The African American Theatrical Body: Reception, Performance, and the Stage. By Soyica Diggs Colbert. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011; pp. xiii + 329, 11 illustrations. $99 cloth, $79 e-book.

Abstract

her offstage love life and the professional persona she developed as one of America's earliest sex symbols. Menken was indeed an anomaly in the Victorian era due in part to her five marriages and to her unapologetic and public attitude toward female sexuality; however, the authors' editorializing about her most intimate personal moments (including fictionalized descriptions and comparisons of her wedding nights with different husbands) trivializes her relationships and distracts from her work as a professional artist at a time when attemptingand succeeding at-such a career as a woman was a rarity. Menken's success is both worthy and in need of further serious treatment and research by theatre historians.But theatre historians the Fosters are not, and in some ways this may contribute to more successful aspects of the book that receive less attention in other scholars' treatments of Menken. (Daphne Brooks's chapter on Menken in the excellent Bodies in Dissent [Duke UP, 2006], not cited by the Fosters, comes immediately to mind.) One positive and significant contribution the authors make is a strong emphasis and reliance on Menken's poetry, which was widely published in periodicals during her life, and in a collected volume posthumously. Noting the personal nature of Menken's poems, the authors identify and trace themes important to the artist throughout her career: love, respect, trust, and an eerie premonition that she would meet an untimely death. They convincingly suggest these poems offer readers a vulnerable vantage point from which to consider Menken as not only an objectified but successful international superstar, but also a lonely, peerless woman in search of personal and professional security.While vastly different in tone, approach, and scope, Cheng's and Foster and Foster's work reminds me of the importance of histories that will continue to broaden our understanding of, and suggest new perspectives on, women's contributions to the development of American theatre and popular entertainment, and their roles in the cross-cultural circulation of ideas, style, and art on the worlds' great stages. These books on two well-known female performers demonstrate that there is still much to be said about even our most treasured artists, and even more to be discovered about those who have fallen out of view but are waiting in the archival wings to be called, once again, to center stage. • • •