A 21st-Century Perspective

FRANCESCA ROYSTER: I struggle myself with putting myself in the place of an audience member because I think that it's difficult as a 21st-century scholar to really think about the psychological and sort of psychic effects of watching blackface, but I do think that there is a way that watching the imitation of blackness through minstrelsy is a way of first of all demonstrating control over blackness. And definitely, I think, as we consider the space of minstrelsy on the stage, and kind of the fictional world of minstrelsy, we can't separate it from the politics of race that are happening all around. So this is because the minstrel performance often parodied black religion, black sexuality, as well as black civility and social habits, these were three areas that were volatile in terms of intercultural relations and racism. So these minstrel shows approached these very volatile subjects in a humorous way and it gave audiences and actors also, a chance to kind of embody these sort of feared areas and to sort of laugh at them. It was kind of a catalyst in that way.

But I think that there's also an aspect in terms of thinking about the black body itself where minstrel shows gave white audiences who lived in segregated cultures a chance to look at and you know, think about, dream about, the black body which was, you know, a forbidden thing. To desire in some ways the black body and to feel a connection to it, feel an intimacy to it, and certainly in writings that I've read of blackface performers who are white who describe the process of putting on blackface, part of what they describe is this ability to kind of put on a mask that allows them to become something else.

It demonstrates the way that Shakespeare had not yet kind of become this realm of highbrow culture, that it was really a part of popular culture and therefore in a lot of different ways in American culture, integrated with other kind of popular ways of entertaining oneself. That's definitely one thing that we can get from the connection between minstrelsy and Shakespeare. And that we see Americans using Shakespearean narratives to talk about the political and social concerns of being Americans and of the struggles around fears of miscegenation—issues of slavery, for example, what to do with white immigrants like Germans and Irish, how are those immigrants integrated into the binary opposition of black and white. Those were some of the American concerns that were worked out through the Shakespearean narratives or these minstrel performances of Shakespearean narratives.