Burnt Cork: Traditions and Legacies of Blackface Minstrelsy ed. by Stephen Johnson (review)

In his introduction, editor Stephen Johnson argues that blackface has never completely disappeared from the American imaginary, and the eight essays that comprise this volume aim to explore “contemporary manipulations and negotiations [of] race” through the legacies of the mask (15). With essays by some of the most renowned scholars working in the field, several of them continuing work begun elsewhere, Burnt Cork articulates various “critical-historical context[s]” of blackface through a diverse range of methodologies and case studies. This approach rightly mirrors the “complexity of intention and reception in blackface performance,” a complexity that “builds up in layers over time, adding radical meaning to the accepted imagery without entirely erasing the old . . . accumulating ways of reading blackface” (3). Each contributor explores these accumulations of meaning from a distinct discipline, such as the labor practices of the burgeoning animation industry during the 1930s and the study of blackface beyond US borders. As a result, the volume exemplifies the rich possibilities of considering the legacies of blackface beyond the minstrel stage, making it a valuable addition to the field of blackface studies.

The essays are arranged in chronological order, beginning with the early days of blackface performances of T. D. Rice in the 1830s and concluding with “ghetto parties” on US college campuses in 2010. This arrangement allows the essays not only to build on the layers of prior scholarship on blackface minstrelsy, but also on one another. Each stands on its own, to be sure, but some contributors directly reference other essays in the book, creating a network of ideas across disciplines, enriching the collection as a whole.

In the first essay, W. T. Lhamon Jr. continues his work of recontextualizing the Jim Crow figure, starting with the popularity of Jim Crow cookies in 1838 and ending with Barack Obama’s inauguration as president in 2008. He argues that every iteration of Jim Crow, from ginger cookies to minstrel performances, mark the “urge of white people . . . to take in, digest, black gestural charisma” (19). Lhamon suggests that this figure has made blackness popular, consumable, and enchanting enough to inspire both black and white Americans to identify with blackness and even to elect its first black president.

Next, musicologist Dale Cockrell considers the ways in which blackface functions in music “as a transgressive mask enabling comment, criticism, or advocacy of social and political change,” and argues that songs like “Jim Crow” and “Zip Coon” effectively “comment on social conditions” (62). Editor Johnson’s contribution is a micro-historical study of the deaths of minstrels Gilbert Pell, dancer William Lane (“Juba”), and Thomas Briggs. By exploring the details of these men’s deaths and the responses to them, Johnson fruitfully interprets information that otherwise might not seem useful to historians of minstrelsy. Then, Louis Chude-Sokei considers the connection between minstrels and machines, beginning with the birth of American popular culture in 1835 with Barnum’s “exhibition” of Joice Heth, the woman advertised as George Washington’s mammy (and suspected of being an automaton), and concluding in 1923 when the term robot was coined in Karel Čapek’s science-fiction play R.U.R. Chude-Sokei’s argument that Southern plantations were systems of mass production anticipating Fordism, which positions race as the dialectical other of machines and allows both to “blend and pass for each other” (112), fascinatingly introduces current post-humanist discussions of the material and inanimate in performance to the study of racialized performance.

The three chapters that cover blackface in film and television reveal the ways that it has been carried into contemporary US popular culture, often in surprising ways. Linda Williams’s essay on D. W. Griffiths’s “very worst film,” One Exciting Night, from 1922 (133) and Nicholas Sammond’s consideration of the minstrelized Mickey Mouse “as the embodiment of the animator’s alienated labor” (182) cover the period between the two world wars. The most compelling contribution, and perhaps the most unsettling, is Alice Maurice...