Single Review on past events

We invited you to our hybrid Jour fixe on Tuesday, 10 May.

Eric Lott (Senior Fellow / English and American Studies, City University New York Graduate Center, USA) spoke about "Blackface from Time to Time".

Abstract:

Ethnic drag in the form of white performers in blackface seems to exist in some kind of eternal present: instances of its performance go back centuries, come into commercial popularity in the U.S. in the 1820s and '30s, dominate popular entertainment on stage in the form of the "minstrel show" all across the 19th century, then migrate to Hollywood film for much of the 20th century.  And it was a global phenomenon, extending from Great Britain to South Africa, Japan to Australia.  The official censuring of blackface in the 1960s has coincided with its "vernacular" reappearance in Halloween costumes and fraternity parties and college yearbooks to this day, where from time to time blackface makes its inevitable return.  Recent cases of white activists and scholars passing for Other (Rachel Doležal, Jessica Krug, Andrea Smith) only thicken the plot.  I will talk about the time-to-time temporality of blackface's ongoing present and why American culture seems to require the racial, sexual, and gendered interventions of its eternal returns.  

Links and literature:

https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/ralph-northam-and-the-history-of-blackface

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/07/arts/blackface-american-pop-culture.html