Behind The Burnt Cork Mask: Early Blackface Minstrelsy And Antebellum American Popular Culture; Author: Mahar, William J.; Paperback

Author: Mahar, William J.
Music in American Life (Paperback); Paperback; 56 Illustrations
512 pages
Published: January 1999
University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 0252066960

Blackface conventions both criticized the changes occurring in antebellum American life and helped shape images of race, gender, and class. Through the songs, dances, jokes, parodies, spoofs, and skits of blackface, white performers could satirize majority values without directly attacking them. Burnt cork served as a masking device for these entertainers, shielding them from any directpersonal identification with the material they were performing.Behind the Burnt Cork Mask reassesses relationships between blackface comedy and other genres and traditions of Western theater; between the music of minstrel shows and its European sources; between blackface performance and socially constructed identities; and between popular and elite culture.