As the Crow Flies: The Intermediality of Moran and Mack

How are the celebrity body, the voice, and race related to each other? This essay examines the career of the popular early twentieth-century American blackface minstrels Moran and Mack. It charts their rise across a range of media platforms and (for one of them) through more than one body, discussing how the figure of the minstrel reveals through its fungibility the raced nature of celebrity and the longstanding historical relationship between racial formations and performing commodities.