"Knight's fine book is compelling reading that takes black cinema scholarship into new unmapped issues and territories. Notable is Knight's thoroughly innovative and nuanced discussion of 'blackface' (and its 'whiteface' counterpoint) and how blacks deployed forms of 'black blackface, ' to discover pain, pleasure and irony in its complexities. Importantly, Knight charts the power of black musical performance, illuminating the schizophrenic disjuncture between the pervasive influence of the black Jazz sound and the simultaneous erasure, segregation, or devaluation of the African American musician's visual presence in mainstream cinema. "Disintegrating The Musical "casts its arguments in bold, lucid strokes, standing out as a solid contribution to the fields of cinema and performance studies and Jazz scholarship."--Ed Guerrero, New York University

Arthur Knight is Associate Professor of American Studies and English at the College of William and Mary.

Wearing and

Tearing the Mask

BLACKS ON AND IN BLACKFACE, LIVE

downtown vaudeville

What was not pleasant was the hush that coughed

When the Negro clown came on the stage and doffed

His broken hat. The hush, first. Then the soft

Concatenation of delight and lift,

And loud. The decked dismissal of his gift,

The Sugared hoot and hauteur. Then, the rift

Where is magnificent, heirloom, and deft

Leer at a Negro to the right, or left-

So joined to personal bleach, and so bereft:

Finding if that is locked, is bowed, or proud.

And what that is at all, sporting the crowd.

-GWENDOLYN BROOKS (1949)

Does blackface make everyone who puts it on white?

-SANDER GILMAN (1991)

When The Jazz Singer (1927) finally came to the Black Metropolis of Chicago's South Side in early May of 1928, it came without synchronized sound. Even so, The Jazz Singer was not "silent." Reviewing the event, a writer for the Chicago Defender reported that the African American organist at the Metropolitan Theater sang the climactic song, "My Mammy," while the blackfaced Al Jolson performed it on the screen. The next fall, after the Metropolitan had been wired for sound, The Jazz Singer returned. This time the mechanically reproduced Jolson sang for himself, but the feature was supplemented by a sound short of the great black musicians Noble Sissle and Eubie Blake, authors of the music for the seminal black stage musical Shuffle Along (1921) and tuxedo-wearing vaudevillians who had long and famously refused to wear blackface. At least on the South Side of Chicago, then, Jolson's most famous cinematic blackface performance never proceeded without being twinned, visually and aurally, by an African American performance.

These varying conjunctions of black and blackface performance were perhaps uniquely local and not inherent in The Jazz Singer . However, beginning in 1930 with another Jolson film, Big Boy , at least twenty musical films-from at least seventy-two Hollywood movies containing self-conscious blackface, that is, blackface that draws attention to itself as a mask-internalized similar conjunctions by including both blackface and veritable black musicians or comics. Two of the last three classical-era Hollywood films to use blackface performance also staged this conjunction: Torch Song , starring Joan Crawford, and Walking My Baby Back Home , starring Janet Leigh and Donald O'Connor, were both made in 1953 and each featured their white stars blacked up along with veritable black performers. A knowledgeable fan would have noted the absence of this conjunction in The Eddie Cantor Story , the third blackface film of 1953. Cantor had become a star performing in blackface in the Ziegfeld Follies with the monumental, black and blackfaced comedian and singer Bert Williams, but this specific facet of Cantor's career is elided in his biopic, perhaps literalizing Cantor's claim-intended as a compliment-that Williams was "the whitest black man I ever knew."

In this first part of my analysis, moments of conjunction between black and blackface performance will be my primary texts, and understanding the possible meanings of such moments will be my primary aim. In this chapter, focusing on the period from the late twenties to the early forties, a period that saw the proliferation of blackface in cinema, I examine the complicated responses of black writers to black blackface as a live performance tradition. The second chapter considers the same period, but focuses on the conjunctions of white blackface and veritable black performance in films that live black blackface would have been competing against; here I pay especially detailed attention to Al Jolson and black responses to his work. Finally, the third chapter analyzes the few instances we have of black blackface in film. Eric Lott has called the presence of blackface in Hollywood musicals "minstrelsy's somewhat baffling afterlife." Understanding the extent and relative vigorousness of this afterlife and where it took place should help make it less baffling. It will at least delineate our bafflement.

The films that I will discuss in the following chapters serve to disprove two frequent assumptions about cinematic blackface performance that prevail in American film scholarship. The first and more general of these assumptions is that blackface performance disappeared from the American cinema after The Jazz Singer . This assumption probably arose from a combination of the growing feeling, beginning during the rise of the Civil Rights Movement, that blackface was a profoundly embarrassing, racist practice of the American "past" and the fact that most blackface performances took place in isolated musical numbers in what have come to be obscure musical films. Feeling and "fact" can reenforce one another, though, so that what has grown embarrassing becomes obscure-as, for example, when television stations cut "Abraham, Abraham," a number which pairs a blacked-up Bing Crosby with Louis Beavers, from the very familiar Holiday Inn (1942) or when scholars of the ideological effects of American movies ignore This Is the Army (1943), which is among the most financially successful musicals ever and which featured Ronald Reagan, Joe Louis, and a blackface number. The assumption that blackface ended, more or less, with The Jazz Singer denies the term "blackface" any historical, material specificity and, instead, recreates it as an empty, metaphorical term of disapproval. "Stereotyped" black performances in films and on TV, white performers playing black characters but without using darkening make-up (e.g., Susan Kohner in the 1959 Imitation of Life ), and many white musicians who appropriate black music-making practices (Elvis Presley, Mick Jagger, Vanilla Ice) thus all become "blackface more broadly understood." One purpose of these next three chapters will be to rediscover, then, through analyzing a full range of blackface practices in American musical film, the historical and material specificity of blackface as a performance practice and as a descriptive term throughout the middle of the twentieth century.

The second and more specific assumption films conjoining black and blackface performance disprove is that blackface, along with appropriated black music and gesture, "only denotes African American absence from the screen." This assumption is convenient because it suggests simple measures for white appropriation and clearly demarcated, always visible and audible boundaries across which appropriation takes place unidirectionally. But, as the examples from this chapter's opening suggest, such a belief is far too easy. Crucial foundations for the U.S. economy, society, and culture were set with the appropriation of black African bodies and labor, and most strands of white U.S. culture have sustained themselves by further appropriating elements from black cultures. Blackface performance stands as a particularly stark and obvious marker of such appropriations, and cultural critics and analysts need to recognize this obviousness. "It could be argued," Carol Clover has claimed, "that there was a perverse honesty to traditional blackface." We need to recognize that white appropriations of black culture, along with their blackface marker, did not only or always indicate absence of (and for) African Americans; rather, they indicate a complex, relational, multivalent, though virtually always constrained and unequal presence . That presence needs to be described and analyzed. Apropos of nineteenth-century uses of blackface, music historian Eileen Southern has noted, "No one forgot who was behind it all"-and sometimes African Americans were literally, materially behind it all. African Americans blacked up, too, and not just for white audiences. To impute this practice only to the force of racism or wholly to false consciousness on the part of many black performers verges on the racism such claims are meant to combat. A second purpose of this chapter, then, is to understand in a more complex, historically grounded manner the varieties and interconnections of blackfaces and representations of "veritable" blackness-interconnections that were not stable or constant but, rather, shifted with audiences and across historical moments.

My argument is not that blackface is not embarrassing and racist or that there are no continuities between self-conscious blackface performance and other (mis-) representations of African Americans. Rather, it is that blackface is not simply embarrassing and racist and that its continuities with other forms of representation cannot be assumed to be clear and direct. If scholars and critics permit discomfort and distaste to dominate (as opposed to inform) history writing and interpretation, then we risk reifying past practices and, consequently, reproducing the worst aspects of those practices as their opposites. As Stuart Hall puts it: "However deformed, incorporated, and inauthentic are the forms in which black people and black communities and traditions appear and are represented in popular culture, we continue to see, in the figures and the repertoires on which popular culture draws, the experiences that stand behind them."

The pairing of black and blackface performance in film musicals provides a limit case to Hall's claim, since it thematizes what, from a present-day perspective at any rate, seem to be the extremes of deformation, incorporation, and inauthenticity. Consequently, some of the questions that will organize my study in the following chapters are: What, specifically, was blackface performance? What did it look like and sound like? What was its history in relation to the American film musical, and what were its incarnations in the film musical? What black experiences "stand behind" blackface performance in Hollywood musical film? What happens when the experiences embodied in the figure of the black performer stand not behind but beside or within the blackface mask? How does the conjoining of the "authentic" with the "inauthentic" work, and toward what effect? What forms does it take, and what were the meanings of those forms to white and, more importantly, black critics and observers? Who sees (and hears) what behind and through the deformed form?

Black Critics of Blackface

By the time The Jazz Singer was released, blackface, as a self-conscious, professional, theatrical practice in the United States, was over a century old, and since at least the turn of the century both black and white cultural critics had been variously predicting and lamenting or calling and hoping for its demise. As a complete, self-contained form, the blackface minstrel show had ceased to be popular in the cities by the late 1800s. The minstrel show, largely performed by African Americans, did continue in rural areas, especially the south, into the 1950s. One writer for the black press estimated that in 1930 there were "twenty odd" minstrel shows and one hundred plantation shows and carnivals employing African American minstrels, but increasingly in the early decades of the twentieth century, "minstrelsy" had come to mean blackfaced "specialties" or "singles" in variety, burlesque, and vaudeville. By 1927 blackface seemed at once thoroughly residual (and, to many, retrograde) and tremendously resilient. Blackface showed this resilience when it appeared in early sound film, bringing Carl Wittke to conclude his celebratory history of minstrelsy, Tambo and Bones (1930), with this vision: "Here the story of the decline of American [blackface] minstrel shows might end, were it not for the fact that the `talkies' promise a revival of this venerable art.... The future of minstrelsy seems to lie in the lap of Hollywood."

Partly as a consequence of this revival at the hands of Hollywood, blackface came under intense scrutiny as critics tried to understand its origins and development and championed their ideas for its future. Studies as diverse as Wittke's, James Weldon Johnson's Black Manhattan (1930), and Constance Rourke's American Humor: A Study of the National Character (1931) all explored blackface and its legacies in some detail. What was unique about this moment of reflection compared with earlier reflections on blackface is that it now included the voices of black critics, critics who often had significantly different ideas about blackface than white writers-never purely celebratory, though not necessarily only stringently critical. So the renewal that mass media offered blackface also resulted in African American attention to blackface that was unique both in its concentration and in the fact that via the growing black press this criticism, too, was mass mediated.

Continue...

Excerpted from Disintegrating the Musical by ARTHUR KNIGHT Copyright © 2002 by Duke University Press
Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.