Hemispheric Blackface

Danielle Roper is Neubauer Family Assistant Professor of Languages and Literatures at the University of Chicago.

Acknowledgments ix Introduction. Scenes of Racial Enjoyment in the Hemispheric Fold 1 1. Blackface and Racial Scripts at the Andean Fiesta: Staging the Slave Past in the Andes 26 2. Doing Antiblackness in the Hemispheric Fold: Blackface Performance in Miami in the Age of Obama 59 3. Flipping the Racial Script: Blackface Performance as Resistance in Colombia 87 4. The Postcolonial Below: Roots Theater and Black Enjoyment in Jamaica 136 Conclusion. Hemispheric Blackface and Its Afterlives 172 Notes 181 Bibliography 213 Index 233

"By considering the Americas as an expansive geographic unit, Danielle Roper demonstrates how a black studies methodology cuts through the foundational fictions that obscure or romanticize the structural and cultural implications of the afterlives of slavery and colonization. In so doing, she disrupts what otherwise might be considered area studies or nation-centered models by showing how multiracial societies rely on practices and tropes of antiblackness. An outstanding and timely book." - Donette Francis, author of (Fictions of Feminine Citizenship: Sexuality and the Nation in Contemporary Caribbean Literature) "Most studies of blackface privilege the nation and its history to understand the rise, popularity, and aesthetics of blackface performance. What makes Danielle Roper's book so special is how it looks across spaces in the Americas to think about blackface comparatively in places many readers might not expect. It helps chart a new course for understanding the contemporary uses of blackface as well as the broader political currents in the Americas regarding race and multiculturalism. This major work will come to be seen as a model for hemispheric approaches to the study of cultural production in the Americas." - Albert Sergio Laguna, author of (Diversion: Play and Popular Culture in Cuban America)