Why read Love and Theft?

Book cover of Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class

Book description

For over two centuries, America has celebrated the very black culture it attempts to control and repress, and nowhere is this phenomenon more apparent than in the strange practice of blackface performance. Born of extreme racial and class conflicts, the blackface minstrel show sometimes usefully intensified them. Based on the…

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Why read it?

1 author picked Love and Theft as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Tim Brooks

Author

A highly opinionated, and thus sometimes frustrating, analysis of the pre-Civil War minstrel show, and how it impacted both oppressed African-Americans and the working-class whites who made the shows so popular. This was the first major book to advance the idea that the minstrel show was not only an exploitation of black culture (the “theft”), but also appreciated that culture and began its integration into the American musical mainstream (the “love”), which would prove to have profound implications in decades to come. An influential book that has been frequently cited in subsequent works.

From Tim's list on The best books to understand the minstrel show.