Featuring Monty Banks and William Blaisdell, AFRICA F.O.B. features actors performing in blackface. Early cinema was deeply rooted in vaudeville where blackface was a popular staple. As film critic Ty Burr wrote in a recent assessment of Al Jolson's THE JAZZ SINGER, "Minstrelsy was the then-accepted cultural mechanism by which the governing white culture could appropriate and tame various representations of black people." The history of blackface is complex and its legacy is far from resolved. While blackface iconography is offensive today, it remains deeply telling of the culture from which it emerged.
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