Marvin McAllister's Whiting Up: Whiteface Minstrels and Stage Europeans in PDF

By Marvin McAllister

ISBN-10: 0807835080

ISBN-13: 9780807835081

Within the early Nineties, black performer Bob Cole grew to become blackface minstrelsy on its head along with his nationally well-known whiteface production, a personality he known as Willie Wayside. simply over a century later, hiphop superstar Busta Rhymes played a whiteface supercop in his hit song video "Dangerous." during this sweeping paintings, Marvin McAllister explores the iconic culture of "whiting up," during which African American actors, comics, musicians, or even daily humans have studied and assumed white racial identities.

Not to be stressed with racial "passing" or derogatory notions of "acting white," whiting up is a planned functionality procedure designed to problem America's racial and political hierarchies via moving intended markers of whiteness to black bodies--creating unforeseen intercultural alliances whilst it sharply reviews racial stereotypes. in addition to traditional theater, McAllister considers various different concert modes, together with weekly promenading rituals, antebellum cakewalks, solo functionality, and standup comedy. For over 3 centuries, whiting up as allowed African American artists to acceptable white cultural construction, type new black identities via those "white" kinds, and boost our collective skill to find ourselves in others.

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Extra info for Whiting Up: Whiteface Minstrels and Stage Europeans in African American Performance

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In the upper image, labeled “The Dance,” we have a finely attired white couple 34 Early Whiteface Minstrels Figure 1 American Home Scenes, by Winslow Homer. Published in Harper’s Weekly, April 13, 1861. with a male dancer working his slight legs and feet in a light jig. Beneath that image is a vignette titled “The Breakdown,” which features a Negro couple dancing in a cabin. Again, a male dancer draws visual focus, and in this case a somewhat stout black dancer pounds the earth with his large feet and legs.

Even if their owners failed to recognize the African American identity formation at work, enslaved Africans still promoted an undeniably black cultural product that elevated the European Grand March to new and unexpected levels. Again, the mere suggestion of slave agency and artistic production sounds strange, given the violence and coercion of this devastating institution. Perhaps we can never remove the specter of domination from any moment of enslaved “fun and frolic,” but unlike the illegal and dangerous country dance, the cakewalk was born from an affable combination of coercive and voluntary acculturation.

As early as 1740, so many Charleston slaves were living apart from their masters that local authorities officially forbade enslaved Africans from sleeping away from their master’s compound. This colonial era ban on living out was never strictly enforced because wealthy slave owners did not support the municipal ordinance. Therefore, Charleston slaves continued to live out and even began renting rundown shanties in a suburb just outside Charleston; this area, known as “the Neck,” became Charleston’s first black neighborhood.

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Whiting Up: Whiteface Minstrels and Stage Europeans in African American Performance by Marvin McAllister


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