When cultural theorists and historians ground their arguments in linguistic analogies, a scholarly folk speech often develops. And just as folklorists flinch at the vernacular use of terms like myth or legend, linguists may wince when folklorists or ethnomusicologists, intent on figuring human culture as human language, colloquialize linguistic terminology. In Christopher J. Smith’s The Creolization of American Culture: William Sydney Mount and the Roots of Blackface Minstrelsy, scholars of minstrelsy and vernacular American music, painting, and theater will find much of interest, while those interested in creolization will be more or less satisfied, depending on how much they expect from the term “creolization” itself.

Smith’s goals in this book are multifarious, but the essence of his argument is this: the mid-nineteenth century explosion of blackface minstrelsy was preceded and underpinned by the formation of a distinctly American performance idiom, which he dubs "the creole synthesis." This synthesis developed primarily in "riverine and maritime" (2) settings, particularly on the southern and western frontiers, and it involved the deep fusion of Anglo-Celtic and African or Afro-Caribbean cultures (10, 27). As opposed to a conception of the minstrel show proper as a sui generis phenomenon of white Anglo appropriation, Smith postulates an organic development out of frontier street culture, and he makes the case that minstrelsy, though undoubtedly grounded in mimicry and often grotesque parody, involved something more complex than simple appropriation, something more akin to proto-ethnography or, specifically, "participant observation" (29). He extends this argument to the vernacular iconography of the period and the work of vernacular painters, particularly William Sydney Mount (1807-1868), who depicted this "creole synthesis" in action, and whose works provide invaluable "ethnochoreographic" (10) information for scholars today.

After introducing these ideas in the first chapter, Smith proceeds in the second, "The Creole Synthesis in the New World," to explore various settings for the emergence of early minstrelsy. He begins by overviewing the careers of the early "participant observer"/proto-minstrels—Dan Emmett, Thomas Dartmouth Rice, George Washington Dixon, and Joel Walker Sweeney—emphasizing the extent to which they apprenticed with "creolized individuals" (by which, Smith seems to mean, of mixed racial heritage) in riparian locales (32). In addition to drawing from various paintings depicting musical scenes on boats and rafts, he also argues for a ubiquitous Afro-Caribbean influence on the maritime culture of the United States, referencing the influence of the Haitian Revolution, the (putative, it should be said) Afro-Caribbean origins of the banjo, and instances of Afro-Celtic mixing in the Caribbean (40-43). While this argument for an omnipresent, specifically Afro-Caribbean influence is largely speculative, it is followed by a convincing historical account of cultural encounters between Irish immigrants, often employed as canallers, and their African-American co-laborers, particularly in the southern United States.

A third chapter illuminates the degree to which the synthesis in question obtained on Long Island and the Lower East Side of Manhattan, and Smith identifies various components of this synthesis that the reader is by now familiar with: riverine and maritime street culture, multi-racial labor situations, socially transgressive festivals, and the theatricalized mimicry of African-American culture. This sets the stage for a close discussion of Mount, himself a musician and amateur instrument builder who was evidently fascinated by the multi-ethnic musical pollination transpiring before his eyes. Here, Smith makes a deft analogy between Mount and the early minstrels he has previously discussed, and this yields one of the book’s more compelling insights: that the interethnic, interracial cultural exchange at work was compelling across genres; those who could represent it, like Mount and Sweeney and Rice, were likely responding to a more widespread fascination, a fascination that would crest in the eruption of popularity for the minstrel show proper in the 1840s. In a way, however, Smith’s argument also begins to cut against itself here, for in demonstrating that the conditions for the "creole synthesis" were equally present in Manhattan for William Sydney Mount, he undermines his claims for the importance of the western and southern frontier, as well as for any sort of Afro-Caribbean etiology. Why must Caribbean origins or Irish canallers on the Gulf Coast come into play, when all of the ingredients for the "creole gumbo" (117) appear readily at market on the Lower East Side? Considering the dynamic cultural milieu of maritime New York, an insistence on Afro-Caribbean geneses only serves to distract from the excellent work Smith does in delineating cultural fermentation in the urban Northeast.

In the fourth chapter, "Minstrelsy’s Material Culture," Smith focuses in on Mount’s celebrated depictions of African-American instrumentalists, particularly in the paintings Right and Left, his portrait of a left-handed fiddler; The Banjo Player, a portrait of a young coachman playing a Boucher banjo; and The Bone Player, which depicts a dashing and precisely-rendered percussionist sporting a rakish earring. These close readings of Mount’s most famous works are the book’s high point, and Smith offers a number of pertinent ethnomusicological insights into the musicians’ apparels, postures, and instruments, making a strong case along the way for Mount’s commitment to verisimilitude and, by extension, a similar commitment on the part of Mount’s minstrel counterparts, i.e., Dixon, Rice, et al. These portraits, Smith argues, constitute direct and valuable first-hand reportage of proto-minstrelsy at work.

In the last two chapters of the book, Smith remains focused on painting and iconography, arguing that the visual evidence suggests, respectively, an early minstrelsy (his "creole synthesis") that was more polyrhythmic and thus more African-cum-Afro-Caribbean than previously imagined (chapter 5) and a dance culture infused, once again, with African/Afro-Caribbean sensibilities (in chapter 6). Although chapter 5 is prefaced by Rebecca Sacks Norris’s observation that "Body knowledge...is not ’conceptual’ or ’verbal,’ it is not inhibited by contradictions but can recognize many meanings at once" (108), much of the ensuing argument rests on a discussion of "rhythmic languages," "movement vocabularies," and "dance languages" (157). Smith’s essential point here is that minstrelsy’s early phase was considerably more polyrhythmic, improvisatory, participatory, and complex than the later bourgeois, institutionalized form of the minstrel show—and its associated sheet music record—has led us to believe. Although Smith is convincing on these points, bringing substantial original research to bear, this evidence of more complexity seems out of sync with his broader claims for creolization. Most models of linguistic creolization implicate combination but also some measure of simplification. There may be a good argument for why rhythmic complexity is not or should not be construed to figure grammatical simplification in this equation, but the problem here is that we never know exactly what model of creolization or what definition of the word “creole” Smith is using at a given time. Although a detailed appendix surveys the scholarship informing the book, there is very little evidence of engagement with the considerable body of work dealing with linguistic creolization or cultural creolization, and no mention of the substantive critiques of cultural creolization studies made by Stephan Palmié and others (Khan 2007; Knörr 2010; Palmié 2006; Stewart 2010). Even if, by creole, we take Smith to mean, simply, a mix or a hybrid, then what are we to make of the phrase, "creole synthesis"? Considering all that is asked here of a word as inherently polysemous as "creole" (is there, we might wonder, a more mercurial term?), an effort to situate the argument in relation to the spirited and ongoing discourse concerning cultural creolization would have been profitable, particularly in a book that addresses no less broad a topic than the creolization of American culture.

My own qualms about terminology aside, Smith’s book does succeed in developing a number of well-taken insights as well as important new avenues of research into the early era of minstrelsy, most notably in his discussion of Afro-Celtic maritime cultural exchange and in his analysis and contextualization of the world and art of William Sydney Mount. Inspired by the work of Lott, Lhamon, and Cockrell (Lhamon 2003; Lhamon 1998; Cockrell 1997; Lott 1993), Smith advances an exciting vein of scholarship seeking to recuperate, theorize, and historicize one of America’s more curious and enduringly relevant cultural moments.

Works Cited

Cockrell, Dale. 1997. Demons of Disorder: Early Blackface Minstrels and Their World. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press.

Khan, Aisha. 2007. “Good to Think?: Creolization, Optimism, and Agency.” Current Anthropology 48: 653–73.

Knörr, Jacqueline. 2010. “Contemporary Creoleness; Or, The World in Pidginization?” Current Anthropology 51: 731–59.

Lhamon, W. T. 1998. Raising Cain: Blackface Performance from Jim Crow to Hip Hop. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

———. 2003. Jump Jim Crow: Lost Plays, Lyrics, and Street Prose of the First Atlantic Popular Culture. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Lott, Eric. 1993. Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class. New York: Oxford University Press.

Palmié, Stephan. 2006. “‘Creolization and Its Discontents.’” Annual Review of Anthropology 35: 433–56.

Stewart, Charles, ed. 2010. Creolization History, Ethnography, Theory. Walnut Creek: Left Coast Press.

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[Review length: 1470 words • Review posted on August 27, 2014]