Queer Laughter in the Archives of Silent Film Comedy

This chapter looks and listens for queer traces of lesbian sexuality in the archives of American silent film comedies, from 1894 to 1919. Like sexuality, laughter is arousing, ambiguous, and often difficult to understand out of context. Focusing on A Florida Enchantment (1914) and Phil-for-Short (1919), as well as several very early slapstick film comedies, the chapter pursues queer laughter as a historiographic method. It argues that potential queer subtexts emerge in tense conflict with their juxtaposition to offensive representations of blackface minstrelsy, patriarchal sexism, and capitalist class ideology. At once amusing and disturbing in their sexuality effects, these films provoke new intersectional strategies in queer critical reading.

Blackface Minstrelsy and the Reception of Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield

This 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.

‘Blue Lives Matter’ and the legacy of blackface minstrelsy

This article situates the pro-police countermovement, ‘Blue Lives Matter’, within the legacy of blackface minstrelsy. An analysis of various ‘racial performances’ shows how, like its minstrel forbearers, the rebuttal to Black Lives Matter subscribes to a dual identity: envious, fetishistic ‘love’ of Black people on one hand, visceral contempt accompanied by often-violent fantasies on the other. It is argued that by racialising themselves as ‘blue’, the countermovement seeks to expropriate the virtue associated with racial victimisation and articulate their racial fantasies about how Black folks ought to be. The article concludes by arguing that critical analyses of policing should consider policing performances rather than just policing practices.

Songbooks

In Songbooks, critic and scholar Eric Weisbard offers a critical guide to books on American popular music from William Billings's 1770 New-England Psalm-Singer to Jay-Z's 2010 memoir Decoded. Drawing on his background editing the Village Voice music section, coediting the Journal of Popular Music Studies, and organizing the Pop Conference, Weisbard connects American music writing from memoirs, biographies, and song compilations to blues novels, magazine essays, and academic studies. The authors of these works are as diverse as the music itself: women, people of color, queer writers, self-educated scholars, poets, musicians, and elites discarding their social norms. Whether analyzing books on Louis Armstrong, the Beatles, and Madonna; the novels of Theodore Dreiser, Gayl Jones, and Jennifer Egan; or varying takes on blackface minstrelsy, Weisbard charts an alternative history of American music as told through its writing. As Weisbard demonstrates, the most enduring work pursues questions that linger across time period and genre—cultural studies in the form of notes on the fly, on sounds that never cease to change meaning.

“Mike Fright”

This chapter examines the racialization of sound and language during the transitional period in Hollywood. It argues that the studios’ interest in African American representation in the talkies participated in the ongoing construction in US popular culture of the “Black voice” and of ethnically marked ways of speaking as signifiers of substance and vitality. Tracing the genealogy of this “thrown” voice back through white radio comedians’ vocal mimicry, dialect fiction written by white authors, and blackface minstrelsy, the chapter demonstrates that the talkies were a technological medium of racial ventriloquism. Examining the popular RKO feature Check and Double Check (1930)—a complex product both of radio minstrelsy and the early sound era “vogue” for African American musical performance—the chapter centers on a highly revealing gesture of counter-ventriloquism by the members of the Duke Ellington Orchestra, who refuse to adopt the thrown “Black voice” scripted for them, appropriating white singers’ voices instead.

Music to Some Consequence: Reaction, Reform, Race

A naval chaplain in the 1790s, a radical arrested after Peterloo, and a smash hit of blackface minstrelsy: these three disparate historical actors all provide exemplary cases of music in action, playing upon the political passions of the British people. Thinking across the three examples, this article reflects upon the aims of the forum Music and Politics in Britain, c.1780–1850, as well as advancing its own autonomous argument. Alexander Duncan was drummed out of the navy for publishing a pamphlet advocating the use of martial music in action; inspired by the French, Duncan was effectively arguing for a democratization of Britain's servicemen by playing upon their passions. The potential for subversion inherent in this approach was borne out by the career of Samuel Bamford, a Lancashire weaver; music was central to Bamford's activism, and I chart the functional ends to which he deployed music around 1819. In a third instance, with the 1840s hit “Buffalo Gals,” music led to public disorder. The song, due in large part to its musical qualities, enabled forms of licentious behavior among white males that mobilized latent forms of gendered as well as racial prejudice, so that its performance came to excuse forms of sexual harassment.