scholarly journals “A Shplit Ticket, Half Irish, Half Chinay”: Representations of Mixed-Race and Hybridity in the Turn-of-the-Century Theater

2008 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 32-54 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gregory T. Carter
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Mixed Race ◽  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
Uncle Tom's Cabin ◽  
Chinese Dialect ◽  
Stage Directions ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Racially Mixed

Charles Townsend's 1889 adaptation of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin features white actors playing light- and dark-skinned African-American characters, changing degrees of make-up as the script, stage business, or number of available players demands. Thomas Denison's stage directions to his 1895 play, Patsy O'Wang, an Irish Farce with a Chinese Mix-Up, stipulates that the alternation of the half -Chinese, half-Irish cook between his two ethnic personas is “key to this capital farce,” and that a comedie use of the Chinese dialect is central to this. The Geezer (c. 1896), Joseph Herbert's spoof of the popular musical, The Geisha, features white actors playing Chinese dignitaries, but also donning German and Irish accents. The white actors in these plays enact different paradigms of hybridity. The actors in Townsend's Uncle Tom's Cabin, a Melodrama in Five Acts embody conceptions of both mixed and unmixed African Americans, freely alternating between each. In Patsy O'Wang, the main character's background is central to the story, and the lead actor moves between the two ethnicities by his accent, mannerisms, and politics. Racial mixing is central to the plot of The Geezer through Anglo actors who make themselves hybrid by appearing Chinese and appropriating a third accent, rather than the creation of racially mixed offspring.

Raisin, Race, and the Real Estate Revolution of the Early Twentieth Century

2019 ◽  
pp. 287-312
Author(s):  
Carol M. Rose
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Real Estate ◽  
Predominantly White ◽  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
The Real Estate ◽  
Governmental Agencies ◽  
White Neighborhood ◽  
Standard Practices

Lorraine Hansberry’s hit play of 1957, A Raisin in the Sun, centered on the decision of an African American family in Chicago, the Youngers, to move to a house in a white neighborhood. The play is set in the post–World War II era, but many of its scenes and actions relate back to real estate practices that began at the turn of the century and that continued to evolve into the midcentury and to some degree beyond. During those decades, housing development and finance increased dramatically in scale, professionalization, and standardization. But in their concern for their predominantly white consumers’ preferences for segregation, real estate developers, brokers, financial institutions, and finally governmental agencies adopted standard practices that excluded African Americans from many housing opportunities and that then reinforced white preferences for housing segregation. Many seemingly minor features of the play reflect the way that African Americans had been sidelined in the earlier decades’ evolving real estate practices—not just the family’s overcrowded apartment, but also more subtle cues, such as the source of the initial funds for the new house, the methods for its finance, and the legal background of the white homeowners’ effort to discourage the purchase. This essay pinpoints these and other small clues, and describes how standardizing real estate practices dating from the turn of the century effectively crowded out African American consumers like the Youngers, with consequences that we continue to observe in modern patterns of urban segregation.

A Troubled/Troubling History

Ballet Class ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 129-156
Author(s):  
Melissa R. Klapper
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
Native American ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Performing Arts ◽  
Role Models ◽  
Local Communities ◽  
African American Children ◽  
The Creation ◽  
American Children

Ballet has been and continues to be among the least diverse of the performing arts. Until well into the twentieth century, most African American children who wanted to take ballet class were forced to go to segregated studios, which played significant roles in local communities. African Americans also faced very limited opportunities for ballet careers. There were important exceptions who served as role models, and the creation of the Dance Theatre of Harlem in 1969 helped challenge the racist assumptions that dancers of color could not master the ballet aesthetic. A number of prominent Native American ballerinas faced less discrimination. Recent diversity initiatives are slowly improving the situation in both recreational and professional ballet.

Reading Race and Place

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kimberly Chabot Davis
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Metropolitan Area ◽  
Coming Of Age ◽  
Mixed Race ◽  
Book Clubs ◽  
Free Blacks ◽  
Antebellum South ◽  
History Of ◽  
Racially Mixed ◽  
Race And Place

This chapter focuses on the reception of two African American “post-soul” novels that deconstruct essentialist ideas about race. Inviting readers to reconsider binary understandings of blackness and whiteness, Edward P. Jones's The Known World (2003) focuses on free blacks who own slaves in the antebellum South, while Danzy Senna's Caucasia (1998) details the coming of age of a mixed-race girl in Boston in the 1970s and 1980s. The chapter examines how the reading of a racially charged text is influenced by the readers' locality and the communities in which they live and participate. It also compares the conversations of racially mixed book clubs to those with all white or all African American members, and analyzes the connections and disjunctions between empathetic reading and the readers' political lives within a metropolitan area with a long history of racial antagonism.

Not a Human Being

2019 ◽  
pp. 173-193
Author(s):  
Wendy Gonaver
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Quality Of Care ◽  
Civil War ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Lunatic Asylum ◽  
Religious Culture ◽  
Human Being ◽  
Mechanical Restraint ◽  
The Creation

The two decades after the Civil War saw the creation of a handful of insane asylums for African Americans in the South. The first of these institutions was the Central Lunatic Asylum of Virginia, to which all African American patients at the Eastern Lunatic Asylum were transferred at the end of the war. The quality of care at asylums generally deteriorated in this period due to overcrowding and underfunding, but this chapter argues that asylums for African Americans were at the opprobrious vanguard. Focusing on conditions at Central Lunatic Asylum reveals that moral means were immediately abandoned in favor of mechanical restraint and hard labor because white superintendents asserted that newly freedmen and women lacked a moral conscience and refined sensibilities. Using dehumanizing language, they characterized patients as sexually profligate and viewed African American religious culture as inferior.

Race Making

2019 ◽  
pp. 33-56
Author(s):  
Monika Gosin
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Interethnic Relations ◽  
Social Instability ◽  
Black And White ◽  
Interethnic Conflict ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Political Economic

Chapter 1 provides background for understanding the contentious interethnic relations explored in the book. It details Miami’s turbulent Jim Crow history, the historical forces that brought Cubans to Miami, and the clashes that would arise between white Anglos, Cubans, and African-Americans. The chapter illustrates how racist forces and ideologies of worthy citizenship imposed a strict separation between the categories of “African-American” and “Cuban,” and “black” and “white” in Miami, despite the actual heterogeneity of people placed in these categories. The chapter argues that three dominant race-making frames involved in the creation of worthy citizenship, traditionally utilized by whites to divide themselves from groups of color, become useful for racialized groups when they are faced with political, economic, and social instability. Using the case of Miami, the chapter illuminates how histories of white colonial and settler domination, and ideologies that justify such domination, are connected to interethnic conflict writ large.

More Shadow than Substance

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leah Wright Rigueur
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Substance P ◽  
National Committee ◽  
Party Leaders ◽  
Political Ideas ◽  
Black Republicans ◽  
State And Local ◽  
American Party ◽  
Local Party

This chapter studies how, as the 1970s progressed, black Republicans were able to claim clear victories in their march toward equality: the expansion of the National Black Republican Council (NBRC); the incorporation of African Americans into the Republican National Committee (RNC) hierarchy; scores of black Republicans integrating state and local party hierarchies; and individual examples of black Republican success. African American party leaders could even point to their ability to forge a consensus voice among the disparate political ideas of black Republicans. Despite their ideological differences, they collectively rejected white hierarchies of power, demanding change for blacks both within the Grand Old Party (GOP) and throughout the country. Nevertheless, black Republicans quickly realized that their strategy did not reform the party institution.

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