The White Negress: Literature, Minstrelsy, and the Black-Jewish Imaginary by Lori Harrison-Kahan (review)

Lori Kahan-Harrison’s The White Negress—deserving winner of the American Studies Association’s 2010 Gloria E. Anzaldúa Award—acts as a significant challenge to existing scholarship concerning whiteness, cross-racial performances, and black-Jewish encounters (3). Focusing her research on Jewish and black women’s racial appropriations in literature and minstrelsy, Harrison-Kahan demonstrates that gender and sexuality complicate the “masculinist paradigms” that have long circumscribed scholarly explorations of blackface minstrelsy and “black-Jewish relations” (6).

In The White Negress, Harrison-Kahan analyzes the representation of a fundamentally ambivalent female figure appearing in texts authored by Jewish and black artists during the interwar period. Her four substantive chapters act as case studies, exploring the portrayal of this recurrent character in Sophie Tucker’s stage performances and autobiography Some of These Days (1945), Edna Ferber’s Show Boat (1926), Fannie Hurst’s Imitation of Life (1933), and Zora Neale Hurston’s Moses, Man of the Mountain (1939). Harrison-Kahan names this figure “the white negress” after famed actress Sarah Bernhardt’s self-description in her memoir My Double Life (1907). Associated simultaneously with Jewishness, blackness, and whiteness as well as “unconventional femininity,” Bernhardt—known for her performance of the belle juive, or “beautiful Jewess”—cultivated a mysterious star persona that traded on her racial ambiguity and gender nonconformity (22). Harrison-Kahan argues that, like Bernhardt, the white negresses of Tucker, Ferber, Hurst, and Hurston’s texts are racially ambiguous—Jewish, mixed-race, “racially indeterminate or ethnically unidentified”—New Women, “whose crossing of racial lines becomes intertwined with her defiance of gender and domestic norms” (2). Her central argument is that the white negress complicates the black-white racial binary.

By analyzing these artists’ representations of the sexually and financially independent white negress in minstrelsy and cross-racial narratives, Harrison-Kahan tests longstanding assumptions concerning the motivations behind male Jewish performers’ decisions to “cork up.” On the one hand, Irving Howe, in World of Our Fathers (1976), proposes that American Jewish performers donned blackface as an expression of their Jewishness, an identity conveyed partly through empathy and solidarity with African Americans and their freedom struggle. On the other, Michael Rogin, in his influential Blackface, White Noise (1996), argues that through their blackface routines, Jewish entertainers exploited African Americans, performing racism in an effort to eschew Jewishness and claim whiteness. Yet, as Harrison-Kahan maintains, scholars have largely overlooked the ways that gender informs Jewish artists’ relationships to blackface performance. Her findings suggest that “women performers appear to experience a deeper resistance to assuming blackface” (6). Their resistance, she continues, is partly the result of antiracist impulses, but largely their concern that the masculinizing and desexualizing effects of “blacking up” precluded them from achieving ideal white femininity. Ultimately, Harrison-Kahan contends that Howe and Rogin’s opposing paradigms for understanding Jewish blackface performance—that Jews either identified empathetically with African Americans in order to trouble ethno-racial categories or disidentified with them in a bid for whiteness—obscure “the possibility that whiteness can be both produced and destabilized through cross-racial performances and encounters” (4, 179).

Likewise, Harrison-Kahan’s The White Negress challenges prevailing black-Jewish relations scholarship, which has largely privileged moments of solidarity and enmity between male-dominated political organizations or literary conversations between prominent black and Jewish male authors at mid-century. By exploring intercultural identifications and tensions between Jewish and black women during the interwar period, Harrison-Kahan contests the implicit assumption that men and women experience interracial relationships in similar ways and sheds light on an understudied era of black-Jewish relations.

Although, by her own admission, Harrison-Kahan’s The White Negress is not “a comprehensive survey of black-Jewish relations among women” or Jewish women and blackface performance, her study is perhaps most noteworthy for its assertion that future work in these fields must take women, gender, and sexuality seriously (3).