Whiting Up: Whiteface Minstrels and Stage Europeans in African American Performance

Posted in Books, History, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive, Monographs, Passing on 2011-05-01 04:28Z by Steven

Whiting Up: Whiteface Minstrels and Stage Europeans in African American Performance

University of North Carolina Press
December 2011
336 pages
6.125 x 9.25, 15 illus., notes, bibl., index
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8078-3508-1

Marvin McAllister, Assistant Professor of English
University of South Carolina

In the early 1890s, black performer Bob Cole turned blackface minstrelsy on its head with his nationally recognized whiteface creation, a character he called Willie Wayside. Just over a century later, hiphop star Busta Rhymes performed a whiteface supercop in his hit music video “Dangerous.” In this sweeping work, Marvin McAllister explores the enduring tradition of “whiting up,” in which African American actors, comics, musicians, and even everyday people have studied and assumed white racial identities.

Not to be confused with racial “passing” or derogatory notions of “acting white,” whiting up is a deliberate performance strategy designed to challenge America’s racial and political hierarchies by transferring supposed markers of whiteness to black bodies—creating unexpected intercultural alliances even as it sharply critiques racial stereotypes. Along with theater, McAllister considers a variety of other live performance modes, including antebellum cakewalks and contemporary stand-up comedy by solo artists such as Dave Chappelle. For over three centuries and in today’s supposedly “postracial” America, McAllister argues, whiting up has allowed African American performers first to appropriate artistic products of a white imagination and then to fashion new black identities through these “white” forms, therefore enhancing our collective understanding of self and other.

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Controversy: Race and Sexuality on the American Frontier (FRO 100.023)

Posted in Barack Obama, Course Offerings, Gay & Lesbian, Identity Development/Psychology, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive, Passing, United States on 2011-05-01 04:12Z by Steven

Controversy: Race and Sexuality on the American Frontier (FRO 100.023)

Goucher College, Baltimore, Maryland

Angelo Robinson, Associate Professor of English

“Am I Black or White? Am I Straight or Gay? CONTROVERSY?”  Since its founding, and long before recording artist Prince penned these lyrics in the 1980s, America has been a space and a place demanding and mandating polarized definitions of race and sexuality. This course will examine the reasoning behind and ramifications of these dichotomies from the Colonial Period to the present in genres that include literature, film, and music.  We will also explore how these binaries affect people who identify as biracial and bisexual.

This discussion-based course requires intensive reading, viewing, and listening and will foster your critical thinking and analytical writing.  Topics of discussion will include the “one-drop rule,” the slavery debate, miscegenation, racial passing, segregation, integration, interracial desire, and sexual passing.  Special attention will be given to individuals who and organizations that refuse to follow racial and sexual dictates. Authors will include Thomas Jefferson, Harriet Jacobs, Mark Twain, Nella LarsenJames Weldon Johnson, Ralph Ellison, June Jordan, James Baldwin, Audre LordeStevie Wonder, Prince, Adrienne Rich, E. Lynn Harris, and Barack Obama.

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