Foreword to the 20th-Anniversary Edition by Greil Marcus
Introduction
Part I
1. Blackface and Blackness: The Minstrel Show in American
Culture
2. Love and Theft: "Racial" Production and the Social Unconscious
of Blackface
3. White Kids and No Kids At All: Working Class Culture and
Languages of Race
4. The Blackening of America: Popular Culture and National
Cultures
Part II
5. "The Seeming Counterfeit": Early Blackface Acts, the Body, and
Social Contradiction
6. "Genuine Negro Fun": Racial Pleasure and Class Formation in the
1840's
7. California Gold and European Revolution: Stephen Foster and the
American 1848
8. Uncle Tomitudes: Racial Melodrama and Modes of Production
Afterword to the 20th-Anniversary Edition by the Author
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Eric Lott is Professor of English at the University of Virginia. He is the author of The Disappearing Liberal Intellectual.
"[Lott] takes advantage of the space opened by the times from which
it emerged, while also sustaining a critical perspective." --David
Roediger, Project Muse
Reviews of the previous edition:
"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
"[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 Love and Theft a model for how to study
popular culture."--Alice Echols, The Village Voice
"Love and Theft is relentlessly suggestive, thorough, learned, and
smart: and most impressive of all, its reach doesn't exceed its
grasp."--Michael Bérubé, American Literature
"The analysis is smart in the sense that it is stylish, adroit, and
contrived."--Quarterly Magazine of the Missouri Historical
Society
"Cultural history has entered a boom phase of late. Spurred by
poststructuralist literary criticism, cultural historians have
produced entirely new conceptual frameworks, not to mention
innumerable specific insights, for interpreting the past. Eric
Lott's study of minstrelsy and the American working class is a
premier- indeed, prize-winning- example of the stunning results of
this approach."--The Historian
"This book is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand
the minstrel show, and understanding the minstrel show is essential
to understanding nineteenth-century American culture."--American
Music
"Eric Lott's recent contribution represents a major innovation in
the study of this subject. Aside from a few scattered journal
articles here and there, no critic has approached minstrelsy with
anything like the theoretical sophistication that Lott brings to
it....Some good work precedes Lott, but none comes close to having
the interpretive acuity or critical audacity which characterizes
Love and Theft....Love and Theft is a demanding book,
it is also a tremendously rewarding one....Lott has come up with a
fantastic book on blackface, but has provided an excellent example
of how American Studies might be reinvigorated in the coming
days."--South Carolina
Review
"This is an important book, and will likely be a model for
historians who seek to blend cultural and labor history."--Journal
of Social History
"A brilliant and challenging exposition of a very ambiguous
historical and social phenomenon."--Dan O'Bryan, Sierra Nevada
College
"Lott's project is ambitious, complex, and masterfully
accomplished....the importance of his overall contribution is
unassailable, and it offers an inspiring model for those seeking to
bring an interdisciplinary perspective to the study of American
history."--The Journal of American History
"Wonderfully intelligent analysis of culture, history, American
social expression, and how these all come together in popular
culture and race....his analysis nicely prepares students to read
African American literature in historical context."--Ray Waller,
Florida International University
"Interesting and useful."--Journal of American Culture
Ask a Question About this Product More... |