Blackface

Black Face






Huck Finn: Black Face Minstrelsy started in 1843 in new York City; was a caricature of the Southern slaves, was considered the best sort of show . White people put on blakckfaces and imitated colored people. During Mark Twain's time, the show was accurate. Since Civil Rights time, it became fake. In Huckelberry Finn it's hard to tell whether the source of the minstrelsy is prejudiced or simply original.




John Berryman/ Maber, Peter “So-called black”: Reassessing John Berryman’s Blackface Minstrelsy” : Dreamsongs had main character Henry play blackface; for the innovative intellectual he was, this disoriented more than completely offended the audience. Some justified his using dialect as a way to be authentic . "filter of white performance". Authenticity is questionable.

Berryman felt old before his time; alcohol influence seeped into his writing. In Dreamsongs, Berryman purposefully created a disjointed illusory scene, shifting characters, making fractured dialogue in order to keep the reader guessing what's happening, who's talking to whom etc. : Huffy Henry; Big Buttons Cornet the Advance minstrelsy dialogue is used; A Stimulant for an Old Beast slightly erotic undertones, Henry reappears again and speaks with 'blackface' dialect ; A Capital at Wells; The Prisoner of Shark Island with Paul Muni - Henry is getting old and some kind of totrture is done to him depriving him of teeth, crotch, dreams - his mother comes and goes- flashback to a young love he had Charlotte Coquet; Sabbath, a creepy allusion to death and hell Henry comes back again - he lived like a rat but was not a coward. Henry seems to bore a certain mr. Bones who gets bored with people like him who experience aches, pains. Mr. Bones is bored with life, great literature, people.

The poems talk about freedom and slavery; either as the minstrelsy who is impersonating a black man; or racial oppression, racial relations.

"Browning up" was an expression that meant groveling.

Bert Williams

PBS documentary: Minstrelsy was catapulted in 1830 by Thomas Dartmouth Rice, who was called "Daddy" Rice. During an entracte of a play he did this impromptu dance to Jim Crow wearing shabby attire from an African American he met previously. During that time the issue of slavery and rise of abolition was coming to a head. Minstrelsy: "It presented the black character as being stupid, as being comical, as being basically a frivolous character. Now, how that impacted upon society itself was that they embraced it. They loved it. This was what people had thought about blacks all along. So Rice's characterization of blacks then reaffirmed what mainstream America had been thinking all along." The audience was allowed to be rowdy: "The audience for minstrelsy, especially after the 1830s and into the 1840s was a quite localized and specific working class, lower middle-class, mostly male audience that responded very vocally to the kinds of syncopated, pre-rock-and-roll sounds that were put forward on the minstrel stage. " Minstrelsy meant many things to different people: it was at the same time a caricature, a way of addressing problems through humor, a way for white people to 'inhabit' blacks, a way to be free and uninhibted. Some of the minstrelsy distorted the true view of plantation life (ex: Uncle Tom's cabin) . Minstrelsy allowed black people to be on stage afterwards.  Minstrelsy seeped into rock and roll (ex: Mick Jagger and Elvis); some of the words were emphasized the way blacks would say them and dance moves were atypical of white people. Which is why Elvis would make people uncomfortable from being in the middle class and doing "nigger music." Minstrelsy helped to bring political issues about black to the forefront in the stage and even through films like Bullworth. Controversy about Stephen Foster and his songs; are racist yet they can be put in a historical perspective...