Ham Acting: A Circum-Atlantic Genealogy

This essay explores the circum-Atlantic genealogy of ham, an aesthetic category that developed in Britain and America in the mid-nineteenth century as a response to the complex racial politics of blackface minstrelsy. Often used to point out the awkwardness or outdatedness of performers (as with the phrase "ham actors"), the essay argues that ham actually expresses the ambivalent experience of white spectators in a theatre industry where both performers' labor and professional status are racialized. As an aesthetic category, ham provides a lens through which to explore how professional identity has become connected to unstable constructions of whiteness, producing assumptions about "white professional" identity. From the knowingly ham performances of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers to a minstrel dialect recitation about nineteenth-century ham banjo players, the essay examines moments in which concerns over race, labor, and aesthetics converge.