Turning about Jim Crow

Abstract

WHY DOES BLACKFACE PERFORMANCE, WHICH FIRST ENGAGED AUDIENCES at the dawning of modem America, continue to animate and disturb our national culture? In the 1990s, a minstrel song is capable of stirring vigorous debate: witness the Senate's vote to retire Carry Me Back to Old Virginia (written by African American composer James A. Bland) as the state song, finally acceding to protests by black constituents outraged at its textual affection for the slavery era. Not long ago, the Ohio Dance Company received acclaim for its New York revival of Cakewalk, a piece that revisited nineteenth-century dance including steps made famous in minstrel theaters. Likewise, the world of fiction sometimes turns to minstrel characterizations to explore racial identity: Wesley Brown, for example, gives literary life to the fictional source who inspired minstrelsy's Jim Crow in his novel Darktown Strutters. The answer, according to W. T. Lhamon, Jr., may rest with minstrelsy's liberating power as much as with its historical association with racist constraint.1 Scholars, too, have turned to the blackface show in recent years, enriching fields as diverse as musicology, theater history, sociology, folklore, and English. Much of this work advances the postmodernist agenda of destabilizing meanings inherited from both public knowledge and the academy. Earlier interpretations of blackface tended toward the