The Minstrel Show: Academic Histories of Blackface Minstrelsy
March 13, 2002 1:57 PM Subscribe
The Minstrel Show The Minstrel Show presents us with a strange, fascinating and awful phenomenon. Minstrel shows emerged from preindustrial European traditions of masking and carnival. But in the US they began in the 1830s, with working class white men dressing up as plantation slaves. These men imitated black musical and dance forms, combining savage parody of black Americans with genuine fondness for African American cultural forms. By the Civil War the minstrel show had become world famous and respectable. Late in his life Mark Twain fondly remembered the "old time nigger show" with its colorful comic darkies and its rousing songs and dances. By the 1840s, the minstrel show had become one of the central events in the culture of the Democratic party..
The image of white men in blackface, miming black song, dance and speech is considered the last word in racist bigotry for some. And yet, standing at the crossroads of race, class and high and low culture, blackface minstrelsy is one fascinating topic in academic circles. It’s history is intertwined with the rise of abolitionism, the works of Mark Twain and the histories of
vaudeville,
American vernacular music, radio, television,
movies, in fact all of what is called popular culture. Details within.
posted by y2karl (26 comments total)
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There are so many good black minstrelsy histories online that I can not include them all. From the film Stephen Foster, broadcast by PBS’s American Experience, here is an excellent history excerpted from interviews with some of the writers mentioned above. Also from PBS in the site for Ken Burns’ JAZZ, here is one and from I Hear America Singing, yet another about Daniel Decatur Emmet & the American Minstrel. (Emmet was the namesake for Emmett Miller and the man who wrote Dixie, by the way.) More minstrelsy can be found via the University of Virginia with two enormous sites devoted to Harriet Beecher Stowes’ Uncle Tom’s Cabin--and minstrels--and Mark Twain and his Times, with yet more on blackface minstrels.
Social criticisms of minstrels began with Frederick Douglass’s scathing comment on blackface minstrels as the "filthy scum of white society, who have stolen from us a complexion denied to them by nature, in which to make money, and pander to the corrupt taste of their fellow white citizens," excerpted from the excellent review of Inside The Minstrel Mask to be found at the Old Time Herald. A personal narrative comes to us from Kenneth Warren while Manthia Diawara and Nkenge Maideyi Zenzele provide two more. An aficionado of the Philadelphia Mummer’s Parade—there’s a post worthy topic all on its own—reflects on blackface comics in the context of that cultural festival. Another more academic review comes via Maya Gibson.
It’s a complex topic, you see, which has lead me to explorations of "What is This `Black' in Black Popular Culture?" or Whiteness Studies, Wiggers and the folks at Race Traitor. And somewhere in this bowl of intellectual spaghetti lies as yet unexplained the whole dynamic of the Push Me-Pull You two headed billy goat teeter totter of the cultural dynamic between white and black in this country.
All of our history and culture is a story of miscegenation and, obviously, hybrid vigor. Complex, ironic and entrancing as the topic is, my comment in brief: Is this a great country or what?
PS. Pardon the self-link-by-extension here, but you are two clicks away from two link laden vintage blues programs more or less devoted to the topic above.
posted by y2karl at 1:58 PM on March 13, 2002