Blackface, White Noise: The Jewish Jazz Singer Finds His Voice

@article{Rogin1992BlackfaceWN,
  title={Blackface, White Noise: The Jewish Jazz Singer Finds His Voice},
  author={Michael Paul Rogin},
  journal={Critical Inquiry},
  year={1992},
  volume={18},
  pages={417 - 453}
}
  • M. Rogin
  • Published 1 April 1992
  • Art, History
  • Critical Inquiry
Each transformative moment in the history of American film has founded itself on the surplus symbolic value of blacks, the power to make African Americans stand for something besides themselves. There have been four such moments. Edwin S. Porter's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1903), bringing the most performed theatrical spectacle of the late nineteenth century into the movies, marked the transition from popular theater to motion pictures that characterized the prehistory of classic Hollywood cinema. The… 
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131 Citations
Background Citations
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131 Citations

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THE NEW DEAL brought the immigrant to the center of American politics. Shifting the orientation of the majority party from the hinterland to the metropolis, Franklin D. Roosevelt's victories were…
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An important though under-examined novel of the Harlem Renaissance, Rudolph Fisher’s The Walls of Jericho (1928) is conversant with its contemporary intellectual and social developments. These…
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