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Race and American Culture
Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class
For over two centuries, America has celebrated the very black culture it attempts to control and repress, and nowhere is this phenomenon more apparent than in the strange practice of blackface performance. Born of extreme racial and class conflicts, the blackface minstrel show sometimes usefully intensified them. Based on the appropriation of black dialect, music, and dance, minstrelsy at once applauded and lampooned black culture, ironically contributing to a "blackening of America." Drawing on recent research in cultural studies and social history, Eric Lott examines the role of the blackface minstrel show in the political struggles of the years leading up to the Civil War. Reading minstrel music, lyrics, jokes, burlesque skits, and illustrations in tandem with working-class racial ideologies and the sex/gender system, Love and Theft argues that blackface minstrelsy both embodied and disrupted the racial tendencies of its largely white, male, working-class audiences. Underwritten by envy as well as repulsion, sympathetic identification as well as fear--a dialectic 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. Lott exposes minstrelsy as a signifier for multiple breaches: the rift between high and low cultures, the commodification of the dispossessed by the empowered, the attraction mixed with guilt of whites caught in the act of cultural thievery.
328 pages, Paperback
First published October 28, 1993
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About the author
Eric Lott
11 books6 followersEric Lott is Professor of English and American Studies at the Graduate Center, City University of New York.
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October 6, 2020
Recent revelations that so many politicians and heads of state participated in blackface in college or admitted to enjoying the shows inspired me to find out what the hell was going on. Turns out my American public education lied to me: baseball is not the American pastime. The minstrel show is.
It began as a form of theater in the 1830s, though it has its origins much, much earlier. People had been dressing up as other races and genders before going out and committing acts of defiance for generations. The Boston Tea party, for example: to white people, Native Americans represented people free from authority, a symbol of chaos, so to don their dress was to put on a spirit of rebellion against European society itself. So what did black people represent to working white males in the decades prior to the American Civil War?
The author seeks not to moralize or judge rather to analyze this pop culture phenomenon from the point of view of its audience: what were the viewers getting out of it, and why did they make it so popular? The author chooses to do this through economic and... Freudian analysis. Yeah, this is a Freudian take on just what the white working class theatergoer was getting out of blackface shows.
This is a little hard to swallow (Freudian implications intended) because it seems like the wrong angle to analyze blackface theater. I’m always skeptical of such takes because from what little I know of Freud, there’s a simpler explanation for damn near everything.
The history doesn’t begin until chapter 2, meaning you have to get through a lot of Freudian stuff first. Eventually the book does dive into the minstrel show’s origins, and that’s when it becomes interesting because this is where all the stereotypes of African Americans come from.
Contrary to popular belief, minstrel performers did not visit plantations and observe slave culture before bringing that to the stage. All of the cultural exchanges happened in the North, where the races met and mixed, such as taverns and ship docks. White people saw and heard them then, and they appropriated what they witnessed for the stage, setting these interactions in a fictional Southern plantation. When a minstrel performer saw an African street vendor in New York City hawking watermelons, the minstrel actor made watermelons part of his act, and this became a meme within the style of theater, overblown to comic proportions. Slapstick antics, folk singing, mock violence, lame puns, foolish speeches. Essentially everything Americans now associate with cartoons originated in the minstrel theater.
Perhaps most notably, they portrayed Africans as simple-minded and uneducated because by and large that’s what the actors saw on the street, but this was not attributed to Africans being slaves and thus not allowed to learn to read or write or have the upbringing and opportunities whites did. It was simply presumed to be intrinsic of their race. There were entire scientific specialties devoted to studying race at the time. There was a good deal of “scientific” justification for why white people were at the top of society. The American School of Ethnology was founded in the 1840s, which the book states championed the idea that God created the races separately and unequally, different species essentially, therefore white people were justified in subjugating them because they were simply incapable of being cultural or intellectual equals with whites. (Phrenology was also a real science back then. Look it up. It’s a hoot.) All of these ideas were going around at the time, and the minstrel show drew upon them. It sometimes subverted them but more often than not reinforced them.
This form of theater was seen as a style of theater. Americans of all ages and social classes knew the minstrel theater as the new groundling entertainment. It united the nation (the northern states, at least) in a cultural experience; most white people accepted the minstrel show as authentic, real Africans on stage performing, even as the actors themselves went out of their way to show the audience that they themselves were not black.
Knowing this, why did it captivate its audience? The shows began as opening and intermission plays for other productions, so why did they grow in popularity so quickly? The author argues the audience of Northern whites empathized with the depiction of the “working fool” being exploited by some upper class white man.
As the economy became less driven by apprentices becoming masters of professions, and more and more controlled (not to mention mechanized) by business-owning capitalists, working-class white men felt the squeeze. They saw themselves in the faux-black men on stage: the clowns who were at the bottom of society, victims of swindlers and slapstick antics condemned to work for someone else and yet never to reap the benefits of their own labor. This was them, exploited human beings, if not by a slave-owner, then by an employer. The minstrel show expressed an emerging sense of dividing class lines between white men at the time, which I think is a much more tangible explanation for why it became such a pop-culture success than Freudian symbolism.
Simply put: entertainment for the upper classes (Shakespeare, the orchestra) no longer appealed to the working people. Blackface was rebellion against the emerging high-classes and a slap in the face to “respectable” entertainment and culture. The minstrel show reflected the audience’s own (economic) situation in a way nothing else ever had as a way to laugh at their own plight while at the same time look down upon the plight of others.
While subconsciously envying the black penis, of course.
Okay, the Freudian analysis is absurd at times, as it is so speculative and makes the book difficult for outsiders to access, but the chapters detailing the sexual appeal of these acts do make sense, especially from the point of view of a Victorian audience. Suggestive song and dance certainly would rock the (white) world for this very reason. This makes the blackface show the rock-n-roll or punk rock of its time, complete with blatant innuendo both in lyrics and in dance: they were sexual rebellion against discreet, Victorian society.
All of this made the minstrel show America’s first pop culture hit. It had enormous appeal in the masses while drawing universal revulsion from its critics, not because of its cultural distortion and racial caricaturing but because it lacked any kind of sophistication. Critics at the time noted this was the first true American contribution to music and theater—something that did not merely mimic the cultural forms of Europe but stood on its own as American. Working-class audiences ate it up because it was so new, it reflected their own situation, and the upper classes despised it.
Little thought was given to what effect it had on the perception of the races being portrayed. The author argues this was another aspect of its appeal: to exploit the audience’s fear/fascination of the “other” while at the same time containing this fear, thereby asserting control over it by way of appropriation and mockery. Lott does make a good case that white men feared above all else a mixing of the races both 1) sexually, in Freudian terms of protecting their subconscious chance at procreation against what they perceived to be “more masculine” men, and 2) economically in terms of protecting their professions and livelihoods from an influx of competing laborers. (More on that in a moment.) The minstrel show put those fears front and center for all to laugh at in song and dance and foolish slapstick skits.
Rather telling is that actual black people were almost never allowed on stage, and when they were, they had to wear blackface makeup, too. Audiences didn’t want to see real black people. They wanted their subconscious anxieties mocked. They wanted the distortion. They wanted to confront and ridicule their fear of the other, not to mention their own economic frustrations, without actually facing them.
Not just fears and anxieties but desire. Working people no longer identified with the troubles of Shakespeare’s Hamlet or Macbeth. Instead people expressed displacement (many were immigrants, after all), loss, yearning for earlier times when the social order made sense. Times were beginning to change in the 1830s, and people recognized the old ways of European life were waning in the face of maturing capitalism: the household was no longer central to the economy, with the man as its king and the wife and children all unquestionably subordinate to him. Increasingly people had to rely on wage labor from an employer, meaning working men were not in charge of their own professions, so they feared becoming slaves to wages. The minstrel show portrayed all of this when no other form of entertainment did, often setting them in a fictionalized version of the South where the plantation was family and Master was father. The white men in the audience secretly desired to be the slave-owner, master of the labor system again, even as the focus was always on the blackface actors.
It also allowed for expression of misogyny, as women were now part of the labor force, competing for men’s jobs, and husbands were no longer kings of the household. Instead of directing the audience’s anger to the upper classes causing this shift in society, the minstrel show helped the audience direct its anger at their fellow laborers as competitors for jobs. All of this, the author puts forth, is encoded in the minstrel songs and skits.
The author argues that the presence of slavery in America kept the workers from uniting as a class, for the minstrel show reminded whites that there existed some class lower than themselves, therefore working white men didn’t have it so bad after all working for a wage. The minstrel show played up the white man’s fear of slipping down the social ladder, not to mention the possibility of social mobility for the enslaved. To free the slaves (or even to let slavery expand into the western territories) would have meant competition for jobs. Slavery was portrayed as stable in minstrel shows but jokingly fluid to evoke this fear of the Other coming to take the white man’s livelihood.
Things changed when the California gold rush hit. All of the songs that began as minstrel hits were rewritten by prospectors going west to reflect their current situation, and they did such a good job nobody today remembers the original lyrics. Americans still believe Old Dan Tucker was a “Frontier” song, and let’s not get started on what Dixieland originally meant.
By the time of the Gold Rush of the mid-1800s, the nation had become paralyzed by the question of whether the new western territories would be slave or free. Working whites began to despise the idea of slavery spreading to the western states because they would in effect be out of a job having to compete with slave labor there. For a while, it was assumed slavery should be contained to the Southern states, but this was purely for the benefit of working white men, nothing to do with morality. (If somehow slavery were to fall, people favored sending the liberated blacks to Africa, again for the purpose of preventing Africans from competing with whites for employment.)
Though many held moral objections to slavery, the larger debate up through the American Civil War was never about freeing fellow human beings from bondage or ending slavery as a moral ideal. It was all about whites fearful of blacks competing for wage labor, either as slaves or fellow employees. Rather than see Africans as fellow sufferers in the working world falling prey to exploitation and uniting as a class against it, the minstrel theater taught white men to fear becoming equal to a slave in competition for employment. This prejudice is very much part of the American identity. At its core, it’s what the blackface theater was all about.
This is a heavy read but also informative, though the Freudian stuff is awkward and I would have preferred a strictly cultural history rather than swimming in speculation of castration and cross-dressing psychology. American public education does not teach very much about what happened between the American Revolution and the American Civil war. “Love and Theft” takes place in those intervening years, and the author makes it easy to slip into this other time when the minstrel show was rebellion against the current culture, mocking everything happening between boss/worker, rich/poor, and black/white. It helped white America laugh at its problems and even galvanize itself in its goals, though it did so at the expense of the most disadvantaged people in society.
Disappointing that the author does not dive in to what effect the minstrel show had on African Americans, though it can be inferred from the text. I think he should have done this rather than compare and contrast stage versions of Uncle Tom’s Cabin in the final chapter. He highlights how the different adaptations changed the story to suit political motives, using blackface tropes in a drama, which was radical for the time, but he also treats this as the “culmination” of minstrelsy. It just doesn’t seem like that big a deal to me; why not continue past that into how the minstrel show sustained itself over the next century, what audiences got out of it then, and how it affected African Americans? He spends all this time covering blackface’s beginning, so why not cover the rest of its history?
Blackface used the plight of African slaves as fiction in order to express the plights and fears of white working men, helping them laugh at their increasing suffering under wage-labor while at the same time reassuring them that they were nonetheless above the black man. By portraying blacks as clowns on stage for white men to laugh at, it burned into the minds of its audience a sense of gratitude for not being a slave, and to guard their wage labor at all costs as a symbol of their social status.
This pop-culture firestorm gave white Americans a perception of African Americans that endures to this day. The legacy of the minstrel show in the United States cannot be overstated, and yet it has been deliberately buried. It should be a case study in how fiction and entertainment can create reality because the minstrel show helped its audience not only express its fear of the black man but legitimize it. This should have been the book’s final analysis. Without it, the study feels incomplete.
It began as a form of theater in the 1830s, though it has its origins much, much earlier. People had been dressing up as other races and genders before going out and committing acts of defiance for generations. The Boston Tea party, for example: to white people, Native Americans represented people free from authority, a symbol of chaos, so to don their dress was to put on a spirit of rebellion against European society itself. So what did black people represent to working white males in the decades prior to the American Civil War?
The author seeks not to moralize or judge rather to analyze this pop culture phenomenon from the point of view of its audience: what were the viewers getting out of it, and why did they make it so popular? The author chooses to do this through economic and... Freudian analysis. Yeah, this is a Freudian take on just what the white working class theatergoer was getting out of blackface shows.
Bold swagger, irrepressible desire, sheer bodily display: in a real sense the minstrel man was the penis, that organ returning in a variety of contexts, at times ludicrous, at others rather less so.
This is a little hard to swallow (Freudian implications intended) because it seems like the wrong angle to analyze blackface theater. I’m always skeptical of such takes because from what little I know of Freud, there’s a simpler explanation for damn near everything.
The history doesn’t begin until chapter 2, meaning you have to get through a lot of Freudian stuff first. Eventually the book does dive into the minstrel show’s origins, and that’s when it becomes interesting because this is where all the stereotypes of African Americans come from.
Contrary to popular belief, minstrel performers did not visit plantations and observe slave culture before bringing that to the stage. All of the cultural exchanges happened in the North, where the races met and mixed, such as taverns and ship docks. White people saw and heard them then, and they appropriated what they witnessed for the stage, setting these interactions in a fictional Southern plantation. When a minstrel performer saw an African street vendor in New York City hawking watermelons, the minstrel actor made watermelons part of his act, and this became a meme within the style of theater, overblown to comic proportions. Slapstick antics, folk singing, mock violence, lame puns, foolish speeches. Essentially everything Americans now associate with cartoons originated in the minstrel theater.
Perhaps most notably, they portrayed Africans as simple-minded and uneducated because by and large that’s what the actors saw on the street, but this was not attributed to Africans being slaves and thus not allowed to learn to read or write or have the upbringing and opportunities whites did. It was simply presumed to be intrinsic of their race. There were entire scientific specialties devoted to studying race at the time. There was a good deal of “scientific” justification for why white people were at the top of society. The American School of Ethnology was founded in the 1840s, which the book states championed the idea that God created the races separately and unequally, different species essentially, therefore white people were justified in subjugating them because they were simply incapable of being cultural or intellectual equals with whites. (Phrenology was also a real science back then. Look it up. It’s a hoot.) All of these ideas were going around at the time, and the minstrel show drew upon them. It sometimes subverted them but more often than not reinforced them.
This form of theater was seen as a style of theater. Americans of all ages and social classes knew the minstrel theater as the new groundling entertainment. It united the nation (the northern states, at least) in a cultural experience; most white people accepted the minstrel show as authentic, real Africans on stage performing, even as the actors themselves went out of their way to show the audience that they themselves were not black.
Knowing this, why did it captivate its audience? The shows began as opening and intermission plays for other productions, so why did they grow in popularity so quickly? The author argues the audience of Northern whites empathized with the depiction of the “working fool” being exploited by some upper class white man.
As the economy became less driven by apprentices becoming masters of professions, and more and more controlled (not to mention mechanized) by business-owning capitalists, working-class white men felt the squeeze. They saw themselves in the faux-black men on stage: the clowns who were at the bottom of society, victims of swindlers and slapstick antics condemned to work for someone else and yet never to reap the benefits of their own labor. This was them, exploited human beings, if not by a slave-owner, then by an employer. The minstrel show expressed an emerging sense of dividing class lines between white men at the time, which I think is a much more tangible explanation for why it became such a pop-culture success than Freudian symbolism.
Simply put: entertainment for the upper classes (Shakespeare, the orchestra) no longer appealed to the working people. Blackface was rebellion against the emerging high-classes and a slap in the face to “respectable” entertainment and culture. The minstrel show reflected the audience’s own (economic) situation in a way nothing else ever had as a way to laugh at their own plight while at the same time look down upon the plight of others.
While subconsciously envying the black penis, of course.
Okay, the Freudian analysis is absurd at times, as it is so speculative and makes the book difficult for outsiders to access, but the chapters detailing the sexual appeal of these acts do make sense, especially from the point of view of a Victorian audience. Suggestive song and dance certainly would rock the (white) world for this very reason. This makes the blackface show the rock-n-roll or punk rock of its time, complete with blatant innuendo both in lyrics and in dance: they were sexual rebellion against discreet, Victorian society.
All of this made the minstrel show America’s first pop culture hit. It had enormous appeal in the masses while drawing universal revulsion from its critics, not because of its cultural distortion and racial caricaturing but because it lacked any kind of sophistication. Critics at the time noted this was the first true American contribution to music and theater—something that did not merely mimic the cultural forms of Europe but stood on its own as American. Working-class audiences ate it up because it was so new, it reflected their own situation, and the upper classes despised it.
Little thought was given to what effect it had on the perception of the races being portrayed. The author argues this was another aspect of its appeal: to exploit the audience’s fear/fascination of the “other” while at the same time containing this fear, thereby asserting control over it by way of appropriation and mockery. Lott does make a good case that white men feared above all else a mixing of the races both 1) sexually, in Freudian terms of protecting their subconscious chance at procreation against what they perceived to be “more masculine” men, and 2) economically in terms of protecting their professions and livelihoods from an influx of competing laborers. (More on that in a moment.) The minstrel show put those fears front and center for all to laugh at in song and dance and foolish slapstick skits.
Rather telling is that actual black people were almost never allowed on stage, and when they were, they had to wear blackface makeup, too. Audiences didn’t want to see real black people. They wanted their subconscious anxieties mocked. They wanted the distortion. They wanted to confront and ridicule their fear of the other, not to mention their own economic frustrations, without actually facing them.
Not just fears and anxieties but desire. Working people no longer identified with the troubles of Shakespeare’s Hamlet or Macbeth. Instead people expressed displacement (many were immigrants, after all), loss, yearning for earlier times when the social order made sense. Times were beginning to change in the 1830s, and people recognized the old ways of European life were waning in the face of maturing capitalism: the household was no longer central to the economy, with the man as its king and the wife and children all unquestionably subordinate to him. Increasingly people had to rely on wage labor from an employer, meaning working men were not in charge of their own professions, so they feared becoming slaves to wages. The minstrel show portrayed all of this when no other form of entertainment did, often setting them in a fictionalized version of the South where the plantation was family and Master was father. The white men in the audience secretly desired to be the slave-owner, master of the labor system again, even as the focus was always on the blackface actors.
It also allowed for expression of misogyny, as women were now part of the labor force, competing for men’s jobs, and husbands were no longer kings of the household. Instead of directing the audience’s anger to the upper classes causing this shift in society, the minstrel show helped the audience direct its anger at their fellow laborers as competitors for jobs. All of this, the author puts forth, is encoded in the minstrel songs and skits.
The author argues that the presence of slavery in America kept the workers from uniting as a class, for the minstrel show reminded whites that there existed some class lower than themselves, therefore working white men didn’t have it so bad after all working for a wage. The minstrel show played up the white man’s fear of slipping down the social ladder, not to mention the possibility of social mobility for the enslaved. To free the slaves (or even to let slavery expand into the western territories) would have meant competition for jobs. Slavery was portrayed as stable in minstrel shows but jokingly fluid to evoke this fear of the Other coming to take the white man’s livelihood.
Things changed when the California gold rush hit. All of the songs that began as minstrel hits were rewritten by prospectors going west to reflect their current situation, and they did such a good job nobody today remembers the original lyrics. Americans still believe Old Dan Tucker was a “Frontier” song, and let’s not get started on what Dixieland originally meant.
By the time of the Gold Rush of the mid-1800s, the nation had become paralyzed by the question of whether the new western territories would be slave or free. Working whites began to despise the idea of slavery spreading to the western states because they would in effect be out of a job having to compete with slave labor there. For a while, it was assumed slavery should be contained to the Southern states, but this was purely for the benefit of working white men, nothing to do with morality. (If somehow slavery were to fall, people favored sending the liberated blacks to Africa, again for the purpose of preventing Africans from competing with whites for employment.)
Though many held moral objections to slavery, the larger debate up through the American Civil War was never about freeing fellow human beings from bondage or ending slavery as a moral ideal. It was all about whites fearful of blacks competing for wage labor, either as slaves or fellow employees. Rather than see Africans as fellow sufferers in the working world falling prey to exploitation and uniting as a class against it, the minstrel theater taught white men to fear becoming equal to a slave in competition for employment. This prejudice is very much part of the American identity. At its core, it’s what the blackface theater was all about.
This is a heavy read but also informative, though the Freudian stuff is awkward and I would have preferred a strictly cultural history rather than swimming in speculation of castration and cross-dressing psychology. American public education does not teach very much about what happened between the American Revolution and the American Civil war. “Love and Theft” takes place in those intervening years, and the author makes it easy to slip into this other time when the minstrel show was rebellion against the current culture, mocking everything happening between boss/worker, rich/poor, and black/white. It helped white America laugh at its problems and even galvanize itself in its goals, though it did so at the expense of the most disadvantaged people in society.
Disappointing that the author does not dive in to what effect the minstrel show had on African Americans, though it can be inferred from the text. I think he should have done this rather than compare and contrast stage versions of Uncle Tom’s Cabin in the final chapter. He highlights how the different adaptations changed the story to suit political motives, using blackface tropes in a drama, which was radical for the time, but he also treats this as the “culmination” of minstrelsy. It just doesn’t seem like that big a deal to me; why not continue past that into how the minstrel show sustained itself over the next century, what audiences got out of it then, and how it affected African Americans? He spends all this time covering blackface’s beginning, so why not cover the rest of its history?
Blackface used the plight of African slaves as fiction in order to express the plights and fears of white working men, helping them laugh at their increasing suffering under wage-labor while at the same time reassuring them that they were nonetheless above the black man. By portraying blacks as clowns on stage for white men to laugh at, it burned into the minds of its audience a sense of gratitude for not being a slave, and to guard their wage labor at all costs as a symbol of their social status.
This pop-culture firestorm gave white Americans a perception of African Americans that endures to this day. The legacy of the minstrel show in the United States cannot be overstated, and yet it has been deliberately buried. It should be a case study in how fiction and entertainment can create reality because the minstrel show helped its audience not only express its fear of the black man but legitimize it. This should have been the book’s final analysis. Without it, the study feels incomplete.
August 5, 2020
I found this book after a conversation with a student in class about the use of memes and gifs, particularly those depicting Black women, as a way for men--honestly, if I recall the conversation correctly, it primarily centered on the use of such by gay white men--to name their feelings, thoughts, reactions to events. The overall question centered on the means through which such actions have become a way to embody a representation without having to give full weight and understanding to the lived experiences of that/those bodies. They are but brief moments in time captured in a photo or a gif and wether it is to call upon a facial expression or a codified statement that has become popularized, it is always remarkable to think of the ways in which these "brief moments" do represent a larger dynamic. Words like "privilege" and "acknowledging" have become so prevalent they mean nothing now; thus, I will stop short of engaging in the discourse about the aforementioned conversation centered on those ideas. However, if you curious as to the genuine love affair that America has with African-Americans while simultaneously engaging in acts and moments that reflect a continuation of past actions, I recommend this book. Short and sweet, but spot on.
December 16, 2025
would have been a lot better if the author used the term "Freudian" 100 less times
October 1, 2007
The introduction should be required reading for everybody. All the fools who think racism is in the past, but also everybody else: Black nationalists, white negrophiles, people who think they are not at all racist, people who hate gangsta rap, people who love gangsta rap, gangsta rappers, europeans who love jazz, europeans who think race problems only exist in America, fans of country music, fans of bluegrass music, fans of the blues, musical theatre, and jazz...
Ok, you get the point. The body of the book is a carefully studied look at a particular historical moment. But the introduction, he lays out his whole argument, so just take an hour and read the intro.
Ok, you get the point. The body of the book is a carefully studied look at a particular historical moment. But the introduction, he lays out his whole argument, so just take an hour and read the intro.
August 30, 2022
One of my favorite reads from my theory list. Lott performs some incredible interdisciplinary synthesis and has inspired some ideas of my own regarding national imaginaries and the potential of radical imaginative projects to respond to harmful and violent myths (like those perpetuated in 19th-blackface minstrel performances, and the long-term legacies of those spectacles and stereotypes). His work synthesizes so much of the American cultural studies theory I’ve read (and attempted to absorb), and it makes me want to incorporate a focus on pop cultural forms, including and alongside literary study.
March 19, 2008
"My title is actually a riff on one of Leslie Fiedler's; he wrote a famous book of literary criticism called Love and Death in the American Novel, and, among other things, it suggests that classic U.S. fiction is continually possessed by the idea of two men, one white and one dark, alone together in the wilderness or on the open sea, like Huck and Jim, Natty Bumppo and Chingachgook, Ishmael and Queequeg—on up to Captain Kirk and Dr. Spock, Mel Gibson and Danny Glover in the Lethal Weapon movies, and beyond, I suppose. I think the minstrel show isn't too far from this notion; with white men putting on blackface to mimic and lampoon black people and black culture, there's the same kind of imaginary proximity of white and black men. So "Love and Theft" it was: the fascination with and heisting of black cultural materials."
April 26, 2012
A classic of the field- essentially for critical race theory. A bit dense. Read with bottle of aspirin close by....but worth it.
April 5, 2024
The 20th anniversary afterword of this book faces me with a difficult conundrum. While Lott seems here to honestly and critically reflect on many of the same flaws that I noticed with the work, he chooses to end the book with a quote (and a not even terrible one at that) from Obama’s Dreams of My Father. I must admit that a significant part of my low rating was influences by the audacity that it takes to do that so removed from a critique of the bloodthirsty imperialism of the Obama regime.
In Lott’s first chapter, he designates two modes of interpretation of the blackface minstrel theater, the “populist,” epitomized by Mark Twain and viewing minstrelsy as an legitimate people’s culture, and the “revisionist,” which viewed minstrelsy as purely a racist mockery. Though I am only familiar with either school of criticism through osmosis and not direct reading, I am obviously much more sympathetic to the latter view and find some of Lott’s problems with it unconvincing. The worst parts of this book came off as attempts to bridge the gap of the two views, which could really only have the effect of bolstering the former.
I cannot judge completely Lott’s account of the early minstrel songs of the 1820s as mixed both culturally and politically, but he does not provide a full musicological study outside of the first half of Chapter 7, and he strikes me as entirely too optimistic with regard to white motivations at this point in time. As I mentioned previously however, Lott does take some steps to recognize how the book was received in this manner at the time of its publication.
The portion of Lott’s title mentioning the (white) working class is somewhat overblown here as well. He is keen to point to American proletarianization, in part due to the nature of the “frontier,” as much more nascent in the early 19th century than its entrenched European counterpart. Thus for the most part, Lott and his primary sources treat minstrel audiences as audiences in the abstract, comprised of different strata of white society, and then connects this to antebellum political developments as they related to the working at large.
This leads me to another frustration I had with the work: Lott explicitly declares himself committed to a Marxist framework and will liberally pepper his outline with Walter Rodney and CLR James references, however his concern with the minute specifics of what was going on in the heads of racist audiences, “within a single audience, and even within individual audience members,” whether pro-slavery, anti-slavery, or ambivalent, I really find more evident of the framework of Derrida or even, through him, Heidegger. I also found the Freudian psychosexual analysis in Chapter 6 obvious to the point of gratuitousness; though his pictographic examples did illustrate his point well.
Perhaps some of my issues may have been due to my own expectations. I had assumed the book would be more of a historical account and touch more on the exploitation of Black people and culture, proto- and post-minstrelsy, and broader political events in regard to 19th century US imperialism. It shines best at doing so in Chapters 7 and 8, charting westward expansionism’s relation to a multiracial labor and abolitionist movement and the ideological development of minstrelsy. I am admittedly a bit of a “hard facts” person. There is admittedly a lot of good material throughout as well behind the editorializing, with the material on contemporary responses to the 1834 anti-abolitionist riots and on PT Barnum being some highlights. Ultimately though, Lott has his background in literature studies and the analysis of texts, and it makes itself evident.
One more complaint for the road: Lott never does quite get to explaining his pretentious phrase from Chapter 1 about “the slave as poet-legislator” as promised and as Greil Marcus so overbearingly applauds. The enslaved were not considered by whites to be poet-legislators, no matter what Song of the South might portray, they were worked to early deaths, if not outright murdered, and held in some of the most terrible conditions imaginable.
In Lott’s first chapter, he designates two modes of interpretation of the blackface minstrel theater, the “populist,” epitomized by Mark Twain and viewing minstrelsy as an legitimate people’s culture, and the “revisionist,” which viewed minstrelsy as purely a racist mockery. Though I am only familiar with either school of criticism through osmosis and not direct reading, I am obviously much more sympathetic to the latter view and find some of Lott’s problems with it unconvincing. The worst parts of this book came off as attempts to bridge the gap of the two views, which could really only have the effect of bolstering the former.
I cannot judge completely Lott’s account of the early minstrel songs of the 1820s as mixed both culturally and politically, but he does not provide a full musicological study outside of the first half of Chapter 7, and he strikes me as entirely too optimistic with regard to white motivations at this point in time. As I mentioned previously however, Lott does take some steps to recognize how the book was received in this manner at the time of its publication.
The portion of Lott’s title mentioning the (white) working class is somewhat overblown here as well. He is keen to point to American proletarianization, in part due to the nature of the “frontier,” as much more nascent in the early 19th century than its entrenched European counterpart. Thus for the most part, Lott and his primary sources treat minstrel audiences as audiences in the abstract, comprised of different strata of white society, and then connects this to antebellum political developments as they related to the working at large.
This leads me to another frustration I had with the work: Lott explicitly declares himself committed to a Marxist framework and will liberally pepper his outline with Walter Rodney and CLR James references, however his concern with the minute specifics of what was going on in the heads of racist audiences, “within a single audience, and even within individual audience members,” whether pro-slavery, anti-slavery, or ambivalent, I really find more evident of the framework of Derrida or even, through him, Heidegger. I also found the Freudian psychosexual analysis in Chapter 6 obvious to the point of gratuitousness; though his pictographic examples did illustrate his point well.
Perhaps some of my issues may have been due to my own expectations. I had assumed the book would be more of a historical account and touch more on the exploitation of Black people and culture, proto- and post-minstrelsy, and broader political events in regard to 19th century US imperialism. It shines best at doing so in Chapters 7 and 8, charting westward expansionism’s relation to a multiracial labor and abolitionist movement and the ideological development of minstrelsy. I am admittedly a bit of a “hard facts” person. There is admittedly a lot of good material throughout as well behind the editorializing, with the material on contemporary responses to the 1834 anti-abolitionist riots and on PT Barnum being some highlights. Ultimately though, Lott has his background in literature studies and the analysis of texts, and it makes itself evident.
One more complaint for the road: Lott never does quite get to explaining his pretentious phrase from Chapter 1 about “the slave as poet-legislator” as promised and as Greil Marcus so overbearingly applauds. The enslaved were not considered by whites to be poet-legislators, no matter what Song of the South might portray, they were worked to early deaths, if not outright murdered, and held in some of the most terrible conditions imaginable.
July 22, 2024
God I'm a nerd because my first instinct upon cracking this book and seeing phrases such as "dissatisfaction with erstwhile modes of racial critique, which in their political disapprobation, dovetailing with aesthetic disdain, were unwilling to engage with the artifacts and social realities of popular life, too ready to dismiss the mentalité of the popular classes, finally impatient with politics itself" was to sigh in relief, like I had just slipped back into a warm bath. Oh academia (in small doses and on interesting topics), what a balm! An intelligent and influential work, dense but never intentionally obscure or irresponsibly imprecise. Lott does not shy away from the hard work and the uncomfortable questions while investigating a topic with as many opinions on it as players in it.
October 24, 2023
A really masterful work, it’s incredible how he takes such a nuanced view and then proves it so clearly. It’s a delicate argument but one he does well.
Only 4 stars because sometimes I felt he overloaded his argument with Freud or other frameworks that weren’t needed. He could make his argument without bringing in Freud at all, I think, so the sudden appearance of the Oedipal complex was distracting.
I highly recommend and will recommend to anyone interested in American pop culture, racism in media, Black representation, and US history of the period. I learned so much about all these things!!
Only 4 stars because sometimes I felt he overloaded his argument with Freud or other frameworks that weren’t needed. He could make his argument without bringing in Freud at all, I think, so the sudden appearance of the Oedipal complex was distracting.
I highly recommend and will recommend to anyone interested in American pop culture, racism in media, Black representation, and US history of the period. I learned so much about all these things!!
September 24, 2021
One of the crucial, seminal texts in the area of African-American studies looking at minstrel shows and their history. Particularly useful for its chapter at the end of the book on Uncle Tom's Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe's reaction to minstrel show adaptations of her novel springing up against her wishes, and the early background of the stage producers who first put up productions and plays.
February 17, 2025
absolutely mind blowing level of analysis on how black bodies have been utilized and abused as tools by society to navigate desires gearing towards violence and sex.. honestly disturbing to read at times. my critique however would be the lack of intersectional thought— the minimal acknowledgement for how black women’s identities have been stripped of autonomy and the rape culture surround minstrelsy was disappointing.
July 9, 2018
Always a Classic
I’ve read this book multiple times over the course of my academic career. No matter how far away from the 1980s we get it still holds weight in cultural studies and in my work. If you’re interested in histories of race and blackface minstrelsy in America, it is worth a read as a foundational text.
I’ve read this book multiple times over the course of my academic career. No matter how far away from the 1980s we get it still holds weight in cultural studies and in my work. If you’re interested in histories of race and blackface minstrelsy in America, it is worth a read as a foundational text.
July 3, 2021
I found this book through Bob Dylan's album of the same name, which delves into Southern Culture. Naturally, this book is very different and focuses on a painful chapter from American history. All of this is fascinating and important. One disappointment I had was that Lott didn't focus on minstrelsy influences in rock and roll, which would have made a incredible indictment of modern culture/
June 3, 2020
I read this book in college and was reminded of it after listening to ep 3 of the 1619 podcast. I remember really struggling to get through this cool, but also am surprised that 11 years later, I can still feel its impact. I want to read it again.
November 13, 2020
Difficult to read. But if you can muscle through the obtuse language it has excellent insights into not only minstrelsy but into the forces that came together during the Jackson era and developed the institutionalization of racism in America.
December 20, 2023
I didn’t agree with some of the arguments but overall the book was interesting.
Rereadability: Hmmm, I don’t think I would read the whole book over again, perhaps I would refer back to find some of the key points though.
Rereadability: Hmmm, I don’t think I would read the whole book over again, perhaps I would refer back to find some of the key points though.
Read
May 1, 2025Lott's readings of the "wench" character in blackface minstrelsy made me laugh.
October 1, 2007
i'm against a lot of praise for a group of musical icons who make a collective genre...cause it's all bull shit, maybe. just be yourself and stop trying to put forth a genre...just play what you feel you should, you know? you're not as important as your music and your music is not as important as you.
March 11, 2013
If you're intensely interested in the subject, you've probably already read the book. If you're not, just get it from your library and read the chapter called "Love & Theft" and you'll be well-served.
July 11, 2010
Brilliant, but also hefty.
March 6, 2013
Wow! This book is so educational. I've read nothing like it.
Read
November 20, 2008spike lee class
Currently reading
January 18, 2009I'm using this book for the Representations of Race class I am co-teaching with Noel Ignatiev
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