Stealing the Show: African American Performers and Audiences in 1930s Hollywood by Miriam J. Petty (review)

• Published in: JCMS : Journal of cinema and media studies Vol. 58; no. 1; pp. 199 - 203
• Main Author: Sheppard, Samantha N
• Format: Journal Article Book Review
• Language: English
• Published: Austin Michigan Publishing 01.10.2018; Michigan Publishing (University of Michigan Library)
• Subjects: Actors; African Americans; Audiences; Essays; Film history; Ideology; Mass media; McDaniel, Hattie (1895-1952); Morrison, Toni (1931-2019); Motion pictures; Perry, Lincoln Theodore (1902-1985); Race; Reading; Slavery; Spectatorship; United States > US; California
• ISSN: 2578-4900; 2578-4919; 2578-4919
• DOI: 10.1353/cj.2018.0086

In the past decade, scholars have shifted the historical, theoretical, and critical conversations around American cinema and African American filmgoing, specifically attending to the on-screen figures, critical discourses, and spectatorial practices during early cinema and the studio system.5 Film historians have delved into the complex and often fraught performative practices of African American entertainers and the varied and sometimes contradictory discourses produced by Black audiences. Beginning in the book’s first chapter with Hattie McDaniel and the iconic image of “Mammy” in Gone with the Wind (Victor Fleming, 1939), Petty manages to reveal new depths of this overdetermined cinematic figure while addressing the actress’s artistry on-screen and the promotional tactics she used to appeal to Black audiences who condemned and celebrated her Academy Award–winning portrayal. 15 This nod to the present in Stealing the Show invites readers to consider the broad scope of Petty’s arguments and the “critical questions about the nature of stardom as inflected by American racial ideologies” in and beyond the 1930s.16 There is so much that this excellent book says about Black stars and audiences today in what Kristen J. Warner calls the “time of plastic representation” in Hollywood.17 Stealing the Show should inspire cinema and media scholars to expand on this stunning contribution to the field by looking back at the roles of other “picture stealers” in the studio era and thinking forward to their modern-day counterparts. Duke University Press, 2015); and Ellen C. Scott’s Cinema Civil Rights: Regulation, Repression, and Race in the Classical Hollywood Era (New Brunswick, NJ: