawsuit and the copyright claim together, and reading both alongside Hudgins’s blackface routine, the chapter argues that Hudgins’s copyright was an attempt to counter a history of commodification by asserting himself as a subject rather than object of property.
