Dancing for eels at Catherine Market; the blackface lore cycle; blame it on Cain; finding Jim Crow.
Jim Crow is our Punch and Judy--every one responds to it. But Jim
Crow, unlike Punch and Judy, is by its nature explosive, dangerous,
unresolved, and coded.The language of Jim Crow is a set of secret
languages hidden within everyday talk, indications of sin, guilt,
domination, violence, and fate communicated through seemingly
meaningless gestures. One of the truly fascinating aspects of
"Raising Cain" is the way Lhamon shows how these gestures retain
both their shapes and meanings as they travel through the decades
and from one century to another, from one part of the country to
another. In my reading of contemporary American cultural criticism,
or cultural criticism generally, Lhamon's ability to supersede the
barriers between cultural forms that most writers take for granted
is very nearly unique. Beyond his consistently forceful, lucid,
jargon-free, careful, an enthusiastic prose style, I think this is
the most striking aspect of his work. Lhamon's book locates the
sources, practice, and reception of minstrelsy as a cultural
battleground, and takes it as seriously as other historians of the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries have taken religious revivals.
-- Greil Marcus
"["Raising Cain"] is a bravura performance, an astounding feat of
intellectual detective work that--at its best--reassembles the
world in new ways that challenge our assumptions...It's always
provocative, as when Lhamon finds evidence of awareness of
blackface minstrelsy in works like "Benito Cereno," "Uncle Tom's
Cabin," and Martin Delaney's novel "Blake..".Connections between
the past and the present are no less provocative. Lhamon invokes Al
Jolson, rock-and-roll, Elvis, the Rolling Stones, Norman Mailer,
Bob Dylan, M.C. Hammer (remember him?) and even talk shows and
stand-up comedy as substitutes for vaudeville, claiming all descend
from blackface performance...This is a rich and enduring work, a
secret history of how the world we live in came to be." --David
Nicholson, "Washington Post" "What was the first Atlantic mass
culture? In this stimulating study, W. T. Lharmon argues that the
black minstrel shows--an evening's entertainment based on 'songs,
dances and patter purporting to be the behaviour of southern
[American] field hands'--enjoyed such booming audiences in the
1840s that they can be envisaged as outcasts who took the popular
stage by storm. To the standard account of the beginnings of black
minstrelsy in 1843, when Dan Emmett's Virginia Minstrels first
performed at the Chatham Theatre, Lhamon adds an interesting
discussion of precursors, such as the open-air performers in New
York's marketplaces and the more improvised 'plantation
frolics'..."Raising Cain" is full of fresh insights into the
meaning of performance--from the cultural significance of whistling
to the use of elaborate winks by satirical performers...In
political terms, Lhamon's project is to reevaluatethe once-scorned
aspects of black culture in general and blackface performance in
particular, and in "Raising Cain" he delights in reviving them in
all their rude vitality...[Readers] will enjoy a writing style that
excels in passionate advocacy, scholarly comment, imaginative
sympathy and political acuteness..."Raising Cain" may raise hackles
among the politically correct, but it also deserves to encourage
debate about the politics of pop culture." --Aleks Sierz, "Times
Higher Education Supplement "[UK] "[W. T. Lhamon] examines the
emotions that helped to generate blackface, a form of performance
that in the 1830s erupted across the industrial world. In so doing
he directly counters those historians who have lambasted minstrelsy
as a purveyor of racial abuse. Blackface, as he sees it, was a
liberating ritual, a proletarian cultural form through which
marginal peoples made sense of themselves...The book is
exhilarating in its command of the topic, in the stylishness of the
writing, and in its ability to read in a wink or a whistle or a
bent kneebone the traces of profound social and economic change."
--Marybeth Hamilton, "Journal of Contemporary History" [UK]"W.T.
Lhamon seeks to look beyond the shukkin' and jivin' of minstrelsy
to delve into its roots and its historical import--not just to
blacks, but to all Americans. In doing so, he provides an in-depth
history of blackface performance that begins with New York Negroes
dancing for eels and porgies in that city's Catherine Market, takes
us through the development of the now maligned Jim Crow character,
and examines those modern performers who unwittingly carry on the
blackface performance legacy (Hammer time!)." --Kemp Powers,"City
Pages" [Minneapolis] "Lhamon is a cutting-edge historian...He makes
excellent use not only of song lyrics and theatrical plots, but of
illustrations and playbills. Using them, he shows how the dance
steps that still excite American youth, whether Michael Jackson's
moonwalk or the 'run step' and 'market step' featured in MC
Hammer's popular MTV videos, were first danced by slaves and
appropriated by minstrels. As Lhamon notes, you can never tell
where these elements will turn up; they are deeply embedded in both
American popular culture and black culture." --Joel Dinerstein,
"American-Statesman" [Austin, Texas] "[A] pathbreaking book...[and]
a rich trove of fresh meaning and flashing insight...[Lhamon is] an
acute sensor on whom nothing is lost." --Thomas Cripps, "Journal of
American History" "Lhamon's provocative thesis gains persuasive
momentum by enabling readers to empathize with early artists and
audiences, a goal he pursues through interpreting a variety of
fascinating texts....[Lhamon creates] a synthesis [between
interpretive voice and historical analysis] that offers a model for
scholars of cultural history...and offers the conceptual foundation
for a new, process-oriented paradigm for the study of cultural
history." --Howard L. Sacks, "American Quarterly" "Lhamon...look[s]
primarily at 'the links blackface performance made across race and
class, ' and thus investigate[s] 'struggles over interracial
fascination, against and for it, leading to [the form's]
transmission, recombination, and cultural work.' He succeeds
admirably...The strength of "Raising Cain" is its reconsideration
of long-held and often skewed views of minstrelsy, its
author'scontextualization of the topic with historical data (as a
cultural historian) and literary allusions (as a literary critic),
and the lively and thought-provoking explications that spring from
Lhamon's fertile, questioning mind." --D.B. Wilmeth, "Choice" "Jim
Crow is our Punch and Judy--every one responds to it. But Jim Crow,
unlike Punch and Judy, is by its nature explosive, dangerous,
unresolved, and coded.The language of Jim Crow is a set of secret
languages hidden within everyday talk, indications of sin, guilt,
domination, violence, and fate communicated through seemingly
meaningless gestures. One of the truly fascinating aspects of
"Raising Cain" is the way Lhamon shows how these gestures retain
both their shapes and meanings as they travel through the decades
and from one century to another, from one part of the country to
another. In my reading of contemporary American cultural criticism,
or cultural criticism generally, Lhamon's ability to supersede the
barriers between cultural forms that most writers take for granted
is very nearly unique. Beyond his consistently forceful, lucid,
jargon-free, careful, an enthusiastic prose style, I think this is
the most striking aspect of his work. Lhamon's book locates the
sources, practice, and reception of minstrelsy as a cultural
battleground, and takes it as seriously as other historians of the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries have taken religious revivals."
--Greil Marcus "W. T. Lhamon's dazzling book is an extraordinary
piece of work that offers much. By turns he is marvelously erudite,
probing, poetic, witty, and politically incisive. This is a book
about race in America which distinguishes itself by
concedingnothing to the pieties that regulate what can be said
openly on the subject. The history and historiography of minstrelsy
and mimesis are folded into powerful readings of texts,
performances, and films that are both well-known and entirely
unfamiliar.Throughout, 'theoretical' commentaries on culture and
its transactional workings are skillfully interwoven with Lhamon's
own observations and critical expositions. "Raising Cain" will
obviously become a central reference point for future discussions
of race and culture." --Paul Gilroy, Goldsmiths' College,
University of London "Freely and elegantly moving between the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries and between high culture
(Melville and Stowe in particular among earlier figures) and
popular entertainment, this is an engaging and passionately
personal study of blackface minstrelsy and its radical agenda and
lasting importance in the continuing creation of United States
culture." --"Nineteenth-Century Literature"
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