WHITES IN BLACKFACE, BLACKS IN WHITEFACE

197 Pages·2005·0.77 MB·English

WHITES IN BLACKFACE, BLACKS IN WHITEFACE:
RACIAL FLUIDITIES AND NATIONAL IDENTITIES

By

JASON RICHARDS

A DISSERTATION PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT
OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA

2005
Copyright 2005

by

Jason Richards
TABLE OF CONTENTS

page
ABSTRACT.........................................................................................................................v
CHAPTER
1 INTRODUCTION: HISTORY AND THEORY..........................................................1
Blackface and the Minstrel Show.................................................................................3
The Critical Paradox.....................................................................................................9
Blackface and American Literature............................................................................17
Blackface and Making American Selfhood................................................................18
Blackface and National Identities...............................................................................21
Notes...........................................................................................................................30
2 LOCALIZING THE EARLY REPUBLIC: WASHINGTON IRVING AND
BLACKFACE CULTURE.........................................................................................32
Storytelling, Cultural Hybridity, and Blackface Desire..............................................34
Washington Irving in the Blackface Breeding Grounds.............................................40
Dislocating Local Identity..........................................................................................44
Localizing National Identity.......................................................................................51
Notes...........................................................................................................................56
3 IMITATION NATION: BLACKFACE MINSTRELSY AND THE MAKING OF
AFRICAN AMERICAN SELFHOOD IN UNCLE TOM’S CABIN..........................58
Red, White, Blue, and Blackface................................................................................61
Blackface George Washington...................................................................................62
Black Sam, Uncle Sam...............................................................................................66
Adolph and George Harris: (Un)making African American Selfhood.......................71
Notes...........................................................................................................................83
4 MELVILLE’S (INTER)NATIONAL BURLESQUE: WHITEFACE,
BLACKFACE, AND “BENITO CERENO”..............................................................85
Babo’s White Mask....................................................................................................87
Blackface Delano........................................................................................................94
Cereno, the Dark Dandy...........................................................................................101
iii
The Menacing Shave................................................................................................108
Notes.........................................................................................................................114
5 BLACKFACE VIOLENCE: DISTORTING CULTURE, HISTORY, AND
FEELING..................................................................................................................116
“A Turn of the Wheel”: Blackface Revolution in The Bondwoman’s Narrative.....121
Blackface Revenge in The Garies and Their Friends...............................................125
Whipping up Minstrel Types in Blake......................................................................131
Notes.........................................................................................................................142
6 WORKING IN THE WHITE WAY: HORATIO ALGER’S RAGGED DICK
AND BLACKFACE MINSTRELSY.......................................................................144
Jim Crow and the Preindustrial Presence.................................................................149
Zip Coon and Aristocratic Decline...........................................................................155
Deminstrelization and Working in the White Way..................................................160
Notes.........................................................................................................................166
7 AFTERWORD; OR, THE AFTERMATH: DARKTOWN STRUTTERS AND
BAMBOOZLED........................................................................................................168
Fixing and Mixing Race in Darktown Strutters.......................................................169
Bamboozled and the Dance of Death........................................................................174
Notes.........................................................................................................................180
LIST OF REFERENCES.................................................................................................181
BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH...........................................................................................191

iv
Abstract of Dissertation Presented to the Graduate School
of the University of Florida in Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy

WHITES IN BLACKFACE, BLACKS IN WHITEFACE:
RACIAL FLUIDITIES AND NATIONAL IDENTITIES

By

Jason Richards

August 2005

Chair: Malini Johar Schueller
Major Department: English

This project examines how literary uses of blackface minstrelsy both stabilize and
destabilize raced and national identities by investigating texts that involve figurative and
literal representations of whites in blackface and blacks in whiteface. The narratives I
analyze employ minstrelsy not only to create and sustain raced identities, but also to
register slippages, overlaps, and inversions across the color line—paradoxically
reinforcing and subverting racial hierarchies. I am ultimately concerned with how this
paradox reveals the often contradictory nature of American selfhood. By drawing on
postcolonial theory to explore how minstrelsy shaped national identity, I have sought to
recontextualize blackface, which has remained largely outside discussions of
postcoloniality in American studies.
My first chapter recovers evidence of nascent blackface culture in the early texts of
Washington Irving, evidence that has been wholly overlooked, probably because Irving
began writing before minstrelsy formalized. I argue that by drawing on the local and
v
biracial complexities of blackface culture, Irving confronts post-colonial realities in the
early national period. In the subsequent three chapters, I address blackface as a fully
formed, national phenomenon. Chapter 3 illustrates how black characters in Harriet
Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin employ minstrelsy and colonial mimicry to resist
and conform to aspects of American identity while testing racial barriers to self-making
and achieving differing degrees of selfhood. Chapter 4, on Herman Melville’s “Benito
Cereno,” complicates the conventional reading of Babo as a slave in virtual blackface by
arguing that he also performs a version of whiteface and that the captains Amasa Delano
and Benito Cereno, who represent the North and South respectively, resemble blackface
buffoons. Chapter 5 illustrates how Hannah Crafts, Frank Webb, and Martin Delany use
blackface violence to challenge a hegemonic nationalism and emphasize the emotional,
cultural, and historical violence committed against blacks through minstrelsy. Chapter 6
argues that the young bootblack and eponymous hero of Horatio Alger’s Ragged Dick
performs the popular minstrel roles of the ragged Jim Crow and the richly dressed Zip
Coon, roles that allegorize class and sectional tensions. Dick distinguishes himself from
these figures as he uncovers his whiteness and works to achieve middle-class
respectability. The project ends with an afterword that addresses minstrelsy’s legacy by
discussing two recent works, Wesley Brown’s Darktown Strutters and Spike Lee’s
Bamboozled.

vi
CHAPTER 1
INTRODUCTION: HISTORY AND THEORY
Blackface minstrelsy, a nineteenth-century staged entertainment form wherein
whites “blacked up” and gave their impressions of blacks and black life, has had
enormous consequences for American racial formation, national identity, American
literature, music, and film. Combining comedy, dancing, music, singing, and acting, the
minstrel show, and the various performance cultures from which it grew, helped lay the
groundwork for much of American popular culture. While its most prominent feature was
blackface makeup, minstrelsy was as much about burlesquing blacks as satirizing society,
as much about fixing race as making race fluid and adaptable. Rooted in the anxieties and
desires that erupted over blackness during the slave trade, minstrelsy’s more immediate
origins are spread throughout the mid-Atlantic, particularly in New York, where the form
boomed around the Civil War. Although it faded from the stage by the twentieth century,
then reemerged in early American cinema, before receding again during Civil Rights,
blackface minstrelsy colors our culture still, persisting in various, less recognizable
forms. For instance, in 2004 a black comedy team from Hollywood known as the Wayans
brothers “whited up,” donned blonde wigs, and impersonated two hotel heiresses (a
scarcely masked parody of the Hilton sisters) in their film White Chicks, a “whiteface”
comedy that was popular among white and black audiences. Today, white men strutting
around in actual blackface is strictly taboo. But black men burlesquing white socialites is
not. The mask has merely changed color, according to the social climate.
1
2
Wearing the mask, Ralph Ellison has argued, is largely what it means to be
American. Remarking on the many historical figures who have used masking, Ellison
notes that the revolutionaries attended the Boston Tea Party dressed as Indians;
Hemingway posed as a non-bookish outdoorsman; Faulkner played a farmer; and Lincoln
let people imagine he was an honest country lawyer. “America is a land of masking
jokers” (109), concludes Ellison, a declaration that has weathered time, for the American
desire to wear masks continues, and masking oneself remains a tool for celebrity and
power. By successfully imitating black music and dialect—that is, by mining African
American charisma—white rapper Eminem has risen to the top of the musical charts. By
acquiring the accents of rural America—that is, by harnessing Texas cowboy cachet—a
Connecticut-born, Yale-educated blue blood has risen to president. The mask, whether
literal or figurative, remains a vital, lucrative, deceiving part of American culture.
The blackface mask itself, a mixture of mashed burnt cork and water, gave material
expression to a mimetic American culture that emerged after the Revolution. In a
postcolonial nation searching for an identity, imitating blackness and whiteness became
central to American self-creation.1 Especially in northern marketplaces, but also in
southern plantations, whites and blacks copied one another’s accents, moves, and
cultures. The cultural and racial overlap resulting from such imitations, particularly in the
urban North, eventually coalesced into the minstrel show. The biracial, crosscultural
impulses of minstrelsy reflected the hybrid nature of America, yet whites drew racial
boundaries to preserve their sense of homogenous space. Blackface embodied this
paradox, for it registered racial fluidity and fixity, racial freedom and regulation, all at
once.
3
Since minstrelsy embodied such intense contradictions, it is no wonder scholarship
on the subject has traveled two paths. One avenue sees minstrel shows as a capitalist
stereotyping machine that rigidly defined race, putting a positive spin on whiteness while
debasing and stalling the development of black identity. The other celebrates minstrelsy’s
subversive, interracial energies and vital contributions to American popular culture. Both
tell two sides of a single story. Both are equally true, even though a critical debate, as old
as minstrelsy itself, has tried proving one side over the other. Because the quarrel over
minstrelsy has been long fought, I do not wish to argue whether blackface did more harm
than good, whether we should condemn or celebrate it. Rather, I want to let the paradox
of minstrelsy tell its own tale. I am particularly concerned with how this tale is told by
American narratives that have been informed by minstrelsy. Ultimately, I am after how
this paradox reflects the conflicted impulses of American selfhood, racial formation, and
national identity.
Blackface and the Minstrel Show
Before defining major terms and outlining the direction of my study, I first want to
elaborate the cultural and critical histories of minstrelsy in order to contextualize my
project. With its roots deep in Anglo and African American folk forms and European
music, drama, and literature, blackface performance underwent a long evolutionary
process before adopting the name “minstrels” in 1842. Yet, because of its protracted and
scattered history, isolating the precise origins of blackface is difficult; determining when
enough elements gathered to make it a form is an easier but still slippery endeavor. We
might begin by acknowledging that blackface theater was not always “minstrel” in the
way we think of the term today. Emerging during the middle ages to describe a musician
or singer, the word did not invoke the burlesque typical of blackface comedy. And as far
4
as blackface masking goes, people had been blacking up and imitating “Africans” since
antiquity.2 But the most memorable instances of early blackface are found in
Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus and Othello, both of which featured Moors as characters.
The latter play made its blackface debut in the United States in 1751, but was performed
as serious theater, as opposed to minstrel burlesque. Nevertheless, the “legitimate”
American stage fostered some of the earliest elements of minstrelsy. For instance, in its
first American production in 1769, the comic opera The Padlock featured a blackface
servant named Mungo, who finds relief from his servitude by dancing and singing for
whites. By the late eighteenth century, more minstrel ingredients emerged. In The
Irishman of London, which made its American debut in 1793, the central character
Cubba, who is infantile, cunning, and content in slavery, embodies features later
emphasized by blackface burlesque. Then, in the 1795 version of The Triumphs of Love;
or, Happy Reconciliation, the first full comic blackface character, Sambo, hits the stage.
Although blackface characters from early American theater could perform non-comical
roles, these early productions show how the legitimate stage helped birth racist
stereotypes that would later find full expression in blackface minstrelsy.3
While it cultivated racism on stage, on the streets blackface was something entirely
different. In public gatherings in the early nineteenth century, blackface performance was
not about race as much as it was about community, satire of authority, and joy under
oppression. Folk rituals such as Carnival, callithumpian bands, and mumming plays, for
instance, allowed people to mask themselves (usually with grease or soot) and critique
dominant values while behaving in ways usually unacceptable to those in power.4 The
color of the mask in these festivals was not as important as masking identity, losing the