Racechanges: White Skin, Black Face in American Culture (Race and American Culture)

The great strength of this fascinating examination of "cross-racial impersonations and imitators" is the thoroughness with which Susan Gubar approaches her topic, focusing on film, literature, journalism, painting, and photography. Because she focuses on the decades before the 1970s, Gubar takes in a great deal of territory--movies such as Birth of a Nation, in which blacks were played by whites in blackface; and Watermelon Man, a 1970 film in which black comedian Godfrey Cambridge played a white man who mysteriously becomes black; the photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe; minstrel images of Bing Crosby, Shirley Temple, and Mickey Rooney; as well as instances of literary "blackface" such as white writer William Styron's novel The Confession of Nat Turner. This is an important work that illuminates the tangle of American mulatto culture that produced both Elvis (who wanted to sing like a black man) and country music singer Charlie Pride.