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Imitation Nation: Blackface Minstrelsy and the Making of African American Selfhood in Uncle Tom's Cabin

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From: Novel
Date: 20060401
Author:Richards, Jason

The two most popular cultural productions in nineteenth-century America, Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) and blackface minstrelsy, were mutually constitutive phenomena. Despite Stowe's Puritan resistance to the theater, her novel borrowed lavishly from blackface, then settled its debt by recycling minstrel types to the stage, and later to early American cinema.1 Uncle Tom's Cabin and blackface both relied on impressions of slave culture that profoundly shaped black and white American identities; both were invested in the national tensions that led to the Civil War; and both ...

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