Inside the Minstrel Mask

Inside the Minstrel Mask PDF Author: Annemarie Bean
Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
ISBN: 9780819563002
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 332

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Book Description
A sourcebook of contemporary and historical commentary on America's first popular mass entertainment.

Inside the Minstrel Mask

Inside the Minstrel Mask PDF Author: Annemarie Bean
Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
ISBN: 9780819563002
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 332

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Book Description
A sourcebook of contemporary and historical commentary on America's first popular mass entertainment.

Blacking up : the minstrel show in nineteenth-century America

Blacking up : the minstrel show in nineteenth-century America PDF Author: Robert C. Toll
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 310

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Book Description


Darkest America: Black Minstrelsy from Slavery to Hip-Hop

Darkest America: Black Minstrelsy from Slavery to Hip-Hop PDF Author: Yuval Taylor
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393070980
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 353

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Book Description
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.

Exporting Jim Crow

Exporting Jim Crow PDF Author: Chinua Thelwell
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781625345165
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Based on the author's thesis (doctoral)--New York University, 2011.

The Blackface Minstrel Show in Mass Media

The Blackface Minstrel Show in Mass Media PDF Author: Tim Brooks
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 1476676763
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 291

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Book Description
 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.

Behind the Burnt Cork Mask

Behind the Burnt Cork Mask PDF Author: William John Mahar
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 9780252066962
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 476

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Book Description
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.

Beyond Blackface

Beyond Blackface PDF Author: William Fitzhugh Brundage
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 0807834629
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 385

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Book Description
Beyond Blackface

Representing African Americans in Transatlantic Abolitionism and Blackface Minstrelsy

Representing African Americans in Transatlantic Abolitionism and Blackface Minstrelsy PDF Author: Robert Nowatzki
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807137456
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 231

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Book Description
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.

Birth of an Industry

Birth of an Industry PDF Author: Nicholas Sammond
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822375788
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 232

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Book Description
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.

The Creolization of American Culture

The Creolization of American Culture PDF Author: Christopher J Smith
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 0252095049
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 353

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Book Description
The Creolization of American Culture examines the artworks, letters, sketchbooks, music collection, and biography of the painter William Sidney Mount (1807–1868) as a lens through which to see the multiethnic antebellum world that gave birth to blackface minstrelsy. As a young man living in the multiethnic working-class community of New York's Lower East Side, Mount took part in the black-white musical interchange his paintings depict. An avid musician and tune collector as well as an artist, he was the among the first to depict vernacular fiddlers, banjo players, and dancers precisely and sympathetically. His close observations and meticulous renderings provide rich evidence of performance techniques and class-inflected paths of musical apprenticeship that connected white and black practitioners. Looking closely at the bodies and instruments Mount depicts in his paintings as well as other ephemera, Christopher J. Smith traces the performance practices of African American and Anglo-European music-and-dance traditions while recovering the sounds of that world. Further, Smith uses Mount's depictions of black and white music-making to open up fresh perspectives on cross-ethnic cultural transference in Northern and urban contexts, showing how rivers, waterfronts, and other sites of interracial interaction shaped musical practices by transporting musical culture from the South to the North and back. The "Africanization" of Anglo-Celtic tunes created minstrelsy's musical "creole synthesis," a body of melodic and rhythmic vocabularies, repertoires, tunes, and musical techniques that became the foundation of American popular music. Reading Mount's renderings of black and white musicians against a background of historical sites and practices of cross-racial interaction, Smith offers a sophisticated interrogation and reinterpretation of minstrelsy, significantly broadening historical views of black-white musical exchange.