“Blackface Geographies” — A TDR Special Issue coedited by Kellen Hoxworth and Douglas A. Jones

We invite submissions to an issue of TDR that explores circulations of blackface, minstrelsy, and their legacies through theatre, dance, music, popular culture, and festival performance across transnational and transhemispheric itineraries. This issue aims to redress US-centric biases in the study of blackface and minstrelsy by considering what other critical narratives and aesthetic genealogies might emerge by departing from the “nation” as the implicit frame for blackface scholarship. It also seeks to engage with recent scholarship on “Black Geographies” to consider the role of racialized performance in animating both dominant geographic mappings of the world and resistant praxes of Black place-making (McKittrick & Woods 2007; Hawthorne & Lewis 2023). Here, we are interested in both how performance offers new ways of thinking through “Black Geographies” insofar as it involves both material practice by actual people and figural economies that mediate “imaginative geographies” or race and place (Said 1994).

As a field of study, blackface scholarship has long suffered from a nationalistic bias that insists upon the nation—and of the United States, in particular—as the default frame for analyzing blackface, minstrelsy, and related forms of racialized performance (see Toll 1974; Lott 1993; Bean, Hatch, and McNamara, 1996; Cockrell 1997; Mahar 1999). Over the past two decades, several studies have begun to challenge these nationalistic assumptions, offering new frameworks for apprehending the traffics of blackface from the nineteenth century through the present (see Lhamon 1998; Lhamon 2003; Nyong’o 2009; Johnson 2012; Cole and Davis 2013). From the Black/circum-Atlantic to analyses of blackface in non-US American national contexts, the centrality of the United States in blackface scholarship has started to shift. Blackface, these studies show, may not necessarily be bound to—nor bounded by—national formations of politics, race, and/or historical narratives.

Yet the “nation” has also proven sticky, underwriting many analyses of the performance form’s racial significances and functions, even in contexts where the “nation” is an anachronism. For instance, several critical works informed by postcolonial studies have contested the US-centric assumptions of blackface studies but have nevertheless focused on different individual nations as the default frames for analyzing the performance form and its politics (see Cole 2001; Lane 2005; Pickering 2008; Thelwell 2020). We argue that much of this bias derives from two very material issues: the production of blackface performance histories along lines of national and area studies; and, the preponderance of US American archival material in blackface scholarship.

To redress these issues, we and our contributors ask several interrelated questions. What other historical narratives and critical trajectories may be possible by departing from the “nation” as the implicit frame for blackface scholarship? What other geographies of performance emerge from sustained attention to other archives and repertoires of blackface? How might we analyze blackface locally and globally—as a performance form that has circulated in performance economies both intranational and transnational? What other political and discursive frameworks are necessary to interpret and narrate blackface performance otherwise to trace “new geographic stories” (McKittrick 2006)?

We invite essays of no more than 8-9000 words each, inclusive of notes and bibliography. Prepare your manuscript according to TDR’s Writers’ Guidelines. Materials should be submitted to TDR by 31 May 2024 via Scholar One https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/tdr-journal.

 

For inquiries, contact hoxworth@buffalo.edu.

 

References

Bean, Annemarie, James V. Hatch, and Books McNamara, eds. 1996. Inside the Minstrel Mask: Readings in Ninteenth-Century Blackface Minstrelsy. Wesleyan University Press.

Cockrell, Dale. 1997. Demons of Disorder: Early Blackface Minstrels and Their World. Cambridge University Press.

Cole, Catherine M. 2001. Ghana’s Concert Party Theatre. Indiana University Press.

Cole, Catherine M., and Tracy C. Davis, eds. 2013. “Routes of Blackface.” TDR 57, 2. Special Issue

Hawthorne, Camilla, and Jovan Scott Lewis, eds. 2023. The Black Geographic: Praxis, Resistance, Futurity. Duke University Press.

Johnson, Stephen, ed. 2012. Burnt Cork: Traditions and Legacies of Blackface Minstrelsy. University of Massachusetts Press.

Lane, Jill. 2005. Blackface Cuba, 1840-1895. University of Pennsylvania Press.

Lhamon Jr., W.T. 1998. Raising Cain: Blackface Performance from Jim Crow to Hip Hop. Harvard University Press.

Lhamon Jr., W.T. 2003. Jump Jim Crow: Lost Plays, Lyrics, and Street Prose of the First Atlantic Popular Culture. Harvard University Press.

Lott, Eric. 1993. Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class. Oxford University Press.

Mahar, William J. 1999. Behind the Burnt Cork Mask: Early Blackface Minstrelsy and Antebellum American Popular Culture. University of Illinois Press.

McKittrick, Katherine. 2006. Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle. University of Minnesota Press.

McKittrick, Katherine, and Clyde Woods, eds. 2007. Black Geographies and the Politics of Place. Between the Lines.

Nyong’o, Tavia. 2009. The Amalgamation Waltz: Race, Performance, and the Ruses of Memory. University of Minnesota Press.

Pickering, Michael. 2008. Blackface Minstrelsy in Britain.: Ashgate.

Said, Edward W. 1994.Orientalism, 25###sup/sup### Anniversary Edition. Vintage Books.

Thelwell, Chinua. 2020. Exporting Jim Crow: Blackface Minstrelsy in South Africa and Beyond. University of Massachusetts Press.

Toll, Robert C. 1974. Blacking Up: The Minstrel Show in Nineteenth Century America. Oxford University Press.