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1 Introduction The Persistence of Blackface and the Minstrel Tradition STEPHEN JOHNSON If it hadn’t a’ been for Cotton-Eye Joe I’d’a been married a long time ago. Oh, where did you come from, where did you go? Where did you come from, Cotton-Eye Joe? —From a 1994 recording of an early minstrel song by the Swedish band Rednex Not long ago I was approached by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in Toronto, where I teach, to be interviewed on a radio talk show regarding the question “Why has there been a resurgence in the use of blackface in contemporary society?” The interview did not take place—more newsworthy events took precedence—but the question remains. Although I cannot anticipate the experience of the reader of this volume, in my own experience, in just the past few years (as of this writing), I have been repeatedly confronted by blackface in almost every “walk” of my life as a spectator.1 In film, Tropic Thunder featured Robert Downey Jr. in permanent blackface in a parody of the overzealous “method” actor. On cable television, Sarah Silverman sported blackface for an episode of her comedy series, and a character in Mad Men, set in the 1960s, blacked up to serenade his fiancée at a public gathering. In the British sketch series Little Britain, performers in traditional “golliwog” blackface appeared in a series of sketches as a “typical” minstrel family. In the reality series America’s Next Top Model, a fashion “shoot” involved the contestants mixing and matching cultural groups, including both “traditional” costuming and face painting.2 Off-off-Broadway, the Wooster Group has used blackface to denote and then 2 Stephen Johnson deconstruct the performance of race.3 Off-Broadway, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s play Neighbors cast actors in blackface for roles named Zip, Jim, and Topsy. On Broadway, the musical The Scottsboro Boys used a traditional minstrel show (whatever that may be; see the discussion later in this introduction) as an organizing format, and included a “blacking up” scene. Closer to my own local culture, a student paper’s annual satirical issue mocked “experimental” theater productions by advertising a (fictitious) radical reinterpretation of You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown, in blackface; and a group of undergraduates won a Halloween costume contest dressed in blackface as the characters from the Jamaican bobsled comedy Cool Running.4 I could add to this list at some length. Having established that there is, indeed, a resurgence of blackface in contemporary society, I would ask just one follow-up question: Did “blackface” ever go away? It seemed largely to disappear from television, film, and other popular mass media from at least the 1960s. But in fact, I don’t believe it did, or could, disappear entirely. By way of illustration, when I first began teaching in the late 1980s, I invited the students of a senior seminar at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, to bring in some evidence of the theater in their local community. One young man brought in a videotape that, when played for the class, showed a recording of his local community service club’s annual charity fundraiser: a fully produced blackface minstrel show, with makeup and woolly wigs, white gloves, and dialect jokes. The students were shocked and outraged, raised as they were in a post–civil rights North America (and in southern Ontario, a terminus of the Underground Railroad). They had never seen anything like this; and yet there it was, on video, no more than a year or two old, sufficiently popular in its community to raise funds for charity. In our class discussion, we wondered aloud what would have happened if we had gone to the men who had produced this event and confronted them with their clearly racist portrayals; my own suspicion was and is that they would have looked at us dumbfounded, and then angrily denounced us as the “real” racists, reading derogatory portrayals into what was to them a de-racialized (or never racialized ), abstract, clownlike performance of comedy and song. Their argument would not have been disingenuous; they would have believed what they were saying, however much we might have disagreed. The fact is that the blackface minstrel tradition has never left us, not since the early nineteenth century, when white men (and black men, and sometimes women) applied a coal-black makeup made from burnt cork, and behaved in front of an audience as if they were African Americans...

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