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From Blackface to ‘Genuine Negroes’: Nineteenth-Century Minstrelsy and the Icon of the ‘Negro’

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 January 2009

Lisa M. Anderson
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Extract

In 1855, the first ‘coloured’ minstrel troupe, the Mocking Bird Minstrels, appeared on a Philadelphia stage. While this company did not stay together long, it heralded a change in the ‘face’ of minstrelsy in the United States. Many other black minstrel troupes would quickly follow, drawing attention away from the white minstrels who had until then dominated the scene. However, the white minstrel show had already iconized a particular representation of the ‘Negro’, which ultimately paved the way for black anti-minstrel attitudes at the end of the nineteenth century. The minstrel show existed in two guises: the white-in-blackface, and the black-in-blackface. The form and content of the minstrel shows changed over time, as well as audience perception of the two different types of performance. The black minstrel show has come to be regarded as a ‘reclaiming’ of slave dance and performance. It differs from white minstrelsy in that it gave theatrical form to ‘signifyin” on white minstrelsy in the manner in which slaves practised ‘signifyin” on whites in real life.

Type
Articles
Information
Theatre Research International , Volume 21 , Issue 1 , Spring 1996 , pp. 17 - 23
Copyright
Copyright © International Federation for Theatre Research 1996

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References

Notes

1. Robert, C.Toll documents this event in Blacking Up: The Minstrel Show in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974).Google Scholar

2. Ibid., p. 34.

3. Traylor, Eleanor W., ‘Two Afro-American Contributions to Dramatic Form’, The Theatre of Black Americans, ed. Hill, Errol (New York: Applause Theatre Book Publishers, 1987), p. 49.Google Scholar

4. Stearns, Marshall & Stearns, Jean, Jazz Dance: The Story of American Vernacular Dance (New York: Schirmer Books, 1968), pp. 24–7.Google Scholar

5. Holmberg, Carl Bryan and Schneider, Gilbert D., ‘Daniel Decatur Emmett's Stump Sermons: Genuine Afro-American Culture, Language and Rhetoric in the Negro Minstrel Show’, Journal of Popular Culture 19.4 (1986), pp. 27–37.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

6. Toll, , Blacking Up, p. 52.Google Scholar

7. Ibid., p. 55.

8. Brown, William Wells, Escape, or a Leap to Freedom, in The Roots of African American Drama, ed. Hamalian, Leo and Hatch, James V. (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1991), p. 67Google Scholar. First published in 1849.

9. From the script of The Quack Doctor, in Engle, Gary D., This Grotesque Essence: Plays from the American Minstrel Stage (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1978), pp. 34–5. Emphasis added.Google Scholar

10. Simond, Ike, Old Slack's Reminiscence and Pocket History of the Colored Profession from 1865–1891 (Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1974 [reprint from Harvard Theatre Collection]), pp. 15–18.Google Scholar

11. Engle, , This Grotesque Essence, p. xix.Google Scholar

12. Hatch, James V., ‘Some African Influences on the Afro-American Theatre’, The Theatre of Black Americans, ed. Hill, p. 27.Google Scholar

13. Mitchell, Loften, Black Drama: The Story of the American Negro in the Theatre (New York: Hawthorne Books, 1967), pp. 46–7.Google Scholar

14. Toll, , Blacking Up, p. 205.Google Scholar

15. The first of these groups, the Fisk Jubilee Singers, was initially mistaken for minstrel performers; however, they sang spirituals and religious music exclusively, and had none of the comedy of the minstrel show.

16. Toll, , Blacking Up, p. 247.Google Scholar

17. Traylor, , ‘Two Afro-American Contributions…’, p. 247.Google Scholar

18. See especially the first three chapters of Gates, 's The Signifyin' Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988).Google Scholar

19. Ibid., p. xxv.

20. Ibid., pp. xxii–xxiii.

21. Ibid., p. 51.

22. Stearns, & Stearns, , Jazz Dance, p. 22.Google Scholar

23. Ibid.