Review: Demons of Disorder: Early Blackface Minstrels and Their World by Dale Cockrell; Raising Cain: Blackface Performance from Jim Crow to Hip Hop by W. T. Lhamon, Jr.; Behind the Burnt Cork Mask: Early Blackface Minstrelsy and Antebellum American Popular Culture by William J. Mahar

2000 ◽  
Vol 53 (1) ◽  
pp. 165-183
Author(s):  
Charles Hamm
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Hip Hop ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
American Popular Culture ◽  
Blackface Minstrelsy ◽  
Blackface Performance

Ukraine in Blackface: Performance and Representation in Gogol'’s Dikan'ka Tales, Book 1

Slavic Review ◽  
2003 ◽  
Vol 62 (3) ◽  
pp. 525-547 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roman Koropeckyj ◽  
Robert Romanchuk
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
National Culture ◽  
Russian Language ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Gaze ◽  
American Popular Culture ◽  
Blackface Minstrelsy ◽  
Blackface Performance

In this article, Roman Koropeckyj and Robert Romanchuk present a Lacanian reading of the preface and “The Fair at Sorochintsy” from Nikolai Gogol’s Evenings on a Farm near Dikan'ka, vol. 1 (1831), viewed through the prism of American blackface minstrelsy. They trace representations of ethnicity and class in Gogol'’s “performance” of Ukraine. Their analysis of the preface demonstrates how Pan'ko’s Ukraine reaches a Russian lowerclass audience through the intervention of the gaze of an Other, an elite nonreader. The self-absenting of this Other opens a space for the audience’s imaginary identification with the Ukrainian minstrel, while structuring this space symbolically. Their analysis of “The Fair” demonstrates how this “opening” creates a fantasy of Ukraine as a world of unbridled sexuality, simultaneously repressed and re-presented by the story’s Russian- language fabula and elegiac “bookends.” The repressed Ukrainian content irrupts, symptomatically, in the story’s epigraphs. Akin to minstrelsy’s “blackening” of American popular culture, the tension between the repressed and the expressed adumbrates the “Ukrainianization” of Russian national culture.

Immunizing Strategies: Hip-Hop and Critique in Tanzania

Africa ◽  
2005 ◽  
Vol 75 (4) ◽  
pp. 488-509 ◽  
Author(s):  
Koen Stroeken
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
Hip Hop ◽  
Social Impact ◽  
Freedom Of Expression ◽  
Political History ◽  
Social Critique ◽  
American Popular Culture ◽  
The Social ◽  
Public Exposure

AbstractTanzania has in the last decade seen a vibrant form of hip-hop emerge that is gaining wide public exposure thanks to its political tenor. First, this article illustrates how rap lyrics reflect Tanzanian political history and in part determine it. Bongo Flava, as the local hip-hop genre is called, has gained credibility by reinterpreting Nyerere's normative legacy and by expanding freedom of expression in the country, while unhampered by factors that normally mitigate the social impact of popular culture. Second, the article explores the global relevance of their social critique. Bongo Flava attempts to outwit the sophisticated indifference and neoliberalism of postcolonial rulers and ruled. Partly inspired by African American popular culture, many songs expose the postcolonial strategy of survival, which is to immunize oneself against the threat of commodification by fully embracing it, the contamination yielding extra power. The lyrics, in their irony and pessimism, exhibit the same immunizing tendency. However, this tendency is curbed by two principles that safeguard streetwise status: the rapper's willingness to ‘duel’ and the Kiswahili credo of activating bongo, ‘the brains’.

Jump Jim Crow: Lost Plays, Lyrics and Street Prose of the First Atlantic Popular Culture. Edited by W. T. Lhamon. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003; pp. 459. $39.95 cloth.

2005 ◽  
Vol 46 (2) ◽  
pp. 333-335
Author(s):  
Kate Roark
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Harvard University ◽  
Popular Entertainment ◽  
History Of ◽  
Performance Texts ◽  
Blackface Performance

As the first published collection of early blackface-performance texts, W. T. Lhamon's Jump Jim Crow: Lost Plays, Lyrics, and Street Prose of the First Atlantic Popular Culture provides scholars of American popular entertainment with a much-needed sourcebook. These texts are collected in service of the book's larger purpose of evaluating the career of Thomas Dartmouth “Daddy” Rice, the first superstar of blackface performance, who became synonymous with his most popular character, Jim Crow. All the songs and plays gathered in Jump Jim Crow were performed by Rice (with the exception of the “street prose” section, which includes two contemporary, pamphlet biographies of Rice). The texts work with Lhamon's introduction to tell the story of Rice's career, which is a case study of the larger topic: the history of blackface performance before the rise of the minstrel show in the mid-1840s. As the plays collected here reveal, Rice's performance of blackface was fundamentally different from minstrel-show performance on many levels. The most important difference, Lhamon argues in his introduction, is that Rice's performances encouraged the white audience to identify with his blackface character, to laugh with him rather than at him.

The New World Presses

2019 ◽  
pp. 61-105
Author(s):  
Brian Fox
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
New World ◽  
Strong Sense ◽  
Comic Strip ◽  
Specific Kind ◽  
American Popular Culture ◽  
Blackface Minstrelsy ◽  
Hollywood Movies ◽  
History Of ◽  
Broadway Musicals

Chapter 2 examines allusions to American popular culture in Joyce’s work. A potentially voluminous subject given the sheer range of references, the chapter narrows it down to areas which show a continued engagement across Joyce’s works. One of the most significant examples of this is blackface minstrelsy. Indeed, Joyce, it would appear, is particularly drawn to a specific kind of American popular culture, one with a strong sense of a connection with a history of colonialism, empire, and race. Within this framework, Joyce appropriates and renegotiates Irish relations to not only blackface minstrels, but also the Mutt and Jeff comic strip, Hollywood movies, Broadway musicals, cowboys and Indians, jazz, flappers, speakeasies, and myriad other markers of American popular culture.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document