A01=Rhae Lynn Barnes
african-american
amos and andy
antiracist
Author_Rhae Lynn Barnes
bigotry
blackface
caste
Category=ATD
Category=ATY
Category=JBFA
Category=JBFA1
Category=NH
Category=NHK
Category=NHTB
civil rights
civil rights movement
colonialism
eq_art-fashion-photography
eq_bestseller
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_new_release
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
fdr
incarceration
internment camp
jim crow
minstrel
minstrelsy
racism
slavery
theater
vaudeville
Product details
- ISBN 9781631496349
- Weight: 939g
- Dimensions: 165 x 244mm
- Publication Date: 24 Mar 2026
- Publisher: W W Norton & Co Ltd
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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Never before has the disturbing story of blackface and its piercing reflection of American society been so comprehensively told. Darkology meticulously unravels this complex, subterranean and all-too-often expunged history. By 1830, blackface, which caricatured ex-slaves for their supposed subservience and happy demeanour, had become a venomous cultural export. Blackface theatre soon segued into everyday amateur shows during Jim Crow, whose name derives from minstrelsy’s founding character. Beloved by presidents including FDR and Gerald Ford, blackface saturated twentieth-century America, permeating US military bases abroad and Second World War Japanese American internment camps as an “Americanisation” tool. Despite a 1950s backlash led by Black mothers protesting public school performances, 1960s college students from California to Vermont aggressively challenged legal bans. With its gripping writing and penetrating archival research, Darkology is a landmark work that peers beneath the historical boulders that deliberately obscure America’s racial past.
Rhae Lynn Barnes is an assistant professor of American cultural history at Princeton University and the Sheila Biddle Ford Foundation Fellow at the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research at Harvard University.
