Theatre History Studies

In January 2020, the Froggy Carr Mummers Club danced down Broad Street in Philadelphia with their trademark "frog-face" umbrellas painted orange to match their black-and-orange costumes honoring Gritty, the media star and mascot of the Philadelphia Flyers. But the organization (which dates back to the 1930s) was disqualified from awards after at least one of its members was found to have been wearing blackface as part of their costume. The act drew condemnations from the Mayor of Philadelphia, other mummer groups, and the press—though [End Page 218] one mummer told local media that wearing blackface "wasn't racist" to him or the African Americans he knows.¹

The Mummers Parade—which dates to the colonial history of the city and draws from a variety of European working-class traditions—is a Philadelphia institution; as someone who grew up in Eastern Pennsylvania, I recall watching local broadcasts of the parade every New Year's Day. But as evidenced by the recent controversary over Froggy Carr, the parade has a long history of problematic representations of race, gender, and ethnicity. In his expansive and personal book from the University of Michigan Press, Christian DuComb charts the complicated history of the Mummer's Parade in the City of Brotherly Love from performances that grew out of public tensions over racial identity in lateeighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century Philadelphia to the formation of a contemporary performative space featuring competing visions over representation.

One of DuComb's guiding themes is how performances "haunt" the various spaces of Philadelphia, as the history of racialized and gendered performance imprint on the collective memory of the city. Drawing on the work of scholars like Joseph Roach and John Kuo Wei Tchen, DuComb outlines how Philadelphia mumming and other racialized performances coarticulate "blackness and orientalism" and why such representations often "play out either across women's bodies or in conjunction with male-to-female transvestitism" (11). For him, this specter of performance carries an additional weight in the make-up of Philadelphia as a historical place. As he writes, "Ghosts can and do appear through presenting those aspects of the past that remain stubbornly in place"—both in terms of the performance institution of mumming and the geographical place of Philadelphia, "where specific performance histories both shape and index changing social relations in the city, the nation, and the broader Atlantic world" (19).

One of the surprising aspects of DuComb's work is his broader scope of the development of racial performative haunting in Philadelphia. I suspect that, for many scholars, the starting point of such an exploration would be the intersection of Irish immigrants and African Americans, as well as the rise of the minstrel show, in the mid-nineteenth century. While DuComb dedicates portions of several chapters to this better-known historical genealogy, including an engaging analysis of minstrel parade performances in the years prior to the Civil War, some of his strongest chapters are concentrated on the development of these questions of Blackness and performance in the broader Atlantic world. In chapter 2, DuComb shows that performative events like the Meschianza, [End Page 219] street burlesques, and various dance performances before, during, and after the Revolutionary War drew on a complicated web of Anglo-American and European co-construction of Orientalism, Blackness, and gender that "all haunt each other" in one place: Philadelphia (57). Indeed, one of the consistent ironies that DuComb frequently notes is that for a city whose culture is often seen historically as insular, one of Philly's best-known cultural events offers a historical genealogy that is far from provincial.

I found the most engaging chapter to be "The Minstrel Wench and the Mummers Wench: A Performance Genealogy." Here DuComb traces the development of the "wenches" archetypes (male Mummers dressed as women and/or dancing to minstrel-era dances) and then analyzes the significance of those archetypes in contemporary performance, centering his research on trends post-1964...