Blackface Cuba, 1840-1895.(Book review)

Blackface Cuba, 1840-1895. By Jill Lane. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005. xi + 274 pp. $50.00 cloth.

Blackface Cuba is an examination of nineteenth-century Cuban society and theatre. Cuba at the time experienced an uneasy relationship with racial interaction: racial unity was perceived as a source of national pride, but racial divisions led to tension. Blacks and whites competed for the right to determine Cuban national identity, with blackface performance expressing multiple and contradictory desires for independence, emancipation, and the status quo. The history of Cuban blackface appeared through the theatrical style known as "teatro bufo" and was, according to Jill Lane, "a critical history of the relation between racial impersonation, popular culture, and the development of an anticolonial public sphere" (2). Stereotypes of blacks appeared in numerous plays and comic skits throughout the period, becoming part of Cuba's growing nationalism. Dramatists incorporated African, Spanish, and local styles in closet dramas, plays, and bufo, leading to a hybrid of antecedents and innovations. Despite a confluence of influences, the "publicity, reviews, and the plays themselves typically characterized [the performances] not as racialized (not black, not mulata) but national (Cuban): the danzon and the negrito were first and foremost imagined as Cuban" (3).

Each chapter examines the nationalism of nineteenth-century Cuba as illustrated in performance, demonstrating how performance helped define Cuba's cultural identity. Chapter 1 analyzes the "costumbrismo," a literary and performative style utilizing idiomatic vernacular, elaborate pageants, and local life. The principal contributors were poet and playwright Bartolome Jose Crespo y Borbon, who (using several aliases) popularized the bozel character (the African-born slave), and Francisco Covarrubias, who "debuted as the first blackface stage character in 1812: the negrito" (29). The costumbrismo scripts followed the prescriptive designs familiar to European commedia dell'arte: swiftly recognizable types ensnared in zany shenanigans. A steady stream of these popular plays depicted music, food, costumes, and indigenous characters. What complicated matters was the use of blackface, which, as Lane carefully points out, had a unique and complex cultural significance.

Chapter 2 explores the visiting Spanish touring troupes that "transformed their source materials" and established "a recognizable Cuban aesthetic that gained new relevance in the contest of anticolonial resistance" (61). The 1860s marked the first of several wars for Cuban independence. These rebellions influenced the teatro bufo; plays and sketches began providing roots to revolutionary ideology. The core of the cultural conflict was centered in blackface performance, where the potential meaning of blackface could "function as a sign of racial division, marking and reinforcing the difference between white and black; at the same time, it could function as a sign of racial contact, where black met white for some new 'mestizo' entity" (66-67). This complex interaction brought on by blackface stimulated the appearance of skits and dramas that depicted, albeit covertly, anticolonial attempts at pitting locals against invaders. Dramatists invented ways of using the blackface mask to create satirical tropes, "enabling the emergence of a 'Cuban' humor, style, and rhythm" (80). But this development, Lane maintains, was in constant flux as Cubans attempted to formulate a national style against the backdrop of racism, class conflict, and colonial power.

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