Download or read book How to Put on a Minstrel Show written by Harold Rossiter and published by . This book was released on 1921 with total page 68 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Blackface Minstrel Show in Mass Media written by Tim Brooks and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2019-11-29 with total page 291 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Birth of an Industry written by Nicholas Sammond and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2015-08-27 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book This Grotesque Essence written by Gary D. Engle and published by . This book was released on 1978 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Darkest America Black Minstrelsy from Slavery to Hip Hop written by Yuval Taylor and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2012-08-27 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Investigates the origin and heyday of black minstrelsy, which in modern times is considered an embarrassment, and discusses whether or not the art form is actually still alive in the work of contemporary performers--from Dave Chappelle and Flavor Flav to Spike Lee.
Download or read book Inside the Minstrel Mask written by Annemarie Bean and published by Wesleyan University Press. This book was released on 1996-11-29 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A sourcebook of contemporary and historical commentary on America's first popular mass entertainment.
Download or read book Burnt Cork written by Stephen Burge Johnson and published by Univ of Massachusetts Press. This book was released on 2012 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Beginning in the 1830s and continuing for more than a century, blackface minstrelsy--stage performances that claimed to represent the culture of black Americans--remained arguably the most popular entertainment in North America. A renewed scholarly interest in this contentious form of entertainment has produced studies treating a range of issues: its contradictory depictions of class, race, and gender; its role in the development of racial stereotyping; and its legacy in humor, dance, and music, and in live performance, film, and television. The style and substance of minstrelsy persist in popular music, tap and hip-hop dance, the language of the standup comic, and everyday rituals of contemporary culture. The blackface makeup all but disappeared for a time, though its influence never diminished--and recently, even the makeup has been making a comeback. This collection of original essays brings together a group of prominent scholars of blackface performance to reflect on this complex and troublesome tradition. Essays consider the early relationship of the blackface performer with American politics and the antislavery movement; the relationship of minstrels to the commonplace compromises of the touring "show" business and to the mechanization of the industrial revolution; the exploration and exploitation of blackface in the mass media, by D. W. Griffith and Spike Lee, in early sound animation, and in reality television; and the recent reappropriation of the form at home and abroad. In addition to the editor, contributors include Dale Cockrell, Catherine Cole, Louis Chude-Sokei, W. T. Lhamon, Alice Maurice, Nicholas Sammond, and Linda Williams.
Download or read book Minstrel Traditions written by Kevin Byrne and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-05-06 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Minstrel Traditions: Mediated Blackface in the Jazz Age explores the place and influence of black racial impersonation in US society during a crucial and transitional time period. Minstrelsy was absorbed into mass-culture media that was either invented or reached widespread national prominence during this era: advertising campaigns, audio recordings, radio broadcasts, and film. Minstrel Traditions examines the methods through which minstrelsy's elements connected with the public and how these conventions reified the racism of the time. This book explores blackface and minstrelsy through a series of overlapping case studies which illustrate the extent to which blackface thrived in the early twentieth century. It contextualizes and analyzes the last musical of black entertainer Bert Williams, the surprising live career of pancake icon Aunt Jemima, a flourishing amateur minstrel industry, blackface acts of African American vaudeville, and the black Broadway shows which brought new musical styles and dances to the American consciousness. All reflect, and sometimes incorporate, the mass-culture technologies of the time, either in their subject matter or method of distribution. Retrograde blackface seamlessly transitioned from live to mediated iterations of these cultural products, further pushing black stereotypes into the national consciousness. The book project oscillates between two different types of performances: the live and the mediated. By focusing on how minstrelsy in the Jazz Age moved from live performance into mediatized technologies, the book adds to the intellectual and historical conversation regarding this pernicious, racist entertainment form. Jazz Age blackface helped normalize new media technologies and that technology extended minstrelsy's influence within US culture. Minstrel Traditions tracks minstrelsy's social impact over the course of two decades to examine how ideas of national identity employ racial nostalgias and fantasias. This book will be of great interest to scholars and researchers in theatre studies, communication studies, race and media, and musical scholarship
Download or read book Oxford Bibliographies written by and published by . This book was released on with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Demons of Disorder written by Dale Cockrell and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1997-07-28 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A study of blackface minstrels in the first half of the nineteenth century.
Download or read book Behind the Burnt Cork Mask written by William John Mahar and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 1999 with total page 476 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The songs, dances, jokes, parodies, spoofs, and skits of blackface groups such as the Virginia Minstrels and Buckley's Serenaders became wildly popular in antebellum America. Behind the Burnt Cork Mask not only explores the racist practices of these entertainers but considers their performances as troubled representations of ethnicity, class, gender, and culture in the nineteenth century. William J. Mahar's unprecedented archival study of playbills, newspapers, sketches, monologues, and music engages new sources previously not considered in twentieth-century scholarship. More than any other study of its kind, Behind the Burnt Cork Mask investigates the relationships between blackface comedy and other Western genres and traditions; between the music of minstrel shows and its European sources; and between "popular" and "elite" constructions of culture. By locating minstrel performances within their complex sites of production, Mahar offers a significant reassessment of the historiography of the field. Behind the Burnt Cork Mask promises to redefine the study of blackface minstrelsy, charting new directions for future inquiries by scholars in American studies, popular culture, and musicology.
Download or read book Representing African Americans in Transatlantic Abolitionism and Blackface Minstrelsy written by Robert Nowatzki and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2010-06 with total page 231 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this intriguing study, Robert Nowatzki reveals the unexpected relationships between blackface entertainment and antislavery sentiment in the United States and Britain. He contends that the ideological ambiguity of both phenomena enabled the similarities between early minstrelsy and abolitionism in their depictions of African Americans, as well as their appropriations of each other's rhetoric, imagery, sentiment, and characterization. Nowatzki reveals how the most popular form of theatrical entertainment and the most significant reform movement of nineteenth-century Britain and America helped define cultural representations of African Americans.
Download or read book Blackface Minstrelsy in Britain written by Michael Pickering and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-05 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Blackface minstrelsy is associated particularly with popular culture in the United States and Britain, yet despite the continual two-way flow of performers, troupes and companies across the Atlantic, there is little in Britain to match the scholarship of blackface studies in the States. This book concentrates on the distinctively British trajectory of minstrelsy. The historical study and cultural analysis of minstrelsy is important because of the significant role it played in Britain as a form of song, music and theatrical entertainment. Minstrelsy had a marked impact on popular music, dance and other aspects of popular culture, both in Britain and the United States. Its impact in the United States fed into significant song and music genres that were assimilated in Britain, from ragtime and jazz onwards, but prior to these influences, minstrelsy in Britain developed many distinct features and was adapted to operate within various conventions, themes and traditions in British popular culture. Pickering provides a convincing counter-argument to the assumption among writers in the United States that blackface was exclusively American and its British counterpart purely imitative. Minstrelsy was not confined to its value as song, music and dance. Jokes at the expense of black people along with demeaning racial stereotypes were integral to minstrel shows. As a form of popular entertainment, British minstrelsy created a cultural low-Other that offered confirmation of white racial ascendancy and imperial dominion around the world. The book attends closely to how this influence on colonialism and imperialism operated and proved ideologically so effective. At the same time British minstrelsy cannot be reduced to its racist and imperialist connections. Enormously important as those connections are, Pickering demonstrates the complexity of the subject by insisting that the minstrel show and minstrel performers are understood also in terms of their own theatrical dynamics, t
Download or read book Ragged but Right written by Lynn Abbott and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2009-09-17 with total page 470 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The commercial explosion of ragtime in the early twentieth century created previously unimagined opportunities for black performers. However, every prospect was mitigated by systemic racism. The biggest hits of the ragtime era weren't Scott Joplin's stately piano rags. “Coon songs,” with their ugly name, defined ragtime for the masses, and played a transitional role in the commercial ascendancy of blues and jazz. In Ragged but Right, Lynn Abbott and Doug Seroff investigate black musical comedy productions, sideshow bands, and itinerant tented minstrel shows. Ragtime history is crowned by the “big shows,” the stunning musical comedy successes of Williams and Walker, Bob Cole, and Ernest Hogan. Under the big tent of Tolliver's Smart Set, Ma Rainey, Clara Smith, and others were converted from “coon shouters” to “blues singers.” Throughout the ragtime era and into the era of blues and jazz, circuses and Wild West shows exploited the popular demand for black music and culture, yet segregated and subordinated black performers to the sideshow tent. Not to be confused with their nineteenth-century white predecessors, black, tented minstrel shows such as the Rabbit's Foot and Silas Green from New Orleans provided blues and jazz-heavy vernacular entertainment that black southern audiences identified with and took pride in.
Download or read book Raising Cain written by W. T. Lhamon and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1998 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cain made the first blackface turn, blackface minstrels liked to say of the first man forced to wander the world acting out his low place in life. It wasn't the "approved" reading, but then, blackface wasn't the "approved" culture either--yet somehow we're still dancing to its renegade tune. The story of an insubordinate, rebellious, truly popular culture stretching from Jim Crow to hip hop is told for the first time in Raising Cain, a provocative look at how the outcasts of official culture have made their own place in the world. Unearthing a wealth of long-buried plays and songs, rethinking materials often deemed too troubling or lowly to handle, and overturning cherished ideas about classics from Uncle Tom's Cabin to Benito Cereno to The Jazz Singer, W. T. Lhamon Jr. sets out a startlingly original history of blackface as a cultural ritual that, for all its racist elements, was ultimately liberating. He shows that early blackface, dating back to the 1830s, put forward an interpretation of blackness as that which endured a commonly felt scorn and often outwitted it. To follow the subsequent turns taken by the many forms of blackface is to pursue the way modern social shifts produce and disperse culture. Raising Cain follows these forms as they prolong and adapt folk performance and popular rites for industrial commerce, then project themselves into the rougher modes of postmodern life through such heirs of blackface as stand-up comedy, rock 'n' roll, talk TV, and hip hop. Formally raising Cain in its myriad variants, blackface appears here as a racial project more radical even than abolitionism. Lhamon's account of its provenance and persistence is a major reinterpretation of American culture.
Download or read book Gentlemen be Seated written by Marc Bauch and published by GRIN Verlag. This book was released on 2011 with total page 57 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Document from the year 2011 in the subject American Studies - Literature, grade: --, Saarland University (Amerikanistik), language: English, abstract: A native form of entertainment that came up in around 1843 was the minstrel show. The minstrel show was a show that consisted of melodies by slaves and jokes by white actors in blackface in order to imitate the blacks. Led by Mr. Interlocutor, the master of ceremonies, three more actors in blackface sat in a semicircle. The endmen or cornermen were known as Mr. Bones and Mr. Tambo, who joked together or made fun of slaves. Thus, the minstrel show was double-edged: on the one hand, racism in the United States was reinforced; on the other hand, so many white Americans have become aware of black popular culture. No wonder therefore, the rise of the minstrel show coincided with the growth of the abolitionist movement in the 19th century. But without doubt, racial discrimination was played down in the minstrel show. The minstrel show was meant as a form of entertainment, which was not intended to be taken seriously. Although the minstrel aimed to create a native and distinctly American form of entertainment, the songs they adopted were of English, Irish or Scottish origin. Furthermore, they presented parodies of European-style entertainment or parodied works by William Shakespeare. The book gives an overview of the history of the minstrel show. Marc A. Bauch is a scholar of American Literature and has specialized in American Theater, including the American Musical.
Download or read book Whiting Up written by Marvin Edward McAllister and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2011 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the early 1890s, black performer Bob Cole turned blackface minstrelsy on its head with his nationally recognized whiteface creation, a character he called Willie Wayside. Just over a century later, hiphop star Busta Rhymes performed a whiteface superco
