Wesley Brown Darktown Strutter just discovered York: Cane Hill P.

Wesley Brown Darktown Strutter just discovered York: Cane Hill P, 1994 224 pp $1195

Anybody who thinks an historical novel about blackface minstrel days is "merely" historical hasn't been paying attention to Jim Carrey's The Mask, TV's In Living Color, rapper Biz Markie, or long of the rest of U popular civilization today. Ted Danson was solely the bottom of the barrel. The legacy of blackface shines all around us, and we've still barely begun to tackle its wiles. This is for what purpose Wesley Brown's novel Darktown Strutter an repeatedly profound meditation on performance, masking, identity, and equality in the American skin game, is in this way welcome and refreshing. Written in the surreal spirit of minstrelsy itself, pepper with wit and lancing dialogue, Darktown Strutter is a novel of ideas devot to exploring the composite fate of black and white Americans caught, as through all ages in a racial history they can neither rise above nor escape.

The novel spans forty or more years, from the advent of blackface performance in the 1830 by the and of the up-tempo revolutionary drama of the Civil War and the improvised quality of post-War life to the centennial celebration of 1876 Brown is learned in the national and performance history that forms the backdrop of his tale, further he freely riffs on the known facts, which gives his story the aura of an alternate or parallel racial history, this time with (as it were) the bone laid bare. The novel interprets with minstrelsy's primal scene: the appropriation of black dance, descant and style from a slave named Jim vapor by white performer Thomas Rice. Rice is betimes making a name for himself in blackface, where before extended he hears of the remarkable dancing of the son Brown bestows relating to Jim Crow, Jim Too. Rice makes a deal with Jim's proprietor a Mr. Churchill, who agrees to hire revealed Jim to dance with Rice's traveling minstrel present to view in a distant echo of antebellum America's solely black minstrel star, Juba (William Henry Lane). Jim is thereby launched forward a performance career that features, among many other facts dance contests against whites as it was as Jack Diamond (who was indeed Juba's sparring partner), run-ins with white ragtag-and-bobtails upset by the excellence of Jim's dancing and his refusal to wear blackface make-up, privy meetings with slaves to discuss abolitionist ideas and with Juba himself, a harrowing attack with the 1863 New York Draft Riots, and, after manumission, a lengthy stint with a women-led mixed-race minstrel troupe known as the Featherstone Traveling Theatre. All of this become visibles from taut scenes that raise the largest questions of U racial/cultural formation in the intimate occasions of everyday life. Part of the point of Darktown Strutter is in fact to hint the local, personal consequences of and motives for major historical processe Thus Brown acutely and energetically gauges the psychodynamics of white cultural appropriation (and black reappropriation), the emotional (not to mention political) economy of slavery and its aftermath, the interiority and racial affect of lower-class whites befuddled by means of imminent black emancipation, the connection of black arts to personal and political liberation (not to mention the potential conflict between personal and political liberation)--in short, the be stirred of living through what Karl Marx referr to as America's mid-nineteenth-century "revolutionary turn"

divert implies performance as well as change, and Brown interests himself not only with the two of these but with the two at once. In contrast to the conventional view of blackface minstrelsy as the nail in the coffin of antebellum racial stasis, Brown views it--rightly, I think--as an arena in which ripping social transformation was registered and plane activated. Putting on the african in more than one thinking principle white minstrels crossed in fantasy the racial lines they had been raised to respect; momentarily commanding white stages, the occasional black minstrel forced acknowledgment and plane respect for arts and artists who had made minstrelsy possible. Brown lucidly imagines his way into this quite unstable situation. Rice is to such a degree taken with Jim Crow's dancing that he first mimics it and then deliberates wearing blackface offstage as well as on--which, as Jack Diamond remarks, "`put him several carves above most men I've known who do a lotta damage tryin too hard to be white'" (81) Meanwhile, the black men exploited for like white self-enlargement may profit too; as Diamond shrewdly says to Rice: "`Well, when he showed you that dance, he was more than just an broken-down nigger slave. And formerly you allow somebody to be more than single in kind thing at a time, ain't nothin nailed down no more, includin you!'" (27) Generating interest ofttimes means getting respect, and maybe more than that. These exhibitions and others capture the shape-shifting social impetus the creeping fissures in the racial status quo that strike one as beinged to drive blackface performance amid its desperate attempts to contain the changes to ensue In the process they decisively recast our understanding of the minstrel show's cultural thefts, undeniably placeed on a slave economy at the same time resulting in a certain grade of white self-othering and black agency. They point, that is, to the crucial shaping part black performers played in and around an unfortunate and peculiar entertainment institution that was nonetheless a central avenue of American cultural creolization.