Step Right Up: The Many Minstrel Shows of Tyehimba Jess’s Olio

Abstract: With its contrapuntal verse, reinvented forms, and dizzying formal constraints, Tyehimba Jess’s Pulitzer-prize-winning Olio is a difficult text to appreciate, not the least because it does not conform to contemporary expectations of the American “lyric.” The book’s form and content restage a carnival or minstrel show—the sort of mediated performance of blackness that the “first-generation-freed” artists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, who serve as the subject matter and cast of Olio , used or misused for their bodily and cultural survival. Their artistry has survived—these Black performances, though stolen and appropriated, have become the backbone of what we now see as US culture. Olio is interested in these Black performers’ artistry as artistry, in their masks as mask, paying homage to Black genius without separating it from history. But Olio goes one step further, casting the whole literary establishment, and the Pulitzer Prize itself, as another stage of white appropriation—another minstrel show. Having taken the spotlight, Jess steals these Black stories back into memory and acclaim through virtuosic style and formal invention.