Michael Pickering, Blackface Minstrelsy in Britain. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008

摘要

Implicit in many analyses of popular cultural forms, be they contemporary or historical, is an assumption that their popularity both validates their importance and dignifies their content. Within this frame, the pleasures of popular culture are often readily romanticized as testaments to the creativity, capriciousness and complexity of subaltern groups. But what does the cultural analyst do when aspects of popular culture express patently repressive and chauvinistic qualities or values? One option is to construct an ironic apologia - to contend that these apparent meanings arc not really meant.