I went to the event presented by Provost Ann McClellan on February 29th, 2024 from 6:00 pm- 7:00 pm, in the Old Main Colloquium. The main message and purpose of this presentation was to teach the listeners about the history and influence of media Sherlock Holmes had/has on different genres in films, books and tv shows. Ann McClellan discussed the direct impact Sherlock Holmes as a predominant white male has had on Broadway (musicals and plays), silent films, American jazz, graphic novels, dystopian fiction and fan fiction, which are some examples of genres she used when discussing the past vs present.
Ann McClellan started off her presentation with background information on Sherlock Holmes’ character. His history of being the most portrayed character with a mostly white fandom, called the Baker Street Irregulars. After learning about the history of the character, Ann McClellan jumped into how Sherlock Holmes was affected through Broadway musicals. “In Dahomey”, a musical from 1903, was a play that had the first African American “Sherlock Holmes” (masked as a character called Shylock in the play), Bert Williams. She also discussed heavily the ideas of Blackface and how it was used. Bert Williams, although being an African American male, actually used Blackface when performing “In Dahomey”, he used white around his mouth area to make his facial expressions heightened. Williams, among other African American actors who also used Blackface, felt that if white actors could use Blackface and make money off of pretending to be another race, they should be able to do the same. Ann McClellan then moved on to a silent film from 1918, “A Black Sherlock Holmes”. This film reconciles with white characters as African American actors. They took the character Sherlock Holmes and made it into a story following a non white detective, assumed to be Sherlock Holmes. The character was identifiable as Sherlock Holmes because of the iconic hat he wore, which matched the one described and characterized with Sherlock Holmes. And because of the book he read in the opening scene, a guide on how to detect. Ann McClellan also discussed the ties of the colorblind casting issue surrounding this film, among others. I think both of these examples from the entertainment industry showed just how bias people are, even when it comes to fictional characters.
Ann McClellan then went on to the music industry, specifically jazz music. She talked about the heavy influence Sherlock Holmes had on jazz music, different bands catered their music towards this fictional character in order to appease to the hype from the public. One song she played for us was “Dr Watson and Mr. Holmes” from 1934, she also showed pictures of different members of bands and soloists who would dress up as Sherlock Holmes (or a detective with the iconic hat, which led people to assume they were dressing up as this character), and played clips of singers having Sherlock Holmes somewhere in their song (either by word or through description). Ann McClellan lastly discussed the popularity of Sherlock Holmes through books. The first fiction novel “The Hound of Justice” from 2019 was a detective book with heavy female representation. This was just one of the many novels written surrounding detectives with a mystery story. She then turned the presentation towards fanfiction using the website Archive of Our Own. She went into explicit detail about the website itself, sharing that it was primarily used for fans to write stories about fictional characters from their own perspective. Ann McClellan gave statistics about with Sherlock Holmes fanfiction written and catagrized with tags like #SherlockHolmes. The statistics read that Sherlock Holmes was written as a non white detective in only fifteen stories out of hundreds of thousands of stories. She ended her presentation with stating that just recently there has been movement towards Sherlock Holmes being differently raced other than white, and that is one of the high takeaways I got from this presentation. Both of these examples are also excellent examples of the biases people still have, even to this day.
