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COPYRIGHT 2007 Associated University Presses
Performing Blackness on English Stages, 1500-1800, by Virginia Mason Vaughan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Pp. xiv + 190. Cloth $75.00.
When I teach about blackface conventions in my undergraduate Shakespeare classes, I often ask students to cull from their own experiences of blackface performance. Most are from an American context: many of them have seen Spike Lee's Bamboozled, or caught a clip of Al Jolson (or Bugs Bunny imitating Al Jolson) singing "Mammy." A few have been lucky enough to have seen Marlon Rigg's groundbreaking documentary of blackface and its American roots, Ethnic Notions. In the United States, blackface performance has been forged in the ovens of slavery and postslavery race relations. In the sexual stereotypes of U.S. blackface images, we find lurking fantasies spawned from the systematic breeding and trade of black bodies; in the mixture of violence and humor of blackface, we might see a spectacular transmogrification of the post-Reconstruction Black Laws, ever-present threat of lynchings, and the rise of Jim Crow. And in the careers of blackface performers, white and black, we see reflected the tenuous act of becoming white and protecting whiteness borne from the history of U.S. immigration. The late twentieth and early twenty-first century brings a whole new trajectory of blackface appropriations shaped by U.S. experiences, including the critical use of blackface in the art and performances of Fred Wilson, Chris Rock, Whoopie Goldberg, and Michael Ray Charles, whose modern racial kitsch figures appear in Spike Lee's film, Bamboozled. But while our most familiar associations of blackface tradition might most likely be informed by the American historical context, Americans did not invent blackface. As Virginia Mason Vaughan discusses in her powerful study, Performing Blackness on English Stages, 1500-1800, the early modern period in England has yielded several examples of white actors performing in blackface for the popular stage, and we can reach even further back to blackfaced devils in medieval mystery plays, or further still to black slave characters in classical Roman productions. Vaughan's Performing Blackness is valuable for its history and analysis of English blackface traditions in their specificity; at the same time, the work provides an important conceptual framework that might help bridge blackface traditions across time, nation, and audience.
Vaughan's study focuses on the relationship between text and performance in the...
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