ABSTRACT
Ralph Ellison insightfully identified nineteenth-century blackface minstrelsy as a theatrical venue where Americans enacted a unique performance of desires. The minstrel stage, Ellison noted in his essay ‘Change the joke and slip the yoke’, is where ‘private is public and the public private, where black is white and white black, where the immoral becomes moral, and the moral is anything that makes one feel good’ (1972:49-50). Performed primarily in northern, urban venues to white male audiences, early minstrelsy situated itself in the South, giving a symbolic significance to a contained universe located on the plantation which also allowed a permissible attitude of ‘anything goes’. Nationalism was on the rise in 1850s America, an age of abolitionist and women’s movements, and minstrelsy kept at bay an urban culture demanding that men give up their individual identity to the mega-identity of the city. Based in a hypernostalgic state, minstrelsy was where the plantation culture of the South existed as a performed cultural imaginary of the urban displaced white man.
