Bohlman’s definition of the adjacent term “racial imaginary.” 6 But whereas Radano and Bohlman emphasize ideological constructions, “fantasy” draws attention to the intersection of affect, desire, and power as expressed in both musical and embodied registers. The world-building power of the racial fantasy animates much of the history and historiography of race, racial representation, music, gender, class, and sexuality in American culture. Racial fantasy is a productive trope that brings together the disparate conversations about race that are engaged by this colloquy. A limiting framework that retrospectively views much of American culture through a Black-white binary has prohibited scholars from grappling with the truly astounding range of racialized musics produced before the twentieth century. 4 Recognizing minstrelsy’s broader stakes helps to reframe the horrors of the Jim Crow era as part of America’s “Greater Reconstruction,” a term that captures the coincident traumas of the US imperial project of westward expansion and racial exclusion, including the Chinese Exclusion Act (1882), the annexation of the Kingdom of Hawai’i (1898), and the mass murder and imprisonment of Native Americans in the reservation system following the Wounded Knee Massacre (1890). 3 In their live performances, minstrel troupes burlesqued in blackface, redface, and yellowface to exert social control not only by playing off against each other caricatures of Black Americans, Chinese Americans, and Indigenous peoples, but also by deploying gender-bending stereotypes while mocking Irish, German, Italian, and Jewish Americans. 2 Take the much-studied phenomenon of blackface minstrelsy: before the racially reductive Lost Cause narratives that erroneously reframed the Civil War as a valiant fight for states’ rights (rather than the expansion of a white supremacist empire), before the legal and psychic perversions of Jim Crow, before the racialized market segmentation of the recording industry and the incomplete triumphs of the Civil Rights Movement, there was a pan-racial and ethnic minstrel culture in the sheet music, newspaper advertisements, sporting print culture, broadsheets, and commercial photography that constituted the era’s mass media.
1900 has made recognizing the diversity and fluidity of prior American racializations difficult. This colloquy aims to advance the conversation about music and the construction of race by foregrounding case studies of marginalized music makers in America before the advent of recorded sound. Nineteenth-century blackface minstrelsy, which promoted white supremacy and has been held up as a paragon of US musical ingenuity and US racism, reflects racialized musical fantasies, ideologies, and practices that had been coalescing for centuries. Belief in Euro-Americans’ racial superiority found support in the pious and genteel repertoire that was popular among white citizens in the early United States. Enslavers perceived threats and conspiracy in African and African American singing, drumming, and dancing, and regulated against them. Native peoples and European colonists heard each other’s music foremost as indicators of indelible difference and secondarily as signs of friendliness or danger. This holds true across genres and contexts. The staggering diversity of music heard in the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries, as waves of colonization, forced migration, enslavement, expulsion, and immigration brought different peoples into prolonged and often violent contact with each other, created lasting ideas and praxes of musical alterity. An ideology of racial difference is baked into American music history.
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