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Black Politics but Not Black People Rethinking the Social and “Racial” History of Early Minstrelsy Douglas A Black Politics but Not Black People Rethinking the Social and “Racial” History of Early Minstrelsy Douglas A. Jones Jr. During an 1833 anti-abolition riot in New York City, a mob of an estimated two thousand peo- ple found the entrance to the Chatham Street Chapel blocked by locked iron gates. Inside the chapel, a committee of abolitionists was busy laying the foundation for an “association to oppose slavery, and reaffirm the doctrine of their revolutionary forefathers,” as one member put it (Tappan 1870:172). That association would become the New York City Anti-Slavery Society, a regional precursor of the American Anti-Slavery Society that formed later that year. After the adoption of resolutions concerning the group’s function and structure, the abolitionists gave the keys to the janitor and instructed him to allow the mob to enter the chapel. When the rioters discovered their targets had escaped by way of private passages and therefore violence against the abolitionists was no longer possible, they decided they would “amuse themselves” another way (171–72): namely, they would “be rich in black fun,” to use the evocative phrase of contem- poraneous British actor Charles Mathews (Mathews 1839:29).1 Thus, the mob moved to hold a mock antislavery meeting. The rioters forced an African American bystander to assume the role of leading abolitionist and social reformer Arthur Tappan, chair the proceedings, and offer a speech. Although the conscripted participant resisted performing in their improvisation, “his audience would take no denial.” He addressed the mob in a stunning, yet dangerous performance of blackness: I am called upon to make a speech! You doubtless know that I am a poor, ignorant man, not accustomed to make speeches. But I have heard of the Declaration of Independence, and have read the Bible. The Declaration says all men are created equal, and the Bible 1. Tracy C. Davis reads Mathews’s comment somewhat differently. She argues that he sought to emphasize his belief that the black content of his piece, Trip to America, would literally make him rich and make the work more engaging. In my view, however, the personal significations of Mathews’s remark do not necessarily under- cut or oppose the way the phrase captures broader functions of contemporaneous blackface performance. Indeed, the “black fun” that Mathews sought for his Trip to America in order to increase his popularity, and therefore his receipts, rests on structures of social feeling and racial expropriation very similar to those the anti-abolitionist rioters sought to produce in their improvisational entertainment (see Davis 2011). Douglas A. Jones Jr. is Cotsen Fellow in the Princeton Society of Fellows. At Princeton, he holds appointments in the Department of English and the Center for African American Studies. His book, The Captive Stage: Performance and the Proslavery Imagination of the Antebellum North, is forthcoming from University of Michigan Press. In fall 2013, he will join the English department faculty of Rutgers University. [email protected] TDR: The Drama Review 57:2 (T218) Summer 2013. ©2013 New York University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology 21 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/DRAM_a_00259 by guest on 27 September 2021 says God has made us all of one blood. I think, therefore, we are entitled to good treat- ment, that it is wrong to hold men in slavery, and that — (in Tappan 1870:171–72) The rioters halted his words with “yells and curses” and “broke up their meeting and dispersed” (172). Perhaps they did not expect such daring eloquence in the face of their violent multitude. Nonetheless, this man’s performance enacted the menace of what theorist Nahum Chandler calls black “exorbitance”: that is, the destabilization of normative understandings of sociality and historicity by means of a politicized, epistemic surplus (Chandler 2008). The mob made the mistake of allowing (black) “Tappan” to speak for himself: his improvisatory excess disrupted the intended narrative, and therefore the political intentionality, of their production. The circumstances of this (misfired) riot-cum-minstrel act evoke a number of concerns regarding the interconnectedness of political ideology, class formation, and the function of minstrelsy in the antebellum period. Most notably, why and in what ways did the perform- ers and publics of blackface minstrelsy circumvent the threats of black exorbitance but main- tain their clear investment in black culture? What were the dynamics of this negotiation? And how did this investment yield crucial material for the development of white cultural and polit- ical formations? I address these questions specifically in relation to the socioeconomic and racial contexts that conditioned the production of early minstrelsy (1829–1843). Robert Toll and Eric Lott, among other scholars who have traced minstrelsy’s diachroneity, have persua- sively shown that after 1843, in response to the economic depression of the late 1830s and early 1840s and the commercialization and sentimentalization (i.e., the inclusion of bourgeois mores) of the form, minstrelsy began to solidify its pro-plantation ideology and nostalgia (Toll 1974; Lott 1993:111–67). For Lott, and especially for musicologist Dale Cockrell and cultural his- torian W.T. Lhamon, this periodization represents the course of antebellum minstrelsy — that is, “an early radical phase followed by its co-optation by commercial and middle-class inter- ests by the 1850s” (Nyong’o 2009:8; see also Lott 1993; Cockrell 1997; Lhamon 1998, 2003).2 For these scholars, much of what made early minstrelsy “radical” is that it “asks poor [and dis- affected] whites to align themselves with blacks against the civil sense that it was ‘a gross out- rage’ to do so” and that such an alliance reflected white spectators’ desire to form bonds of interracial, particularly working-class, solidarity (Lhamon 2003:28). This view is an “increas- ingly orthodox” one, as Tavia Nyong’o notes (2009:8). Yet I seek to disturb that historiographic orthodoxy, arguing instead that an examination of the socioeconomic and racial conditions that shaped and surrounded minstrelsy in its first decade and a half reveals how the form helped fos- ter the development of white working-class Northerners’ distinct brand of antiblack, proslavery thought, a worldview intended to bring about their own betterment. Perhaps more than any other factor, whites’ refusals to collaborate with actual African Americans in early minstrelsy undermine the claim that the form’s producers and publics sought social and political accord with their black counterparts, both within the theatrical frame and beyond. Simply put, blackface minstrelsy was for, by, and about the white commu- nity. Although in its early period it was “a form of engaging the black ‘Other,’” it is mislead- ing to suggest that this engagement “might even [have been] supportive of action to correct the Other’s social plight” (Cockrell 1997:161). This claim is emblematic of much of the scholarly literature on American early minstrelsy that has followed Lott’s Love and Theft (1993). These studies seek to “re-complicate” the earlier findings of Ralph Ellison (1964), Nathan Huggins ([1971] 2007:244–301), and Toll (1974), among others, who stressed minstrelsy’s virulent rac- ism and fashioning of white supremacy. Yet in its effort to construe early minstrelsy as an aes- theticized reflection of white workers’ desire for interracial solidarity, this work has too quickly minimized the broader, extratheatrical doings of those who produced the form, including their allegiance to an antiblack and often proslavery Jacksonian democracy, forms of racial terror, 2. Lott, Cockrell, and Lhamon are the most influential and determinative treatments of early minstrelsy. Douglas A. Jones Jr. A. Douglas 22 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/DRAM_a_00259 by guest on 27 September 2021 and violence against African American communities (see Grimsted 1998; Litwack 1961; Harris 2003). These actions simultaneously conditioned and were conditioned by early minstrelsy’s ideological and aesthetic formations, manifesting, for example, in the form’s explicit pro- Jacksonian politics and its visual and discursive reliance upon the battered and bruised black body for its humor.3 As both archive and repertoire of this sociopolitical history, the textual and performative traces of early minstrelsy do not uphold claims of white working-class interest in the amelioration of black social, political, and economic abjection. Moreover, the view that early minstrelsy represents an aspirational yet abortive attempt to forge an alliance of African American and white workingmen also fails to take account of the equally critical fact that although performances very often took place near black communi- ties, the producers of such performances almost always barred the contributions of actual black people.4 Black input would have subverted the mechanisms of identification and structures of (inter)racial feeling that white audiences (predominately male) worked out for themselves in minstrelsy and other sociocultural formations — structures they used to buffer the ongoing vicissitudes of industrialization and the entrenchment of capitalism. Indeed, black performance by black people (as opposed to “black” performance from within the minstrel mask) would have altered the very definition and history of the American working class itself: at the very least, the embrace of black performers and their politics would have broadened the imaginative space, and therefore the political space, of white working-class culture. Had that happened, “working class” might not have become the “racially specific gendered category” (i.e., white, male) that labor theorist and historian Stanley Aronowitz (1990:175) claims it is. We have no record of black minstrel performers during the early period of minstrelsy because, perhaps, none existed. The improvisation of (black) “Tappan” at the Chatham Street Chapel tells us why: there was always the threat that African Americans might move off script and subvert dominant intentionality.
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