This conference paper uses newspaper evidence, minstrel lyrics, and minstrel sketch scripts to describe the ways in which blackface performances contributed to an imaginary of burnt cork nationalism in South Africa. The discursive humor of blackface minstrel shows often portrayed black characters as non-citizens, unfit for democratic participation in a white racial state. Blackface caricatures reinforced ideas of who should be included and who should be excluded from civic participation.
Furthermore, my concept of burnt cork nationalism puts the extractive logics of blackface minstrelsy and colonial states into comparative framework. Whereas minstrels expropriate black skin, song, and dance as commodifiable resources, colonial states extract raw materials and native labor. This kind of materialist reading of blackface minstrelsy helps scholars engage Catherine Cole’s suggestion: “Could a transnational appraisal of blackface lead us to conclude that blackface, rather than being a quintessentially American form, is rather a quintessentially colonial one?” Blackface minstrelsy was quintessentially colonial because its extractive logics mirrored those of the settler colonies. Many British settlers in the Cape Colony of the nineteenth century cultivated an ideology of “accumulation and dispossession.” Given this worldview, how exciting it must have been to watch a touring minstrel troupe and realize that black culture was one more part of the colonial landscape that could be owned. A widespread “possessive investment in whiteness” established white racial identity as exclusive property. Meanwhile, blackness was thoroughly commoditized, unmoored, and available for pillaging. In the colonial setting of the Cape and Natal, blackface minstrel shows offered colonial fantasies of resource expropriation.
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