ABSTRACT Title of Dissertation: THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF ...

lackface puppetry, the production of an exaggerated, racialized sculptural body connects
that body to the tradition. Thus, eidos better articulates the overarching consciousness of
the tradition, since the essence of an aggregate of constructed bodies and their
performative actions is pertinent to this study. Actor-specific choices executed to reenact
a predrawn character are the subjects of live-actor theatre history.
The bracketed nature of phenomenology is essential to an investigation of
blackface puppetry, for it encourages a progressive investigation of essences. Each
chapter and subsection of the following monograph will survey particular blackface
puppets in the repertoire of individual artists, since these are, in effect, the corporeal
forms of blackface characters. Stanton B. Garner, a noted scholar of literature and drama,
argues for the centrality of corporeal form in theatre studies. Essentially, the variables of
subjectivity are contained in the clumsy presence of the body on the stage. To quote
Garner directly:
Theater ‘stages,’ ‘puts into play’ variables and issues that have comprised the
special province of phenomenological inquiry from its inception: perception and
the constitution of meaning, objects and their appearances, subjectivity and
otherness, presence and absence, body and world. 19
The puppet’s corporeal frontality encapsulates these phenomenological wonderings,
putting a constructed face (and body) on its creator’s sense of these fundamental
questions of existence. Thus, to ask the question “how does a puppeteer represent
blackness” is to use the puppet as a lens into its creator’s sense of race as a theatrical
construct.
19
Stanton B. Garner, Bodied Spaces: Phenomenology and Performance in Contemporary Drama
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), 12.
11