Passing for Colored: Meanings for Minstrelsy and Ragtime

Again and again, James Weldon Johnson returned to the fascination of black cultural expressiveness for whites. In Black Manhattan (1930), he asserted the black origins of minstrelsy, America’s only original contribution to theatrical genres. In his Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912), he had played off his protagonist’s attempt to pass for white against white sightseers, slummers, and performers seeking material for their blackface turns. In Ike Hines’s Professional Club, they heard a music that “demanded physical response, patting of the feet, drumming of the fingers, or nodding of the head” — this was ragtime, “growing to be a rage, which has not subsided” (p. 72). Toward the end of his life, in Along This Way (1933), Johnson looked back on the whites who tried desperately to dance their way back through jazz to “the original Garden of Eden; in a word, doing their best to pass for colored” (p. 328).

This is a later version of the Love that Lott finds in the antebellum minstrel show. The Theft is the commodification and exploitation of blackness by whites. Together they made minstrelsy the first truly national form of entertainment in the United States, dominating popular taste until the end of the century. Ragtime, which became almost synonymous with American popular music from the mid-1890s to about 1920, showed the same counterpoint. The love was signified, perhaps, in Joe Lamb’s endorsement by Joplin (“a good rag — a regular Negro rag,” Curtis, p. 150), and the theft by the charge that Alexander’s Ragtime Band was stolen from Joplin by Irving Berlin (Berlin, pp. 210–12). Although Berlin disposes of this allegation against his namesake, his earlier work (Ragtime: A Musical and Cultural History, 1980) did demonstrate that ragtime whitened in the early 1900s. It was “incorporated,” as Curtis now develops the argument, into an entertainment industry dominated by white agencies and sensibilities (p. 102).

Curtis is an intellectual historian interested in the cultural bases of social power. She chose to examine the challenges posed by marginal groups to middle-class white male hegemony through Scott Joplin because she is a ragtime enthusiast. Although influenced by cultural studies and “the linguistic turn” she has not allowed either to colonize her language or analysis (her “conversation” is a welcome change from those repetitive “discourses”). Berlin is a musicologist whose view of cultural context and history remains innocently empirical, but over the years he has done more than any other individual to recover the lost world of ragtime. Lott’s ambitions, though, are on a different plane. Not only does he make the striking claim that minstrelsy “brought to public form racialized elements of thought and feeling, tone and impulse, residing at the very edge of semantic availability” (p. 6), but he seeks to set new standards for American Studies as a cultural studies interdiscipline. They’re all here — Adorno, Althusser, Anderson, Attali... Bakhtin, Barthes, Bhaba, Bourdieu — the whole deconstructed postmodernist alphabet, though the reliance on fre/audian theory seems rather questionable these days. ¹ But Lott also knows his social, musical, and theatrical history. Throughout, he insists on the instability of minstrelsy and its resistance to selective meaning; and he emphasizes the cultural choices that went into the definitions (and, inevitably, “trangressions”) of race, class and gender that it embodied. If, finally, we know little more about the content of antebellum minstrelsy itself than we did from Robert Toll’s Blacking Up (1974), we certainly get an enhanced sense of how contemporaries might have experienced it.

In Lott’s account, various earlier cultural forms...