ABSTRACT Title of Dissertation: THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF ...

In some cases, the minstrel show images were imagined to be the “real Negro”
culture that puppeteers tried to reproduce in wood and paint. In other cases, puppeteers
clearly distinguished minstrels from “real” African Americans, believing instead that
other characters, such as Topsy or Brer Rabbit, were authentic. At least by twenty-first
century standards, the exaggerations reflected in puppet productions of Uncle Tom’s
Cabin or the “Uncle Remus” stories are still fictions. However, in order to explicate fully
the eidos of blackface puppetry in this period, the investigation must compare the goals
of the artists, in many cases “authenticity,” to the revised perspective of the twenty-first-
century.
In order to maintain manageability, this investigation will not engage the
phenomenological epoche beyond a comparison between the essences of specific
blackface puppet characters as conceived by the artists who created them, and the
essences of specific blackface puppet characters as conceived by the author of the
investigation. Husserl’s method might allow the scholar to, in bracketed fashion, expand
into the essence of African American, or even worldwide Black, culture. This would
compel the scholar to deal with the indelibly complicated question of defining authentic
black culture. Instead, the investigation will look only at the essence of a blackface
puppet for the artist, which includes characteristics of exaggeration, humor, imagined
authenticity, and atomization, and compare it to the essence of a blackface puppet for the
author.
The first chapter of this dissertation examines the circumstances that brought
D’arc and Bullock’s Royal Marionettes to the United States and analyzes their
interpretation of blackface characters and plays based on the company’s puppets, its
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