Blackface Minstrelsy

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Blackface Minstrelsy

• Black Cultural Studies
• Week Five
• April 27 and 29, 2009

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Blackface Minstrelsy

• originated in the United States in 1789 by actor
  Lewis Hallam, Jr.
• popularized in early 1800s by an actor
  masquerading under the name Daddy Jim Crow
• included acting, dancing, and singing
• White actors enacted Blackness by smearing
  burnt and moistened champagne corks (and later
  greasepaint or shoe polish)
• Songs/roles performed in a caricatured Black
  dialect
• This popularized the darky character, in which
  actors had comically enlarged lips, googly eyes,
  etc
• Black face made its way to the movies The Jazz
  Singer

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Historicizing Blackface Reconstruction (1866-77)

• period in U.S. history after the American Civil
  War (1861-65) when the Confederacy of Southern
  states was reunited with the Union of Northern
  states
• also a government-led set of initiatives that
  followed President Lincolns act of freeing
  slaves
• South was divided into military districts for the
  supervision of elections to set up new state
  governments
• Southern black men began to vote, were elected to
  public office, and established community
  resources
• Reconstruction ended when last troops were
  withdrawn

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Historicizing Blackface Jim Crow (1876-1965)

• "Jim Crow" character introduced in 1832 through
  song written and sung by "Daddy" Dan Rice in his
  minstrel act. The term eventually came to mean a
  "Negro"
• describes racial segregation used in
  institutions, businesses, hotels, and restaurants
  in Southern states and states on the
  Southern-Northern border
• After Reconstruction before Civil Rights Act of
  1964
• segregation sanctioned, supported by state
  local laws
• followed the Black Codes, which had restricted
  civil rights and liberties of U.S. black people
  but never went into effect because Northern
  legislators responded with guarantees for civil
  rights and the right to vote

5
Historicizing Jim Crow World War I (1914 to
1918)
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World War I (1914 to 1918)

• battle between Allied and Central Powers
• gt400,000 African Americans served in the war
• African American soldiers faced hostility and
  discrimination of a racist American military
• Back home, war had halted the flow of European
  immigrant workers to industrial centers ? 300,000
  to 1 million African Americans moved from the
  rural South to large industrial cities to fill
  war-time jobs
• African American soldiers returned to strict
  segregation, unprecedented racial violence,
  unemployment, verbal harassment and abuse, and
  inadequate food, housing, and medical attention

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White Ethnic Immigration White Ethnic Identity

• Until WWI, U.S. government practiced an open-door
  immigration policy for people with white skin
  color
• European immigration in 19th c white ethnic
  immigrants melted or forged into the white
  race
• 1789-1870, mostly Western Europeans immigration
• 1870-1924, mostly Southern and Eastern Europeans
  (primarily from Poland and Italy). They, as well
  as the Irish, entered U.S. at bottom of labor and
  social ladder
• Immigrants were largely rural, poor, and
  unskilled faced heavy discrimination
• Many immigrants changed names, accents, and
  religion to avoid discrimination

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Solidifying Whiteness Assimilation and
Acculturation

• White immigrants granted privilege of owning
  land, becoming citizens, etc.
• European immigrants accepted and perpetuated
  racism out of belief that they gained advantages
• Labor Unions had racist policies excluding
  non-white laborers
• Assimilation minority group is absorbed into
  dominant culture presumes loss of all or many
  characteristics which make the newcomers
  different
• Acculturation exchange of cultural features
  which result when groups come into continuous
  firsthand contact. Either or both groups of the
  original cultural patterns may be changed a bit,
  but the groups remain distinct overall

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Love and Theft Eric Lott

• Since 1990, Lott on faculty of English dept at
  UVA. He works in the areas of American Studies
  and Cultural Studies. PhD from Columbia in 1990.
• Selected Bibliography Book The Disappearing
  Liberal Intellectual Or, How the Left Became the
  Center (Basic Books, 2006). Articles 1. You
  Make Me Feel So Young Sinatra Basie Amos
  Andy. This Is Pop II Papers from Experience
  Music Project (forthcoming). 2. Anti-American
  Studies 9/11, Patriotism, and the Nation-State.
  Prospects The Annual of American Cultural
  Studies (2005). 3. Anti-American Studies 9/11,
  Patriotism, and the Nation-State. Prospects The
  Annual of American Cultural Studies (2005).

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Love and Theft Lott

• Key questions for Lott Where, literally, did
  the minstrel show come from? What black cultural
  forms did it reference and how were they taken up
  and eclipsed by minstrel performances? What
  social relations were mapped in blackface mask?
• Lott examines these questions by studying
  songbooks, plays, burlesque sketches and
  reminiscences of minstrels from 1st blackface
  performers of the 1830s to Civil War

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Love and Theft Lott

• Deals with historical forms of white racial
  subjectivity as they were worked out in the
  context of minstrel performances.
• Rather than signifying white encounters with life
  on the plantation, minstrel performances
  signified racial contacts and tensions endemic to
  the North and the frontier. It is out of these
  places, particularly the North, that the minstrel
  show was born.

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Love and Theft Lott

• Minstrel shows as interaction ritual, a
  commercial context that mediated cultural
  mixing. The minstrel show was a socially
  approved context of institutional control that
  both acknowledged and absorbed black culture
  while also protecting white America from it.
• Blacks in the North acculturated more quickly,
  which both gave whites greater hegemonic
  assurance and allowed Northern blacks to develop
  own cultural forms and institutions. However,
  white interest in black cultural practices
  literalized the financial metaphor always
  implicitly structured by an economics of slavery.

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Love and Theft Lott

• Black performers of the time (1830s) and black
  patrons often had their own performance spaces,
  but black performers became targets for mimicry
  by the minstrel performers.
• This resulted in a new racial performance that
  affected black performers, so much so that they
  sometimes incorporated elements of the minstrel
  show in their own, more traditional, theatrical
  performances. Example of Aldrige, who
  incorporated the song Opossum Up a Gum Tree
  after this song was created by minstrel performer
  Mathews.

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Love and Theft Lott

• Blackface, miming out of primarily working-class
  rituals of racial interaction suggests that
  blackface performance produced or instantiated a
  structured relationship between the races.
• Codes of black and white manhood gave minstrel
  show its force as often about manhood and
  unmanning, as about racial performance to
  wear blackface or appropriate blackness was to
  inherit the cool, virility, humility, abandon,
  or gaite de couer that were the prime components
  of white ideologies of black manhood

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Love and Theft Lott

• The minstrel show can be seen as the beginning of
  American bohemia, as artists such as Stephen
  Foster and E.P. Christy sought to indulge their
  sense of difference from dominant, upper class
  whiteness but associating themselves with
  blackness.
• Minstrelsy carried not just a homosocial, but a
  homoerotic charge bohemia of Jacksonian times
  marked by a sense of sexual ambiguity, and
  sexualized images of black men were a part of the
  minstrel show that both played on ideas of black
  male sexuality and served to feminize black men
  by objectifying them.

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Love and Theft Lott

• While minstrelsy developed out of perceptions of
  black culture, anxiety around the origins of
  minstrel performance highlight social fears of
  both slavery and miscegenation talk of cultural
  merging in the development of the minstrel
  performance close to talk of amalgamation, fear
  of cultural combination.
• To deal with this question, reference to the
  black origins of minstrel work were common, but
  unease underlying this cultural appropriation was
  represented in much talk about the origins of
  blackface.

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Love and Theft Lott

• Ultimately, through commodification process
  blackness becomes most apparent, and the work
  of minstrelsy serves to create a model of
  blackness
• The minstrel show flaunted, as much as it hid
  the fact of the expropriation and its subtexts,
  enslavement and intermixture.

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The Jolson Story (Black Face White Noise)
Michael Rogin

• Taught political science at Berkeley for more
  than three decades. Died in 2001 at 65. Obituary
  for Rogin, rationalistic explanations
  (including Marxism) defeated by staggering
  violence of Vietnam As a result, he felt
  compelled to explore psychoanalytic theory and
  use it to study culture as the making of meaning,
  for only in this way could he understand the
  imperial violence and racial domination at the
  center of American life.
• Selected bibliography Ronald Reagan - The Movie
  And Other Episodes in Political Demonology,
  Fathers Children Andrew Jackson and the
  Subjugation of the American Indian, Subversive
  Genealogy The Politics and Art of Herman
  Melville

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The Jolson Story (Black Face White Noise) Rogin

• The chapter U.S. film history and subtexts of
  white superiority in some early examples.
  Unifying theme of black representation among the
  films reviewed is use of blackface minstrelsy.
• In the 1920s, film emerging as new medium which
  Rogin says represented new working-class,
  immigrant perspective Cultural guardians feared
  early silent cinema as an immigrant menace to the
  dominant culture (p. 78).
• With addition of sound, film credibility rose and
  social capital it could yield became both an
  issue of concern and liberation. From its
  beginnings, film entangled in cultural struggle
  over meaning and significance.
• The Jazz Singer produced in this context as first
  talking picture

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The Jolson Story (Black Face White Noise) Rogin

• Rogin deconstructs The Jazz Singer in order to
  illustrate how the film facilitates the union
  not of white and black but of gentile and Jew
  (p.79).
• Metaphorically, Jewish protagonist (Al Jolson)
  confronts generational patriarchy (representing
  gentile society) with Jazz music (representing
  American possibility and freedom) while
  successfully obtaining gentile heroine.
• The use of blackface allows Jolson a type of
  expressive freedom and social empowerment. The
  movie was promising that the son could have it
  all Jewish past and American future, Jewish
  mother and gentile wife (p.86).

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The Jolson Story (Black Face White Noise) Rogin

• The mask perpetuates racial/ethnic hierarchy
  (Jewish over African-American) while adding
  authenticity to the musical performance
  Stereotypes located within both pariah groups
  Jewish and African American were exteriorized
  as black, embraced as regenerative, and left
  (along with actual blacks) behind (p.100).
• Jazz represents link b/t Jewish/American
  traditions with blackface providing
  socially-acceptable performative outlet for the
  music.
• A writer at the time explained Jewish
  contributions to American jazz as musical
  miscegenation and its hybridity helps make its
  performance more acceptable to the mainstream.

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The Jolson Story (Black Face White Noise) Rogin

• Blacking their faces seems to have enabled the
  Jewish performers to reach a spontaneity and
  assertiveness in the declaration of their Jewish
  selves. (p.99).
• Appropriation of music and representation
  exploits black musical/physical form for Jewish
  empowerment in the context of their own social
  marginalization.
• Rogin implies that consequence of this type of
  cinema was a move toward the naturalization of a
  racial/ethnic hierarchy that placed Black under
  Jewish.
• Though the arguments have resonance, especially
  when viewed with an historical lens, not much
  discussion of agency concerning the audiences and
  their reactions to this type of representation.