Black Fridays: Transatlantic entertainments and the racial construction of Robinson Crusoe’s Man Friday

Since Robinson Crusoe was first adapted into a staged pantomime in 1781, Crusoe’s companion has been a stereotypical comic native. By the late 1800s, the narrative was one of the most popular texts for children, and British and American stages filled with comedic revisions of Defoe’s characters. This article argues that transatlantic popular cultural exchanges transformed Friday into a caricature of blackface pantomime-minstrelsy by the 20th century. It traces the historical staging of Friday in popular entertainments such as pantomime in England and the colonies, Jim Crow blackface performances in America and London, and its survival in Al Jolson musicals and animated cartoons. These theatrical and cinematic representations played on racial stereotypes, and Friday has become a clown figure in the Euro-American collective imagination. In considering these representations, the article touches on racial constructions of Friday, the colonial power dynamics inherent in the original narrative, and the transatlantic exchange of ideas through popular entertainment. Victoria Pettersen Lantz is a visiting Assistant Professor of Theatre at Sam Houston State University in Huntsville, Texas. She is the co-editor of the Routledge collection, Nationalism and Youth in Theatre and Performance (July 2014), and has book chapters in the collections Border-Crossings: Narrative and Demarcation in Postcolonial Literatures and Media and Adapting Chekhov: The Text and Its Mutations