For some reason I have always liked the O. Henry story “After Twenty Years,” in which two pals agree to meet at the same spot twenty years later, no matter the circumstances, to compare their fates; in the meantime Jimmy becomes a beat cop and Bob a wanted crook, whom the former is, when they meet again, obliged to apprehend. Seeing this new edition of Love and Theft is not unlike meeting yourself at the same corner twenty years on, nightstick in hand, seeing what became of your erstwhile self, learning so much more after the book’s publication what it is about.
I had some intentions going in. Late 1980s, long hot New York summers, the crack panic and Paul Simon’s Graceland, the vogue of Public Enemy and Spike Lee alongside racist attacks in Howard Beach and Bensonhurst, New York City’s first black mayor David Dinkins up against revanchist Ronald Reagan successor George H. W. Bush. Me, post-suburban jazz refugee immersed in the dark arts, by which I pretty much mean bebop, fascinated by the role of culture in such racial contradictions, my own included. As an aspiring scholar and writer, I thought it a little overhasty if not dishonest to presume expertise in African-American life and began to wonder about the prehistory of cross-racial interest like mine, its capacity to intervene in, to move or to stall, weirdly uncertain political climates like the one around me.
Tambo and Bones, bingo: greasepaint and sweat under guttering gaslights in sweltering city theaters, young white Negroes doing what Joni Mitchell calls the “boho dance,” getting under someone else’s skin and getting paid for it. What was the story there? The idea was to try for scholarly writing that would bring together something of the wit and learning of my teacher Steven Marcus’s work on the quintessentially indefensible form of Victorian pornography, the revolutionary insouciance and class rage of T. J. Clark on nineteenth-century French art, the deep racial ironies articulated in Ralph Ellison’s essays (more profoundly subtle, it still seems to me, than his Invisible Man), the dramas of cultural insurgency in Amiri Baraka’s prose and plays, the dialectical design of Fredric Jameson’s The Political Unconscious, the commitment to the popular as a crucial domain of socialist struggle as Stuart Hall wrote of it, the cunning analysis of working-class culture that another teacher, Michael Denning, brought to the dime novel, and above all the framework of the American 1848 that Michael Rogin had established to study what Karl Marx himself called the U.S.’s mid-century “revolutionary turn.” All of it, not too distantly one hoped, summoning the punch of Robert Christgau, Ellen Willis, Greil Marcus, and Greg Tate on politics and pop music. I found myself well situated during graduate school, keeping myself alive by teaching literacy workshops at Borough of Manhattan Community College, just down the street from the former site of P. T. Barnum’s American Museum, and working crew at the Public Theater—Astor Place, an earlier time’s ground zero—including the Delacorte stage in Central Park and a mobile Shakespeare unit that went to all the boroughs. Shades of trodding the boards in the period that drew me.
I was surprised and schooled by the tangle of convergences and connections that emerged during the writing and after the appearance of Love and Theft. Rogin had himself begun to write about blackface, it turned out, and he became a pre-publication supporter and friend. David Roediger was comradely enough to show me galleys of his fine chapters on minstrelsy from his soon to be celebrated Wages of Whiteness. I had sought to bring together critical race and cultural studies with the (then still mostly race-blind) new social and labor history, and these august fellows were helping lead the way. Love and Theft was in turn part of a long (Clintonian but ongoing) moment defined by scholarly fascination with performative race and gender crossing both in minstrel shows and out, producing such works as Marjorie Garber’s Vested Interests, Rogin’s Blackface, White Noise, Susan Gubar’s Racechanges, Saidiya Hartman’s Scenes of Subjection, Robert Cantwell’s When We Were Good, W. T. Lhamon’s Raising Cain, Nick Tosches’s Where Dead Voices Gather, Daphne Brooks’s Bodies in Dissent, Camille Forbes’s Introducing Bert Williams, and many, many others. The week my book came out, Ted Danson told racist jokes in blackface at a Friar’s Club roast of his then-girlfriend Whoopi Goldberg, prompting my colleague Paul Cantor to suspect my publisher had arranged for the promotion. Fairly soon, “love and theft” became a kind of shorthand for the dialectic of white racial attraction and repulsion, cultural expropriation born of cross-racial desire, that first arose in public commercial terms in the antebellum minstrel show but is plain today wherever you look.
In 2001 Bob Dylan released an album called “Love and Theft”—the only one of his dozens of titles to appear in quotation marks. My title riffed on Leslie Fiedler’s Love and Death in the American Novel; why couldn’t Dylan lift mine? It was, after all, in the tradition. I suspect Dylan liked my title for its general resonance, in which stolen hearts and emotional misdemeanors stalk the sweetness of love, as they usually do in Dylan’s songs. Plus he knows full well the cross-cultural indebtedness of music in the Americas, his included, and he alludes to that in the songs as well as the title, itself stolen, of “Love and Theft.” Novelist and cultural critic Jonathan Lethem later wrote an essay celebrating this sort of thing as “The Ecstasy of Influence.” Love and Theft became a pop-country band’s name. “Some of these bootleggers/They make pretty good stuff,” Dylan sang on the “Love and Theft” song “Sugar Baby.” It is quickly becoming a truism of popular music studies that crossover bootlegging, as rich in result as it is unfair in credit, has always been American music’s hallmark—less roots and remixes than masking and mimicry all the way down.
Of course I have been gratified as well as edified by these developments. They do sometimes make me wish I had punched up the writing a little (where’s that nightstick?). But it’s also true that responses to Love and Theft generally hew to the phrase and its local implications, for worse as well as better. I still think it serves as an apt conceptual handle for cultural relations in North America; but it can seem overly equivocating, even apologist, regarding the meaner aspects of those relations. This is because the larger framework of Love and Theft is often overlooked. The book is embedded rather strenuously in a Marxist architecture. It is not simply the irony of American history I am after, although there is that, with the blackface mask of political containment backing its partisans into unbidden subversions at a particular historical juncture. More than this, the blackface mask is understood here, I think for the first time, not as a dead sign of social stasis transparent to nostalgic racists and anti-racist scourges alike but as a nearly isotopic sizzle of historical conflict, a meeting-place (per V. N. Volosinov’s idea of class struggle at the level of the sign) for the clash of forces that defined its revolutionary moment. Not that minstrelsy is an agent of revolution (pace Lhamon): it is, though, a place of reversals and unintended consequences that grew out of the moment’s explosive capitalist energies and class struggles lived in the modality of race. Something of much greater weight than blackface bad taste was at stake—a labor abolitionism, the possibility of a revolutionary interracial working-class alliance, whose here rising and there declining fate blackface seemed to me to augur. The architecture of the book’s second half was tacitly drawn, in fact, from Jameson’s Political Unconscious, with its three outlined horizons of analysis: a textual horizon in which, here, blackface performance is an internally contradictory symbolic act, an imaginary resolution of real social contradiction (Ch. 5); an ideological horizon in which texts or performances become the occasional utterances of larger groups or social classes, often wielding the most extreme accents of class and racial antagonism (Chs. 6 and 7); and a final horizon that sees the transformation of both of these into symbolic forms or sign systems that are traces or anticipations of (competing, overlapping) modes of production themselves—capitalism and slavery, North and South, in my terms Chapter 8’s competing pro- and anti-slavery versions of Uncle Tom’s Cabin on the antebellum stage. Social contradiction and dialectical reversal foretelling the revolution of 1865 and the ensuing drama of Reconstruction are at the heart of my analysis, in other words, leaving minstrelsy not in some moralistic purgatory (now is it ok? isn’t it gone yet?) but as fundamental—then and now—to the fate of racial representation, and therefore racial liberation, in these United States.
I am not sure why this didn’t wholly take, but the entire trajectory of my argument depends on it. That is why it still kills me that T. D. Rice begins his career as little Jim Crow in early-1830s minstrel acts and ends it as noble Uncle Tom in 1850s Tom shows. What happened after that is another two or three stories, as the scholars mentioned above have variously demonstrated. Of blackface’s continuing relevance there is no doubt: ask your local wigger. Or Barack Obama. The election of the first African-American president of the United States occasioned the legitimate return of blackface comedy. All across Obama’s first term the burnt cork snuck back, most notably in comedian Fred Armisen’s many Obama impressions on Saturday Night Live; the kitchen heating up, SNL replaced Armisen’s Obama during election season with that of African-American Jay Pharoah, whose artificially lightened skin on top of the inevitable comparisons to his comedic predecessor only redoubled the minstrel quotient. A national fantasy of the new men of power played out on American screens. Earlier in the decade, Dennis Haysbert had laid important representational track for Obama’s advancement in his portrayal of black president David Palmer on Fox’s 24, solemnizing somewhat comedian Chris Rock’s conceit in the 2003 film Head of State. With Obama’s actual triumph came the conscious restoration of minstrelsy.
Should the specter of a blackface Obama surprise us? After all, as Constance Rourke observed long ago, commercial blackface stage performance first appeared at the turn of the 1830s in tandem with William Lloyd Garrison’s abolitionist movement (and its paper The Liberator); isn’t this always the dialectic of racial representation in America? It’s never clear in any case what the relation is between off-color comedy and advances of color. Counterweights or complementarities? Could Obama in cork be a backward testament to Americans’ investment in a black president? Obama’s Dreams from My Father, as Donald Pease has argued, suggests the president’s dialectical cast of mind when it comes to such questions. At one moment while a Columbia undergraduate, he and his sister go at his mother’s behest to see the 1950s Brazilian film Black Orpheus; the author is dismayed by the romantic racialism of the “childlike blacks” onscreen and embarrassed at his mother’s rapt involvement in them. The eternal racial gulf, he despairs, even amongst loved ones. “Whether we sought out our demons or salvation,” Obama writes, “the other race would always remain just that: menacing, alien, and apart.” Later, though, hearing his mother talk about his father, a deeper feeling settles over him. She’s still “that girl with the movie of beautiful black people in her head,” but he realizes that her love for his father was guileless and unself-conscious like any other love, transformed if we’re lucky into something firmer. “What I heard from my mother that day, speaking about my father, was something that I suspect most Americans will never hear from the lips of those of another race, and so cannot be expected to believe might exist between black and white: the love of someone who knows your life in the round, a love that will survive disappointment.” Ardor and disappointment, theft and love, twenty years later I’m beginning to see the light.
Major thanks to Benjamin Fagan for assistance in
preparing this new edition.