Darkology: Blackface and the American Way of Entertainment
Rhae Lynn Barnes
Liveright
In Darkology, Rhae Lynn Barnes meticulously unravels the complex, subterranean, and all-too-often expunged history of “Darkology”—the insidious study, commodification, and dehumanization of Black life, through which performers caricatured the enslaved and formerly enslaved for their supposed subservience and happy demeanor. Painstakingly piecing together scattered shards of evidence, Barnes reveals the shocking extent to which blackface took center stage in every era of American history, dismantling the myth that blackface was a fleeting, post–Civil War phenomenon.