Mixed Race Studies

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

Some commentators predict that ethnoracial distinctions in the United States will disappear in the twenty-first century. Perhaps they are right, but there is ample cause to doubt it. And a glance at the history of Brazil, where physical mixing even of blacks and whites has magnificently failed to achieve social justice and to eliminate a color hierarchy, should chasten those who expect too much from mixture alone. Moreover, inequalities by descent group are not the only kind of inequalities. In an epoch of diminished economic opportunities and of apparent hardening of class lines, the diminution of racism may leave many members of historically disadvantaged ethnoracial groups in deeply unequal relation to whites simply by virtue of class position. Even the end of racism at this point in history would not necessarily ensure a society of equals.

David A. Hollinger, “Amalgamation and Hypodescent: The Question of Ethnoracial Mixture in the History of the United States,” The American Historical Review, Volume 108, Number 5, December 2003. http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/ahr/108.5/hollinger.html.

Blackface Cuba, 1840-1895

Posted in Books, Caribbean/Latin America, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive, Monographs on 2012-10-25 16:52Z by Steven

Blackface Cuba, 1840-1895

University of Pennsylvania Press
2005
288 pages
6 x 9
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8122-3867-9

Jill Lane, Associate Professor of Theater and Performance Studies
New York University

Blackface Cuba, 1840-1895 offers a critical history of the relation between racial impersonation, national sentiment, and the emergence of an anticolonial public sphere in nineteenth-century Cuba. Through a study of Cuba’s vernacular theatre, the teatro bufo, and of related forms of music, dance, and literature, Lane argues that blackface performance was a primary site for the development of mestizaje, Cuba’s racialized national ideology, in which African and Cuban become simultaneously mutually exclusive and mutually formative.

Popular with white Cuban-born audiences during the period of Cuba’s anticolonial wars, the teatro bufo was celebrated for combining Spanish elements with supposedly African rhythms and choreography. Its wealth of short comic plays developed a well-loved repertory of blackface stock characters, from the negrito to the mulata, played by white actors in blackface. Lane contends that these practices were embraced by white audiences as especially national forms that helped define Cuba’s opposition to Spain, at the same time that they secured prevailing racial hierarchies for a future Cuban nation. Comparing the teatro bufo to related forms of racial representation, particularly those created by black Cubans in theatres and in the press, Lane analyzes performance as a form of social contestation through which an emergent Cuban national community struggled over conflicting visions of race and nation.

Table of Contents

Preface. On the Translation of Race
Introduction. ImpersoNation in Our America
Chapter 1. Blackface Costumbrismo, 1840-1860
Chapter 2. Anticolonial Blackface, 1868
Chapter 3. Black(face) Public Spheres, 1880-1895
Chapter 4. National Rhythm, Racial Adulteration, and the Danzón, 1881-82
Chapter 5. Racial Ethnography and Literate Sex, 1888
Conclusion. Cubans on the Moon, and Other Imagined Communities
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments

Tags: Cuba, Jill Lane, University of Pennsylvania Press

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Blackface Cuba, 1840-1895

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