Another important and penetrating book that has been recently indexed by Southwest Humanities, Danielle Roper’s Hemispheric Blackface: Impersonation and Nationalist Fictions in the Americas (Duke University Press, 2025) has recently been published (May 2025). This pathbreaking study reorients the conversation around blackface performances by charting their recurrence not just in the U.S. but across the entire Americas. She explores how blackface persists in cultural rituals and entertainment in countries like Peru, Bolivia, Colombia, Jamaica, Cuba, and regions like Miami. Roper argues that these performances aren’t relics of the past but are instead woven into ongoing national myths (mestizaje, creole nationalism, post-racialism, and “racial democracy”) that downplay racial inequality. Through examples from Andean fiestas and Jamaican roots theater to Miami television skits she reveals how blackface continues to mediate broader narratives of racial belonging and transformation across nations. Rather than presenting blackface as simply oppressive or liberatory, Roper traces its layered emergence from collective histories of slavery and societal desires for racial legitimacy and enjoyment. Hemispheric Blackface provides a compelling, multi-layered exploration of racial impersonation—not as a static historical artifact, but as an active, symbolic medium through which the Americas process, perform, and preserve racial fantasies and inequalities. Its hemispheric scope and nuanced analysis make it a significant contribution to performance studies, critical race studies, and transnational cultural scholarship. For more information about this excellent new title, please see the publisher’s website here.
SOUTHWEST HUMANITIES 