Oriental, Black, and White

"Josephine Lee looks at how nineteenth and early twentieth century commercial American theater combined Black and Asian stage representations. In minstrelsy, melodrama, vaudeville, and musical theater, both white and Black performers enacted blackface characterizations alongside Oriental stereotypes of opulence and deception, comic servitude, and exotic sexuality. Building on scholarship on orientalism in arts and culture and Blackness in minstrelsy, Lee shows how blackface was often associated with working-class masculinity and the development of a nativist white racial identity for European immigrants. Meanwhile, everything 'oriental,' Lee argues, marked what was culturally coded as foreign, feminized, and ornamental, and these conflicting racial representations were often intermingled in actual stage performance"