Participants
Race, History, and Masquerade in James Sturm's The Golem's Mighty Swing
By Brian Cremins
Assistant Professor
Department of English
Louisiana State University
Baton Rouge, LA 70803
bcremins@lsu.edu
In 2001, cartoonist James Sturm published The Golem's Mighty Swing, the last volume in a trilogy of historical graphic novels devoted to different eras in American cultural history. This last volume features the story of the Stars of David, a fictional Jewish baseball team of the 1920s and their African American "clean-up batter," a player from the Negro Leagues named Henry Bell. "As a star of David," the narrator informs us, "he is Hershl Bloom (member of the lost tribe)" (Sturm 13). Having already taken on a new identity in order to join the team, Henry/Hershl later undergoes a second transformation, this time playing the role of a Golem in a costume based on the one worn by the creature in Paul Wegener’s 1920 German silent film Der Golem. The team's manager explains, "The public is eager for spectacle-they don't split hairs. I'm sure Hershl, excuse me, Henry will embrace this new role. Negroes, after all, are born performers" (Sturm 30). Dressed as the Golem when he takes to the field, Henry/Hershl becomes the most popular member of the team and increases the drawing power of the Stars of David across the country. Sturm's narrative, told in a spare, austere style which calls to mind the work of popular 1920s cartoonists such as Little Orphan Annie's creator Harold Gray, examines the blurring of American racial and ethnic identities in the realm of popular culture. Baseball, the movies, comics: for Sturm, each one has produced images which provide Americans with a common vocabulary, yet each one exoticizes and reinscribes racial and ethnic differences. This paradox is at the heart of Sturm's project, a narrative which employs images to comment on the production and circulation of images of difference in three of the twentieth century's most popular forms of American mass entertainment.
Work Cited
Sturm, James. The Golem's Mighty Swing. Montreal: Drawn
and Quarterly, 2001.
