Racechanges: White Skin, Black Face in American Culture (Race and American Culture)

356 Pages·2000·34.24 MB·English

by  Susan Gubar

RACECHANGES
RACE AND AMERICAN CULTURE
Arnold Rampersad and Shelley Fisher Fishkin
General Editors
Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery,
and the American Working Class and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century
Eric Lott America
Saidiya V. Hartman
The Dialect of Modernism: Race,
Language, and Twentieth-Century Racechanges: White Skin, Black Face
Literature in American Culture
Michael North Susan Gubar
Race: The History of an Idea in
Bordering on the Body: The Racial
America, New Edition
Matrix of Modern Fiction and
Thomas F. Gossett
Culture
Laura Doyle
Psychoanalysis and Black Novels:
Desire and the Protocols of Race
"WhoSetYouFlowin'?":
Claudia Tate
The African-American Migration
Narrative
Black Hunger: Food and the Politics
Farah Jasmine Griffin
of U.S. Identity
Doris Witt
"Doers of the Word": African-
American Women Speakers and The New Red Negro: The Literary Left
Writers in the North (1830-1880) and African American Poetry,
Carla Peterson 1930-1946
James Edward Smethurst
Race, Rape, and Lynching: The Red
Record of American Literature, New-slave Narratives: Studies in the
1890-1912 Social Logic of a Literary Form
Sandra Gunning AshrafH.A. Rushdy
RACECHANGES
White Skin,
Black Face
in American Culture
SUSAN GUBAR
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
New York Oxford
Oxford University Press
Oxford New York
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Berlin Ibadan
Copyright © 1997 Susan Gubar
First published in 1997 by Oxford University Press, Inc.
198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016
First issued as an Oxford University Press paperback, 2000.
Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
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electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise,
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Gubar, Susan, 1944-
Racechanges: white skin, black face in American culture /
Susan Gubar.
p. cm. — (Race and American culture)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-19-511002-1
ISBN 0-19-513418-4 (Pbk.)
1. Afro-Americans in popular culture. 2. Blackface entertainers—
United States—History—20th century. 3. Arts, Modern—20th
century—United States. I. Title. II. Series.
NX652.A37G83 1997 305.8'00973—DC20 96-28151
1 3 5 7 9 8 6 42
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
For Donald Gray
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CONTENTS
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS ix
PREFACE xiii
1. ADVENTURES IN THE SKIN TRADE 3
2. SPIRIT-MURDER AT THE MOVIES 53
Blackface Lynchings
3. MAKING WHITE, BECOMING BLACK 95
Myths of Racial Origin in the Harlem Renaissance
4. DE MODERN DO MR. BONES 134
(and All That Ventriloquist Jazz)
5. PSYCHOPATHOLOGIES OF BLACK ENVY 169
Queer Colors
6. WHAT WILL THE MIXED CHILD DELIVER? 203
Conceiving Color Without Race
7. THE EDIBLE COMPLEX 240
A Postscript
NOTES 263
WORKS CITED 293
INDEX 313
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ILLUSTRATIONS
CHAPTER 1
Figure 1.1 JaniformVase 4
Figure 1.2 White Face of Janiform Vase 4
Figure 1.3 Black Face of Janiform Vase 4
Figure 1.4 Man Ray, Noire et blanche (Black and white) 7
Figure 1.5 Man Ray, Noire et blanche, negative version 8
Figure 1.6 Hannah Hoch, Entfuhrung (Abduction) 9
Figure 1.7 Hannah Hoch, Denkmall II: Eitelkeit (Monument II:
Vanity) 9
Figure 1.8 Engraving of Ellen Craft 14
Figure 1.9 Carrie Mae Weems, Mirror, Mirror 16
Figure 1.10 Pears'Soap Advertisement 22
Figure 1.11 Annie Leibovitz, Whoopi Goldberg 23
Figure 1.12 David Wayne and Keenan Wynn in FMan's Rainbow 26
Figure 1.13 Godfrey Cambridge in Watermelon Man 28
Figure 1.14 James Whitmore in Black Like Me 29
Figure 1.15 Portrait of Beethoven 32
Figure 1.16 The Morphing of Queen Elizabeth 33
Figure 1.17 Rebirth of a Nation 34
Figure 1.18 The Emperor of Abyssinia and His Suite 35
Figure 1.19 White Like You, from Dick Gregory, What's
Happening? 36
Figure 1.20 Herbert M. Cole, White Man 39
Figure 1.21 Man Ray, Noire et blanche, vertical pose 49
Figure 1.22 Charles Cullen, Tableau 50
Figure 1.23 Robert Mapplethorpe, Ken Moody and Robert
Sherman 50
Figure 1.24 Jean-Paul Darriau, Red, Blond, Black, and Olive 51