Slavery, performance, and the design of African American theatre

Abstract

On the evening of June 28, 1849, Frederick Douglass attended a performance by Gavitt’s Original Ethiopian Serenaders, one of the few all-black minstrel troupes before the Civil War. In spite of his “disgust” at minstrelsy’s racist grotesqueries, Douglass decided to go to the theatre because of his “love of music” and “curiosity to see persons of color exaggerating the peculiarities of their race,” as he put it in his review that ran in his newspaper, The North Star , the following day. Midway through the review, Douglass turned from his assessment of the Serenaders’ act to reflect on the political potential of black performance in general. He writes: “It is something gained, when the colored man in any form can appear before a white audience; and we think that even this company, with industry, application, and a proper cultivation of their taste, may yet be instrumental in removing the prejudice against our race.” In other words, if African Americans controlled the means of production – even if they appropriated the form of blackface minstrelsy, which by the late 1840s was virulently anti-black – their aesthetic and cultural efforts could help redress racial inequality. Much to Douglass’s dismay, however, Gavitt’s Original Ethiopian Serenaders simply “exaggerate[d] the exaggerations of our enemies” and “cater[ed] to the lower elements of the baser sort.” In his brief review, Douglass articulated a profound degree of ambivalence regarding the use of performance in the work of black uplift. His ambivalence was born of the decidedly fraught relation that enslaved Africans and their descendants have had with cultural performance since the time of their earliest arrivals in the early seventeenth century. Simply put, Douglass perceived how dominant performance practices entrenched sociopolitical norms such as slavery and white supremacy, but he also recognized how slaves and free people of color used performance to fashion modes of protest and pleasure.

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