Shane Vogel

“Stolen Time” is a book-length cultural history of the calypso craze that swept the United States in the late 1950s. It tracks the popularity of calypso across different types of postwar middlebrow entertainment, including sound recordings, nightclub acts, television broadcasts, Broadway musicals, and films. Across these media, it argues that black performers used the professional, historical, and musical opportunities afforded by this mass cultural event to expand African American history and deepen its relationship to diasporic consciousness.