Jump Jim Crow
Subtitle: lost plays, lyrics, and street prose of the first Atlantic popular culture
By: W.T. Lhamon, Jr.
Contributors: Lhamon, W. T.
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Published: 2003
Place of publication: Cambridge, Mass
Language: eng
Number of pages: 459
Subjects: Rice, Tom, 1808-1860; African Americans -- Literary collections; Social classes -- Literary collections; Popular literature -- United States; American literature -- 19th century; Blackface entertainers -- History; African Americans in literature; Social classes in literature; Minstrel shows -- History; Blacks in literature; Race in literature
Genres: Literary collections.
Description: Beginning in the 1830s, the white actor Thomas D. Rice took to the stage as Jim Crow, and the ragged and charismatic trickster of black folklore entered--and forever transformed--American popular culture. Jump Jim Crow brings together the plays and songs performed in this guise and reveals how these texts code the complex use and abuse of blackness that has characterized American culture ever since Jim Crow's first appearance. Along with the prompt scripts of nine plays performed by Rice--never before published as their original audiences saw them--W.T. Lhamon Jr. provides a reconstruction of their performance history and an analysis of their contemporary meaning. His reading shows us how these plays built a public blackness, but also how they engaged a disaffected white audience, who found in Jim Crow's sass and wit and madcap dancing an expression of rebellion and resistance against the oppression and confinement suffered by ordinary people of all colors in antebellum America and early Victorian England. Upstaging conventional stories and forms, giving direction and expression to the unruly attitudes of a burgeoning underclass, the plays in this anthology enact a vital force still felt in great fictions, movies, and musics of the Atlantic and in the jumping, speedy styles that join all these forms.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. 407-454) and index.