White Kids and No Kids At All

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 registered and created, and that the racial feeling underlying and shaping but many times eluding the official narratives of race in these years began to appear. Rather than locate in disembodied minstrel types some coherent, intentional politics (derived from our present notions of nineteenth-century racial matters), one ought, as Gareth Stedman Jones’s work suggests, to examine the complications in the minstrel show’s languages of race with reference to antebellum social and political developments (Languages 8). The popular theater was itself an increasingly crucial though less and less respectable part of those developments, and for a time this status enabled minstrelsy to become an oppositional, almost underground cultural form. As a result, it told a story less articulate yet perhaps more revealing than the taunts and ripostes of polemicists.

Aesthetics · Argument (complex analysis) · Art · Literature · Narrative · Political science · Politics · Race (biology) · Racial politics · Situated · Sociology · White (mutation) · Gender Studies · Law · Theater, Performance, and Music History · Theatre and Performance Studies