Raising Cain: Blackface Performance from Jim Crow to Hip Hop. - Review - book reviews

Journal of Social History, Winter, 1999 by Walter T. Howard

Raising Cain: Blackface Performance from Jim Crow to Hip Hop. By W.T. Lhamon, Jr. (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1998. x plus 269pp.).

W.T. Lhamon, Jr.'s Raising Cain: Blackface Performance from Jim Crow to Hip Hop is both engaging and enlightening. Social historians, as well as scholars of African American life, will undoubtedly find it quite useful. The author, a proven specialist in American social and cultural matters, offers an insightful, unique, and well-written account of an important element of popular culture--"blackface performance." It is an entirely new way of looking at the Jim Crow minstrel, associated figures and their enduring legacy.

This book forcefully presents a new interpretation of America's blackface tradition that reveals its continuing influence today. The author shows that blackface constituted a ritual the underclass used to understand and bolster itself. Vocals and theatricals presented by these characters performed the existential task of aiding marginal people in American society face up to, and deal with, the derision by which the white Anglo majority oppressed them. For example, Lhamon clearly shows how blackface players deliberately aligned themselves with runaway slaves whom they cleverly (and subtlety) championed in ways not fully perceived by whites. The book also illustrates how blackface performances also made their way across the Atlantic to Europe where these rites forged an alliance of compassionate concern that crossed class and national boundaries. In all geographic venues, it was bondsmen, itinerants and rowdies in the working class, and in certain segments of the middle class, who responded with enthusiasm and understanding to this alluring phenomenon. In effect, it helped forge a unifying sense of suffering and hope among large, diverse and repressed social groups.

Lhamon acknowledges that in surface aspects blackface was a manifestation of white bigotry. However, he persuasively argues that it was also liberating. Further, he explores a blackness, sharply different from whiteness, that emphasized meritorious attributes that included healthy resistance and a willingness to rebel against white hegemony. Just as slaves used their indigenous cultural strengths to weather the harshness of "the peculiar institution," so blackface performers practiced a form of psychological resistance that increased black self-esteem in the process of outwitting whites.

Although not a professional historian, the author skillfully traces the long, involved history of blackface. He begins, appropriately enough, in New York where on Catherine Market (a sort of cultural crossroads in a large, ethnically diverse urban area) African Americans performed for handouts from their audience. Lhamon delineates an account of a unique cultural form that moves through the nineteenth century to familiar, contemporary post-modern iconography of stand-up comedy, rock music, talk television, and hip hop. These latter, well-known elements of present-day popular culture are, argues the author, the heirs of the blackface tradition.

Lhamon writes better than many historians. His book sparkles with captivating prose that is at times poetic, but also erudite and didactic. Given the voluminous production in the field, it is sometimes difficult to write with originality about the history of race in the United States. The author's depiction of the historiography of minstrels and related topics is, almost by definition, highly original. He utilizes fresh materials--including texts, plays and cinema--that are new to most historians. His interpretive analysis, challenging standard interpretations of such classics as Uncle Tom's Cabin and The Jazz Singer, discloses inventive wisdom about race and culture in American social history. The blackface entertainer of the past and present--an insubordinate, rebellious figure who lay outside of the dominant culture--fashioned a viable social persona that revealed the edifying function of cultural resistance. All told, this story makes for good history.