Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class. - book reviews

Criticism, Summer, 1998 by Lori Merish

Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class by Eric Lott. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. Pp. 314. $17.95, paper.

Class and sexuality seem to be at a wide remove as categories of critical analysis and textual concern--at least in the realm of contemporary cultural criticism and theory. Alongside the work of contemporary critics and theorists of sexuality (most notably queer theorists and some feminist and gender theorists) who employ postmodern concepts of subjectivity to emphasize sexual multiplicities and the complex, often shifting nature of erotic identifications, the work of critics and theorists of social class can seem staid and mundane. Indeed, Marxism, the richest intellectual tradition for conceptualizing class as a social formation and for theorizing class relations, has tended to stabilize class as an "identity" (somehow tied, although in various post-Marxist accounts complexly and ambiguously, to relations of production or economic base) rather than to engage conflicted psychic processes of identification, while reducing questions of sexuality largely to the issue of reproduction. Certainly, historians have addressed complex interdeterminations of class and sexuality in a number of ways: historians of domesticity, for instance, have identified domestic, heterosexual arrangements as a primary site of middle-class formation and culture in the nineteenth century; historians of the working class (especially feminist historians such as Kathy Peiss and Christine Stansell) have documented departures of working-class sexual practices from middle-class heterosexual, marital norms; historians of gay and lesbian sexualities (such as George Chauncey, Elizabeth Kennedy, and Madeline Davis) have correlated class identification, (homo-)erotic practices, and certain forms of gender and sexual identity; while John D'Emilio, negotiating between economic history and the history of sexuality, has argued that industrial capitalism, and its particular gender divisions of labor, created the historical conditions that made what Foucault termed the "invention" of the homosexual possible. At the same time, literary critics have more readily embraced the postmodern critique of foundationalist epistemologies and have (re-)defined class as less an "objective" entity than a relationally defined construct, one constituted through the play of linguistic difference. For example, Nancy Armstrong and Anita Levy, drawing from Foucault as well as from a certain interpretation of Antonio Gramsci, have argued that discursive (especially novelistic) formations of sexuality are a central site in the formation of middle-class hegemony; Armstrong even argues that this ideological configuration preceded the rise of the middle-class per se--although in all these accounts (as in Foucault) relations of production occupy a distant position in the analysis. Considering these methodological differences, one may or may not subscribe to Teresa Ebert's distinction between a "ludic" critical practice (founded on poststructuralist assumptions and addressing itself exclusively to cultural politics) and a critical practice of "resistance" (indebted to historical materialism and regarding culture as articulated by material forces). But Ebert is surely correct to point out that critics and theorists who place sexuality at the center of their analyses don't regularly engage with questions of class, while analysts of class have tended to relegate questions of sexuality (let alone gender) to the periphery. Social class can seem a hard, material limit to the pleasurable forms of sexual indeterminacy and performativity emphasized in much theoretical work on sex: when class gets called (in), so to speak, the party is over.

Some of these critical and theoretical difficulties are evident when one considers a concept like "performativity," which is central to much contemporary work on sexuality. While "the performative" has served as a crucial concept for dismantling normative formations of sexuality, race, and gender and in establishing them as socially constructed, the performative is a more problematic, indeed contradictory, analytical move in terms of social class, in part because it threatens to reinforce hegemonic conceptions of class difference. The notion of "class as performative" is intellectually and politically useful when engaging instances where class, and the reproduction of poverty, have been pathologized and "essentialized," often by mapping class onto racial and ethnic categories. An understanding of class as performed and performative also can destabilize the bourgeois naturalization of class differences through the mystifications of "taste" (a capacity partly localized and inscribed on the body) and the bodily signs of class (e.g., clothing, manners). But because social class has often been conceptualized, particularly in the United States, as inherently and constitutively performative, the idea of class as performative may reinforce the dominant conception of class location as the product of individual agency and determination; as a result, it can obscure the existence of persistent, structural, and transgenerational class inequities, as well as material and economic constraints on the performance of class identities and identifications. At the same time, theories of the performative (as is evident especially in Judith Butler's work) can refigure "the material" itself, arguably reducing its complex determinations to the singular referent of the "body-as-signifier." There is a related problem that involves the performative as a theorization of what Butler (following Simone de Beauvoir) terms a condition of "becoming": it is only when one attains a certain distance from a class identification that one can perform it--which in the case of class arguably depends, at least in part, on the attainment of cultural literacies and competencies that both are produced through and enable class mobility.