Sarah Vaughan with Clifford Brown: A Classic Date Remembered
Gems of Jazz commemorates the date, December 18th, in 1954, when Sarah Vaughan and a roomful of estimable musicians completed the splendid Emarcy recording that became Sarah Vaughan with Clifford Brown. Clifford Brown is unquestionably memorable on that recording, but so were contributions from Paul Quinichette, Herbie Mann and Roy Haynes, whose authority anchors the session for me. An indispensable document of modern jazz and song at peak.
The Content of Our Caricature: African American Comic Art and Political Belonging (Postmillennial Pop) (2020)
“Revealing the long aesthetic tradition of African American cartoonists who have made use of racist caricature as a black diasporic art practice, Rebecca Wanzo demonstrates how these artists have resisted histories of visual imperialism and their legacies. Moving beyond binaries of positive and negative representation, many black cartoonists have used caricatures to criticize constructions of ideal citizenship in the United States, as well as the alienation of African Americans from such imaginaries. The Content of Our Caricature urges readers to recognize how the wide circulation of comic and cartoon art contributes to a common language of both national belonging and exclusion in the United States.
Historically, white artists have rendered white caricatures as virtuous representations of American identity, while their caricatures of African Americans are excluded from these kinds of idealized discourses. Employing a rich illustration program of color and black-and-white reproductions, Wanzo explores the works of artists such as Sam Milai, Larry Fuller, Richard “Grass” Green, Brumsic Brandon Jr., Jennifer Cruté, Aaron McGruder, Kyle Baker, Ollie Harrington, and George Herriman, all of whom negotiate and navigate this troublesome history of caricature. The Content of Our Caricature arrives at a gateway to understanding how a visual grammar of citizenship, and hence American identity itself, has been constructed.”
Rebecca Wanzo is Associate Professor of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Washington University in St. Louis. She is the author of The Suffering Will Not Be Televised: African American Women and Sentimental Political Storytelling (2009).
