The main argument of the book is that the charisma of four mainstream black male performers in twentieth-century American culture is due to a specific performance of difference that the author calls "skin acts." These skin acts were an increasingly political mode of being onstage that challenged the racist powers of the hegemonic gaze by means of different tricks. The narrative arc of the book starts in the 1900s with Bert Williams, a black minstrel blackface performer, and one of his plays, In Dahomey (the first minstrel show of its kind, crafted entirely by important black figures, some of whom would later participate in the Harlem Renaissance). The second chapter (set in the 1920s and 1930s) analyzes the participation of Paul Robeson as model and actor in a series of modernist works by white artists (including the poet H. D.). Chapter three focuses on Harry Belafonte, an actor and musician of Caribbean background, who would reach the status of a movie star in the American context of the civil rights movement. The last chapter analyzes the figure of Bob Marley as he emerged through the processes of decolonization in the Caribbean. All chapters include an account of the performers' public relationships with women, suggesting a history of (interracial and intraracial) public gender relations.