I attended “The Sherlock Holmes You Never Knew: Black American Adaptations, Then and Now.” This event took place on Thursday, February 29th from 6 to 7 pm in the Old Main Colloquium. The presentation was delivered by Dr. Ann McClellan who is the Chief Academic Officer and a provost at SUNY Cortland. Many people attended the presentation including students, professors, and even President Bitterbaum! Her presentation focuses on Sherlock Holmes who audiences recognize as the founding father of all great (white) fictional detections. The presentation focused on the adaptations of Sherlock Holmes that people fail to acknowledge. Since 1903 there have been Black American Sherlock Holmes characters and her presentation covered the history of the Black Sherlock Holmes adaptations across genres.
Dr. McClellan began with a brief introduction of herself, she told the audience that her presentation is a part of a larger project she has been working on for several years. It wasn’t until 2014 on a research trip in London that she read a self-published pamphlet created by an American. The pamphlet had an entire history and connection of African American culture and Sherlock Holmes, it opened up stories, characters, narratives, and representations that she had never heard of or seen in her prior research. Before this presentation, I honestly didn’t know much about the character Sherlock Holmes, but Dr. McClellan told us that according to the Guinness World Records, Sherlock Holmes is the most portrayed fictional character of all time. One thing that stands out about Sherlock Holmes is that he is known as a white man from England. Even his fan group is primarily white. She showed us a photo from the annual dinner in NYC of the Bakers Streets Irregulars, a worldwide fan society of Sherlock Holmes. The dinner is invite only and everyone in the photo is white and a male. We looked at a photo from 1986 and 2020; the only difference is that there is now one woman and one man of color. Other than that, his fan base is predominantly white males and over the years, as the world has advanced not much has changed within the fan base. I found this to be very surprising and it also made me curious if this fan base also studies these different adaptations.
Dr. McClellan then defined the word adaptation which was very helpful as her presentation is focused on these different adaptations. She defines adaptation as another person’s take on a story or character, a different genre, a different period, or a completely new story. This simple definition she included, made it much easier to understand and connect to her presentation. She then began to discuss the first African American adaptation of Sherlock Holmes which took place in 1903. This was the first Broadway musical with an all-black cast which is not widely recognized due to racism. The play is titled “Dahomey” and it stars Bert Williams as the main character who plays Shylock Homestead. Although he was African American, he used burnt cork to make his skin look darker and outlined his lips in white makeup to exaggerate his characteristics. He felt that if white people could make money by doing blackface, he should be able to do the same. Dr. McClellan then began to discuss different genres like silent films and music which was centered around Sherlock Holmes. Something that stuck out to me was her explanation of whitewashing and colorblind casting. She spoke about how this still occurs in today’s society. Whitewashing is when characters who are created to be of a certain race, ethnicity, or culture are converted to be white in films, plays, etc. Colorblind casting states that race doesn’t matter and will instead be ignored. It was argued that colorblind casting makes racial identity invisible, but audience critics argued that the first thing people notice is racial and ethnic identities. They believed it influenced how viewers see and react to characters and their relationships with others. I connected this aspect of her presentation to our class discussions on color blindness. Lastly, as Dr. McClellan concluded her presentation, she provided a great wrap-up and lasting impact. She stated how there have been several Sherlock Holmes adaptations, including stories of Sherlock Holmes being a woman, transgender, an alien, and an MLB player. All of these different things have nothing to do with the original story, yet audiences still struggle to imagine the character as a different race or ethnicity. She told the audience how this shows us the importance of fans of color and creating, collecting, and archiving diverse representations of iconic figures.
Overall, I enjoyed this event and took a lot of information away from it. It is clear to see how passionate Dr. McClellan is about her research. Through her presentation, I learned about adaptations I did not know existed. This event sparked my curiosity and left me wondering about racism and biases that still occur in today’s society. Her presentation was engaging and presented in an organized manner.
