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Raising Cain: Blackface Performance from Jim Crow to Hip Hop
Cain made the first blackface turn, blackface minstrels liked to say of the first man forced to wander the world acting out his low place in life. It wasn't the "approved" reading, but then, blackface wasn't the "approved" culture either--yet somehow we're still dancing to its renegade tune. The story of an insubordinate, rebellious, truly popular culture stretching from Jim Crow to hip hop is told for the first time in Raising Cain , a provocative look at how the outcasts of official culture have made their own place in the world.
Unearthing a wealth of long-buried plays and songs, rethinking materials often deemed too troubling or lowly to handle, and overturning cherished ideas about classics from Uncle Tom's Cabin to Benito Cereno to The Jazz Singer , W. T. Lhamon Jr. sets out a startlingly original history of blackface as a cultural ritual that, for all its racist elements, was ultimately liberating. He shows that early blackface, dating back to the 1830s, put forward an interpretation of blackness as that which endured a commonly felt scorn and often outwitted it. To follow the subsequent turns taken by the many forms of blackface is to pursue the way modern social shifts produce and disperse culture. Raising Cain follows these forms as they prolong and adapt folk performance and popular rites for industrial commerce, then project themselves into the rougher modes of postmodern life through such heirs of blackface as stand-up comedy, rock 'n' roll, talk TV, and hip hop.
Formally raising Cain in its myriad variants, blackface appears here as a racial project more radical even than abolitionism. Lhamon's account of its provenance and persistence is a major reinterpretation of American culture.
Unearthing a wealth of long-buried plays and songs, rethinking materials often deemed too troubling or lowly to handle, and overturning cherished ideas about classics from Uncle Tom's Cabin to Benito Cereno to The Jazz Singer , W. T. Lhamon Jr. sets out a startlingly original history of blackface as a cultural ritual that, for all its racist elements, was ultimately liberating. He shows that early blackface, dating back to the 1830s, put forward an interpretation of blackness as that which endured a commonly felt scorn and often outwitted it. To follow the subsequent turns taken by the many forms of blackface is to pursue the way modern social shifts produce and disperse culture. Raising Cain follows these forms as they prolong and adapt folk performance and popular rites for industrial commerce, then project themselves into the rougher modes of postmodern life through such heirs of blackface as stand-up comedy, rock 'n' roll, talk TV, and hip hop.
Formally raising Cain in its myriad variants, blackface appears here as a racial project more radical even than abolitionism. Lhamon's account of its provenance and persistence is a major reinterpretation of American culture.
- GenresMusic
288 pages, Paperback
First published February 15, 1998
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
April 22, 2023
W.T. Lhamon Jr has written so many seminal, foundational texts about how to understand Black American culture from its inception to now, and in this volume, it is one of the especially groundbreaking texts that still needs to be so much more widely taught and available in a new edition. As the title states, Lhamon Jr. discusses blackface minstrelsy at length, and of particular highlight to my own research was the discussions he included about the character of Topsy in "Uncle Tom's Cabin," which I have been studying for years. Lhamon Jr. goes into how Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of UTC, was definitely influenced by blackface minstrelsy shows even if she wouldn't be forthcoming about it necessarily, and even though when she saw the beginnings of the first minstrel shows that did unauthorized adaptations into stage plays of UTC, she was outraged (this is while copyright was still in its infancy, so it's a grey area). The author brings forward notions of white audience, commercialism, consumer appeal, and more, tracing links that are foundational to understand for anyone looking at this subject matter.
December 8, 2017
Excellent, tightly woven, work of history. Challenges the readers preconceptions about blackface and posits that it never really went away.
September 27, 2023
“Every motif or gesture is embedded in a train of previous such gestures which pull it to the present. I want to suggest that we conceive the ‘exchange’ of cultural tokens as transactions: they do not replace the parts of one's identity but, instead, compound who one is. Although the cultural market grew out of actual material markets and although the crossings in material markets are prerequisites for cultural flows, the transfer is different in the two spheres. When people dance for eels in a market, two separate transferences occur, one at the material level, another at the cultural level.
Although they are often designated by the same word, ‘exchange,’ these transfers produce discrete results.
At the material level, a performer gives steps (or enjoyment) for food and a buyer gives food for steps (or enjoyment). A crude replacement occurs. I give something I have for something you have. At the same time, another transfer occurs — the passing of cultural gesture, or identity tokens.
This is quite a different sort of transfer and cannot be analyzed by the same calculus as the exchange which it seems to emulate. Why not? Because in cultural exchange, the transfer is not of one good for another, but a compounding of goods, one onto others. When I pick up a cultural gesture, it need not bump out a corresponding gesture I already practice. Rather, I graft it onto who I am. Perhaps even more important, when one group passes its gestural practices onto another group, there is not a loss of those practices. Nor is there a unilateral ownership on either side. Instead, there are mutual transactions. Sharing and cross-connections prevail, with both groups continuing to practice those gestures so long as they seem to be useful blazonings of identity.”
Although they are often designated by the same word, ‘exchange,’ these transfers produce discrete results.
At the material level, a performer gives steps (or enjoyment) for food and a buyer gives food for steps (or enjoyment). A crude replacement occurs. I give something I have for something you have. At the same time, another transfer occurs — the passing of cultural gesture, or identity tokens.
This is quite a different sort of transfer and cannot be analyzed by the same calculus as the exchange which it seems to emulate. Why not? Because in cultural exchange, the transfer is not of one good for another, but a compounding of goods, one onto others. When I pick up a cultural gesture, it need not bump out a corresponding gesture I already practice. Rather, I graft it onto who I am. Perhaps even more important, when one group passes its gestural practices onto another group, there is not a loss of those practices. Nor is there a unilateral ownership on either side. Instead, there are mutual transactions. Sharing and cross-connections prevail, with both groups continuing to practice those gestures so long as they seem to be useful blazonings of identity.”
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews