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| Publications [#45257] of Daniel H. Foster
Books
- D.H. Foster. The Transatlantic Minstrel Show: British Romanticism and American Blackface. (in progress).
Abstract:
The Transatlantic Minstrel Show: British
Romanticism and American Blackface
Scholars have long regarded blackface
minstrelsy as a peculiarly American
institution. However, recent performance
genealogies trace minstrelsy beyond these
national boundaries. My book project
continues this trend by following
minstrelsy back to a little explored
source: the figure of the minstrel as
constructed by British Romantic poets and
scholars. In general such genealogies
allow us not only to understand how we have
arrived somewhere but also how we might
redirect our energies in order to arrive
somewhere else. In particular a
performance genealogy of minstrelsy may
help us to better understand and possibly
reconfigure our attitudes toward the things
and people it influenced most: African
Americans, the working class, and
minstrelsy’s aesthetic descendents among
vaudeville, radio, film, and television. I
have already undertaken research at the
Library of Congress, the British Library,
Cambridge University, and Duke University.
The Journal of American Drama and Theatre
has published my findings, which I have
since reworked into the book’s
introduction, and I have presented my work
at the Modern Language Association and the
Hope Franklin Humanities Center at Duke
University. Since I have completed most of
the necessary research of primary
materials, I intend to complete a first
draft of the book in 2006-2007.
By way of introducing the minstrel, the
first part of my book examines various
literary and musical retellings of
Orpheus’s failed rescue of Eurydice from
the underworld. I set this myth up as a
paradigm for minstrelsy’s ongoing,
conflicted relationship to sight and
sound. According to the myth, after
Eurydice dies Orpheus descends to the
underworld to rescue her. Charming its
denizens with his music, Orpheus is allowed
to escort Eurydice back to the upper world
on the condition that he not look back to
see if she is following him. Orpheus
successfully resists temptation until the
very moment he steps into the sunshine once
more and, to verify sound by sight, turns
to see Eurydice and so loses her. In the
darkened underworld, Orpheus has only his
music and his listeners only their ears.
There he easily succeeds, using sound to
soften difference and unify enemies.
However, as soon as he can see his beloved
again, even the world’s greatest minstrel
cannot resist. For the Greeks as for other
Western cultures, the primary medium for
perception and knowledge is sight not
sound. But by giving into this cultural
bias Orpheus not only loses Eurydice—
literally, “beautiful voice”—he betrays his
own voice as a minstrel.
Guided by this paradigm, the second part of
my book argues that the figure of the
British Romantic minstrel lives between
verbal and visual traditions of published
author and singer-poet. Relying upon
supposedly ancient authority, scholars like
Thomas Percy and poets like James Beattie
and Sir Walter Scott constructed the
minstrel mostly out of Scottish song and
legend. Although not a stranger to the
aristocracy, this Romantic minstrel was
conceived of as a wandering bard, an
outsider who was simple, of low origins,
and/or plain-spoken. Over time, because of
this outsider status, those in the working
classes and rural poor were both encouraged
to help create the minstrel’s identity and,
with it, the identity of the British
empire. British minstrelsy was not,
however, without its visual and middle-
class influences. The Romantic minstrel
not only lived in song and memory but also
on the page as a literary and therefore
visual object for consumption by the middle
classes. However, this method for
preserving minstrelsy also helped destroy
it. Even as authors sought to safeguard
this tradition through visual means, they
deconstructed it as an aural tradition.
The third part of my book argues that
blackface minstrelsy in the U. S. followed
this British model by engendering a formal
conflict between sight and sound, by using
minstrelsy as a means to national identity,
and by borrowing heavily from Scottish
culture while seeking its own Other among
African Americans. As in Britain, this use
of an Other encouraged working-class
participation in minstrelsy, essentially a
parody of middle-class pretensions that
united black and white audiences. Although
American minstrelsy had always been more
visual than British minstrelsy—since it
involved theater, dance, and a mask—it was
originally much more an aural than a
visual, let alone a literary, experience.
Its performers and audience members—
frequently one and the same—were often
illiterate. Importantly, this more aural
phase in minstrelsy preceded the use of the
word “minstrel” to apply to blackface, the
first instance of which appears to be
1842. Through this association,
entertainers exploited the word’s European
lineage, making minstrelsy more
respectable, middle-class, and visual.
Inevitably, rather than parodying the
middle classes, minstrels began parodying
those whom they portrayed: African
Americans and the working class. The
minstrel mask became less ritualistic, more
representational and racist, even as
printed scripts succeeded improvisation by
and for the working class. By the end of
the nineteenth century, minstrelsy had lost
the voice that had once unified black and
white audiences and was replaced by the
stereotyping spectacle we associate with
the word today.
My epilogue traces minstrelsy to its
rebirth in radio, especially through shows
such as Amos ’n’ Andy. Created by former
minstrels Freeman Gosden and Charles
Correll, Amos ’n’ Andy’s 50-year run on
radio testifies to minstrelsy’s aural power
for palliating difference. Like staged
minstrel shows, radio minstrelsy consisted
of the working class parodying middle-class
pretensions for the enjoyment of African
Americans and European Americans. Here was
the rebirth of blackface as blackvoice.
Indeed, when Amos ’n’ Andy tried moving to
television in the 1950s it failed after
only two years, although it remained on the
radio for another seven years, evidence of
the voice’s ability to overcome difference
during a time of increasing racism. Even
today blackvoice remains popular in music
as the voice of the working class, while
blackface has mercifully all but
disappeared, as if Orpheus were finally
able to redeem Eurydice without needing to
see her.
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