Part 4 of 5. Under the cut.
Okay, so this is not a biblio so much as a resource list of works I own or have read to date which inform this series of entries. Some are books, some are papers, there's a couple of movies. Some may not appear to be directly related, but are to me in an All Things Flow Into One sense of things. (Not my line, it's from a book that's rather tedious until you get to the end, when it knocks you over. Worth crawling through it for that end. Totally.) What's below is not everything, just the best of what I can personally recc. Also, since learning about this topic involves a lot of constructing a big picture by coming across pieces of info in works about something else, I'm not including all of the 'something else' items. (For one, there's far too many of them.) Example, when I read Race & Reuion back in the summer, how delightful it was to see new-to-me information about how minstrelsy was used to build some of the white mythological elements of the UGRR! Now I have to make my way through his biblio and hunt down his source material.
White skin, Black masks: Nigger Minstrelsy in Victorian Britain, Michael Pickering (If you want to learn more about minstrelsy in Europe, you want start with Pickering and get your hands on as many journal articles as you can possibly find. I discovered him in the late 90s and hunted down as much as I could, though I haven't got it all yet. Other articles of his that relate are The BBC Kentucky Minstrels: 1933-1950, Blackface Entertainment on British Radio; John Bull in Blackface and Stereotyping: The Politics of Racial Representation)
The Negro Character As Seen by White Authors, Sterling A. Brown (Widely available in 1,0001 anthologies. Though written in 1933, it could have been written yesterday.)
Blackface Street Minstrels in Victorian London and its Resorts: Popular Culture and its Racial Connotations As Revealed in Polite Opinion. Journal of Popular Culture, Summer 1981 (Isn't that a great title?)
Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. Toni Morrison
Blackface, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting Pot, Michael Rogin
The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class, David Roediger (Get the revised edition. You'll understand why if you do.)
Blackatcha, Mark Steven Greenfield (I wish I owned a copy of this. I have held one in moi hands, then it was taken away. *sniff* Happily, he has that website.)
Impossible Purities: Blackness, Femininity, and Victorian Culture, Jennifer Brody (Among other things, in this book she takes on The Island of Dr. Moreau. By the time she's finished you might need to lay down for a while and recover.)
Archeology and the threat of the Past: Sir Henry Rider Haggard and the acquisition of time, Tim Murray. Found in the Oct. 1993 issue of World Archeology. (In addition to being an armchair mountaineer, I'm an armchair archeologist.)
Mammy and Uncle Mose: Black American collectibles and American Stereotyping, Kenneth Goings
Blackface Broadcasting in the Early Days of Radio, Radio Journal, 2005-ish
Dancing in the Dark, Caryl Phillips (This is a novel about Bert Williams. It's excellent. But if you're a wuss like me don't read it because you'll cry. One of my fave lines in it A man can kill himself trying to please white folks. This guy also wrote Foreigners: Three English Lives, which came out this year, and a collection titled The Nature of Blood, which came out in the 1990s. Though unrelated to the topic at hand, I mention them because I really like this guy's writing. My envy over coming up with "The Nature of Blood" as a title has yet to abate, and it's been years... I need to look into the rules for stealing somebody else's title. I want that title! Why didn't I come up with that title? I NEED THAT TITLE! Completely unrelated update: From the lj of somebody I don't know which I found on the flist of somebody else I don't know, here's his writing room. I bet he came up with that title while sitting at that desk. Okay, I'll stop, now. Unrelated update II: Just wanted to point out this article, and this article, both of which generally relate to the big picture topic at hand. The first article is better at the top. I remember hearing about that BBC list when it first came out... I must add that I liked the book more than either of the reviewers linked to here. In case you don't know, one of the persons explored in "Foreigners" is David Oluwale, the British citizen whose murder and cover up by police officers is the focus of the nonfiction book [not by Phillips] called Nationality Wog: The Hounding of David Oluwale. I don't have that one yet, but wanted to mention it. The title of that book comes from what was on one on two of Oluwale's book-in sheets. Where "British" was written for his nationality, a cop crossed that out and wrote "Wog." On another book-in sheet, "Wog" was typed in as his nationality. Here's an article from back in the spring about that book, which is titled "Nationality Wog" in case I hadn't mentioned it.) Okay, leaving now. Chitlins on the stove and all...)
The Last Darky: Bert Williams, Black-on-Black Mistrelsy & the African Diaspora, Louis Chude-Sokei
Shades of Brown: The Law of Skin Color, Trina Jones, Duke Law Journal, 2000
Bamboozled, Spike Lee (This is a movie)
Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race, Mat Frye Jacobson
Blackface, David Levinthal
Englishness and Blackness: Cricket as Discourse on Colonialism and The Blackface Stereotype, by Manthia Diawara. (The second one you can find as an essay in Levinthal's book. I don't know where the first one appeared...I didn't write source info on my very old copy.)
White on Black: Images of Africa and Blacks in Western Popular Culture, by Jan Pieterse
Raising Cain: Blackface Performance from Jim Crow to Hip Hop, W.T. Lhamon (Truthfully, your mileage may vary on this one. I think it's worth the read.)
Love & Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class, Eric Lott
Where Dead Voices Gather, Nick Tosches (For the record, I hate this book. It’s about Emmett Miller, but it is crippled by Tosches’ inability to get the fuck out of the way. But there is information within that is useful to find as you slog through it.)
Uncle Tom's Cabin, Harriett Beecher Stowe
Everybody's Protest Novel, James Baldwin (widely available in anthologies)
Staging Race: Black Performers in Turn of the Century America, Karen Sotiropoulos
The Colored Museum, George C. Wolfe (This is a play. Sometimes it shows up on PBS, though it's been a while.)
Characteristics of Negro Expression, Zora Neale Hurston
Sambo Sahib: The Story of Little Black Sambo and Helen Bannerman, Elizabeth Hay
"Little Black Sambo : A History of Helen Bannerman's The Story of Little Black Sambo and its Popularity/Controversy in the United States" Phyllis Yuill
The Natural History of Make-Believe: A Guide to the Principal Works of Britain, Europe, and America, John Goldthwaite
Next: And after all that, I should probably read The Black Dossier, huh? Whenever I finish, I'll come back and post final thoughts. Meanwhile, the blog will return to normal operation.
Part 1. Part 2. Part 3. Part 4. Part 5. Full run.
*** Bamboozled, Spike Lee, 2000
