Scotland’s popular culture once teemed with white performers blacking up and mimicking African-descended people on stage, but that history has been largely erased from public memory. This project recovers that hidden record, examining how racial impersonation—through prosthetics, movement, and speech—appeared in music halls, variety theatres, early jazz, circuses, and human exhibitions across Scotland. It is the first study to put Scottish history and Black British history into direct conversation, addressing enduring silences about the legacies of empire in Scottish cultural life. The research also restores the lives and labours of black performers and other black diasporic people living and working in Scotland during this period. If successful, the project will reshape how Scotland understands its own cultural past, prompting public conversations about how race was made and reproduced in everyday entertainment. This is fundamental historical and cultural research; its immediate impact is on scholarship and public memory, not on infrastructure or technology. But by revealing how racial ideas were embedded in popular culture, it could inform how museums, theatres, and schools today handle representations of race—a quiet but consequential shift in how a nation tells its own story.
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Performative Blackness and Black Histories in Scotland, 1839-1939, initiates a new cultural history of Scotland: one that reconnects Scotland with its imperial and colonial past, and reveals the hidden history of representations of blackness embedded in Scottish popular culture at a time of rapid colonial expansion and social upheaval. This study, the first of its kind, will explore performative blackness, that is, racial impersonation of people of African descent through the use of prosthetics, movement and speech, across a range of interrelated performance genres in Scotland. Performative blackness was abundant in Scottish popular culture in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but has been subject to silence and erasure. This project will examine how blackness was performed by white and black entertainers in Scotland in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Its primary focus will be musical theatre, including music hall, variety theatre and early jazz, exploring both professional performance and the local amateur responses it inspired and how these changed over time. Furthermore, it will make connections between performative blackness witnessed in musical theatre and parallel genres of entertainment including the circus and human exhibitions. This project contributes to Scottish History and Black British History, and puts them in conversation with each other. It adds to a new global history of Scotland which in recent decades has begun to address enduring silences on the legacies of enslavement, colonialism and imperialism, revealing Scottish universities as engines of racial thought, and Scotland's economy as disproportionately involved in enslavement in the Caribbean (Mullen & Gibbs, 2023: 927). This project considers legacies of empire in Scottish cultural life by examining widespread representations of blackness in Scottish popular culture and the audiences who consumed and reproduced them. It pays much needed attention to the lives and labours of black diasporic peoples living and working in Scotland in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, including black performers. In short, it restores a history of race-making in Scottish culture to the historical record, and initiates a public conversation about the legacies of this history.
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