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Love and theft : blackface minstrelsy and the American working class / Eric Lott.

Van Pelt - Albrecht Music Library ML1711 .L67 2013
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Format:
Book
Author/Creator:
Lott, Eric
Series:
Race and American culture
Language:
English
Subjects (All):
Minstrel shows--United States--History.
Minstrel shows.
Working class--United States.
Working class.
History.
United States.
United States--Race relations.
Race relations.
United States--History--Civil War, 1861-1865.
Physical Description:
xiv, 327 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm.
Edition:
Twentieth-anniversary edition.
Place of Publication:
New York : Oxford University Press, [2013]
Summary:
Taking up white America's long fraught relationship with African-American culture, Love & Theft examines the role of the blackface minstrel show in the years leading up to the Civil War. Drawing on minstrel music, lyrics, jokes, burlesque skits, dance, and theatrical form, Eric Lott's classic cultural history highlights the complex interaction between blackface minstrelsy and its largely white, male, working-class audiences. Underwritten by envy as well as repulsion, sympathetic identification as well as fear-a strange dynamic of "love and theft"-the minstrel show continually transgressed the color line even as it enabled the formation of a self-consciously white working class. A new foreword by Greil Marcus considers the book's cultural legacy and a new afterword by Lott reflects on its relevance, extending Love & Theft's range into the twenty-first century. Book jacket.
Contents:
Blackface and blackness : the minstrel show in American culture
Love and theft : "racial" production and the social unconscious of blackface
White kids and no kids at all : working-class culture and languages of race
The blackening of America : popular culture and national cultures
"The seeming counterfeit" : early blackface acts, the body, and social contradiction
"Genuine negro fun" : racial pleasure and class formation in the 1840s
California gold and European revolution : Stephen Foster and the American 1848
Uncle Tomitudes : racial melodrama and modes of production.
Notes:
Includes bibliographical references (pages 291-318) and index.
ISBN:
9780195320558
0195320557
0199717680
9780199717682
OCLC:
822028665

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