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Darkology: When the American Dream Wore Blackface
September 26, 2019 @ 7:00 pm - 8:30 pm
| Dr. Rhae Lynn Barnes, assistant professor of history at Princeton University, will present research from her forthcoming book, Darkology: When the American Dream Wore Blackface. Her research maps the political, economic, and cultural geography of amateur blackface minstrel shows by laying bare its unstudied bibliographic history. Marketed nationally as local entertainment, the nearly ten thousand published minstrel show plays—the bedrock of this project—are material remnants of white supremacy’s intellectual and cultural life between the Civil War and Civil Rights. This prolific and censored archive reveals the crucial role the United States government played in accelerating, funding, and disseminating blackface minstrel shows in amateur form worldwide. The project has received funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Library of Congress, the Council on Library Information Resources, the Western History Association, the Society for American Music, the Harry Ransom Center, the Rare Book School at the University of Virginia, and the Bibliographical Society of America. An interactive website will be released as a companion to the book.
This event is free and open to the DSU community and general public. Sponsors include A World Class Experience (QEP), the Division of Social Sciences and History, and the Diversity Committee. For more information, please contact Michelle Johansen at mjohansen@deltastate.edu. |
