Love and Theft at 20

In her 1994 Village Voice review of Eric Lott’s Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class, the great feminist and cultural historian Alice Echols pronounced the “dazzling” book “a model for how to study popular culture.” Echols specified as exemplary its command of gender and sexuality, as well as so much more. Even as its ambitious agenda made a topic overwhelmingly seen as being about race also speak to class formation, there was room for analysis of crossdressing and desire. I would add that the decision to offer finely grained analysis of one metropolis and the extraordinary attention to change over time—detailing three distinct periods in the space of thirty years of the history of blackface—also mark the study as a model of urban history. Its use of literary sources, especially those of Herman Melville, Mark Twain, and Harriet Beecher Stowe is certain. In speaking to music, for example, in marvelous passages on “two-tone” minstrel songs, Lott calls on knowledge drawn from past and present, from musicology and from critical theory. Two decades after its appearance, Oxford University Press’s new edition of Lott’s now-classic study, with a foreword by Greil Marcus and a new afterword by the author, offers an opportunity to place Lott’s book in its moment and to show why it speaks to ours in method and content, to endorse and elaborate on Echols’s judgment of the exemplary nature of the study, and to wonder, in a decidedly more minor chord, whether twenty years have given us grounds to ask and to learn more about blackface.¹

PLACING LOVE AND THEFT

Full disclosure perhaps provides a point of departure for locating Lott’s work in its period. As he was finishing Love and Theft, my Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (1991) appeared. Its slight chapter on minstrelsy leaned heavily on Alexander Saxton’s excellent earlier work, a version of which appeared in his monumental The Rise and Fall of the White Republic (1990). Indeed, after very little being written at book length—Baldwin’s heavyweight The Price of the Ticket (1985) was not widely recognized as such—an incredible outpouring of work on whiteness appeared in the first five years of the 1990s (Roediger 2007; Saxton; Baldwin). Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark was the apogee of such scholarship, which also included important contributions from Vron Ware, George Lipsitz, Cheryl Harris, Noel Ignatiev, Theodore Allen, and others. I have written at length elsewhere about the genesis of this scholarship and its debts to Baldwin and W. E. B. Du Bois, emphasizing also its roots in the Reagan / first Bush 1980s and early 90s. During that time, white working-class willingness to provide the votes necessary to empower reaction, and the inability of feminism to meaningfully include women of color, loudly called for explanation, making the critical study of whiteness possible and necessary (Morrison; Harris; Allen 1994; 1997; Ignatiev; Lipsitz; Ware).²

My reaction to the other books, and particularly to Lott’s projected book, reflected a fear that Wages of Whiteness would be out there by itself, seen as idiosyncratically combining lots of Marxism and (what was more controversial in social history) a little psychoanalysis. To be part of a spate of similarly inclined new books was remarkably calming, and even now I see them as sharing more than they divided over. To find in Lott’s emerging work a sophisticated study of the working class that fully incorporated psychoanalytic categories was especially cheering. If its success in theorizing gender made my chapter on minstrelsy seem poorer, the contribution was nevertheless a welcome one. I sent Lott page proofs before Wages of Whiteness appeared and references to it found their way into Love and Theft. The other work critically studying whiteness mostly appeared too late to figure in Lott’s analysis. The twinned “American Working Class” in both his subtitle and mine also struck me initially as wonderful...