Black Theatre's Closet Drama

Where do the early blackface plays collected in W. T. Lhamon's Jump Jim Crow belong in the genealogy of black performance?¹⁰ Nowhere, Shauneille Perry suggests.¹¹ Contrasting blackface minstrelsy with black radicalism, Perry notes reprovingly, "Had there been a multitude of Nat Turners, Harriet Tubmans, Toussaint L'Ouvertures and Mary Princes in 19th-century America, there would have been no Jim Crow, then or now." Perry invokes these heroic names as talismans against Lhamon's restoration of Jim Crow as an icon of a circum-Atlantic, multiracial lumpenproletariat (literally, a proletariat in rags). In early Jim Crow he finds a performance effigy more subversive of white supremacy than abolitionism. Perry dismisses this argument along with the plays Lhamon has republished. Calling them "distorted remnants from a painful past," they do not represent identification across the color line for Perry, but rather a "soul-destroying force." In place of such grotesqueries, Perry substitutes prime symbols of what Victor Anderson calls "ontological blackness."

Ontological blackness, Anderson writes, emphasizes "the heroic capacities of African Americans" and depicts black people "as surviving under unprecedented struggle by the development of a revolutionary consciousness that is itself representational of authentic black consciousness." But Anderson traces this racial ontology to the "Western aesthetic category of genius" and goes so far as to assert that "ontological blackness signifies the blackness that whiteness created." The rhetorical strategy Perry employs to reject the theft of black culture, Anderson might counter, is itself a "mirror" of Euro-American categories.¹² This does not in itself invalidate Perry's reaction, but it does demonstrate the degree to which all attempts to specify pure origins inevitably reveal hybrid affiliations.

The inverse relationship Perry posits between racial equality and blackface performance is a longstanding hypothesis in black letters. We hear an echo of it in an 1862 article, "Jim Crow Exhibitions and Negro Extravaganzas," published in the black California newspaper, the Pacific Appeal. Terming minstrelsy "a moral ulcer" and calling for its "abolition," the Appeal made an early linkage between Jim Crow the performance and Jim Crow the segregation. "In the City of Boston," the Appeal wrote, "these Negro delineators cannot obtain permission of the city authorities to exhibit," while in San Francisco they are "of nightly occurrence." In Boston, "Colored and white children are educated at the public schools in common," while in San Francisco "Colored men are refused a seat in omnibuses." In places "where the rights of the Colored man are mostly respected," the Appeal concluded, "those burlesquing exhibitions are never tolerated," while in those "where their rights mostly are discarded, these exhibitions in ridicule are of common occurrence."¹³ With its twin emphasis on rights and respectability, the Appeal articulated the black uplift agenda, which values education, sobriety, and the upward mobility that lies at the heart of the myth of a classless democracy. Blackface performance yoked black people to the body and its disrespectable pursuits (dancing, sexuality, excretion). In its place, respectable black "performances"—attending school, riding in omnibuses, voting in elections—were propounded as the remedy for racial inequality. This eminently bourgeois agenda has much more in common with Perry's radical genealogy than is easily recognized. Both posit an inverse relationship between the spread of inauthentic "Negro delineators" and the flowering of authentic black culture.

On this point, a generation of work on blackface minstrelsy, by scholars such as Eric Lott, Dale Cockrell, Annemarie Bean, and Lhamon himself, has been both revelatory and frustrating. This work—often loosely allied with the project of critical white studies—has not managed to unsettle a basic division of labor between the study of performance seen as "representational of authentic black consciousness" on the one hand and, on the other, of the "Negro delineators" whose persistent attraction to and co-optations of the styles and sounds of that authenticity have been prime movers in American culture. This division is replicated in the body scholastic, with black scholars working primarily on...