Whiting Up: Whiteface Minstrels and Stage Europeans in African American Performance by Marvin McAllister (review)

In this studiously researched book, Marvin McAllister selects case studies of actors, performers, and playwrights who have used whiteface mask throughout American theatrical history. The tradition of “blacking up”—wearing theatrical blackface makeup in order to mock or imitate black culture—has a long history. Over the past-quarter century, research has caught up with the performance of “blacking up.” Whiting up, however, is a relatively new field of scholarship. McAllister does a superb job of analyzing this art form. He uncovers numerous examples of imitation, parody, and style, and ultimately illustrates multiple manifestations of whiting up.

McAllister contends that whiting up can be classified under four rubrics: satirizing whiteness for the purpose of exposing racism; imitating whiteness in order to form personal, professional, and political associations with mainstream art and culture; illuminating systemic white terror against African Americans; and, for McAllister the most compelling performance, the creation of an associative and dissociative relationship to white culture in order to both identify with the mainstream and, simultaneously, contest it as an outsider. This last agenda originates in the social function of cakewalking, a dance in which slaves both imitated and parodied their white masters.

For McAllister, early African American whiteface spectacles and performances were less about ridiculing whiteness and more about “showcasing black style, forging communal identity, asserting representational freedom, and training American Negroes for emancipation” (20). Early whiteface performances epitomized blacks unwilling to endure as subalterns and finding innovative ways to challenge the status quo. Chapter two focuses on the actor James Hewlett, whose performances in the early nineteenth-century African Grove Theatre equaled those of the best European and American stage actors of his time. Hewlett’s skills in portraying multiethnic, multiclass and cross-gender white (or assumedly white) characters undermined any stereotyping of black behavior, thereby proving that black actors could indeed excel in the same roles as their white counterparts by creating multidimensional performances.

Chapter three examines one of the most underrated actors in history, Robert “Bob” Cole. His late nineteenth-century performance in the whiteface role of Willie Wayside in his musical, A Trip to Coontown, was a benchmark of comic characterization and what McAllister calls his “low-down” style. According to McAllister, “Cole’s true revolution was in creating a whiteface character who could read as simultaneously black and white, thus potentially altering how we interpret the relationships between race and class onstage” (98). Though McAllister doesn’t discuss it in this book, Cole also influenced early twentieth-century “hobo” performers such as Charlie Chaplin and Emmett Kelly (an astute insight that McAllister raised in a conference paper I was fortunate to attend). Chapter four examines two mid-twentieth-century actors, Evelyn Preer in Oscar Wilde’s Salomé, and Canada Lee in John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi. McAllister pays particular attention to the photos of these actors in their whiteface performances.

Chapters five and six turn to dramatic literature and performing artists, respectively, during the mid- to-late twentieth century. Building on Jean Genet’s play The Blacks, McAllister contends that the dramatists Adrienne Kennedy, Douglas Turner Ward, and Amiri Baraka worked through Brechtian estrangement to extend or contest Genet’s assertions of race and decolonization in the African diaspora. The final chapter examines one-person whiteface performances of Whoopi Goldberg, Anna Deavere Smith, Sammy Davis, Jr., Richard Pryor, and Dave Chappelle, as they imitate whiteness for social and comic effect.

Unfortunately, this book arrived shortly after the discovery of Bob Cole’s A Trip to Coontown. The text of this musical would have enhanced the author’s arguments. There is also no evidence that Cole married his acting-dance partner Stella Wiley; McAllister claims she was his wife (94), but offers no proof. McAllister is also unsympathetic to Sammy Davis, Jr., claiming that the “core problem” of his imitations of Sinatra, Cagney, or other white singers and actors “was the absence of a real or...