Contents The Minstrel Show Will Never Die Jim Crow and Tom Thumb Irishness of it All Irving Berlin Titillates Gershwins Racial Profiling Jews in Blackface Jolson the Shlemiel Strutting to Redemption Endnotes -------------------------------- How New York City, the Birthplace of Blackface, Defined Humor and Race for 100 Years (MIB: 12-17) Jim Crow, a blackface stage character, lends his name to the pernicious practice of racial segregation. Native New Yorker Tom Rice performed "Jim Crow" at the Bowery Theatre in 1832. (MIB: 22-24) Edwin P. Christy established the first permanent minstrel hall at 472 Broadway in New York City in 1847. Christy created the stylized format which endured for 10 decades. Why Irish Americans Wore Blackface (MIB: 18-19) Dan Emmets "Dixie", written as a minstrel tune, became the Confederate anthem. In an earlier minstrel song, Emmett romanticized slavery: "Ill dance all night an work all day." (MIB: 46-48) Ned Harrigan, the grandfather of the Broadway musical, pitted on stage the Irish Mulligan Guard in 1879 against the black (white actors in blackface) Skidmore Guard--"Ten platoons of dandy coons." The Blackface Burden of Jewishness (MIB: 73-78) Irving Berlin, son of a cantor, penned his first "coon song" in 1909, and added eight more to his "coon song" cycle. Berlin staged blackface minstrel shows for the Army in both World War I and World War II. His 1942 film, "Holiday Inn", introduced "White Christmas" and Bing Crosby in blackface. (MIB: 101-138) Al Jolson in blackface made the first talking motion picture in 1927. In each of his eight Hollywood films over two decades, Jolson weaved the theme of Jewishness into the blackface minstrel show. He is the worldwide icon of blackface.

 The minstrel show occupies a complex and controversial space in the history of American popular culture. Today considered a shameful relic of America's racist past, it nonetheless offered many black performers of the 19th and early 20th centuries their only opportunity to succeed in a white-dominated entertainment world, where white performers in blackface had by the 1830s established minstrelsy as an enduringly popular national art form. This book traces the often overlooked history of the "modern" minstrel show through the advent of 20th century mass media--when stars like Al Jolson, Bing Crosby and Mickey Rooney continued a long tradition of affecting black music, dance and theatrical styles for mainly white audiences--to its abrupt end in the 1950s. A companion two-CD reissue of recordings discussed in the book is available from Archeophone Records at www.archeophone.com.

In Birth of an Industry, Nicholas Sammond describes how popular early American cartoon characters were derived from blackface minstrelsy. He charts the industrialization of animation in the early twentieth century, its representation in the cartoons themselves, and how important blackface minstrels were to that performance, standing in for the frustrations of animation workers. Cherished cartoon characters, such as Mickey Mouse and Felix the Cat, were conceived and developed using blackface minstrelsy's visual and performative conventions: these characters are not like minstrels; they are minstrels. They play out the social, cultural, political, and racial anxieties and desires that link race to the laboring body, just as live minstrel show performers did. Carefully examining how early animation helped to naturalize virulent racial formations, Sammond explores how cartoons used laughter and sentimentality to make those stereotypes seem not only less cruel, but actually pleasurable. Although the visible links between cartoon characters and the minstrel stage faded long ago, Sammond shows how important those links are to thinking about animation then and now, and about how cartoons continue to help to illuminate the central place of race in American cultural and social life.

Introduction -- Carnival -- The Vulgar Republic -- Jim Crow's Genuine Audience -- Black Song -- Meet the Hutchinsons -- Love Crimes -- The Middle-Class Moment -- Culture Wars -- Black America -- Conclusion: Musical without End

For over two centuries, America has celebrated the same African-American culture it attempts to control and repress, and nowhere is this phenomenon more apparent than in the strange practice of blackface performance. Born of extreme racial and class conflicts, the blackface minstrel show appropriated black dialect, music, and dance; at once applauded and lampooned black culture; and, ironically, contributed to a "blackening of America." Drawing on recent research in cultural studies and social history, Eric Lott examines the role of the blackface minstrel show in the political struggles of the years leading up to the Civil War. Reading minstrel music, lyrics, jokes, burlesque skits, and illustrations in tandem with working-class racial ideologies and the sex/gender system, Love and Theft argues that blackface minstrelsy both embodied and disrupted the racial tendencies of its largely white, male, working-class audiences. Underwritten by envy as well as repulsion, sympathetic identification as well as fear--a dialectic of "love and theft"--the minstrel show continually transgressed the color line even as it enabled the formation of a self-consciously white working class. Lott exposes minstrelsy as a signifier for multiple breaches: the rift between high and low cultures, the commodification of the dispossessed by the empowered, the attraction mixed with guilt of whites caught in the act of cultural thievery. This new edition celebrates the twentieth anniversary of this landmark volume. It features a new foreword by renowned critic Greil Marcus that discusses the book's influence on American cultural studies as well as its relationship to Bob Dylan's 2001 album of the same name, "Love & Theft." In addition, Lott has written a new afterword that extends the study's range to the twenty-first century.

A New Statesman essential non-fiction book of 2021 Featured in Book Riot's 12 best nonfiction books about Black identity and history A Times Higher Education Book of the Week 2022 Finalist for the Prose Awards (Media and Cultural Studies category) Why are there so many examples of public figures, entertainers, and normal, everyday people in blackface? And why aren't there as many examples of people of color in whiteface? This book explains what blackface is, why it occurred, and what its legacies are in the 21st century. There is a filthy and vile thread-sometimes it's tied into a noose-that connects the first performances of Blackness on English stages, the birth of blackface minstrelsy, contemporary performances of Blackness, and anti-Black racism. Blackface examines that history and provides hope for a future with new performance paradigms. Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.