Two new publications

 The end of 2021 brought two new article publications for me. Both have been in the works for a long time... Both connect to my interest in recovering and retelling somewhat forgotten stories of African American theater and performance in the mid-20th Century: And both are connected to the theater history of Philadelphia, another scholarly interest of mine...

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  Philadelphia production of One-Third of a Nation, 1938

  "Caricatured, Marginalized, and Erased: African American Artists and Philadelphia's Negro Unit of
  the Federal Theatre Project, 1935-1939," in the latest volume of the peer-reviewed journal Theatre History Studies. The article tells the stories of three different productions with African American performers that were staged in Philadelphia at the Walnut Street Theater during the Great Depression, under the Federal Theatre Project (part of the New Deal program Works Progress Administration). 
  
  
  
  
  
  

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  Wayland Rudd in Eugene O'Neill's 
  The Emperor Jones (1930)

  "Before Rudd Was Russian: The Hidden History of a Trailblazing African American Actor," in the book The Wayland Rudd Collection (ed. Yevgeniy Fiks, Ugly Duckling Press). Wayland Rudd was an actor who got his start at the Hedgerow Theatre in Rose Valley, PA in the 1920s. Rudd received much critical acclaim for his acting at Hedgerow, and then moved to New York. But he became disillusioned with racism in the United States, and soon emigrated to Russia—one of a group of Black actors of the era attracted by the propsect of racial justice in that country. Rudd continued his acclaimed acting career in film and theater in the Soviet Union. (Here's a good bio of Rudd.)
  
  The book is the companion to an art exhibition that toured a few years ago. According to Ugly Duckling Presse, "Bringing together post-colonial and post-Soviet perspectives, the book maps the complicated and often contradictory intersection of race and Communism in the Soviet context, exposing the interweaving of internationalism, solidarity, humanism, and Communist ideals with practices of othering and exoticization." I was pleased to contribute with an essay about Rudd's achievements as an actor in the United States before he emigrated in 1932.

Let me know if you want to read either of these articles.