Alongside minstrel shows, Wild West shows, and vaudeville, the circus was one of numerous forms of entertainment that demonstrated the complex relationship between performer, performance, and audience during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Sakina M. Hughes explores this intricate web of interactions in Music, Muscle, and Masterful Arts: Black and Indigenous Performers of the Circus Age. Specifically focusing on the experiences of African American and Native American entertainers between roughly 1870 and 1920, Hughes carefully unpacks the ways that their performances enabled them to resist racist depictions of nonwhite people and build lives for themselves within and against a traveling entertainment industry that at once mocked them and relied on their labor and authenticity to sell particular narratives about the nation and its past and future. Following in the footsteps of cultural historians such as Janet Davis and Joy Kasson, Hughes offers an in-depth examination of the lives of Black and Indigenous performers through the intersection of race, gender, class, and disability. Underlining her focus on performers of color is also the history of the traveling entertainment industry and how it was shaped by technological advances like the transcontinental railroad and the phonograph.

Drawing on company promotional material, photographs, newspapers, and other archival documents, Hughes provides a nuanced reading of Black and Indigenous experiences within and alongside the circus, showing how Black women, for instance, had to navigate their race and gender during their interactions with circus employers and white audiences. This is one of the numerous examples of the intersectional analysis that runs throughout the book. Through her focus on these Black and Native performers, Hughes also expertly emphasizes the circus, minstrel show, medicine show, and Wild West show as both distinct entertainment forms and productions that bled into one another. Her focus on performers of color further illuminates this phenomenon. As she writes, “These venues were inseparable, as entertainers and laborers fluidly moved, season by season, from one to the next” (6).

Starting with a broader exploration of the circus in relation to other entertainment forms in chapter one, Hughes goes on in the second chapter to examine how Black artists shaped the circus industry and musical genres like jazz. The specific roles African Americans held in the circus—whether as performing artists such as kinkers (skilled performing artists) or as manual laborers such as horse drivers —is the subject of chapter three. Although Native American experiences appear to some degree in these earlier chapters, it is in the fourth chapter where Hughes offers a more detailed discussion of Indigenous experiences in Wild West shows against the backdrop of a settler colonial logic that marked them as one-dimensional, uncivilized, and quickly dying out. The fifth and final chapter turns attention to two midwestern towns to discuss how Black and Indigenous performers created enriching lives for themselves and their families. In Peru, Indiana, and Columbus, Ohio, African Americans and Native Americans used the circus to establish communities in the face of Jim Crow segregation and forced removal as a result of westward expansion. It is here where the legacies of slavery and settler colonialism emerge most explicitly in the text.

What Hughes does best is illuminate the agency of performers of color, showing in detail how they responded to segregation and outright exclusion from various traveling companies and crafted their own spaces of entertainment and upward mobility. Black and Indigenous performers were not merely passive victims of discriminatory practices and representations but were instead active agents of their own livelihood and the well-being of their communities. Newspaper articles especially reveal the relationships that these performers established with Black and Indigenous audiences, highlighting the fan culture these productions encouraged. For performers such as Millie and Christine McKoy—conjoined twins born into slavery during the mid-nineteenth century who went on to perform all across the country and even in England for Queen Victoria—performance was not simply a means to financial security. Although they amassed a substantial fortune by the end of their career, they used their financial success to help Black communities, donating money to Black churches and schools and eventually establishing a school for Black children in North Carolina. Despite years of white audiences gazing upon their bodies as spectacle, the McKoy sisters took control over their lives and gave back to causes that were important to them. Their story is one of many that Hughes highlights in the book to showcase resistance by Black and Indigenous entertainers.

“Why, there were no Black or Indian people in the circus!” This was the response Hughes received from an archivist when relaying her research interests at the beginning of this project (14). This response, of course, did not deter Hughes, who went on to prove the archivist decisively wrong. Music, Muscle, and Masterful Arts not only shows the presence of Black and Native circus performers in the archival record but also illuminates the myriad ways they shaped this entertainment industry at a time when people of color had limited opportunities for upward mobility and faced racial violence on a daily basis. This book is excellent reading for cultural historians and students interested in Black and Indigenous histories through the lens of performance.