Blackface, white noise: Jewish immigrants in the Hollywood melting pot

Abstract

Blackface, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting Pot. Michael Rogin. Berkeley: U of California P, 1996. xvi+339=355, 61 illustrations. $24.95 cloth. Blackface is a form of cross-dressing, in which one puts on the insignias of a sex, class or race that stands in binary opposition to one's own. Current attention to cross-dressing, however, derives from gender, not racial studies. But from the seventeenth century, when blackface emerged as a product of European (English first) imperialism, to the end of the eighteenth century, and bequeathed to Americans a double national birth to both slavery and natural right (demanding freedom from enslavement to England for a new nation built on slavery), these early voices of the American vernacular were the ones that challenged aristocratic Europe. But these voices were those of the Yankee, the backwoodsman, and the blackface minstrel that asserted American nationalism simultaneously. Unfortunately, for the whole of the nineteenth century the professional blackface minstrel troupe was our only American institution, as one minstrel called it, the most popular mass spectacle of the United States. Minstrelsy's successors, vaudeville, Tin Pan Alley, motion pictures and radio, did not so much displace as incorporate blackface. It was two white men, with black voices, who invented and played Amos and Andy. Likewise, white Americans created a national popular music by capitalizing on black roots, as with Stephen Foster's Oh Susanna, and Folks at Home, Irving Berlin's Alexander's Ragtime Band, George Gershwin's Swanee, and Elvis Presley and his successors, who found inspiration in black music and performance styles after literal blackface had lost national legitimacy. In 1927, the beginning date for this book, when Amos n' Andy was on the verge of becoming the most popular radio show in the country, The Jazz Singer, starring Al Jolson in blackface, became the first talking picture and the first movie musical, and Show Boat, featuring Tess Gardella as Aunt Jemima playing Queenie in blackface, became the first Broadway musical play to highlight blackface. As is well known, Uncle Tom's Cabin, and The Birth of a Nation preceded The Jazz Singer. What is little known is that they applied burnt cork unselfconsciously; The Jazz Singer made blackface its subject. The Jazz Singer showed a Jewish American who escaped his Old World identity through blackface; it facilitated the union not of white and black but of gentile and Jew. …

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