How booze, drunkenness, and theatricality perpetuated racist stereotypes in Prohibition-Era Harlem

What is it about?

As temperance historian W. J. Rorabaugh has asserted, “drinking often occurs in proximity to power.” While this project began as a simple noticing of the presence of alcohol within a variety of immersive theatre performances today, it progressed into a far wider-reaching analysis of how drinking has worked historically in facilitating performances of power and inequality in New York City. White patrons of Harlem’s famous Cotton Club, for example, were intoxicated not only by the bootlegged whiskey in their highball glasses, but on the stereotyped fantasy of blackness fostered by the venue and the performances therein.

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