Table of Contents

Introduction: Portraits of Black Fame, or The Past as Blueprint for the Present       
Chapter 1: “my black body / thrown free”: The Legacy of Jack Johnson in Kevin Young’s To Repel Ghosts: The Remix from the Original Masters                
Chapter 2: “More of a man than you”: The Many Faces of Jack Johnson in Adrian Matejka’s The Big Smoke                                         
Chapter 3: “The Sting of Race and Sport”: Revivifying Isaac Burns Murphy in Frank X Walker’s Isaac Murphy: I Dedicate This Ride                            
Chapter 4: “the overwhelming evidence of his artistry”: Wiping Away the Minstrel Mask in Caryl Phillips’s Dancing in the Dark                            
Chapter 5: “Blind Tom, Musical Prodigy of the Age”: Unrecoverability in Jeffery Renard Allen’s Song of the Shank                                     
Chapter 6: “Let this belting be our / unbinding”: Reconceptualizing Black Entertainment in Tyehimba Jess’s Olio                                      
Bibliography                                              
Endnotes                                              
Index                         

About the Author

EMILY RUTH RUTTER is an associate professor of English at Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana. She is the author of Invisible Ball of Dreams: Literary Representations of Baseball behind the Color Line and The Blues Muse: Race, Gender, and Musical Celebrity in American Poetry, as well as co-editor of Revisiting the Elegy in the Black Lives Matter Era.