A concentrated analysis of Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s play An Octoroon (2014), this chapter explores how representations of Black people have been utilized and appropriated by white America. Jacobs-Jenkins uses minstrelsy-style theatre and lynching photos to force the audience into recalling a past when people of color were corporeally represented on stage by white actors in colored face paint. In a manner similar to the play on which Jacobs-Jenkins bases his play – The Octoroon (1859) by Irish playwright Dion Boucicault – An Octoroon debuted at a time when the American political landscape was fraught with civil and racial unrest; Jacobs-Jenkins uses humor, Brechtian theatrical devices, and self-referential framing to illustrate how the threat of violence functions in modern America to debilitate Black Americans and maintain the construct of racial hierarchism.

Though London’s Evening Mail [GK9]declared that “‘The Civil War in the United States affects our people more generally even than the Indian Mutiny’” (August 22, 1862), prominent British writers avoided the topic. The sole canonical poet to represent the US Civil War in Britain was American Walt Whitman in W. M. Rossetti’s British edition (1868). Though this chapter considers working-class and feminist writers’ depiction of the war, its principal focus is the underlying causes of major writers’ persistent silence. These causes included President Lincoln’s reluctance to name slavery as the war’s fundamental issue in hopes of bringing the South back, which led many Britons to suspect economic self-interest as the North’s principal motivation; declining abolitionist sympathy based on moral complacency; Conservatives’ sympathy for the Confederacy based on shared commitment to social hierarchies; and increased racism fueled by anthropology and stereotypes of Black Americans circulated in popular minstrel shows.

This chapter explores the history of representations of race in the Irish theatre, with a particular focus on blackface and minstrelsy – a discussion which uses at is focal point the pre-histories and afterlives of Dion Boucicault’s 1859 play The Octoroon. That melodrama is resituated within an Irish performance tradition (one that Boucicault himself would have encountered as a young man in Dublin) that stretches from the late nineteenth century, and which involved the performance on Irish stages of African-American characters – whose identity was often juxtaposed with that of stage Irish characters, and often performed by white Irish actors. In such a context, The Octoroon represents a form of continuity with what came before – and must therefore be seen in Irish as well as American contexts. Its impact on subsequent performance histories is also considered, up to and including the staging on the Abbey Theatre stage of An Octoroon – an adaptation of the original play – in 2022.

From 1880, the performer Lio Medo embarked on a career as a phrenologist in colonial New Zealand and – later – Tasmania, fleeing controversy and another name. As a man of African descent, Medo laboured under heavier cultural baggage than his white brethren, not least because of a recurrent minstrel trope. Originating in the US, the joke of the ‘lack phrenologist’ sailed to Australia with minstrel troupes, sheet music and newsprint, constantly confronting real-life Black phrenologists such as Medo. A performer’s awareness and skill in navigating such representations created opportunities, even while these caricatures perpetuated oppressive racial myths. Men such as Lio Medo therefore plied popular science within a paradox, the signifier of skin attracting attention that added to the usual phrenological work of winning improved social status. For Lio Medo, signs of identity emanated not just from a top hat and a gold watch, but from his very body.

This chapter examines the diverging ways that minstrelsy used Haiti as source material. Minstrelsy took direct and mocking aim at the aspirations of African Americans, even as its turn to Haiti implicitly acknowledged the transformative power of racial revolution. In popular transatlantic plays like M. M. Dowling’s Othello Travestie, minstrelsy used Haiti to reimagine the rising hopes and transgressive desires of the Black Atlantic. By the 1850s, minstrelsy used Haiti as an empty signifier, a marker of ludicrous and disruptive Blackness.

The USA is born as a site of intense struggle in and out of the musical realm. Escapees from slavery sing of such heroes as the maroon leader Jean St. Malo, songs are sung over “The Rights of Woman,” and the labor movement produces its first store of agit-prop songs. As the Indigenous peoples of the east stare into the face of settler-colonial encroachment, the nascent music industry erupts with sentimental songs about the “Noble Savage” and the “Vanishing Indian.” Partisans of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson fight their battles through song, and the Louisiana Purchase doubles the size of the USA and the territory for musical conflict. The rise of the “Injun Fighter” has its own soundtrack, eliding the continued seizure of Indigenous territory. The War of 1812 gives birth to “The Star-Spangled Banner,” while the songs of conscientious objectors are pushed to the margins. Blackface minstrelsy emerges as one of the greatest cultural challenges to Black American self-definition. Meanwhile, eastern cities are bursting at the seams with the steady influx of European immigrants, and the hawks of Manifest Destiny look westward to Texas, Mexico, and beyond, buttressed by shrill musical calls to “Remember the Alamo!”

The Mexican–US War ends with the top half of Mexico – and its people – subsumed into the voracious US empire. A new musical genre – the Corrido – emerges from the new borderlands. The California Gold Rush produces a wealth of song from as far east as Scandinavia and as far west as China. US nativists sing against the arriving Germans and Irish Catholics, but they reserve their greatest musical venom for the Chinese in the form of the “John Chinaman” minstrel stereotype. Against such vicious representations, we have the Songs of Gold Mountain to reflect the true humanity of Chinese immigrants. In the wake of the Seneca Falls Convention, songs of women’s suffrage resound across the landscape, including those of Sojourner Truth. The Hutchinson Family Singers become the first US “supergroup” with their abolition songs, and Black challenges to the minstrelsy of E. P. Christy, Stephen Foster, and others continue, not only through the oratory of Frederick Douglass and songs of the Underground Railroad, but also through the operatic accomplishments of Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield.As the country careens toward the irrepressible schism of civil war, song becomes a highly supercharged, sectional arena.

Black Americans sing of their hope in the promise of Reconstruction, which is eventually betrayed as the white North and South sing their way into the “romance of reunion.” The Indigenous peoples to the west face a US government hostile to their songs and dances, Mexican vaqueros are immortalized in corridos, Chinese and Irish railroad workers are pitted against each other in minstrel songs, and the Fisk Jubilee Singers introduce the spiritual to the world (even as the Ku Klux Klan churns out its earliest sheet music). Woman suffragists and former abolitionists join hands in song; and as the country descends into the corrupt mire of a Gilded Age, Grange farmers take on the monopolies of railroad magnates and “robber barons” in songs that ring into the present century. In the Pennsylvania coal fields, the executed Molly Maguires are memorialized in powerful balladry, and the Knights of Labor provide the musical soundtrack to the greatest fight between labor and capital that the country has yet seen.

Chapters 2 and 3 focus on Frederick Douglass’ transatlantic journey to Britain between 1845 and 1847. Douglass epitomized the successful exploitation of adaptive resistance and showed that his employment of each triad’s element simultaneously could court significant fame. He recognized the essential importance of print culture, however, and as a result altered his relationship with that triad to place it center stage. Hence, Chapter 2 discusses Douglass’ performative strategies and his relationship with print culture. He incorporated both favorable and negative reviews of his lectures into his repertoire, and courted endless debate in the press. His invocation of strategic anglophilia was balanced with a chastisement of British policy that championed liberty without actively seeking to help the enslaved in America. Unlike Roper, Douglass was a virtuoso who could balance assimilationist and dissonant language effectively. As a result, Douglass caused a furor toward slavery that was unrivaled by any other African American within a similar time period.

Chapter 7 moves beyond most scholarly accounts of Black abolitionist transatlantic visits to the British Isles and focuses on Josiah Henson in the time period 1876–1877. I analyze his lecturing tour, his visit to Windsor Palace to meet Queen Victoria, and the numerous artistic responses to him, which included a revised performance of Uncle Tom’s Cabin on the stage, a bust in the Royal Academy, and a wax model in Madame Tussaud's. I argue that Henson exploited adaptive resistance in an entirely new age and to do this, he needed to reawaken British interest and lecture about the memory of slavery. He used assimilationist language to capitalize on his association with the character of Uncle Tom from Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin to win fame (and fortune) on the British stage. However, Henson had to negotiate racial stereotypes and work in a climate that whitewashed the nation’s own bloody history of slavery in favor of a romanticized plantation ideal in America. Henson fought against this at every turn and contributed to the Black American protest tradition in Britain a decade after the end of the Civil War.