From Minstrelsy to Lynching: Secreting the Spectacle of Transnational Racism from the American Art Association of Paris

Abstract This article analyzes and interprets an 1897 blackface minstrel program cover from the American Art Association of Paris and its circulation in an American newspaper in 1898. It connects the representation to three key aspects of the transnational construction of Blackness in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: the performance of White Americanness in the US artists’ colony in Paris; the embedded imperial violence in the international modernist style of art nouveau; and the epidemic of racialized violence and lynching in the United States. Arguing that the program cover entwines these three themes, the article traces how Blackness became a pernicious tool for White social cohesion tied to European colonial enterprises and racism in the art world and in society on both sides of the Atlantic. In the context of Americans’ often uneasy place in the French art world, studying the circulation of images and stereotypes points to the centrality of race performance and racially motivated violence as an urgent strategy to build Americanness at the turn of the century.