Composing in Black and White

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sandra Jean Graham
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
Code Switching ◽  
Primary Sources ◽  
Social Constructions ◽  
Black And White ◽  
Musical Comedy ◽  
Blackface Minstrelsy ◽  
Ambiguous Position

This chapter examines how Sam Lucas (1840–1916), one of the most popular black performers of the late 1870s and 1880s, was able to transcend the restrictions imposed on black entertainers in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, mainly through his songs that deploy ideologically laden codes to signify social constructions of race. Renowned for his songs, comic ingenuity, pleasing tenor voice, nimble dance steps, and dramatic intensity, Lucas holds the distinction of being the only African American to perform in the genres of blackface minstrelsy, variety and vaudeville, turn-of-the-century black musical comedy, and film (as a lead character). This chapter considers Lucas’s “black-coded” and “white-coded” songs and relates them to his deliberate attempt to manage his ambiguous position between sociocultural groups. To illuminate Lucas’s strategy of code-switching, a selective biography of Lucas based on primary sources and his own narratives is presented.

Blackface Minstrelsy and the Reception of Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield

2021 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
pp. 305-320
Author(s):  
Julia J. Chybowski
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
Social Class ◽  
Gender Roles ◽  
Black Swan ◽  
Social Hierarchies ◽  
Race And Gender ◽  
Blackface Minstrelsy ◽  
And Gender

AbstractThis article explores blackface minstrelsy in the context of Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield's singing career of the 1850s–1870s. Although Greenfield performed a version of African American musicality that was distinct from minstrel caricatures, minstrelsy nonetheless impacted her reception. The ubiquity of minstrel tropes greatly influenced audience perceptions of Greenfield's creative and powerful transgressions of expected race and gender roles, as well as the alignment of race with mid-nineteenth-century notions of social class. Minstrel caricatures and stereotypes appeared in both praise and ridicule of Greenfield's performances from her debut onward, and after successful US and transatlantic tours established her notoriety, minstrel companies actually began staging parody versions of Greenfield, using her sobriquet, “Black Swan.” These “Black Swan” acts are evidence that Greenfield's achievements were perceived as threats to established social hierarchies.

Defying Boundaries and Escaping Stereotypes

2019 ◽  
pp. 200-220
Author(s):  
Thomas L. Riis
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Creative Work ◽  
Personal Stories ◽  
Blackface Minstrelsy ◽  
Original Creative Work ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Nineteenth

Riis takes up the complicated conventions and troubled history of late-nineteenth-century blackface minstrelsy as it was blended and interwoven into the activities among a largely unknown contingent of thousands of African American (and mostly midwestern) musicians and entertainers. He explores how nineteenth-century entertainers understood their business, including the moniker “minstrel” itself, and what for them constituted original, creative work. In this essay, the questions of identity have less to do with personal stories than the importance of the group and how its activities have been lost to history. Knowledge of these forgotten show people, and the sources where more information about them might be found, can help us combat the persistence of degrading stereotypes used to provide oversimplified explanations of black musical and theatrical activity.

Enslavement and the Temporality of Childhood

2020 ◽  
Vol 92 (1) ◽  
pp. 33-59
Author(s):  
Sarah E. Chinn
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
Slave Narratives ◽  
Early Years ◽  
Primary Sources ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Multiple Points ◽  
The People ◽  
Material Reality ◽  
Formative Experiences

Abstract This article explores how thinking about the time of childhood through the lens of US slavery forces us to rethink both phenomena. According to many of the people who lived through it, enslaved childhood was a shifting, episodic phenomenon that had multiple points of definition. Throughout the nineteenth century, as their adult selves looked back on their early years, formerly enslaved people adopted a number of different strategies to understand and narrate how they came to be who they were and what their formative experiences meant in terms of the trajectory of their lives. They wrote within a literary culture that was itself partially responsible for creating (and certainly was instrumental in promoting and perpetuating) the temporal understanding of childhood as unidirectional, progressive, and only tangentially connected to material reality. But they also described quite different temporal patterns for slave childhood. These patterns are the focus of my analysis here: how African American narrators negotiated their vexed relationship to childhood as both never- and always-children in order to challenge the growing consensus on how childhood could and should be staged in literary texts. My primary sources are narratives by formerly enslaved people, written, as most slave narratives were, primarily but not exclusively for white readers.

Conclusion

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher J. Smith
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
North America ◽  
Cross Cultural ◽  
Primary Sources ◽  
American Popular Culture ◽  
Cultural Encounter ◽  
Blackface Minstrelsy ◽  
Street Performance

This book has constructed a portrait of the multiethnic nineteenth-century world that gave birth to blackface minstrelsy using primary sources such as demographics, tune repertoires, archival materials, and most especially iconography. Drawing on evidence from the biographical experience and visual reporting of William Sidney Mount, it has also presented a more expansive history than blackface scholarship has formerly recognized. It has argued that the resources and conditions for the creole synthesis existed across the riverine and maritime zones of North America, and that these conditions produced the creole street-performance idioms that were the sources of blackface theatrics. In investigating the riverine and maritime, geographic, demographic, ethnic, and musical roots of blackface minstrelsy, the book has elucidated the processes of cross-cultural encounter, collision, and piebald synthesis by which American popular culture has always been and is still defined.

Slavery and Class in the American South

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
William L. Andrews
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
African Americans ◽  
American South ◽  
Frederick Douglass ◽  
Harriet Jacobs ◽  
Slave Narrative ◽  
William Wells Brown ◽  
The American South ◽  
Work Family

In this study of an entire generation of slave narrators, more than sixty mid-nineteenth-century narratives reveal how work, family, skills, and connections made for social and economic differences among the enslaved of the South. Slavery and Class in the American South explains why social and economic distinctions developed and how they functioned among the enslaved. Andrews also reveals how class awareness shaped the views and values of some of the most celebrated African Americans of the nineteenth century. Slave narrators discerned class-based reasons for violence between “impudent,” “gentleman,” and “lady” slaves and their resentful “mean masters.” Status and class played key roles in the lives and liberation of the most celebrated fugitives from US slavery, such as Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, William Wells Brown, and William and Ellen Craft. By examining the lives of the most- and least-acclaimed heroes and heroines of the African American slave narrative, Andrews shows how the dividing edge of social class cut two ways, sometimes separating upper and lower strata of slaves to their enslavers’ advantage, but at other times fueling convictions among even the most privileged of the enslaved that they deserved nothing less than complete freedom.

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