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For over two centuries, America has celebrated the very black culture it attempts to control and repress, and nowhere is this phenomenon more apparent than in the strange practice of blackface performance. Born of extreme racial and class conflicts, the blackface minstrel show sometimes usefully intensified them. Based on the appropriation of black dialect, music, and dance, minstrelsy at once applauded and lampooned black culture, ironically contributing to a "blackening of America." Drawing on recent research in cultural studies and social history, Eric Lott examines the role of the blackface minstrel show in the political struggles of the years leading up to the Civil War. Reading minstrel music, lyrics, jokes, burlesque skits, and illustrations in tandem with working-class racial ideologies and the sex/gender system, Love and Theft argues that blackface minstrelsy both embodied and disrupted the racial tendencies of its largely white, male, working-class audiences. Underwritten by envy as well as repulsion, sympathetic identification as well as fear--a dialectic of "love and theft"--the minstrel show continually transgressed the color line even as it enabled the formation of a self-consciously white working class. Lott exposes minstrelsy as a signifier for multiple breaches: the rift between high and low cultures, the commodification of the dispossessed by the empowered, the attraction mixed with guilt of whites caught in the act of cultural thievery.

THE WAGES OF WHITENESS provides an original study of the formative years of working-class racism in the United States. In an Afterword to this second edition, Roediger discusses recent studies of whiteness and the changing face of labor itself--then surveys criticism of his work. He accepts the views of some critics but challenges others.

An odyssey for the 21st century in poems that bind family and myth.

After more than forty years of publishing short stories, Theroux has become a master of the form, with a deep capacity to engage, enchant and unsettle . . . [He] asserts his preeminence in short fiction with an unassuming brilliance. Kirkus Reviews, starred review A family watches in horror as their patriarch transforms into the singing, wisecracking lead of an old-timey minstrel show. A renowned art collector relishes destroying his most valuable pieces. Two boys stand by helplessly as their father stages an all-consuming war on the raccoons living in the woods around their house. A young artist devotes himself to a wealthy, malicious gossip, knowing that it s just a matter of time before she turns on him. In this new collection of award-winning short stories, acclaimed author Paul Theroux explores the tenuous leadership of the elite and the surprising revenge of the overlooked. He shows us humanity possessed, consumed by its own desires and compulsions, always with his carefully honed eye for detail and the subtle idiosyncrasies that bring his characters to life. Searing, dark, and sure to unsettle, Mr. Bones is a stunning new display of Paul Theroux s fluent, faintly sinister powers of vision and imagination (The New Yorker). "

Beginning in the 1830s and continuing for more than a century, blackface minstrelsy--stage performances that claimed to represent the culture of black Americans--remained arguably the most popular entertainment in North America. A renewed scholarly interest in this contentious form of entertainment has produced studies treating a range of issues: its contradictory depictions of class, race, and gender; its role in the development of racial stereotyping; and its legacy in humor, dance, and music, and in live performance, film, and television. The style and substance of minstrelsy persist in popular music, tap and hip-hop dance, the language of the standup comic, and everyday rituals of contemporary culture. The blackface makeup all but disappeared for a time, though its influence never diminished--and recently, even the makeup has been making a comeback. This collection of original essays brings together a group of prominent scholars of blackface performance to reflect on this complex and troublesome tradition. Essays consider the early relationship of the blackface performer with American politics and the antislavery movement; the relationship of minstrels to the commonplace compromises of the touring "show" business and to the mechanization of the industrial revolution; the exploration and exploitation of blackface in the mass media, by D. W. Griffith and Spike Lee, in early sound animation, and in reality television; and the recent reappropriation of the form at home and abroad. In addition to the editor, contributors include Dale Cockrell, Catherine Cole, Louis Chude-Sokei, W. T. Lhamon, Alice Maurice, Nicholas Sammond, and Linda Williams.

In the vein of You’re Never Weird on the Internet (Almost) and Black Nerd Problems, this witty, incisive essay collection from New York Times critic at large Maya Phillips explores race, religion, sexuality, and more through the lens of her favorite pop culture fandoms. From the moment Maya Phillips saw the opening scroll of Star Wars, Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back, her life changed forever. Her formative years were spent loving not just the Star Wars saga, but superhero cartoons, anime, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Harry Potter, Tolkien, and Doctor Who—to name just a few. As a critic at large at The New York Times, Phillips has written extensively on theater, poetry, and the latest blockbusters—with her love of some of the most popular and nerdy fandoms informing her career. Now, she analyzes the mark these beloved intellectual properties leave on young and adult minds, and what they teach us about race, gender expression, religion, and more. Spanning from the nineties through to today, Nerd is a collection of cultural criticism essays through the lens of fandom for everyone from the casual Marvel movie watcher to the hardcore Star Wars expanded universe connoisseur. “In the same way that the fandoms Phillips addresses often provide community and a sense of connection, the experience of reading Nerd feels like making a new friend” (Karen Han, cultural critic and screenwriter).

THE STORY: Toby and Mia are graduate students with a bright future ahead of them: a baby on the way and a college coaching job for Toby. But when Toby stumbles across a secret that threatens to derail their future, he and Mia must decide between honesty and loyalty, and whether doing something wrong is the only way to do what’s right. Inspired by the Penn State sexual abuse scandal, FOR THE LOYAL is an emotional and thought-provoking night of theater.

A city under attack from a nuclear blast. As the dust settles, Louise wakes to find herself in a fallout shelter with Mark, the colleague who has saved her life. They have enough water and food to last two weeks. Now they just need to find a way of surviving each other. A chilling post-nuclear play that examines what it takes to endure catastrophe. After the End was originally published in 2005. This revised and updated edition was published to coincide with the London production at Theatre Royal Stratford East in February 2022.

In Birth of an Industry, Nicholas Sammond describes how popular early American cartoon characters were derived from blackface minstrelsy. He charts the industrialization of animation in the early twentieth century, its representation in the cartoons themselves, and how important blackface minstrels were to that performance, standing in for the frustrations of animation workers. Cherished cartoon characters, such as Mickey Mouse and Felix the Cat, were conceived and developed using blackface minstrelsy's visual and performative conventions: these characters are not like minstrels; they are minstrels. They play out the social, cultural, political, and racial anxieties and desires that link race to the laboring body, just as live minstrel show performers did. Carefully examining how early animation helped to naturalize virulent racial formations, Sammond explores how cartoons used laughter and sentimentality to make those stereotypes seem not only less cruel, but actually pleasurable. Although the visible links between cartoon characters and the minstrel stage faded long ago, Sammond shows how important those links are to thinking about animation then and now, and about how cartoons continue to help to illuminate the central place of race in American cultural and social life.