A Picture of Modern Black Life

Abstract Focusing on Oscar Micheaux’s The Exile (1931), this chapter examines the functions of musical specialty numbers in “Race movies”—the period term for feature films with largely or entirely African American casts, produced for African American audiences, by Black- or interracially managed independent companies. Ubiquitous in these companies’ 1930s and ’40s productions, such scenes feature star singers, dancers, and musicians performing as themselves in diegetic cabaret scenes. The chapter argues that specialties grounded Race filmmaking, which struggled to reorganize itself after the transition to sound, in a preexisting musical culture that Black audiences associated with aesthetic excellence and cultural modernity; made available new channels for Black authorship; and disrupted the aesthetics and politics of respectability that determine these films’ narratives. Literally stopping the show, specialty numbers provided alternative sites of raced and gendered self-fashioning on screen, counterbalancing the normative figures of the “Race woman” and “Race man.”