Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 1996. [Vol. 3.] Eger Journal of American Studies. (Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 23)
STUDIES - Gabriella Varró: The Theme of Comic Love in Blackface Minstrelsy: The Anatomy of the Grotesque
"comic-horrific" image he turned himself into; while minstrel audiences could let the steam off by laughing at and also pitying the image presented. (C) THE MINSTREL GROTESQUE AS A WORLD VIEW AND A PHILOSOPHY OF CULTURE As noted by critics, minstrelsy, as an institutionalized form of popular theater played a major role in spreading popular ideologies of culture and society, and therefore functioned essentially as a shaper of the popular social consciousness and of the cultural awareness of the masses. Ostendorf, for instance, sees minstrelsy as "a symbolic slave code, a set of humiliating rules designed by white racists for the disenfranchisement of the black self' (66); Toll describes it as "the first example of the way American popular culture would exploit and manipulate Afro-Americans and their culture to please and benefit white Americans" (51); while Saxton has called it "halfa century of inurement to the uses of white supremacy" (27); and examples could be quoted endlessly to prove that blackface minstrelsy clearly worked as a philosophy of culture (a cultural and also social and political ideology) through which the dominance of white cultural and political practices was reassured and rehearsed in code. What should be obvious in this connection is that we are witnessing a sort of ideological game in minstrelsy. One way of understanding ideology is through looking at the repertoire of images, themes and ideas disseminated for broad public consumption by and for the dominant culture. In American culture, where a multitude of priorities have existed but not all of them prevailed, the very process of institutionalized or semi-institutionalized selection of images for a wide public audience (via, for instance, the minstrel network) was strongly reflective of interests and commitments determined mostly from above. Thus the selective process —along with its concomitant repudiation and subversion of alternative frames of reference (i.e. its suppression of the counter-culture) —has always been, intrinsically ideological. 94
