Ridicule and Wonder: The Beginnings of Minstrelsy and New York
2012; Volume: 36; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
0364-2437
Autores Tópico(s)Theater, Performance, and Music History
ResumoIf they imitate they should imitate, not any meanness or baseness, but good only; for mask which actor wears is apt to become his face. --Plato, The Republic Blackface minstrel plays were a phenomenon that became one of most popular forms of entertainment by Civil War in 1861 As theatrical productions in which white men caricatured blacks for sport and profit by painting their faces black using a burnt cork paste, minstrelsy held obvious racial implications. Principally found in urban North in early nineteenth century, these plays were space for more than just blackface performers themselves; they were stage to a collision of culture and race, class and gender that helped create definition of a new American identity. The study of minstrelsy therefore treads upon uncomfortable territory of racial conflict. The inherent discomfort of this topic has been ubiquitous in our society for years, a paradigm of which perhaps minstrelsy itself is a root. Developed during a tumultuous time in our nation's history, minstrelsy was elemental in shaping American perception of black culture, and burnt cork black on a white face was an ominous foreshadow of residue of blackness to be left on newly created white culture. However, we must not be satisfied to merely condemn inherent evils of minstrelsy and move on, for its legacy is all around us, imbedded in our culture. From TV shows to Hollywood movies, cartoons to comedies sketches, popular music to jargon and dress of what is known as American culture, minstrelsy fomented a process that still affects our society today. The setting is different--the idyllic plantation exchanged for mean streets of urban America--but process of black culture being marketed for white profit is same. We must revisit these plays and their audience and find how it all began. To find social origins and psychological motives behind these plays, we must take inventory of their effects, tracing change back to source in nineteenth century United States. The minstrel show began in an environment that was struggling to find identity. The antebellum North was deeply engaged in urbanization, industrialization, minstrel show. The wars abroad were over, but wars at home were only about to begin, on and off battlefields of Vicksburg, Gettysburg, and Antietam. At a time in which United States was arguably at its weakest, masses of working-class, white Americans of diverse descent flocked to minstrel stage and helped popularize a new identity. The minstrel depiction of blacks created a perception of black identity based on how white actors presented it, and white audience embraced production with cheers and applause. A difficult, yet irrevocable truth is that blackface minstrelsy's audience was not motivated solely by racial prejudice and slander. There were contradictory impulses at work. Condescending racism combined with potentially positive elements of what was portrayed as black culture to create cultural theft--a concept that carries connotations of envy as opposed to hatred. In his masterpiece on minstrelsy, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and American Working Class (1993), author Eric Lott describes this phenomenon, holding that the blackface performance ... was based on small but significant crimes against settled ideas of racial demarcation, which indeed appear to be inevitable when white Americans enter haunted realm of racial fantasy. (2) Although study of minstrelsy is not uniform, there tends to be two broad views on blackface: populist and revisionist views. (3) The revisionist view is more controversial in that it does not align nicely with immediate negative impression of minstrelsy and requires a certain objective detachment from minstrelsy's inherent inequalities. …
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