Cosmopolitan Minstrelsy: Race, Gender, and Transatlantic Theatre

Artistic creations, performances, and the artists who produce them have played central roles in the communication and reinforcement of national identities and their accompanying racial categories. Boarding ships bound for Europe, African American musicians, singers, dancers and artists made use of the modern availability of international travel and increased European interest for the consumption of American culture during the early twentieth century. African American women entertainers found particular success in the genres of vaudeville, cabaret and music hall. Josephine Baker, Mabel Mercer, Aida “Bricktop” Smith and Adelaide Hall are just a few of the popular African American women entertainers who became successful performing abroad. I am interested in the varied experiences and performative strategies of African American women in trans-Atlantic expressive culture. My core concern is to highlight African American women’s self-fashioning in an exploitative cultural arts industry. In this paper I will delineate the genres of expressive culture and examine the different ways black folk culture was read and how it was used in the United States and Europe. I argue that black American art and expressive culture was read as folk in a colonial context and that African American women used of stage performance to work against colonial and plantation racial and gender troupes. I will also explore the globalization of minstrelsy-how it evolved and re-appeared in a trans-Atlantic context as what I term cosmopolitan minstrelsy.  Although firmly grounded in archival historical research, this paper is interdisciplinary in design. I offer a black feminist critique of black internationalism by inserting African American women as players in the discussion of black transnational/ global/ international culture. I highlight several African American women performers and specifically examine the lives of: Josephine Baker, Ada “Bricktop” Smith and Adelaide Hall and their trans-Atlantic performances.