Christy's Minstrels set a new standard for minstrel performance in mid-Victorian Britain. Yet reception was far from monolithic: the cultural affiliations of audiences led to important regional differences in reception, including room for racialist perspectives complicated by religion, nationalism, class, and antislavery convictions.

Throughout its history, blackface minstrelsy has been at once potent and slippery, notoriously difficult to control as signification. When one race impersonates another and bills it as entertainment, reception becomes a barometer of ethnic hegemony, interracial politics, and power. The essays in this issue of TDR challenge and contribute to the historiography of blackface by examining previously untapped evidence, questioning current orthodoxies about the role of minstrelsy in US racial formations, and expanding the geographic scope of its performative genealogies.

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.

The 2010 Blackout protest at UC Berkeley affords a moment of reflection on what, if anything, Black life means in the world today.

The blackface minstrel troupes who toured preindustrial South Africa contributed to the preservation of both the boundaries of racial difference in the British colonies of that country and the racial hierarchies of the Cape and Natal colonies.

In 1901, a white theatre director reportedly established an exclusive school to teach 150 African Americans from the South how to perform themselves. His curriculum: the original blackface minstrel act. The report of this school illuminates how minstrelsy not only defined “blackness” but also made it a teachable concept by white Americans.

In a dark footnote to a dark chapter in US history, Japanese Americans interned by their own government during World War II performed in blackface behind barbed wire. Exploring blackface performance in the camps raises questions regarding the potential resistance of racial impersonation and blackface's potential for triangulating race.

The presence of the blackface minstrel mask within the Cape Town Minstrel Carnival has been a source of divisive and prolonged local, national, and international debate. But the mask also invites us to consider both the procession's historical relationship to slavery and its participants' contemporary, though fleeting, occupation of a postcolonial, postapartheid urban center.

The 1960s witnessed among African Americans a wholesale rejection of white power, including the repertoire and iconography of blackface performance. And yet, surprisingly, one finds among some of the most revolutionary Afrocentric artists, critics, and activists of the time a complex, nuanced, even contradictory attitude towards “blacking up.”

F. Charles “Chuck” Knipp claims his portrayal of Shirley Q. Liquor, a saucy, middle-aged Louisiana black woman, is more “an extended drag comedy character” than a minstrel routine. But the most salient feature of the live performances by Knipp—a gay, white male—is his blackface makeup.