ABSTRACT Title of Dissertation: THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF ...

There appears to have been at least some effort on the part of these puppeteers to limit the
most egregious exaggerations to the vestiges of the more clownish puppets. Sambo, the
clever child who defeats a band of tigers, is almost human. Jumbo, the ne’er do well
father of Sambo, a character without influence or agency within the tale, is as
exaggerated in his blackface appearance as his minstrel clown counterparts. There is,
therefore, clear agency within its essence. But the copresence of stereotype cannot be
merely rejected out of hand, for the possibilities of a particular blackface frontality are
conditioned by the blackface puppets that exist before them.
However, the African American puppeteers shown in the photograph of a
Philadelphia production of Little Black Sambo were less successful in giving Sambo
humanity. Their objects are similar to the exaggerated blackface toys examined in
chapter VI (see figure 62). The father and mother have comically pointed noses.
Sambo’s eyes are unnaturally large, and his nose, though not pointed, is nonetheless
exaggerated in size.
A Buffalo, New York unit’s production of Uncle Tom’s Cabin also illustrates the
most exaggerated images of blackface puppetry (see figure 63). The Topsy depicted in
the photograph is coal black and has an almost simian ridge for her brow.
Counterintuitively, the fragments of history seem to suggest that white puppeteers
produced less stereotyped blackface puppets than their African American colleagues, at
least in the annals of the Federal Theatre Project.
The categorical distinctions drawn by McPharlin, Sarg, and other puppeteers of
the early twentieth century explain this seemingly contradictory circumstance. African
American puppeteers, who one might initially expect to undercut the stereotypes
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