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Title: Black Shakespeareans vs. Minstrel Burlesques: "Proper" English, Racist Blackface Dialect, And the Contest for Representing "Blackness," 1821-1844 (Report)
Author : Shakespeare Studies
Release Date : January 01, 2010
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
Pages : * pages
Size : 284 KB

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ONE AREA OF MARKED OVERLAP in examinations of race in Renaissance studies and of antebellum minstrelsy alike is an interest in whether or not early representations of blackness--however "early" is defined--might stage the authentic presence of black identities and perspectives. As Eric Lott noted in his study, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (1993), the earliest historians of minstrelsy "assum[ed] ... that minstrelsy's scurrilous representations of black people were scrupulously authentic." (1) In response to generations of what Lott called "revisionist" critics who thereafter aimed at revealing "minstrelsy's patent inauthenticity, its northern origins, [and] its self-evidently dominative character," (2) W. T. Lhamon Jr. has been one of the chief proponents in the last several years of what we might call a counterrevisionist interpretation of minstrelsy by which he sees any racist elements in supposed white egalitarian critiques of elitism as accidental or even as entirely absent. Before the rise of fullblown minstrelsy in 1843, Lhamon indeed finds only "cross-racial attraction or mutuality," "anti-racist dimensions," and wholly inclusive, "integrative" impulses in American blackface, particularly in T. D. Rice's famed impersonation of blackness through the character of "Jim Crow." (3) Before we turn to reexamining this romanticized view, such recent counterrevisionist work must be distinguished at the outset from the previous, more subtle criticism of Lott, which granted "minstrelsy's oppressive dimension" while simultaneously aiming to complicate the previous dualism of interpretations reading the tradition as either "wholly authentic or wholly hegemonic." (4) Noting that beyond the pervasive grotesque racial parody and racial domination was an occasionally "sympathetic (if typically condescending) attitude toward black people" in blackface minstrelsy, Lott pointed to particular moments in which we may sometimes observe a paradoxical, "dialectical flickering of racial insult and racial envy, moments of domination and moments of liberation.... a pattern at times amounting to no more than the two faces of racism, at others gesturing toward a specific kind of racial danger, and all constituting a peculiarly American structure of racial feeling." (5) Unfortunately, in the inevitable pendulum swing of criticism, Lott's subtle revision has given way to some views in recent work that Lott clearly aimed to differentiate himself from: "I am not one of those critics who see in a majority of minstrel songs an unalloyed self-criticism by whites under cover of blackface, the racial parody nearly incidental." (6) He seems here to have anticipated Lhamon's argument that Rice's stereotypical representations do not constitute racial parody but rather an unambiguous, unambivalent acknowledgment of the presence of black culture and perspectives--Rice is, for instance, said to have been "translating black experiences for whites" in "ethnographic skits" in which he was "copying black gestures to identify ... with them"--even as, dubiously, the presence of some black audience members in the now newly segregated "upper gallery reserved for blacks" (in the very period in which "Jim Crow" was already becoming synonymous with segregation) is here somehow recast as "partially integrated in the compromise then permissible" in order to suggest some remarkable inclusiveness in Rice's representations. (7) Without intending to refute Lott's nuanced arguments finding moments of attraction and ambivalence in some minstrelsy (especially since audience interest is, in fact, a major concern in this essay), recent critical excesses warrant a corrective reexamination of the limits of assuming identification and presence via mere representation. Writing in a different, yet ultimately highly relevant context in her work on the representation of race in Renaissance England, Dympna Callaghan challenged "the fetishistic insistence o