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

Criticism, Summer, 1998 by Lori Merish

Chapter 6, "'Genuine Negro Fun': Racial Pleasure and Class Formation in the 1840s," continues this analysis of minstrelsy's forms of "racial pleasure" and subjectivity during the more conservative post-panic years, when the minstrel show developed into a two-part, night-long entertainment. As Lott describes it, "The minstrel show ...

met the crisis of the early 1840s with an intensified white egalitarianism that, for all its real instability, buried class tensions and permitted class alliances along rigidifying racial lines" (145). At the same time, Lott focuses on the minstrel show's "unusual set of racial and sexual fantasies and representations"--especially the widespread "preoccupation ... with oral and genital amusement" (145). Lott unpacks here and elsewhere "minstrelsy's obsession with the [black] penis" as a figuration of white workers' (homosocial) identification with black men as exploited workers; their homosexual desire for black men (rerouted, through such strategies as cross-dressing, onto the bodies of women); and their anxieties about castration (also registered in insistent appeals, in workingmen's rhetoric, to ideals of "manliness"). Lott demonstrates how the shows featured certain strategic bodily zones--"fat lips, gaping mouths, sucks on the sugarcane; big heels, huge noses, enormous bustles"--to present "a child's eye view of sexuality"; exemplifying what Bakhtin termed "grotesque realism," minstrelsy activated preoedipal fantasies that were at once antibourgeois, misogynous, and racist. In other words, while staging a controlled form of regression in its white, mostly male spectators that allowed workers newly subjected to industrial discipline and morality to recollect preindustrial pleasures, these "low" pleasures were displaced (in minstrelsy's songs, jokes, and dramatic skits) onto the bodies of black people, especially black women. According to Lott, "By way of the `grotesque' (black) body, which denied with a laugh the ludicrous pose of autonomy adopted by the subject' and reopened the normally repressive boundaries of bodily orifices, the white subject could transform fantasies of racial assault and subversion into riotous pleasure, turn insurrection and intermixture into harmless fun--even though the outlines of the fun disclose its troubled sources" (147). He argues that "disgust bears the impress of desire": the "racial repressed is ... retained as a (usually eroticized) component of fantasy"; "Hence the threat of this projected material [i.e., white fantasies of racial "Others"], and the occasional pleasure of its threat" (149). Constituted through racial splitting, white subjectivity, for Loft, "was and is ... a mobile conflictual fusion of power, fear, and desire, absolutely dependent on the Otherness it seeks to exclude and constantly open to transgression" (150).