Promotions - Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles 2023 -

Jacobson (American studies and history, Yale) explores the terms of assimilation and resistance by celebrity entertainer Davis (1925-1990) from the 1940s to the 1980s. Not exactly a biography, this subtle, expansive study is a scaffold for a searing assessment of white racism that forced African American entertainers into hard spaces during the long civil rights era. The biographical details Jacobson includes demonstrate that Davis endured racism at every turn--from his childhood in vaudeville through his military service and performances on Broadway and in Hollywood; his work in Vegas and on television; his public interracial relationships; his celebratory autobiography Yes I Can (1965); and his work directly aligned with the Civil Rights Movement. Paying careful attention to the aesthetic and political structures surrounding popular entertainment, Jacobson portrays Davis as caught amid difficult forces, struggling to survive at the whims of white producers and of the Rat Pack, whose "good-natured hijinks suggested ... the extent to which racism was so deeply rooted as to inflect the very logic of American culture, including--and perhaps especially--American liberalism" (p. 119). Davis, who interacted personally with Martin Luther King Jr. and Richard Nixon, emerges as a complex cultural worker whose outstanding artistry allowed him access to worlds that modeled "self-emancipation" from strictures of white racism.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; professionals; general readers.