Black Politics but Not Black People: Rethinking the Social and “Racial” History of Early Minstrelsy

Although American blackface minstrelsy in its early period (1829–1843) esteemed the anti-authoritarian potentiality of black alterity, the form's performers and most influential public (the white working class of the urban northeast) spurned actual black people. In minstrelsy they fashioned “blackness,” a new “race” with which to distinguish themselves from socioeconomic elites as well as African Americans.