Routes of Blackface Catherine M

Routes of Blackface Catherine M. Cole and Tracy C. Davis

Throughout its history, blackface minstrelsy has been at once potent and slippery, notoriously difficult to control as signification. When one race impersonates another and bills it as enter- tainment, reception becomes a barometer of ethnic hegemony, interracial politics, and power. Artists have been repeatedly tempted to appropriate — and even to try to reassign — signifiers from this tradition, but blackface and its indelibly associated minstrel repertoire retain the power to reopen deep wounds. The least contentious attempts at this have happened far from the United States. Students in colonial Ghana, for example, imitated Al Jolson films as a way to travesty and ridicule colonial mannerisms taught in their schools (Cole 2001). As Nadia Davids argues in this issue, black Capetonians in South Africa selectively utilize cultural mem- ory and amnesia of the creolized slave experience, the mid-19th-century visit by Christy’s Minstrels, and modern American and South African iconography in a living archive of minstrelsy and colored face-painting, evoking many historical practices and contemporary dis- courses, including the “rainbow” of the postapartheid state. Meanwhile, on many American college campuses, students stage “ghetto parties” in the semiprivate space of fraternities and sororities. A Google image search using the key words “ghetto party” conjures astonishing new incarnations of an old American form: white college students, clutching plastic beer cups, grin at the camera, their faces blackened with grease paint, their fingers pointed in gestures evoking urban gang signs yet also unwittingly ghosting the “Zip Coon” antebellum minstrel character in updated attire. Blackface, a quintessential signifier of the minstrel repertoire, continues to travel through time and space frequently unmoored from knowledge about its antecedents.

Catherine M. Cole is Professor of Theater, Dance and Performance Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of Performing South Africa’s Truth Commission: Stages of Transition (Indiana University Press, 2010) and Ghana’s Concert Party Theatre (Indiana University Press, 2001). In addition to recently serving as the Editor of Theatre Survey, she has coedited the book Africa After Gender? (2007), and a special issue of Theatre Survey on African and Afro-Caribbean Performance. She has published articles in Africa, Critical Inquiry, Disability Studies Quarterly, Research in African Literatures, Theatre, Theatre Journal, and TDR, as well as numerous chapters in edited volumes. [email protected]

Tracy C. Davis is Barber Professor of Performing Arts and Associate Dean for Academic Affairs in The Graduate School at Northwestern University. She edits the book series Cambridge Studies in Theatre and Performance Theory and is author of Actresses as Working Women: Their Social Identity in Victorian Culture (Routledge, 1991), George Bernard Shaw and the Socialist Theatre(Praeger, 1994), The Economics of the British Stage 1800–1914(Cambridge University Press, 2007), and Stages of Emergency: Cold War Nuclear Civil Defense (Duke University Press, 2007). Her edited anthologies include Theatricality (Cambridge University Press, 2004), The Cambridge Companion to Performance Studies (2008), The Performing Century: Nineteenth Century Theatre’s History(Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), and The Broadview Anthology of Nineteenth-Century British Performance (2012). [email protected]

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8 Cole/Davis and kudzu America ispersistent, destructive, andseeminglyineradicable. Cutthebranchfromvine (an importedplantnowinvasivethroughoutthe American South)blackfaceminstrelsyinNorth Or soclaimits significatory, experiential, orpoliticalobverse. McAllister hasdemonstrated, thedoubleconsciousnessofwhitinguphasneverbeenblackface’s sumers engagedwiththeformduringveryparticularconjuncturesofUShistory. As Marvin how uncritical celebrationoftheformorexclusivefocusonmoralcondemnation Nyong’o havemovedwellbeyondtheextremesthatmarkminstrelsyhistoriography as RobinBernstein, Saidiya V. Hartman, DavidKrasner, W.T. Lhamon, EricLott, and Tavia tools asmultiple, heterodox, andpolymorphousastheformitself. Inrecentyearsscholarssuch ceptions inequalmeasure. Blackfaceminstrelsydemandsresearchmethodsandtheoretical slavery andracialsegregation:asboth “shadows” and “acts,” expressingandshaping publicper and Robert Toll readminstrelsyasbothreflectiveandconstitutiveofthematerialrealities upon whichthemasqueraderwasforcedtostand. Mid-centurywriterssuchasRalphEllison lifted, eversobriefly, “themaskthatgrinsandlies,” revealingatorturedsoul andthe “vileclay” DuBois providedpoliticallyincisivecritiques. Inhispoem “We Wear theMask” (1896)Dunbar celebrated itas Americana. At theturnoflastcentury, PaulLaurenceDunbarand W.E.B. Scholarship ontheformbeganwithuncriticalnostalgiaofcollectorsandaficionadoswho to radio, film, television, merchandizing, andnowtheinternetin20th21stcenturies. media havekeptupwiththetimes, fromdance, monologue, andsongsheetsinthe19thcentury order todepartfromitmakesforhighlyvolatileculturalpolitics. politics ofblackface. The authorschallengeandcontributetothehistoriography ofblackface and sourcematerialsbringfreshinterpretivetechniquesto bearonthepotenthistoriesand assembled heredeployarangeofrhetoricalandanalyticalstrategies, astheyleveragenewsites perhaps bestapproachedusingajiujutsuofthespirit([1953] 1995:56, 276–77). The essays Town asanhistoricist, polychromaticpalimpsest. in colonialSouth Africa asadiscourseofEnglishidentity; andreimaginedin21st-centuryCape incarnated throughouttheUnitedKingdomwithhighlyspecific localmeanings;re-produced in theUnitedStatesasanalienheritage, raciallytriangulated alterity, BlackPower, andcamp; historical rootsaswellseveralbranches the full-blownonslaughtofburntcorkoritsgrease-paintprogeny. Inthisissue, TDR time sothattheyareidentifiableinthemerestgesture, musicallick, orintonation, nevermind ied representationandreception, toperceivetherecapitulationsofrepertoireechoingacross enabled scholarstoresearchacrossthesedomainswhileattunedthecomplexitiesofembod- chandise, musictocartoons, andtelevisiontotheinternet. Performancestudieshaslikewise racialized evenastheymoverecklesslyandmercuriallyfromtheatretocinema, noveltomer unsettled, andreified;asevidenceofhowsocialformationsarethoroughlyviscerally action andintervention;aslacunaeinwhichpowerrelationsweresimultaneouslyestablished, and understandminstrelsy’spersistentproblematicembodimentsascriticalsitesforsocial Lott, inparticular, culturalstudiesliberatedmanyscholarstomoveoutsideofdisciplinarysilos orized (albeitofteninunacknowledgedways)byculturalstudies. Through theworkofEric 1. Blackface minstrelsywasthefirst Americanmassculture, andfornearlytwocenturiesits (2006); Nyongo’o (2009); Bernstein (2011); McAllister (2011); and Johnson (2012). (1997); Hartman Krasner (1997); Lhamon (1998); Cole (2001); Lane (2005); Chude-Sokei (2006); Brooks See Toll (1974). For more recent appraisals of blackface, see Lott (1993); Bean et al. (1996); Cockrell (1997); Ralph Ellisononceadvisedthatantiblackrepresentationalrepertoires arelikeritualobjects, Some ofthemostinnovativeresearchonminstrelsypasttwodecadeshasbeenauth blackface operated, whatculturalandpoliticalworkitdid, andhowitsproducerscon- — like blackfaceminstrelsy embodiers; othersarealltooawareofitsracistcitationality. Likethekudzuvine — can sproutupanew. Eventotrycitethistraditionin — or routes 1 — of blackfaceminstrelsy, repurposed — to askprecisely — examines that is, - - Routes of Blackface 9 - created alternate performers such students at Berkeley staged an students at Berkeley the now infamous “Compton Cookout” “Compton Cookout” the now infamous — — whereby grotesquerie is the vehicle and the target of white whereby grotesquerie is the vehicle and the —

“blacks” —

The issue begins with “Notes from the Blackout” by Omar Ricks and Kim McNair, a poetic Ricks and Kim McNair, by Omar “Notes from the Blackout” The issue begins with from the United States to the United The following three articles trace travel routes route of blackface that links Christy’s and far-flung Thelwell traces a little-known Chinua Ricks and McNair assert the importance of black people and the material realities of their Ricks and McNair assert the importance ations of the form in unexpected contexts such as the World War II Japanese internment camps; internment II Japanese War World contexts such as the form in unexpected ations of the white a Chuck Knipp, drag performances of the contemporary Arts Movement; and the Black black “Queen Latifah Liquor while wearing character Shirley Q. performed as the gay man who Wal-Mart.” lady makeup from an academic journal) its own kind through unconventional form (for intervention that performs to a racially themed party Responding of jiujutsu. San Diego of California, held in 2010 at University the Jacksonian stage is central to the social Thus, ideology. and fuels proslavery Rice, T.D. as This helps to account for minstrelsy’s volatility over processes of class and racial alignment. from the history and “separate” or “innocent” and the inability of any of its elements to be time, American slavery. legacy of Thelwell both document Chinua Davis and C. Tracy Africa. and thence to South Kingdom, in Britain from immortalized State in 1842, York a troupe formed in New Christy’s Minstrels, from 1864. Antipodes Africa and the and that ventured out on a global tour to South 1857, but argues imbued in blackface minstrelsy, Davis recognizes political substructures Like Jones, and that given the multidirectional cultural flow of the form (and its constitutive elements), many fac- the absence of consensus about polygenic racism in Britain during 1850s and ’60s, Close attention and Scottish spectators into a public. Irish, tors complicate what made English, elements to time and place shows how blackface minstrelsy was less a comingling of cultural (as in Jones’s (as in Lott’s model) or of respective black and white anxieties about race and class upon model) but an abutment between two systems that can be differently identified depending which are locally legible. but more readily than their meanings, Performances travel, the locale. the minstrel form Landing in the Eastern Cape, Africa. in Britain to mid-19th century South including a Port Elizabeth inn named environment, Africa’s built found its way into South of Cape In the polyglot milieu Cabin.” Tom’s “Uncle and a Kimberly hotel called “Jim Crow” troupe “coloured” as when an amateur variants, minstrelsy took root and spawned new Town, minstrelsy by examining previously untapped evidence, question current orthodoxies about the orthodoxies about question current untapped evidence, by examining previously minstrelsy - scope of the performa expand the geographic racial formations, American in role of minstrelsy on iter and focus abroad, exported minstrel performances American to consider tive genealogy spectacle of blackness. In the face of black stereotypes unleashed by the Cookout, they by the Cookout, In the face of black stereotypes unleashed spectacle of blackness. cacophony of racist insults that In answer to the and uniformity. searing images of solidarity the Blackout protest exploited the in the wake of the UCSD party, spewed onto the internet of the Compton Cookout, In response to the historical amnesia rhetorical power of silence. erasing memories of its the potency of minstrelsy while simultaneously which attempted to tap a condensed catalog stretching across Ricks and McNair offer of violence, foundational histories this incident drew. centuries of the ignoble legacies upon which “Black in Jones Jr. A. a premise shared by Douglas lives when viewing the specter of blackface, Minstrelsy.” ‘Racial’ History of Early the Social and Politics but Not Black People: Rethinking of blacks through white working-class solidarity Jones overturns Eric Lott’s construct of love where race He argues that minstrelsy is precisely the space and theft of blacks’ cultural heritage. whites’ anxieties over waged capitalism as being and racism are equally important in expressing whites’ early minstrelsy absorbed At the same time, too like the brutalities of slaveholding. in which gross injustices abided with or with- fear of blacks’ violent reprisals against a system the formative years of minstrelsy do not show a simple For Jones, out the presence of slaves. white performers and their substitution as transmit- mimetic equivalence (through adoption by minstrelsy constructs a new cat- Instead, and dance). stories, ters of black repertoires of gesture, egory Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/DRAM_a_00257 by guest on 24 September 2021 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/DRAM_a_00257 by guest on 24September 2021

10 Cole/Davis or blacknessreifiedintheseperformances? HowdidartistsoftheBAMdevisemeanstospeak .culture andthuscapableofreading thestepsofdétournement Yet what(orwho) istheblack tion, politicallyhonedto afinepointforaudiencesprimedbylifetime’ssaturationin black tionized thewayweunderstand race, culture, andpower 1960s and’70s express displacement, yearning, andagentialdignity. IntheBlack Arts Movement(BAM)ofthe aged intoaMidwayentertainment. InCaliforniain1942 itwasrepurposedfromthemoviesto upon theaimsofthosewhowieldit. In1901Buffaloit wasapseudo-restoredbehaviorpack- erable” commoditycapableofaestheticrepurposing, repackaging, andrecapitulationdepending order authorizingtheevacuationandinternmentitself. suffering underUSexclusionlaws, mostpressinglyPresident FranklinD. Roosevelt’sexecutive persecutions of African Americans sufferingunder JimCrowsegregationand Asian Americans strategically functionedinaracialtriangulationtohighlightthe parallel(thoughhardlyequal) the partofnon-whiteactorsinUnitedStates. She argues thatblackfaceand Asian alterity ture onminstrelsydidanappropriateprecedentexistforanalyzing suchracialimpersonationon in citingthefilmHoliday Inn, Roxworthyfoundthatnowhereintheextensivescholarlylitera- bles. While suspectingthattheseperformerslaidclaimtoadomesticformofracialsuffering ily convertedintoaconcentrationcamp, whereJapanese Americans werehousedinhorsesta- the Santa Anita Assembly Center, aLos Angeles–area racetrackandentertainmentmeccahast- whites’ nostalgicrecapitulationsofantebellumlife. lineage to American slaverythatKootinhighlightsisfilledinwithmanufacturedauthenticityof foreign country. Indeed, blackfaceminstrelsyhadlongsincecircledtheglobe, butthebroken purported antebellumcultureofplaytimeandagriculturallaborasiftheywerethewaysa ertoire ofthis “genuine blackculture.” Hiredblackperformerslearnedthemannersoftheir had noethnologicalgroundingwhatsoever. White instructorsweretherepositoriesofrep- taught acurriculumofcamp-meetingsongs, cakewalks, buckdances, andnegromelodiesthat Buffalo, New York, recruitedperformersforitsOldPlantationexhibit, Southernblackswere strelsy hadbecomefrom African American lifeby1901:whenthePan-AmericanExhibitionin ist caricature. tial ofthisblackfaceperformancetobeapowerfullytransformativemaskandnotmerelyrac- significantly, arepositoryfortheCapeslaveexperience. Davidsendsbyexploringthepoten- order tointerprettheCapeMinstrelCarnivalasbothanexpressionofracialanxietyand, more this blackfaceformwithintwokeySouth African theoreticaldiscourses nial Cape Town, andtodayitexpressesaculturaldislocationwroughtbyslavery. Davidsplaces ers in South Africa: thecontemporaryCapeCarnival. The formknownin Afrikaans asklopsekam- gies ofXhosaidentity, NadiaDavidsfocusesonaverydifferentinstanceofblackfaceminstrelsy colonial metropole. as ameanstoknittogetherBritishsubjectswithinthisoutpost, aremoterelativetotheir Dutch subcultures, minstrelsyenactedaveryparticularwhiteidentity and hypersexualizedXhosa. Inalandwhere “white” identitywasfracturedbyBritishand ican labor, andperformedthisagainstabackdropoflocalstereotypesaboutindolent, blacks intoatypologythatincludedromanticizednotionsofproductiveandhappyblack Amer for definingsettlerculture, erectingandpreservingracialboundaries, collapsingimagesof guage. Within apreindustrial, pre-apartheidera, minstrelsyfunctionedasadiscursive performed thesong “Malingo Hoy, theCape Town Coolie” intheDutch-Mozambiquelan- originatedasanemancipatoryprocessionbythecity’scolouredpopulationthroughcolo- Kootin, Roxworthy, andMikeSellalldetail versionsofhowblackfaceminstrelsyisa “deliv- Emily Roxworthyexaminesblackfaceactsperformedin1942byteenagedNiseiinterneesat Amma Y. Ghartey-Tagoe Kootindemonstrateshowindisputablyremovedblackfacemin- While Thelwell’s articleexploreshowwhitesettlersusedminstrelsytonegotiatemytholo- — the aestheticandspiritualsister oftheBlackPowermovementthatrevolu- — it wasaninstrumentofdeconstruc - — — English “race” andplace — and served thieving, strategy — in Routes of Blackface 11 witted are still — Cambridge: Cambridge whether pretty, ugly, or useful ugly, whether pretty, — its supply far outstrips even its most nimble- — even as drag, homage, and recognizable “folk” fig- “folk” and recognizable homage, even as drag, New York: Vintage International. Vintage New York: — . Amherst: University of . Minstrelsy of Blackface and Legacies Traditions . Cambridge, MA: Cambridge, from Jim Crow to Hip Hop. Performance Raising Cain: Blackface up to two meters per week — Durham, NC: Duke University Press. NC: Duke University Press. Durham,

cannot escape a legacy of racist deployments. In this case, even a Southern clown who In this case, of racist deployments. cannot escape a legacy

— . Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press. Wesleyan NH: Hanover, . Minstrelsy Nineteenth-Century Blackface University Press. York New York: NC: Duke University Press. Diaspora. University Press. Oxford University Press. York: New Massachusetts Press. Martin’s Press. St. York: New Harvard University Press. So, like kudzu, which springs up seemingly at will and has so far been impossible to eradicate which springs up seemingly like kudzu, So, Finally, Jennifer Schlueter’s work on Chuck Knipp’s voluble character Shirley Q. Liquor character Shirley Q. Schlueter’s work on Chuck Knipp’s voluble Jennifer Finally, . World Their and Minstrels Blackface Early Demons of Disorder: 1997. Dale. Cockrell, kudzu even when the lush foliage is stripped away and the vines are twisted and modeled into kudzu even when the lush foliage is stripped with its astonishing and kudzu thrives on herbicides, When alive, a sculpture that is left to dry. growth rate such a growth can neither be eradicated and damaging in equal measure, Verdant adapters. nor ignored. New to Civil Rights. American Childhood from Slavery Racial Innocence: Performing 2011. Robin. Bernstein, Durham, 1850–1910. of Race and Freedom, Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Performances 2006. A. Daphne Brooks, African and the Minstrelsy, Black-on-Black Williams, Bert “Darky”: The Last 2006. Louis. Chude-Sokei, Press. Bloomington: Indiana University . Theatre Ghana’s Concert Party 2001. Catherine. Cole, Mead and Co. Dodd, York: New In Lyrics of Lowly Life. the Mask.” Wear “We 1896. Paul Laurence. Dunbar, Shadow (1953) 1995. and Act. Ralph. Ellison, . America and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century Slavery, Terror, Scenes of Subjection: 1997. V. Saidiya Hartman, : Burnt Cork 2012. ed. Stephen, Johnson, 1895–1910. Theatre, American African and Double Consciousness in Parody, Resistance, 1997. David, Krasner, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. 1840–1895 . Cuba, Blackface 2005. Jill. Lane, 1998. W.T. Lhamon, References Readings in Mask: Inside the Minstrel 1996. eds. Brooks McNamara, Hatch, V. James Annemarie, Bean, where imported, blackface minstrelsy is voracious in its appetite though, when felled, adapt- when felled, blackface minstrelsy is voracious in its appetite though, where imported, constructions such Yet able for aesthetic purposes. draws Southern conservatives’ indignation can never “just” be campy parody. Knipp readily be campy parody. “just” indignation can never draws Southern conservatives’ minstrelsy since its inception. the enduring opportunism that has dogged identifies in his fans reveals many of the persistent problems with blackface minstrelsy: no matter what the white problems with blackface minstrelsy: reveals many of the persistent Not all mimicry overdetermined. reception is or willful ahistoricism, performer’s intention, racial impersonation but is minstrelsy, ures back to the Empire (of racism) in which blackface minstrelsy flourished and from which it still and from which it still flourished in which blackface minstrelsy Empire (of racism) back to the produced through of the vertiginous ironies an examination Through be expunged? could not such as figures Situationists, like the that, Sell argues idiom, of the minstrel BAM’s deployment - power of critical appropri appreciated the and Ed Bullins Ward, Turner Douglas Amiri Baraka, black- no true escape from that there is They understood symbolic reversal. ation and strategic rise of critical whiteness decades before the Two with respect to it. strategic positions only face, idea that though blackface was the BAM artists performatively realized the Sell argues, studies, playwrights it also confirmed in the hands of subversive inauthenticity, quintessential sign of revolutionary Blackness. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/DRAM_a_00257 by guest on 24 September 2021 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/DRAM_a_00257 by guest on 24September 2021

12 Cole/Davis Toll, RobertC. 1974. Blacking Up: The Minstrel ShowinNineteenth-Century America. New York: Oxford Nyong’o, Tavia.2009. McAllister, MarvinEdward. 2011. WhitingUp: Whiteface Minstrels andStage Europeansin African American Lott, Eric. 1993. Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy andthe American Working Class. New York: Oxford University Press. University ofMinnesotaPress. Performance. ChapelHill:UniversityofNorthCarolinaPress. University Press. The Amalgamation Waltz: Race, Performance,. andtheRusesofMemory Minneapolis: