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

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Lott, Eric

Contributor:

ebrary, Inc.

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:

1 online resource (xiv, 327 pages) : illustrations.

Edition:

Twentieth-anniversary edition.

Place of Publication:

New York : Oxford University Press, 2013.

System Details:

text file

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 and index.

Electronic reproduction. Palo Alto, Calif. : ebrary, 2013. Available via World Wide Web. Access may be limited to ebrary affiliated libraries.

OCLC:

853564427

Access Restriction:

Restricted for use by site license.