The familiar other: blackface performance in creole works from 1780s Saint-Domingue

This chapter analyses an overlooked tradition of blackface performance that emerged in the French colony of Saint-Domingue in the 1780s. All extant references to blackface performance in Saint-Domingue are in relation to four locally-composed works set in the colony, including the popular Creole-language comedy, Jeannot et Thérèse. Whereas blackface in contemporary European works denoted alterity in something unfamiliar, it is argued that blackface in Saint-Domingue worked differently, denoting alterity in something familiar and potentially threatening. Local works undoubtedly brought new – and possibly sympathetic – black characters to the stage, but their representation in blackface insidiously enforced colonial notions of racial difference.