How popular theater, including blackface characters, reflected and
influenced attitudes toward race, the slave trade, and ideas of liberty
in early America.
Jenna M. Gibbs explores the world of theatrical and related print
production on both sides of the Atlantic in an age of remarkable
political and social change. Her deeply researched study of
working-class and middling entertainment covers the period of the
American Revolution through the first half of the nineteenth century,
examining controversies over the place of black people in the
Anglo-American moral imagination. Taking a transatlantic and nearly
century-long view, Performing the Temple of Liberty draws on a wide
range of performed texts as well as ephemera--broadsides, ballads, and
cartoons--and traces changes in white racial attitudes.
Gibbs asks how popular entertainment incorporated and helped define
concepts of liberty, natural rights, the nature of blackness, and the
evils of slavery while also generating widespread acceptance, in America
and in Great Britain, of blackface performance as a form of racial
ridicule. Readers follow the migration of theatrical texts, images, and
performers between London and Philadelphia. The story is not flattering
to either the United States or Great Britain. Gibbs's account
demonstrates how British portrayals of Africans ran to the sympathetic
and to a definition of liberty that produced slave manumission in 1833
yet reflected an increasingly racialized sense of cultural superiority.
On the American stage, the treatment of blacks devolved into a
denigrating, patronizing view embedded both in blackface burlesque and
in the idea of "Liberty," the figure of the white goddess.
Performing the Temple of Liberty will appeal to readers across
disciplinary lines of history, literature, theater history, and culture
studies. Scholars and students interested in slavery and abolition,
British and American politics and culture, and Atlantic history will
also take an interest in this provocative work.