Rowdy Carousals
The Bowery Boy on Stage, 1848-1913
by J. Chris Westgate
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Pub Date Jul 01 2024 | Archive Date Jul 01 2024
University of Iowa Press | University Of Iowa Press
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Description
THEATRE / SCHOLARLY
Rowdy Carousals makes important interventions in nineteenth-century theatre history with regard to the Bowery Boy, a raucous, white, urban character most famously exemplified by Mose from A Glance at New York in 1848. Theatrical representations of the Bowery Boy emphasized the privileges of whiteness against nonwhite workers including enslaved and free African Americans during the Antebellum Period, an articulation of white superiority that continued through the early twentieth century with Jewish, Italian, and Chinese immigrants.
The book’s examination of working-class whiteness on stage, in the theatre, and in print culture invites theatre historians and critics to check the impulse to downplay or ignore questions about race and ethnicity in discussion of the Bowery Boy. J. Chris Westgate further explores links between the Bowery Boy’s rowdyism in the nineteenth century and the resurgence of white supremacy in the early twenty-first century.
Advance Praise
“Westgate’s book presents a new and exciting history of a well-known figure in theatre history, the Bowery Boy. His detailed and careful research illustrates the Bowery Boy’s enduring influence on the representation of white working-class men and how the figure became intertwined in debates over race, class, and immigration.”—Michelle Granshaw, author, Irish on the Move: Performing Mobility in American Variety Theatre
“Exploring some of the nineteenth century’s most popular theatricals, Rowdy Carousals reveals the importance of urban subcultures to American cultural history—with their lively and sometimes troubling acts, Mose and his Bowery Boy cohort highlight the cross-class dynamics at the theatrical core of nineteenth-century philanthropy, urban tourism, and celebrity marketing.”—Peter Reed, University of Mississippi
Available Editions
| EDITION | Other Format |
| ISBN | 9781609389475 |
| PRICE | $85.00 (USD) |
| PAGES | 294 |
Links
Available on NetGalley
Featured Reviews
Logan K, Reviewer
Why I like history is how much is new. For all the quotes iterating on the iterations of history, "yea, even unto the Middle Ages" is more often less true. You can say things like "the brownie was invented in 1893" or "the sectarian violence began in 1922."
Rowdy Carousals is a study of theatrical representations of the Bowery Boy, sometimes the Bowery B'hoy, never The Bowery Boys, through the 19th century and into the early 20th. If you are unfamiliar, it was a subculture in New York City in the same period, associated with moderately skilled labor, volunteer firefighting, and copious violence. Notably, the theatrical presentations of the Bowery Boy were popular with the actual Bowery Boys, but beyond that, both in terms of class and in terms of geography, becoming a sort of national stock character.
As there are several discussions about the Bowery Boy and its popularity in terms of class, the author looks to focus on race and more particularly into the invention of whiteness as a race. There is a way in which the Bowery Boy operated as the sort of carrot to the stick of minstrelsy, providing an aggrandized spin on a set of behaviors and beliefs about those behaviors that lower class individuals, otherwise on the margins, could identify with, setting them apart from Black America.
In the earlier plays, this is more interpretive, and about the way that the Bowery Boy character appears in relationship to higher class characters or blackface performers in the same show. As the stock character develops over time, this becomes overt anti-immigrant narratives, with the Bowery Boy saving the day against assorted ethnic stereotypes; except when the Bowery Boy character was one of those stereotypes.
It is some of the strongest support for the author's thesis, though includes some of the most fragmentary plays, but it seems like the stock character started to include certain ethnic identities, including Jews, who had been under specific target as alien in other plays, as either now fitting in the spectrum of what was considered white, or shown to be capable of achieving whiteness through sufficient assimilation.
Ignoring the class and race aspects of the text for the moment ('other than that, Mrs. Lincoln…') the book is interesting for its theatrical and cultural history. At its time, the Bowery Boy had great cultural cache, but after a transformation that caps off with "Bowery Bugs" it is mostly ignored, or becomes more Cracked article than part of cultural literacy. It is as if in 2172 AD no one remembered Batman except for a movie about the founding of Detective Comics. The art in the book is great, useful and well-examined. And in terms of the actual work of history the author does hard work in putting together what he can, already difficult because it is live performance, but also a topic where not all the works are preserved to the same degree.
Take our your Bingo cards, but my usual complaint about the context of the material mattering in ways that receive insufficient attention: here the plays are treated as text more than as plays. There were a handful of times when my instincts looked to explain something primarily in terms of the theatricality, down to the first recorded presentations of the character, which have an American-style commedia sense, the violent clown who nevertheless plays Virgil of the alleyways to patricians. These are not mutually exclusive. In fact, they sort of need not to be, since comedy works by its sociological functions as well as its paronomasiatic ones (see punching up/down) but its absence changes the tone of the work negatively towards theater and comedy in general.
The book ends with a call to action about critical studies into whiteness and how that has worked throughout American Theatrical history, and specifically in light of the way that this treating whiteness as unconstructed or invisible is part of the context of Trump and his discontents and modern political debate in general. This felt more like a bromide than a conclusion to the book. Which is strange, because it feels like the book up to the point lays the groundwork for a more interesting set of conclusions. Like what I find striking is the way the trope reduplicates the Sheepdog mythos but as group identity. Society requires hard men to get things done; 'things' is understood inclusive of manual labor and racial violence. It does not stop at differentiation but makes a virtue of a vice for a purpose. Also, while not conspiratorial, it is highly calculated. That, which, again, the book provides as much detail on as the more abstract conclusion it does land on, seems to me much more useful in contemporary political life.
But hey, even if none of that matters to you because you are my One Racist Reader or something, this is still a fun book, academic but readable, about the Antebellum greaser equivalents and their outrageous argot.
My thanks to the author, J. Chris Westgate, for writing the book, and to the University of Iowa Press for making the ARC available to me.
