Talk:Blackface/Lott

message: Some notes from 
*Lott, Eric. Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. ISBN 0195078322.
I've been drawing on this book for articles on various individual performers, etc. These notes all have potential for use in blackface, minstrel show, or elsewhere, but I'm not sure exactly what to do with them. Please, feel free to draw on this. If you incorporate a passage into an article, please strike through like this and leave a note about where it landed, so we don't end up using the same material twice. I will probably still be adding to this: I have a lot more handwritten notes I'm going through. -- Jmabel | Talk 04:12, August 22, 2005 (UTC)
:I've read over the list, and I think much of this should probably go to minstrel show. I lack the time to do the merging right now, but I've taken the liberty of moving the paragraphs I think should be merged with that article to their own section. Good job, Jmabel! BrianSmithson 00:11, 23 August 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Untitled

message: Lott argues that while early blackface often involved class identification of white workers with blacks, the minstrel show was another matter. Arising at the same time that "workingmen's nativist, pro-Southern, and temperance groups began to form", this "spectacle of vulgarity… did not merely confirm an already existent racism" but (following a pattern that had been pioneered by Rice) helped to create a new one, uniting workers and "class superiors" against a common black enemy, symbolized especially by the character of the black dandy. (Lott, 1993, 137-138) In this same period, the class-conscious but racially inclusive rhetoric of "wage slavery" was largely supplanted by a racist rhetoric of "white slavery" that suggested that the abuses against northern factory workers were a graver ill than the treatment of black slaves, or by a less class-conscious rhetoric of "productive" vs. "unproductive" elements of society. (Lott, 1993, 155)
The vulgarity was no accident: it was part and parcel of the aesthetic of the form. The Spirit of the Times wrote (October 9, 1847) of the Ethiopian Serenaders that they were "entirely too elegant" and that the "excellence" of their singing "is an objection to it." (Lott, 1993, 153).
Some of the racism (and misogyny) in minstrelsy was rather vicious. There were "comic" songs in which black were "roasted, fished for, smoked like tobacco, peeled like potatoes, planted in the soil, or dried up and hung as advertisements", and there were multiple songs in which a black man accidentally put out a black woman's eyes. (Lott, 1993, 150-152) All of the "wench" roles played by men (most famously Barney Williams and George Christy) in drag, this at a time when American theater outside of minstrelsy was filled with actresses. (Lott, 1993, 160) The humor often turned on the male characters' desire for a woman who would be perceived by the audience as unattractive. (Lott, 1993, 166)
Lott suggests that among the appeals of the minstrel show were the pleasure of the grotesque and that its infantilization of blacks allowed (by proxy, and without full identification) childish fun and other "low" pleasures in an industrializing world where workers were increasingly expected to abandon these pleasures. (Lott, 1993, 143-148) Meanwhile, the more respectable could view the vulgar audience itself as a spectacle. (Lott, 1993, 158)
I've added most everything to minstrel show, and I've struck through what's been used. BrianSmithson 03:36, 9 September 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: More material, 6 Sept 2005