'Evah Dahkey is a king:' In Dahomey and the representation of racial authenticity

This paper explores the presentation and commodification of Black authenticity in the 1903 musical, In Dahomey. In Dahomey, a production of the Williams and Walker Theater Company, was the first musical on Broadway completely written and performed by African Americans. The musical, with book by Paul Laurence Dunbar, music by Will Marion Cook, and starring Bert Williams and George Walker, loosely followed a plot based around a back-to-African colonialization scam, wherein two street-wise African Americans decide to take advantage of the potential gains in moving to the nation of Dahomey, now Benin. An incredibly successful production, In Dahomey toured the United States and Great Britain, performing a script that simultaneously challenged and affirmed expectations of African American representation on the stage. Through historical ethnographic methods, this paper recreates the creative milieu of late 19th/early 20th century New York known by scholars as Black Bohemia and explores how the members of the Williams and Walker Theater Company who were part of that social set used their performances, both on stage and in the media, to communicate subversive messages of self-determination and identity to Black audiences, while masking that intent with the vestigial minstrel tropes White audiences had long found palatable. With a textual analysis of the lyrics and scripts, transposed with a visual analysis of the published sheet-music, and then contextualized through the public and private statements of participants and observers, this paper presents evidence that the long-footnoted musical In Dahomey was, in fact, an important marker in the evolution of Black expressive arts in America.