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Kellen Hoxworth, "Transoceanic Blackface: Empire, Race, Performance" (Northwestern UP, 2024)
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- [00:00]
Stassi Schroeder
I am your host, Stassi Schroeder. Welcome to Tell Me Lies, the official podcast. What's the most unhinged thing of season three?
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Steven.
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Stassi Schroeder
Because he's so evil.
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Dr. Kellen Hawkesworth
I do think he is misunderstood. You see everyone face consequences. It's intoxicating.
- [00:16]
Stassi Schroeder
The writers just know how to trick.
- [00:18]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, there's always a twist in this show. It's nothing you would expect.
- [00:21]
Stassi Schroeder
Tell Me Lies, the official podcast. Now streaming and stream the new season of Tell Me Lies on Hulu and Hulu on Disney.
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- [01:37]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Hello, and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased today to be speaking with Dr. Kellen Hawkesworth about his book titled Transoceanic Blackface Empire Race Performance, published by Northwestern University Press in 2024. Now, this book takes us on a bit of a sweeping history across a number of different places of racialized performance in the anglophone imperial world. So we're cover kind of a decent range of time as well, 18th, 19th, even early 20th century, to look at a number of different tropes around what's happening in terms of things like blackface, for instance, but not just kind of in one particular culture of it. You know, we're not just looking at, for instance, the American south. We are looking at broader places and times than that, and crucially, also the connections, too. So there's going to be a number of things, clearly for us to cover. So, Kellen, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
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Dr. Kellen Hawkesworth
Thank you, Miranda, so much for having me. It's a pleasure to be here, and I look forward to talking about the book with you and your listeners.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Well, I'm looking forward to our discussion about the book, too. But before we get too far into it, can you introduce yourself a little bit and tell us why you even decided to write this in the first place?
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Dr. Kellen Hawkesworth
Sure. So I am a professor of theater and performance studies at the University at Buffalo, State University of New York. I specialize in studying theater and performance that intersects with histories of imperialism and colonialism, especially in Africa and the African diaspora. So my interest in blackface minstrelsy really stems from those sorts of questions, those sorts of areas of interest. In many ways, this is the book that I wish I had been able to read when I started researching the project. And so it began as a project growing out of a master's thesis, where I became interested in racial impersonation in South Africa. And all of the material that I encountered really wanted to tell a South African story. The only influences, the only points of contact for South African theater and performance were apparently South African. And then I also noticed that the literature on racial impersonation really only seemed to focus on the United States. And so there was this disciplinary siloing of the various things that I wanted to bring together. And I kind of became uneasy with this, the way that we tell these discrete national narratives unconnected to other geographies and cultural flows. I wanted to consider how performance does not remain within the neat national and temporal containers that we often want to place it in as a given historical context. And so my question really started out being, what stories about blackface and racialized performance remained hidden due to our reliance on core assumptions about the origins of blackface and minstrelsy, and especially an idea that it started in the United States and then spread elsewhere. What other stories might be hiding in the margins of that one?
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
I find often that interesting books come out of exactly that impulse of, I wish I had had this book to read and I went looking for it and it didn't exist. So I guess I have to be the one to write it. So intrigued that this book had an origin story along those lines. But within then those questions and silos that you came across, what sorts of questions did you develop sort of within those boundaries that then sort of, you know, you answered through the book.
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Dr. Kellen Hawkesworth
So the first major question was when and how did blackface and minstrelsy become a global phenomenon? And really the first question from that was, are blackface and minstrelsy the same thing? Should we be actually thinking about them as different or as related? What are practices of blackface that maybe were antecedents or precedents to what becomes the minstrel show? How does minstrelsy then do new and different things with blackface and so forth? These questions led me to a lot of different interdisciplinary conversations. I ended up really asking questions about what kind of model of imperialism to work with, and especially against top down models of imperialism. I was interested in how popular culture and everyday life are central sites of colonial and imperial processes, especially of racialization. Hence, as we'll discuss, I end up theorizing race as part of the furniture, part of everyday life, of empire. I also ended up engaging with different models for theorizing race and sort of questioning which of those are most appropriate to understanding racialized performance. So how did racial discourses circulate across national borders? This forced me to grapple with how we tend to think of race as a subset of the nation. But instead I wanted to think, well, how does race cross national boundaries? How especially do empires and their binding together of disparate geographies and peoples always kind of weaved racial discourse as a transnational and global discourse? And then how did racialized performance partake in, and more importantly, promulgate imperial racial discourses? This then invites even more questions. I have a lot of questions I think your listeners will find. How might following the circulations of performance invite a reconsideration of how we think about performance history beyond national borders and the silos of area studies and toward a more complex, interconnected historical world? Here I'm engaging with some other scholars, like Joseph Roach in Cities of the Dead, where he theorizes circumatlantic performance. Elizabeth Mattock Dillon, who elaborates on that New World drama and even more recent work by Elizabeth Mattock Dillon. Sorry, not Elizabeth. Matt Dillon. Can I take that again? Can we pause and edit? Okay, I'm thinking about a lot of other scholars as well, like Joseph Roach, who does Cities of the Dead, where he theorizes circum Atlantic performance. Elizabeth Mattock Dillon, who elaborates on Circum Atlantic performance in New World Drama and also more recent work by Kathleen Wilson. And so in that sense, I wanted to think of again more complex, interconnected histories of performance and to especially Think how we might better understand racialized performance beyond the frame of the nation. If blackface is not just a US Phenomenon, Then might its racial politics also extend beyond the United States? This turn towards a more global framework. Ultimately brought me into a lot of questions raised by world systems theory to grapple with interconnections of ostensibly separate geographies. Nations, political economic systems, and discourses.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
A lot of questions indeed, and many intriguing ones, especially when all grouped together. So I want to get into some of the kind of key terms as we begin to explore answers. The obvious one I think I want to start with is the title of the book. Right. Transoceanic Blackface. What do we mean by that in the context of these questions?
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Dr. Kellen Hawkesworth
Yeah, thank you for that. So this was something that was very important to me. As I was trying to think about how I was imagining the world as being interconnected. I began working on this project in what was very much a transnational turn in theater and performance studies. But I quickly realized that transnational wasn't quite the appropriate concept. Because that would posit that there are two nations, the United States and the United Kingdom, that are the main sites at which I'm focusing on where racialized performance is happening. And really, my primary sites are the colonies of various empires, which are not necessarily nations. They're subsets of nations or, you know, satellites of nations. And often are not included in such transnational histories. So transoceanic was my way of thinking of how empire actually works. Which is binding together all of these different geographies. Through oceanic networks, through a transoceanic system. And because of that, I could extend some of the ideas of transnational research, how performance culture flows across national boundaries. To also incorporate these other colonial sites, which are often overlooked in our work. Similarly, I wanted to think about blackface and the boundaries that we've sort of built up around that. And the scholarship on blackface minstrelsy. There's a basic history, which is that the minstrel show starts in the early 1840s. So we have a lot of history about the specific formation that becomes the minstrel show. There's then a generation of scholarship that starts looking at what is called early blackface minstrelsy. What are the antecedents to that? But that still focuses primarily in the United States. And so I wanted to think, why are we stopping our search for antecedents or precedent forms to 20 years prior, just in the same geographic location? Why not expand and see where the influences of that early phase of blackface minstrelsy were coming? From. And so there are these other forms of Blackface, especially in 18th century British theater, music and popular culture, that became important for me to think about, and hence the title Transoceanic Blackface.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
That is useful to understand the title and very neatly sets up the next thing I'd like for you to answer to us, which is, what does happen when you look further back into those antecedents of Anglophone blackface?
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Dr. Kellen Hawkesworth
So in my telling, I am focusing primarily on comic figurations of black racialized figures in theater and popular culture. There's, of course, an even deeper history of blackface that extends to the early modern period. There are blackface characters in Shakespeare experience, so on and so forth. But this project is really looking at this new articulation of, again, a comic black figure that shows up in the British theatrical culture. Around the middle of the 18th century, there's a proliferation of blackface servant characters. One is Kingston in High Life Below Stairs. Another is Mungo in the Padlock. And these were sensationally popular characters in exceedingly popular plays. They were performed throughout the United Kingdom, the United States, but also throughout the British Empire, including on board ships that were going from London to the colonies. And these comic figurations of blackness featured derogatory tropes of black speech. Black speech is almost always posited as an inarticulate imitation of white speech. It often shows these black male servant characters aspiring to freedom, but always being represented as incapable of properly performing the civilization that is required for freedom. Also, freedom is linked directly to interracial sexuality and criminality, as though once black people are free, everything about white imperial culture comes crashing down. And so there's this way in which they end up embodying racial hierarchy as natural. These comic plays always end with the social and racial order restored, with white supremacy affirmed and black servitude naturalized. When Britain moved towards the abolition of the slave trade and then of slavery itself, these tropes don't go away, but instead just get reworked. So we start seeing black servant characters still in blackface performed by white actors who, rather than simply being freed and becoming equal to white people, they start voluntarily putting themselves back into servitude, often calling themselves slaves, as though that is again their natural state. And so all of these early black characters in British theater are working through white imperial anxieties about freedom and unfreedom, for whom is freedom an inherent property? And in many of these plays, freedom is posited as an inherently white property. And black people are therefore necessarily dependent on white people. And hence Structures of white supremacy are affirmed. These plays then get taken up in visual culture. There are songs in these comic plays that then get sung far beyond the theatrical stage. And so they end up proliferating a vast array of popular culture in text, in print, in music that I term scriptive blackface, where it goes beyond the theater for everyday people to start taking up and incorporating in part of their everyday life. And it's my argument that it is through these many different vectors, both through precedents on the stage, but also these sort of capillaries throughout popular culture, that blackface extends its reach and sort of lays dormant, waiting for it to be refashioned into what later becomes blackface minstrelsy.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
This is really interesting to trace those origins back further, to see sort of what's developing. The other key thing that you mentioned earlier of kind of not wanting to fall into the trap of is looking at these sort of, you know, we might call them kind of Jim Crow performances, but not just assuming that they only show up, for instance, in the American south, where we usually see them analyzed. So can you tell us more about how these performances go beyond the US through the British Empire?
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Dr. Kellen Hawkesworth
Yeah, absolutely. So Jim Crow is a character who is fashioned by an American performer named T.D. rice, Thomas Dartmouth Rice. It becomes his signature character. And Jim Crow has long actually been theorized as the first global blackface phenomenon. Rice, after establishing Jim Crow as a popular mainstay of the American stage and American popular culture, goes on a wildly successful, successful tour of London and brings Jim Crow to Britain, where it is received rapturously. And so the question then is, what is going on? That Jim Crow appealed both to American audiences and British audiences. And there are two sort of question answers to that question. The first is that Rice himself was a regular theatrical actor. He worked his way up through the American theater repertory, which was substantively a British theatrical repertoire. And so he was performing a lot of these 18th century British comic plays and blackface roles. So he's already learning and incorporating a lot of those tropes into his figuration of Jim Crow. Jim Crow is first and foremost a song and a dance. He later includes the character in a number of plays, but he also learns sort of how to craft this character in such a way that it can touch on present day political and social concerns. This is what differentiates Jim Crow and what is often known as early blackface minstrelsy from its 18th century precedent, is that 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, and it's transatlantic and ultimately transoceanic popularity emerges right in this interesting time period between 1807 when Britain abolishes the slave trade, and 1834, or, sorry, 1807 is when it abolishes slavery in Britain itself, and 1834 when it abolishes slavery in its colonies. And Jim Crow emerges right in the middle of that. Ultimately, Britain has a workaround, which is that enslaved people in the colonies are not fully free until 1838. So even Rice's performances in London land in between 1834 and 1838. Right. When all of these questions about abolitionism and anti abolitionism are on the forefront of British minds. So that really is what Jim Crow comes to symbolize, is he walks this boundary line between freedom and unfreedom, freedom and slavery, but also, what is black freedom. He embodies all of these tropes of freedom not being put to proper use. Again, some of these same ones that were already germinating in the 18th century. But he makes this character laughable. He makes this all fun, and he popularizes it globally. So much so that in South Africa, for instance, in the 1830s, where enslaved people are awaiting their freedom, there is a local piece called Keki Kekelback that is in many ways picking up directly on Jim Crow, reworking it for a local audience, and dealing with what the freedom of enslaved people in South Africa would look like for that local audience.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Hmm. So that's really interesting to see this kind of key character in this key moment. And we're mentioning a bunch of places that are well beyond the American south and seeing this circulation more broadly. Is there anything further we need to understand about how blackface minstrelsy is becoming transoceanic and global in its circulation?
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Dr. Kellen Hawkesworth
I mean, I have so much I can say to that question. I'll try to be brief here, which is that in many ways, Rice shows that blackface as an American branded product. Right. I contest that it ever was distinctly American, but he very much wants to promote it as an American form and that America has something to teach the world. He actually says this about what he went and did in Britain when he returns to the state, is that he taught them the truth and about black people, and that that is, of course, a racist truth that he wanted to spread globally, and that that's really what blackface minstrelsy ends up becoming is after he returns to the United States. Other blackface performers know that British audiences are going to be receptive to this performance form. And so, only a few short years after his transatlantic tour, the first ensemble blackface minstrel troupes form. These are otherwise solo performers who get together and start performing as ensembles and traveling together, performing full evening performances. And almost as soon as the first of these, the Virginia minstrels, forms in New York City, a few months later, they go directly to London. And this sets a precedent where whenever a new troupe gets famous enough, popular enough in the United States, they immediately cross the pond and start performing in Britain as well. And so blackface minstrelsy is always this transatlantic, and, as I argue, a transoceanic phenomenon. Because as soon as these troops start going to Britain, colonists throughout the British empire, in South Africa, in Australia, in South Asia, ultimately in Otero and New Zealand, start putting together their own bespoke minstrel shows. They start gathering together songs, start gathering together scripts and putting up their own shows. And one of the key vectors for the spread of blackface minstrelsy globally are precisely these amateur performances that local people were doing blackface minstrelsy throughout the British empire before any global tours of professional troops. This forces us to, again, think about how performance is circulating globally. This belies any idea that there's an export model that, you know, something is fashioned in the United States and then it's just shipped off elsewhere. But instead, there's a complex interaction between global touring, right, These transatlantic tours, material circulation of print, of visual culture, of music, and local people who really want to embrace and put this on. 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. Here I want to really emphasize that imperialism is a ground for blackface minstrelsy's global popularity. It also is a ground for imperial racial discourses. There is something about this form that allowed it to speak to a broad array of racial anxieties, fears, tensions, and to allow people to work through them. And again, colonists throughout the globe were very eager to take up this form as a way of working through all sorts of racial discourse.
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- [23:09]
Dr. Kellen Hawkesworth
Experian.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, let's talk about some of the working through that these performances are doing. Because as you've outlined there, the sort of demand alone, the supply of it, like, there's clearly a lot of interest in this. And obviously we could say, oh, that's just entertainment, right? But we all know that entertainment and performance is having an impact, is kind of doing work on people's ideas. So what is happening with these circulations in all these different places doing to expand and embed racial hierarchies and racial discourses throughout the empire?
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Dr. Kellen Hawkesworth
So the blackface minstrel show, in many ways, sort of the apogee of blackface as a formal performance form is intentionally a flexible structure. It has three parts. There's an opening part, which is all sung music, which usually even gets subdivided into two or more parts of different kinds of music, comic and sentimental. You then have a middle part called the olio, which is just anything that had specialty acts. You know, there were a number of performers in any minstrel troupe. And so these could be musical performances, they could be dance performances, they could be comic sketches. And then you would have a big closing number, often a big closing burlesque as well. And this would be a sort of short play that was often a parody of either a popular drama, could usually be Shakespeare or opera, became incredibly popular objects of blackface burlesque. And then a big plantation scene often would close the whole thing down with a big dance number. And because it is structured in this way, where you can change the songs, you can change all of the different variety acts in the middle, you can change out any of the sketches or even the concluding number. It allows a lot of formal flexibility. And that minstrelsy is really about fungibility. Even the characters are interchangeable. So 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. It actually invites the adaptation of its dramaturgies to other racial subjects. So when in California and in Australia there is a large influx of Chinese migrants who come to work on gold mines, blackface minstrelsy is already there and already has a formula and immediately begins adapting that formula to start coming up with abject figurations of Asian people and specifically of Chinese people. So we have the advent of yellowface minstrelsy right? As part of a blackface minstrel show. This immediately becomes popular, becomes popular again in California, in Australia, ultimately goes global itself. Very specifically, one of the originators of these yellowface roles ends up in a company member, in a company with another member who is just an amateur performer at the time in Australia, working the gold mines in Australia. And that amateur performer is a guy named Dave Carson, who ends up being the first person to lead a blackface minstrel troupe to South Asia. And when he arrives in South Asia, he spends a couple years, but starts to adapt blackface minstrelsy, and especially, I think, the sort of intermediary type of the yellow face character to what we call brown face character, South Asian characters. And again, we see the same formula, right? How do we turn this already existing form into something that can incorporate these new racial subjects so that we can once again deal with white anxieties about living amongst or dealing with the cultural differences, all of the tensions, political, sexual, racial, otherwise gendered, that come with what Empire produces, which is all of these contact zones between different racialized people. And minstrelsy becomes this capacious site. It also becomes a sort of surrogate site for staging those contact zones. We get to have a facsimile of racial contact that is made safe by the dramaturgies of blackface minstrelsy.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Is this sort of being able to have discussion about race, but in a sort of bounded and therefore seemingly safe way? Is that why we see so many versions of Othello being staged in these different parts of the Empire?
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Dr. Kellen Hawkesworth
I would argue so. And again, like Othello is an interesting case because there are many blackface burlesques, blackface minstrel burlesques of Othello that show up especially on the US stage in the mid to late 19th century. But what's really fascinating about Othello is that even before the blackface minstrel show was invented, we see already British playwrights starting to take on this play and work through their anxieties about blackness, but also about other racial subjects of the British Empire in comic form. Othello is an obvious play for this kind of work in many ways, because it is the play in Shakespeare's canon that most directly addresses issues of race. It stages necessarily countless acts of physical racial contact right between Othello and, I want to say Othello is not necessarily black. Historically. Sometimes he's figured as being a sort of noble warrior, more as Coleridge calls him, which turns him into a more suitable tragic figure, he argues, than just being. If he were a black African is sort of his racial logic. There are other people who think of him as a black figure. And that. That's actually the great tragedy of the play, is that interracial sexuality is happening. And therefore tragedy can only ensue from that. But the point here is that Othello ends up being interpreted in all of these different ways as a way to resolve anxieties about the fact that we have a racialized figure on stage who is engaging in sexual contact with a white woman, Desdemona. So there's this long history of trying to work through these anxieties. Othello goes through all of these racial changes in terms of how he's figured on stage with different kinds of racializing makeup, different kind of racial costuming. And then we start getting, even before we get to blackface, minstrelsy, comic versions of blackface, which turn him into a bit of a clown. And so instead of being a tragic figure who we might feel anxious about or fearful of, now he's someone that audiences can laugh at, where the very idea of interracial sexuality is made. The joke of the play, Desdemona becomes foolish, and Othello becomes foolish. Anyone who would participate in this becomes foolish. And what this points up is how Empire is always something that is creating contact between racialized people and white imperialists. And how then the Empire sets about managing that racial contact is actually a primary concern. The work of Ann Laura Stoller is very informative here. That racial discourse has to be taught and reinforced in large part because Empire necessitates all of these points of racial contact. And those points of racial contact are always necessarily points of working through questions of gender and especially questions of sexuality. What is an appropriate gendered performance for men and for women? And how do we deal with the possibility that different racialized people will come into sexual contact and might even produce children together, which is, of course, anathema to the white supremacy that is supporting the British Empire at the time. And so Othello then becomes this very voted site for working through all of those questions and all of those tensions, both tragically and and comically.
- [31:21]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Can we talk a little bit more about the gender anxieties that are showing up in Othello and in other performances of this sort? I mean, the kind of sexual nature of it you've clearly explained there, I think, and does definitely show up, obviously, in the plot of Othello. But it's not just those questions that are related to questions of gender that you discuss in the book, right?
- [31:43]
Dr. Kellen Hawkesworth
Absolutely. So the other. I mean, let me rewind a second. These kind of gender and sexual anxieties are also central to menstrual sea blackface minstrelsy itself. Blackface characters, again, are always presented as being in some way failed imitations of white people. So black male characters can't speak English properly. Black male characters don't know how to dress properly. They're either too shabby or too ostentatious in their fashions. Black male characters are always at risk of. And this goes all the way back to the 18th century British characters seducing white women, right? So this fear of interracial sexuality is a through line of blackface and blackface minstrelsy. As blackface minstrelsy expands its character list to include yellowface characters and brown faced characters, any number of racialized characters, these same tropes show up again and again. So again, yellow faced characters can't speak English properly and are always threatening to try and seduce a white woman, right? South Asian characters, it's the same thing, can't speak English properly, always threatening to seduce white women. What we see by the time these other characters emerge is that the tropes are so well worn that the comedy of it is just overbearing. Right? It just hits you over the head with the impossibility in the minstrel show for these racialized characters to succeed. And that's the way that blackface minstrelsy really creates the safe space. It allows us to entertain the possibility of it, but always to keep it very much contained. This does have one major change, however, which is that once we have minstrelsy in all of these colonized sites, it creates the possibility for colonized subjects to start to engage with minstrelsy with its discourses, to start producing it themselves. One of the key sites we see this is in South Asia, where we have a really fascinating example of how minstrelsy's gender anxieties and its racial anxieties come together. One other thing I should say about its gender anxieties is that minstrelsy is really centrally focused on promulgating normative gender discourses. Its comic devices mocked men, mostly racialized men, but it also really centrally mocks women who deviate from normative gender roles. So this includes mocking racialized women, frankly, for being racialized women, right? For not being the normative white woman. It also focuses on sort of fashioning idealized caricatures of racialized women as servants, right? In servitude to white women and to the white family. That's what is normative for non white women. And also though it is very eager to scorn any white woman who dares challenge dominant racial discourses and normative racial performance. So abolitionists, feminists, women who present themselves publicly, all come in for minstrel parody. These scripts travel very far. And one of them is a very famous piece of kind of yellow journalism called the Girl of the Period. It's a anti feminist screed written by a woman, an anti feminist woman, that has a sort of immediate global uptake because it touches on all these anxieties about what is the proper public presentation of women in this rapidly shifting modern world. And it frames this by arguing that white women are betraying their own race by adopting what this woman, Elizabeth Linton, viewed as racialized fashion. And so already we have this notion of proper gender, gender performance, and proper gender discourse being entangled with race and racialization. What then happens when it goes global is that a South Asian theater maker adapts Linton's text to a song called the Parsi Girl of the Period. This is about Parsi women who are part of an ethnic group in Mumbai, India. And this weaves together a complex entanglement of discourses about gender, theatrical performance, public visibility and national tradition, most ironically because it is performed by a white woman performer. So in all of these performances, you have white women who can take the stage, whereas South Asian women cannot. White women who are performing in a sort of brown face mockery of South Asian women who are themselves figured as trying to imitate white women. And again, you can see the complexity and the level of nuance that goes into these kinds of racial parody that are really then serving as some kind of public pedagogy for what proper gender performance is throughout the Empire.
- [36:54]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
It's so interesting to trace how these things have the many different impacts in the many different places. And really kind of goes back to what you were saying earlier about the problem of silos. If we only look at one place and understand what's happening, and also if we only look at one time as well. So I did mention at the beginning that the book covers the 18th and 19th centuries, but does go into the 20th as well. So what happens with transoceanic blackface continuing in the 20th century?
- [37:19]
Dr. Kellen Hawkesworth
Blackface minstrelsy, like every performance form, has its heyday and then has its long, slow decline. So by the 1890s, the Minstrel show is old hat. It's not a popular mainstay any longer, though it does still exist, and it primarily exists in a number of offshoots. It becomes once Again, a kind of solo specialization within vaudeville. It also, though, finds its way into what was then new media. So every time there is a new innovation in media, blackface is right there at the very beginning. This happens for film, this happens for radio, this happens for television. And so by the mid 20th century, we have blackface comedies still happening on television in the United States. In Amos and Andy, this is actually the object of a major organized protest, which is one of the reasons why we now understand that blackface is a taboo was because of the work done by activists back in the 1950s. But at the same time, Amos and Andy is popular in the United States. The BBC is airing its own blackface show, the Black and White Minstrel show, which actually runs all the way until 1978. So blackface is still part of mainstream US and British popular culture well into the 20th century. It continues to be disseminated throughout the Empire as well. The Black and White Minstrel show was rebroadcast by the Australian broadcast Epstein Co. Into the 1980s in South Africa. They did their own local versions of the Black and White Minstrel show because they could not broadcast it due to apartheid restrictions on television. But this is just to say that media becomes a major vector for the ongoing circulation and dissemination of blackface. Blackface also continues to be part of the repertoire of popular theatrical performance everywhere that the Blackface Minstrel show had gone. So, for instance, in places like South Africa, you have playwrights at the turn of the century who are writing comedies, and they're clearly citing blackface, minstrel songs, jokes, characters, et cetera, that had long been performed on the South African stage. You also have it still lingering in everyday life. So blackface has long structured racial discourse. It was the popular performance form of empire for the better part of a century. And so it really shaped how people understood race itself. And so even everyday racial discourses continue to be informed by blackface and minstrelsy, if not always in obvious ways, in more subtle, everyday, habitual ways.
- [40:10]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Which is intriguing and also, I imagine, kind of hard to investigate in some senses and notice and be able to piece together with this longer history. So helpful that you've traced out, kind of going both further backwards in time and maybe further forwards in time than our sort of traditional understandings of this would show, which is obviously quite helpful for us to have that additional nuance. So I'm curious what you might be investigating next or currently, given that this book is off your desk. Is there anything you're working on at the moment you'd like to give us a sneak preview of.
- [40:41]
Dr. Kellen Hawkesworth
I've got a handful of projects and the first I'll say is that I really do hope that this book is an invitation to other scholars to do the the incomplete work that was impossible to fit into this one book, as you're saying, it was difficult for me to continue tracing into the 20th century some of the various strands of how blackface continued to shape performance culture, but also popular culture more broadly. And so the first project that I'm working on right now is a special section of the theatre and performance studies journal tdr. And the special section is titled Blackface Geographies. I'm co editing this with my colleague Douglas A. Jones and we've gathered together a lot of new research on blackface and related forms of racial bias performance globally. Really trying to pursue some of these questions I was raising in the book around global circulations, both historical and contemporary. And this special section is actually in the very next issue, so it should be out very soon, maybe even by the time this goes live. So I do hope your listeners check it out. I also have two book projects that I'm starting. The first is tentatively titled Performing African on the African American Stage. This in many ways is an inverse project to what I pursued with Transoceanic Blackface, which looks at how figurations of blackness circulated globally. Here I'm interested in how figurations of Africa and the African have showed up in Black American theater historically. Rather than viewing this as a single relationship that's just being staged over and over, I'm interested in tracing how black Americans have re envisioned and reimagined, reworked their relationship to the African continent over a long history of black American performance. My other book project, which actually grew out of this first follow up project is tentatively titled Revisionary Blackness. And that project I'm looking at a number of mid century black American playwrights and I really am curious to think through how their emphasis on black drama as a written form builds into it certain modes of thinking, certain modes of mediated reflection on blackness, on black experience that in some ways we've left behind after the black arts movement. And a sort of embrace of blackness is something that is immediate or more visceral. And so it's a project that wants to think about what are the affordances of black drama rather than black performance.
- [43:23]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Goodness, plenty to be keeping busy with, many of which are. I can definitely hear sort of similarities between the book we've been discussing and current work, which is always intriguing. So for listeners who want to learn more they can, of course, read the book we are talking about titled Transoceanic Empire Race Performance, published by Northwestern University Press in 2024. Kellen, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
- [43:46]
Dr. Kellen Hawkesworth
Thank you, Miranda.
- [43:47]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
It's been a pleasure.