ABSTRACT Title of Dissertation: THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF ...

minstrelsy. They would also permit alternative experiences to simple laughter at the
expense of stereotyped African Americans.
Bannerman’s text provided a range of possibilities. Other puppeteers chose to
embed their productions with much cruder versions of blackface, increasing the lowbrow
status of the local blackface puppet (see figure 46). The grotesquely large mouths and
Fig. 46. “Black Jumbo and Black Mumbo.” Copied from: Marion Flexner, Alice Crane,
and Dorothy Park. Hand Puppets: A Practical Manual for Teachers and Children. New
York: Samuel French, 1935.
noses of the Flexner/Crane/Park hand puppets may be partly the work of poor designers
rather than intentionally representative of nineteenth-century minstrels. However, the
crude simplicity is so visually similar to the Bullock designs that it would have helped
circulate the copresent aesthetic of the most grotesque nineteenth-century blackface
puppetry to the schools. Teachers and youths engaging in the creation of such objects
would be encouraged to perpetuate the stereotypes that other productions of Little Black
Sambo were helping to reduce.
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