The White Negress: Literature, Minstrelsy, and the Black-Jewish Imaginary (review)

Since the 1990s, whiteness studies has emerged as a vital area of academic inquiry that challenges the racelessness and universalism once attributed to the white subject. While the pioneering work of David Roediger, Ruth Frankenberg, and most recently Nell Irvin Painter has done much to demonstrate the historical origins of whiteness as a socially constructed identity, too often whiteness is treated as a monolithic category defined largely by privilege and invisible entitlements. Lori Harrison-Kahan’s book, The White Negress: Literature, Minstrelsy, and the Black-Jewish Imaginary, offers an important contribution to figurations of race in the twentieth century. Emphasizing the instabilities rather than continuities of racial categories, Harrison-Kahan examines appropriations of blackness that simultaneously reify and challenge white identity.

In her analysis of texts and performances from the 1920s until the beginning of World War II, Harrison-Kahan provides a necessary gendered analysis of “the black-Jewish imaginary,” that is, cultural productions in which Jews and African Americans present themselves and each other against white social norms. The figure of the “white negress,” an independent working woman who flaunts prescribed social categories, fundamentally unsettles conceptions of whiteness by both crossing racial lines and defying prevailing notions of femininity. By focusing on women’s racial appropriations in literature and minstrelsy, Harrison-Kahan demands a re-evaluation of how issues of gender and sexuality complicate the production of whiteness. Her analysis resists binaristic conceptions of race by highlighting the fluidity of racial meaning that adheres to Jewishness, an identification that can signify both whiteness and racial difference. A powerful example of the multivalent insights generated by interdisciplinary research, The White Negress combines critical analysis of literary and popular texts to trace the historical development of female Jewish minstrelsy from Sophie Tucker to Sarah Silverman.

Harrison-Kahan has organized her book as a series of case studies, which delve deeply into the historical circumstances of Jewish performers and writers Sophie Tucker, Edna Ferber, and Fannie Hurst, while also providing nuanced close readings of their works. She explores the dialogue that these “white negresses” sustained with African American artists and art forms, eschewing the impulse to label even the blackface performances of Tucker as uniformly racist. Rather, Harrison-Kahan finds both complexity and complicity in Tucker’s minstrelsy and the offensive stereotypes of Ferber’s Show Boat (1926), arguing, for example, that Ferber valorizes interracial identity over a universal whiteness in her widely adapted novel. Just as Harrison-Kahan carefully delineates the original Show Boat from its musical and cinematic versions, she distinguishes Hurst’s novel Imitation of Life (1933) from its two famous film adaptations. Revealing a layered series of passing narratives in the novel, Harrison-Kahan persuasively argues that Imitation of Life undermines any simplistic claim to racial authenticity.

The final and perhaps most original chapter focuses on Zora Neale Hurston’s expropriation of the tale of Exodus in Moses, Man of the Mountain (1939), which replaces the ancient Hebrews with a black cast. Reading Hurston’s novel as an allegory for interracial coalitions during the early civil rights movement, Harrison-Kahan affirms black-Jewish relations as a dynamic exchange rather than as a singular movement of appropriation and assimilation. Although Hurston adopts minstrel conventions in Moses, Man of the Mountain, these tactics invert cross-racial identifications. Demonstrating a kind of “minstrelsy in reverse,” Hurston’s novel critiques reciprocal cultural appropriations between Jewish and African American artists (p. 176).

With its incisive readings, The White Negress demonstrates the kind of work necessary to finally dispense with the tired binaries that too often define American race relations. It marks an important evolution in critical whiteness studies through its investigation of the instabilities that adhere to racial constructions. As Harrison-Kahan affirms, whiteness is not simply concerned with dominance but may also be a key site of resistance and artistic play.