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Eric Lott

Love & Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (Race and American Culture) 20th Edition

by Eric Lott (Author), Greil Marcus (Foreword)

4.7 45 ratings

Part of: Race and American Culture (11 books)

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For over two centuries, America has celebrated the same African-American culture it attempts to control and repress, and nowhere is this phenomenon more apparent than in the strange practice of blackface performance. Born of extreme racial and class conflicts, the blackface minstrel show appropriated black dialect, music, and dance; at once applauded and lampooned black culture; and, ironically, contributed to a "blackening of America."

Drawing on recent research in cultural studies and social history, Eric Lott examines the role of the blackface minstrel show in the political struggles of the years leading up to the Civil War. Reading minstrel music, lyrics, jokes, burlesque skits, and illustrations in tandem with working-class racial ideologies and the sex/gender system, Love and Theft argues that blackface minstrelsy both embodied and disrupted the racial tendencies of its largely white, male, working-class audiences. Underwritten by envy as well as repulsion, sympathetic identification as well as fear--a dialectic of "love and theft"--the minstrel show continually transgressed the color line even as it enabled the formation of a self-consciously white working class. Lott exposes minstrelsy as a signifier for multiple breaches: the rift between high and low cultures, the commodification of the dispossessed by the empowered, the attraction mixed with guilt of whites caught in the act of cultural thievery.

This new edition celebrates the twentieth anniversary of this landmark volume. It features a new foreword by renowned critic Greil Marcus that discusses the book's influence on American cultural studies as well as its relationship to Bob Dylan's 2001 album of the same name, "Love & Theft." In addition, Lott has written a new afterword that extends the study's range to the twenty-first century.

ISBN-10

0195320557
ISBN-13

978-0195320558
Edition

20th
Publisher

Oxford University Press
Publication date

August 9, 2013
Part of series

Race and American Culture
Language

English
Dimensions

9.66 x 0.64 x 5.69 inches
Print length

352 pages
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Editorial Reviews

Review

"[Lott] takes advantage of the space opened by the times from which it emerged, while also sustaining a critical perspective." --David Roediger, Project Muse

Reviews of the previous edition:

"Terrifically smart and unexpectedly timely."--New York Times

"One of the most stimulating and nuanced accounts of 19th-century blackface minstrelsy."--Boston Phoenix

"Original and erudite....A clever, disciplined, and resourceful reading of the commonplace: a pioneering study."--Kirkus Reviews

"Love and Theft is an original and absolutely brilliant contribution to understanding the politics of cultural production. Lott makes an incisive, provocative, and stunning analysis of the complex and contradictory ways in which minstrelsy embodied and acted out the class, racial, and sexual politics of its historical moment. As readers we come to understand for the first time how blackface performance imagined and addressed a national community and we realize the extent to which we still live with this legacy. An enthralling and important book."--Hazel Carby, Yale University

"The author adroitly leads us through minstrelsy's maze of complex relationships....Ground-breaking work."--Theatre Survey

"This spectacular book, a history of blackface from the bottom up, offers a gripping, original interpretation of the first and most popular form of nineteenth-century entertainment. Placing minstrelsy at the center of class, race, and political relations, and seeing blackface as a contaminated form of interracial desire, Love and Theft will stimulate vigorous debate. To dissent from portions of the argument in no way diminishes the subtlety and importance of Eric Lott's achievement."--Michael Rogin, University of California, Berkeley

"[Lott] offers a stunning, provocative interpretation of the minstrel tradition....I found his insights into white male desire to appropriate or step into black bodies utterly fascinating and pretty funny."--Robin D.G. Kelly, The Nation

"Lott's commitment to connecting the cultural to the political, and to exploring rather than castigating the structure of feeling behind blackface, make Love and Theft a model for how to study popular culture."--Alice Echols, The Village Voice

"Love and Theft is relentlessly suggestive, thorough, learned, and smart: and most impressive of all, its reach doesn't exceed its grasp."--Michael Bérubé, American Literature

"The analysis is smart in the sense that it is stylish, adroit, and contrived."--Quarterly Magazine of the Missouri Historical Society

"Cultural history has entered a boom phase of late. Spurred by poststructuralist literary criticism, cultural historians have produced entirely new conceptual frameworks, not to mention innumerable specific insights, for interpreting the past. Eric Lott's study of minstrelsy and the American working class is a premier- indeed, prize-winning- example of the stunning results of this approach."--The Historian

"This book is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the minstrel show, and understanding the minstrel show is essential to understanding nineteenth-century American culture."--American Music

"Eric Lott's recent contribution represents a major innovation in the study of this subject. Aside from a few scattered journal articles here and there, no critic has approached minstrelsy with anything like the theoretical sophistication that Lott brings to it....Some good work precedes Lott, but none comes close to having the interpretive acuity or critical audacity which characterizes Love and Theft....Love and Theft is a demanding book, it is also a tremendously rewarding one....Lott has come up with a fantastic book on blackface, but has provided an excellent example of how American Studies might be reinvigorated in the coming days."--South Carolina Review

"This is an important book, and will likely be a model for historians who seek to blend cultural and labor history."--Journal of Social History

"A brilliant and challenging exposition of a very ambiguous historical and social phenomenon."--Dan O'Bryan, Sierra Nevada College

"Lott's project is ambitious, complex, and masterfully accomplished....the importance of his overall contribution is unassailable, and it offers an inspiring model for those seeking to bring an interdisciplinary perspective to the study of American history."--The Journal of American History

"Wonderfully intelligent analysis of culture, history, American social expression, and how these all come together in popular culture and race....his analysis nicely prepares students to read African American literature in historical context."--Ray Waller, Florida International University

"Interesting and useful."--Journal of American Culture

About the Author

Eric Lott is Professor of English at the University of Virginia. He is the author of The Disappearing Liberal Intellectual.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Oxford University Press; 20th edition (August 9, 2013)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 352 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0195320557
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0195320558
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.1 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 9.66 x 0.64 x 5.69 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #749,740 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #121 in American Literature (Books)
- #183 in Black & African American Literary Criticism (Books)
- #2,790 in Cultural Anthropology (Books)

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4.7 45 ratings

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Ari Weinberg

Always a Classic

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on July 9, 2018

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I’ve read this book multiple times over the course of my academic career. No matter how far away from the 1980s we get it still holds weight in cultural studies and in my work. If you’re interested in histories of race and blackface minstrelsy in America, it is worth a read as a foundational text.

7 people found this helpful

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Kneeson

Interesting perspective

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on December 6, 2004

Verified Purchase

I chose to use this book in a paper that I wrote for my Race and Realism class. I was not able to grasp everything that the author had to say about blackface minstrelsy but what I did find was an interesting perspective. I don't necessarily agree with the whole phallic aspect and the need to "size up" to the African-American race, but I do want to agree with the fact that there was a fascination in the race and I think that is what Lott is trying to get across to the readers. There were many angles that could be taken with this book and it was incredibly useful to my paper. I enjoyed it and it was easy to apply to many of the novels written by Twain, Harper, Crane and Chesnutt.

11 people found this helpful

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Happy

now I'm so glad I found it again so I can finish it

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on February 20, 2018

Verified Purchase

I found a copy of it years ago and lost it; now I'm so glad I found it again so I can finish it, finally!
Good

One person found this helpful

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Dat

Unreadable theory-laden abstraction

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on September 18, 2020

Verified Purchase

A maze of jargon filled with academic tropes. Might be enjoyed by someone with a PhD in English who can chuckle and feel smug with every off-the-cuff invocation of a bizarre term from Althusser without any explanation. Not a sentence goes by without some abstract observation and a citation of a big name without any unpacking of content or real investigation. I'll give an example from a random page:

"What interests me here is the allusive elasticity of nostalgia as a mode, its ability to join, through what Saxton calls 'psychological identity' the facts of metropolitanization, the frontier, immigration, and urban weightlessness - to bring these together and to suggest by way of the black mask their relationship to racial matters..." (198).

What this actually means to the human brain is unclear. Nobody should have to bother to unpack a sentence like this, and definitely not an entire book. It's torture. The whole thing is torture. Unorganized, rambling thought and severely messy prose and syntax. Tough to read, but not because of the content. Tough to penetrate the cloud of noxious academia that surrounds what this author actually is trying to say here. The book is supposed to be about lower classes and black/white popular experience and all of that... yet it does not resonate with any actual humanity, and has no real voice, perched on top of a mountain of highfalutin theoretical references from upper academia, clearly the downfall of a privileged education. Probably the result of a painful dissertation or other school project that reeks of impressing academics above your pay grade with references they'll enjoy.

20 people found this helpful

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Mark Levine

Ambivalent

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on June 27, 2012

Verified Purchase

An unquestionably serious study of an undeniably significant manifestation of race in the 18th century, with ramifications a century later, but a very dense and overly academic text makes this tough going. Somehere in here is an argument that minstrelsy was far from the purely racist phenomenon that many would take it to be then and now, but it often seems as if Lott makes the case for its ambiguity by citing such abundant and seemingly contradictory documentation and opinion--- everything from Walt Whitman to the Frankfurt school, and with (as some readers point out) a great deal of Freudian babble--- that one might conclude that a minstrel show, after all an unsophisticated form of mass entertainment6--- might be about just about anything. And, though I have read a good deal on related subjects and on the period, I was lost in Lott's case for the interconnectness of minstrelsy with working-class politics before the Civil War. Sean Wilentz's book on the subject was complex enough without blackface, racial, or sexual ambiguity thrown into the mix. A too ambitious effort, I think.

15 people found this helpful

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Bashir Ali

Content is explicit and detailed for historic accuracy

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on November 4, 2018

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The book is a great piece to read in today's hyper-racialized moments

4 people found this helpful

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d mac

Interesting subject

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on January 16, 2012

The subject of the book is fascinating, and the author is clearly very knowledgeable. My one complaint is that the writing style is at times impenetrable, seemingly on purpose, as if the author is hinting at things he does not want to say in plain English. But the book is well worth the effort.

17 people found this helpful

Helpful

PatSweeney@aol.com

A hard cover doctoral dissertation; dry, dull and academic.

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on November 4, 1998

I can think of no better way to convey the tone and style of"Love & Theft" than by providing a couple of excerpts from the book.
"In the pages that follow I return the minstrel show to a northeastern political context that was extremely volatile, one whose range can be seen in the antinomy of responses I have identified, themselves anticipatory of twentieth-century debates about the nature of the `popular' ".(page 17)
"Althusserian social theorists have suggested that every social formation resides not in a single mode of economic production but in a complex overlay of several modes at once, with residual modes now subordinated to the dominant one and emergent modes potentially disruptive of it".(page 220)
In the acknowledgements, author Eric Lott notes that the book grew out of a dissertation. A reader better be prepared for a document that didn't grow far enough from a mind-numbing, academic treatment of a topic that deserves a little lighter handling. Social politics aside, minstrelry was popular entertainment. Love & Theft is not.

46 people found this helpful

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Thomas Schumacher

Tiefgehende Analyse eines einmaligen kulturellem Phänomen

Reviewed in Germany 🇩🇪 on October 22, 2017

Verified Purchase

Für jemanden. der sich tatsächlich mit dem Phänomen Rock'n'Roll auseinandersetzen möchte, ist dies ein erstaunlicher einblick in die Dynamik von schwarzer und weißer Kultur.

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