#eric lott

His first studio album in 4 years, Love and Theft was a commercial and critical success, peaking at #5 in the US (#3 in the UK) and receiving 3 Grammy nominations, including Album of the Year and Best Male Rock Vocal Performance (for “Honest with Me”). It received the Grammy award for Best Contemporary Folk Album.

Since the dawn of cinema and until the mid-20th century, the minstrel show-based practice of donning blackface to portray characters of African descent has been a staple in Hollywood. TCM host Jacqueline Stewart and Professors Donald Bogle and Eric Lott explain blackface’s harmful history and how its usage has been damaging for Black representation.

Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class by Eric Lott "For over two centuries, America has celebrated the very black 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 sometimes served to usefully intensify these conflicts. Based on the appropriation of black dialect, music, and dance, minstrelsy at once applauded and lampooned black culture, ironically contributing 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. "

In his Introduction, Lott states his desire to "reorient the traditions of American Studies by asking questions about the role of culture in the political development of a specific national entity".  That's his axe to grind and, if you're a fan of writing that namechecks Althusser, Gramsci and "modes of production," this is just your meat.  It's well-researched--which one might expect from a doctoral diss, somewhat combative in tone--which lends it a strong authorial voice, and occasionally mired in jargon, neo-Marxist and otherwise, e.g., "the production of the minstrel show out of gendered commodity exchanges".  Uh-huh.  I won't fault it for what it is--academic writing--just note it and praise the wealth of good information studded  throughout.