Jump Jim Crow : lost plays, lyrics, and street prose of the first Atlantic popular culture

Format:

Book

Language:

English

Imprint:

Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press, 2003

Subject:

Rice, Tom, - 1808-1860
African Americans - Literary collections
Social classes - Literary collections
Popular literature - United States
American literature - 19th century
Blackface entertainers - History
African Americans in literature
Social classes in literature
Minstrel shows - History
Black people in literature
Race in literature

Contributor:

Lhamon, W. T

ISBN:

9780674010628 and 0674010620

Description:

xi, 459 pages : illustrations ; 25 cm

Bibliographic Note:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 407-454) and index

Contents:

Lateral sufficiency -- Gumbo Cuff and the New York Desdemonas -- Change the joke and slip the stereotype -- The phases of Jim Crow's runaway stage -- Songs: Coal black Rose -- The original Jim Crow -- Jim Crow still alive! -- Dinah Crow -- Jim Crow (London) -- De original Jim Crow -- Jim Crow (Boston) -- All de women shout loo loo -- Clare de kitchen -- Gombo Chaff -- Sich a gitting up stairs -- Jim crack corn, or, The blue tail fly -- Settin' on a rail, or, Raoon hunt -- Plays: Oh! hush! or, The Virginny cupids! -- Virginia mummy -- Bone squash -- Flight to America -- The peacock and the crow -- Jim Crow in his new place -- The foreign prince -- Yankee notes for English circulation -- Otello -- Street prose: The life of Jim Crow -- A faithful account of the life of Jim Crow the American negro poet

Summary:

Beginning in the 1830s, the white actor Thomas D. Rice took to the stage as Jim Crow, and the ragged and charismatic trickster of black folklore entered--and forever transformed--American popular culture. Jump Jim Crow brings together the plays and songs performed in this guise and reveals how these texts code the complex use and abuse of blackness that has characterized American culture ever since Jim Crow's first appearance. Along with the prompt scripts of nine plays performed by Rice--never before published as their original audiences saw them--W.T. Lhamon Jr. provides a reconstruction of their performance history and an analysis of their contemporary meaning. His reading shows us how these plays built a public blackness, but also how they engaged a disaffected white audience, who found in Jim Crow's sass and wit and madcap dancing an expression of rebellion and resistance against the oppression and confinement suffered by ordinary people of all colors in antebellum America and early Victorian England. Upstaging conventional stories and forms, giving direction and expression to the unruly attitudes of a burgeoning underclass, the plays in this anthology enact a vital force still felt in great fictions, movies, and musics of the Atlantic and in the jumping, speedy styles that join all these forms

Collection:

BGC Monograph Stacks

Call Number:

PS509.B53 J86 2003

Available

c.1