In his new anthology, Burnt Cork: Traditions and Legacies of Blackface Minstrelsy, Stephen Johnson weaves together eight essays that comment on the historic and contemporary manifestations of blackface minstrelsy. Although each essay offers a unique authorial voice, the collection revolves around shared themes: Jim Crow's symbolism, black/white relations, Eric Lott's ideas regarding minstrelsy and the working class, and, of course, performance. Smaller thematic clusters converge around essays that speak to live performance or around those addressing film, television, and animation. Reading cover to cover reveals Johnson's careful editing. He strategically places Louis Chude-Sokei's essay, “The Uncanny History of Minstrels and Machines, 1835–1923,” in the center of the text, providing a smooth transition between the essays concerned with minstrelsy's premodern manifestations, in historical documents and performances, and its more contemporary iterations, found on film and screen. Chude-Sokei's essay mirrors the text as a whole: by drawing attention to a single performance in which an ambivalent minstrel figure is presented alongside an automaton, he shows how the juxtaposition of such contiguous “objects” and desires makes it possible for humans to understand change within a climate of impending modernity. Transition and ambivalence serve each author's argument to some degree, speaking to the immanence and necessity of these two traits to the whole blackface tradition.
Each author picks up on transitional moments in history, either when a new means of portraying blackness enters the stage or when two opposing perceptions/caricatures share the stage. W. T. Lhamon presents this opposition via the relationship between integration and separation produced by years of conflicting “Jim Crow” lore. Through cartoons, songs, plays, novels, and reviews, America had built a system of imagined referents for the Jim Crow figure, the majority of which—since T. D. Rice—have been negative. Dave Cockrell locates this tension in a single performance, a moment when, he claims, blackface changes from the presentational to the representational. Stephen Johnson examines the “exceptional normal” within the lives and documents of three men. Taking a cue from Eric Lott's Love and Theft (2003), Johnson locates the simultaneous push and pull toward the grotesquery and beauty of these men's work. For Chude-Sokei, the juxtaposition and re-labeling of human and machine mark the birth of modernity. He claims the presentation of Joice Heth as machine rather than human marks a necessary process of commodification in the coming of the machine age. Her simultaneous symbolic relationship to Africa and technology—the primitive and the modern—mitigates the pressures of change; she legitimizes the new by resembling the old. Moments such as these serve Johnson's primary goal of interrogating minstrelsy's sneaky and subversive nature and questioning: “Did blackface ever go away”? (2). Authors pick up not only on such historical transitions, but as Johnson references in his introduction, a large resurgence in the use of blackface today. Thus, Chude-Sokei's essay not only brings minstrelsy into dialogue with modernity from a theoretical vantage point, but insinuates, as Johnson does, that minstrelsy lives on. Several of the authors—including Johnson, who outlines minstrelsy's manifestations in the media, linking it to interactive videos on YouTube—bring a contemporary situation to bear on his/her historical analysis.
Lhamon's opening essay, for example, concludes with an analysis of Obama's “post-raciality” campaign. This essay marks the next phase in Lhamon's long line of work on the lore of blackface and Jim Crow (Lhamon Reference Lhamon1998, Reference Lhamon2003), but makes a much bolder statement at a time when, nationally, much is at stake politically. Lhamon deconstructs the present day meaning attached to Jim Crow, tracing it back to the white minstrel T. D. Rice and his integrationist and abolitionist intent. The meanings amassed by the Jim Crow figure through time—its inverted symbolism—“bind,” “confirm,” and “channel” America's correspondences (24). Such a fetishizing of Jim Crow makes it possible for America to simultaneously unite on the basis of class and/or circumstance, and yet still find cause for racial divide and mockery. Until Obama wins the election, he is beyond race; once he gains the vote, he inflates his blackness and identifies with all of America who support his inauguration. This latter stage, professes Lhamon, confirms the original intent of Jim Crow. America has reversed the Crow coin once again, so that the performance of blackness holds a message of unity and hope. Lhamon's only concern—an anxiety felt by multiple authors of this text—is whether or not this signification will stick; it might, so long as we are conscious of the multiple surrogates that seek to mask and negate the democratic optimism of blackness's image.
The trope of blackface surrogation with which the book opens in Lhamon's essay persists throughout Johnson's text but takes on a specifically media-centered lens in the essays following Chude-Sokei's: Linda Williams, Nicholas Sammond, and Alice Maurice invite a critique of blackface's moving image. Williams follows the trend of modernity through a juxtaposition of the old alongside the new in her reading of one of D. W. Griffith's lesser-known films, One Exciting Night. Griffith's use of both Tom and anti-Tom figures blurs representations of race, making space for conflicting modes of desire; it stages an imagined ambivalence behind the black body. Sammond finds this conflict within one of America's most innocent characters, calling Mickey Mouse a “vestigial minstrel,” and explaining how the early cartoon short, Trader Mickey, positions the Jim Crow figure of the plantation alongside the barbaric animal of Africa. Animators reinforce the visual semiotics by incorporating plantation tunes and jazz standards, such that the production as a whole supports the associations between minstrelsy, blackness, the Old South, Africa, jazz, and “jungle music.” Though this tension appears in many forms for Alice Maurice, the tension between laughter as natural and laughter as prescribed, manifested in both Spike Lee's New Millennium Minstrel Show audience and the in-house audience on NBC's Deal or No Deal, is the crux of her argument. In a brilliant exegesis of Spike Lee's Bamboozled, Maurice tackles Lee's film from all angles: his editing, the film's symbolism, the dialogue, and the multiple audiences at play, both the audiences built within the film and the perceived spectatorship outside the film. Unlike other critical analyses of Lee's controversial film, Maurice shows how Lee's method of blurring audience and spectacle “predicts the direction of contemporary television's exploitation of identity” (193). Both Bamboozled and the even more contemporary Deal or No Deal merge audience identification with the performer's representation of identity, thus making the shows' creators rich off of the creation and propagation of identities—a type of minstrelsy in disguise.
Despite the text's indulgence in following the movement of certain images and stock characters in blackface, from the perspective of dance scholarship, it does not rigorously critique movement. That is, with the exception of Johnson's brief description of William Henry Lane's tap dancing, Chude-Sokei's kinetic focus through Sambo, Williams's short analysis of the movement repertoire behind different black masks in Griffith's films, and Sammond's identification of a Charleston and Black Bottom within the major production number of Trader Mickey, the authors of this text do not make the dancing body a primary concern. As dance and minstrelsy have deep and intimate relations, attention to dance scholarship might have bolstered the authors' arguments. Still, reassuringly for those of us writing from within the field, this book treats with care concepts such as corporeality and “the body on display.”
Until the final essay, Johnson's book ignores direct mention of minstrelsy's geography, raising questions about whether minstrelsy is a quintessentially American form that has occasionally traversed the British landscape, or whether it is merely an effect of colonialism. Catherine Cole's closing essay begins to answer this question as she shows how minstrelsy not only persists locally, but can be traced transnationally. Picking up on her distinguished research on Ghanaian performance (Cole Reference Cole2001), Cole finds interesting similarities between Ghanaian Concert Parties and the blackface that surfaces on American college campuses at fraternity “ghetto parties.” Reading these two disparate phenomena side by side demonstrates that minstrelsy thrives in sites where upward mobility is highly stratified. In other words, masquerading as something/someone else holds the promise of “performative self-actualization” in a world where realizing one's aspirations is an intangible reality (250). Minstrelsy's tug-of-war, for Cole, is located in this promise of something unattainable.
Johnson's anthology makes clear that minstrelsy lives everywhere, and especially in the liminal spaces of representation; ambivalence accounts for its existence. Its presence can be seen in Liverpool, Harlem, Hollywood, Kentucky, Ghana, and San Diego, on the Silver Screen, at home, on set, and in ink. Although there might be fascinating moments of convergence across time and space, minstrelsy's figures and faces morph along with its sites and styles; the representation of blackness continues to move and haunt the spaces where one least expects to find ghosts. Johnson's text offers a comprehensive analysis of minstrelsy's thriving economy, as it exists locally and abroad, past, present, and future.
