In Travers’s first “Mary Poppins” novel, published in 1934, a magic compass transports the children around the world, including a stop where they meet a scantily clad “negro lady,” dandling “a tiny black pickaninny with nothing on at all.” (“Pickaninny” has long been seen as an offensive term for a black child.) She addresses Mary Poppins in minstrel dialect and invokes the convention of blacking up: “My, but dem’s very white babies. But a key sequence of the film plays into a much more fraught history from a suppressed part of Mary Poppins’s past. “Mary Poppins Returns,” set in the 1930s, seems to offer a more racially inclusive vision of the Banks’s London (at least among the working classes). In the 1952 novel “Mary Poppins in the Park,” the nanny herself tells an upset young Michael, “I understand that you’re behaving like a Hottentot.” And it’s not only fools like the Admiral who invoke this language. It’s a parody of black menace it’s even posted on a white nationalist website as evidence of the film’s racial hierarchy. When the dark figures of the chimney sweeps step in time on a roof, a naval buffoon, Admiral Boom, shouts, “We’re being attacked by Hottentots!” and orders his cannon to be fired at the “cheeky devils.” We’re in on the joke, such as it is: These aren’t really black Africans they’re grinning white dancers in blackface. The 1964 film replays this racial panic in a farcical key. Then she leads the children on a dancing exploration of London rooftops with Dick Van Dyke’s sooty chimney sweep, Bert. When the magical nanny (played by Julie Andrews) accompanies her young charges, Michael and Jane Banks, up their chimney, her face gets covered in soot, but instead of wiping it off, she gamely powders her nose and cheeks even blacker. One of the more indelible images from the 1964 film is of Mary Poppins blacking up. Travers’s books to Disney’s 1964 adaptation, with disturbing echoes in the studio’s newest take on the material, “Mary Poppins Returns.” Part of the new film’s nostalgia, however, is bound up in a blackface performance tradition that persists throughout the Mary Poppins canon, from P. "A nanny blacking up, chimney sweeps mocking the upper classes, grinning lamplighters turning work into song.“Mary Poppins Returns,” which picked up four Oscar nominations last week, is an enjoyably derivative film that seeks to inspire our nostalgia for the innocent fantasies of childhood, as well as the jolly holidays that the first “Mary Poppins” film conjured for many adult viewers. "Disney has long evoked minstrelsy for its topsy-turvy entertainments," Pollack-Pelzner writes. The professor, who graduated from Yale University with a history degree in 2001 and earned his doctorate in English from Harvard University nine years later, also notes that “minstrel history” associated with blackface and racial commentary is not limited to “Mary Poppins.” He says it is “a mainstay” of Disney musicals, including the jiving blackbird in the 1941 film, “Dumbo,” and a 1933 Mickey Mouse short, “Mickey’s Mellerdrammer,” which parodies “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” Pollack-Pelzner cautions, however, that the new film is “bound up in a blackface performance tradition” that persists throughout the “Mary Poppins” genre. He calls the new film “an enjoyably derivative film that seeks to inspire our nostalgia for the innocent fantasies of childhood, as well as the jolly holidays that the first ‘Mary Poppins’ film conjured for many adult viewers.” Pollack-Pelzner’s article comes as “Mary Poppins Returns” picked up four Academy Award nominations last week.
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