Transnational Cinematic and Popular Music Icons: Lena Horne, Dorothy Dandridge, and Queen Latifah, 1917-2017

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Transnational Cinematic & Popular Music Icons: Lena Horne, Dorothy Dandridge, & Queen Latifah, 1917-2017 centers twentieth and twenty-first century black-transnational stereotypes, celebrities, and symbols Lena Horne's, Dorothy Dandridge;s, and Queen Latifahs transnational popular cultural struggles between domination and autonomy, with a particular emphasis on their films and popular music. Linking each performer to twentieth century U.S., African-American, and global gender histories and noting the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, class, and empire in their overlapping transnational biographies, Transnational Cinematic & Popular Music Icons: Lena Horne, Dorothy Dandridge, & Queen Latifah, 1917-2017 connects Horne, Dandridge, and Latifah to each other and legacies of Hollywood stereotypes and popular musics internationally-routed politics. Through a close reading of Horne's, Dandridge's, and Latifahs films and popular music, the performers tie to historic black-transnational caricatures, from the tragic mulatto to Sapphire, Mammy, and Jezebel, and additional, non-white female performers, from Josephine Baker to Halle Berry, maneuvering within transnational popular culture industrial matrices and against white supremacist and hetero-patriarchal forces.

Author Bio

Aaron E. Lefkovitz teaches U.S. history at Harold Washington College, The City Colleges of Chicago, and DePaul University.