Raising Minstrelsy: Humour, Satire and the Stereotype in The Birth of a Nation and Bamboozled

© Canadian Review of American Studies/Revue canadienne d’études américaines 33, no. 1, 2003 Raising Minstrelsy: Humour, Satire and the Stereotype in The Birth of a Nation and Bamboozled Michael H. Epp How much does blackface minstrelsy – the first form of American mass culture – share in modern depictions of blackness in popular television and cinema? What (if anything) can be done about the form’s disturbing legacy? Scholarly criticism over the past decade has grappled with these questions to uncertain effect and with limited success, sometimes attempting to recover a lost minstrelsy that might again produce performances that resist racist hegemony, sometimes reasserting minstrelsy’s intrinsic racism and consigning its potential for the present to the scholarly practice of history. Importantly, Spike Lee’s recent film Bamboozled, motivated partly by American film’s albatross, D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation, addresses these same questions by cinematically staging American mass entertainment’s history of discrimination and intimate association with humiliating minstrel stereotypes. Bamboozled, however, seems to embody the theoretical impasse in the scholarly debates, if only because the film enacts the very restaging of minstrelsy it apparently condemns. Because of minstrelsy’s charged political currency and its continuing influence on contemporary film and scholarship, I have attempted to theorize why minstrelsy remains crucial to mass entertainment and to unpack the sometimes convoluted but important claims Bamboozled makes about contemporary popular culture. After a brief survey of recent scholarship, I address three always inter-implicated discursive elements that remain key to evaluations of the form: humour, satire, and the stereotype. Conceptions of how these artistic – and political – discursive elements operate socially inform most critical positions on minstrelsy, and thus constitute the materials through which I articulate my intervention. Most importantly , I suggest that one of the key difficulties for theorizing minstrelsy is the problem of the complex address of the viewing subject implicit in any staging or restaging of the form. Any reckoning of minstrelsy’s apparently intrinsic racism, and any project for a resistant repetition of minstrelsy (like Lee’s film), I argue, must account for the crucial distinction between minstrelsy in uncritical mass Canadian Review of American Studies 33 (2003) 18 entertainment, in scholarship, and in satire. I. Blackface Criticism, Blackface Potential In three important studies from the 1990s, blackface takes on meanings and potentials that might seem surprising to those millions who reacted with confident vitriol to Ted Danson’s 1980s blackface performance at a roast for Whoopi Goldberg. Eric Lott, for instance, in his influential Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class, argues that antebellum minstrelsy was not only a racist display of white supremacy but also a set of complex stage conventions white men coined to make money and to celebrate perceived similarities between slaves and the white working class. Blackface, in this view, must be understood dialectically , as a “theft” of African-American cultural gestures, songs, and rights to perform, yet also as a “loving” expression of identification and interracial attraction. Minstrelsy for Lott is still a racist genre, but inflected (at least as it was deployed in antebellum America) with the potential to challenge class divisions that privilege the few. W.T. Lhamon, in Raising Cain: Blackface Performance from Jim Crow to HipHop , articulates an even more optimistic vision of minstrelsy’s resistant potential. For Lhamon, theft cannot be attributed to blackface minstrels who popularized and preserved African-American folk tales, songs, and gestures in order to provide the lumpenproletariat with a means of representing itself. Rather, theft can be more accurately attributed to historians who characterized minstrelsy as unambiguously racist by repeating the forged histories that nineteenth-century middle-class magazines, jealous of and worried by minstrelsy’s popularity, circulated to discredit the working-class stage. These inaccurate histories, Lhamon writes, prevent scholars from perceiving the traces of African-American experience and cultural resistance embedded in blackface’s origins, unfairly limiting the potential of blackface in modern performance. To retrieve blackface from this “easy” dismissal, Lhamon identifies a “blackface lore cycle” that can be traced from minstrelsy’s earliest stage conventions to modern performances . This lore cycle carries the potential to resist discriminatory conceptions of whiteness and...