Overview

The first book in the series Race and American Culture, Lott's study of the origins of blackface proved to be one of the most favourably received academic books in 1993. Its sophisticated analysis of antebellum race relations appealed to a cross-disciplinary readership in history, literature, and cultural studies. The paperback edition is certain to be taught in upper level courses in African American Studies, and will also continue to be purchased by individual scholars and students.

Full Product Details

9780195096415

Table of Contents

Reviews

Terrifically smart and unexpectedly timely. --New York Times<br> One of the most stimulating and nuanced accounts of 19th-century blackface minstrelsy. --Boston Phoenix<br> Original and erudite....A clever, disciplined, and resourceful reading of the commonplace: a pioneering study. --Kirkus Reviews<br> Love and Theft is an original and absolutely brilliant contribution to understanding the politics of cultural production. Lott makes an incisive, provocative, and stunning analysis of the complex and contradictory ways in which minstrelsy embodied and acted out the class, racial, and sexual politics of its historical moment. As readers we come to understand for the first time how blackface performance imagined and addressed a national community and we realize the extent to which we still live with this legacy. An enthralling and important book. --Hazel Carby, Yale University<br> The author adroitly leads us through minstrelsy's maze of complex relationships....Ground-breaking work. --Theatre Survey<br> This spectacular book, a history of blackface from the bottom up, offers a gripping, original interpretation of the first and most popular form of nineteenth-century entertainment. Placing minstrelsy at the center of class, race, and political relations, and seeing blackface as a contaminated form of interracial desire, Love and Theft will stimulate vigorous debate. To dissent from portions of the argument in no way diminishes the subtlety and importance of Eric Lott's achievement. --Michael Rogin, University of California, Berkeley **** do not cut ****<br> [Lott] offers a stunning, provocative interpretation of the minstrel tradition....I found his insights into white maledesire to appropriate or step into black bodies utterly fascinating and pretty funny. --Robin D.G. Kelly, The Nation<br> Lott's commitment to connecting the cultural to the political, and to exploring rather than castigating the structure of feeling behind blackface, make Love and Theft a model for how to study popular culture. --Alice Echols, The Village Voice<br> Love and Theft is relentlessly suggestive, thorough, learned, and smart: and most impressive of all, its reach doesn't exceed its grasp. --Michael Berube, American Literature<br> Announcing an important new series: <br> RACE AND AMERICAN CULTURE<br> General Editors: Arnold Rampersad, Princeton University and Shelley Fisher Fishkin, University of Texas, Austin<br> Examining aspects of the interplay between the idea of race and the phenomenon of American culture in its many forms, the books in this series will contribute significantly to our understanding of the complex place of race and racism in American history and American society as a whole. Exploring a wide spectrum of the factors involving race, the series will not be limited to any particular ethnic group. Although it will regularly publish books in African-American literature and culture, it will also feature studies of Chicano, Native American, and Asian-American culture, as well as how issues of race shape and are shaped by the cultural mainstream.<br>

Terrifically smart and unexpectedly timely. --New York Times One of the most stimulating and nuanced accounts of 19th-century blackface minstrelsy. --Boston Phoenix Original and erudite....A clever, disciplined, and resourceful reading of the commonplace: a pioneering study. --Kirkus Reviews Love and Theft is an original and absolutely brilliant contribution to understanding the politics of cultural production. Lott makes an incisive, provocative, and stunning analysis of the complex and contradictory ways in which minstrelsy embodied and acted out the class, racial, and sexual politics of its historical moment. As readers we come to understand for the first time how blackface performance imagined and addressed a national community and we realize the extent to which we still live with this legacy. An enthralling and important book. --Hazel Carby, Yale University The author adroitly leads us through minstrelsy's maze of complex relationships....Ground-breaking work. --Theatre Survey This spectacular book, a history of blackface from the bottom up, offers a gripping, original interpretation of the first and most popular form of nineteenth-century entertainment. Placing minstrelsy at the center of class, race, and political relations, and seeing blackface as a contaminated form of interracial desire, Love and Theft will stimulate vigorous debate. To dissent from portions of the argument in no way diminishes the subtlety and importance of Eric Lott's achievement. --Michael Rogin, University of California, Berkeley **** do not cut **** [Lott] offers a stunning, provocative interpretation of the minstrel tradition....I found his insights into white male desire to appropriate or step into black bodies utterly fascinating and pretty funny. --Robin D.G. Kelly, The Nation Lott's commitment to connecting the cultural to the political, and to exploring rather than castigating the structure of feeling behind blackface, make L

To this original and erudite study, Lott (American Studies/University of Virginia) brings a mass of obscure information and a multidisciplinary approach, interpreting the meaning of black-face minstrelsy to the white working classes who invented and performed it. The appropriation of black music, dance, humor, and narratives for commercial entertainment, says Lott, expressed the deep racial conflicts suffered by the white working classes, especially in the North in the decades before the Civil War. Their parodies reflected their admiration and contempt, their envy and fear, their remoteness and - as the economy changed - their impending identification with the dispossessed, whom they represented as absurd. In their imitation of blacks, and in the cross-dressing that minstrelsy required, whites males gained control over the alien and the threatening (especially black sexuality) and changed the way they experienced themselves as men. Lott's study ranges through folklore, history, sociology, politics, economics, psychoanalysis, theater history, popular music, even film theory, but it's based clearly on contemporary and technical studies of race, gender, and class: The stars of minstrelsy, Lott says, inaugurated an American tradition of class abdication through gendered cross-racial immersion. In the course of his analysis, Lott places Huckleberry Finn, Uncle Tom's Cabin, and the music of Stephen Foster in new and interesting perspective, and reveals the significance of an art form, a ritual, that has fallen into neglect after a period of universal popularity. A clever, disciplined, and resourceful reading of the commonplace: a pioneering study that, though somewhat academic, will no doubt influence more popular studies. (Kirkus Reviews)

<br> Terrifically smart and unexpectedly timely. --New York Times<br> One of the most stimulating and nuanced accounts of 19th-century blackface minstrelsy. --Boston Phoenix<br> Original and erudite....A clever, disciplined, and resourceful reading of the commonplace: a pioneering study. --Kirkus Reviews<br> Love and Theft is an original and absolutely brilliant contribution to understanding the politics of cultural production. Lott makes an incisive, provocative, and stunning analysis of the complex and contradictory ways in which minstrelsy embodied and acted out the class, racial, and sexual politics of its historical moment. As readers we come to understand for the first time how blackface performance imagined and addressed a national community and we realize the extent to which we still live with this legacy. An enthralling and important book. --Hazel Carby, Yale University<br> The author adroitly leads us through minstrelsy's maze of complex relationships....Ground-breaking work.

Author Information

Tab Content 6

Customer Reviews

Recent Reviews

Countries Available