‘A corporeal supplement’: Blackface, disability and prosthesis in the minstrelsy of Bert Williams

In Ian Smith’s ‘Othello’s black handkerchief’, what arises from his reading of the handkerchief in Othello as a prosthetic black cloth becomes a means of subsequently theorizing how Black skin is signified in the play as a corporeal supplement. From Smith’s theorization of the way that blackness is performed in the early modern theatre, the theatrical significance of the prosthetic black cloth prescribes a way of understanding, in turn, the theatrical significance of Thomas D. Rice’s burnt cork mask of blackness for the nineteenth-century minstrel show. Just as it becomes possible to view Rice’s minstrel performance as intent on signifying Black skin, and how this signification is predicated on the prosthetic significance of blackness, which supplements Rice’s whiteness, Bert Williams’s minstrel performance also signifies Black skin, but, by contrast, in a way of theorizing Williams’s real blackness as a disability supplemented by the specific, theatrical implications of Williams’s burnt cork mask of blackness as a performative prosthesis. To this end, Williams’s minstrel performance, more so than Rice’s, allows his burnt cork mask of blackness to become a corporeal supplement to his real blackness, so that there are intersectional implications to how Williams consumes blackface, produces disability and casts prosthesis.