Racism on the Victorian stage : representation of slavery and the black character / Hazel Waters.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Waters, Hazel.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Racism in popular culture--Great Britain--History--19th century.

Racism in popular culture.

Racism and the arts--Great Britain--History--19th century.

Racism and the arts.

Theater and society--Great Britain--History--19th century.

Theater and society.

Race in literature.

History.

Great Britain.

Physical Description:

viii, 243 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, UK ; New York : Cambridge University Press, 2007.

Summary:

While there are many studies of nineteenth-century race theories and scientific racism, the attitudes and stereotypes expressed in popular culture have rarely been examined, and then only for the latter half of the century. Theatre then was mass entertainment and these forgotten plays, hastily written, surviving only as hand-written manuscripts or cheap pamphlets, are a rich seam for the cultural historian. Mining them to discover how 'race' was viewed and how the stereotype of the black developed and degraded sheds a fascinating light on the development of racism in English culture. In the process, this book helps to explain how a certain flexibility in attitudes towards skin colour, observable at the end of the eighteenth century, changed into the hardened jingoism of the late nineteenth. Concentrating on the period 1830 to 1860, its detailed excavation of some seventy plays makes it invaluable to the theatre historian had black studies scholar.

Contents:

1 From vengeance to sentiment 7

2 The beginning of the end for the black avenger 37

3 Ira Aldridge and the battlefield of race 58

4 The comic and the grotesque: the American influence 89

5 The consolidation of the black grotesque 114

6 Slavery freed from the constraint of blackness 130

7 Uncle Tom - moral high ground or low comedy? 155.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 191-239) and index.

ISBN:

0521862620

9780521862622

OCLC:

74523272