Oriental, Black, and White : : the formation of racial habits in American theater / / Josephine Lee.

• VerfasserIn: Lee, Josephine,
• Place / Publishing House: Chapel Hill : : The University of North Carolina Press,, 2022.
• Year of Publication: 2022
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (x, 331 pages) :; illustrations

"Josephine Lee looks at how nineteenth and early twentieth century commercial American theater combined Black and Asian stage representations. In minstrelsy, melodrama, vaudeville, and musical theater, both white and Black performers enacted blackface characterizations alongside Oriental stereotypes of opulence and deception, comic servitude, and exotic sexuality. Building on scholarship on orientalism in arts and culture and Blackness in minstrelsy, Lee shows how blackface was often associated with working-class masculinity and the development of a nativist white racial identity for European immigrants. Meanwhile, everything 'oriental,' Lee argues, marked what was culturally coded as foreign, feminized, and ornamental, and these conflicting racial representations were often intermingled in actual stage performance" -- Provided by publisher.

Table of Contents

Oriental, black, and white -- The racial refashioning of "Aladdin" -- The lesser roles of Ira Aldridge -- Blackface minstrelsy's Japanese turns -- The tricky servant in blackface and yellowface -- The Chinese laundry sketch -- "Maybe now and then a Chinaman": African American impersonators and Chinese specialties -- Divas and dancers: oriental femininity and African American performance -- Oriental frolics and racial uplift in the early African American musical -- Pleasure domes and journeys home: "In Dahomey," "Abyssinia," "The Children of the Sun," and "Shuffle Along" -- Fantasy islands: staging the Philippines, 1900-1914 -- Racial puzzles, chop suey, and Juanita Long Hall in "Flower Drum Song.".