Disintegrating the Musical

"Knight's fine book is compelling reading that takes black cinema scholarship into new unmapped issues and territories. Notable is Knight's thoroughly innovative and nuanced discussion of 'blackface' (and its 'whiteface' counterpoint) and how blacks deployed forms of 'black blackface, ' to discover pain, pleasure and irony in its complexities. Importantly, Knight charts the power of black musical performance, illuminating the schizophrenic disjuncture between the pervasive influence of the black Jazz sound and the simultaneous erasure, segregation, or devaluation of the African American musician's visual presence in mainstream cinema. "Disintegrating The Musical "casts its arguments in bold, lucid strokes, standing out as a solid contribution to the fields of cinema and performance studies and Jazz scholarship."--Ed Guerrero, New York University

Arthur Knight is Associate Professor of American Studies and English at the College of William and Mary.