ABSTRACT
Blackface has been making a comeback, not just in the United States but also in Britain and Australia, and possibly other countries too. However, it is in the United States that blackface, with its link to the African-American population and its fraught association with minstrelsy, remains most contentious. John Strausbaugh (2006: 14) notes that “blackface, unconditionally banned for decades …, has crept back into the public arena.” In 1993 Ted Danson caused a storm of outrage when he blacked up to roast his then partner, Whoopi Goldberg, at a Friars Club event in New York. Yet, as Strausbaugh points out, Chuck Knipp, a white American drag artist, has become a cult figure blacking up to play welfare queen Shirley Q. Liquor. One way in which blackface has returned to acceptability is through its being positioned as self-conscious commentary. Thus, for example, Spike Lee’s film Bamboozled, released in 2000, can be read as a fictionalized discussion of the history of American minstrel blackface. Differently, the use of blackface in Ben Stiller’s film, Tropic Thunder (2008), can be understood ironically to indicate the extreme to which the self-important method actor, Kirk Lazarus (played by Robert Downey Jr.), would go for his art. In these instances postmodern blackface has become acceptable as the reflexive, knowing, performance of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century blackface.
