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Old 10-31-2014, 02:12 PM   #27 (permalink)
Lord Larehip
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Minstrelsy as a comedy designed to point out and therefore avoid certain social pitfalls was a failure. Minstrelsy was originally driven by anti-slavery sentiments expressed by people as George Washington Dixon and Stephen Foster. But as the Civil War raged, whites wanted theater to take them away from the turmoil, to show them joy and wholeness. So they were treated to the sight of a white man, dressed up as a black man singing, "Oh, I wish I was in de lan' ob cotton…" at a time when hundreds of real blacks were fleeing North. That the South would adopt the song as an unofficial anthem was a bit ridiculous and apparently the irony was not lost on the song's author, Dan Emmett, who was furious when he heard what the Confederacy had done.

The song was intended as racial harmony and happiness and to have the slaveholders adopt it was galling to him. But the song also demonstrated the failure of minstrelsy for depicting what could not be true: that blacks were happy down South, so much so that those up North longed to return to it. And since whites could not apparently be happy without convincing themselves that blacks were happy, the fact that blacks were really not happy meant that whites were really not happy either. Minstrelsy simply sold a blatant illusion that could not be maintained once the war ended and the slaves freed because white=free, black=chattel was simply not true anymore and so all such associations in minstrelsy had to be redefined.

New innovations in minstrelsy occurred such as clogging, female impersonation, redface (Native Indian) minstrelsy and cakewalking. Although the Yellow Peril hysteria was strong, there was little of yellowface minstrelsy to be seen. Shortly after the war, there was a minstrel troupe known as The Flying Black Japs but they soon disbanded. Most of America had no experience of the Chinese who were enslaved on the railroads or running tiny businesses on the West Coast in hopes of eking out an existence. Even on the West Coast where the hatred of the Chinese was strong, whites seemed not to notice them except to segregate themselves from them.

Robert Louis Stevenson traveled from his native Scotland to ride the rails of the Union Pacific Railroad across the plains to California in 1879 and noted that Chinese passengers, many of them men who had slaved sunup to sundown to lay the tracks their train was riding on, were forced to ride in a segregated car. Stevenson noticed that the whites took these Chinese railroad builders for granted, totally ignoring them except to occasionally vent "the stupid ill-feeling" as he called it. By 1897, Dan W. Quinn sang "Mr. Jappy Jap Jappy" and James T. Powers followed this in 1898 with "Chin Chin Chinaman" but yellowface minstrelsy never seemed to click. These Asians came from a foreign land and could not represent an idyllic pre-Fall life for the white audiences. There was no relating. Asians are, after all, "inscrutable."


Yellow Peril fear was just as strong in Europe as in America as this German depiction makes clear.


Dan W. Quinn "Chin Chin Chinaman" The Geisha -- from 1898, Berliner disc 525 - YouTube
Dan W. Quinn's version of "Chin Chin Chinaman" from an 1898 disc is full of pidgin English stereotypes not to mention that "Chinaman" is considered a slur among Asian-Americans. It is part of a larger work called "The Geisha" betraying the Westerner's usual careless confusing of Japanese and Chinese. A Chinese person who didn't know the difference between the English and the Germans would be considered a complete idiot in the West.
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