THE JUBA PROJECT
Featured Performers and Documents
Blackface Minstrelsy in Context
Blackface in the Library

The word 'blackface' typed into a 'Google Books' search results in 3,450 hits (August 2009). No doubt that will grow daily. Such access to information provides an extraordinary resource for anyone interested in finding out more about this subject (or any other), but it can also make it difficult to begin. Here are some basic sources.

For the most part, this list restricts itself to works published since the early 1990s, books only, and books with a significant discussion of blackface from any perspective--cultural and social history, histories of theatre, cinema, music and dance, as well as discussions of class and gender.  Much more will be found by the interested researcher in journal articles, dissertations, and archives.

Excerpted from a bibliography compiled by Agnieszka Baranowska for the project "Biting the Invisible Hand: Blackface Minstrelsy and the Origins of American Animation."

To Begin--8 Works on the 'Matter' of American Blackface Minstrelsy

Anne-Marie Bean.  Inside the Minstrel Mask: Readings in Nineteenth-Century Blackface Minstrelsy.  Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1996.

Dale Cockrell. Demons of Disorder: Early Blackface Minstrels and Their World. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

Gary D. Engle. This Grotesque Essence: Plays From the American Minstrel Stage.  Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1978.

W. T. Lhamon. Raising Cain: Blackface Performance From Jim Crow to Hip Hop.  Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998.

W. T. Lhamon. Jump Jim Crow: Lost Plays, Lyrics, and Street Prose of the First Atlantic Popular Culture.  Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003.

Eric Lott. Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.

Hans Nathan. Dan Emmett and the Rise of Early Negro Minstrelsy. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1962/1977.

Robert C. Toll. Blacking Up: The Minstrel Show in 19th Century America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1974.

To Begin--The Burnt Cork Symposium

Daphne Brooks.  Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Performances of Race and Freedom, 1850-1910.  Duke University Press, 2006.

Dale Cockrell.  Demons of Disorder: Early Blackface Minstrels and Their World.  New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

Catherine M. Cole.  Ghana's Concert Party Theatre.  Indiana University Press, 2001.

Arthur Knight.  Disintegrating the Musical: Black Performance and American Musical Film.  Duke University Press, 2002.

W. T. Lhamon.  Raising Cain: Blackface Performance From Jim Crow to Hip Hop.  Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998

Linda Williams.  Playing the Race Card: Melodramas of Black and White from Uncle Tom to O. J. Simpson.  Princeton University Press, 2001.

To Begin--Websites

www.iath.virginia.edu/utc/minstrel/mihp.html
University of Virginia website on blackface minstrelsy includes playbills, reviews, advertisements, letters, texts and songs.  Part of an important site tracing the history and legacy of Uncle Tom's Cabin in print, on stage, in film, and popular culture more generally.

www.utm.utoronto.ca/~w3minstr/index.html
The University of Toronto’s own Juba project.  Featuring performance archives, artist responses and a microhistory of blackface minstrelsy's 'export' to the United Kingdom during the 1840s.

www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/foster/sfeature/sf_minstrelsy.html
This PBS website includes information on the history of blackface minstrelsy as well as responses by blackface historians, including Dale Cockrell.  It was created to accompany the PBS movie about American musician Stephen Foster, titled Stephen Foster.

Selected Works that discuss the traditions and legacies of blackface

Roger D. Abrahams. Singing the Master: The Emergence of African American Culture in the Plantation South. New York: Pantheon Books, 1992.

Anne-Marie Bean. Inside the Minstrel Mask: Readings in Nineteenth-Century Blackface Minstrelsy. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1996.

Daniel Bernardi. The Birth of Whiteness: Race and the Emergence of U.S. Cinema. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1996.

Donald Bogle. Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks: An Interpretive History of Blacks in American Films. New York: Continuum, 2001.

Joseph Boskin. Sambo: The Rise and Demise of American Jester. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986.

Louis Chude-Sokei. The Last "Darky" : Bert Williams, Black-on-black Minstrelsy, and the African Diaspora. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2006.

Dale Cockrell. Demons of Disorder: Early Blackface Minstrels and Their World. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

James W. Cook. The Arts of Deception: Playing with Fraud in the Age of Barnum.  Cambridge:  Harvard University Press, 2001.

Susan Courtney. Hollywood Fantasies of Miscegenation: Spectacular Narratives of Gender and Race, 1903-1967. Princeton, N.J. : Princeton University Press, 2005.

Thomas Cripps. Slow Fade to Black: The Negro in American Film, 1900-1942. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.

Sam Dennison. Scandalize My Name: Black Imagery in American Popular Music. New York: Garland Publishing, 1982.

Harry Elam. African-American Performance and Theater History: A Critical Reader.  New York: Oxford University Press, 2001.

Lynn Emery. Black Dance in the United States from 1619 to 1970. Palo Alto: National Press Books, 1972/1988.

Gary D. Engle. This Grotesque Essence: Plays From the American Minstrel Stage.  Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1978.

Frantz Fanon. Black Skin, White Masks. New York: Grove Press, 1967/1986/1994.

Tom Fletcher. One Hundred Years of the Negro in Show Business. New York: Da Capo Press, 1984.

Stephen Foster. Minstrel Show Songs. New York: Da Capo Press, 1980.

Henry Louis Gates Jr. Race, Writing and Difference. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985.

Paul Gilroy. Against Race: Imagining Political Culture beyond the Color Line. Cambridge, Mass: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2000.

Susan Glenn.  Female Spectacle:  The Theatrical Roots of Modern Feminism.  Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000.

Brenda Dixon Gottschild. Digging the Africanist Presence in American Performance: Dance and Other Contexts. Westport, CN: Greenwood, 1996.

Janice Gray. Armstrong Catching the Tune: Music and William Sidney Mount. New York: The Museums at Stony Brooks, 1984.

Susan Gubar. Racechanges: White Skin, Black Face in American Culture.  New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.

Edward Guerrero. Framing Blackness: The African American Image in Film. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993.

Saidiya V. Hartman.  Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteeth-Century America.  New York:  Oxford University Press, 1997.

Katrina Hazzard-Gordon. Jookin': The Rise of Social Dance Formations in African-American Culture. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990.

Ronald L. Jackson. Scripting the Black Masculine Body: Identity, Discourse, and Racial Politics in Popular Media. State University of New York Press, 2006.

Richard Kislan. American Show Dance: From Minstrelsy to MTV. A Cappella Books, 1994.

Daniel J. Leab. From Sambo to Superspade: the Black Experience in Motion Pictures. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1975.

W. T. Lhamon. Raising Cain: Blackface Performance From Jim Crow to Hip Hop.  Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998.

W. T. Lhamon. Jump Jim Crow: Lost Plays, Lyrics, and Street Prose of the First Atlantic Popular Culture.  Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003.

Peter Linebaugh. The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, and the Atlantic Working Class in the 18th Century. 

Glenn Loney. Musical Theatre in America: Papers and Proceedings of the Conference on the Musical Theatre in America. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1984.

Eric Lott. Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.

William J. Mahar. Behind the Burnt Cork Mask: Early Blackface Minstrelsy and Antebellum American Popular Culture. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999.

Jacqui Malone. Steppin' on the Blues: The Visible Rhythms of African American Dance. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996.

Doug McClelland. Blackface to Blacklist: Al Jolson, Larry Parks, and The Jolson Story. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1987.

George McKay. Yankee Go Home & Take Me With U: Americanization and Popular Culture. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1997.

Sarah Meer. Uncle Tom Mania: Slavery, Minstrelsy, and Transatlantic Culture in the 1850s.  Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2005.

Hans Nathan. Dan Emmett and the Rise of Early Negro Minstrelsy. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1962/1977.

Mark E. Neely. The Boundaries of American Political Culture in the Civil War Era.  Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005.

William Dillon Piersen. Black Legacy: America's Hidden Heritage. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1993.

Caryl Phillips. Dancing in the Dark. London: Secker & Warburg, 2005.

Thomas Laurence Riis. Just before Jazz: Black Musical Theatre in New York, 1890-1915. Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1989.

Thomas Laurence Riis. More Than Just Minstrel Shows: The Rise of Black Musical Theatre at the Turn of the Century. New York: Institute for Studies in American Music, Conservatory of Music, Brooklyn College of the City University of New York, 1992.

David R. Roediger. The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class. New York: Verso, 1991/1999.

David R. Roediger. The Meaning of Slavery in the North.  New York: Garland Pub., 1998.

Michael Rogin. Blackface, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting Pot. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996.

Constance Rourke. American Humor: A Study of the American Character. New York: New York Review Books (2004), 1931/1985/2004.

Henry T. Sampson. Blacks in Blackface: A Source Book on Early Black Musical Shows. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press 1980.

Alexander Saxton. The Rise and Fall of the White Republic: Class Politics and Mass Culture in 19th Century America. London: Verso, 1990.

Andrew Silver. Minstrelsy and Murder: The Crisis of Southern Humor, 1835-1925.  Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006.

Eileen Southern. The Music of Black Americans. New York: Norton, 1983/1997.

Seymour Stark. Men in Blackface: True Stories of the Minstrel Show. Xlibris Corporation, 2001.

Larry Starr. American Popular Music: From Minstrelsy to MTV.  New York: Oxford University Press, 2006.

John Strausbaugh. Black Like You: Blackface, Whiteface, Insult & Imitation in American Popular Culture. New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin, 2006.

Robert C. Toll. Blacking Up: The Minstrel Show in 19th Century America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1974.

Nick Tosches. Where Dead Voices Gather.  Boston: Little Brown, 2001.

Kevern Verney. African Americans and US Popular Culture. New York: Routledge, 2003.

Richard Waterhouse. From Minstrel Shows to Vaudeville: The Australian Popular Stage 1788-1914. Kensington, NSW: New South Wales University Press, 1990.

Mel Watkins. On the Real Side: Laughing, Lying and Signifying: The Underground Humor Tradition of African-American Humor That Transformed American Culture, from Slavery to Richard Pryor. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994.

Sean Wilentz. Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788-1850. New York: Oxford University Press, 1984.

Carl Frederick Wittke. Tambo and Bones: A History of the American Minstrel Stage. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1930/1968.

David Wondrich. Stomp and Swerve: American Music Gets Hot, 1843-1924.  Chicago, Ill.: A Cappella Books, 2003.