Performing Jim Crow: Blackface Performance and Emancipation

Authors

  • Thomas L. King School of Theatre and Dance. James Madison University (USA)

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.5944/rdh.23.2014.14953

Keywords:

Blackface, Gilpin, Octoroon, Robeson, Minstrel

Abstract

Abstract: A nineteenth-century American actor named Thomas Rice was sensationally popular as a blackface character named Jim Crow. His popularity is credited with giving birth to blackface minstrelsy as others began to imitate him in the hope of emulating his success. Rices Jim Crow provided a name for laws and customs designed to repudiate the emancipation of African slaves. Blackface minstrelsy staged an idealized version of slave life on a southern plantation. Paradoxically, as blackface revoked the emancipation of slaves on stage, it emancipated the American theatre from its British origins and its audience of recently immigrated laborers from a low social position. It even occasionally performed an ironic reversal of the subaltern status of the very African slaves whose freedom by proclamation and constitutional amendment the performance sought to negate. Contradictions in the history of blackface performance in the United States stage American anxieties about race, class, emancipation, and the very construction of the concepts of blackness and whiteness.

 

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Author Biography

Thomas L. King, School of Theatre and Dance. James Madison University (USA)

Thomas L. King is Emeritus Professor of Theatre at James Madison University in the United States. He holds a PhD in theatre from Indiana University. He taught theatre at Sweet Briar College for five years and at James Madison University for thirty years. He was Senior Fulbright Lecturer at Hacettepe University in Ankara, Turkey for the academic year 1996-97. He is interested in choruses that dance in Greek drama and has directed his translations of the Bacchae and the Medea with dancing choruses. Since he retired from teaching he continues to direct and design in community theatre and is pursuing research in how theatre and performance assert and define identity. His paper “Between Piety and Sacrilege: Muslim Theatre and Performance” will be published in Theatre Symposium, 2013, ed. Edward Bert Wallace. He has also published “Talk and Dramatic Action in American Buffalo,” Modern Drama, December, 1991 and “Irony and Distance in The Glass Menagerie,” Twentieth Century Interpretations of The Glass Menagerie, ed. R. B. Parker, Yale, 1983 which was first published as “Irony and Distance in The Glass Menagerie,” Educational Theatre Journal, spring 1973.

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How to Cite

King, T. L. (2015). Performing Jim Crow: Blackface Performance and Emancipation. Revista de Humanidades, (23), 75–93. https://doi.org/10.5944/rdh.23.2014.14953

Issue

No. 23 (2014): Emancipation: Freeing the self in literature, arts, religion and sport

Section

Monograficos

License

The work was published in Revista de Humanidades licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License. The authors know and agree that the distribution of the work is done by the use of such license. You can copy, use, distribute, transmit and publicly display, provided that the original authorship and source publication (magazine, editorial and URL of the work) is acknowledged, no use for commercial purposes and the existence and specifications of this license is mentioned. For any other use not specified in the license of authors consent should be required.