Love and Theft: the Racial Unconscious of Blackface Minstrelsy Author(S): Eric Lott Source: Representations, No

Love and Theft: The Racial Unconscious of Blackface Minstrelsy Author(s): Eric Lott Source: Representations, No. 39 (Summer, 1992), pp. 23-50 Published by: University of California Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2928593 Accessed: 07/07/2010 12:56 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=ucal. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. University of California Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Representations. http://www.jstor.org ERIC LOTT Love and Theft: The Racial Unconscious of Blackface Minstrelsy I THE BOUNDARIES SEPARATING black and whiteAmerican cultures in the nineteenthcentury were marked most vividlyalong the lines of property and sexuality.Traffic in slave commoditieswas as defininga racial practiceas the preservationof white racial purity.The blackface minstrelshow, we now com- monly believe, dedicated itself to staging or constructingthese boundaries. Eclecticin origin,primitive in execution,and raucous in effect,a theatricalaffair principallyof the urban North,minstrelsy has been summed up as, in Alexander Saxton's words, "half a centuryof inurementto the uses of white supremacy."' While it was organized around the quite explicit"borrowing" of black cultural materials for white dissemination (and profit),a borrowing that ultimately depended upon the material relations of slavery,the minstrelshow obscured these relations by pretending that slavery was amusing, right, and natural. Though it arose froma white obsession withblack (male) bodies that underlies whiteracial dread to our own day,it ruthlesslydisavowed its fleshlyinvestments throughridicule and racistlampoon. Yet I am not so sure thatthis is the end of the story.In lightof recentwork on race thatproceeds frompostmodern accounts of subjectivity,we probably ought to take these factsand processes as merelya startingorientation for inquiryinto the great complexitiesof racism and raced subjectsin the United States.2In the followingpages, I want to put some of this work to use in the area of blackface,the first,formative public or institutional acknowledgmentby whites of black culture.In doing so I hope to showthat blackface performance arose from and embodied what we might call a mid- nineteenth-century"racial unconscious"-a structured formation,combining thoughtand feeling,tone and impulse, and at the veryedge of semanticavail- ability,whose symptomsand anxieties make itjust legible.3A reading of these symptomsand anxietiessuggests, contrary to currentwisdom, that blackface min- strelsywas based on small but significantcrimes against settled ideas of racial demarcation,which indeed appear to be inevitablewhen whiteAmericans enter the haunted realm of racial fantasy.Ultimately I am after some sense of how REPRESENTATIONS 39 * Summer 1992 ( THE REGENTS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA 23 precariouslynineteenth-century white people lived theirown whiteness.This will later involve an argumentabout the uses of ethnographyin the historicalstudy of readers and audiences. Of course there is no doubt thatblackface witnessed the efficientexpropria- tion of the culturalcommodity "blackness"-a factwell demonstratedin an 1867 AtlanticMonthly article rather hypotheticallyrecounting blackface "originator" T. D. Rice's firstblackface performance,in Pittsburghin around 1830.4 Con- frontedone day withthe dazzling spectacle of black singing,the storygoes, Rice saw his "opportunity"and determinedto take advantage of his talentfor mimicry. Fortunately,intones Atlantic writer Robert P. Nevin,"There was a negro in atten- dance at Griffith'sHotel, on Wood Street,named Cuff,-an exquisite specimen of his sort,-who won a precarious subsistenceby lettinghis open mouth as a mark forboys to pitchpennies into,at threepaces, and by carryingthe trunksof passengers from the steamboats to the hotels." Aftersome persuasion, "Cuff" agrees to accompany the actor to the theater.There Rice blacks his face, orders Cuffto disrobe, and "invest[s]himself in the cast-offapparel." As Nevin puts it, on stage "the extraordinaryapparition produced an instanteffect." At thispoint somethingvery curious happens, and it bears quoting at length. A steamerappears on the Monongahela Wharf,and Cuff-"who meanwhilewas crouching in dishabille under concealment of a projectingflat behind the performer"-begins to thinkof his livelihood: Betweenhimself and othersof his colorin the same line of business,and especiallyas regardeda certainformidable competitor called Ginger, there existed an activerivalry in thebaggage-carrying business. For Cuffto allowGinger the advantage of an undisputed descentupon theluggage of theapproaching vessel would be notonly to forgetall "con- siderations"from the passengers,but, by provinghim a laggardin his calling,to casta damagingblemish upon hisreputation. Liberally as he mightlend himselfto a friend,it could not be done at thatsacrifice. After a minuteor twoof fidgetywaiting for [Rice's] songto end,Cuff's patience could endure no longer,and, cautiously hazarding a glimpse of his profilebeyond the edge of the flat,he called in a hurriedwhisper: "Massa Rice, Massa Rice,must have my clo'se! Massa Griffif wants me,-steamboat's comin'!" The appeal wasfruitless. Massa Rice did nothear it, for a happyhit at an unpopular cityfunctionary had set the audiencein a roar in whichall othersounds were lost.... [Anotherappeal wentunheeded, when,] driven to desperation, and forgetfulin theemer- gencyof everysense of propriety,Cuff, in ludicrousundress as he was,started from his place,rushed upon thestage, and, laying his hand upon theperformer's shoulder, called outexcitedly: "Massa Rice, Massa Rice, gi' me nigga'shat,-nigga's coat,-nigga's shoes,- gi' me nigga'st'ings! Massa Griffif wants 'im,-STEAMBOAT'S COMIN'!!" The incidentwas the touch,in the mirthfulexperience of thatnight, that passed endurance.(609-10) This passage, in all its woozy syntaxand headlong rush,is probablythe least trustworthyand most accurate account of American minstrelsy'sappropriation of black culture. Indeed it reads something like a master text of the racial 24 REPRESENTATIONS economy encoded in blackface performance.For one thing,it calls on minstrel devices (ventriloquizeddialect, racial burlesque) to narrate the origins of minstrelsy,as if thisparticular narratable event generated or secreted"naturally" the formalmeans appropriate to it; itsmultiple frames (minstrelsy within minstrelsy) amount to so many techniques of black subordination.True to form,a dimin- ished, not to say "blackfaced"Cuff has replaced Rice as this account's center of attention.And its talk of opportunityand investment,lending and ownership, subsistence and competitionis more preoccupied with cultural value than we mighthave expected. Its racial unconscious,we mightsay, reveals a great deal of anxietyabout the "primitiveaccumulation" it ostensiblycelebrates.5 The fascina- tion withCuff's nakedness, moreover,highlights this as an affairof male bodies, where racial conflictand culturalexchange are negotiatedbetween men. Cuff's stripping,a theftthat silences and embarrasseshim on stage but whichneverthe- less entails both his bodily presence in the show and the titillatingthreat that he mayreturn to demand his stolencapital, is a neat allegoryfor the mostprominent commercialcollision of black and whitecultures in the nineteenthcentury. The cultural expropriationthat formed one central drama of the boundary-staging minstrelshow was already an unsettledmatter of racial intercourseand an injec- tion of "blackness"into the public sphere. But thissimultaneous construction and transgressionof racial boundaries is somethingthat itselfneeds explaining, as one performer'senthusiasm for his blackfaceact suggests:"I shall be richin black fun."6 A strongwhite fascinationwith black men and black culture,that is to say, underwrote this popular expropriation. Blackface performerswere conspicu- ously intriguedwith the streetsingers and obscure charactersfrom whom they allegedlytook the materialthat was later fashionedto racistends. There are sev- eral accounts of these men's attractionto their"donors," and it is no wonder that an aura of illicitsexuality-nineteenth-century observers called it "vulgarity"- shadowed the most chaste of minstrelshows.7 From the startit appeared that a sort of generalized illicitnesswas indeed one of minstrelsy'smain objectives.So much is suggested,at least,by the lengthsto whichreviews and playbillstypically went to downplay (even as theyintimated) its licentious atmosphere:

Load more