The birth of the ‘African Glen’: blackface minstrelsy between presentation and representation

Abstract

Acts performed by blackfaced minstrels in Victorian Britain relied on what we could qualify as a will for representation. The repetition implied in re-presentation showed its symptomatic meaning: representation as produced by an absence of origin. My approach here had to be accommodated by an adequate historical method. Although I am concerned by representation to its core (re-presentation: presenting something once again), I also wish to consider how it found its place inside the British cultural scope as a generator and constructing knowledge of race, class, imperialism and gender. I am not just interested in its quantitative popularity but rather in the fact that it did expend without major obstacles by developing its own meaning system. I concentrate on a period ranging from the 1820s to the late 1880s for this is a time scale during which blackface minstrelsy emerged, developed, extended and capitalised. The sources used are mainly Glasgow-based, a city in which popular entertainments developed extensively. Stories (reviews, comments, advertising …) built over the event of blackface minstrelsy opened narratives which manifested the genre's capacity to use the body as a shifting nexus of reference. Finally, I wish to show that this meaning system allowed the cultural, read artificial, production of the body as a carrier of multi-level representations.

Keywords:

• Blackface
• Minstrelsy
• Scotland
• Representation
• Textuality
• Origin