Meticulous, clear-eyed, and pulverizing ... She has scraped together everything that’s known and plastered new receipt after new receipt after new receipt to the walls of the historical record ... The author is often at her best when detailing what blackface performances left in their shadow. They were crucial in perpetuating the stereotypes of Black people as lazy, criminal, lewd and illiterate ... Barnes is an American aquarium drinker, with a nose for the dregs at the bottom of the tank. You can open up Darkology almost anywhere and find the squirming details ... Some long books you must feel your way into. Others smack you awake from their first pages. Darkology is among the latter. It opens with a 33-page introduction that is so vivid and shot through with annihilating detail that you wonder if she has anywhere left to go. She does. This book, I suspect, will detonate over certain corners in America ... If Barnes’s book has a fault, it’s an occasional lack of nuance ... A major and thrilling work.
ecause of her narrative design and the depth of her research archive, including a thick, potent stew of scholarly sources, Barnes has corralled the chaos, contradiction, and surprise of American social reality; evaded mythology; and made, for the most part, the 'unwritten' legible ... Demands attentive close reading because it is aiming toward a question that it still can’t state or answer ... Painfully necessary.
The scope and tenacity of Barnes’ research is impressive, as she reveals blackface as a cultural institution supported by white officials at every level of government. Barnes occasionally argues beyond her evidence; while it’s clear that blackface performance typified and perpetuated American racism, Barnes tends to frame it as a root cause rather than a symptom or manifestation—an unnecessary overstep in a book that has so much to offer to the historical record.
