ABSTRACT Title of Dissertation: THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF ...

cannot answer this question effectively without delving far more deeply into the changes
in live-actor blackface that occurred throughout the early twentieth century.
This is a dilemma similar to the notion of imagined authenticity that has woven
through these materials. Puppeteers like Lano, Hastings, and Chesse’ discuss openly
what they believe “real Negroes” and “real Negro” culture to be. These disparate
imaginations of authenticity drive them to experiment with materials as diverse as the
John Payne Collier Punch text and the Vachael Lindsay poem “Congo.” However, it is
far beyond the limits of this investigation to determine the extent to which these artists
effectively approximated “authentic” African American or African life in their puppet
plays. Weaver Dallas may have created a puppet production of the “Uncle Remus”
stories, but even if one accepts that the Harris stories are authentic (and it is arguable that
they are, at the most, a record of authentic folklore), Dallas’s production can only be an
approximation of the Harris stories. Once one begins to wonder the extent to which the
Harris stories constitute authentic African American culture, the investigation descends
into a mess of impossible questions about the nature of authenticity itself. These
questions, if they are indeed answerable, must be answered in another investigation at
another time.
What this study can encompass, are the imaginations of authenticity articulated by
the puppeteers themselves and executed in their puppet productions. Lano imagined
authentic African American culture as exotic, very different from the traditions of white
society. His gave his blackface puppet a faux-African vestige and used it in a playtext as
Shallaballa, rather the then-standard Jim Crow. McPharlin imagined the minstrel puppet
as a fictional golliwog, while he envisioned other “Negro” puppets, including the
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