ABSTRACT
Theatre manager William Murray, who had already presented Aldridge on stage, supplied him in Obi with rousing denunciations of hypocritical Christian slave owners and inspiring justifications for the revenge he visited upon them by recalling the carnage English slave traders had wrought when they raided Jack's village in Africa. Aldridge moved the text away from stereotype as a retort to the grotesqueries of black representation in minstrelsy and Mathews-style attacks on black aspiration. Blackface outside of minstrelsy began to fade in Britain in the 1950s, though it survived in major productions of Othello until 1980 and was notably seen in the supposedly more realistic media of film when Alec Guinness 'browned' up in the 1984 film of A Passage to India. Theatrically, blackface minstrelsy was indomitably non-literary and stood against the tenets of the Romantics. Blackface minstrelsy was both one of the major currents of white control and, because of its pervasiveness, one of the major outlets for black performance.
