Chapter 2: "Fool Acts".

This chapter focuses on the conjunctions of white blackface and veritable black performance in films that live African American blackface would have been competing against. The availability of sound film to African Americans meant that for relatively little money and relatively free from white surveillance they could see, hear and judge the meanings and qualities of white blackface performance--a type of performance that supposedly represented them and that many African Americans saw as having highly charged connections with and implications for black entertainment and culture. Sound film also wrought some formal changes in the blackface performance practice: By both spectacularizing and narrativizing blackface performance, it altered the frames in which blackface had been ordinarily placed and understood.