Limit search to available items
Book Cover
E-book
Author Thelwell, Chinua, author

Title Exporting Jim Crow : Blackface minstrelsy in South Africa and beyond / Chinua Thelwell
Published Amherst : University of Massachusetts Press, [2020]

Copies

Description 1 online resource (xii, 283 pages) : illustrations
Contents Introduction. Burnt Cork Nationalism and the Five Waves of Minstrel Globalization -- Foundations: Blackface Minstrelsy in the United States and Across the British Empire, 1830-1862 -- An Empire of Burnt Cork: Blackface Minstrelsy in Pre-Industrial South Africa, 1862-1872 -- Diamonds, Dandies, and Dispossession: Minstrel Shows During the South African Mineral Revolution, 1872-1889 -- "Slipping the Yoke": McAdoo's Jubilee Singers, McAdoo's Minstrels, and Racial Uplift Politics, 1890-1898 -- Brown-on-Black Masquerade: Cape Town's Coon Carnival -- Afterword. Global Blackface: Toward Transnational Minstrelsy Studies
Summary "Following the pathways of imperial commerce, blackface minstrel troupes began to cross the globe in the mid-nineteenth century, popularizing American racial ideologies as they traveled from Britain to its colonies in the Pacific, Asia, and Oceania, finally landing in South Africa during the 1860s and 1870s. The first popular culture export of the United States, minstrel shows frequently portrayed black characters as noncitizens who were unfit for democratic participation and contributed to the construction of a global color line. Chinua Thelwell brings blackface minstrelsy and performance culture into the discussion of apartheid's nineteenth-century origins and afterlife, employing a broad archive of South African newspapers and magazines, memoirs, minstrel songs and sketches, diaries, and interview transcripts. Exporting Jim Crow highlights blackface minstrelsy's cultural and social impact as it became a dominant form of entertainment, moving from its initial appearances on music hall stages to its troubling twentieth-century resurgence on movie screens and at public events. This carefully researched and highly original study demonstrates that the performance of race in South Africa was inherently political, contributing to racism and shoring up white racial identity"-- Provided by publisher
Notes Based on the author's thesis (doctoral)--New York University, 2011
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references and index
Notes Print version record
Subject Minstrel shows -- South Africa
Blackface entertainers -- South Africa
White people -- Race identity -- South Africa
Black people -- Race identity -- South Africa
SOCIAL SCIENCE -- General.
Blackface entertainers
Black people -- Race identity
Manners and customs
Minstrel shows
Race relations
White people -- Race identity
SUBJECT South Africa -- Race relations. http://id.loc.gov/authorities/subjects/sh85125494
South Africa -- Social life and customs
Subject South Africa
Form Electronic book
ISBN 9781613767665
1613767668