| Description |
xi, 459 pages : illustrations ; 25 cm |
| Bibliography |
Includes bibliographical references (pages 407-454) and index. |
| Contents |
Lateral sufficiency -- Gumbo Cuff and the New York Desdemonas -- Change the joke and slip the stereotype -- The phases of Jim Crow's runaway stage -- Songs: Coal black Rose -- The original Jim Crow -- Jim Crow still alive! -- Dinah Crow -- Jim Crow (London) -- De original Jim Crow -- Jim Crow (Boston) -- All de women shout loo loo -- Clare de kitchen -- Gombo Chaff -- Sich a gitting up stairs -- Jim crack corn, or, The blue tail fly -- Settin' on a rail, or, Raoon hunt -- Plays: Oh! hush! or, The Virginny cupids! -- Virginia mummy -- Bone squash -- Flight to America -- The peacock and the crow -- Jim Crow in his new place -- The foreign prince -- Yankee notes for English circulation -- Otello -- Street prose: The life of Jim Crow -- A faithful account of the life of Jim Crow the American negro poet. |
| Summary |
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 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 an 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. |
| Subject |
African Americans -- Literary collections.
|
|
African Americans. |
| Genre/Form |
Literary collections.
|
| Subject |
Social classes -- Literary collections.
|
|
Social classes. |
|
Popular literature -- United States.
|
|
Popular literature. |
|
United States. |
|
American literature -- 19th century.
|
|
American literature. |
| Chronological Term |
19th century |
| Subject |
Blackface entertainers -- History.
|
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Blackface entertainers. |
|
History. |
|
African Americans in literature.
|
|
African Americans in literature. |
|
Social classes in literature.
|
|
Social classes in literature. |
|
Minstrel shows -- History.
|
|
Minstrel shows. |
|
Rice, Tom, 1808-1860.
|
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Rice, Tom, 1808-1860. |
|
Black people in literature.
|
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Black people in literature. |
|
Race in literature.
|
|
Race in literature. |
| Genre/Form |
Literature.
|
|
Literature.
|
| Added Author |
Lhamon, W. T.
|
| ISBN |
0674010620 cloth alkaline paper |
|
9780674010628 cloth alkaline paper |
|
