on Transoceanic Blackface

Courtney Murray Ross (CMR): Where did this project start for you, and can you tell us a little bit more about your book process?

Kellen Hoxworth (KH): Into the deep recesses of my mind here. So, the very first inkling of this project came when I was doing my master’s thesis, which was actually about post-apartheid South African theater. I was studying what was going on after the fall of apartheid, especially in terms of nation-making and imagining. How are we remaking this sort of new South Africa as a rainbow nation? And one of the things I kept bumping into was how much racial impersonation there is in South African theater. My question became: Is this an artifact of racial segregation and apartheid, or is there a deeper history that we need to be looking at here? Very simple, very direct question that produced this not direct book.

What ended up happening was I went to South Africa in 2013, trying to find the nineteenth-century antecedents of racial impersonation. Specifically, I was looking for blackface, and I kept bumping into interesting historical problems. One of the first historical problems was that a lot of scholars cited 1862 as the first blackface minstrel troupe performing in South Africa. Then others, 1848. And I was like, well, that’s a really huge swath of time. What happened in between those 14 years? So, that became my first sort of research question. Let’s go back to 1848. While I’m doing that, I start finding that these people are not going to South Africa. They’re stopping in South Africa on the way to Australia or on the way to South Asia. And that suddenly became my research question. If they were just stopping in South Africa, what was going on? Why were they going elsewhere? They weren’t clearly designing racial impersonation just to be in South Africa and to stay in South Africa. They were doing these things while on tour. 

Once I started following that thread, I developed the dissertation project. Who are these people? Why is blackface minstrelsy traveling to all these places? Who is the audience for them? Why is blackface minstrelsy, which to this point had really been thought of as an American form that then went a couple of places, going to all these other places? If it’s not distinctly American, what are the politics of this performance? Why are audiences so eager to see it? Before long, I was taking another trip to South Africa. I was taking a trip to South Asia. I was rifling through every single digital newspaper archive I could find. Fortunately, Australia and New Zealand have digitized everything, saving me a research trip or two and several thousand dollars - always a consideration when you’re a graduate student. And that ended up being the research process in the dissertation. 

I want to pause here just to say that my dissertation has almost nothing to do with the book on a sentence level. There’s almost no sentence that is carried over from one to the next. 

CMR: For graduate students interested in doing large archival and international projects, how did you manage that while also making progress through the dissertation?

KH: Yeah, that’s a good question. I did not try to fit archival trips in during the school year. So, anytime I was in coursework, I would focus on whatever I needed to do in coursework and exams. I set my summers aside for months-long archival research trips because mine were international. If I was going, I was going to go for a very long time, and I was going to hunker down and do nothing else. That mostly worked except for the year I had to do my oral exams, and I was spending days in the archives and reading for my orals at night. That was miserable. In short, I compartmentalized. I tried to pack everything like courses, exams, and conferences during the academic year, and then archive time over during the summer became the time to do my own work.

I did not try to write when I was in the archives. Some people do that, but I wanted to pull together as much material as I could. So, I didn’t try to synthesize any of the stuff I found until I got back and was drafting the prospectus.

CMR: One last follow-up. You said that there’s not much crossover between your dissertation and book. How did that go in terms of finding a publisher or completing the book overall? 

KH: I was very fortunate to have a postdoctoral fellowship. I spent two years at Dartmouth College, and writing the book was the main project I was working on. I was trying to reconceptualize it theoretically and address some of the blind spots that the dissertation had, and I needed to do additional research. For instance, when I was doing the dissertation, I really had a hard cap on the nineteenth century and wasn’t going to leave that century in any major way. Whereas the book’s first full chapter is pre-nineteenth century, and I knew I needed more than a couple of citations. I knew I needed to write that new chapter. Those two years were transformative for me. It gave me a different kind of trajectory: how to cut through the material, organize it, and how I could think differently about aspects of my archive together in a way that would be more accessible to a reader.

I had an unusual journey finding a publisher. I published an essay that had nothing to do with this project. It’s an essay on Sarah Baartman and protest performances in South Africa in 2015 around a sculpture of her. That ended up winning an award, so I was invited to meet with the acquisitions editor of Northwestern University Press. I was very eager to get a contract because I was on the job market, and I felt that if I had a contract, that would make all the difference in the world. I don’t think that it did because I did not yet have a book, but in any case, I did end up with an advanced contract with Northwestern. That gave me a ticking clock, so I knew I had a set amount of time to get a manuscript to the editor. Then, Covid happened, so that amount of time expanded by a year. In the whole revision process, I did have that time to sort of do that reconceptualization work and start thinking about the audience much more intentionally because I already had a press in mind. Again, because I had a postdoctoral fellowship, I had a little bit of headspace and time to do that work of moving things around and reimagining the project. 

Jordan Sanders (JS):  Your answer wonderfully segues to my question: who’s going to be reading this project? Compared to how, as graduate students and early professionals, we think of a more finite readership, what kinds of intellectual communities did you want to invite into this project, and what decisions did you make to ensure those invested communities found entrance points into your project?

KH:  That’s a good question. In terms of imagining an audience for the book, one is always aspirational, right? One really doesn’t know who is going to read it. I’m really glad I’m talking to you both because  I imagined it would primarily be of interest to nineteenth-century literary scholars, historians, and performance scholars. I’m a theater and performance scholar, so I thought that people in my discipline would also be interested in it. Other people I think I’m writing to or, depending on how we want to think about it, writing at are minstrel scholars, which I have a pretty clear intervention into that literature. That’s my primary scholarly audience I was imagining. 

I also want to be clear that because it’s a transnational project, I really do hope there are readers in South Africa, South Asia, Australia, and Aotearoa New Zealand, and hopefully, it can spur some deeper historical work into the legacies of racialized performance globally, especially in these sites. The reason for this is because a lot of nineteenth-century theater history tends to be nationalistic to a certain extent. Particularly in postcolonial theater histories, you get, “here’s all the bad stuff, colonial people doing Shakespeare, or colonial populations wanting to project that they are civilized.” Then, there’s a counterreaction to that. I really do hope that this book can enrich some of those conversations by pointing out that this is what “civilization” looked like, and there was a lot of blackface minstrelsy. So, how does that help us to rethink those different theater histories as well?

CMR: That transitions to our next question. We were really intrigued by the book’s terminology. Of course, the main one is “transoceanic blackface.” You define it as “a global assemblage of performances now known as blackface or minstrelsy.” And, then, you also demonstrate that “transoceanic blackface also conscripted non-white subjects and subalterns into its racial repertoires.” Can you tell us how you came to the concept, and were there ever instances where it refers to cross-cultural relationships, awareness, commiserations, and/or modes of resistance?

KH:  The first part of your question has a sort of two-part answer. Then, I’ll come back to the questions about solidarities and resistance. 

The dissertation had a slightly different title. It was Transoceanic Blackface, Imperial Whiteness, and I was thinking much more with and alongside minstrelsy studies. My primary focus in the dissertation was: What imperial white cultures were being produced through blackface and minstrel performance? I didn’t really have as much material that looked into South Asian performances, and I hadn’t really gotten deeply enough into other sites to be able to speak in an informed way about different modes of resistance to it. One of the big things I changed moving forward was that I wasn’t actually only interested in whiteness. I was really interested in how this performance form became one of the major popular vectors for circulating images, ideas, impressions, and structures of feeling about race. I did not think that was necessarily limited to whiteness. Obviously, this is going to conscript, to some extent, colonized people, subjects, and subalterns into relation to these discourses. So, the book tries to address that. 

I also want to clarify why I say transoceanic rather than transnational blackface. Transoceanic, in many ways, tries to get us away from thinking about the nation as the container. Although many of the sites in the book have national theater histories or national cultural histories, they were colonial spaces. They were not independent nations. They’re even at times sharing the same colonial governors who would be transferred from one continent to the next. Performers and audiences are bringing these materials with them everywhere they’re going. If I was talking about this as a transnational project, it would be a US/UK project. I wanted to think about all these different sites and how they’re connected together. So, thinking about them as connected across oceanic space was a way for me to do that and to get us from some of those assumptions about national borders. 

In terms of solidarities, there’s not much in this book. We don’t find these moments of people resisting and succeeding in that resistance. That is a very hard, painful, and difficult fact I encountered. I went looking anywhere I could for people speaking back to people performing blackface. Some moments give us a clear sense of opposition. The clearest one is most plainly articulated in Canada when we get this specific petition against blackface minstrelsy performances in Toronto. Blackface was inspiring actual white mobs and attacks against Black people. The State never responds. We just have these petitions. There’s just complete silence, so how do you narrate that? There are similar and messy things happening in South Asia. For instance, the opening anecdote in the book I start with is about a Parsi theatrical company doing yellow- and blackface. This South Asian theatrical troupe has this affiliation or alignment with whiteness, with the colonial, dominant forms of racial discourse. 

In protests that do not work or achieve their ends, there are attempts at agency. But, I’m interested in thinking about agency in a more complex way—agency is something constrained by discourse and the conditions of politics and popular culture. We’re not seeing that achievement of agential self-realization because there isn’t that fundamental political recognition being met. That’s something I tried to think with throughout the book. I don’t want to be the person who just writes agency into the history because I’m a well-meaning white guy who wants that to be the history. That’s its own kind of paternalism and condescension. Instead, I’m trying to think through how this didn’t lead to people identifying across these different possible racial identities or forms of oppression.

JS: I think that’s something really important to think about in the way that you narrated to what extent these groups are interacting with each other. What I appreciate in this project is that you use terms like “transoceanic” and “empire”—terms that really make us think about distance and separation—this wide expanse of empire across oceans, and that can be sprawling and daunting. Somehow, you make it small. You resist that affect of distance and separation, and you ask the readers to think about these dense intimacies kind of folding in on themselves and the dense intimacies of a kind of racializing performance project. Can you talk about the ways that you actively thought about the affect of intimacy both in producing this project and with performance? In what ways did technology like travel or even print increase this intimacy of blackface performance as a commonsense violence?

KH:  The book gestures to these large expanses, and we might think that oceans or distance are what keep various subaltern oppressed people from gathering together. But I do think it has to do with something that’s much more intimate. An example I discuss in the book is that, in South Asia, you have people in Kolkata and people in Mumbai who aren’t seeing each other or sharing any information, so that becomes even one of the sites where various brownface characters are shaping how white people and South Asian people are thinking about other South Asian people. You have that divide and rule happening within the same colonial space among people that now we would think of as one national population. So, I do think that kind of intimacy helps us get away from what we think about in terms of the nation being one thing. I want us to think about what kind of affective work these performances were doing, and for me, the affective work of minstrelsy is always, in part, sexual in nature. It binds together ideas, images, and feelings about race with a deep, libidinal, affective anxiety. I don’t think they can be separated. I don’t think it helps us to try and separate them. This is something that really clicked for me when I started doing more work into the eighteenth century. One of the first proto-minstrel jokes, however, we want to classify them, is a Black character misspeaking the word “important” so that it becomes “impotent.” There’s a working through of a racial anxiety but fundamentally a sexual anxiety. 

So much of what I’ve been tracing about empire is about how anytime you have these colonial contact zones that Mary Louise Pratt writes about, you’re always dealing with a way of separating out, dividing, and policing that boundary that is not only a racial boundary but also a sexual boundary. This is something that Ann Laura Stoler has written several books about, so I spent a lot of time thinking with her and about how performance allows this to be acted out. We have these spectacles of minstrel performances and enactments that are allowing for a sort of proxy colonial contact zone to be staged. But it’s all contained and made safe because we all know that it’s white people underneath the mask. So, that’s one of the major ways I’m thinking about intimacy in this project and how it’s tangled up with sexual politics. We can’t think about imperial or racial politics without that key aspect in mind. 

JS: I really appreciate you teasing that out. Transoceanic blackface allows the contact to happen in a way that the public and the audience feel safe. You’re also asking us to imagine a broader understanding of circulation that somehow is always following and multiplying. I’m interested in how you chart that for us between the theatrical itineraries, and I’m also interested in the “scriptive blackface” that circulates in the printed materials. You define scriptive as the “paratheatrical network of closet dramas, paratheatrical writing, comic almanacs, and proliferating visual materials” that influenced blackface performance. What is the relationship between the scriptive and performance in constructing anti-black regimes of power? To what extent does the scriptive script what is performed?

KH: That is a lovely question. There are a lot of places I want to go with it. First, the entire chapter, “Othello Travestied,” arose from one archival document I found. It was a reproduction of a burlesque version of Othello’s oration to the Venetian Senate in a South African newspaper in 1861. At first, I did not know what play this was from or if it was widely performed. I just knew that someone who bought this newspaper in nineteenth-century Cape Town would have had the full script of this speech. They could have re-performed the speech. This resonated enough with the Cape Town audience that they wanted access to it, or someone decided to give them access to this script. This was compelling. We’re talking about something that’s circulating in another way.

This started as a methodological problem. When I went to the Cape Town library and asked for what they had about nineteenth-century theater, they gave me exactly two playbills. One of them was a minstrel show, and the other wasn’t. I couldn’t write a dissertation or a book based on that, so part of this became me finding where else this material was being reproduced and circulated. Sure enough, it was regularly reproduced in newspapers. Later, when I looked elsewhere, it was being reproduced in almanacs. Again, there’s this entire paratheatrical complex of material that, then, became a substantial part of my archive. So, I started to think: Where else are people performing other than just on the theatrical stage? 

Presumably, someone is reading this aloud; people are speaking this; maybe they’re even reperforming it on an amateur level. We’re not just talking about professional minstrels. Now, we’re talking about amateurs. This really changes the dynamic of how we even think about the cultural transmission of racialized performance. It’s not just about these high-profile, famous globetrotting performers. We have all these other people in on the activity. For instance, when I write about the Silver Belt Jig in chapter three, there’s a shipwreck, and the minstrel troupe happens to be on the ship. The ship goes down. The minstrel troupe survives, but what is lost is the championship silver belt of one of the performers who claimed to be the world champion in blackface. This was all a sham because minstrel performers lied a lot to build their reputations. But then, the local colonists decided to make him a new championship silver belt to replace the lost one. This is really remarkable. You then have this outlay of resources because the Cape colonists want to reproduce this and be a part of it.

 So, in order to understand the extent of imperial and colonial investment in these performances, we actually have to see how far and deep these racialized repertoires of blackface go. It’s not about if they’re just going to shows. Are they spending time and money to make someone a new silver belt? Are they buying, reproducing, or citing something they’ve heard or read elsewhere? How long is that going on? This goes on well into the early twentieth century, where the book ends. There’s this larger complex where we can really see theater and performance not being limited to what’s happening on stage but rippling through and really being formative of a larger cultural project that is adamantly anti-black and invested in imperial supremacy and white supremacy.

CMR: I think that dovetails well into our interest in how bodies show up in your book because even how you’re describing the costume has all these different levels to it. There’s a lot of materiality going on to make the minstrel or the blackface happen, and I really enjoyed your examples of Bobalition, scripts, and the visual origins of blackface. 

All that helped coalesce, in my mind, blackface performance’s ties to citation. When you gave the part of the definition of “performance,” meaning “furnishing forth,” it made me look up whether citation is connected to that sort of performativity. It does have a similar aspect to it— “summon, urge, call to put in sudden motion.” So, to connect all these pieces, I was thinking about how the body, especially the black body, is circulated and cited in all these different ways. So, can it then be argued that what transoceanic blackface does so well is show how the black body is called upon to birth empire, performing and being embodied, citational, fungible matter? 

KH:  Thank you for that. That’s a really wonderful distillation of a lot of things from the book, and I take that you’re sort of referencing the citation of the “chingaring” chorus of Charles Dibdin’s eighteenth-century plantation blackface songs where “chingaring” starts as the sound of a banjo strum that gives this happy and pleasant plantation affect that then gets cited all the way through until we end up with nineteenth-century yellowface performances that say “chingaring” with different variations on it. So, yes, absolutely. 

CMR: Yes, and you also start the book by analyzing The Black Doctor and The Quack Doctor. These examples show there is this foundational understanding of blackness. I think it is Ira Aldridge who’s being situated in that particular iteration of the play. Would that have happened if it was called the “white doctor” or if there was a white body on stage? The citation or the calling forth to birth the Empire seems to be grounded in what the black body can do, regardless of geography.

KH: So, there are two different things I want to say about this. One is something that was in the dissertation and ended up in a side publication, so you can actually look this up. In a book called Mimetic Desires, I have a longer piece about Dave Carson, the original brownface minstrel in South Asia. He had this songbook cover, and it’s all drawn by hand, but he’s in the middle, and you then have next to him all these small versions of his various brownface characters.  On the bottom corners are the two blackface end-men characters, so if you’re looking at this, you see a white man, and then you have brownface still anchored by blackface. You kind of have a sort of minstrelized chain of being happening here. But the end-men are always there, right? Even when Dave Carson is doing brownface in South Asia, he’s still doing it in a blackface minstrel show. The blackface is always there, and so part of what you’re helping me draw out of the project is that the blackface doesn’t go away. It is the foundation. It is the basic performance material from which all of these other racialized performance forms end up being elaborated and drawn out. 

There is, of course, a sort of material historical connection here where, for instance, after the abolition of slavery, we have the invention of the “coolie” trade where we’re literally trying just to find other people who can fill this role of unfree labor. That’s happening in the same exact historical moment, so I do think that there’s a historical connection. In terms of an economic and political structure of things, there is a place that blackness has held in society that can only ever be replaced at best, right? But it’s always going to be there. Blackness is sort of this substrate to white imperial culture, and what we see in terms of brownface and yellowface being adapted out of black-based material is a cultural version of that same sort of mode of replacement adaptation – but ultimately not adapting very far. 

How do I want to put this in terms of this idea of blackness being kind of fundamentally fungible? We can’t think about something like capitalism without thinking about race and racialization, so why would we think that we can think about any of these performance economies without thinking about the role of blackness in shaping them? Why are we even thinking about the concept of performance as a nineteenth century concept without thinking about the role that blackness had in making that?

This goes back to our earlier conversation about agency. If we’re looking for narratives of resistance, we’re not going to see it in many of these contexts. So how does thinking about the specific historical constraints and violences that are going on and being produced by this performance culture help us to understand and maybe rethink how we think about performance? 

I have a little addendum. There’s a lot of really fantastic work about the long eighteenth century and performance culture, and a lot of that focuses on performances of indigeneity. The narrative usually is that then we get blackface, and blackface takes over. And what I find really interesting, because you were talking about citationality, is that blackface minstrelsy isn’t usually citing indigenous impersonation. There is actually some kind of rupture. What blackface and minstrelsy are doing is not continuing that work, at least in my analysis and archives. So, blackface is doing something fundamentally different, and that’s why I’m really interested in its existence in this critical moment of the British Empire reorienting its empire from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean world. Because blackface does make that transition. So it was very interesting to me that blackface is able to circulate and actually become a foundational part of this global performance culture in a way that I wasn’t finding with other forms of racialized performance.

JS: Perhaps connected to that rupture, it might be worth discussing the actual materiality of the performances and the way the materials of performance relate to how blackness itself was theorized. As you were talking, I immediately thought about how your text draws our attention to illustration, particularly circulated drawn bodies and photographed bodies. They invite us to question what it takes, materially, to transform this white body into a blackface self and to what extent these kinds of material concerns play out in printed forms. 

So because your close readings of the images were probably my favorite parts of the book, I do want to ask, what do you see as the tension or the relationship between the kind of bodies that can be made and unmade –  covered in ink or whatever materials are necessary to make them caricatures of blackness – an indelible ink that comes with print and photography? Are these printed, blackened bodies somehow rendered stable in a way that the performed body isn’t? What kinds of intimacies do the printed images embrace, reject, or project as they circulate in discourses around race? 

KH: The images, especially the ones that I write most about, are—this is a very sort of Joseph Roach way of thinking—kinds of surrogates for the performance itself, right? They’re mnemonics in many ways. So they are ways of remembering and reproducing much in the same way we were talking about scriptive blackface. It is a useful way of tracking the extent of any individual performance or individual playtext if it has all of this cultural material that carries these bodies far beyond that initial performance space, but there’s also a second thing that’s going on there. They also help us to think about how such images are carried within the bodies of audiences and the bodies of readers. They give us a way of tracking. Joseph Roach calls this the “kinesthetic imagination,” which is how we imagine bodies. Movement is always part of a performance culture, so each and every one of these images is in some ways an index of how a black body is being envisioned, not only how it’s performed and, again, how it circulates, not only in print, as you’re asking us to think about, but also beyond print. I can summon the images that you’re talking about without having them in front of me, as could anyone who is dealing with those images in the nineteenth century, so that’s one way of thinking about it.

Also, maybe to push against what you were saying about one being indelible and one being maybe more ephemeral, I think that the performance actually does have its own very long afterlife in terms of embodied memory. But what you are right to point out is that these images help to, in many ways, concretize, sediment, and, therefore, reify certain imaginations. Performers all have their own particular stage tricks for how they make themselves up and whatever else, but ultimately, what happens when we have an image is that it becomes something to aspire to or something to reproduce in one’s own performance. There is this feedback loop in which the print is helping, much like a script, to give a set of possibilities to be realized on stage, and that’s something to be written about. I’m thinking a little bit about Miles Greer’s book Inkface and that interplay between the ink on the page and the burnt cork or shoe polish or what have you. By the nineteenth century, it wasn’t ink, and yet, I think what you’re asking us to think about is inkiness, right? What’s the indelible sort of thing that blackface is also participating in producing or doing here?

JS: Or that putting it in print at least calls us to notice ways that that “inkiness” might not show up when we’re just thinking about the performance. Reading your book – sitting with the images and thinking about how the blackened body gets printed and circulated – raised questions about how print negotiates racial caricature. In printed images of photographed and illustrated blackface performers, the ink has to do a kind of work because we’re not necessarily looking at color animation. So, maybe to go back to Courtney’s point in a kind of interesting way, blackness has to do a lot of work, and in the case of print circulation, it seems that blackness becomes as black ink is the material even as performances might differentiate or mark a particular iteration of racialized performance. 

KH: Yes, I like that. I think you’re absolutely right, and there’s this way, again, that we’re sort of circling back to this the way that blackness anchors, an entire sort of way of visualizing race. I think there’s a way in which the garishness of the blackface minstrel mask – which, by the way, was always being confused for realism in the nineteenth century – allows other people to think that these other racialized performances are maybe more real or less exaggerated because they’re not such an extreme or you know they’re not fulfilling that exact sort of expectation. But then, linking scriptive blackface to this idea of the “inkiness,” so much of the early blackface archive that I focus on is based on texts that were not allowed to be performed or embodied in the first place. So much of where blackface, at least in my telling of it, begins is in the imagination, scripting, and printing of it that then has to be realized in bodies. So, I do think a really key part of the dynamic that I’m looking at is that these aren’t passive archival documents. They’re part of something that is producing and reproducing this very performance culture.

CMR: This conversation about bodies and images made me think about the image on page 178 of “Leon the Great” as the black ballerina. That image struck me and Jorden, and it leads to my own question.  I really enjoyed this chapter because, when thinking about minstrelsy and blackface, we don’t often see all kinds of characters being portrayed, and you don’t see Black women participating in these or as their own characters. So, on the one hand, you have white men who can embody white women themselves, Black men, and Black women. On the other hand, you have Black women who don’t necessarily have that ability. 

So my question was, we’ve already established that there’s something to blackness that allows for empire to be circulated the way that it is. Could you expand on what happens when you add femininity onto this already marked, fungible flesh? How does Black femininity then transform the stakes of empire, and how does it bear its head through performance, circulation, and citation? 

KH: Actually, you’re touching on something that I wish I had been able to figure out how to do differently about the book because this is another one of those things that I tried to sort of weave throughout, but because I only really address gender specifically in the final chapter, it’s belated. It’s not something that I was able to set up early enough for the reader to really be thinking with me all the way through. If you go back to the eighteenth-century material that I’m looking at, there are blackface characters that are female. In one of these very first plays, High Life below Stairs, there is a Black woman who is very eagerly trying to partner with a white plantation owner. And so you have these very dense, very horribly violent discourses around Black women’s sexual availability to white men. The play, of course, resolves it by partnering her with the only Black male character, and then everything’s happy, but the play still feels the need to put that forth. Same with Charles Dibdin’s plantation songs –  there are Black women in them, and again, there are all these traces of sexual violence and sexual intimacy, so gender is always part of these imperial politics. The Black women are usually on the margins: Dibdin’s song is about the Black man and him being cuckolded and not about the violence that his wife is experiencing. What I’m doing in the final chapter is trying to sort of peel back and work through what is always going on here. I guess the only chapter where this isn’t necessarily true is the Othello chapter because there are no Black women in Othello, but the rest of minstrelsy is always putting forth these Black female characters. The question becomes: how are these performances of Black femininity woven into this larger process of race and empire?

Reproduction is at the heart of it. There is clearly this sexual desire, but it has to be denied. The audience has to be invited to desire the Black female character and then say, “We see it, and we say no to that,” because that gives us all plausible deniability. But again, she has to be made available. She’s not just available to the white male character who’s a protagonist of the play, but also to the spectating audience that is predominantly male.

That’s one of the key aspects of minstrelsy: the audience is imagined to be white and male. Other people get to watch, but this is mostly a bunch of white men, mostly performing for white men. When Black women show up, it is also about how those white men are imagining Black women together. It is about seeing them as desirable, or if they’re not desirable, they’re caretaking, or if they’re not caretaking, then they must not be good, right? And that’s when we get the comic bits. There’s this very familiar minstrel trope called “the dark triangle” by some minstrel fans in the early twentieth century. The dark triangle is where you have two Black men fighting over one Black woman, and this happens over and over and over in minstrel songs and in minstrel sketches. The dark triangle is also about how desirable and available the Black woman is because, of course, all the white men in the audience know these are white men who are also pursuing her in blackface. So it goes beyond slavery itself, with the sort of sexual politics of white men desiring Black women within some kind of imagined, idealized patriarchal structure involving sex, sexual access, or some form of social reproduction.

CMR: Wow, the layers there are disturbing, especially when you think about how this further sexualizes modes of reproduction and circulation through Black women’s bodies. Definitely want to think more about that.

On another note, we always like to look forward, so we decided to end with a question that maybe would get you to speculate or think about an ideal world without transoceanic blackface or talk about your next project. What would a world where transoceanic blackface no longer circulates look like, or do you believe its afterlives are far too entrenched in our global economies? If you want to access the speculative differently, what are your next steps or project?

KH: I’ll just be very frank: I  do not tend towards the utopian. I’m a historian for a reason. I think that we live in history. I’ve written about Ralph Northam and his blackface as Governor of Virginia. For a time, Justin Trudeau and his blackface and brownface were part of my introduction. We have Iggy Azalea in Australia. There’s an entire film series in post-apartheid South Africa that has a white comedian in blackface performing as a Zulu man that was very popular. We are in no way beyond actual reproductions of transoceanic blackface, so it’s hard for me to imagine a future without it. Wouldn’t it be great if it just hadn’t happened? If it hadn’t happened, we would be in a completely different world. So yes, I absolutely want to live in that world. Please sign me up. But, that’s a completely different world. 

Regarding my next work, I’m currently working with Doug Jones on a special issue of the journal TDR (The Drama Review), which is about blackface geographies and is trying to bring together people who are working on similar questions, looking at blackface as it travels, especially as it circulates beyond national boundaries so that there are conversations that come out of this book. Hopefully, we will start thinking about blackface as not being distinctively US American and start thinking about its politics in a more complex way. So that’s where I hope this project goes.

I’m just starting a second book project with only one foot in the nineteenth century. It’s a transhistorical project about Black American theatrical performance, and I’m really interested in what Africa is doing on the Black theatrical stage. What is an “African” in this theatre tradition? How do you perform an “African?” Why are we imagining Africa? What work is that doing? I’m interested in sort of tracing how Africa is being used as a sort of refracting lens for Black Americans to think about themselves, think about their identities, think about who they are and what their culture is in relation to whatever they imagine or embody Africa to be.