ABSTRACT Title of Dissertation: THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF ...

lackface characters for ridicule; his puppets reflect the most egregious stereotyping
evident in nineteenth-century puppetry. A rudminentary response might hold that Lano’s
worldview clearly distinguishes between artistic portrayals of black characters, and the
actual African Americans with whom Lano lived and worked. Some of Lano’s artistic
choices could be explained as an intellectual divergence between stage blackface and the
reality of black life. Others can be identified merely as crude, for the audiences to which
the showman often played were as satisfied by medicine shows or chair balancing, as by
elaborate productions with Lano’s innovative “trick” marionettes.
Yet, there is more at work in Lano’s career. The puppeteer’s approach to “Negro
puppets” and “Negroes” demonstrates an attempt to exoticize other races, to set the art
and culture of nonwhites apart from Euroamerican “white” culture. In this sense, Lano is
a kind of folklorist, though in the most hackneyed sense of the term. During a visit to a
Native American reservation, he witnessed a rod puppet show that, according to him:
“handed down from […] the days when the Indian’s features were actually flatter than
they are now, as were the faces of the Indian marionettes.” He was a friend of Harry
Houdini. The great escape artist told him of an “Oriental sketch” where a sultan had a
famous magician behead his favorite wife, then ordered him, on pain of death, to restore
her to life. This sketch found its way into the puppeteer’s repertoire. Lano fancies
himself a cataloguer of the exotic, of ethnic performance traditions.
Thus, when contributing to blackface puppetry, he creates a fiction of “the Negro”
in his tales of his encounters with them, and that translates into a radically “othered”
interpretation of the blackface puppet. He chooses John Payne Collier’s text of Punch
and Judy, which draws the blackface puppet back to its roots in the pre-Jim Crow African
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