In the early twentieth century, Black American theatre pioneers like Paul Laurence Dunbar and Will Marion Cook sought to redefine the stereotypical minstrel figure for white audiences. Their efforts gave rise to the ‘coon’ character, a complex representation of Black urban life that challenged traditional norms while perpetuating some harmful stereotypes. This figure played a significant role in global modernism and shaped discussions about race, appearing in works by Eugene O’Neill and Jean Genet. By the 1960s, Black American artists felt the need to reimagine the ‘coon’ character to align with a more radical political agenda, reflecting the evolving social and cultural landscape that included the advent of Black radical politics and postcolonial thought. The new figure that emerged directly challenged political disenfranchisement and cultural appropriation, creating a theatre that was far more confrontational in its exploration of race.

In his intensely physical acting, the nineteenth-century actor, Edwin Forrest, crafted a working-class theatrical aesthetic that imagined our existence not as drifting, but as ontologically between, an ontological third term distinct from both the mind-centered and the body-centered ontological paradigms. By recovering the way Forrest staged his own muscular—and white—body in his interpretation of Shakespeare’s Othello (1826) and in Bird’s The Gladiator (1831), this chapter argues that Forrest used the experience of his labored at, and laboring, body to perform this ontological betweenness as an alternative to the antebellum market’s alienation and regulation of working-class bodies. In staging the agency of white, working-class bodies against Black inagentic bodies on stage, Forrest’s performance of ontological betweenness “minded the body” by offering his adoring working-class audiences less alienated—but racially complicated—ways to perform their own material embodiment in the early nineteenth century.

This article explores the reception of American popular visual culture in Ireland. The role Irish Americans played in the development of blackface is discussed, highlighting how blackface was used by the Irish to distance themselves from African Americans, thus helping their integration into (white) American society. Reception of blackface in Ireland is also explored. Consideration is then given to various technological visual media, notably large-scale panorama paintings, which offered American scenes of interest to Irish emigrants, and the cinema, which became so pervasive by the Great War that American cinema, especially, had eclipsed all other entertainments. The article then outlines the contributions made to Irish film by reverse migrants, who produced the first realist representations on film of Irish history and culture during 1910–14. The last section focuses on the ideological resistance by Catholics and nationalists alike to American cinema, which was deemed immoral and undermined the Catholic-nationalist project. This led in 1923 to the introduction of the first piece of media legislation in independent Ireland that severely restricted what could be shown in Irish cinemas. Notwithstanding this cultural protectionist measure, American cinema remained hugely popular in Ireland.

This chapter explores the history of representations of race in the Irish theatre, with a particular focus on blackface and minstrelsy – a discussion which uses at is focal point the pre-histories and afterlives of Dion Boucicault’s 1859 play The Octoroon. That melodrama is resituated within an Irish performance tradition (one that Boucicault himself would have encountered as a young man in Dublin) that stretches from the late nineteenth century, and which involved the performance on Irish stages of African-American characters – whose identity was often juxtaposed with that of stage Irish characters, and often performed by white Irish actors. In such a context, The Octoroon represents a form of continuity with what came before – and must therefore be seen in Irish as well as American contexts. Its impact on subsequent performance histories is also considered, up to and including the staging on the Abbey Theatre stage of An Octoroon – an adaptation of the original play – in 2022.

This essay examines the role of blackface in white Irish culture, especially around the time of the emergence of independent Irish statehood in the first half of the twentieth century, as a critical context for contemporary practices and ideas of whiteness in Ireland. This examination takes three forms: the first is a speculative history (and it can be no more) of blackface minstrel theater in Ireland; the second is an analysis of representations of blackface acts in Irish modernism (specifically in works by James Joyce and Jack B. Yeats); and the final section offers a brief consideration of the longer and perhaps ultimately more troubling manifestations of blackface in Irish folk culture.

Chapter 4 defends classifying a further five grey area examples as hate speech in the ordinary sense of the term under the global resemblance test. We shall also critically examine Facebook’s community standard on hate speech in relation to its handling of these kinds of attacks, and make specific recommendations to address relevant weaknesses. Section 4.2 looks at what we call identity attacks. Section 4.3 investigates existential denials, namely statements denying the very existence of people identified by a protected characteristic. Section 4.4 scrutinises identity denials, by which we mean statements denying that certain people are who they take themselves to be, based on protected characteristics. Section 4.5 examines identity miscategorisations, which go one step further and attribute identities to people that do not match the identities they take themselves to possess, based on protected characteristics. Finally, Section 4.6 assesses identity appropriations, wherein people adopt elements of the identities of other people, based on protected characteristics, but without claiming to possess the relevant identities.

Traditionally underexplored by historians of modern Iran, over the past few years slavery in Iran has become a recognizable subject of historiographic inquiry. Taking as an example the transmediation of a Persian legend (Dāsh Ākul) into literary fiction, and then film, this chapter explores the limits and contradictions of slavery’s historical recovery. In the cinematic version of Dāsh Ākul, the narrative foe Kākā Rustam wears blackface, reactivating a historical detail lost in Sadeq Hedayat’s famous short story of the same name published forty years prior. In Masūd Kīmīā’ī’s 1971 film, Kākā Rustam’s blackface recalls the fact that he was the child of African slaves, witness to his parents’ brutal murder at the hands of their master. This chapter argues that the various transformations and distortions that occur through the medial transmission of Dāsh Ākul illustrate how distortion is constitutive of, rather than merely contingent to slavery’s archive.

How did blackness and whiteness figure in the patterns of life and represenation that moved across the eighteenth-century theatrical empire? Performances of blackface characters in colonial environments – in this case of Mungo, the enslaved Black Servant in the comic opera The Padlock – could take the lead in parsing, categorizing and enacting typologies of "darker-skinned" peoples with lasting effects – an embodied form of racial "knowledge" that undergirded the subordination of non-British peoples in the construction of a global laboring class.

This chapter examines the diverging ways that minstrelsy used Haiti as source material. Minstrelsy took direct and mocking aim at the aspirations of African Americans, even as its turn to Haiti implicitly acknowledged the transformative power of racial revolution. In popular transatlantic plays like M. M. Dowling’s Othello Travestie, minstrelsy used Haiti to reimagine the rising hopes and transgressive desires of the Black Atlantic. By the 1850s, minstrelsy used Haiti as an empty signifier, a marker of ludicrous and disruptive Blackness.

Sen’s chapter examines specific historical manifestations of race, particularly the representations of black and brown bodies in Joyce’s texts, annotating Joyce’s concerns with twentieth-century colonialism while also acknowledging the enduring forms of imperialism and hegemony in the contemporary moment: the multiethnic contemporary present of Irish life and the concurrent reinvigoration of white supremacist and racist nationalisms in twenty-first-century geopolitics.Sen’s chapter asks how Joyce’s texts inform our understanding of the present and its multiple sociopolitical and ecological challenges within which race operates as a key determinant. He examines a scene in “The Dead” as staging the delegitimization of the subject of blackness, appearing as it does as an impolite intrusion upon civil discourse. He interprets the reading in “Cyclops” of the account of the lynching as normalizing violence against bodies of color. Sen asks when Joycean ironies fail to humanize and modernize subjects of color within empire.

Leslie Arliss’s The Man in Grey features a Regency-period staging of Othello’s murder of Desdemona, with a white Jamaican named Swinton Rokeby (played by Stewart Granger) blacked up for the title role. Partly through Othello, the film suggests a racial fantasy in which Rokeby reaffirms his whiteness by violently reclaiming his island home from emancipated black slaves. In this way, the film captures anxieties about race, sexuality and colonial participation that are activated by the migration to Britain of black West Indians to aid in the war effort; to put it differently, The Man in Grey appropriates Othello in order to explore how racial difference reveals the limits of a coherent British identity. The film also collapses the distinction between Shakespearean tragedy and costume melodrama, thereby mocking the canons of taste (and the view of the Bard) generally shared by film companies, period critics and government propagandists

In the mid-nineteenth century, touring minstrel and Italian operatic troupes reached Bombay’s shores, exposing its residents to the delights of European and American popular tunes and burlesque Italian opera. Although reformists initially struggled to convince locals to patronise this strange warbling, opera gradually became a marker of high culture in the subcontinent. This transition was the result of the adoption of the term ‘opera’ by Parsi theatre, India’s most widespread, commercial, ‘modern’ dramatic form. The chapter traces Parsi theatre's role in the creation of a modern South Asian aural culture during the second half of the nineteenth century through the indigenisation of Italian opera. It delineates how the locus for Hindustani music shifted, from the courts of Awadh to the proscenium theatres of Asia, and how an Indian brand of opera that combined European melodies with Hindustani music became a staple not only of the theatre but also of the cinematic medium that followed.

This essay examines the meanings of black and white within the early modern lexicon while considering how these meanings translate in performance. It addresses the relationship between the audience perception of race and the performance of blackness on the early modern stage while explaining the various materials and technologies available to early modern actors to create a range of racial identities, such as black and white cosmetic paints, textiles, clothing, and music. Finally, this essay draws upon available evidence about black presence in early modern England to suggest the plausibility of a more diverse audience than theatre scholars have been willing to admit. This diversity therefore would have influenced not only the reception of racial performances but also the development of staged representations of racial otherness over time.

This essay begins from the premise that we can best locate Shakespeare’s historical relationship to racist and anti-racist projects not in speculation about authorial intention but in analysis of performances of his plays. I cover a selection of performances of Othello, The Tempest, and Antony and Cleopatra to argue that whatever progressive potential Shakespeare’s plays have arises at the nexus where stage tradition, audience expectation, local racial politics, directorial concept, and performers' choices coincide. There is nothing in the text of the plays – or even in newer casting traditions – that can guarantee that a performance will aid in the redistribution of the property, protection, and pleasure that have accrued to those who claim whiteness. There is, however, the potential that calculated violation of law or custom in performance can make Shakespeare do such redistributive work.

Research in recent decades has drawn out the Caribbean dimensions and occlusions of the Harlem Renaissance and its historiography. Building on the foundations of such work, this chapter focuses on a rarely discussed Caribbean backstory to a symposium on Negro art that W. E. B. Du Bois ran in The Crisis through much of 1926. As a backdrop to US-tropical American fissures, the discussion charts some of the graphic, textual, and representative tensions between Alain Locke’s Survey Graphic, “Harlem: Mecca of the New Negro” and The New Negro anthology and rival work by Eric Walrond and Miguel Covarrubias in Vanity Fair. In the foreground, it examines how Knopf’s 1925 edition of Haldane Macfall’s 1898 novel, The Wooings of Jezebel Pettyfer – which is virtually unheard of today – prompted one of the most significant discussions on the issue of black representation in the arts in the 1920s.