If the blackface scandals that rocked Virginia in early 2019 have taught Americans anything, it is that the ugly art of blackface—which many mistake for an enigmatic sidebar to American history—has possessed a remarkably durable half-life in certain sections of the culture. If those scandals and the public reactions to them have taught historians of blackface anything, it is that Americans still have very little understanding of the practice’s sprawling, multifaceted history.

This panel brings together scholars who take revisionist approaches to the history of blackface minstrelsy, and whose work urges a deeper understanding of blackface’s importance within the long arc of history in the Atlantic World. Using a diverse range of primary sources—from print culture to oral interviews, newspaper articles to sociological research notes—they variously challenge conventional interpretations of blackface as: 1) a primarily nineteenth-century artifact; 2) largely confined to the United States; and 3) singularly cultural or artistic in its manifestations. Individually, scholars here reveal blackface to be a stunningly resilient form of racial mockery—one so resilient even in the decades after World War II, and so deeply offensive to African Americans during the civil rights era, that battling blackface constituted an important plank of black freedom activism through at least the end of the 1960s. They cast blackface as a dynamic practice that traversed the Atlantic basin from the United States and Great Britain to Africa, animated colonial fantasies in South Africa, and structured understandings of belonging and exclusion in the Cape and Natal colonies. And they uncover the ways that the stage practice of blackface ramified in unpredictable and previously unseen ways—most notably in the form of Jim Crow-era white criminals using blackface in the commissioning of crimes in order to divert suspicion from themselves and frame their racial counterparts.

Collectively, this panel repositions blackface minstrelsy as not simply ancillary to the history of the United States, Great Britain, and South Africa, but as an important feature of those nation’s cultural histories. More broadly, panelists show how the history of blackface can be read in ways that shed new light on processes of colonialism, nationalism, and racial formation; intellectual projects such as criminology and the social constructions of crime and race; and the freedom activisms of marginalized people.

Logistical note: Rhae Lynn Barnes’s paper was originally submitted and accepted for presentation at the AHA’s 2019 conference. However, due to an on-site medical issue during the session in which she was to present (session #153), the session ended early and she did not have the opportunity to present the paper. We ask that her paper be considered anew within the context of this current submission.