Revisiting Minstrelsy: Love & Theft at Twenty

Eric Lott’s Love & Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Classturned twenty in 2013. The book originally dropped the year before I started graduate school. Reading it then—before British cultural studies had so thoroughly saturated the humanities, before phrases like “popular music studies” rolled off the tongue—was electric, a shock to a system that had begun to break down the disciplinary walls that sequestered culture from politics but had yet to grapple with pleasure as a political force.

Antebellum blackface minstrelsy was one of the most divisive cultural formations in US history. Perhaps because of this fact, it had received relatively scant scholarly attention in decades. Important works by Nathan Huggins in 1971 and Robert Toll in 1974 established minstrelsy as a tool of racial domination. ¹Lott, inspired by Stuart Hall and other theorists of the contested terrain of the popular, had the audacity to imagine that minstrelsy was about more than denigrating the black Other. Minstrels and their audiences were into their dangerous black fun. “Underwritten by envy as well as repulsion, sympathetic identification as well as fear, the minstrel show continually transgressed the color line even as it made possible the formation of a self-consciously white working class,” Lott declared (9). Love & Theftheld the trifecta: it argued that popular culture mattered to political historians; it integrated cultural theory about the social construction of race with deep archival research; and it revived interest in a dangerous and maligned topic. There was little like it at the time.

For its twentieth anniversary, the book has been reissued with a new afterword by the author and a foreword by Greil Marcus, the eminent rock and cultural critic. Marcus notes that Love & Theftinspired other scholars to explore the long history and legacy of minstrelsy. “As a breach in the dialogue the American vernacular conducts with itself, in its way Love & Theftwas its own pop explosion,” he writes. “Lott retrieved minstrelsy from the museum of racist embarrassment, and he opened up a field—a field not only of study, but of action” (ix-x). Marcus is correct. The publication of the new edition offers an opportunity to revisit the work, reflect on its legacy, and explore the current state of one of the fields it opened up, as revealed in several recent books about blackface. What concerns scholars of minstrelsy twenty years after Lott helped to revitalize the field? How does recent work extend or complicate Lott’s formulation? And how can a work forged out of a different moment inside and outside the academy speak to us today? Two decades later, the influence of the book is as uneven as it is undeniable.

Love & Theftoffers a history of blackface minstrelsy from the time of its emergence into public consciousness in the early 1830s through its dominance of national popular culture in the years before the Civil War. Lott establishes a broad narrative arc across this period. Early minstrelsy was largely the product of northern, urban, white, working-class men. The blackface mask—alternately considered a genuine investment in blackness and a complete ruse—enabled actors and audiences to explore and negotiate race, gender, and class identity. “The black mask offered...