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.