Behind the Burnt Cork Mask: Early Blackface Minstrelsy and Antebellum American Popular Culture.

Behind the Burnt Cork Mask: Early Blackface Minstrelsy and Antebellum American Popular Culture. By William J. Mahar. (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, c. 1999. Pp. xxii, 444. Paper, $24.95, ISBN 0-252-06696-0; cloth, $60.00, ISBN 0-252-02396-X.)

During the past decade, antebellum blackface minstrelsy has been the subject of a number of groundbreaking studies, most notably Eric Lott's Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York, 1993) and Dale Cockrell's Demons of Disorder: Early Blackface Minstrels and Their World (Cambridge, Eng., and New York, 1997). William Mahar's Behind the Burnt Cork Mask is yet another pioneering study on the topic. His meticulous research on blackface minstrelsy focuses on song texts, playbills, newspaper advertisements, and articles published between 1843 and 1860. In addition he cites numerous minstrel parodies of lectures, sermons, and "stump" speeches. This is a must-read book for scholars interested in the ongoing research in the field.

The book is divided into six thematic chapters. The first revisits the history of antebellum blackface minstrelsy in light of the author's new research of playbills and other "contextual evidence" (p. 9). He concludes that the scope of the subjects burlesqued went well beyond the racial parodies that are most often associated with the blackface tradition. The second chapter examines blackface parodies of American speech and rhetoric; based on this study, Mahar's assessment is that the dialects used in these parodies bore at least some resemblance to the reality of antebellum "black english" (p. 100), and that these same dialects were becoming obsolete on the minstrel stage as the Civil War approached. The third chapter focuses on minstrelsy's burlesque of English and Italian operas; Mahar concludes that these endeavors, which exploited class rather than race distinctions, were a "nativist critique" (p. 156) of European cultural imports. The fourth chapter looks at the portrayal of race found in the "Ethiopian Sketches" (p. 157) performed by blackface minstrels during the antebellum period. Mahar is critical of scholars who see these racial representations only as manifestations of white supremacy. Once again he argues that the issue implicit in these sketches is "often one of class masquerading as race" (p. 192). Later chapters also interrogate the misogyny implicit in the negative images of women found in blackface repertories. The author concludes that "[h]owever much blackface comedy demeaned and insulted African Americans, its usually sentimental and often hostile values reinforced the limitations on freedom and equity for American women even more" (p. 328).

Mahar's book opens up new avenues of research within antebellum blackface minstrelsy, especially with respect to the stereotypical portrayal of women and the burlesque of foreign operas. To his credit, he is able to demonstrate that the early minstrel shows were not totally preoccupied with race, and that they also addressed class and gender issues. Mahar's attempt to marginalize race in favor of class and gender is problematic, however, as the above quote on the treatment of women in minstrelsy makes clear. Even where these other themes tend to dominate the minstrel repertoires, they are still performed in blackface and dialect. The racial signifiers are ever present, therefore, even if they are also infused with class and gender markers. It is the African American stereotypes, moreover, that have become a centerpiece of American popular culture, certainly more so than the operatic parodies, or even the caricatures of women. Nevertheless, Mahar's study is an important new contribution to the burgeoning scholarship on antebellum blackface minstrelsy. It opens up fertile areas of inquiry for further investigation, and it will no doubt fuel the ongoing debate on the subject.

WILLIAM BARLOW Howard University