Eric Lott
Biographic Data
| ID | 681687 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Eric Lott |
| GIVEN NAMES | Eric |
| FAMILY NAME | Lott |
| SIGNATURE | LOTT E |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Virginia |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 46 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 114 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 46 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1982 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Advancing Health Equity Through Substance Use Medical Record Data Sharing: Insights from Healthcare Providers
This study sets the stage for understanding and addressing sensitive healthcare data access and privacy concerns through improved care coordination, systems interoperability, education, and policy reform
Balancing Privacy, Trust, and Equity: Patient Perspectives on Substance Use Disorder Data Sharing
These findings underscore the ethical imperative to address stigma and foster trust to promote equitable SUD data sharing. Policies must empower patients with control over sensitive health information while ensuring cultural competence and fairness in care delivery. Ensuring that patients feel confident in how their data are used may encourage greater participation in health information exchange, ultimately supporting more effective and individua…
The Origin of OthersGoodness and the Literary Imagination: Toni Morrison
Book Review| April 28 2023 The Origin of OthersGoodness and the Literary Imagination: Toni Morrison The Origin of Others. By Toni Morrison. Foreword by Ta-Nehisi Coates. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press. 2017. xvii, 114 pp. Cloth, $22.95.Goodness and the Literary Imagination: Toni Morrison. Ed. Davíd Carrasco, Stephanie Paulsell, and Mara Willard. Charlottesville: Univ. of Virginia Press. 2019. viii, 262 pp. Cloth, $27.95. Eric Lott Eric Lott E…
Jazz and Cocktails: Rethinking Race and the Sound of Film Noir by Jans B. Wager
Reviewed by: Jazz and Cocktails: Rethinking Race and the Sound of Film Noir by Jans B. Wager Eric Lott Jans B. Wager. Jazz and Cocktails: Rethinking Race and the Sound of Film Noir. Austin: U of Texas P, 2017. 163 pp. $24.95. Jans Wager works at the intersection of film soundtrack studies and racial analyses of cinema to offer an account of the way film noir deploys jazz to further its often racially fraught designs. In nine chapters that range m…
Black Mirror: The Cultural Contradictions of American Racism
Blackness is a prized commodity in American pop culture. Marketed to white consumers, it invites whites to view themselves in a mirror of racial difference, while remaining "wholly" white. From sports to literature, film, and music to investigative journalism, Eric Lott reveals the hidden dynamics of this self-and-other racial mirroring
Katrina Dyonne Thompson. Ring Shout, Wheel About: The Racial Politics of Music and Dance in North American Slavery
Journal Article Katrina Dyonne Thompson. Ring Shout, Wheel About: The Racial Politics of Music and Dance in North American Slavery. Get access Katrina Dyonne Thompson. Ring Shout, Wheel About: The Racial Politics of Music and Dance in North American Slavery. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2014. Pp. x, 242. Cloth $85.00, paper $28.00. Eric Lott Eric Lott Graduate Center, City University of New York [email protected] Search for o…
Songs Are Like Tattoos: A Response
Songs Are Like Tattoos:A Response Eric Lott (bio) “Songs are like tattoos,” sings Joni Mitchell in “Blue” (1971), opening with a figure she’ll work much harder before the song is through. She’s written a song for Blue, and this is it. “There is a song for you / Ink on a pin / Underneath the skin / An empty space to fill in.” More than other songs-about-this-song of its moment (Leon Russell’s “A Song for You,” say, or Elton John’s “Your Song,” or …
Back Door Man: Howlin' Wolf and the Sound of Jim Crow
In June 1960, after nine years of recording and over two decades of touring and performing, Howlin' Wolf and some trusty sidemen entered Chess Studios in Chicago to cut three sides: "Wang Dang Doodle," "Spoonful," and "Back Door Man." There was nothing especially historic about the session. In June of 1960, Howlin' Wolf was fifty years old and an established act. Yet everything about the session's results, and particularly the song "Back Door Man…
Semi-mojo, or Shaft in Scarsdale: Michael Rogin and Comparative American Studies
Michael Rogin's Blackface, White Noise (1996) brought the institutional racial unconscious of the entertainment industry into the light. Ten years on, and six years after the author's death, this essay celebrates its publication by looking at some of the ways the book helps illuminate cultural artefacts and productions from Joe Klein's roman à clef Primary Colors (1996) to the music of Steely Dan. Rogin's book is a reminder of the thorny social a…
Chants Demagogic
Eric Lott responds to the essay by this issue's guest editors (Sean McCann and Michael Szalay), "Do You Believe in Magic? Literary Thinking after the New Left
The First Boomer: Bill Clinton, George W., and Fictions of State
This essay discusses the way our images of the presidency dictate our relationship with governmental structures of all kinds-also known as the state. I consider how two recent presidents' generational status as baby boomers defines them in particular ways. For Clinton, his "blackness" generated his evasive aura of post-1960s hipness; for Bush, his status as "rightful heir," center of a long-awaited "Restoration" of pre-1960s values, now legitimiz…
Raising Cain: Blackface Performance from Jim Crow to Hip Hop
Book Review| March 01 2002 Raising Cain: Blackface Performance from Jim Crow to Hip Hop By W. T. Lhamon Jr. Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press. 1998. x, 269 pp.$24.95. Eric Lott Eric Lott Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google American Literature (2002) 74 (1): 146–147. https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-74-1-146 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Permissions Search Site Citation Eric Lott; Raising Cain:…
After Identity, Politics: The Return of Universalism
New Literary History - Volume 31, Number 4, Autumn 2000
Darktown Strutters
Wage and Resistance
Left History features articles from a variety of theoretical approaches; these include feminist, marxist, and postmodernist deliberations on topics such as race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality, culture, the state, labour, the environment, theory, and method
Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working-Class
Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class
The Blackening of America: Popular Culture and National Cultures
Jim Crow and Zip Coon seemed unlikely candidates for a national cultural form. and yet, as the Democratic Review admitted in 1845, the idea had a certain plausibility. “The lowest description of American farce,” to be sure, “still in its elements, not without originality, considerable invention, and a rich vein of burlesque humor, is the !Ethiopian drama” (“American” 219). (Perhaps an orthographical adjustment would take care of everything.) In w…
Uncle Tomitudes: Racial Melodrama and Modes of Production
In January 1854 T. D. Rice took the Bowery Theatre stage as Tom in one of the numberless dramatic productions of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Rice’s path from celebrated Jim Crow in the early 1830s to sympathetic Uncle Tom twenty years later highlights the improbable political geometry ofblackface minstrelsy. Surely Rice’s Bowery appearance in a more or less antislavery play registered a series of changes: changes in the theater’s s…
California Gold and European Revolution: Stephen Foster and the American 1848
An extraordinary confluence of forces destroyed the minstrel show’s hermetic self-satisfaction. The hedging politics of reform were overshadowed in the late 1840s by the slavery issue, and class-consciousness played an unpredicted role in its return. The manner in which social change was registered and produced in public discourse was itself changing, saturated by a consolidating “sentimental” ethos not unrelated to women’s rights agitation for f…
“Genuine Negro Fun”: Racial Pleasure and Class Formation in the 1840s
Sometime in the winter of1842-43 four irregularly employed circus and minstrel men, in one of the numberless small hotels that lined the Bowery, hit upon the idea of a blackface minstrel band. The band would soon be called the Virginia Minstrels, and it was the first troupe of its kind to form in New York City. Although the story is variously told, all accounts agree that this happy occurrence came about quite by accident. Sitting in the North Am…
Love and Theft: “Racial” Production and the Social Unconscious of Blackface
Motives of race, status, economics and guilt are always clustered here.
“The Seeming Counterfeit’’: Ear Blackface Acts, the Body, and Social Contradiction
In January 1831 William Lloyd Garrison founded the Liberator in Boston, setting in motion one of the great radical movements in American history. A little more than a year later, twenty-four-year-old T. D. Rice toured the northeastern sea-board with his celebrated “Jim Crow” act, landing in New York in November 1832. These twin instances of white racial discourse, one middle class and one working class, were dialectical partners not only in their…
Double V, Double-Time: Bebop’s Politics of Style
Blackface and Blackness: The Minstrel Show in American Culture
In the theatrical world, as in the aesthetic world more generally, ideology is always in essence the site of a competition and a struggle in which the sound and fury of humanity’s political and social struggles are faintly or sharply echoed.
Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class
For over two centuries, America has celebrated the very black culture it attempts to control and repress, and nowhere is this phenomenon more apparent than in the strange practice of blackface performance. Born of extreme racial and class conflicts, the blackface minstrel show sometimes usefully intensified them. Based on the appropriation of black dialect, music, and dance, minstrelsy at once applauded and lampooned black culture, ironically con…
Love and Theft: The Racial Unconscious of Blackface Minstrelsy
Research Article| July 01 1992 Love and Theft: The Racial Unconscious of Blackface Minstrelsy Eric Lott Eric Lott Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Representations (1992) 39: 23–50. https://doi.org/10.2307/2928593 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation…
The Seeming Counterfeit: Racial Politics and Early Blackface Minstrelsy
THE CURRENT CONSENSUS ON BLACKFACE MINSTRELSY PROBABLY IS summed up best by Frederick Douglass's righteous response in The North Star. Blackface imitators, he said, were filthy scum of white society, who have stolen from us a complexion denied to them by nature, in which to make money, and pander to the corrupt taste of their white fellow citizens -a denunciation that nicely captures minstrelsy's further commodification of an already enslaved, no…
Double V, Double-Time: Bebop's Politics of Style
After Identity, Politics: The Return of Universalism
New Literary History - Volume 31, Number 4, Autumn 2000
Back Door Man: Howlin' Wolf and the Sound of Jim Crow
In June 1960, after nine years of recording and over two decades of touring and performing, Howlin' Wolf and some trusty sidemen entered Chess Studios in Chicago to cut three sides: "Wang Dang Doodle," "Spoonful," and "Back Door Man." There was nothing especially historic about the session. In June of 1960, Howlin' Wolf was fifty years old and an established act. Yet everything about the session's results, and particularly the song "Back Door Man…
Semi-mojo, or Shaft in Scarsdale: Michael Rogin and Comparative American Studies
Michael Rogin's Blackface, White Noise (1996) brought the institutional racial unconscious of the entertainment industry into the light. Ten years on, and six years after the author's death, this essay celebrates its publication by looking at some of the ways the book helps illuminate cultural artefacts and productions from Joe Klein's roman à clef Primary Colors (1996) to the music of Steely Dan. Rogin's book is a reminder of the thorny social a…
Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class
Touching Liberty: Abolition, Feminism, and the Politics of the Body
Vedantic Approaches to God
Criticism and Social Change
Criticism and Social Change speaks with special timeliness to the role of the political intellectual (here embodied in Kenneth Burke). Lentricchia's provocative analysis demands serious reflection by American radicals. Frederic Jameson A profound meditation on relations obtaining among writing, political consciousness, and criticism this last taken in its most general sense. It is written with passion and grace; it is shot through with learning, …
Double V, Double-Time: Bebop's Politics of Style
Response to Trey Ellis's: The New Black Aesthetic
The Unusable Past: Theory and the Study of American Literature
Vision, Tradition, Interpretation: Theology, Religion, and the Study of Religion
Sinceits founding by Jacques Waardenburg in 1971, Religion and Reason has been a leading forum for contributions on theories, theoretical issues and agendas related to the phenomenon and the study of religion. Topics include (among others) category formation, comparison, ethnophilosophy, hermeneutics, methodology, myth, phenomenology, philosophy of science, scientific atheism, structuralism, and theories of religion. From time to time the series …
The Seeming Counterfeit: Racial Politics and Early Blackface Minstrelsy
THE CURRENT CONSENSUS ON BLACKFACE MINSTRELSY PROBABLY IS summed up best by Frederick Douglass's righteous response in The North Star. Blackface imitators, he said, were filthy scum of white society, who have stolen from us a complexion denied to them by nature, in which to make money, and pander to the corrupt taste of their white fellow citizens -a denunciation that nicely captures minstrelsy's further commodification of an already enslaved, no…
Love and Theft: The Racial Unconscious of Blackface Minstrelsy
Research Article| July 01 1992 Love and Theft: The Racial Unconscious of Blackface Minstrelsy Eric Lott Eric Lott Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Representations (1992) 39: 23–50. https://doi.org/10.2307/2928593 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation…
Epidemics in the Modern World
Touching Liberty: Abolition, Feminism, and the Politics of the Body
The Aesthetic Ante: Pleasure, Pop Culture, and the Middle Passage
Cornel West in the Hour of Chaos: Culture and Politics in Race Matters
Cornel West is a socialist. That he is also a black man, writing out of speEric Lott cial concern for African American lives, makes his project even more difficult than it would otherwise be in left-unfriendly North America. Anyone possessed of a passing acquaintance with Harold Cruse's history of black radicalism within the ranks of the American Communist Party, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, or with Jesse Jackson's dance with the Democra…
The Blackening of America: Popular Culture and National Cultures
Jim Crow and Zip Coon seemed unlikely candidates for a national cultural form. and yet, as the Democratic Review admitted in 1845, the idea had a certain plausibility. “The lowest description of American farce,” to be sure, “still in its elements, not without originality, considerable invention, and a rich vein of burlesque humor, is the !Ethiopian drama” (“American” 219). (Perhaps an orthographical adjustment would take care of everything.) In w…
Uncle Tomitudes: Racial Melodrama and Modes of Production
In January 1854 T. D. Rice took the Bowery Theatre stage as Tom in one of the numberless dramatic productions of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Rice’s path from celebrated Jim Crow in the early 1830s to sympathetic Uncle Tom twenty years later highlights the improbable political geometry ofblackface minstrelsy. Surely Rice’s Bowery appearance in a more or less antislavery play registered a series of changes: changes in the theater’s s…
California Gold and European Revolution: Stephen Foster and the American 1848
An extraordinary confluence of forces destroyed the minstrel show’s hermetic self-satisfaction. The hedging politics of reform were overshadowed in the late 1840s by the slavery issue, and class-consciousness played an unpredicted role in its return. The manner in which social change was registered and produced in public discourse was itself changing, saturated by a consolidating “sentimental” ethos not unrelated to women’s rights agitation for f…
“Genuine Negro Fun”: Racial Pleasure and Class Formation in the 1840s
Sometime in the winter of1842-43 four irregularly employed circus and minstrel men, in one of the numberless small hotels that lined the Bowery, hit upon the idea of a blackface minstrel band. The band would soon be called the Virginia Minstrels, and it was the first troupe of its kind to form in New York City. Although the story is variously told, all accounts agree that this happy occurrence came about quite by accident. Sitting in the North Am…
Love and Theft: “Racial” Production and the Social Unconscious of Blackface
Motives of race, status, economics and guilt are always clustered here.
“The Seeming Counterfeit’’: Ear Blackface Acts, the Body, and Social Contradiction
In January 1831 William Lloyd Garrison founded the Liberator in Boston, setting in motion one of the great radical movements in American history. A little more than a year later, twenty-four-year-old T. D. Rice toured the northeastern sea-board with his celebrated “Jim Crow” act, landing in New York in November 1832. These twin instances of white racial discourse, one middle class and one working class, were dialectical partners not only in their…
Double V, Double-Time: Bebop’s Politics of Style
Blackface and Blackness: The Minstrel Show in American Culture
In the theatrical world, as in the aesthetic world more generally, ideology is always in essence the site of a competition and a struggle in which the sound and fury of humanity’s political and social struggles are faintly or sharply echoed.
Afterword
Subject Society and Culture Race and Ethnicity Social and Cultural History Collection: Oxford Scholarship Online
White Kids and No Kids At All: Working-Class Culture and Languages of Race
As the minstrel show situated itself in the urban North, its debased cultural position, no less than its racial economy, made its representations politically volatile. Its racial meanings were inextricable from its class argument, and one must therefore attend to the shifting class formations, and minstrelsy’s shifting place within them, in the antebellum North. It was in rowdy theatrical spaces that an emergent racial politics was both registere…
Dedication
Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class
For over two centuries, America has celebrated the very black culture it attempts to control and repress, and nowhere is this phenomenon more apparent than in the strange practice of blackface performance. Born of extreme racial and class conflicts, the blackface minstrel show sometimes usefully intensified them. Based on the appropriation of black dialect, music, and dance, minstrelsy at once applauded and lampooned black culture, ironically con…
Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class
Art (34 works) · Art history (24 works) · History (22 works) · Political science (21 works) · Law (20 works) · Sociology (19 works) · Blackface (17 works) · Politics (15 works) · Race, History, and American Society (13 works) · Gender Studies (12 works)