Download or read book Beyond Blackface written by William Fitzhugh Brundage and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2011 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Beyond Blackface

Download or read book Blackface written by Ayanna Thompson and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2021-04-08 with total page 145 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Blacks in Blackface written by Henry T. Sampson and published by Scarecrow Press. This book was released on 2013-10-30 with total page 1573 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Published in 1980, Blacks in Blackface was the first and most extensive book up to that time to deal exclusively with every aspect of all-African American musical comedies performed on the stage between 1900 and 1940. An invaluable resource for scholars and historians focused on African American culture, this new edition features significantly revised, expanded, and new material. In Blacks in Blackface: A Sourcebook on Early Black Musical Shows, Henry T. Sampson provides an unprecedented wealth of information on legitimate musical comedies, including show synopses, casts, songs, and production credits. Sampson also recounts the struggles of African American performers and producers to overcome the racial prejudice of white show owners, music publishers, theatre managers, and booking agents to achieve adequate financial compensation for their talents and managerial expertise. Black producers and artists competed with white managers who were producing all-Black shows and also with some white entertainers who were performing Black-developed music and dances, often in blackface. The chapters in this volume include: An overview of African American musical shows from the end of the Civil War through the golden years of the 1920s and ’30s New and expanded biographical sketches of performers Detailed information about the first producers and owners of Black minstrel and musical comedy shows Origins and backgrounds of several famous Black theatres Profiles of African American entrepreneurs and businessmen who provided financial resources to build and own many of the Black theatres where these shows were performed A chronicle of booking agencies and organized Black theatrical circuits, music publishing houses, and phonograph recording businesses Critical commentary from African American newspapers and show business publications More than 500 hundred rare photographs A comprehensive volume that covers all aspects of Black musical shows performed in theatres, nightclubs, circuses, and medicine shows, this edition of Blacks in Blackface can be used as a reference for serious scholars and researchers of Black show business in the United States before 1940. More than double the size of the previous edition, this useful resource will also appeal to the casual reader who is interested in learning more about early Black entertainment.

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 Blackface White Noise written by Michael Rogin and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1996-06-01 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The tangled connections that have bound Jews to African Americans in popular culture and liberal politics are at the heart of Michael Rogin's arresting and unnerving book. Looking at films from Birth of a Nation to Forrest Gump, Rogin explores blackface in Hollywood films as an aperture to broader issues: the nature of "white" identity in America, the role of race in transforming immigrants into "Americans," the common experiences of Jews and African Americans that made Jews key supporters in the fight for racial equality, and the social importance of popular culture. Rogin's forcefully argued study challenges us to confront the harsh truths behind the popularity of racial masquerade.

Download or read book Blackface Nation written by Brian Roberts and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2017-04-18 with total page 371 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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

Download or read book From Blackface to Black Twitter written by Jannette Lake Dates and published by Peter Lang Incorporated, International Academic Publishers. This book was released on 2018 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Part one: The roots of black humor -- Part two: The fruits of black humor -- Part three: Black comedy, social identity and user-generated content -- Part four: Black humor and politics -- Appendix A. Noteworthy African American men in comedy (both stand-up and screen) -- Appendix B. Notable African American women in comedy (both screen and stand up)

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 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 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 Blackface written by Nelson George and published by . This book was released on 2002 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This important book of essays chronicles the rise of African-American cinema. Subjects include: Spike Lee, Eddie Murphy, Laurence Fishburne, blaxploitation and its influence on modern film, and the social impact of film in the African-American community.

Download or read book Burgers in Blackface written by Naa Oyo A. Kwate and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2019-07-19 with total page 91 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Exposes and explores the prevalence of racist restaurant branding in the United States Aunt Jemima is the face of pancake mix. Uncle Ben sells rice. Chef Rastus shills for Cream of Wheat. Stereotyped Black faces and bodies have long promoted retail food products that are household names. Much less visible to the public are the numerous restaurants that deploy unapologetically racist logos, themes, and architecture. These marketing concepts, which center nostalgia for a racist past and commemoration of our racist present, reveal the deeply entrenched American investment in anti-blackness. Drawing on wide-ranging sources from the late 1800s to the present, Burgers in Blackface gives a powerful account, and rebuke, of historical and contemporary racism in restaurant branding. Forerunners: Ideas First Short books of thought-in-process scholarship, where intense analysis, questioning, and speculation take the lead

Download or read book It was Play Or Starve written by John Hanners and published by Popular Press. This book was released on 1993 with total page 182 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Unearths the personalities and experiences of touring and itinerant popular entertainers in 19th-century America. Drawing on both primary and secondary sources, describes life and work on the showboats, among the small towns, and in the big cities; and the financial difficulties, the physical dangers, the social prejudices, and cultural barriers. No index. Paper edition (unseen), $15.95. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Download or read book Racism and Early Blackface Comic Traditions written by Robert Hornback and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-07-19 with total page 331 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book traces blackface types from ancient masks of grinning Africans and phallus-bearing Roman fools through to comedic medieval devils, the pan-European black-masked Titivillus and Harlequin, and racial impersonation via stereotypical 'black speech' explored in the Renaissance by Lope de Vega and Shakespeare. Jim Crow and antebellum minstrelsy recycled Old World blackface stereotypes of irrationality, ignorance, pride, and immorality. Drawing upon biblical interpretations and philosophy, comic types from moral allegory originated supposedly modern racial stereotypes. Early blackface traditions thus spread damning race-belief that black people were less rational, hence less moral and less human. Such notions furthered the global Renaissance’s intertwined Atlantic slave and sugar trades and early nationalist movements. The latter featured overlapping definitions of race and nation, as well as of purity of blood, language, and religion in opposition to 'Strangers'. Ultimately, Old World beliefs still animate supposed 'biological racism' and so-called 'white nationalism' in the age of Trump.

Download or read book Michael Jackson and the Blackface Mask written by Dr Harriet J Manning and published by Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.. This book was released on 2013-08-31 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Blackface minstrelsy, the nineteenth-century performance practice in which ideas and images of blackness were constructed and theatricalized by and for whites, continues to permeate contemporary popular music and its audience. Harriet J. Manning argues that this legacy is nowhere more evident than with Michael Jackson in whom minstrelsy’s gestures and tropes are embedded. During the nineteenth century, blackface minstrelsy held together a multitude of meanings and when black entertainers took to the stage this complexity was compounded: minstrelsy became an arena in which black stereotypes were at once enforced and critiqued. This body of contradiction behind the blackface mask provides an effective approach to try and understand Jackson, a cultural figure about whom more questions than answers have been generated. Symbolized by his own whiteface mask, Jackson was at once ‘raced’ and raceless and this ambiguity allowed him to serve a whole host of others’ needs - a function of the mask that has run long and deep through its tortuous history. Indeed, Manning argues that minstrelsy’s assumptions and uses have been fundamental to the troubles and controversies with which Jackson was beset.

Download or read book Was the Cat in the Hat Black written by Philip Nel and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017-07-06 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Racism is resilient, duplicitous, and endlessly adaptable, so it is no surprise that America is again in a period of civil rights activism. A significant reason racism endures is because it is structural: it's embedded in culture and in institutions. One of the places that racism hides-and thus perhaps the best place to oppose it-is books for young people. Was the Cat in the Hat Black? presents five serious critiques of the history and current state of children's literature tempestuous relationship with both implicit and explicit forms of racism. The book fearlessly examines topics both vivid-such as The Cat in the Hat's roots in blackface minstrelsy-and more opaque, like how the children's book industry can perpetuate structural racism via whitewashed covers even while making efforts to increase diversity. Rooted in research yet written with a lively, crackling touch, Nel delves into years of literary criticism and recent sociological data in order to show a better way forward. Though much of what is proposed here could be endlessly argued, the knowledge that what we learn in childhood imparts both subtle and explicit lessons about whose lives matter is not debatable. The text concludes with a short and stark proposal of actions everyone-reader, author, publisher, scholar, citizen- can take to fight the biases and prejudices that infect children's literature. While Was the Cat in the Hat Black? does not assume it has all the answers to such a deeply systemic problem, its audacity should stimulate discussion and activism.

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