ABSTRACT Title of Dissertation: THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF ...

Lano fancies himself an advocate of the African Americans in his long career.
Many of these individuals were his employees or financial partners; at least two were his
employers. Yet the Lano blackface puppet is surprisingly different from the
sentimentalized vestiges of Meader or Deaves. Lano produces a “Negro puppet” that is
more radically distorted. However, Lano’s unusual form of distortion reveals an attempt
to illustrate the “exotic” nature of African American culture. As he fancies himself an
advocate of his African American associates, he also fancies those African American
associates as members of a culture that is foreign to white culture. This “orientalizing”
essence of blackness pervades both his puppets and his choice of texts.
Lano also brings the study into the twentieth century, since he continued making
puppet plays well into the 1930s. The third chapter investigates Paul McPharlin’s career
in the 1910s and 20s, in the context of the “revival of puppetry” leading up to the first
international puppetry festival held in the United States. 21 McPharlin was a major
organizer of the revival, founding the Puppeteers of America and organizing important
summits. A number of McPharlin’s puppets and playtexts exist, and he was
unquestionably the most prolific author of books and articles on puppetry before the
middle of the century.
McPharlin seldom created his own blackface puppet shows, but his professional
activity established a core division between highbrow and lowbrow puppetry, one that
had resounding impact on the eidos of blackface puppetry. This categorical division is
what the modern scholar might see as the high/popular categories that have driven, and at
times burdened, American aesthetics for more than a hundred years. For McPharlin,
21 I am not discussing McPharlin’s entire career, which continued to his death in 1948.
18