Lott — Love and Theft

Author: Eric Lott
Title: Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class
Year: 1993
Type: Academic book (Oxford University Press)

Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class is a book by the literary and cultural historian Eric Lott, published by Oxford University Press in 1993. Its jacket presents the minstrel show as driven at once by desire and dread, what Lott calls love and theft, and as a stage on which a white working class came to think of itself as white. Its evidence is the songs, jokes, skits and pictures of the minstrel stage before the Civil War, read against the racial thinking of the white working class, and Lott writes that the tradition the blackface stars began persists, “in historically differentiated ways, to our own day.” The book won the Modern Language Association’s prize for a first book and the Organization of American Historians’ Avery O. Craven Award in 1994. Kirkus called it a pioneering study. Jonathan Freedman, writing in 2015, called it “a work of genius” and recounted its reach beyond the academy, including an album by Bob Dylan named after it, but found that its reception had taken up the theft in its title and neglected the love.

Lott, then an assistant professor at the University of Virginia, published the book with Oxford University Press in October 1993.^{1, 2} The jacket says Lott places the minstrel show in the political conflicts that led to the Civil War, reading its songs, jokes, skits and pictures alongside the racial thinking of the white working class and its ideas of gender.³ In its words, the book 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.”³ Lott had published an essay under the title “Love and Theft: The Racial Unconscious of Blackface Minstrelsy” in Representations in 1992.⁴

Kirkus wrote that, in Lott’s account, “the appropriation of black music, dance, humor, and narratives for commercial entertainment” expressed “the deep racial conflicts suffered by the white working classes,” and that “their parodies reflected their admiration and contempt, their envy and fear.”² Lott writes that the blackface performers were “to some extent drawn to ‘blackness,’” and that this should “interrogate the racial logic usually hidden in our romantic notions of the bohemian, the Beat, the hipster.” He asks the reader to recognize “the degree to which blackface stars inaugurated an American tradition of class abdication through gendered cross-racial immersion which persists, in historically differentiated ways, to our own day.”³ Kirkus also found that the book casts new light on Huckleberry Finn, Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the music of Stephen Foster.²

Reviewers praised the book, and Jonathan Freedman’s admiring essay of 2015 questioned how it had been received. In 1994 it won the Modern Language Association’s prize for best first book and the Organization of American Historians’ Avery O. Craven Award for the best book on the Civil War and Reconstruction.¹ Kirkus admired its ingenuity and discipline and called it “a pioneering study that, though somewhat academic, will no doubt influence more popular studies.”² Freedman, in the Los Angeles Review of Books, called it “a work of genius” and one of the rare academic books that has managed “to cross over to the public sphere”: Dylan named his album “Love and Theft” after it, with quotation marks around the title, and Spike Lee acknowledged it in the credits of his 2000 film Bamboozled. His students, Freedman wrote, grasped the book’s account of theft, but he felt that they, and the book’s readers generally, had lost sight of the love.⁵

Key contributions

• Blackface minstrelsy read as a dialectic of love and theft, of envy and repulsion, identification and fear, in its largely white working-class audiences.
• Minstrelsy placed in the class and racial politics of the decades before the Civil War, as a means by which a self-consciously white working class formed.
• A tradition of “class abdication through gendered cross-racial immersion” traced from the blackface stars to later bohemians, Beats and hipsters.

See also

• The color line in pop — the color line as industry infrastructure, from market categories to radio formats
• The transatlantic feedback loop — music carried between Britain and the United States
• Authenticity and its discontents — the debate over authenticity in popular music