Renee Romano
Oberlin College
BGC Fellow

Dan Emmett and Me: Race, Identity, and Commemoration in an Ohio Town

Daniel Decatur Emmett was a leading blackface minstrel performer of the 1840s and 1850s who is perhaps best-known as the composer of “Dixie,” the song that became the unofficial anthem of the Confederacy during the Civil War. In this talk, historian Renee Romano will trace the history of the commemoration of Dan Emmett and “Dixie” in his birthplace of Mount Vernon, Ohio. Drawing on both her personal experience living with her multiracial family in the Mount Vernon area and on extensive historical research, the talk explores how an Ohio city with a statue of a Union Soldier in its town square came to build its civic identity around a blackface minstrel performer. It also asks what Mount Vernon’s commemorative culture can tell us about the nature of whiteness and the construction of white racial identity, and examines the long-lasting legacies of this kind of commemorative practice.

Renee Romano is the Robert S. Danforth Professor of History and Professor of Comparative American Studies and Africana Studies at Oberlin College in Ohio and adjunct professor of Museum Studies at CUNY School of Professional Studies. A specialist in recent American cultural and political history and in the field of historical memory, she explores the creation, contestation, and promotion of different narratives of America’s racial history. She is the author of Racial Reckoning; Reopening America’s Civil Rights Trials (2014) and Race Mixing: Black-White Marriage in Postwar America (2003), as well as the coeditor of three collections: Historians on Hamilton: How a Blockbuster Musical Is Restaging America’s Past (2018); Doing Recent History (2012); and The Civil Rights Movement in American Memory (2006). She has served as a consultant for the New-York Historical Society, the Wilson Bruce Evans Home Historical Society, the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History, and the May 4th Visitor’s Center at Kent State University. While at Bard Graduate Center, she will be researching sites of Confederate memory outside the South, especially focusing on the commemoration of Daniel Decatur Emmett, a nineteenth-century blackface performer and the composer of “Dixie.”

Tuesday, October 29, 12:15 pm

38 West 86th Street, Lecture Hall

Lunch will be served starting at noon. Registration required.