Blackface Nation: Race, Reform, and Identity in American Popular Music, 1812-1925
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.14 (894 Votes) |
| Asin | : | 022645164X |
| Format Type | : | paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 384 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2013-11-02 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
Its performers embodied the love-crime version of racism, in which vast swaths of the white public adored African Americans who fit blackface stereotypes even as they used those stereotypes to rationalize white supremacy. The Hutchinson Family Singers, the Northeast’s most popular middle-class singing group during the mid-nineteenth century, is perhaps the best example of the first strain of music. The group’s songs expressed an American identity rooted in communal values, with lyrics focusing on abolition, women’s rights, and socialism. By the early twentieth century, the blackface version of the American identity had become a part of America’s consumer culture while the Hutchinsons’ songs were increasingly regarded as old-fashioned. Blackface Nation elucidates the central irony in Am
The placing of the War of 1812 as a watershed in US popular culture is especially remarkable. Accessible and sometimes displaying a sly humor, Blackface Nation deserves a wide readership in and beyond undergraduate classrooms.”. Roberts treats blackface over a long period of time, beginning before and extending well after its heyday. “It is no easy thing to produce a strikingly original book covering blackface minstrelsy, a topic on which longstanding, cross-disciplinary, and voluminous scholarship exists. Roberts make blackface performance speak meaningfully to the whole of US history—especially to rebellion, settler colonialism, republicanism, gender, and white supremacy