Black Writing and Whiteface

Abstract

To this point, my focus has been exclusively on the ways in which white southern writers have inverted the conventions of blackface minstrelsy through a recurring whiteface figure—the sometimes minstrel, sometimes trickster character who is racially white, but who, in some sense, is always only passing as southern White. We have seen how, for example, Faulkner’s Uncle Ike McCaslin, O’Connor’s Hazel Motes, and Barth’s Todd Andrews end up, without their conscious recognition, performing cultural blackness. These characters, whose enactments of white masculinity are decidedly at odds with social expectations, serve as sites of multiple misrecognitions within their white communities. They are, after all, a strange kind of artificial Negro. Blinded by the white, no one can actually identify these characters’ difference as racially inflected. As I have argued, these whiteface characters, no matter how well or poorly their authors imagine cultural blackness, have a subversive potential inasmuch as they problematize the assumption that whiteness transcends race and serve as the universal norm against which all darker difference may be measured. What I wish to do in this concluding chapter is to consider how the whiteface figure might also operate in twentieth-century African American ficition. I turn specifically to Zora Neale Hurston’s Moses, Man of the Mountain and Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo.