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223 8 American Ghetto Parties and Ghanaian Concert Parties A Transnational Perspective on Blackface CATHER INE M. COLE Ralph Ellison identified the minstrel mask as “an inseparable part of the national iconography,” and he is certainly not alone in seeing minstrelsy as a quintessentially American form.1 How deeply embedded blackface is in our national psyche is perhaps nowhere more evident than the transformation of Jim Crow from a fictional nineteenth-century stage character to the rubric for legislation that enforced racial segregation in schools, public places, and public transportation for eighty-nine years. No other single performance tradition in U.S. history has had the same scope, popularity, volatility, and problematic endurance. The genre’s characteristic blackened face makeup, whitened lips, exaggerated gestures, malapropisms, derogatory accents, and cartoonish dress have morphed and been transformed from the earliest manifestations of blackface in places like the Catherine Market in the Seventh Ward of New York City in 1820 to more recent iterations such as Spike Lee’s film Bamboozled in 2000 or indeed the “Compton Cookout” party staged by fraternity boys at the University of California, San Diego, in 2010—a subject to which I shall return. Minstrelsy’s historiography has likewise morphed from the breathy fetishism and nostalgia of collectors and aficionados and the pained ambivalence of writers such as Paul Laurence Dunbar and W. E. B. Du Bois in the early twentieth century to the ethical criticism of writers such as Ralph Ellison and Robert Toll, who read minstrelsy as both reflective and constitutive of the material realities of slavery and racial segregation. More recent scholarship by Eric Lott, W. T. Lhamon Jr., and Saidiya V. Hartman, among others, has attempted 224 Catherine M. Cole to move beyond the extremes of uncritical celebration and moral condemnation to analyze precisely how blackface operated, what cultural and political work it did, and how it worked on both its producers and its consumers during very particular moments of our national history.2 Yet for all the richness of this historiography, blackface scholarship to date has tended to be nationalistically myopic. How would our appraisal of blackface change if we were to take account of its rather astonishing transnational reach? The map of minstrelsy’s global circulation in the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries includes such disparate locations as Australia, Brazil, Britain, Colombia, Cuba, colonial Ghana (Gold Coast), Jamaica, Puerto Rico, South Africa, and Trinidad.3 In South Africa, blackface has deep historic roots dating back over 150 years. Blackface in South Africa has for over a century been commonly performed among the Cape Coloreds, a Creole population that includes Dutch, Indonesian, Malaysian, Bantu, and Khoisan ancestry, who have been performing the annual “Coon Carnival” or “Kaapse Klopse” ever since the arrival of the traveling Christy’s Minstrels on South Africa’s shores in 1862. Blackface was also adopted among the black Zulu population in South Africa, and one can see vestiges of blackface in the dance and musical genre known as isicathamiya, a form made famous in the choreographed line dancing, hand gestures, and a cappella harmonies performed by the Afropop troupe Ladysmith Black Mambazo.4 An even earlier manifestation of blackface outside American soil took place in Cuba in the form of negritos, performers who appeared as early as 1812, concurrent with the earliest history of American minstrelsy.5 These global examples of blackface share one common denominator: colonization . But just how common is this denominator? Spanish colonization of Cuba is quite different from Dutch and British colonization of South Africa, and American (and to some extent Cuban) colonization of Puerto Rico is not to be confused with British colonization of the Gold Coast. Could a transnational appraisal of blackface lead us to conclude that blackface, rather than being a quintessentially American form, is rather a quintessentially colonial one? And what would be the implications of such a claim? Louis Chude-Sokei has taken us the furthest in thinking of blackface as a transnational sign, a mask that even within America has had a radical transnational polyvalence when one considers the history of Bert Williams, one of the most famous black performers of late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century America. Williams was not actually African American but rather a West Indian immigrant from the Bahamas. “For the foremost ‘exponent’ of the ‘darky’ to not be African American, well, that was no doubt a fascinating political and cultural scenario,” observes Chude-Sokei, “particularly since it was through [3.15.193.45...

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