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 for the first time 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 a provocative 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.
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