Amateur Hour: Performances of Race in Twentieth Century American Popular Culture

Session Submission Type: Paper Session: Traditional Format

Abstract

Playing at racial otherness has a long history in the United States. Within popular culture in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, that history has encompassed minstrel shows, vaudeville acts, films, and radio and television shows. In these professional settings, performers have played at being black, Indian, Irish, Asian, Jewish, and white, among other racial and ethnic imaginings. Scholars have connected these productions to threats and desires related to whiteness, class politics, Americanness, and immigration. Beyond the professional realm, however, little attention has been paid to the amateur performances within North American communities, where playing at and playing with racial identities has its own history across a wide variety of local settings. These enactments include multi-racial populations in the 1890s performing Irish and Chinese, white musicians across the country playing Hawaiian music and enacting their version of Hawaiian culture in the first half of the twentieth century, and white church people, school children, and civic group members acting out blackness in Northern cities and towns in the 1940s and 1950s.

This panel embraces a comparative approach to consider the local, amateur, and informal performances of race in North American communities from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. We are using the term “racial performance” broadly to consider the ways in which in the name of entertainment various groups have intentionally taken on and played with explicit racial roles. Our papers situate these performances within a historical context in which playacting at the local level becomes an avenue for grappling with broader national transformations related to immigration, gender, discrimination, racial liberalism, war, imperialism, and civil rights. We consider, for example, the ways in which playing racial otherness was connected to concerns around empire and citizenship in the 1890s, the fascination with Hawai’i and the steel guitar throughout much of the twentieth century, and anxieties about the steadily increasing influx of Black Southerners into the North and West in the 1940s and 1950s. A central thread running through our papers is the way in which local performances of race became a site for pleasure and anxiety. Moments of fun and frivolity met the serious anxieties surrounding racial identities and constructions in particular eras, and in these contexts the performances themselves could at once reaffirm and unravel meanings attached to race. Significantly, away from the national and professional stage, local and amateur performances of race served as critical sites for exploring racial meanings within the cultural realm.

Sub Unit

• American Studies Association Annual Meeting

Chair

• To Be Announced, NA

Individual Presentations

• ‘The Hawaiian boys knew we were sincere’: Performances of Music and Race during the Hawaiian Steel Guitar Craze - John Troutman, University of Louisiana, Lafayette (LA)

• When Blackface Went Local: Racial Anxiety and Amateur Minstrel Shows in the U.S. North, 1940-1954 - Stephen A. Berrey, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (MI)

Comment

• Erin D. Chapman, George Washington University (DC)