| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 87.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 87.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Behind the Burnt Cork Mask: Early Blackface Minstrelsy and Antebellum American Popular Culture. By William J. Mahar. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999. xxii, 444 pp. Cloth, $60.00, isbn 0-252-02396-X. Paper, $24.95, isbn 0-252-06696-0.)

This latest addition to the scholarship on antebellum minstrelsy departs from the conclusions of Eric Lott, Dale Cockrell, David Roediger, and others who have understood this form of popular entertainment primarily in terms of its racial politics. William J. Mahar's content analyses and contextual readings of minstrel programs, skits, and songs provide fresh insight into the burlesque nature of blackface performance. His focus on discrete meanings, however, avoids larger questions about the rhetoric and effects of this racist form of entertainment. . . .

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