And Then There Were None: Britain's Fight over Blackface Minstrelsy

Authors

• Quanda Johnson

Abstract

From 1958 to 1978, The Black and White Minstrel Show appeared on the British Broadcasting Corporation’s (BBC) prime-time television as a weekly variety show celebrating the “bucolic and homey” tradition of blackface. Similarly, from 1939 to 1985, Agatha Christy’s detective novel, known in the U.S. as And Then There Were None (1940), remained in British libraries and bookstores by its original title, Ten Little Niggers (1939). How do these two historical facts juxtapose against a Britain that considers itself socially liberal while simultaneously, as recent as a decade ago, at least one third of its population admitted to harboring racial bias (British Social Survey, 2014)? This question fuels my curiosity of origin stories surrounding Black Atlantic trauma, drawing me to Great Britain and a creative research project borrowing its title from the Agatha Christy novel. “And Then There Were None” is a theatrical performance, visual art installation, and essay that interrogates the nascence of Black Atlantic ontology in North America and parts of the circum-Caribbean through the Anglophone Transatlantic slave trade and British white normative gaze. Building on Simon Gikandi’s Slavery and the Culture of Taste (2011), it uses ethnographic and autoethnographic practice-as-research to position British imperialism within the origins of anti-African and consequently anti-Black racism in the United States, Canada, and parts of the circum-Caribbean. It then reaches across the Atlantic to explore residual anti-Blackness existing in the U.K. in comparison to that of its “cousin” nations “across the pond”.

Recommended Citation

Johnson, Quanda (2026) "And Then There Were None: Britain's Fight over Blackface Minstrelsy," Comparative Drama: Vol. 60: Iss. 1, Article 4.
Available at: https://scholarworks.wmich.edu/compdr/vol60/iss1/4