A01=Josephine Lee
Abyssinia
Afro-Asian
Aida Overton Walker
Aladdin
all-Black musical
American orientalism
Author_Josephine Lee
Bert Williams
blackface minstrelsy
Category=ATD
Category=JBSL
Chinese laundry
chop suey
Cross-racial performance
eq_art-fashion-photography
eq_bestseller
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
Flower Drum Song
George Walker
In Dahomey
Ira Aldridge
Japanese Tommy
Juanita Long Hall
nineteenth-century American theater
Princess Sotanki
racial habit
racial stereotypes
representations of the Philippine-American War
Salome
Shuffle Along
Sissieretta Jones
yellowface
Product details
- ISBN 9781469669618
- Weight: 287g
- Dimensions: 155 x 233mm
- Publication Date: 20 Sep 2022
- Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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In this book, Josephine Lee looks at the intertwined racial representations of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American theater. In minstrelsy, melodrama, vaudeville, and musicals, both white and African American performers enacted blackface characterizations alongside oriental stereotypes of opulence and deception, comic servitude, and exotic sexuality. Lee shows how blackface types were often associated with working-class masculinity and the development of a nativist white racial identity for European immigrants, while the oriental marked what was culturally coded as foreign, feminized, and ornamental. These conflicting racial connotations were often intermingled in actual stage performance, as stage productions contrasted nostalgic characterizations of plantation slavery with the figures of the despotic sultan, the seductive dancing girl, and the comic Chinese laundryman. African American performers also performed common oriental themes and characterizations, repurposing them for their own commentary on Black racial progress and aspiration. The juxtaposition of orientalism and black figuration became standard fare for American theatergoers at a historical moment in which the color line was rigidly policed. These interlocking cross-racial impersonations offer fascinating insights into habits of racial representation both inside and outside the theater.
Josephine Lee is professor of English and Asian American Studies at the University of Minnesota.
