The Myths of Haji Firuz

Every year, around the arrival of the Spring equinox, Iranians in Iran and in diaspora will recognize a minstrel named Haji Firuz with his Nowruz jingle. The inclusion of Haji Firuz during Nowruz festivities has been questioned and challenged for decades; where some will point out his connections to anti-Blackness, others will defend Haji Firuz, arguing that his face is only covered in soot from fires also associated with the holiday. This article contextualizes these arguments as a part of a larger discourse of denying racism in Iran and, more poignantly, erasing Iran’s history of slavery altogether. This article addresses the consequences and pitfalls of defending Haji Firuz’s blackface performance, and its implications for the broader Iranian community.

Black, White and Blue: Pregnancy and Unsettled Binaries in The Masque of Blackness (1605)

This article examines the construction of national and racial identities within Ben Jonson’s and Inigo Jones’s Masque of Blackness against the backdrop of King James’ investment in creating a ‘British’ union at the start of his reign. The article re-examines the blackface performance of the Queen and her ladies in the contexts of the Queen’s and Inigo Jones’ European connections, the Queen’s reputation as ‘wilful’, and her pregnant body’s ability to evoke widespread cultural beliefs about the maternal imagination’s power to determine a child’s racial make-up. We argue that the masque’s striking use of blue-face along with black and white-face reveals a deep investment in Britain’s ancient customs which stands in tension with Blackness’ showcasing of foreign bodies, technologies, and cultural reference points. By demonstrating the significance of understanding Queen Anna’s pregnancy and her ‘wilful’ personality within the context of early modern humoral theory, moreover, we develop existing discussions of the humoral theory that underpins the masque’s representation of racial identities. We suggest that the Queen’s pregnant performance in blackface, by reminding the viewer that her maternal mind could ‘will’ the racial identity of royal progeny into being, had the power to unsettle King James I’s white male nationalist supremacy in the very act of celebrating it before their new English court and its foreign guests.

Blacksound

This chapter considers the relationship between philosophy, music, and race through a theory of Blacksound. Blacksound is the sonic and embodied legacy of blackface performance as the origin of popular music, entertainment, and culture in the United States. As a hermeneutic tool, Blacksound is an epistemology designed to historicize and redress how we conceive the formation of race and property laws throughout the nineteenth century via aesthetics. In particular, this tool analyses the construction, consumption, and erasure of black people and blackness out of blackface minstrelsy—the first original form of popular entertainment in North America. Blacksound is an open concept that challenges fixed notions of intellectual property by pointing to the role that the performance of race and the making of racism in popular music plays in copyright laws that have developed throughout the nineteenth century.

The Recordings of Andy Kirk and his Clouds of Joy

This is the first book-length study of the recordings of Andy Kirk and His Clouds of Joy. This all-black band found nationwide fame in the later 1930s and came to exemplify the Kansas City style of jazz through the records they made between 1929 and 1946. That body of work, however, serves to raise fundamental questions about the long-standing relationship between jazz music and the critical discourses about race that shaped it. This book considers how Kirk and his band appropriated musical styles in a way that was akin to the manipulation of masks in black forms of blackface performance: it signified race as much as it subverted racist conceptions of style. The band’s composer-pianist, Mary Lou Williams, and their singer Pha Terrell are reconceived within that context, and the band’s recordings are framed for their significance in understanding the way such black musicians influenced racial-musical negotiations over what and how they performed and recorded. The book brings together analytical tools from musicology with other perspectives that aim to show how intersecting discourses about race and musical styles are embedded in and expressed by the musical materials heard on the records. The difference between the band’s live and recorded performances establishes the place of audiences, especially dancing ones, in shaping jazz as a practice and conception, and it opens avenues for further investigation of the way practices of performance and recording have shaped understanding of what jazz music is and the racialized conceptions that underpin it.

Race and Affect: Pleasurable Mixing in Ben Jonson's The Masque of Blackness

The critical field of The Masque of Blackness often annotates Queen Anne and her ladies’ blackface performance with a courtier's eye-witness comment that the “lean cheeked moors” were “loathsome” and “ugly.” Yet Ben Jonson's performance text, when read beside Dudley Carleton's correspondences, resists the undue influence of the aristocrat's anecdotal disparagement. This project refuses to take Carleton's denigration as fact. Instead, it investigates the masque's representation of Niger's daughters to develop the affective experience of pleasurable mixing across racial identities and to show how the opulence, innovation, and beauty afforded by blackface are the means to underwrite arguments of political authority. Rather than a deviation from the performance's magnificent appeal, racial impersonation is constitutive of the masque's demonstration of beauty and invention of pleasure. As such, the allegory of King James I's power hinges on a fiction of idealized incorporation that is ideologically powerful precisely because it is primarily an aestheticized, affective experience. Beyond the ostensible trope of racial transformation, Jonson presents the pleasure of mixing across racial identities as the precondition for Britannia's absorption of migrant bodies. Blackness is a visual reminder of an indelible difference that can be absorbed, incorporated, indeed “salved,” by the monarch's faculties of conversion. The affective experience afforded by blackface is thus an argument for the sovereign's power of unification, underwriting what was a largely unfulfilled and controversial political agenda: the coalition of realms under the aegis of Great Britain.

Race, Blacksound, and the (Re)Making of Musicological Discourse

This article highlights practices of exclusion embedded in musicology—especially in relation to race, racialized people, and race relations—in order to rupture its constructed borders and decentralize the normative systems that have come to shape the discipline, its membership, and its discourses. To this end, I define and apply the concept of Blacksound—the sonic and embodied legacy of blackface performance as the origin of all popular music, entertainment, and culture in the United States. Blackface emerged as the first original form of US popular music during chattel slavery, and it helped to establish the modern music industry during the time in which Guido Adler began to define Musikwissenschaft (1885). Blacksound, as the performative and aesthetic complement to blackface, demonstrates how performance, (racial) identity, and (intellectual) property relations have been tethered to the making of popular music and its commercialization since the early nineteenth century. Blacksound also reveals how practices of exclusion that are germane to musicological discourse are connected to the racist practices and supremacist systems that defined society and popular culture throughout the nineteenth century. To redress the impact of these customs, this article defines and employs Blacksound as a means of placing (the performance of) race, ethnicity, and their relationship with other forms of identity at the center of the way we approach and select our subject matter and create musicological epistemologies within the development of music studies.

Akimbo Culture

This chapter examines the physical and participatory implications of blackface dance, and the dance cultures more generally, depicted by William Sidney Mount. It also uses the evidence drawn from Mount's visual depictions to locate prototypical blackface dance vocabularies and rhythmic practices in vernacular art works of the earlier nineteenth century. The chapter first considers the resources for recovering the kinesics of minstrelsy, along with visible evidence of Afro-Caribbean influence on bodily kinesics, before turning to juba and the aesthetics of African movement. It then analyzes Mount's choreological evidence to illustrate the consistency with which he records and manipulates the cultural associations of body vocabulary, as well as his integration of the creole synthesis in his works. It argues that it was rhythm and dance that accounts for minstrelsy's remarkably immediate yet enduring popularity and influence. It shows that, in addition to the symbolic transgression of bourgeois grace implicit in Jim Crow's akimbo representation, the images' anatomical distortions also capture movement, not stasis. The chapter concludes by looking at the so-called “bending knee-bone” in blackface performance.

That “Weird and Wonderful Posture”

Sometime in the late 1820s to early 1830s, a little-known white theatre performer named Thomas Dartmouth Rice modeled a blackface song and dance on a “crippled Negro”; his performances of “Jump Jim Crow” became extraordinarily popular in pre–Civil War America. The extensive literature on these performances has generally been silent on two key characteristics of the phenomenon: the importance of “audience” performance to the act’s popularity and reception and the fact that the pleasure of jumping “Jim Crow” was rooted in the spectacular performance of disability by presumably able-bodied people: usually white and usually male. This essay demonstrates that blackface performance almost always involved performances of disability (physical and cognitive), which constructed both privileged white citizens and stigmatized defective Negroes, unworthy of citizenship. As such, they participated in contemporary discourses about citizenship in which race and disability play central and deeply entwined roles.

Fatty Boom Boom and the Transnationality of Blackface in Die Antwoord's Racial Project

The South African hip hop group Die Antwoord deploys blackface performance as part of a racial project that characterizes race as contingent and mutable in contrast to its rigid apartheid articulation. Examining the flows that carry their work transnationally makes visible the ways US cultural consumption becomes entangled with processes of racialization.