The Introduction of Kellen Hoxworth's Transoceanic Blackface: Empire, Race, Performance outlines the three terms noted in the subheading, carefully detailing the origins and usage of each keyword, and reading like a well-authored and cited textbook on the subject of international blackface minstrelsy and racial impersonation. Drawing on explorations of blackface in both US and international contexts by scholars including Eric Lott, Catherine M. Cole, and Jill Lane, Hoxworth approaches blackface as a phenomenon that predates the Jacksonian period in US politics and that is not limited by nationalistic thinking or borders. Instead, he argues that blackface was an international currency that trafficked in the widely understood logic of racial impersonation throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in the Anglophone empire. Hoxworth writes:
Whether staged in imperial metropoles or on colonial frontiers, transoceanic blackface constituted a popular, everyday mode of performance that involved all classes of white imperial society. The white, male, working-class environment in which minstrelsy flourished throughout the United States during the Jacksonian era (ca. 1820s–1830s) was not the only—nor the primary—basis for its transoceanic popularity, which drew together “high” and “low” performance cultures of the Anglophone empire. (9)
This claim, in and of itself not necessarily a novel one, forms the basis of Hoxworth's overarching argument. The resulting book is highly teachable (especially for undergraduate audiences new to theatre research) and makes a valuable contribution by bringing together many disparate resources and archives in conversation with existing scholarship on nineteenth-century blackface.
Although Hoxworth does not offer a new framing to analyze these texts, his primary contribution is the historical and archival breadth of the work. Other scholars have offered a transnational or international approach to the histories of blackface and racial impersonation, but Hoxworth draws these archives into conversation under the umbrella of empire, more specifically the British Empire of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This historiography lends greater context to the transnational scope of blackface performances of that era. To that end, each chapter is organized more thematically than chronologically and offers unique case studies that expand our definitions of racial impersonation. In Chapter 1 Hoxworth traces “the traffics of blackface performance throughout the circum-Atlantic Anglophone empire from the mid-eighteenth through the early nineteenth century” (32). Chapter 2 follows a narrower tract as he traces the origins and exchanges taking place around the dramatic figure of “Jim Crow” in the nineteenth-century Anglophone empire (67). His tracing denies, or rather resists, nationalistic boundaries that would claim Jim Crow to be a distinctly US cultural benchmark, offering instead case studies from “Australia, Canada, South Asia, Jamaica, and southern Africa” (67). Chapter 3 “maps global circulations of ensemble blackface minstrelsy and its imperial racial repertoires” (91). Throughout the chapter, he traces the progression of blackface from solo acts to ensemble performances. Chapter 4 deals with “British imperial stagings of Othello,” and how they “demonstrate that theatrical enactments of miscegenatory anxieties were not limited to the racial formations of the newborn United States of America but rather constituted a global, transoceanic phenomenon” (128). The final chapter, Chapter 5, explores the evolution of yellowface and brownface performance as they developed alongside transnational blackface. Hoxworth argues that “The overlapping and intersecting repertoires of blackface, yellowface, and brownface trace the ‘racial triangulation’ not only of Asian migrants in the United States but also of differently racialized Asian subjects and subalterns throughout the Anglophone empire” (159).
The depth and rigor of the archival research utilized in this work are striking. Due to this, the reader gains a thorough understanding of the landscape into which blackface was born in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. By extending the timeline and analysis of blackface beyond the nineteenth century, Hoxworth excavates key information about the history of racial impersonation in the Anglophone world. By the conclusion of the monograph, the reader will have a firm understanding of the case studies and history of racial impersonation as it relates to the multifaceted racial formations of the Anglophone imperial world, without privileging solely the US-born racism that dictated the politics and performances of the nineteenth-century American stage. Undergirding these racial anxieties was a desire to reinstate white supremacist ideology and control that blackface minstrels and racial impersonators espoused during their performances. Hoxworth expertly explores the themes of empire and race as they relate to performance in ways that will prove useful to educators and students engaged in courses on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Black studies, performance studies, and theatre history.
