Danielle Roper on Hemispheric Blackface: Impersonation and Nationalist Fictions in the Americas

This is Fatima Seck and today’s discussion is with Dr. Danielle Roper, an assistant professor in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at the University of Chicago from Kingston, Jamaica. She is also the curator of the digital exhibit: Visualizing/Performing Blackness in the Afterlives of Slavery: A Caribbean Archive.  She is from Kingston, Jamaica.

In this conversation, we discuss her latest monograph Hemispheric Blackface: Impersonation and Nationalist Fictions in the Americas. Dr. Roper examines blackface performance and its relationship to twentieth- and twenty-first-century nationalist fictions of mestizaje, creole nationalism, and other versions of postracialism in the Americas.

What is Conversations in Atlantic Theory?

These conversations explore the cultural, political, and philosophical traditions of the Atlantic world, ranging from European critical theory to the black Atlantic to sites of indigenous resistance and self-articulation, as well as the complex geography of thinking between traditions, inside traditions, and from positions of insurgency, critique, and counternarrative.