American minstrelsy went overseas soon after its invention. And if critics considered that the shows would have less appeal or relevance outside their original political context, they were mistaken. When American minstrelsy traveled abroad, it became clear that it wasn’t just about a single political context; it was also about helping mainstream white audiences situate themselves in relation to a feared or subordinate “other.”
According to Richard Waterhouse, minstrelsy found a market in the United Kingdom and Australia for some of the same reasons that it did in the United States. With urbanization and a growing entertainment industry, “the traditional rural pastimes were irrelevant both to the values and the rhythm of the modern city.” Western Victorian ideology linked status and respectability to order, morality, and hard work. In contrast,
the minstrel stage Negro was lazy, self-indulgent, foolish and undisciplined. The minstrel show was therefore a place where the new urban classes, caught up in an unprecedently competitive environment, went both to release and define themselves.
In the United States, minstrelsy was a pressing and immediate comment on enslavement, culture, and the Black body. Britain, though, had abolished slavery and had no specific relationship to Black American populations.
What Britain did have, however, was an empire, and blackface was a medium that let audiences reinforce their own roles therein. Theater and performance scholar Tracy C. Davis entertains the idea that while Christy’s overseas tour may have actually been a way to promulgate anti-slavery concepts—she notes that “the repertoire of Christy’s Minstrels referred to slavery…more often than their competitors and had twice as many lyrics (4 out of 50) than their contemporaries that critiqued slavery in a recognizable form”—this concept didn’t necessarily resonate with audiences. The popularity of minstrel shows in England implicates colonialism and the related belief that Britain was providing West Indian, African, and South Asian populations with civilization and order.
“The popularity of the minstrel show,” writes Waterhouse, confirms “that these were attitudes and assumptions shared not only by those who had acquired and maintained the Empire but by the rest of the population as well.” Black stage characters become a proxy for “all groups lacking in Anglo-Saxon character” and in need of civilizing influence.
It was a flexible form. Saxton argues that, taken as a whole, “the genre provided a kind of underground theater where the blackface ‘convention’ rendered permissible topics which would have been taboo on the legitimate stage or in the press.”