Never before has the disturbing story of blackface and its piercing reflection of American society been so comprehensively told. Darkology meticulously unravels this complex, subterranean and all-too-often expunged history. By 1830, blackface, which caricatured ex-slaves for their supposed subservience and happy demeanour, had become a venomous cultural export. Blackface theatre soon segued into everyday amateur shows during Jim Crow, whose name derives from minstrelsy’s founding character. Beloved by presidents including FDR and Gerald Ford, blackface saturated twentieth-century America, permeating US military bases abroad and Second World War Japanese American internment camps as an “Americanisation” tool. Despite a 1950s backlash led by Black mothers protesting public school performances, 1960s college students from California to Vermont aggressively challenged legal bans. With its gripping writing and penetrating archival research, Darkology is a landmark work that peers beneath the historical boulders that deliberately obscure America’s racial past.

"Rhae Lynn Barnes’s Darkology is not only exemplary scholarship for its sharp original material, precision, and care, its vivid and engaging storytelling recreates a shameless world where the most popular forms of American entertainment treated the demeaning of Black people as the most natural of things." -- Howard French, author of Born in Blackness and The Second Emancipation
"Toiling for years in archives across the United States, Rhae Lynn Barnes has uncovered an often deliberately buried body of evidence: an indisputable record of the ubiquity of blackface minstrelsy across two centuries of American history. Darkology is the definitive, searing account of that unsettling past." -- Jill Lepore, author of These Truths and We the People

Rhae Lynn Barnes is an assistant professor of American cultural history at Princeton University and the Sheila Biddle Ford Foundation Fellow at the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research at Harvard University.