Common Experiences

Regular Feature | Book Reviews Randolph Lewis Visiting Fellow, University of California, Davis Common Experiences Michael Rogin. Blackface, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting Pot University of California Press, 1996. (Cloth. $24.95) "Hollywood has gone minstrel," proclaimed one popular historian ofthe strange art of"blacking-up" in 1929. In Blackface, White Noise:Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting Pot, Michael Rogin reveals the truth ofsuch statements, as he traces the first and most popular form of mass culture in the nineteenth-century United States well into the twentieth century. Rogin is bestknown for RonaldReagan, TheMovie and OtAerEpisodesin PoliticalDemonology (1987), a study that focused neither on Reagan nor the movies but on what Rogin called the "countersubversive tradition" in American politics. Again, he has published a book whose title seems ill-suited to its contents: "white noise" is not the clearest description ofthe process ofwhite exploitation ofblackness. The two books share more than a title which fails to do justice to the author's ideas. He argues that Ronald Reagan found out who he was through the roles he played on film. Blackface, White Noise extends this process ofself-definition through national level performance, arguing that white Americans (in this case immigrantJews) glossed over their ethnic differences and constructed a unified sense ofculture by defining "Americanness" against blackness. To explain how immigrants could manipulate cultural productions to mainstream assimilation, Rogin examines the central role of blackface in American cinema between 1901 and 1949. Rogin's brand ofpolitical psychoanalysis makes for numerous insights. Blackface, White Noise begins abruptlywith a description of"OwlJolson," the Looney Tunes cartoon version of the blackfacedJewish "jazz singer," AlJolson. Making the first of many linkages between cultural text and historical context, Rogin shows how popular culture Americanizes Owl Jolson. Here, AlJolson becomes the book's emblematic figure: theJewish immigrantwhose successful assimilation comes—usually unconsciously —at the expense ofBlack assimilation. Blackface is both literal and figurative in Rogin's analysis: it is the theatrical practice ofblacking up plus the symbolic blackface ofanyone employing the power ofblackness to assimilate. Rogin describes the common experiences that brought Blacks andJews together, with the factors that complicated and undermined this relationship , as Jews—such as Eddie Cantor and Al Jolson—became the preeminent blackface entertainers in the 1920-s. In his analysis, Rogin delineates three modes ofreading blackface, each ofwhich includes a particular emotional response : (1) patriotic nostalgia for a populist entertainment; (2) modernist disapproval ofits political implications; (3) postmodernist pleasure in breaking racial—and sometimes gender —boundaries. His sympathies lie mostly with the modernist perspective that blackface caricature essentializes blackness and whiteness, emphasizing the line between the two even as it is transgressed. Rogin's argument moves quickly, sometimes confusingly , with rapid fire allusions to Natty Bumpo, Queen Anne, St. Jerome, Elvis Presley, and Mickey Mouse, the white-gloved and blackfaced rodent who was inspired by Al Jolson. But throughout the discussion ofsuch eclectic material, Rogin evinces an impressive knowledge ofrecent scholarship on subjects from cross-dressing toJacksonian working class culture to Benedict Anderson's concept ofimagined communities. One noteworthy lacuna is the literature on representation coming out ofdepartments ofCultural Studies, Anthropology, and English ; Rogin has somehow managed to write an entire book about representation without once using the word. This shortcoming does not undermine the fine textual readings at the heart ofthe book, which owes a great deal to Stephen Greenblatt's writings. Rogin does quote the New Historicist in passing—"Imagined self-loss [i.e., the loss ofwhiteness in the blackface performance] conceals its opposite: ruthless displacement and absorption ofthe other"—and the statement neatly summarizes his argument about blackface and how it silences African Americans. One benefit ofRogin's analyses of TheJazz Singer and Home ofthe Brave (1949) is the clear structure it provides his argument. It keeps him on the mark more so than in earlier chapters, where his flitting between multiple levels ofabstraction creates a sense ofvertigo. The book also benefits from Rogin's judicious approach to his subject, about which he does not moralize. "Instead of choosing sides between mass culture and liberal politics in America," he suggests, "it is better to untangle the knot that ties them together." By demonstrating how "blackface made...