The Rebel Café: Sex, Race, and Politics in Cold War America's Nightclub Underground

by Stephen R. Duncan

Overview

Subterranean nightspots in 1950s New York and San Francisco were social, cultural, and political hothouses for left-wing bohemians.

The art and antics of rebellious figures in 1950s American nightlife—from the Beat Generation to eccentric jazz musicians and comedians—have long fascinated fans and scholars alike. In The Rebel Café, Stephen R. Duncan flips the frame, focusing on the New York and San Francisco bars, nightclubs, and coffeehouses from which these cultural icons emerged. Duncan shows that the sexy, smoky sites of bohemian Greenwich Village and North Beach offered not just entertainment but doorways to a new sociopolitical consciousness.

This book is a collective biography of the places that harbored beatniks, blabbermouths, hipsters, playboys, and partisans who altered the shape of postwar liberal politics and culture. Throughout this period, Duncan argues, nightspots were crucial—albeit informal—institutions of the American democratic public sphere. Amid the Red Scare’s repressive politics, the urban underground of New York and San Francisco acted as both a fallout shelter for left-wingers and a laboratory for social experimentation.

Touching on literary figures from Norman Mailer and Amiri Baraka to Susan Sontag as well as performers ranging from Dave Brubeck to Maya Angelou to Lenny Bruce, The Rebel Café profiles hot spots such as the Village Vanguard, the hungry i, the Black Cat Cafe, and the White Horse Tavern. Ultimately, the book provides a deeper view of 1950s America, not simply as the black-and-white precursor to the Technicolor flamboyance of the sixties but as a rich period of artistic expression and identity formation that blended cultural production and politics.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781421426334
Publisher:	Johns Hopkins University Press
Publication date:	11/01/2018
Pages:	336
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.10(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Stephen R. Duncan is an assistant professor of history at Bronx Community College of the City University of New York.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Maps of North Beach and Greenwich Village

Introduction. Can You Show Me the Way to the Rebel Café?
Chapter One. Blue Angels, Black Cats, and Reds: Cabaret and the Left-Wing Roots of the Rebel Café
Chapter Two. Subterranean Aviators: Postwar America's Literary Underground
Chapter Three. Bop Apocalypse, Freedom Now!: Jazz, Civil Rights, and the Politics of Cross-Racial Desire
Chapter Four. Beatniks and Blabbermouths, Bartok and Bar Talk: New Bohemia and the Search for Community
Chapter Five. Rise of the "Sickniks": Nightclubs, Humor, and the Public Sphere
Chapter Six. The New Cabaret: Performance, Personal Politics, and the End of the Rebel Café
Conclusion. Playboys and Partisans: American Culture, the New Left, and the Legacy of the Rebel Café

Notes
Index

What People are Saying About This

Howard Brick

"Stephen Duncan offers a palpable sense of place and space as he tours the salon-like taverns and basement clubs of mid-twentieth-century Greenwich Village and San Francisco’s North Beach—proof that a period of astonishing creativity from the late 1940s to early 1960s possessed a cultural character all its own."

Stephen Kercher

"By vividly reconstructing the creative, communal, and liberating spaces that North Beach and Greenwich Village nightspots afforded a broad range of midcentury dissenters and nonconformists, Duncan's nuanced and highly original study provides us with a new appreciation for the distinct geographies and social networks that helped sustain bohemian culture in America."

Jerald Podair

"An indispensable guide to the unique cultural moment when a bicoastal group of underground rebels broke with the past and planted the seeds of the open, ironic, and transgressive American culture of the twenty-first century. If you want to know how we got from there to here, this is the book."

From the Publisher

I read this book with great admiration. Once and for all, Duncan consigns the thesis of the monolithic conformism of 1950s America to the dustbin of history. No other historian has analyzed so well, so sensibly, and so thoroughly the politics and aesthetics of this generation of artists, intellectuals, and activists across its numerous gender, sexual, and racial divisions.
—Saverio Giovacchini, University of Maryland, College Park, author of Hollywood Modernism: Film and Politics in the Age of the New Deal

Duncan makes the compelling argument that the 'nightclub underground' represented a clear counter-public in the cities of San Francisco and New York. An excellent book.
—Jon Shelton, University of Wisconsin–Green Bay, author of Teacher Strike!: Public Education and the Making of a New American Political Order

An indispensable guide to the unique cultural moment when a bicoastal group of underground rebels broke with the past and planted the seeds of the open, ironic, and transgressive American culture of the twenty-first century. If you want to know how we got from there to here, this is the book.
—Jerald Podair, Lawrence University, coeditor of The Routledge History of the Twentieth-Century United States

By vividly reconstructing the creative, communal, and liberating spaces that North Beach and Greenwich Village nightspots afforded a broad range of midcentury dissenters and nonconformists, Duncan's nuanced and highly original study provides us with a new appreciation for the distinct geographies and social networks that helped sustain bohemian culture in America.
—Stephen Kercher, University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh, author of Revel with a Cause: Liberal Satire in Postwar America

Stephen Duncan offers a palpable sense of place and space as he tours the salon-like taverns and basement clubs of mid-twentieth-century Greenwich Village and San Francisco’s North Beach—proof that a period of astonishing creativity from the late 1940s to early 1960s possessed a cultural character all its own.
—Howard Brick, University of Michigan, coauthor of Radicals in America: The U.S. Left since the Second World War

Jon Shelton

"Duncan makes the compelling argument that the 'nightclub underground' represented a clear counter-public in the cities of San Francisco and New York. An excellent book."

Saverio Giovacchini

"I read this book with great admiration. Once and for all, Duncan consigns the thesis of the monolithic conformism of 1950s America to the dustbin of history. No other historian has analyzed so well, so sensibly, and so thoroughly the politics and aesthetics of this generation of artists, intellectuals, and activists across its numerous gender, sexual, and racial divisions."

Editorial Reviews

An outstanding work of cultural history that is also one of cultural geography. Rarely has a book about a subculture revealed such an extraordinary sense of place. [Duncan] animates the Village for those who only heard it described as a bohemian utopia. The San Remo, the Village Vanguard, and the White Horse Tavern leap from names on the page to places in the memory, causing readers who know the territory to pause and remember a scene that is no more . . . Reaching the end of Duncan's remarkable book, I could not help but think of King Arthur's reflections in the final scene of the Broadway musical Camelot (1960): "For one brief shining hour" there was something known as Camelot. Such was Greenwich Village, as lovingly recreated by Duncan.
—Bernard F. Dick, Fairleigh Dickinson University, H-Diplo

From the Publisher

An outstanding work of cultural history that is also one of cultural geography. Rarely has a book about a subculture revealed such an extraordinary sense of place. [Duncan] animates the Village for those who only heard it described as a bohemian utopia. The San Remo, the Village Vanguard, and the White Horse Tavern leap from names on the page to places in the memory, causing readers who know the territory to pause and remember a scene that is no more . . . Reaching the end of Duncan's remarkable book, I could not help but think of King Arthur's reflections in the final scene of the Broadway musical Camelot (1960): "For one brief shining hour" there was something known as Camelot. Such was Greenwich Village, as lovingly recreated by Duncan.

H-Diplo - Bernard F. Dick