ABSTRACT Title of Dissertation: THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF ...

Sarg and Blackface
Though Sarg never presented a minstrel show, or the newly standardized Uncle
Tom’s Cabin or Little Black Sambo, many of his “foreign” pieces featured blackface
characters. His A Stolen Beauty and the Great Jewel (1917), a supernatural tale involving
Eastern merchants and kidnapping, featured a black slave marionette alongside the same
snake charmers designed for A Night in Delhi, in a stage environment Sarg called The
Temple of the Jewel God. In 1937, Sarg presented Robinson Crusoe on a bill with his
Mikado. Though not the first puppeteer to attempt Crusoe, Sarg deepened its exoticism
with a series of “native warrior” marionettes patterned after Guinean tribes. Sarg’s most
original contribution to blackface puppetry was a production of Joel Chandler Harris’s
Uncle Remus Stories (1933). With assistance from one of his numerous company
puppeteers, one A.C.M. Azoy, Sarg produced a sequence of several of Harris’s collected
African American folktales. The production included selections from Uncle Remus, His
Songs and Sayings, Uncle Remus and His Friends, and Nights with Uncle Remus.
The essences of Sarg’s blackface puppets are consistituted by the collaborative
co-presence of his desire to detail human life in puppetry and his interest in ambitious
narratives. The objects are exoticized and exaggerated, but far less distorted than those
previously examined in this study. They are logical object actors for a puppeteer that
wished to advance the field by introducing both a sort of “realism” and new, challenging
texts.
The Uncle Remus tales, subtitled Legends of the Old Plantation in Harris’s first
publication (1881), are stories told in dialogue by an elderly African American man
named Uncle Remus. He relates the tales to a young African American known only as
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