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

Criticism, Summer, 1998 by Lori Merish

In attempting to (re-)construct the "historical forms of consciousness and subjectivity" of minstrelsy's audience--its conflictual, shifting identifications--Lott draws from a number of sources: the work of labor historians who describe historical contexts that, Lott suggests, shaped audience members' particular investments in minstrelsy; extant minstrelsy texts (e.g., songs, scripts); published reviews and unpublished accounts of performances by audience members; and accounts by blackface performers themselves.

Lott's method is interdisciplinary and his approach eclectic: he draws from a variety of approaches (performance theory, Lacanian psychoanalysis, Bakhtin's poetics of the body, Victor Turner's theory of dramatic ritual), as well as critical methods of close textual analysis, to examine minstrelsy texts as "an index of popular white racial feeling in the United States" (5). Rejecting both "reactionary, nostalgi[c]" arguments about minstrelsy as a reflection and product of black "folk" culture, and a "narrowly functionalist" analysis of minstrelsy as an unproblematic instance of racial domination (while acknowledging that the refutation of minstrelsy's racial stereotypes "still, in certain instances, offers the terms in which cultural struggle ought to be waged"), Lott presents minstrelsy as a site of highly mediated racial exchange in antebellum culture, a "shape-shifting middle-term in racial conflict," that was always connected to--and partially determined by--economic relations (6-8). Drawing from Homi Bhabha's analysis of ambivalence as constitutive of colonial subjectivity and ideology, Lott's basic argument is that minstrelsy stages working class white men's ambivalence toward black men--fundamentally shaped by the institution of chattel slavery--which Lott characterizes as a process of "love and theft": both identification with black men as exploited workers and (homo-)erotic valorization of the black male body (the "love" of Lott's title), and a sense of white racial entitlement to ("theft" of) black culture and black labor. Following Leslie Fiedler's well-known observation that "born theoretically white, we are permitted to pass our childhood as imaginary Indians, our adolescence as imaginary Negroes, and only then are expected to settle down to being what we really are: white once more," Lott explores how "the assumption of dominant codes of masculinity in the United States was (and still is) partly negotiated through an imaginary black interlocutor" (53). Minstrelsy, Lott contends, instantiated a certain (class-based) structure of racial feeling and gave it dramatic, indeed ritualized form.