The jazz singer's legacy: The racial role-play of African-Americans and Jews in twentieth century American performance

This study re-examines the racial role-play of African-Americans and Jewish-Americans to further understand how racial identity has been constructed in America and the ways in which these constructions overlap and affect one another. Although racial role-play is most often associated with blackface minstrelsy, I define it more broadly as an overt staging of a racial identity. Unlike passing—an attempt to assume another identity without being detected—racial role-play calls attention to its performance. Because of its negative association with blackface minstrelsy, racial role-play disturbs many Americans. Yet to dismiss or avoid the function racial role-play has had in America is to miss a key means of understanding the cultural formation of our country. Moreover, racial role-play has been used by performers of various backgrounds, including African-Americans, to undermine stereotypes, to cross racial boundaries, and to question racial definitions altogether.; Chapter One discusses the history of minstrelsy and how this practice might have been used and viewed by both African-Americans and Jewish-Americans. Chapter Two follows this discussion with an in-depth look at both the play and the film of The Jazz Singer, including critical responses from the Jewish, the Black, and the mainstream press. In contrast to Whiteness scholars who argue that blackface was a means for Jews to distance themselves from Blacks in order to assimilate into White America, I argue that blackface was a form of identification with African-Americans in order to distinguish themselves from White Christians. Chapter Three focuses on the attempts of certain African-American artists in the 1960s to re-appropriate racial role-play and demonstrates how Jews functioned symbolically as a means of asserting an evolving Black identity. Chapter Four illustrates how Jews once again utilized racial role-play alongside of African-Americans in the 1990s as performance artists explored identity politics. In particular, I examine the work of Anna Deavere Smith, Sandra Bernhard, and Danny Hoch—who suggest that identities are not fixed, but rather can be continually questioned, challenged, and negotiated through performance. This fluidity, however, comes at the cost of losing or ignoring group distinctions, whether these distinctions are self-imposed or externally assigned.