Early in his excellent new book, Shane Vogel reproduces an admiring inscription from a presentation copy of Langston Hughes's 1927 poetry collection Fine Clothes to the Jew. It is from Hughes to Havelock Ellis, the most influential sexologist of his time, slyly commending to him “these songs and poems of a simple people.” “Simple” was a Russian doll of a word for Hughes, and Vogel suggests that – far from racial abasement – Hughes's inscription positioned his poems of the cabaret and “everynight life” as an alternative sexology to the scientific classifications of Ellis, one less interested in taxonomy and pathology than in celebrating queerly intimate forms of association that took place after hours and off the map. Vogel places Hughes as the quintessential figure in a “cabaret school” of writers who turned to Harlem's nightlife as a way of articulating a politics of liberation based in the performance of public intimacy, rather than in playing the game of refuting stereotypes of African American life, or arguing for a better footing in rigid classifications of sexual, racial and class identity. This was in deliberate contrast to the rhetoric of uplift typified by W. E. B. Du Bois, which installed bourgeois concepts of continence, family, economy and culture both as norms to judge by and as a beacon to follow. Reading the cabaret school as “against uplift,” Vogel connects their literary scenes of rambunctious nightlife with an often evanescent archive of actual cabaret photographs, memoirs and performances. He then demonstrates how frequently these scenes, spaces and routines neither uncritically pandered to white tastes for the exotic primitive nor reneged on commitments to racial justice, but instead placed the queering power of the intimate and the ordinary at the heart of their politics.

The book has many strengths, not least that Vogel's style delights in the sense of fun and irreverence that animates his topic, rather than stultifying it in the theoretical languages of identity. This is fused with a sophistication that consistently rejuvenates debates about racial representation in the Harlem Renaissance that have often become wearily familiar. For example, he revisits Du Bois's infamous review of Claude McKay's urban picaresque novel Home to Harlem, but not to rehearse Du Bois's oft-quoted moral outrage at McKay's gleeful depictions of sexual and narcotic indulgence. Instead, he deftly examines Du Bois's recollections of his experiences of dance as a young man, and how this informed a more modulated approach to what he termed the “problem of amusement” than he is often credited with. He offers fresh readings of familiar cabaret scenes by Nella Larsen and Zora Neale Hurston – and compellingly conscripts Lena Horne's nightlife persona of noncommittal aloofness into his “cabaret school.”

Some will feel that Vogel overstresses the political valence of performance at the expense of more traditional roadmaps to racial justice in the US. This applies particularly to uplift, which is in danger of becoming a straw man in some recent African American cultural criticism, but also communism, which barely registers in his accounts of Claude McKay and Hughes – despite the importance of Marxism to both writers' understandings of the economy of entertainment. Its heart is also in Harlem, despite the tantalizing potentialities of the transnational inflections of cabaret performance that the book briefly explores – which illustrate that the norms of state and nation were just as challenged by the fluidities of everynight intimacy as were those of gender, race and class. This does little to detract from the book's achievements, though: Vogel's book is an elegant and engrossing synthesis of performance studies, queer theory and the increasingly sophisticated archival work that is reshaping Harlem Renaissance studies. In being so it suggests the mileage of attending more closely to what happens after closing time for the future of the field.