2009 ASTR Conference

Christian DuComb, Brown University

Almost every New Year’s Day since 1901, thousands of Mummers—most of them white, working class men from South Philadelphia—have paraded up Broad Street, performing everything from tightly choreographed pageants to carnivalesque displays of social inversion. This paper will trace a genealogy of the Mummers “wench,” a popular parade figure traditionally performed by white men in blackface and drag, dancing to the music of hired black brass bands. Although city authorities banned blackface from the Mummers Parade in 1964, the wenches and many of their performance practices have endured. By excavating the historical memories embodied in the wench performances of the contemporary parade, I will link the blackface transvestism of the pre-1964 Mummers wench to stage, street, and print histories of racial and gender impersonation in nineteenth and early twentieth century Philadelphia. I will also explore the convergence of these strands of the wench’s genealogy with at least two elements of African American performance culture: brass band music, and the cakewalk—an antebellum slave dance popularized in the 1890s in the cities of the Atlantic rim, which became the template for the signature “strut” of the Mummers wench. Despite the appropriation of black cultural forms and the exclusion of women practiced by today’s Mummers wenches, many wench performances suggest a carnivalesque transgression of firm boundaries between black and white, women and men, Self and Other. This paper will take up the ambivalent politics of the Mummers wench, both historical and contemporary, as a rich destination for carnival scholarship.

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