New Books Network

Interview with Kellen Hoxworth: "Transoceanic Blackface: Empire, Race, Performance"

Date: January 20, 2026
Host: Dr. Miranda Melcher
Guest: Dr. Kellen Hoxworth

Episode Overview

This episode features Dr. Miranda Melcher in conversation with Dr. Kellen Hoxworth about his new book, Transoceanic Blackface: Empire, Race, Performance (Northwestern UP, 2024). The discussion explores the global history of blackface and minstrelsy, tracing its development and dissemination across the Anglophone imperial world from the 18th to the 20th centuries. Dr. Hoxworth challenges established national narratives, revealing how blackface performance and its associated racial discourses became transoceanic—embedded in imperial, colonial, and popular cultures far beyond the US South. The conversation ranges from the origins and evolution of blackface to its role in entrenching racial and gender hierarchies, and its enduring impact in modern and contemporary media.

Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. Author’s Background & Book Genesis

• Introduction to Dr. Hoxworth’s Research (02:52)
  • Professor of Theatre and Performance Studies at SUNY Buffalo.
  • Specializes in intersections of theater/performance and imperial/colonial histories, especially in Africa and the African diaspora.
  • Book originated from a master's thesis on racial impersonation in South Africa, driven by noticing disciplinary silos that separated national histories of blackface and minstrelsy (03:20).
  • Desire to explore hidden transnational stories:

    “What stories about blackface and racialized performance remained hidden due to our reliance on core assumptions about the origins of blackface and minstrelsy...?” (04:07)

2. Framing Key Questions

• Main research inquiries included:
  • Distinguishing blackface from minstrelsy, and tracing the antecedents of both (05:06).
  • Challenging top-down models of imperialism, emphasizing the role of popular culture and everyday life in colonial processes (05:45).
  • Moving beyond the nation-state as the unit of analysis; considering racial discourses and performance as circulatory and interconnected across empires (06:20).
  • Building upon theories from scholars like Joseph Roach (“circumatlantic performance”) and Kathleen Wilson, pushing for more complex, non-nationalistic performance histories (07:45).

3. The Concept of "Transoceanic Blackface"

• Why not “transnational”? (08:46)
  • “Transnational” implies exchanges solely between established nations; “transoceanic” recognizes the complex networks of empire, including colonies and other sites beyond the metropole.
  • The book’s title reflects a deliberate expansion to include colonial sites traditionally omitted (09:00).
  • Argues against limiting analysis to US-centered narratives, instead finding important antecedents in 18th-century British theater and popular culture (09:55):

    “Why are we stopping our search for antecedents... just in the same geographic location? Why not expand and see where the influences...were coming from?” (10:23)

4. Tracing the Deep Origins of Blackface and Minstrelsy

• Early Comic Black Figures in British Theatre (11:16)
  • Focus is on emergence of comic black racial figures in mid-18th-century British theater (e.g., Kingston in High Life Below Stairs, Mungo in The Padlock).
  • Such figures appeared across the empire, even on ships bound for the colonies.
  • These comic tropes:
    • Ridiculed and “naturalized” black servitude and white supremacy.
    • Affirmed freedom as a property of whiteness, depicting black aspirations for freedom as inherently absurd or dangerous.
    • “Freedom is linked directly to interracial sexuality and criminality, as though once black people are free, everything about white imperial culture comes crashing down.” (12:17)
  • Blackface tropes migrate beyond theater to visual culture, music, and print—what Hoxworth terms “scriptive blackface”.

5. Blackface Beyond the US: Jim Crow’s Global Circulation

• Jim Crow as a Transoceanic Figure (15:19)
  • T.D. Rice’s “Jim Crow” is seen as the first global blackface phenomenon.
  • British theatrical tradition already steeped in similar comic black figures and tropes; Rice reabsorbs and retools these when performing in Britain.
  • “Jim Crow is completely mutable. He can sing about anything, he can talk about anything. And so the song is regularly revised. He is always, though, touching on one core issue...what is black freedom?” (16:19)
  • Local adaptations arise, e.g., “Keki Kekelback” in South Africa, reflecting anxieties about impending emancipation.

6. Mechanisms of Global Circulation

• Transoceanic Networks of Performance (19:23)
  • Blackface minstrelsy is never merely “exported” from the US; it’s adapted, localized, and enthusiastically adopted by amateurs across the British empire—often before professional troupes tour.
  • “There’s a complex interaction between global touring, material circulation of print, of visual culture, of music, and local people who really want to embrace and put this on.” (21:09)
  • Imperialism provided the fertile ground for blackface minstrelsy’s global uptake as a means for white colonists to work through racial anxieties.

7. Racial and Gender Hierarchies in Blackface Performance

• How Blackface Perpetuated Racial Hierarchies (23:43)
  • The minstrel show’s form (music, sketches, burlesque) allowed it to adapt its racial scripts for different imperial contexts and new racial “others” (e.g., Chinese [yellowface], South Asian [brownface]).
  • “What blackface minstrelsy does centrally is it scripts, racial abjection. It scripts that racialized being is in some way a comic form of being in the world. But it doesn’t actually affix that only to black people.” (24:38)
  • Blackface’s dramaturgy became a “safe” surrogate site for staging and containing the anxieties that empire-arising interracial contact produced (26:38).

8. Othello, Gender, and Race

• Othello Performances as Sites for Racial/Gender Anxiety (27:46)
  • Othello, as a canonical text centering interracial sexuality, becomes both a tragic and comic site for working through racial and gender tensions in the Empire.
  • Comic adaptations of Othello use burlesque to make the idea of interracial sex laughable, thereby reinforcing social and racial boundaries.
  • Ann Laura Stoller’s work is cited: “Racial discourse has to be taught and reinforced in large part because Empire necessitates all of these points of racial contact.” (29:47)

9. Gendered Implications and Female Representation

• Gender Anxieties in Minstrelsy (31:42)
  • Minstrelsy’s core dynamics revolve around failed imitation: black men, yellowface, brownface figures unable to “perform” proper Englishness or gender norms.
  • Comic devices ridicule both racialized and white women—especially abolitionists, feminists, or women challenging racial conventions (33:52).
  • Example: The global circulation and local adaptation of “The Girl of the Period” (British anti-feminist screed) into “The Parsi Girl of the Period” in South Asia—layered performance of gender and racial norms.

10. Blackface’s Persistence Into the 20th Century

• Long After the Minstrel Show’s Heyday (37:18)
  • By the 1890s, minstrelsy fades as a dominant form but continues in vaudeville, and is embedded in new media:
    • Film, radio, and TV incorporate blackface from their inception.
    • US: Amos and Andy (TV/radio) is protested and eventually stigmatized.
    • UK: BBC’s The Black and White Minstrel Show airs until 1978; rebroadcast in Australia and localized versions in South Africa continue into the 1980s.
  • Blackface structures everyday racial discourse; remnants linger in habits and popular culture.

11. Future Research Directions

• Hoxworth’s Current Projects (40:41)
  • Co-editing a special section, “Blackface Geographies,” for the journal TDR with Douglas A. Jones—gathering global scholarship on blackface and related practices.
  • Planned book: Performing African on the African American Stage —exploring how Africa is represented and reimagined in Black American theater.
  • Next project: Revisionary Blackness —focus on mid-century Black American playwrights and the written forms of Black drama.

Notable Quotes & Timestamps

• On Siloed Histories:

  “I kind of became uneasy with this, the way that we tell these discrete national narratives unconnected to other geographies and cultural flows.”
  (03:17, Dr. Kellen Hoxworth)

• On the Need for a Global Perspective:

  “If blackface is not just a US phenomenon, then might its racial politics also extend beyond the United States?”
  (08:19, Dr. Kellen Hoxworth)

• On the Transfer of Tropes:

  “Black speech is almost always posited as an inarticulate imitation of white speech... freedom is linked directly to interracial sexuality and criminality, as though once black people are free, everything about white imperial culture comes crashing down.”
  (12:17, Dr. Kellen Hoxworth)

• On Local Agency in Adopting Minstrelsy:

  “It’s a very big undertaking to put on your own show. And so this isn’t some sort of passive reception of cultural material. It’s an active engagement with it.”
  (21:18, Dr. Kellen Hoxworth)

• On Blackface’s Adaptive Structure:

  “Minstrelsy is really about fungibility. Even the characters are interchangeable... It scripts racial abjection... but it doesn’t actually affix that only to black people.”
  (24:22–24:38, Dr. Kellen Hoxworth)

• On Enduring Impact:

  “Blackface has long structured racial discourse. It was the popular performance form of empire for the better part of a century.”
  (39:12, Dr. Kellen Hoxworth)

Timestamps for Important Segments

• 03:20 — Book origins, problem with siloed histories
• 05:06 — Key research questions and frameworks
• 08:46 — "Transoceanic" vs. "transnational"
• 11:16 — Early British comic blackface figures
• 15:19 — Jim Crow’s global rise
• 19:23 — “Export” models vs. active local adaptation
• 23:43 — How minstrel structures embed and rework racial hierarchies
• 27:46 — Othello and gender/race anxieties
• 31:42 — Gender tropes and the role of women
• 37:18 — Blackface minstrelsy in the 20th century media
• 40:41 — Hoxworth’s current and upcoming projects

Memorable Moments

• The tracing of “scriptive blackface” from theater to everyday cultural practices (13:40–14:51).
• The description of Jim Crow as a mutable, global form that localizes anxieties about emancipation (16:30–19:02).
• The lively explication of how local (e.g., South Asian) iterations of minstrelsy were adapted from British and American sources, and performed by white women “in brownface” for Parsi audiences (33:52–36:53).

Conclusion

This episode provided a multilayered understanding of how blackface and minstrelsy were not just American or British phenomena, but deeply intertwined with the structures, anxieties, and cultural productions of empire. Dr. Hoxworth’s research invites us to rethink established boundaries—temporal, national, and disciplinary—revealing a broader, haunting legacy of racialized performance whose repercussions persist far beyond the stage.

For further reading:
Transoceanic Blackface: Empire, Race, Performance by Kellen Hoxworth, Northwestern UP, 2024.