As an African American performing on the popular stage in the late 1800s and early 1900s, Aida Overton Walker’s body was rendered highly visible by her craft. Her body was automatically coded as deviant because of her race and gender. Caricatured as hypersexual by white minstrels, African American women’s bodies were viewed as sexual, available-a remnant of slavery and continued oppression under Jim Crow laws and etiquette. Overton Walker fought against this codification, often working within middle class Victorian ideals of dress and comportment. She made clear through the careful presentation of her body and ideas in publications that she was politically and socially aware of her precarious position and the potential for ideological disruption of stereotype. Although not in control of her public image, Overton Walker may have asserted agency over photos accompanying advertisements, reviews, and articles related to various performances. These depictions presented her as a carefully adorned, proud, beautiful woman at a time when the public might have preferred she embrace stereotypes of her race. Drawn comic representations were outside of her purview, and control; they depicted her as having literally black skin, wild hair, and dancing in a frenzied fashion. Gone were the classic poses of carefully taken photos and the way she held her body to show she possessed grace, poise, and skill. I argue that photographic representations of the performer unsettle prevailing ideologies of race, class, gender around the turn of the century. Photographs of Overton Walker were a stark contrast to those ideologies, especially when juxtaposed with comic or sketched representations. Through visual cultural evidence, viewers were confronted with a complex, multifaceted image of an African American woman, rather than the “Mammy,” “Jezebel,” or “Sapphire” of white supremacist mythology.
About the presenterJessica A. Saltzberg
Jessica Saltzberg is a doctoral candidate in the American Studies Program at the University at Buffalo. Her research interests include text and visual representations of minorities in the media in the 19th and 20th centuries, and African American History and Literature. Her dissertation focuses on media representations of African American female vaudeville performer Aida Overton Walker at the turn of the century, and the way in which they trouble dominant ideologies of race, class, and gender.