My thought process has been complicated by the fact that minstrelsy is not really based on anything really African or African American. Even its source material is “miscegenated” or “mongrelized. ”
I think many of my classmates were right when they suggested that the true danger of something like minstrelsy is the possibility that it is not derived from truth, but somehow is “truth-making”. Not that the stereotypes of people that it depicts become true, but that it gives the public an excuse to accept those damaging stereotypes as true.
That is only loosely connected to the sense that I got in our last class, that history as “history” is often suspect. That might not be the way to word it but I was fascinated by how little our modern conception of slavery and the civil war resembled the perspectives of the primary sources we looked at.
More than anything, those primary sources seemed to complicate our imagination of what the past was like. The past is as full of the contradiction and complication that we are aware of in our own time. This makes it hard to draw simple thesis about things like black soldiers in the Confederate ranks. When the social forces that fostered the popularity of the minstrel show, or the north’s true ambivalence toward slavery disappear, where do they go? How can one adequately map the “sentiments” or sensibilities of any period when the sensibilities of our own time have colored our perceptions of the cultures of the past?