Blackface Minstrelsy

According to most scholars whose primary focus is on this topic, minstrel shows were one of the most disgraceful yet complex chapters in the history of American musicals. Popularized during the early to mid-19th century, minstrelsy incorporated and emphasized the prevailing racism, racial stereotypes, and white supremacy mentality that had permeated almost every aspect of American society since the mid-1600s. More specifically, minstrel shows transferred and translated concepts of race and racism into a form of leisure activity in which ridiculous and obscene Black American images, such as “Sambo” or “Zip Coon,” who were slow witted “plantation darky” and ignorant free Black Americans, were used to justify racial segregation, political oppression, and at times, uncontrolled racial violence. Despite the ongoing debate within the academy, most scholars contend that the first series of minstrel shows emerged during the 1820s, reached their zenith soon after the Civil War ended, and remained relatively popular well into the early 1900s. As America’s first form of popular entertainment, during its origins minstrel shows were performed by white men, mostly of Irish descent, who blackened their faces with burnt cork, cooled ashes, or dirt and began to ridicule and depict a distorted view of African American life on southern plantations through both songs and dances. Additionally, Black Americans were normally shown as naive buffoons or uncontrollable children who danced their way through and expressed a fondness for the system of slavery. At the same, this musical genre also helped to launch the careers of many well-known entertainers of the era, both African Americans and non-African Americans, such as James Bland, Stephen Foster, Al Jolson, and Bert Williams. In the end, the culture that embraced this type of “popular entertainment” was either wholly enchanted by such racially charged images or took these images as the truth about the history and experience of all African Americans. Additional scholars such as Eric Lott and Robert Toll contend that the origins, development, and legacy of minstrelsy, especially after the mid-1840s, in some ways, was a response to the economic depression of the 1830s and early 1840s, as an attempt to reassure the dominate white society that their societal status and political dominance would continue for decades to come. In some ways, these notions are still alive today. Finally, many studies on the topic of minstrelsy can be divided into historical periods such as: (1) early writings (1930s–1950s); (2) the revisionist era (1960s and 1970s); and the contemporary era (1980s to the present).

Identity as a construct: reading blackness in Eugene O’neill’s the emperor jones.

This paper aims to explore how racialized identities are typified as a modernist construct in Eugene O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones (1920). To this end, the notion of whiteness is identified as a mediated construct and contextualized in the proliferation of American minstrel shows. This popular entertainment projected to white audiences the racial means of differentiation from black caricatures and clichés at the time of segregation. The echoes of minstrel shows and modernists’ instrumentalization of 1920s primitivism serve to initially address the characterization of blackness in Brutus Jones’ identity. Assessed through this in-between construction of symbolic borderlands in which the protagonist is both colonizer and colonized, his blackness becomes a metaphorical mask of otherness while his whiteness shapes the colonial performance of material whiteness. Although he envisions the white ideal in his systematic practices in the Caribbean island, his fragmented identity and his hybridity subject him to a primeval racialized past, to primitivism and atavism.

How Should You Perform and Watch Othello and Hairspray in a Country Where You Could Never Hire Black Actors? Shakespeare and Casting in Japan

This paper discusses how Japanese theatres have handled race in a country where hiring black actors to perform Shakespeare’s plays is not an option. In English-speaking regions, such as the United States and the United Kingdom, it is common to hire a black actor for Othello’s title role. Blackface is increasingly unacceptable because it reminds viewers of derogatory stereotypes in minstrel shows, and it deprives black actors of employment opportunities. However, the situation is different in regions where viewers are unfamiliar with this Anglo-US trend. In Japan, a country regarded as so homogeneous that its census does not have any questions about ethnicity, it is almost impossible to hire a skilled black actor to play a title role in a Shakespearean play, and few theatre companies would consider such an idea. In this cultural context, there is an underlying question of how Japanese-speaking theatre should present plays dealing with racial or cultural differences. This paper seeks to understand the recent approaches that Japanese theatre has adopted to address race in Shakespearean plays by analysing several productions of Othello and comparing them with other major non-Shakespearean productions.

7. Hybrid sounds

‘Hybrid sounds’ highlights southern music. The first association of music with the American South came from the presence of African American slaves. The pre-Civil War blackface minstrel shows displayed southern connections in its imagery of the plantation. After emancipation, African Americans gained employment in such groups as the Georgia Minstrels, as they moved to New Orleans, Memphis, and St. Louis, where they adopted the trumpet, the piano, and other instruments that soon became familiar in the music of black southerners. Sacred music, blues music, jazz, and folk music were all important musical genres which shaped Southern culture and the importance of the commercialization of African American music played a role.

Bessie Smith

Understanding the literary pen as a fundamental tool that writes the narrative of black existence while also analyzing how the black woman’s voice in blues music represents black life is essential in exhibiting utile productions of knowledge and expressive culture in both literature and music. Known for her distinguished classification in music as the “Empress of the Blues,” Bessie Smith was a prominent blues singer of the 1920s. Born in Chattanooga, Tennessee, in 1894, Smith began singing as a street performer and danced in minstrel shows. In 1923, Smith was signed to Columbia Records, becoming the highest-paid blues singer of this epoch. Known for her classic recordings from “Down Hearted Blues” and “Back-Water Blues” to “St. Louis Blues,” “Need a Little Sugar in My Bowl,” and “Nobody Knows You When You’re Down and Out,” the 1920s and 1930s marked the zenith of Smith’s performance career. Not only was Smith constantly touring as a blues singer in the 1920s, but she also starred in the 1929 film St. Louis Blues. Smith produced 160 recordings with Columbia Records, and her collaborations with Louis Armstrong, Fletcher Henderson, and Benny Goodman, respectively a trumpeter, a pianist, and a clarinetist, heightened her blues/jazz mark in the entertainment industry. Smith’s voice resonates in the vocal performances of Billie Holiday, Aretha Franklin, Nina Simone, and Janis Joplin. Many scholars have paid homage to Bessie Smith’s musical ability and performative ingenuity through their anthologies, essays, novels, film, and music. While each source illustrates the skill of Bessie Smith as a prominent blues singer, the sources in each category also convey different ways in which readers see another iteration of Bessie Smith as blues woman and artist whose recordings in the early 20th century spoke to and protested the social ills of the black community. This bibliography is divided into sections on the common sources that provide a general perspective on blues music, primary sources that are fundamental to research on Bessie Smith and blues/jazz music structures, journal articles that provide a brief look into other scholars’ perspectives on Bessie Smith through poetry, the sonic structure of blues music and Bessie Smith’s vocal style, blues music’s portrayal in African American literature, and finally the element of the sermonic in blues music. The citations in this article, from books, essays, and journal articles, provide an interdisciplinary perspective on blues and jazz and on the eminence with which Bessie Smith wrote, sang, and preached the blues.

“Going to the Conservatory”

This chapter looks at Armstrong’s development as a musician in his time with Fate Marable and his orchestra on the Streckfus riverboats. Joe Howard, Norman Mason, and Davy Jones, all good readers and veterans of the minstrel shows, helped Armstrong with his studies. This chapter explores the changing dance tempos as jazz and the Fox-Trot replaced ragtime and the One-Step. The chapter also looks at how barbershop principles were influencing white musicians and being written into sheet music arrangements in relation to “Avalon” (1920).

Darktown Follies (Lafayette Theatre, Harlem, 1913)

One of the earliest large-scale musical revues to be created and performed by an all-Black cast, Darktown Follies premiered in 1913 at the Lafayette Theatre in Harlem. Darktown Follies exhibited qualities common to minstrel shows of the period with its episodic musical numbers and large group finale. The plot, however, focussed on a romantic storyline between two Black characters, which was rarely seen in minstrel performances. Darktown Follies introduced dances, like Ballin’ the Jack (which would eventually become a popular dance on Broadway) and the Texas Tommy (a predecessor of the lindy hop) to the New York stage. Darktown Follies helped launch a trend of White artists traveling to Harlem in search of new material for their own productions. The show foreshadowed the development Black musicals like Shuffle Along (1921) and was an important precursor to the artistic renaissance that would define Black modernism in Harlem of the 1920s and 1930s.

Blackfaced white: rasowe przypadki negatywu

In her essay on the involvement of photography in the system of racial division, Tanya Sheehan (“Comical Conflations: Racial Identity and Science of Photography,” Photography & Culture, vol. 4, no. 2, 2011: 133-156) focused her attention on common comparisons of the photographic negative to the Negroid race. Such a tendency may imply a claim that the negative is racist; once connected, just as African Americans, with pejorative features. The negative picture, different from reality as such but above all negating a realistic (positive) tradition in art, because of being different (other) can be considered wrong or inferior to the positive so that it must be hidden or even destroyed. In such a context, the present paper focuses on the relationship between the photographic negative and the question of race. Although apparently the reversal of the color of skin might result in a racial transformation of the photographed whites, the artistic practice of the 20th and 21st centuries demonstrates that quite often the reversed color does not necessarily mean a change of race. What is more, the negative has been used to oppose by artistic means the simplifying polarization of society. Such avant-garde photographers as Hans Bellmer, Man Ray, and Alexandr Rodchenko used the inversion of tone in their works critiquing colonial and racist stereotypes. Contemporary artists use the negative convention to subvert the dominant positive, realism, light, day, the white male, and other concepts associated with one of the poles constituting the binary value system. Painting one’s face black, in the 19th century used in evidently racist performances called “minstrel shows,” may now convey a positive message.