Description: While there are many studies of nineteenth-century race theories and scientific racism, the attitudes and stereotypes expressed in popular culture have rarely been examined, and then only for the latter half of the century. Theatre then was mass entertainment and these forgotten plays, hastily written, surviving only as hand-written manuscripts or cheap pamphlets, are a rich seam for the cultural historian. Mining them to discover how 'race' was viewed and how the stereotype of the black developed and degraded, sheds a fascinating light on the development of racism in English culture. In the process, this book helps to explain how a certain flexibility in attitudes towards skin colour, observable at the end of the eighteenth century, changed into the hardened jingoism of the late nineteenth. Concentrating on the period 1830 to 1860, its detailed excavation of some seventy plays makes it invaluable to the theatre historian and black studies scholar.
Brief description: Hazel Waters is the editor of Race and Class.
Review Quotes: 'Waters offers a detailed and well contextualized consideration of the role of 'Tom mania' within the overall trajectory of the black stereotype on stage and evaluates both the novel and the subsequent adaptations in relation to their portrayal of the black dramatic character. Waters's work, eminently useful for both the general reader and the specialist, offers a new perspective on the correlation between the onstage changes in the black stereotype during the early nineteenth century (as both image and conception) and the development of a wider ideology about race.' New Theatre Quarterly