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Lessons in Blackbody Minstrelsy: Old Plantation and the Manufacture of Black Authenticity
- TDR: The Drama Review
- The MIT Press
- Volume 57, Number 2, Summer 2013 (T218)
- pp. 102-122
- Article
- Additional Information
In 1901, a white theatre director reportedly established an exclusive school to teach 150 African Americans from the South how to perform themselves. His curriculum: the original blackface minstrel act. The report of this school illuminates how minstrelsy not only defined "blackness" but also made it a teachable concept by white Americans.