Blackface Cuba, 1840-1895

by Lane, Jill

• ISBN13: 9780812238679
• ISBN10: 0812238672
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2005-05-25
• Publisher: Univ of Pennsylvania Pr

Summary

Blackface Cuba, 1840-1895offers a critical history of the relation between racial impersonation, national sentiment, and the emergence of an anticolonial public sphere in nineteenth-century Cuba. Through a study of Cuba's vernacular theatre, theteatro bufo, and of related forms of music, dance, and literature, Lane argues that blackface performance was a primary site for the development ofmestizaje, Cuba's racialized national ideology, in which African and Cuban become simultaneously mutually exclusive and mutually formative. Popular with white Cuban-born audiences during the period of Cuba's anticolonial wars, theteatro bufowas celebrated for combining Spanish elements with supposedly African rhythms and choreography. Its wealth of short comic plays developed a well-loved repertory of blackface stock characters, from thenegritoto themulata, played by white actors in blackface. Lane contends that these practices were embraced by white audiences as especially national forms that helped define Cuba's opposition to Spain, at the same time that they secured prevailing racial hierarchies for a future Cuban nation. Comparing theteatro bufoto related forms of racial representation, particularly those created by black Cubans in theatres and in the press, Lane analyzes performance as a form of social contestation through which an emergent Cuban national community struggled over conflicting visions of race and nation.

Author Biography

Jill Lane teaches theatre studies and American studies at Yale University.

Table of Contents

Preface: On the Translation of Race	ix
Introduction: ImpersoNation in Our America	1	(17)
Blackface Costumbrismo, 1840--1860	18	(42)
Anticolonial Blackface, 1868	60	(46)
Black(face) Public Spheres, 1880--1895	106	(43)
National Rhythm, Racial Adulteration, and the Danzon, 1881--1882	149	(31)
Racial Ethnography and Literate Sex, 1888	180	(44)
Conclusion: Cubans on the Moon, and Other Imagined Communities	224	(13)
Notes	237	(10)
Bibliography	247	(20)
Index	267	(6)
Acknowledgments	273