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date: 18 January 2021

Abstract and Keywords

The career of acclaimed tap dancer Jeni LeGon is remarkable not only for her style but also for the ways in which she navigated the racial politics of the 1930s Hollywood film industry. This chapter examines how identity politics affected LeGon’s movements on and off both stage and screen. Hollywood lacked the political will to commit to LeGon, but she countered with a black will to maintain control and subjectivity. As a light-complexioned African American woman cast in a variety of ethnic roles she demonstrates the fungibility of black and brown bodies. When she presented as both cutesy and powerhouse, and when she performed male lines of business in pants, she troubled conceptions of gender. That the same body read subservient in white films and leading lady in black films tells us about not only the practices of an industry but also the audience’s phenomenological experiences of race.

Keywords: Jeni LeGon, identity politics, political will, black will, Hollywood, tap dance, African American, gender, race, black films

Nadine George-Graves

Nadine George-Graves (BA, Yale; PhD, Northwestern) is Professor of theater and dance at the University of California, San Diego. Her work is situated at the intersections of African American studies, gender studies, performance studies, theater history, and dance history. She is the author of The Royalty of Negro Vaudeville: The Whitman Sisters and the Negotiation of Race, Gender, and Class in African American Theater, 1900–1940 and Urban Bush Women: Twenty Years of Dance Theater, Community Engagement and Working It Out as well as numerous articles on African American theater and dance. Her recent creative projects include directing Suzan-Lori Parks’s Topdog/Underdog, adapting and directing Anansi the Story King, an original dance theater production of African American folk stories using college students, professionals, and fourth graders, and Architectura, a dance theater piece about the ways in which we build our lives. She currently serves as president of the Congress on Research in Dance (CORD).

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