Performing Jim Crow: Blackface Performance and - e

Performing Jim Crow: Blackface
Performance and Emancipation
Thomas L. King
James Madison University
Revista de Humanidades, 23 (2014). p. 75-94. ISSN 1130-5029
Performing Jim Crow: Blackface Performance and
Emancipation
Interpretando a Jim Crow: Blackface y emancipación
Thomas L. King
School of Theatre and Dance
James Madison University
[email protected]
Recibido: 11 de marzo de 2014
Aceptado: 17 de julio de 2014
Abstract
A nineteenth-century American actor named Thomas Rice was sensationally
popular as a blackface character named Jim Crow. His popularity is credited with
giving birth to blackface minstrelsy as others began to imitate him in the hope of
emulating his success. Rice’s Jim Crow provided a name for laws and customs
designed to repudiate the emancipation of African slaves. Blackface minstrelsy
staged an idealized version of slave life on a southern plantation. Paradoxically, as
blackface revoked the emancipation of slaves on stage, it emancipated the American
theatre from its British origins and its audience of recently immigrated laborers
from a low social position. It even occasionally performed an ironic reversal of
the subaltern status of the very African slaves whose freedom by proclamation and
constitutional amendment the performance sought to negate. Contradictions in the
history of blackface performance in the United States stage American anxieties
about race, class, emancipation, and the very construction of the concepts of
blackness and whiteness.
Keywords: Blackface; Minstrel; Gilpin; Octoroon; Robeson.
Resumen
En el siglo XIX, Thomas Rice, un actor estadounidense, ganó mucha fama haciendo
el papel de un personaje cuya cara estaba pintada de negro con el nombre Jim Crow.
Se le da crédito a Rice la creación de grupos de actores que se pintaron la cara de
negro (un estilo denominado blackface) que luego otros se pusieron a imitarlos con
la esperanza de emular su éxito. El Jim Crow de Rice dio nombre a una serie de
leyes y costumbres diseñadas para repudiar la emancipación de esclavos africanos.
Los espectáculos de los actores en blackface representaron una versión idealizada
de la vida de los esclavos en una hacienda sureña. Paradójicamente, mientras el
blackface revocó la emancipación de los esclavos sobre el escenario, emancipó
el teatro estadounidense de sus orígenes británicas y su público que consistía en
obreros inmigrantes de baja clase social. De vez en cuando hasta representó un revés
irónico del estatus barriobajero de los mismos esclavos africanos cuya libertad
por proclamación y enmienda constitucional, la representación quiso negar. Las
77
Performing Jim Crow: Blackface Performance and Emancipation - Thomas L. King
contradicciones en la historia de espectáculos teatrales blackface en los Estados
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emancipación y hasta la construcción misma de los conceptos de blancura étnica y
negrura étnica/”blancura” y “étnica.”
Palabras clave: Blackface; Grupo teatral; Gilpin; Octoroon; Robeson.
Para citar este artículo: King, Thomas L. (2014). Performing Jim Crow:
Blackface Performance and Emancipation. Revista de Humanidades, n. 23, p. 7594. ISSN 1130-5029.
Until the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 and the Thirteenth Amendment
to the Constitution in 1865, the social and legal status of Africans in the United
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complex of laws and social practices termed “Jim Crow” which had the purpose of
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Thomas D. Rice jumping Jim Crow
TCS 82, Harvard Theatre Collection, Houghton Library, Harvard University
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5RHGLJHU'DYLGThe Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American
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5RJLQ0LFKDHO. Blackface, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood
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