http://www.metafilter.com/tags/Minstrels Posts tagged with 'Minstrels' at MetaFilter. Thu, 31 Mar 2005 12:55:09 -0800 Thu, 31 Mar 2005 12:55:09 -0800 en-us http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss 60 http://www.metafilter.com/40864/The%2DMinstrel%2DShow%2D20%2DWhy%2DPostmodern%2DMinstrelsy%2DStudies%2DMatter <a href="http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu:1852/utc/pretexts/gallery/@ebt-link?root=query(%3Cfigure%3E+with+n=%221%22+inside+%3Ctei.2%3E+with+id=%22MIILLSOA%22);showtoc=false" title="One of the earliest and most successful is the performer pictured here: Thomas Dartmouth 'Daddy' Rice.">Jump Jim Crow</a>, through the hoops of one Robert Christgau's erudition as he surveys the literature extant in <a href="http://www.robertchristgau.com/xg/music/minstrel-bel.php" title="What we can know is this: the rise of minstrelsy in the 1840s… constituted a cultural upheaval remarkably similar to the rise of rock and roll in the 1950s. Right--minstrel music was only a part of the minstrel show, which proved the foundation of the entire American entertainment industry. Right--rock and roll was only one in a series of modern musical mongrelizations, from coon song to jazz age to swing era. Nevertheless, both were benchmarks. Minstrelsy transformed blackface from a theatrical to a musical trope. It established that in a Euro-America obsessed with African retentions (the violence of the blood, the puissance of the penis, the docility of the grin), music was the star attraction, especially for the young riffraff who gave American cities their bustle. Like minstrelsy, rock and roll posed not just a racial danger, but a class danger… It made a role model of the unkempt rebel. And by finding simple tunes in the three-chord storehouse of folk modality, it cleared a space for unencumbered beat. Got it? Now ask yourself how much of the rock and roll description can be applied to minstrelsy and vice versa. Most of each for sure."> In Search of Jim Crow: Why Postmodern Minstrelsy Studies Matter</a>, through multiple readings of <a href="http://www.hup.harvard.edu/features/popmusic/raisecain.html" title="Unearthing a wealth of long-buried plays and songs, rethinking materials often deemed too troubling or lowly to handle, and overturning cherished ideas about classics from Uncle Tom's Cabin to Benito Cereno to The Jazz Singer, W. T. Lhamon Jr. sets out a startlingly original history of blackface as a cultural ritual that, for all its racist elements, was ultimately liberating. He shows that early blackface, dating back to the 1830s, put forward an interpretation of blackness as that which endured a commonly felt scorn and often outwitted it.">Raising Cain: Blackface Performance from Jim Crow to Hip Hop</a>, <a href="http://www.cambridge.org/uk/catalogue/catalogue.asp?isbn=0521560748" title="Carnival, charivari, mumming plays, peasant festivals, and even early versions of the Santa Claus myth - all of these forms of entertainment influenced and shaped blackface minstrelsy in the first half of the nineteenth century. In his fascinating study Demons of Disorder, musicologist Dale Cockrell studies issues of race and class by analysing their cultural expressions, and investigates the roots of still remembered songs such as ‘Jim Crow’, ‘Zip Coon’, and ‘Dan Tucker’. Also examined is the character George Washington Dixon, the man most deserving of the title ‘father of blackface minstrelsy’ and surely one of celebrity’s all-time heavyweight eccentrics - a bonafide ‘demon of disorder’.">Demons of Disorder: Early Blackface Minstrels and Their World</a> and and <a href="http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/railton/enam982/eastland.html" title="The current consensus on blackface minstrelsy is probably best summed up by Frederick Douglass's righteous response in the North Star. Blackface imitators, he said, were 'the filthy scum of white society, who stolen from us a complexion denied to them by nature, in which to make money, and pander to the corrupt tastes of their white fellow citizens,' a denunciation that nicely captures minstrelsy's further commodification of an already enslaved, noncitizen people (October 27, 1848). From our vantage point, the minstrel show indeed seems a transparent racist curiosity, a form of leisure that, in inventing and ridiculing the slow-witted but irrepressible 'plantation darky' and the foppish'northern dandy negro,' conveniently rationalized racial oppression. The culture that embraced it, we assume, was either wholly enchanted by racial travesty, or so benighted, like Melville's Captain Delano, that it took such distortions as authentic. I want to suggest, however, that the audiences involved in early minstrelsy were not universally derisive of African Americans or their culture, and that there was a range of responses to the minstrel show which points to an instability or contradiction inn the form itself. My project is to examine that instability for what it may tell us about the racial politics of culture in the years before the Civil War.">Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class</a>. Consider, too, <a href="http://www.yk.psu.edu/~jmj3/mincycle.htm" title="It has been argued - notably by Eric Lott - that the obsession of white boys for black music--the 'crossover' phenomenon (cooptation at the level of consumption)--is motivated by the lure of transgressive sex: the bliss or jouissance promised by miscegenation… White fantasies and desires not only prey upon, they feed black fantasies and desires. That's why James Brown got blacker and proud as his fan base grew whiter and self-conscious. Their gazes met. White and black identity categories linked up… In fact, this circulation of mutually defining desire--which I call the minstrel cycle--is sufficient to create and sustain racial difference. Its operations make race seem like one of the raw materials from which culture is produced, rather than one byproduct of a complex social machine.">The Minstrel Cycle</a> from <a href="http://www.yk.psu.edu/~jmj3/k_readk.htm" title="It's an old story, this ethnographic tale of identification with the other.">Reading The Commitments</a> and other various and sundry attempts to peek <a href="http://www.upne.com/0-8195-5294-1.html" title="As the blackface minstrel show evolved from its beginnings in the American Revolution to its peak during the late 1800s, its frenetic dances, low-brow humor, and lively music provided more than mere entertainment. Indeed, these imitations and parodies shaped society's perceptions of African Americans-and of women-as well as made their mark on national identity, policymaking decisions, and other entertainment forms such as vaudeville, burlesque, the revue, and, eventually, film, radio, and television. Gathered here are rare primary materials-including firsthand accounts of minstrel shows, minstrelsy guides, jokes, sketches, and sheet music-and the best of contemporary scholarship on minstrelsy.">inside the minstrel mask</a>—all multiple readings reading blackface minstrels from the <a href="http://www.metrotimes.com/editorial/story.asp?id=793" title="It makes you a nonperson,' says Lee. 'It makes you not human. It's something that denigrates and dehumanizes you. Savion (Glover) and Tommy (Davidson) said they felt that deeply every time they had to put on blackface in the film.' Putting on the mask is the root of the idea that all blacks look alike. Blackface makeup destroyed the differences between blacks and made them the same in the eyes of the minstrel audience. There was no diversity allowed.">pejorative</a> to the <a href="http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/foster/sfeature/sf_minstrelsy_6.html" title="Was blackface minstrelsy only about caricaturing blacks? Dale Cockrell: Minstrelsy is one of the hardest things to talk about because minstrelsy is all things to all people, and it's intentionally so. And it's one of the reasons that it's such a popular phenomenon. It need hardly be said that minstrelsy is about racial derision. You can hardly look at the mimicking of African-American manners, mores, maybe music, maybe dance, and see that these people are being cast as somehow less than the people who are portraying them. And that needs always to be forefront in any consideration of this. But at the same time, there's an embrace of that culture that's happening on the stage at the same time. People are having great fun, entertainment. They're embracing a culture that they're seeming to deride at precisely the same time. It's a kind of love and loathing that's happening simultaneously.">explorative</a>, subversive to oppressive, past to future, unfolding tesseractly, if not exactly, with singing, dancing and extraordinary elocutions. Buy your tickets and step within for <a href="http://scoop.diamondgalleries.com/news_images/3061_8177_1.jpg" title="Joseph M. Schenck presents Walt Disney's Mickey Mouse The Meller Drammer is boldly pronounced on this full-color, stone lithographic one-sheet cartoon poster portraying a scene from the black and white film short first distributed by United Artists on March 18, 1933; linenbacked, 41' height by 27' width, custom matted and framed. The scene depicts a reenacted stage-show of Uncle Tom's Cabin, in which Horace Horsecollar attempts to whip Mickey Mouse... and havoc ensues.">The Meller Drammer </a>of Minstrelsy in <a href="http://www.metafilter.com/mefi/15495" title="March 13, 2002 - 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 at 1:57 PM PST">The Minstrel Show</a> <strong>2.0</strong>… tag:metafilter.com,2005:site.40864 Thu, 31 Mar 2005 12:55:09 -0800 Americana Blackface BlackfaceMInstrelsy Folk History Minstrels Minstrelsy Music PopularCulture Race Vaudeville y2karl http://www.metafilter.com/15495/ <a href="http://chnm.gmu.edu/courses/magic/news/lgthatcher.html">The Minstrel Show </a> <i>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.. </i> 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 <a href="http://www.jerryjazzmusician.com/linernotes/giddins.html#Minstrelsy and its effect on America">vaudeville</a>, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/books/first/g/giddins-jazz.html">American vernacular music, </a><a href="http://www.otr.com/amosandy.html">radio, </a><a href="http://www.geocities.com/Hollywood/2587/">television</a>, <a href="http://www.bamboozledmovie.com/minstrelshow/index.html">movies</a>, in fact all of what is called popular culture. Details within. tag:metafilter.com,2002:site.15495 Wed, 13 Mar 2002 13:57:05 -0800 Americana Blackface BlackfaceMInstrelsy Folk History Minstrels Minstrelsy Music PopularCulture Race Vaudeville y2karl http://www.metafilter.com/4690/ <a href="http://search-desc.ebay.com/cgi-bin/texis/ebaydesc/results.html?query=Minstrel&amp;srchdesc=y&amp;category0=160">The Grinch who stole eBay?</a> Here's a weird one; help cheerfully accepted. The link is to a search on eBay for Novatel Minstrel's; I decided I wanted to buy one. Everywhere I run the search from, I get substantially different results. Like, 2 answers vs 12. I'd be interested to know if other people who hit the link see similar behavior... This smells weird... kinda like the Amazon differential pricing think, but I can't see a reason why... tag:metafilter.com,2000:site.4690 Fri, 08 Dec 2000 12:51:44 -0800 amazon ebay minstrels novatel baylink