African American

Performance and
Theater History:
A Critical Reader

Harry J. Elam, Jr.

David Krasner,
Editors

OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

African American
Performance and
Theater History
This page intentionally left blank
‘
‘ African American
Performance and
Theater History
a critical reader ‘‘‘
Edited by
Harry J. Elam, Jr.
David Krasner

1
2001
1
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Copyright 䉷 2001 by Oxford University Press, Inc.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

African American performance and theater history: a critical reader /
edited by Harry J. Elam, Jr. and David Krasner.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0–19–512724–2; ISBN 0–19–512725–0 (pbk.)
1. Afro-American theater. 2. American drama—Afro-American authors—History
and criticism. I. Elam, Harry Justin. II. Krasner, David, 1952–
PN2270.A35A46 2000
792'.089'96073—dc21 00–022463

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
 Acknowledgments

Many people have contributed to making this book possible. We would like
to begin by thanking our first editor, T. Susie Chang, for all her work and
support of this manuscript. We also thank her successor, Elissa Morris, for
seeing this book through to fruition. We are grateful to all the contributors
for their commitment, hard work, and insightful chapters.
Lisa Thompson and Nicole Hickman, two Ph.D. candidates in the Modern
Thought and Literature Program at Stanford, worked diligently to compile
the bibliography on African American theater and performance. Hickman
also helped with the editing and proofreading processes. We appreciate the
efforts of Ron Davies, the administrator in the Department of Drama at
Stanford, for preparing the manuscript for publication and of Susan Sebbard,
Assistant Director of the Humanities Center at Stanford, for her careful
proofreading of the volume.
Harry Elam acknowledges the support of Janelle Reinelt, Professor of
Drama at the University of California, Davis, and his life partner, Leonade
Jones, for their readings and honest critiques of his contributions to this
anthology. David Krasner acknowledges the support and hard work of the
Theater Studies’ assistant at Yale, Jan Foery, and his most significant other,
Lynda Intihar. This book was published with the assistance of the Frederick
W. Hilles Publication Fund of Yale University.
We owe an enormous debt to those who went before us, and we are grateful
that they have constructed a ground on which we now walk. Our study is a
continuation of a tradition built on the works of historians, scholars, and
critics, such as William Branch, Winona Fletcher, Paul Carter Harrison,
Samuel Hay, Errol Hill, James Weldon Johnson, Lofton Mitchell, Thomas
Pawley, and Bernard Peterson. We dedicate these chapters to these scholars,
in particular, Professor Errol Hill—brilliant historian,editor,andresearcher.
If our efforts come close to reaching the standards he has set, we will have
accomplished our goals.
Stanford, California HJE jr
New Haven, Connecticut DK
September 2000
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 Contents

Contributors xi
The Device of Race: An Introduction 3
harry j. e l a m , jr .

part i: social protest and the politics

of representation 17

1 Uncle Tom’s Women 19

judith w illiams
2 Political Radicalism and Artistic Innovation
in the Works of Lorraine Hansberry 40
margaret b . wilkerson
3 The Black Arts Movement: Performance, Neo-Orality,
and the Destruction of the “White Thing” 56
mike sell
4 Beyond a Liberal Audience 81
william sonnega

part ii: cultural traditions, cultural memory,

and performance 99

5 Deep Skin: Reconstructing Congo Square 101

joseph r. roach
6 “Calling on the Spirit”: The Performativity of Black Women’s
Faith in the Baptist Church Spiritual Traditions
and Its Radical Possibilities for Resistance 114
t eli a u. a n d e r s o n
7 The Chitlin Circuit 132
henry louis gates , jr .
 8 Audience and Africanisms in August Wilson’s Dramaturgy:
A Case Study 149
sandra g. s h a n n o n

part iii: intersections of race and gender 169

9 Black Minstrelsy and Double Inversion,

Circa 1890 171
annemarie bean
10 Black Salome: Exoticism, Dance, and Racial Myths 192
david krasner
11 Uh Tiny Land Mass Just Outside of My Vocabulary:
Expression of Creative Nomadism and
Contemporary African American Playwrights 212
ki m berly d. dixon
12 Attending Walt Whitman High: The Lessons of
Pomo Afro Homos’ Dark Fruit 235
jay plum

part iv: african american performativity and

the performance of race 249

13 Acting Out Miscegenation 251

di an a r . pau lin
14 Birmingham’s Federal Theater Project Negro Unit:
The Administration of Race 271
tina redd
15 The Black Performer and the Performance of Blackness:
The Escape; or, A Leap to Freedom by William Wells Brown and
No Place To Be Somebody by Charles Gordone 288
harry j. e l a m , jr.
16 The Costs of Re-Membering: What’s at Stake in
Gayl Jones’s Corregidora 306
christina e. s h a r p e

part v: roundtable discussion with

senior scholars 329

17 African American Theater: The State of the

Profession, Past, Present, and Future 331

viii Contents
 Roundtable discussion edited by
harry j. e l a m , jr . , a n d d a v id k r a s n e r
Afterword: Change Is Coming 345
Da v i d Krasn e r
Selected Bibliography 351
Index 357

Contents ix
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 Contributors

TELIA U. ANDERSON teaches English and African studies at New York City
Technical College. She graduated cum laude from Yale in 1991 and earned
an M.A. in theater studies from Brown in 1997. She won the New Scholar’s
Prize, given by the International Federation for Theatre Research, in 1996
for an earlier version of her chapter, “Calling on the Spirit.”

ANNEMARIE BEAN is an assistant professor of Theater at Williams College,

Williamstown, Massachusetts. She was managing editor of the Drama Re-
view for three years; is the coeditor, with James V. Hatch and Brooks
McNamara, of Inside the Minstrel Mask: Readings in Nineteenth-Century Black-
face Minstrelsy (1996); winner of the 1997 Errol Hill Award, given by the
American Society for Theatre Research for outstanding scholarshipinAfrican
American theater studies; and she is editor of A Sourcebook of African-American
Performance (1999). Her current project is a study of gender impersonation
by white and African American nineteenth-century minstrels.

KIMBERLY D. DIXON is completing her dissertation on contemporary African

American women playwrights in Northwestern University’s interdiscipli-
nary Ph.D. program in Theater and Drama. She is a graduate of Yale Uni-
versity and UCLA, with degrees in theater, African American studies, and
psychology. She has published on Suzan-Lori Parks in American Drama. In
addition, Dixon is an emerging playwright and screenwriter.

HARRY J. ELAM, JR., is Christensen Professor for the Humanities, director of

graduate studies in Drama, and chair of the Committee on Black Performing
Arts at Stanford University. He is author of Taking It to the Streets: The Social
Protest Theater of Luis Valdez and Amiri Baraka (1997) and coeditor, with
Robert Alexander, of Colored Contradictions: An Anthology of Contemporary
African American Plays (1996). He is finishing a book entitled (W)Righting
History: The Past as Present in the Drama of August Wilson. He has published
articles in Theatre Journal, Text andPerformanceQuarterly,andAmericanDrama,
as well as contributed to several critical anthologies.

HENRY LOUIS GATES, JR., is the chair of the Afro-American Studies Depart-
ment and director of the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for Afro-American
Studies at Harvard University. He is a prolific writer and scholar, who has
authored and coauthored several books, edited or coedited many more, and
written numerous articles for such magazines as the New Yorker, Time,
and the New Republic. His many books include Figures in Black: Works, Signs,
and the “Racial” Self (1987), The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American
Literary Criticism (1988), Loose Canons: Notes on the CultureWars (1992),Colored
People: A Memoir (1994), The Future of the Race (1996), and Thirteen Ways of
Looking at a Black Man (1997).

JAMES V. HATCH is professor emeritus of English and Theater at City College

of the City University of New York. His publications include a biography,
Sorrow Is the Only Faithful One: The Life of Owen Dodson, which won the Bernard
Hewitt Award for best theater history book published in 1993. He is co-
founder, with his wife, Camille Billops, of the Hatch-Billops Collection and
Archive in African American cultural history.

DAVID KRASNER is director of undergraduate Theater Studies at Yale Uni-

versity, where he teaches theater history and literature, dramatic criticism,
acting, and directing. His book Resistance, Parody, and Double Consciousness in
African American Theatre, 1895–1910 (1997) received the 1998 Errol Hill
Award from the American Society for Theatre Research. He is the editor of
Method Acting Reconsidered: Theory, Practice, Future (2000) and is currently
working on his next book, BlackPerformanceandtheHarlemRenaissance:African
American Theater and Drama, 1910–1930.

DIANA R. PAULIN is an assistant professor in American Studies and English

at Yale University. Her articles on representations of cross-racial liaisonshave
been published in Cultural Critique, Theatre Journal, and the Journal of Dra-
matic Theory and Criticism.

JAY PLUM is Program Manager for the Center for the Study of Media & Society
at the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD). He received
his Ph.D. in Theatre from the Graduate School and University Center of the
City University of New York. His articles have appeared in African American
Review, Modern Drama, Text and Presentation, and Theatre Survey.

TINA REDD is an assistant professor of Theory and Criticism at the University

of Washington. She has published on Negro units and the Federal Theater
Project in The Journal of American Drama and Theatre.

SANDRA L. RICHARDS is chair of African-American Studies and professor of

Theater at Northwestern University. She is author of Ancient Songs Set Ablaze:
The Theater of Femi Osofisan (1996) and a widely recognized authority on
African American and African Drama.

JOSEPHR.ROACH is the Charles C. and Dorothea S. Dilley ProfessorofTheater

at Yale University. He is author of The Players’ Passion: Studies in the Science of

xii Contributors
Acting (1985 reprinted 1993), which won the Bernard Hewitt Award in
1986, and Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (1996), which won
the James Russell Lowell Award in 1997. He has directed more than forty
plays and operas.

MIKE SELL is an assistant professor of English at Indiana University of

Pennsylvania. He has published essays on a variety of topics, including
Vsevelod Meyerhold, Samuel Beckett, film violence, performance art, Ar-
thur Miller, and the relationship of the avant-garde to transformative eco-
nomic systems. He is currently writing a book devoted to case studies in
the relationship of avant-garde performance, the counterculture, and Cold
War capitalism.

SANDRA G. SHANNON is professor of African American literature and criti-

cism in the Department of English at Howard University. She has published
extensively on August Wilson. Her book The Dramatic Vision of AugustWilson
(1995) traces Wilson’s evolution from his boyhood interest in black literature
to his phenomenal success as a Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright. Other
works include an essay in African American Review’s Winter 1998 issue, a
chapter and annotated bibliography in May All Your Fences Have Gates: Essays
on the Drama of August Wilson(1994),andchaptersinAugustWilson:ACasebook
(1994) and Memory and Cultural Politics: New Approaches to American Ethnic
Literature (1996).

CHRISTINA E. SHARPE is an assistant professor in the Department of English

at Tufts University; she teaches courses in multiethnic American literature
and women’s studies. She has published work on race and cyberspace and on
Cherrié Moraga.

WILLIAM SONNEGA is associate professor of Communication and Theater at

St. Olaf College; he teaches theater, media, and cultural studies. He is the
author of a variety of articles on race and performance, including
“Re[pre]senting Jews in Postwar German Theatre” (Theatre History Studies,
1994) and “Morphing Border: The Remanence of MTV” (The Drama Review,
Spring 1995). He is currently writing a book on liberalism and live perfor-
mance.

MARGARET B. WILKERSON is Director of Media, Arts and Culture at the

Ford Foundation. Formerly the director of the Center for Theater Arts,
chair of the Department of African American Studies and professor in the
Department of African American Studies at the University of California,
Berkeley, she is the editor of 9 Plays by Black Women (1986). She is cur-
rently completing a literary biography on playwright Lorraine Hansberry.
Wilkerson was the recipient of the 1996 Career Achievement Award for

Contributors xiii
Outstanding Educator from the Association of Theater in Higher Educa-
tion and of the Black Theater Network’s Winona Fletcher Award for out-
standing scholarship (1994).

JUDITH WILLIAMS received her Ph.D. from the Department of Drama at

Stanford University.

xiv Contributors
African American
Performance and
Theater History
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 The Device of Race
An Introduction

‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘
harry j. elam, jr.

As our title, African AmericanPerformanceandTheaterHistory:ACriticalReader,

suggests, this anthology explores the intersections of race, theater, and per-
formance in America. The interactions among them are always dynamic and
multidirectional. Accordingly, the social and historical contexts of produc-
tion can critically affect theatrical performances of blackness and their mean-
ings. At the same time, theatrical representations and performances have
profoundly impacted African American cultural, social, and political strug-
gles. This book argues that analyzing African American theater and perfor-
mance traditions offers insight into how race has operated and continues to
operate in American society. Significantly, this examinationofAfricanAmer-
ican theater and performance history reflects not only on the historical evo-
lution and cultural development of racial representations but also on the
continuity and continuum of performance theories and theatrical practices
over time. Dramatic tropes, aesthetic and cultural images, artistic agendas,
and political paradigms are repeated and revised as the past is continually
made present, and the present is constituted in the African American
past.
The desire to implement a critical strategy that recognizes the continued
presence of the past in African American theater and performance has led us
to construct this anthology differently from traditional studies of theater
history. Ordinarily, investigations of theater history and performance unfold
chronologically, beginning with articles on the earliest eras and concluding
with contemporary considerations. Such structures, however, do not allow
for analyses of the intersection of issues and themes, for theoretical continu-
ities across and through time. Consequently, we have employed a more
genealogical strategy and organized the essays contained in this volume into
four parts, which are representative of the ways black theater, drama, and
performance, past and present, interact and enact continuous social, cultural,
and political dialogues. Part I covers Social Protest and the Politics of Rep-

3
resentation; part II discusses Cultural Traditions, Cultural Memory, and
Performance; part III looks at the Intersections of Race and Gender; and part
IV focuses on African American Performativity and the Performance of Race.
By structuring the chapters along these lines, we are able to observeparticular
performance practices at specific historic moments and also examine how
African American theatrical moments and movements talk to, comment on,
build upon each other.
Each part contains at least one chapter that focuses on a particular play-
wright or analyzes a specific text, one that examines a theatrical group or
movement, and one that considers a particular historical moment and its
import. Each of the four areas reflects significant and resilient issues within
African American theatrical practice. And yet, at the same time, we acknowl-
edge that this book’s categories draw a map that could have been arranged
differently; issues of black drama and performance overlap and interact in
numerous ways, and the complexity of African American theater, drama, and
performance defies rigid boundaries. Consequently, articles in this volume
talk to each other across the parts as well as within them. This book is a cross-
disciplinary study that explores new terrain revealed by recently developed
methodologies, while offeringfreshinsightsintofamiliartopics.Itjuxtaposes
the work of established historians and critics with those of emerging scholars.
The diversity of research, viewpoints, and ideologies in this work will, we
hope, contribute to a growing interest in black theater and performance. The
underlying purpose of this volume, then, is to position African American
theater and performance scholarship as pivotal in the discussion of African
American history and culture.
Our anthology of African American theater and performanceproceedsfrom
the assertion that, at its inception, the American “race question” is inherently
theatrical. From the arrival of the first African slaves on American soil, the
discourse on race, the definitions and meanings of blackness, have been
intricately linked to issues of theater and performance. Definitions of race,
like the processes of theater, fundamentally depend on the relationship be-
tween the seen and unseen, between the visibly marked and unmarked,
between the “real” and the illusionary. In the past, Western science, philos-
ophy, and literature repeatedly associated black skin and the “negroid” race
with intellectual inferiority and cultural primitivism. The visible differences
among peoples signified that “real,” unquestionable, biologically basedracial
differences existed.1 More recently, racial theorists, such as Michael Omi and
Howard Winant, have defined race as a construct that is historically, socially,
and culturally determined.2 Such constructivist analyses have eroded the
perception that there are essential or ontological bases for race. Yet the visual
markings of race continue to have real meanings and effects.
The play Les Blancs (1969), by Lorraine Hansberry,3 offers one of theclearest
and most powerful discourses on the constructed reality and situational
meanings of race. Throughout the play, an African intellectual character,
Tshembe Matoseh, and a white American liberal, Charlie Morris, engage in

4 African American Performance and Theater History

a series of polemical debatesonrace.Duringonesuchencounter,thefollowing
discussion unfolds:
tshembe: Race—racism—is a device. No more. No less. It explains
nothing at all.
charlie: Now what in the hell is that supposed to mean?
tshembe: I said racism is a device that, of itself, explains nothing. It is
simply a means. An invention to justify the rule of some men
over others. . . . I am simply saying that a device is a device,
but that it also has consequences; once invented it takes on a
life, a reality of its own. So, in one century, men invoke the
device of religion to cloak their conquests. In another, race.
Now in both cases you and I may recognize the fraudulence
of the device, but the fact remains that a man who has a sword
run through him because he is a Moslem or a Christian—or
who is shot in Zatembe or Mississippi because he is black—
is suffering the utter reality of the device. And it is pointless
to pretend that it doesn’t exist—merely because it is a lie!4
In this passage from Les Blancs, Hansberry theorizes that the meanings of
race are conditional, that the illusion of race becomes reality through its
application. Despite its being written more than thirty years ago, this passage
has a particular contemporary relevance. It locates the current debates over
the definitions of race in decidedly and purposefully theatrical terms: “Race
is a device.” The contemporary import of this passage speaks not only to
Hansberry’s prescience but also to the unique nature of theatrical represen-
tation and, thus, to the significance of this critical anthology.
Theater is built upon devices. In the theatrical environment, the signifi-
cation of objects results from their specific usage in the moment. In Les Blancs,
for example, Hansberry uses the device of a black woman dancer to represent
“Mother Africa” and to incite Tshembe’s call to revolutionary consciousness.
Relying on the audience’s suspension of disbelief and the magic of theater,
the dancer exists solely in Tshembe’s mind. Although she appears on stage
with both Tshembe and Charlie, Charlie cannot see her; she is visible only to
Tshembe and to the audience. Thus, the device of the woman dancer directs
the dramatic action, while it foregrounds the unique theatrical negotiation
of illusion and reality. Every theatrical performance depends on performers’
and spectators’ collaborative consciousness of the devices in operation and
their meanings. This consciousness is coconstructed in a new way with each
performance.
The inherent “constructedness” of performance and the malleability of the
devices of the theater serve to reinforce the theory that blackness, specifically,
and race, in general, are hybrid, fluid concepts whose meanings depend upon
the social, cultural, and historical conditions of their use.5 Consequently,
African American theater and performance have been and remain powerful

Introduction 5
sites for the creation, application, and even the subversion of notions of
blackness and of concepts of African American identity. Reflecting on the
transformative potential of Heater in his important 1968 manifesto, “The
Black Arts Movement,” critic Larry Neal calls theater, “potentially the most
social of arts” and “an integral part of the socialization process.”6 Neal and
other artist/activists of the Black Arts Movement championed the theater as
a potent space for the articulation of black social and cultural agency and self-
determination. Most significantly, their conceptions of blackness and their
cultural plan for revolutionary action were rooted in the urgencies of that
particular historic moment.
Our anthology affirms that the meanings and the constructions of race
generally and blackness particularly are contextual and historically specific.
At the same time, it reveals that contemporary African American theater and
performance practices are inherently connected to the performance theories,
rhetoric, and representations of the past. This is not to suggest that contem-
porary African American representations and theories of representation have
not moved away from prior essentialized or monolithic visions of blackness.
And yet, we must assert that representing and performing blackness remain
politically and culturally charged. Racism and its impact on African Amer-
ican life and culture have not disappeared. Race remains a device with very
real meanings. As a consequence, the black figure on the American stage is
always and already fraught with political, cultural, and social significance.

Social Protest and the Politics of Representation

Black theater practitionershavebeencontinuallyconcernedwiththeviability
of black theater as a means of social protest. Consequently, the desire to
control “the politics of representation,” as Stuart Hall terms it,7 has played a
significant role in the history of African American theater and performance.
The politics of representation concern not only understanding the power
inherent in the visible representation of African Americans but also recog-
nizing the mechanisms of production, which dictate the dissemination of
these images. Accordingly, African American theater critics and artists, from
W. E. B. Du Bois to Amiri Baraka to August Wilson, have asserted that
black theater practitioners must not only have authority over the represen-
tational apparatus but must use the theater as a means of protest and revolt
in order to change black lives and fight oppressive conditions.
In his well-known 1926 manifesto for a black theater, Du Bois states that
“a real Negro theatre” must be “About us, By us, For us, and Near us.”8 To
Du Bois, theatrical representation is critical to the perpetuation of an African
American cultural politics of transformation and emancipation. Notably,Du
Bois’s call for a segregated black theater resonates in both Amiri Baraka’s
1965 radical proclamation, “The Revolutionary Theatre,” and August Wil-
son’s more contemporary speech to the Theatre Communications Group’s
1996 national convention, “The Ground on Which I Stand.” Baraka (then,

6 African American Performance and Theater History

as LeRoi Jones) proclaims that the revolutionary theater is “a politicaltheatre,
a weapon to help the slaughter of these dimwitted fatbellied white guys who
somehow believe that the rest of the world is here for them to slobber on.”9
Aligning himself with the African American history of struggle and survival,
as well as the black tradition of a functional art of protest, Wilson states:
I stand myself and my art squarely on the self-defining ground of the slave
quarters, and find the ground to be hallowed and made fertile by the blood
and bones of the men and women who can be described as warriors on the
cultural battlefield that affirmed their self-worth.10
The strategies of Wilson, like those of Baraka and Du Bois, reify the contin-
uous intersections of culture, power, identity, and representation.11
The chapters in the first part of this anthology, Social Protest and the
Politics of Representation, consider such intersections of politics and perfor-
mance. They confront ways in which African American theater and perfor-
mance have operated as social weapons and tools of protest. The four chapters
in part I discuss the actual, real-life consequences and effects that result from
the theatrical representation of African Americans. The opening essay ex-
amines the most popular play ever produced on the American stage, Uncle
Tom’s Cabin. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1851–52)
spawned at least two major stage adaptations as well as a variety of off-shoots
and parodies. As the author Judith Williams observes, Uncle Tom’s Cabin
perhaps seems a strange place to begin a discussion of black theater and
performance history. And yet the original novel, written by Harriet Beecher
Stowe, and the subsequent stage adaptations, Williams maintains, have had
a profound effect on African American culture, as well as on subsequent
representation of blackness. In “Uncle Tom’s Women,” Williams notes how
the performances of Uncle Tom’s Cabin contributed to the creation of three
transcendent black female archetypes: the mammy, the tragic mulatto, and
the Topsy figure, the black “pickaninny,” who was not born but “just
growed.” Significantly, when white actresses played these black figures on
stage in the nineteenth century, Williams argues, it both stereotyped and
silenced real black women. She analyzes how this silence served to fuel white
desire and to suppress black subjectivity. The representations of these ste-
reotypes were not, however, totalizing; they also contained in performance
the potential for subversion.
Margaret B. Wilkerson, in “Political Radicalism and Artistic Innovation
in the Works of Lorraine Hansberry,” focuses on one of the most prescient
and perceptive playwrights of the modern American stage. Eschewing the
identification of Hansberry as a conciliatory integrationist found in 1960s
and 1970s Black Arts criticism, Wilkerson establishes Hansberry as an
advocate of radical change. She documents the political significance of the
playwright’s personal history and underscores the importance of Africa and
African liberation efforts in Hansberry’s dramaturgy. ThisrereadingofHans-
berry identifies ways in which race, gender, and politics dynamically interact
in her work.

Introduction 7
 The Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and early 1970s still stands out in
African American theater history as the most significant collective effort of
black social protest theater. The movement advocated not only social change
but cultural transformation through the institutionalization of a particularly
black aesthetic. Contemporary critics have attacked the essentialism and
misogyny of the movement. Within this volume, in fact, Henry Louis Gates,
Jr., questions whether the movement did function as effective protest. Here
in this section, Mike Sell’s chapter, “The Black ArtsMovement:Performance,
Neo-Orality, and the Destruction of the ‘White Thing,’ ” reevaluates the
movement and sounds acautionarynoteagainstpreviouscritiques.Sellpoints
out that critics need to factor in the politics of their positionality as they are
implicated in the very institutions against which the Black Arts Movement
struggled. The Black Arts Movement, Sell maintains, formulated an alter-
native structure of history, community, and aesthetic, the impact of which
continues to be felt.
The Black Arts Movement spoke specifically and exclusively to black
audiences; it “preached to the converted.” What happens when white audi-
ences attend African American protest theater? How does the performance
work with a clientele whose expectations, socialization, and rationale for
attendance may be decidedly different from the particular African American
audience for whom the social protest performance was intended? William
Sonnega, in “Beyond a Liberal Audience,” addresses these questions by ex-
amining two contemporary performances in Minneapolis, Minnesota: a black
production of Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller and Sally’s Rape by African
American performance artist Robbie McCauley. Sonnega starts from the
assumption that white audiences attending these productions can be con-
structed as “liberal.” Sonnega then critiques notions of white liberalism and
notes how white liberal attendance can reinforce rather than subvert ideas
of white privilege and normative whiteness. Using reactionary racial critics,
such as Dinesh D’Souza and Shelby Steele, in innovative ways, Sonnega con-
siders whether these productions operated as sites for effective cross-cultural
communication, for interracial dialogue and healing, or for the development
of new coalitions and new ideological communities. In order for such effects
to occur, Sonnega argues, white liberalism must be continually interrogated,
and practices need to be constructed that expose rather than reinvent racism.
He challenges and critiques how artists and activists have employed the de-
vice of race to influence attitudes and to incite social change.
The chapters in this part reflect on the potential cultural and political
power of representing and performing blackness. Juxtaposed to each
other, these four authors provide perspectives on the salient interplay be-
tween black politics and the politics of black representation. They further
the discourse on the social efficacy of theatrical representation and com-
ment on the ability of black theater to affect thought, behavior, and even
social action.

8 African American Performance and Theater History

 Cultural Traditions, Cultural Memory,
and Performance

The chapters in the second part of this anthology engage in an interactive

dialogue on the power of cultural memory and how it is constructed through
performance. In their introduction to Memory & Cultural Politics, Amritjit
Singh, Joseph Skerrett, Jr., and Robert Hogan discuss the African American
“struggle to remember.” They maintain:

African Americans, brought hither in chains from their homes across the
Atlantic, have struggled to remember a past from which they were cut off
by the Middle Passage and slavery. As with Native Americans, this feat of
memory could not have been undertaken without conflict with the dom-
inant national narrative, which denied any value to the African American
past and its cultural products.12

Notably, for African Americans physically separated from their African past,
the “struggle to remember” has continually involved performance and other
forms of African American cultural expression because of their ability to
shape perceptions and even rewrite history. African American theatrical
works across historical periods such as May Miller’s Harriet Tubman (1935),
William Branch’s In Splendid Error (1953), and Suzan-Lori Parks’s Impercep-
tible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom (1989) all reimagine the past. In addi-
tion, African American performance practices, from the slave ring shout to
contemporary Hip Hop contain vestiges of earlier African culturaltraditions.
Consequently, performance can constitute, contain, and create “cultural
memory.” By cultural memory, we mean those collective memories that are
culturally constructed over time and whose meanings are historically and
culturally determined. Cultural memories of slavery and past racial oppres-
sion continue to play a critical role in the formation of African American
cultural politics and in the shaping of African American identities.
Significantly, three of the chapters in this second part explore examples of
African American performancepracticesinvenuesoutsideoftheconventional
theater; they thus expand our discussion of performance. Together, these
chapters assert that such “performances of everyday life” have been critical to
black cultural expression, struggle, and survival. Richard Schechner, in Be-
tween Theater and Anthropology, defines performance as “restored behavior” or
“twice-behaved behavior.”13 Following this argument, if performance is re-
stored behavior, then it is inherently connected to social and cultural inter-
actions. Augmenting Schechner’s definition, Elin Diamond perceives per-
formances asculturalpracticesthat“conservativelyre-inscribeorpassionately
reinvent the ideas, symbols, and gestures that shape social life.”14 Inevitably,
then, performances must negotiate systems of power, cultural and social
mores, values, and beliefs. As we will see, the performances and sites of
performance examined in these chapters engage not only with social and
cultural codes but also with cultural memory.

Introduction 9
 Joseph Roach, in his essay “Deep Skin,” calls for a critical approach to
African American performance traditions that recognizes their living mem-
ory, that incorporates and validates African methodologies of remembrance,
and that imagines and examines “environments of memory.” Roach develops
the innovative theoretical concept of “deep skin,” a “melanoma of the imag-
ination,” which stereotypes the behaviors and attitudes of one people toward
another. Deep skin, he theorizes, plays a critical role in the interpretation
and veneration of African American cultural traditions. Roach’s exploration
of Congo Square in New Orleans, Louisiana, the site of slave performances
from 1790 through 1851, as well as jazz funeral processions in more recent
times, locates the square not only as a repository of performances but as an
environment of memory that itself continues to perform.
Telia U. Anderson, in “Calling on the Spirit,” considers the black church
as a site of performance and an environment of memory. Anderson examines
the history of African American women calling on the spirit within the black
Baptist church service. She theorizes that this practice constitutes a radical
Africanist performance strategy and a space of gendered resistance. When
black women respond to the service in this way, they challenge the doctrinal
authority of the male preacher, engage in a form of “guerrilla sermon,” and
transform the meanings present in the service of worship. Anderson’s work
not only recognizes the subversive power present in black women’s calling
on the spirit but also expands our definitions of performance.
A critical element within the dramaturgical project of August Wilson is
the celebration of the collective cultural memory of Africa in African Amer-
ican experiences. Wilson believes that African Americans must rediscover
this Africanness in order to survive in contemporary America. In response to
Wilson’s now-famous speech to the Theatre Communication Group in Jan-
uary 1996, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., in “The Chitlin Circuit,” takes issue not
with Wilson’s cultural aesthetics but with his polemics. The first part of
Gates’s chapter revisits the questions of representation and social efficacy
addressed in part I of this anthology. Gates challenges Wilson’s call for and
conception of an “authentically” black theater and Wilson’s celebration of
the Black Arts Movement. While Sell effectively argues that the Black Arts
Movement had a broad impact on grassroots, community-based theaters and
future playwrights and practices, Gates maintains that the impact of the
movement was more limited. More significantly, Gates turns to a black
theater practice that has been underexamined and even denigrated within
black theater scholarship. And yet the so-called Chitlin Circuit is a tradition
of a decidedly black theater that is for, by, and about black people. The black
touring companies that comprise the Chitlin Circuit reflect the cultural
memory and traditions of the TOBA (Theatre Owners Booking Association,
often euphemistically referred to as “tough on black asses”) of the Harlem
Renaissance. Using stock characters and broad acting techniques and en-
couraging frequent and active audience participation, the Chitlin Circuit
productions operate within a system of black working-class aesthetic values.
The performances occur in a distinctly black, “racially sequestered,” envi-

10 African American Performance and Theater History

ronment of memory. As a result, they require a system of evaluation sensitive
to their particular practices.
Sandra G. Shannon, in “Audience and Africanisms in August Wilson’s
Dramaturgy,” examines how Wilson incorporates African symbolism and
practices into his work. Shannon interrogates the insensitivity of Wilson’s
audiences and critics to his Africanist agenda. Using the work of Pierre Nora,
she theorizes that Wilson’s dramas function as lieux de memoire, sites of mem-
ory, and that his dramatic cycle is an act of personal and collective memory,
“a 400-year autobiography.” Not unlike Roach, Shannon challenges critics
to recognize different modes of analysis and to eschew Western standards of
criticism, which fail to appreciate African aesthetic practices. A different
cultural and aesthetic sensibility, she posits, is at operation in Wilson’s plays.
Part II, then, presents new perspectives on the intersections of black cul-
tural traditions and performance criticism. African American cultural reten-
tions, conventions, and collective memories not only continue to inform and
shape African American cultural production but must affect our critical
interpretations and analyses of African American performance practices as
well.

Intersections of Race and Gender

Another critical concern that African American theater and performance

criticism must address which will expand our perspective and inform our
understandings of performances both past and present, is gender. Recent
scholarship inside as well as outside of the theater establishes gender as a
fundamental condition of experience as well as a critical category of analysis.
More than just the opposition of and differences between masculinity and
femininity, gender operates as a “system of beliefs, of ideology and behaviors
mapped across the bodies of males and females.”15 Gender is not a product of
biology but of social, cultural, and historical forces. When critical analyses
of gender enter into the theoretical discourse on blackness, they help disrupt
and challenge homogenized definitions and essentialized concepts of African
American identity. The constructed nature and devices of the theater can
foreground the fluidity of gender. Theatrical representations of gender can
compel audiences and critics to reconsider the fixity and naturalness of gender
categories. Examining the complex intersections of gender, sexuality, and
race within African American theater and performance practices compounds
the meanings of race and racial representation.
The third part of this anthology, Intersections of Race and Gender, makes
use of contemporary critical articulations of gender to elucidate African
American play texts and performances past and present. Annemarie Bean, in
“Black Minstrelsy and Double Inversion,” examines the interactions of race
and gender on the minstrel stage. Bean addresses how both black and white
minstrel players performed color and gender. They performed “color” rather
than race, she notes, as both black and white minstrels appeared literally

Introduction 11
blackened on stage. The performances of African American minstrels, how-
ever, manipulated and inverted the rules of performance and the derogatory
stereotypes established by white minstrelsy. Bean uncovers and explores new
critical territory in the history of blackface performance, as she interrogates
the very particular experience of African American women who portrayed
men on stage. She terms these performances a “double inversion” because
they inverted conventional white minstrel representations of both men and
women. While the subject of minstrelsy has been the site of much recent
scholarly analysis,16 these cross-gendered double inversions have rarely been
documented or discussed. These performances blurred the lines and chal-
lenged the distinctions between masculinity and femininity. Bean’s work
explores how both race and gender were constructed on and through these
cross-gendered performances.
Continuing the discussion of black female performers’ struggle against
racial and gendered stereotypes, David Krasner, in “Black Salome,” examines
the plight of black female choreographers fighting for recognition at the
inception of modern dance. He focuses on the work of Aida Overton Walker
and her performance of Salome in 1908 and 1912. Krasner documents the
racist origins of modern Western cultural conceptions of “the primitive” and
black cultural inferiority and their impact upon the representations and
expectations of black women. According to Krasner, the notion of black
primitivism along with the legacies of slavery directly contributed to the
exoticization of the black woman and a belief in her hypersexuality. The
black female response to her own sexualized representation was to maintain
a “puritan” respectability and propriety. Thus, Krasner explains, the partic-
ular historical and cultural contexts of the times not only played a significant
role in determining how Walker performed Salome but in how we must
understand and interpret this performance’s meanings.
Kimberly Dixon, in “Uh Tiny Land Mass Just Outside of My Vocabulary,”
considers how what she terms “creative nomadism” works as a strategy to
counter the constraints and restraints of gender and race placed upon African
American playwrights. Dixon defines creative nomadism as a “liberating
hybridity” that allows the playwright to negotiate between worlds from a
fluid and constantly changing vantage point. She cites Obie Award–winning
playwright Suzan-Lori Parks as a key practitioner. The creative nomadism
of Parks and other contemporaryAfricanAmericanplaywrights,Dixonmain-
tains, celebrates and illuminates the constructed, contextual nature of time
and space and of race and gender.
Jay Plum, in “Attending Walt Whitman High,” points out that the pol-
itics of gender do not simply concern the opposition of and differences be-
tween masculinity and femininity. Through this study of the group Post-
modern African American Homosexuals (Pomo Afro Homos) and their
performance piece Dark Fruit, Plum considers the meanings and definitions
of contemporary black masculinity. According to Plum, the sexual politics
of the Pomos’ performances confront conventional and pejorative represen-
tations of black homosexuality, attack black homophobia, and implicate the

12 African American Performance and Theater History

audience. Equally significant, Plum’s criticism implicitly challenges the
heterosexism of traditional black theater scholarship. Within his analysis, as
in the other essays of this part, considerations of gender and sexuality com-
plicate and disrupt conventional racial readings and representations of
blackness.
The discussions of gender in these four chapters also inform our under-
standing of identity. As Stuart Hall notes, “Identity is constructed within
not outside of representation.” The question of who African Americans are
is never distinct from representation but is always invented or constructed
in the moment. According to Hall:
Identities are about questions of using the resources of history, language
and culture in the process of becoming rather than being: not “who we
are” or “where we have come from” so much as what we might become,
how we have been represented and how that bears on how we might
represent ourselves.17
Identity, then, is not fixed but is the site of multiple contestations and fluid
locations. There is not simply one African American identity but many
African American identities.

African American Performativity and

the Performance of Race

If identity is not fixed, and if the meanings of race are the product of social,
cultural, and historic constructions, then can race be performed? Are there
times in everyday life when African Americans act out or “do” blackness?18
Adapting Richard Schechner‘s definition of performance as “twice-behaved
behavior,” at such moments one could argue that the performer repeats,
reinscribes, or even reconfigures established gestures, behaviors, linguistic
patterns, cultural attitudes,andsocialexpectationsassociatedwithblackness.
Accordingly, in slavery times, slaves would wear the mask of ignorance and
perform the expected role of black subservience in order to avoid punishment
from the slave master’s lash. Historically, such performances of blackness
have functioned as methods of cultural or personal survival as well as reaffir-
mations and renegotiations of cultural identity.
Using theories of performance and performativity, the chapters in part IV
probe into the ways blackness and racial identity have been constructed in
and through performance. Diana Paulin, in “Acting Out Miscegenation,”
theorizes that the theatrical representation of interracial desire has the po-
tential to disrupt static definitions of race and that staged portrayals of
interracial unions between black and white characters destabilize definitions
of both blackness and whiteness. Adapting Judith Butler’s concept of gender
performativity, Paulin considers how race operates in performative terms as
she analyzes The White Slave (1882) by Bartley Campbell. Even as this play,

Introduction 13
written by a white playwright, ends with the affirmation of racial difference,
Paulin shows that the introduction of interracial desire complicates racial
readings and any ontological separation of black and white.
In her analysis of the Federal Theater Project’s Negro Unit in Birmingham,
Alabama, “The Administration of Race,” Tina Redd chronicles how certain
racialized social “performances” reinforced the static borders and construc-
tions of race on and off stage. Redd’s study of the all-too-brief existence of
the Birmingham Negro Unit between 1935 and 1936 reveals that white
bureaucrats, in their efforts to control and to define the Negro unit, “per-
formed whiteness” by silencing and excluding any black participation. She
documents the history of a Negro unit under white hegemony and subject
to a particular politics of racial segregation, which defined and delimited all
representations of blackness. As cultural capital, the Birmingham Negro
Unit was subject to economic and administrative practices within a racialized
social field that constructed blackness as separate and unequal and denied
black artistic legitimacy.
While Paulin and Redd observe the constructions of blackness by white
playwrights and under the control of white producers, Harry Elam ex-
amines the power of black performers to exploit their “productive ambiv-
alence” and transgress, transcend, and even subvert established racial cat-
egories. In “The Black Performer and the Performance of Blackness,”
Elam argues that the black performance artist can purposefully utilize his
or her ambivalent status—as a real person, as a theatrical representation,
as a sociocultural construction—to expose and perhaps even explode def-
initions of blackness. He analyzes the work of black performance artists in
two significant works of black theater history, The Escape; or, A Leap to
Freedom by William Wells Brown (1858), the first black play published in
the United States, and No Place To Be Somebody by Charles Gordone, the
Pulitzer Prize–winning play of 1969. In both of these works, black per-
formers exploit the theatricality of race as well as the situational meanings
and constructions of blackness.
Unlike the other works in this part or in the anthology as a whole, Christina
Sharpe examines the role that performance plays in a novel, Gayl Jones’s
Corregidora (1975). Sharpe, in “The Costs of Re-Membering,” argues that
performance functions as a strategy of remembrance and resistance in this
“blues” novel. Within the story of Corregidora, the characters enact a ritu-
alistic remembering of their slave past, the history of African enslavement in
Brazil. The blues themselves, Sharpe argues, operate within the novel as a
cultural intervention and as a source of collective cultural memory. Sharpe
analyzes the relationships among the sexual, gendered, and racial perform-
ances in Jones’s text and the contemporary intraracial interactions of black
men and black women. In this chapter and in this part of the volume,
questions of visibility, the marked and unmarked in black performance,
figure prominently.19

14 African American Performance and Theater History

 Discussion with Senior Scholars
Part V, a roundtable discussion on African American theater historiography,
featuring some of the leading scholars in the field of African American theater
and performance—James Hatch, Sandra Richards, and Margaret Wilker-
son—concludes the anthology. Questioned by the editors, ElamandKrasner,
these scholars assess the past and present state of African American theater
and performance studies. Among many issues, this roundtable examines the
relationship of black theater criticism to black theater and performance
studies practice; considers the role of the scholar in perpetuating as well as
analyzing black performance; analyzes the relationship between African
American “legitimate” theater and what Gates calls the Chitlin Circuit;20
and discusses some of theissuesraisedbytheAugustWilson–RobertBrustein
debate in January 1997.
The roundtable discussion, conjoined with the other parts of this anthol-
ogy, recasts the past with an awareness of critical and theoretical develop-
ments in the present. We show that, in theatrical moments and movements
throughout American history, blackness has functioned as a complex, pow-
erful signifier loaded with historical baggage and yet still dependent on the
situational contexts of its use. This book affirms the power of theater to act
as a cultural force within and as a social barometer of African American
experiences. Analyzing African American performance traditions offers us
insight into how blackness has been produced and even performed as the device
of race is continually reconstructed and redefined within the theater.

notes

1. Nineteenth-century theories of polygenism proposed that geographicalorigins

and biological inheritance determined racial categories. Using pseudoscientific and
biased methodology, authorities on “craniometry” claimed a clear relationship be-
tween the size of human skulls and the shape of human brains and, as a consequence,
racial difference. In 1858, while on tour in Odessa Russia, the great black Shake-
spearean actor, Ira Aldridge, consented to having his head measured by the American
consul there. The consul concluded:
The head of this eminent coloured man is very much larger than the average
size for a white man which, as is generally known, is above the Negro type of
head. . . . his [head], like that of Fred Douglass, is an isolated case and proves
only rare possibilities or outcroppings from common stock.
Thus, Aldridge’s big head was dismissed as a biological aberration. Other biological
interpretations of race in the nineteenth century and even into the early twentieth
century maintained that inherited gene pools determined race, that race was in the
blood.
2. See Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States, 2d
ed. (New York: Routledge, 1994); and David Theo Goldberg, Racist Culture (Cam-
bridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1993).

Introduction 15
 3. While Hansberry wrote the play Les Blancs, her former husband, Robert Nem-
iroff, completed it for the stage in 1969. Hansberry was extremely ill with cancer at
the time. See Margaret Wilkerson’s discussion of the play in chap. 2 of this volume.
4. Lorraine Hansberry, Les Blancs, Collected Last Plays of Lorraine Hansberry, ed.
Robert Nemiroff (New York: New American Library, 1983), 92.
5. See Omi and Winant, Racial Formation in the United States; Goldberg, Racist
Culture.
6. Larry Neal, “The Black Arts Movement,” Drama Review 12, no. 4 (Summer
1968): 33.
7. Stuart Hall, “New Ethnicities,” in The Post-Colonial Studies Reader, ed. Bill
Aschroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin (London: Routledge, 1995), 223–228.
8. W. E. B. Du Bois, “Krigwa Little Theatre Movement,” Crisis 32 (July 1926):
135.
9. LeRoi Jones, “The Revolutionary Theatre,” in Selected Plays and Prose of Amiri
Baraka/LeRoi Jones (New York: William Morrow, 1979), 131.
10. August Wilson, “The Ground on Which I Stand,” American Theatre (Sept.
1996): 16.
11. Spurred on by the vociferous responses to this speech, Wilson helped to
organize a National Black Theatre Summit at Dartmouth College in March 1997.
More than 300 black theater scholars, theater practitioners, entrepreneurs, and
community activists came together to discuss the future of black theater. Signifi-
cantly, the summit led to the creation of a new national black theater organization,
the African Grove Institute, named after the first documented black theater in this
country, Mr. Brown’s African Grove Company (1821–1823).
12. Amritjit Singh, Joseph T. Skerrett, Jr., and Robert E. Hogan, Memory &
Cultural Politics (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1996), 4.
13. Richard Schechner, Between Theater andAnthropology(Philadelphia:University
of Pennsylvania Press, 1985), 35.
14. Elin Diamond, Performance & Cultural Politics (New York: Routledge, 1996),
2.
15. Mimi McGurl, unpublished essay, 9.
16. See W. T. Lhamon, Jr., Raising Cain (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press, 1998); Eric Lott, Love and Theft (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993);
James Hatch, Annemarie Bean, and Bruce McNamara, Inside the Minstrel Mask
(Hanover, N.H.: Wesleyan University Press, 1996); and Dale Cockrell, Demons of
Disorder (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
17. Stuart Hall, “Who Needs Identity?” in Questions of Cultural Identity, ed. Stuart
Hall and Paul du Gay (London: Sage, 1996), 4.
18. These questions are appropriated from Eve Sedgwick and Andrew Parker,
“Introduction,” Performance and Performativity (New York: Routledge, 1995), 1.
19. See Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: ThePoliticsofPerformance(NewYork:Routledge,
1993).
20. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., “The Chitlin Circuit,” New Yorker (3 Feb. 1997): 44–
55 (reprinted as chap. 7 in this vol.).

16 African American Performance and Theater History

“
“
Part I

Social Protest and the Politics

of Representation
This page intentionally left blank
 1

Uncle Tom’s Women

‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘
judith williams

In an anthology dedicated to African American theater history, perhaps it

seems odd to consider dramatizations of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the abolitionist
novel written in 1852 by Harriet Beecher Stowe. Neither the original text
nor the multiple stage adaptations that followed were authored by African
Americans, and within the theater conventions of the era, African Americans
seldom appeared on the stage except in the form of “jubilee singers,” a
nineteenth-century hypertext that interpolated spirituals and slave songs
into the performances. It was not until 1878 that a black Uncle Tom, Sam
Lucas, appeared on the stage. Lucas was a well-known minstrel performer,
who was as attractive for his large resources (rumors of his diamonds abound
in clippings of the period) as for the novelty of a black man on the stage in a
serious role. Black female performers appeared, later, in the role of Topsy but
without the fanfare of Lucas; they were little more than a footnote in the long
history of the “Tom Show”—a fact reflected in this chapter itself. The ques-
tion remains: what does Uncle Tom have to do with African Americantheater
history?
In teaching the university-level course African American Theater, I begin
with Uncle Tom’s Cabin because of the permanence of the images that it
inspired. Although Stowe’s novel is no longer as widely read as it once was,
many individuals who have not read Uncle Tom’s Cabin have a clear picture of
Uncle Tom. Similarly, the stage productions had a tenacious staying power.
The “Tom Show,” as the eventual cavalcade of adaptations of Uncle Tom’s
Cabin were called, was the most widely produced play in the history of the
United States, and despite the longevity of contemporary musicals, has yet
to be surpassed. Its first adaptation appeared while the novel was still in
serialization in the New Era, and performances continued all around the globe
through World War II, although some articles erroneously note the death of
this venerable form in 1930. These blackface performances schematized the
stereotype of the black character and repeated it for almost a century. All
African American traditions were forced to combat the incredible archetypal

19
power of the “Tom Show,” which competed with the other stage images well
into the twentieth century.
“Tom Shows” incorporated the blackface, music, and spectacle of the
minstrel show with the pathos and abolitionist sentiment of Stowe’s novel.
Although early black images appeared before those depicted by Uncle Tom’s
Cabin,1 in this essay, I use the “Tom Show” as a site where the formation of
stereotypes of black female characters can be evaluated. Stowe’sself-professed
objective was to appeal to whites in an arena that was dear to their hearts,
and it was on the terrain of motherhood that she chose to wage her battle.
However, in her depiction of black female characters, Stowe repeated the
tropes of black female representation already developing in the nineteenth-
century imagination, and the enormous stage caricatures that emerged were
not solely the interpolations of her dramatic interpreters. Stowe employs
three primary icons of the black female: the mammy, the tragic mulatto, and
the Topsy figure. The mammy was a favorite of sentimental literature, and
her appearance, typically fat, black, and kerchiefed, linked her to the minstrel
stage. A second figure that gained currency through the nineteenth century
was the tragic mulatto: the near-white, genteel heroine, depicted as a beau-
tiful and articulate woman, whose virtue was threatened by her Negro status.
Stowe added a third type of black female character: Topsy, the disrespectful
child who “never was born” yet became an icon of the American imagination.
In her creation, Stowe engaged in the highly ambivalent process of ste-
reotyping that, in Homi Bhabha’s description, attempts to ascribe a “fixity”
to a subject. According to Bhabha, “The stereotype is a form of knowledge
that facilitates between what is already ‘in place,’ and something that must
be anxiously repeated.”2 Stowe’s characters merely repeated what had already
been “fixed” by earlier racial discourse.
The nineteenth-century representation of these characters was plagued by
what George Fredrickson describes as “romantic racialism” in The BlackImage
in the White Mind in which “benevolent reformers tended to see the Negro
more as a symbol than as a human being with the normal range of virtues
and vices.”3 Although these figures had a symbolic value, they were impli-
cated in the stereotypes of the time. Intrinsic to the process of stereotyping
is an ambivalence that includes:
a repertoire of conflictual positions [that] constitutes thesubjectincolonial
discourse. The taking up of any one position, within specific discursive
form in a particular historical conjuncture, is thus always problematic—
the site of both fixity and fantasy. . . . As a form of splitting and multiple
belief, the stereotype requires for its successful signification, a continual
repetitive chain of other stereotypes.4
In the case of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, this trope functions in its reinscription of
already-held stereotypes, its elevation of stereotype to archetype, and, finally,
the continued repetition of these images on the stage, which yield a cultural
penetration that is so deep that, despite the fact that Uncle Tom’s Cabin is no

20 Social Protest and the Politics of Representation

longer read widely, its stereotypical figures are well fixed in the American
imagination.
Although Stowe’s novel was immensely popular, the proliferation of the
“Tom Shows” that followed the novel increased the potency and size of its
stereotypes. “Tom Shows” changed the landscape of American theater, in-
creased its audience base, and spawned a long-lasting genre of their own. The
essence of stereotype was present in Stowe’s novel, yet the embodiment that
occured on stage added another dimension to it. On stage, ideas achieve
corporeality, and the stereotype gains a greater semblance of reality. In
Unmarked, Peggy Phelan contends:
Performance implicates the real through the presence of living bodies. In
spectatorship there is an element of consumption: there are no left-overs,
the gazing spectator must try to take everything in. Without a copy live
performance plunges into visibility—in a maniacally charged present—
and disappears into memory, into the realm of invisibility and unconscious
where it eludes regulation and control.5
Unlike the permanence of pictures or words, performance can only be cap-
tured through the memories of its documenters, and studying it historically
entails the mediation of those other writers. The texts of nineteenth-century
plays tell one story, their production history another, which is unrecoverable
in its totality. What remains are descriptions by reviewers, memoirs of the
performers, programs, posters, and other artifacts from the shows; from these
pieces of historical memory, one can attempt to recover the lost moment of
the stage presentation.
Each production began with an adaptation of Stowe’s text, and entwined
within the stage adaptations is a tension between Stowe’s vision and that of
her adapters. Their additions as well as those of actors and producers changed
the stereotypes and created a dynamic interplay of ideas and images. Of these
numerous adaptations, two have been placed at the forefront of historical
analysis. H. J. Conway’s version was the most popular, and George Aiken’s
has proven the most durable and has become the standard.
The Aiken version of the play began at the Troy Museum in Troy, N.Y.,
and after a very successful run, the production moved to Albany and then to
New York City, where it played at Purdy’s National Theater. It opened in
1852 and closed on May 13, 1854, after 325 performances. The Conway
adaptation was created for the Boston Museum and opened November 15,
1852. P. T. Barnum then mounted a New York production, which competed
directly with the Aiken version. Conway’s version is widely considered more
sentimental and less didactic in tone than Aiken’s. Because of their unique
combination of the sentimental elements of the melodrama and the burlesque
blackface comedy of the minstrel show, these stage shows proved immensely
popular. In Melodramatic Formations, Bruce McConachie characterizes Uncle
Tom’s Cabin as a “moral reform play,” a form that grew in popularity through
the middle of the nineteenth century. In McConachie’s discussion, it is the

Uncle Tom’s Women 21

Conway, not the Aiken version, that typifies this form, and it is primarily
the white characters who take on the roles of moral reformers. McConachie
describes the problematic representationsofbothblackandfemalecharacters:
“Because they can never be men of principle or women of honor, the African-
American characters are pictured as childish buffoons, their characterization
taken directly from the stereotypes of the minstrel show.”6 Conway took his
inspiration from the stereotypes and assumptions of the time rather than
from any more humanizing aspects of Stowe’s novel. This type of portrayal
is obvious even from the introduction of the characters; for example, Topsy
is called “a rough but true [example] of neglected undereducated black
humanity.”7 This character, a child in Stowe’s text, was most often portrayed
by a grown woman or a boy on stage.
The Aiken version was the first adaptation to include the Topsy character,
and it set the convention for her minstrel-like depiction. Although Stowe
states explicitly in the novel that Topsy is a child of eight or nine years old,
on the stage the character was first played by Caroline Fox, mother to Cordelia
Howard, who played Little Eva, and wife to George Howard, who portrayed
St. Clare. The presence of an adult woman in this role changed the nature of
the relationships among Topsy and the other characters. What may have
been subtle undercurrents of sexuality within the novel were magnified by
the unavoidable presence of a grown woman on the stage. Behaviors that in
children are merely unseemly become vulgar when demonstrated by an adult
woman. The illusion of childhood also increases the sense of potential and
possibility that surrounds Topsy; in a child, “wickedness” hasamoreinnocent
connotation than in an adult woman. Wicked for adult women is most often
linked to sexuality and licentiousness.
Adult women were not alone in their portrayal of Topsy. Like other black
female characters, white men as well as white women enacted her. As Harry
Birdoff comments in his 1947 history, The World’s Greatest Hit: “Uncle Tom’s
Cabin”: “Little Evas grew to Topsies, Maries, Elizas and then Aunt Chloes.
Gangling boys attempted the irrepressible Topsies, went on to Markses, then
to Legrees and in old age achieved the epitome—Uncle Toms.”8 In the stage
vocabulary, black characters appeared almost genderless with a movable
sexuality. In the representation of black women, the stereotype elided not
only any sense of history but even erased the presence of the black female
body from the stage. In this erasure we see the problem of stereotype that
Bhabha describes: “Like the mirror phase, ‘the fullness’ of the stereotype—
its image as identity is always threatened by a ‘lack.’ ”9 On the stage, this
metaphorical “lack” is doubled and reinforced by the actual lack of a black
body.10
Topsy is simultaneously the opposite of the more virtuous black figures of
Stowe’s novel and the foil to the purity of Little Eva. Eva’s appearance marks
her as graceful yet ethereal; Topsy’s countenance marks her as “goblinlike”
or “heathenish.” Stowe describes Eva as “always dressed in white, she seemed
to move like a shadow through all sorts of places, without contracting spot
or stain,”11 whereas Topsy “was dressed in a single filthy, ragged garment,

22 Social Protest and the Politics of Representation

made of bagging.”12 Despite these differences, Stowe describes Eva’sbehavior
on the boat as pure mischief. She wanders without restraint and is not
responsive to the mild chastisements of her father and guardian. Stowe
describes Topsy with equal inclinations toward mischief, yet whereas Eva’s
explorations are childlike and endearing, Topsy’s games are valanced with a
more insidious and threatening character.
On stage, these differences are magnified by the power of the visual image.
The young girl playing Eva is opposed to the larger, more active, full-grown
woman or young boy playing Topsy. They seem not to be potential playmates
at all but clear opposites—any childish innocence for Topsy is drained by
the blackened stage image. At the same time, there isa contrastinthecoloring
of the two. Eva’s fair face and hair highlighted by her white clothes heightens
the blackness of the cosmetic coloring of the white actor playing Topsy. Eva’s
goodness and kindness provide the impetus for Topsy’s eventual reform and
the inevitable triumph of light over dark. The Topsy character realizes the
value of whiteness in antebellum southern society as she constantly espouses
her desire to become white. She links whiteness with goodness. In White,
Richard Dyer emphasizes that “to be seen is to have one’s corporeality reg-
istered yet true whiteness resides in the noncorporeal.”13 Although Eva is
initially embodied, she fades away and dies, only to be remanifested in a final
tableau in the Aiken version as a purely spiritual being, highlighting the
purity of her whiteness.
In contrast, Topsy’s corporealityis ever-present. Inherextremesofbehavior
and appearance, Topsy embodies darkness and resembles the female carica-
tures of the minstrel stage. On stage, these black female characters, who do
not “speak” on the lives of black women, have a long history. The minstrel
wench was first created by white men in black face and in drag. When not a
fair-skinned, mulatto belle, the image of a black woman was usually one of
lascivious nature, grotesque physical proportions, and enormous appetites.
This profile once again echoes the absence of a black woman as a substantial
stage presence. On the minstrel stage, the displacement and absence of the
black woman occurs at a second level. The audience sees the image of a black
woman but without the presence of a black female body—or even a white
female body. The false image of a black woman is instead inscribed on a white
male body.
In Love and Theft, Eric Lott argues that “misrecognition and identification”
were the foundation of the myths of blackness that arose in the nineteenth
century. Given the repression that abounded in nineteenth-century society,
representations of blackness served as an outlet for baser instincts and an
attempt to project them onto black bodies and distance them from polite
society. Dyer describes white masculinity as including both light and dark
elements, yet it is the triumph of the white aspects, linked to mental or
spiritual pursuits, over their corporeal dark opposites that provides the
strength of white manhood. The employment of the blackface embodiesthese
baser aspects but projects them out of the white body and underlines the
white’s mastery of them. Embodied in these images is at once a repulsion of

Uncle Tom’s Women 23

the black and a desire for the black. “The desire ‘to be black’ expressed in
white people’s relationship to black music and dance may well inform the
fashion of tanning, but the point about tanning is that the white person never
does become black.”14 A similar appropriation occurs in minstrelsy, where
whites can take on the spectacular elements of a perceived blackness but just
as easily shrug them off. These images, however, silence the black figure. The
stereotype replaces a real presence and encodes it in silence. These immense
characterizations became the standard by which any “darky” portrayal could
be measured, especially in the theaters of the North, where mostof thepatrons
had limited personal exposure to blacks with which to mediate their expe-
rience of the images that they saw. In Lott’s analysis of Uncle Tom’s Cabin he
argues, however,
Mrs. G. C. Howard’s Topsy . . . was a departure from the minstrel show’s
typical female types, whose ridicule depended on their overripe aptitude
or special ineptness for courtship and love; Topsy, by contrast, was Miss
Ophelia’s mischievous, unruly sidekick, a sort of female match for the
rustic Jim Crow.15
This part of Lott’s argument fails to cover the magnitude of Topsy’s stage
performance. Very few spectators (or reviewers) of the nineteenth century
made the trip to the theater to view Miss Ophelia and her sidekick. Topsy is
the stronger of the two characters, and I would posit that the opposite
relationship is more compelling. Within the milieu of the “Tom Shows,”
Topsy had a tendency to just grow. There arose shows in which the original
story of Tom was excised from the presentation, and the interactions of Topsy
and Little Eva solely were emphasized. For white actresses, Topsy was the
most promising role in the “Tom” circuit. Elizabeth Corbett argues in a 1930
article in Theatre Guild Magazine that
twenty years ago all the celebrated actresses on our stage used to claim that
they began as Topsy. Some of them undoubtedly did. If they were excep-
tionally good Topsies, that was their chance of leaving off Uncle Tom-
ming.16
We are reminded here that, for the white actresses who donned the black face
and bagging dress of Topsy, there was seldom shame; it often proved a way
for actresses to launch their careers and gain notice in the theater circuit. The
stereotypical image of Topsy became a testing ground for young actresses to
prove their mettle. The black face and character of Topsy allowed the creation
of a space of license or transgression for whites. This space permitted them
to take on the more uninhibited attributes that the stereotype allowed for
blacks and inhabit it. When whites put on the black, they reinscribed and
inflated the already existing negative stereotypes of black people.
In a review of a London presentation of the play, the actor who portrayed
Topsy was praised for her ability to convincingly embody the role, which was
seen to be an accurate representation of blackness:

24 Social Protest and the Politics of Representation

 It seems almost impossible to believe that Miss Chippendale is a white
young lady, but such is the fact. Her command of Nigger [sic] mannerisms
appears to be second nature, and where she picked up that extraordinary
croaking intonation in which she makes Topsy speak is one of those things
which no fellow can understand. In her Mrs. Stowe’s Topsy stands con-
fessed.17
Another actress is similarly praised:
One of the best impersonations of the evening, was found in the irrepres-
sible “Topsy,” played with equal care and comicality by Miss Marie Bates,
who sacrifices all scruples of feminine vanity on the altar of art, by making
herself the perfection of Negro ugliness, adopting the most uncouth and
ungraceful dress and demeanor, and tumbling head over heels with a
pantomimic dexterity, which a London street boy might despairingly
envy.18
In both of these reviews, the performances are judged by the distance from
the accepted set of behaviors for white women. The space of license and the
actresses’ ability or willingness to occupy it fully is what provides the sub-
stantive merit of their performances. Yet the seeming reality that these
reviewers find in the performances is questionable. Even more than Stowe
herself, these London denizens are distanced from the day-to-day activities
of motherless, fatherless slave children. The Emancipation Act abolished
slavery in Great Britain and its colonies in 1833. The small population of
blacks in Britain in 1878 consisted of all free people, many of whom had
been emancipated for almost two generations. Race sentiments, however,
were influenced by stereotype and prejudice as the debate on the inferiority
of blacks was waged in Britain as well as in the United States.ThusLondoners,
including the reviewers, although they did not have much firsthand knowl-
edge of blacks, had ample material on which to base their conceptions of
“Negro ugliness” or “Nigger mannerisms” in the scientific and political
debates of the era. Again, the power of the stereotype asserts itself as “a form
of knowledge that vacillates between what is already ‘in place’ and something
that must be anxiously repeated.”19
The primary arbiters of the Topsy character, Stowe, Aiken, Conway, and
other adapters, as well as the actors like Cordelia Howard, were northerners
who reflected northern views of slavery and slave children. For both Aiken
and Conway, Topsy was a comic character. In the Conway version, Topsy is
thoroughly minstrelized and, as McConachie reports, “delivers a stump
speech promising to join a ‘benevolence s’ciety’ in the North to ’lucidate to
dat s’ciety de necessity ob doin’ somethin’ for dere coloured brethren in
bondage.’ ”20 Although the stage presence of Topsy was very different from
the vision that Stowe presents of Topsy in the novel, the language of the
Aiken text almost replicates Stowe’s words and gives insight into the nature
of Topsy’s character and the image that other characters (and the authors)
hold of her. The St. Clares describe Topsy as a “purchase,” an “article,” a

Uncle Tom’s Women 25

“heathenish, shiftless looking object,” and a “thing.” It is clear that Topsy’s
humanity in their eyes (and in the eyes of Stowe?) is in question.
Despite Topsy’s dehumanization, within the representational excess of
black women’s portrayals on the nineteenth-century stage lies the possibility
of subversion. In seeking to create a comic character who drew audiences
accustomed to ludicrous black female impersonations, playwrights allowed
Topsy to grow, and along with her stereotype, the revolutionary potential of
Topsy became part of that representational excess. The extremity of her
character, which makes it humorous, also makes it subversive. Because she
was so distant from appropriate behaviors, audiences could revel in her
ridiculousness. Yet, even at her most ridiculous, she is threatening. As a
character, she is a black woman who behaves badly and who cannot be
controlled. As a stage presence, she is a white woman covered in blackness
and freed to enact behaviors well outside of the realm of a proper woman’s
etiquette. Echoing Peggy Phelan’s argument in Unmarked, “Representation
follows two laws: It always conveys more than it intends; and it is never
totalizing.”21 Even in the most stereotypical reading of Topsy, there is a
representational excess: Topsy is still a stereotype, but she grows.
Topsy was not, however, Stowe’s sole black creation, and she is only one of
the three characters who I will consider here. Outside of the minstrel milieu
in nineteenth century theater, mulatto women were almost always portrayed
by white women in metaphoric blackface. Stage adaptations of Uncle Tom’s
Cabin were some of the first plays that popularized this type of heroine. They
included the story of the fair-skinned Eliza and George Harris, as well as the
tragedies of Cassy and Emmeline. Of the three different types of black female
characters that Stowe presents, the tragic mulatto figures were the most
intelligent and the most sympathetic. Through these figures, she demon-
strates the cost of slavery to the institution of motherhood. At the close of
the novel, in her “Concluding Remarks,” Stowe addresses:
Mothers of America,—you who have learned by the cradles of your own
children, to love and feel for all mankind,—by the sacred love you bear
your child; by your joy in his beautiful spotless infancy; by the motherly
pity and tenderness with which you guide his growing years; by the
anxieties of education; by the prayers you breathe for his soul’s eternal
good; I beseech you, pity the mother who has all your affections, and not
one legal right to protect, guide, or educate the child of her bosom.22
Although Stowe uses the term mother without qualification as though to
indicate all slave mothers, in the novel she highlights the separation stories
of only the fairer-skinned characters: Cassy, Eliza, Emmeline. For these
heroines, Stowe’s portrait is richer. The mulatto figure is by her nature less
fixable; she holds in her body the union of the two races and the possibility
of change. The tragic mulatto was tragic because, although she had the
appearance of a white woman, she was tainted by her relation to her black
mother. This taint also allowed her virtue to be questionable. The tragic
mulatto occupied a liminal space neither white nor black with access neither

26 Social Protest and the Politics of Representation

to full virtue nor its lack. The ability of a white woman to play this role
without cosmetic enhancement underlined the tragic notion of her fate—to
look white but to be black. She appeared as a white woman, but she was
without the protections that white status conferred on her: she could be raped
without consequence. The fact that these women were portrayed on stage by
white women further complicated the idea of an intelligent black woman.
The audience was always aware that the intelligent “black” character on the
stage who inspired compassion was a white woman. At the same time, the
audience was aware that the “black” woman who flouted the norms of society
and stepped out of her place was also a white woman. The images that the
white women created reinforced the need for control of black women.
Through her near-white characters, Stowe sought to bring the tragedy of
slavery close to the sympathies of her readers. But Stowe’s picture of pure
black mothers is not so sympathetic. Stowe presents three mulatto figures
who are subject to the loss of the bonds of motherhood: Eliza, the mother
who escapes with her son to prevent their separation; Emmeline, thedaughter
who is taken from the protection of her mother and falls prey to indecent
sexual advances; and Cassy, the degraded mother whose children were sold
away from her and who resorted to murder to prevent the same fate for her
third child.
In addition to showing aspects of motherhood under siege, these three
figures are also vulnerable as women. Each of the women is cast as a sexual
object without the protection of the law that white women have. Their
appearance marks them as white—they “tragically” look white—yet the
unmarked presence of their blackness brands them as commodities within a
sexual exchange. When Eliza’s owner, George Shelby, is in debt and is forced
to sell Eliza’s son Harry, the slave trader offers to buy Eliza for the New
Orleans market instead, but Shelby refuses. Eliza is spared this fate because
of the affections of her mistress and because her mistress depends on her
services. After Eliza escapes, the slave trader attempts to catch her and sell
her south, but Eliza is not caught. Emmeline is separated from her mother
and is sold to Simon Legree, a character portrayed by Stowe as degenerate
and cruel; his intent is sexual. Cassy eventually falls into the estate of Legree
and serves as his mistress. She had been the mistress of several men, some of
whom treated her more honorably than others, and she bore children who
she was not, as a mother, able to protect. All three of these characters suffer
through the slave system’s denial to black women of the rights to their own
bodies or to the children they produce. Aiken includes all three characters in
his adaptation. Conway, however, eliminates Emmeline and portrays only
Cassy as a mother. Here, I will consider in more depth only the figure of
Cassy, since it is she who most closely approximates the tragedy of the
mulatto.
Although Richard Yarborough describes Cassy as a “proud, willful, mixed-
blood woman who has been driven to infanticide by broken promises, sexual
exploitation, and horrible suffering, Cassy resists her enslavement more
fiercely and actively than any black character besides George Harris,”23 Cassy

Uncle Tom’s Women 27

also exemplifies the Victorian image of the fallen woman. As previously
noted, Cassy had been mistress to three men—one whom she loved and two
whom she despised. Cassy is powerless to prevent her violations by her various
masters. Even in the case of her single “consensual” relationship, she did not
have the power to prevent it. In Stowe’s story, Cassy’s first paramour is
described as having kindness and beauty, and he tells Cassy, in her words,
that “he had loved me a great while, and that he would be my friend and
protector;—in short, though he didn’t tell me, he had paid two thousand
dollars for me, and I was his property.”24 Although this man came to Cassy
kindly and asked for love, the relationship was legally little different from
the one she endured with Legree. This relationship ended when the master
found himself indebted to a less kind man who desired Cassy and acquired
her and her children in payment of that debt. When Stowe introduces Cassy,
it is after years of illicit sexual relationships, which have compromised her
honor and her beauty.
Stowe places Cassy first in the cotton field where, despite seeming out of
place, she completes her field work with incredible facility, seeming “to work
by magic.”25 Stowe describes Cassy more exotically than either of the two
earlier representations of the tragic mulatto. She says of her:
It was a woman, tall and slenderly formed, with remarkably delicate hands
and feet, and dressed in neat and respectable garments. By the appearance
of her face she may have been between thirty-five and forty; and it was a
face once seen, could never be forgotten,—one of those at a glance, seem
to convey to us an idea of a wild painful sexual history. Her forehead was
high, and her eyebrows marked with beautiful clearness. Her straightwell-
formed nose, her finely cut mouth, and the graceful contour of her head
and neck, showed that she once must have been beautiful; but her face was
deeply wrinkled with lines of pain, and of proud and bitter endurance. Her
complexion was sallow and unhealthy, her cheeks thin, her features sharp,
and her whole form emaciated. But her eye was the most remarkable
feature,—so large, so heavily black, overshadowed by long lashes of equal
darkness, and so wildly, mournfully despairing. There was fierce pride and
defiance in every line of her face, in every curve of the flexible lip, in every
motion of her body; but in her eye was a deep settled night of anguish,—
an expression so hopeless and unchanging as to contrast fearfully with the
scorn and pride expressed by her whole demeanor.26
In this description, Stowe specifies her age and, though identified by her
appearance as a tragic mulatto figure, Cassy’s age places her in the same
generation as the conventional mammy figure. But Cassy’s sexual usage sets
her apart from the mythic mammy. Stowe places Cassy at the end of her
youth, and her value as a concubine to Legree is on the decline. Were Cassy
a more complacent character, and Legree less ruthless, she might haveevolved
from her role in sexual service to simply a service role like that of the mammy
figure.

28 Social Protest and the Politics of Representation

 Susan Roberson contends, in “Matriarchy and the Rhetoric of Domestic-
ity,” that “Victorian writers constructed an elaborate sign system whereby,
theoretically, the inner self could be known by external signs such as manners
and dress”27 and that Stowe, like other writers of her era, was proficient in
the use of this system. In the above description, Cassy’s wrecked beauty links
her to a ravaged illicit sexual history and presents her as a clearly sexualized
woman. Despite her sexualized past, Stowe depicts her sympathetically as a
victim of a cruel system and implies in the description a sense of defiance and
internal strength. Additionally, Legree and his slave drivers perceive Cassy
as having access to magical powers. Cassy may not have magical powers, but
she is able to insinuate herself into Legree’s fears and superstitions andappears
to have power where she does not.
On stage, Cassy loses her confrontational desire for freedom and appears
more a character of desperation than defiance. In the Aiken version, Cassy
first appears on the stage when she gives Tom water after his initial whipping
by Legree. She seems so convincingly white that Tom mistakes her for the
mistress, and she corrects him roughly: “Don’t call me missis. I’m a miserable
slave like yourself—a lower one than you can ever be!”28 She then admonishes
Tom to give up his battle against Legree and recounts her own record of
disgrace at Legree’s hands. She has neither the majesty nor the suggestion of
magical powers that Stowe’s Cassy manifests.
A similar conversation occurs between the two in the novel, but the lan-
guage is slightly different. Tom says, “The Lord forbid, missis,” and Cassy
responds not to the title of “missis” but to the appeal to God. She says, “The
Lord never visits these parts.”29 Cassy defies even the idea of divine interven-
tion rather than dwell on her own plight and wretchedness as does her stage
counterpart.
Stowe shows two faces for Cassy: the one she wears in public view, which
is filled with a potent defiance, and a more defeated one, which she reveals to
Tom when she brings him water after his brutal beating at Legree’s hands.
This scene alone is reproduced in the play text, removing the small power or
agency that Stowe seemed to grant Cassy in the novel. In the play, Cassy
seems less defiant; she is simply debased and defeated. As Yarborough con-
cludes, Stowe’s Cassy is almost as rebellious a figure as George Harris, who
escapes slavery on his own, but Aiken’s stage Cassy does not maintain this
type of defiant energy.
Conway, in his version, introduces Cassy early in Act II. Cassy is placed in
a New Orleans jail where she has spent the past three months. It is Legree
who enters, not Tom. She is sleeping when he enters and he rouses her. Legree
says he will take her back if she obeys. She tells him of how she dreamed
about her life before her father’s funeral, and she provides the exposition of
her life to Legree, not to Tom. Legree is exasperated by her repetition of what
he has heard many times before. In this case Legree is the evil cousin who led
Cassy’s beloved to gamble and leave her out of his affections. She also talks
of her lost child “Eliza,” who was sold by Legree. Although Aiken maintains

Uncle Tom’s Women 29

the three tragic mulatto characters—Cassy, Eliza, and Emmeline—he
merges Eliza and Emmeline into a single character so that it is Cassy and
Eliza who plot against Legree, as well as Cassy and Eliza who are revealed to
be mother and daughter.
Despite the sanitization of the Conway version of true abolitionist senti-
ment, Conway creates a stronger character for Cassy than Aiken does and like
Yarborough sees the revolutionary possibility of Cassy. When she is in jail,
Cassy remains defiant and she narrates to Legree a dream of vengeance in
which all of Legree’s murdered victims rise up against him. Although Legree
responds by physically attacking her, he seems somewhat frightened by the
power of her dream.
When Cassy appears in Act V, Scene 2, with the newly purchased Eliza, it
is Eliza who speaks of escape and Cassy who tries to convince her that it is
not possible. Cassy tells Eliza that if she refuses to submit to Legree’s sexual
advances, Legree will murder her as he has murdered others in the past. In
the end, Cassy and Eliza formulate a plan of escape dependent on Cassy’s
knowledge of Legree’s fears. They plan to have Eliza appear dressed asLegree’s
mother in a bloody gown in order to scare him away.
Cassy’s insinuations are essential to the success of the plan. She prods
Legree’s fears about the haunted room where his mother died. Cassy tells
Legree of the things that she has heard and seen in the room. When Legree
checks the room, Eliza emerges dressed as they described. Later when Legree
beats Tom, Cassy again suggests that his mother’s ghost is at hand. Then, at
the moment Legree discovers the talisman that Tom carries and picks it up,
Eva’s hair curls around his finger and he screams. Cassy says the hair comes
from Legree’s murdered mother’s head, and in the window Eliza is visible in
the bloody white dress. Legree has a fit and says that he is choking. He dies
shortly after of fright. It is largely through Cassy’s manipulations that Legree
comes to this end. The rebellious energy of the novel is maintained and the
representational excess of this character, although seemingly tragic, is one of
power and agency.
A British version of the play by Mark Lemon and Tom Taylor maintains a
defiant and willful Cassy and shows the malleability of the mulatto character.
This version of the play describes a cooperation among the black female
characters that is missing in both Stowe’s novel and other versions of the
play. Emmeline does not appear in the play; instead, it is Eliza whom Legree
purchases as Cassy’s replacement. Cassy tells her story not to Tom but to
Eliza, as a way of warning her. She says, “For six years I have been the
companion of a man—brutal, drunken, and inhumane. I have dailywitnessed
cruelty that you believe impossible, and now my tyrant has grown weary of
me and has bought another mistress.”30 In this version, Cassy, not Eliza,
warns Tom of his impending sale. When he refuses to take her advice and
run away, she chastises him that his sale is not the will of heaven: “It is the
laws of devils. Your mass’r would not have sold you, Eliza told me so, but
must sell you, or sell all. You thank him for this.”31 At the conclusion of the
play, Lemon and TaylorpositionthefiguresofEliza,Topsy,Cassy,andGeorge

30 Social Protest and the Politics of Representation

together as they all attempt an escape from Legree’s plantation. In a final act
of defiance, Cassy shoots and kills Legree, ensuring the safety of the party.
Despite the vehemence of Cassy’s rebellion, even this version of the play
elides many of the facts of Cassy’s story, which Stowe presents in the novel.
One fact that is not revealed in the play is that Cassy murdered her third
child rather than have him sold away from her: “I took the little fellow in my
arms when he was two weeks old, and kissed him and cried over him,” Cassy
describes, “and then I gave him laudanum, and held him close to my bosom,
while he slept to death.”32 Here, Stowe’s Cassy is her most threatening and
subversive as she refuses to reproduce the slave children to maintain the
system. She is similar to the Lemon-Taylor Cassy, who is willing to take a
life in order to save her own, but she is an entirely different creature than the
relatively helpless heroine who Aiken provides. Unlike the proactive Cassy
of the novel, the Cassy of George Aiken’s text did not take the life of her child
and does not establish the destructive potential of a violated mother. Cassy
as a stage character never gained the popularity or attention that either Topsy
or Eliza did. Already far from a Victorian heroine in her role as a sexually
compromised woman, the crime of baby killing might have made her almost
a stage villain. The elision of the more horrific facts of her story grant her less
agency and make her a more sympathetic and “womanly” supporting char-
acter. McConachie argues that “Stowe’s conservative feminism helped to
insure that many of her women did not make it to the stage.”33 Those that
did were no longer as strong as they had appeared in the novel. This is due
partly to the nature of the audience, which McConachie reconstructs as
primarily male, working class, and unlikely to have strong abolitionist lean-
ings. For this group, the mulatto provides a particular attraction; she is a
woman who, despite her white appearance, maintains a hidden darkness—
the same darkness that Dyer links with male desire. This construction of the
female implies a passivity, and thus a stronger, more assertive Cassy would
be less desirable to the audience.

Clearly, the translation of Uncle Tom’s Cabin from the page to the stage is not
a smooth one. Stage conventions change and undermine crucial elements of
Stowe’s abolitionist project. Sensationalization of triumphant acts, like
Eliza’s escape across the Ohio River, overshadow the more horrific elements
of the story, like Emmeline’s mishandling on the auction block by Legree. A
defiant female character like Cassy translates from the novel as a weak or
pathetic “womanly” character. Despite being called tragic mulattos, none of
Stowe’s fair heroines truly experiences a tragic ending. Stowe and her theat-
rical imitators rescue their heroines from slavery and abuse.
Like the tragic mulatto, the mammy has inspired a variety of critical
material. For example, in Plantation Mistress, Catherine Clinton contends
that the mammy myth was a creation of the white imagination.

She existed as a counterpoint to the octoroon concubine, the light-skinned

product of a “white man’s lust” who was habitually victimized by slave

Uncle Tom’s Women 31

 owners’ sexual appetites. In addition the Mammy was integral to the white
male’s emasculation of slavery, since she and she alone projected an image
of power wielded by blacks—a power rendered strictly benign and mater-
nal in its influence. Further, her importance was derived from her alleged
influence over whites; in her tutelary role, she was, in fact, invented as the
desired collaborator within white society: idealized by the master class, a
trumped-up, not a triumphant, figure in the mythologizing of slavery.34

Clinton implicitly echoes Toni Morrison’s argument in Playing in the Dark.

The mammy is an example of what Morrison describes as an “enabler” of
whiteness; the black character serves as a darker reflection through which the
white character is established. Morrison suggests four methods in which
African Americans are marked as different and as integral functions in the
performance of an American white identity. In the first role, the black Other
is an “enabler” for whiteness, as described above. Second, Morrison suggests
that white writers use the African American dialect as a marker of difference.
Third, she argues, “We need studies of the technical ways in which an
Africanist character is used to limn out and enforce the invention and impli-
cations of whiteness.”35 Finally, Morrison indicates an approach to the ap-
propriation of the narrative of an African American experience in order to
mediate “one’s own humanity.”36 The mammy is a fiction that, in its repre-
sentation, fulfills all of the criteria that Morrison proposes.
Within the myths of black femininity of the nineteenth century, only the
mammy is free of the taint of sexuality. Her physical traits place her beyond
the pale of sexual attraction. However, like Topsy, her representation entails
an excess, and the same traits that mark her as undesirable can be read as
sexualized. Although the myth marks the mammy as a woman whose body
is denuded of sexuality, in literature, as in reality, this separation is impos-
sible. In Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Stowe described her own character, Aunt Chloe,
as a woman with “a round, black, shiny face” and wrote that “her whole
plump countenance beams with satisfaction and contentment from under a
well-starched turban.”37 Encoded within this visual representation are the
stereotypical features of the mammy. Although Stowe’s project was aboli-
tionist, her depiction of this black character repeats stereotypical tropes,
which link Aunt Chloe to the mammy and allow her appropriation as a
mammy figure. However, the representational excess of her portrait (and of
the mammy more broadly) refutes this interpretation at the same time that
it suggests it.
Stowe presents a Chloe who is surrounded by young children, black and
white. In Stowe’s novel, Chloe is a mother with two small children and an
infant. At the same time that the infant reinforces Chloe’s nurturing role, it
also suggests her sexual one. A woman with an infant is one that cannot be
too far from the sexual act that led to its conception. Chloe’s concern for her
husband, the father of her children, can certainly be read as that of a nurturer
but also as that of a woman connected by a sexual relationship to her man.
And, although she takes great care to accommodate the young master,George

32 Social Protest and the Politics of Representation

Shelby, it is clear at the outset that Chloe’s primary concern is her husband,
Uncle Tom. As Stowe presents her, Aunt Chloe’s mothering of her own
children may be questionable, but her loyalty to her mate is not. She, when
warned by Eliza of Tom’s impending sale, urges Tom to run away. Stowe
also presents a scene in which Aunt Chloe conspires with Mrs. Shelby in order
to prolong a dinner after which the slave trader Haley plans to take possession
of Eliza’s son Harry. Chloe’s “unusually leisurely and circumstantialmanner”
gives Eliza a head start away from the plantation.38 Chloe also reappears at
the end of the novel, having presented the Shelbys with the fruit of her labor
as a baker in order to purchase Tom’s freedom. When she learns that Tom
has died, she gives the money to Mrs. Shelby: “ ‘Thar,’ said she, gathering
[the money] up, and holding it, with a trembling hand, to her mistress,
‘don’t never want to see nor hear on ’t again. Jist as I knew ’t would be,—
sold, and murdered on dem ar’ old plantations!’ ”39 These words again reveal
that, despite Chloe’s pivotal role in the Shelby household, her first obligation
remains her conjugal tie to Uncle Tom. Sarah Duckworth, however,criticizes
Stowe’s articulation of Aunt Chloe and argues that Stowe places her as a less-
adequate mother than the white (or near-white) mothers in the novel:
These white women know full well their spiritual mission as shepherdesses
for God, but Chloe can only identify herself in terms of the physicalservices
she performs. She focuses always on tangibles—abstract concepts of evil
and good are beyond her mental grasp. Consequently the one thing that
makes Chloe’s “fat sides” shake with honest pride and merriment is not a
favorite child, but knowing that her baked goods are better than her
“compeers.”40
Duckworth’s critique emphasizes that Chloe, unlike the white mothers, is
shown as primarily a body in service, not as a fully realized subjectivity.
Although Chloe may not make abstract distinctions between good and evil,
she is consistent in her loyalty to her family and implicitly understands the
“evil” inherent in Uncle Tom’s sale. Chloe, despite any lack of abstract
conception, further understands that her physical service can return Tom to
his family, and by the end of the novel, she has converted the strength of her
baking ability into the capital that might have bought Tom’s freedom—had
he survived. Duckworth’s analysis certainly illustrates the deficiencies in
Stowe’s depiction of Chloe and of the black female characters, and it also
points to Morrison’s discussion of the role of black characters in literature.
Chloe’s lack of abstract thought highlights the social principles of her mis-
tress; when Chloe and the mistress conspire together to delay the dinner,
Chloe’s ineptitude becomes the surrogate expression for Mrs. Shelby’s op-
position to Tom’s sale. Thus, in Stowe’s depiction, one sees a constant tension
between the representation and its excess—the former promoting a tradi-
tional stereotypical reading of Chloe while the latter creates spaces of sub-
version.
These interstices, which allow a resistant reading, are truncated in Stowe’s
own dramatization of the novel, The Christian Slave. In this dramatization,

Uncle Tom’s Women 33

Stowe moves closer to the portrait that Duckworth describes as she empha-
sizes only the service aspect of Chloe’s character, largely because Chloe’s
statements from the novel are reproduced without the mediating effect of
Stowe’s narration. Chloe appears first in her cabin, cooking, and is seldom far
from the kitchen. In both the novel and the dramatization, she cooks Tom a
special breakfast before he leaves and rails against the injustice of Tom’sbeing
sold. She says:
“Sich a faithful crittur as ye’ve been and allers sot his business ’fore yer own
every way, and reckoned on him more than yer own wife and chil’en! Them
as sells heart’s love and heart’s blood, to get out of that scrapes, and the
Lord’ll be up to ’em! Now mind, I tell ye de Lord’ll be up to ’em.”41
Here, Chloe describes Tom in the terms that usually describe the mammy;
his devotion to his master overwhelms any other ties that he may have. Yet,
implicit in her criticism of Tom are the assumptions that Tom should not
place his master before his family and that Chloe maintains the opposite set
of values.
In the Conway version, it is not loyalty but humor that characterizes Chloe.
Instead of entering the opening scene in an intimate family setting, Chloe
performs a minuet and then a dance accompanied by a banjo with another
slave for the entertainment of George Shelby in the plantation house. As
McConachie suggests, the role of black characters in this adaptation of the
play is little more than comic relief, and the contrast between the white
reformer characters and the comic black characters highlights the strengths
of the white characters. To use Morrison’s language, these characters become
enablers of the white characters. When another slave suggests that Tom
might be sold, Chole responds, “Part wid my old man. No—no—Massa
won’t do it nebber lib to see dat day.”42 Rather than the defiance of her masters
depicted by Stowe, Conway shows a Chloe whose faith in her masters makes
Tom’s impending sale seem impossible; the space of resistance thus seems
smaller in this version.
Although less comic, George Aiken’s Chloe appears only once in the
stereotypical attire of the mammy. Birdoff reports that, on opening night,
her mere entrance “set [the crowd] roaring and applauding vociferously.”43
Here, the audience reads the visual text in the minstrel context, where pure
black women were objects of ridicule. The expectation of the audience was
humor, but it was soon sobered by the seriousness of Uncle Tom’s situation:
When Eliza tells Chloe of Tom’s impending sale she says to him:
“Well, old man, why don’t you run away too? Will you wait to be toted
down the river, where they kill niggers with hard work and starving? I’d
a heap rather die than go there, any day! There’s time for ye; be off with—
You’ve got a pass to come and go anytime. Come, hustle up, and I’ll get
your things together.”44
Chloe states plainly that her loyalty to the masters is not valued above her
life and suggests that Tom exploit his trusted position in order to escape.

34 Social Protest and the Politics of Representation

Chloe’s prophetic words are ignored, and Tom convinces her that, if he is
loyal to his master and has faith in God, he will be fine. She expresses her
faith in Tom’s belief and accepts his decision, not the hierarchical order of
the white society. In this instance, the representational excess depicts Chloe
as mammy, whereas the text suggests a different role. No matter that this
Chloe’s physical appearance is fat, dark, and kerchiefed—she is not the docile
mammy of the myth. She is complicated by her relationship to her own
family, and the mere presence of that family gives her an identity outside of
her white masters. She grows larger than simply a vehicle for establishing
the whiteness of the other characters.
In addition to Chloe, a figure that is given the name “Mammy” appears in
Stowe’s novel and dramatization. Although Mammy appears in neither the
Aiken nor the Conway version of the play, she is important to discuss because
she functions in the roles that Morrison assigns to black characters in white
literature. When the St. Clares return to their plantation, their family and
their slaves greet them. Eva first hugs and kisses her mother, who complains
that she is ill; Eva then hurries into the arms of Mammy. Here, we see the
elements of the mammy myth come into focus. This character, like Tom,
served first the parent, Marie St. Clare, and then grew to love the child, Eva.
Eva, like young George Shelby, understands the value of a loyal servant even
when her mother does not. Marie complains that Mammy does not show
proper devotion to her:
If Mammy felt the interest in me she ought to, she’d wake easier—ofcourse
she could. I’ve heard of people who had such devoted servants, but it never
was my luck. Now Mammy has a sort of goodness; she’s smooth and respect-
ful, but she’s selfish at heart. Now, she never will be done fidgeting and
worrying about that husband of hers. You see when I was married and
came to live here, of course I had to bring her with me, and her husband
my father couldn’t spare. He was a blacksmith, and, of course, very nec-
essary; and I thought, and said at the time that Mammy and he better give
each other up, as it wasn’t likely to be convenient for them ever to live
together again. I wish now I’d insisted on it, and married Mammy to
somebody else; but I was foolish and indulgent, and didn’t want to insist.
I told Mammy at the time she mustn’t ever expect to see him more than
once or twice in her life again, for the air of father’s place doesn’t agree with
my health, and I can’t go there; and I advised her to take up with somebody
else; but no—she wouldn’t. Mammy has a kind of obstinacy about her, in
spots that everybody don’t see as I do.45
Marie laments that Mammy is not as faithful to her as the mythical mammy,
to the exclusion of her own family. Marie also reiterates that Mammy cannot
feel love toward her children or husband in the same way that Marie does and
that her separation from them is essentially meaningless. And, like the
character of Chloe, Mammy’s conjugal and filial ties also serve to link her to
sexuality. Furthermore, Marie repeats race sentiments that describe slaves’
insensitivity to pain and normal affections. Beyond Marie’s criticisms,

Uncle Tom’s Women 35

Mammy also falls short of the myth in her appearance. Although “dressed
neatly, with high red and yellow turban on her head,” Stowe describes her as
a “decent mulatto woman” not as the heavy brown woman generally associ-
ated with the figure of the mammy. Mammy does, however, fit Stowe’s
prototype of black motherhood. Whenever Stowe presents an idealized black
mother figure, she is always of mixed race, like Eliza or Cassy. Even when
Stowe creates a character explicitly called “Mammy,” she does not fulfill all
the criteria of the mythic mammy.
In Marie St. Clare, Stowe presents a failed motherhood, and Marie’s criti-
cism of Mammy, whose devotion is clearly stronger than her own, serves to
underscore that point. Mammy’s function for Stowe is to illustrate the defi-
ciencies in Marie St. Clare’s character and to suggest that slavery may abuse
blacks, but it also denigrates whites; this portrait underlies Morrison’stheses.
Stowe wishes to upset what she sees as the northern mythical view of the
South: “It is supposed that domestic servitude in slave states is a kind of
paradise; that house servants are invariably pets; that young mistresses are
always fond of their ‘mammies,’ and young masters always handsome, good
natured, indulgent.”46 Thus, the presentation of Mammy is a deliberate effort
by Stowe to challenge the relationship between white masters and black
slaves; this usage suggests the roles Morrison defines: enabler, mediator of
humanity, and enforcer of the implications of whiteness. This role is under-
scored in Stowe’s representations because in neither the novel nor The Chris-
tian Slave does this character speak. In the novel, Mammy does make an
occasional physical appearance. In Stowe’s dramatization, however, even her
appearance is occluded; she is merely discussed by Marie and Ophelia. Her
presence is invoked, although her voice is absent. Like Stowe herself, her
characters speak for the absent black woman; Mammy’s existence is tied only
to her physical service to the characters’ needs and to her thematic service as
a vehicle for Stowe’s politics.
Any discussion of the mammy figures in Uncle Tom’s Cabin would be
incomplete without a recognition of Uncle Tom himself. Tom embodies
many of the qualities suggested for women by the cult of true womanhood,
which idealized motherhood. Uncle Tom, as feminized hero of the novel,
displays many aspects of the mammy. He responds to Chloe’s accounting of
his relationship to his master: “Wan’he[themaster]putinmyarmsababy?”47
Like many slave nurses, Tom began care of his master when the man was
born. He extends this loyalty to his master’s son, and he retains a strong
relationship with the young master, George Shelby. In the novel, Tom’s
parting from his young white charge seems more poignant than that from
his actual family. The Shelbys had contrived to have young George away at
another plantation. Tom asks as he leaves that Mrs. Shelby give his regards
to George, and then the emotional boy runs his horse up to the parting scene.
“Young Master George sprang into the wagon, threw his arms tumultuously
round his neck, and was sobbing and scolding with energy.”48 Tom returns
his affection and exclaims: “O! Mas’r George! This does me good! . . . I
couldn’t bar to go off without seein’ ye!”49 The intimacy of this relationship

36 Social Protest and the Politics of Representation

foreshadows the close affection that grows between Tom and Little Eva. Tom
cares for his young charges like a mother and suggests the idealized qualities
of the audience, which Stowe desired to address. His gender, however, at
once aids in his heroic depiction and undermines it. As a man, he does not
necessarily suggest the same possibility of sexual compromise that characters
like Eliza, Cassy, or even Topsy and Chloe do. Despite his feminization, he
is a man, who Stowe describes as at the prime of his life, and that image
suggests sexual compromise of another sort, making images of the young
Eva on Tom’s lap evoke additional meaning. At the same time that these two
tensions are in play, we return to Morrison in order to understand that, more
so than any other character, Tom serves as the barometer and enabler for the
humanity of theother characters.ItisTom’srelationshipswithGeorgeShelby
and Little Eva that best illustrate their nobility, just as it is Legree’s relation-
ship with Tom that definitively elucidates his depravity.

Ideas of black women that began in the nineteenth century continue to be

perpetuated through the modern era. In the case of the three images of black
female characters, each was visually codified by a set of physical traits: the
tragic mulatto by her fair skin, the mammy through her size and her ker-
chiefed head, Topsy by the wild tails protruding from her head and her rough
clothing. Each set of traits reflected a set of assumptions, which evolved into
stereotypes ultimately reenacted and played out on the stage and through
American culture. Despite the painful and denigrating nature of the images,
they are also part of the landscape of the American consciousness. At the same
time that these images serve as a reminder of a painful history, they are
markers of a tenacious survival.

notes

1. Jo A. Tanner, Dusky Maidens(Westport,Conn:Greenwood,1992),8–9.Tanner

describes two early productions that included a black female character. A white
woman in blackface played the servant in William Miln’s All in a Bustle (1798), but
no white woman willing to black her face could be found in Cincinnati in 1823, so
in Edwin Forrest’s presentation that year of the farce The Tailor in Distress, the author
hired a black woman to perform the part.
2. Homi K. Bhabha, “The Other Question: Stereotype, Discrimination and the
Discourse of Colonialism,” in The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994),
66.
3. George Fredrickson, The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-
American Character and Destiny, 1817–1972 (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), 109.
4. Bhabha 77.
5. Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (New York: Routledge,
1993), 148.
6. Bruce McConachie, Melodramatic Formations: American Theatre and Society,
1820–1870 (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1992), 182.

Uncle Tom’s Women 37

 7. H. J. Conway, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Uncle Tom’s Cabin Collection, Harry Ran-
goon Humanities Center, University of Texas, Austin, 1.
8. Harry Birdoff, The World’s Greatest Hit: “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.”(NewYork:Vanni,
1947), 6. A program held in the Harvard Theatre Archive’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Collection from a performance on 20 Jan. 1853 at Ordway Hall on Washington
Street lists Mr. Mitchell as Topsy in the cast list.
9. Bhabha 77.
10. Within the minstrel milieu after the Civil War, the minstrel show included
the growing presence on the stage of black men and, in rare instances, women.
Within black minstrel companies, black men cross-dressing as black female char-
actersnever becamea particularlypopularconvention.Inthecaseofthe“TomShows,”
although there is evidence of several black actors, beginning with the minstrel
performer Sam Lucas, portraying Uncle Tom, there is little evidence that a black
woman enacted Topsy on the stage. George Clinton Densmore Odell, Annals of the
New York Stage (New York: Columbia University Press, 1927–1944), vol. 11,records
instances of two black women, Abbie Hampie and Bella Martin, who were both
billed as “the only colored Topsy.” They both appeared in “Tom Shows” in October
1879. In an unidentifiable newspaper clipping from the Harvard Theatre Archive,
“Uncle Tom’s Strong Grip: A Unique Class of Actors Which the Play Has Created,”
the unknown author states: “There were real Negro Topsies and genuine Negro
Uncle Toms” but does not provide any concrete examples of said black Topsies. C. A.
Leonard points to a specific instance in his New York Herald Tribune (19 May 1929)
article, “Negro Theater Is No New Thing; It Started Hereabouts in 1821.” He writes
that, in “1897, Lew Payton, who played Pa Williams in ‘Harlem,’ attempted an all
colored version of ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’ himself playing Uncle Tom.” However,
attempts to find more documentation of this production have been unsuccessful.
11. Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852; reprint, New York: Harper
& Row, 1965), 147.
12. Stowe 239.
13. Richard Dyer, White (New York: Routledge, 1997), 45.
14. Dyer 49.
15. Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 217–218.
16. Elizabeth Corbett, Theatre Guild Magazine (1930), clipping file, Uncle Tom’s
Cabin Collection, Harvard Theatre Archive.
17. Untitled article, London Era, (25 Aug. 1878), clipping file, Uncle Tom’s
Cabin Collection, Harvard Theatre Archive.
18. Untitled article, London Daily Telegraph (1 Sept. 1878), clipping file, Uncle
Tom’s Cabin Collection, Harvard Theatre Archive.
19. Bhabha 66.
20. McConachie 183, citing Conway 4:1.
21. Phelan 2.
22. Stowe 447.
23. Richard Yarborough, “Strategies of Black Characterization in Uncle Tom’s
Cabin and the Early Afro-American Novel,” in New Essays on “Uncle Tom’s Cabin”,
ed. Eric Sundquist (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 55.
24. Stowe 364.
25. Stowe 355.
26. Stowe 353.
27. Susan L. Roberson, “Matriarchy and the Rhetoric of Domesticity,” in The

38 Social Protest and the Politics of Representation

Stowe Debate: Rhetorical Strategies in “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” ed. Mason I. Lowance (Am-
herst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994), 131.
28. George Aiken, Uncle Tom’sCabin, inRepresentativePlaysbyAmericanDramatists,
ed. Montrose Moses (1925; reprint, New York: Benjamin Blom, 1952), 681.
29. Stowe 355.
30. Mark Lemon and Tom Taylor, Slave Life; or, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 24. Uncle
Tom’s Cabin Collection, New York Public Library, Performing Arts Library.
31. Lemon and Taylor 30.
32. Stowe 367.
33. McConachie 12.
34. Catherine Clinton, Plantation Mistress (New York: Pantheon, 1982), 202.
35. Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination
(Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1992), 52.
36. Morrison 53.
37. Stowe 31.
38. Stowe 56.
39. Stowe 440–441.
40. Sarah Smith Duckworth, “Stowe’s Construction of an African Person and the
Creation of White Identity for a New World Order,” in Lowance 220.
41. Stowe 97. “The Christian Slave”: A Drama Founded on a Portion of “Uncle Tom’s
Cabin,” dramatized by Harriet Beecher Stowe expressly for the readings of Mistress.
Mary E. Webb (Boston: Philips, Sampson and Co., 1855), 19.
42. H. J. Conway, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Conway’s Boston Museum version of text,
1876 (as combined with Aiken’s text), 1:8. Harry Ransom Humanities Research
Center, University of Texas, Austin. The text is not complete, and act 4 is an
interpolation from the Aiken text.
43. Birdoff 69.
44. Aiken 621.
45. Stowe 166.
46. Harriet Beecher Stowe, The Key to “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” (1854; reprint, New
York: Arno, 1968), 74.
47. Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 97; Stowe, The Christian Slave, 19.
48. Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 102.
49. Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 102.

Uncle Tom’s Women 39

 2

Political Radicalism and

Artistic Innovation in the
Works of Lorraine Hansberry

‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘
margaret b. wilkerson

Lorraine Hansberry (figure 2.1) was a visionary playwright whose belief in

humankind’s potential to overcome its own excesses of avarice, oppression,
and inhumanity compelledhertoraiseprovocativequestionsontheAmerican
stage. Ironically, her success with A Raisin in the Sun, which won the 1959
New York Drama Critics Circle Award and which won acclaim from white
as well as black audiences during its Broadway production, led some critics
to view her work as integrationist and accommodationist. A virile, confron-
tational Black Arts Movement in the 1960s, which challenged its parent,
the Civil Rights Movement, following Hansberry’s death, seemed to eclipse
her work and to label it as “old-fashioned,” both in form and content. How-
ever, persistent voices continued to claim for Hansberry a more radicalstance,
and during the 1990s, they have been joined by some of her earlier detractors.
A close examination of two of her plays, A Raisin in the Sun and Les Blancs,
combined with information about her sources and facts about her life affirm
a political stance more radical than previously recognized and artistic choices
that challenge the boundaries of theatrical realism.
A Raisin in the Sun remains one of the most-produced plays in the United
States and one of the most popular with audiences of all colors. A drama filled
with humor and pathos, it depicts the conflicts in a working-class black
family in Chicago over the use of a $10,000 insurance benefit paid on the
death of the family’s patriarch. The mother Lena, insists on placing a down
payment on a house, which happens to be in a white neighborhood, counter-
manding her son, Walter Lee, who wants to invest in a liquor store. Both
characters seem to be pursuing the American dream of upward mobility—
property and money—when, in fact, Hansberry is using their aspirations as
metaphors for the dream of freedom and the right to be regarded as not only
a citizen but as a human being. Because the play uses the family’s efforts to

40
Figure 2.1 Lorraine Hansberry. Gin Briggs photo, courtesy Estate of Robert
Nemiroff (Jewel Greshan Nemiroff, executrix).

move into a white neighborhood as its major metaphor, some black artists of
the 1960s considered A Raisin in the Sun an example of a failed and degrading
integrationist philosophy.
Amiri Baraka, whose work in the 1960s emerged as the sine qua non of
black militant drama, epitomized this attitude as he, along with other black
artists, claimed that the play represented a bygone era:

We thought Hansberry’s play was part of the “passive resistance” phase of

the movement, which was over the minute Malcolm’s penetrating eyes
and words began to charge through the media with deadly force. We
thought her play “middle class” in that its focus seemed to be on “moving
into white folks’ neighborhoods,” when most blacks were just trying to
pay their rent in ghetto shacks.1

Political Radicalism and Artistic Innovation 41

 Much of the Black Arts Movement’s discomfort with Hansberry lay in the
character and interpretation of Lena/Mama, the matriarch of the Younger
family. Played by Claudia McNeil in the original stage and film productions,
she was seen by audiences, particularly whites, and critics alike, as a familiar
figure from the American literary and dramatic canon: the dark-skinned,
white-haired, conservative mammy of the “good old days,” who revered the
master, sought to emulate his lifestyle, and struggled to keep her unruly
children in line. Visually, McNeil fit the stereotype, but her actions belied
the concept. Walter Lee’s decision not to take the money from the Clybourne
Park residents, who want to keep their neighborhood white, was seen often
as a capitulation to his mother’s will rather than as a personal triumph. Some
angry men of the Black Arts Movement took umbrage at Walter Lee, who
seemed ineffectual, impotent, and proven wrong byhismother,areductionist
view of their situation, demeaning the black man’s struggle for manhood in
a racist society. The controversy over whose story it was—Walter’s or
Mama’s—was waged during the play’s out-of-town trials in 1958 as Sidney
Poitier and Claudia McNeil vied for central focus. Audiences of that time
took greater comfort in the familiar figure of Mama, finding Poitier’s restless
and explosive Walter Lee more disturbing.
However, in 1986, Baraka, after seeing a revival of A Raisin in the Sun,
which restored some material cut from the original production and which
eventually became an “American Playhouse” television production, wrote a
dramatic reassessment of the play:
[In the 1960s,] we missed the essence of the work—that Hansberry had
created a family on the cutting edge of the same class and ideological
struggles as existed in the movement itself and among the people. What
is most telling about our ignorance is that Hansberry’s play still remains
overwhelmingly popular and evocative of black and white reality, and the
masses of black people dug it true.2
Baraka argues that this play “typifies American society in a way that reflects
more accurately the real lives of the black U.S. majority than any work that
ever received commercial exposure before it, and few if any since. It has the
life that only classics can maintain (20).” Baraka makes this reevaluation of
the play without any reference to the passages cut from the original but
restored in the Roundabout Theatre production that he witnessed. When he
compares the next two explosions in black drama, James Baldwin’s Blues for
Mr. Charlie and his own Dutchman, (the first constructs a debate of the ideas
of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X, and Dutchman openly advocates
the use of armed resistance), he finds them both wanting because “for one
thing, they are both (regardless of their ‘power’) too concerned with white
people.”3 In contrast, Baraka notes:
It is Lorraine Hansberry’s play which, though it seems “conservative” in
form and content to the radical petty bourgeoisie (as opposed to revolu-
tionaries), is the accurate telling and stunning vision of the real struggle.

42 Social Protest and the Politics of Representation

 Both Clay [Dutchman] and Richard [Blues . . . ] are rebellious scions of the
middle class. The Younger family is part of the black majority, and the
concerns I once dismissed as “middle class”—buying a house and moving
into “white folks’ neighborhoods”—are actually reflective of the essence
of black people’s striving and thewillto defeatsegregation,discrimination,
and national oppression. There is no such thing as a “white folks’ neigh-
borhood” except to racists and to those submitting to racism.4
Baraka’s concise deconstruction of the term white folks’ neighborhood reminds
us that the phrase accepts the terms of segregation and discrimination; the
more radical view taken by Mama is the right to live where she can afford
with no regard to claims of neighborhood “ownership.” Baraka rightfully
equates the Younger family with the Fannie Lou Hamers, Malcolm Xs, and
Angela Davises, advocates of a radical vision of full participation in society
and full acceptance as human beings for the majority, not just the elite class,
of blacks. The Youngers are the incarnation of the “ghetto-variety” masses
who would burst forth from “the bloody southern backroads and the burning
streets of Watts and Newark onto TV screens and the world stage” in the
years following the original production of the play.5
Walter Lee, a frustrated and restless chauffeur, who desires the opportu-
nities that the “white boys” have, is a precursor to the overtly militant male
characters of the 1960s. Hansberry foresaw the explosion to come as the
curtailment of the black male’s possibilities became unbearable. Hansberry
intends Walter to be the protagonist in the play who, according to the
principles of Western dramaturgy, undergoes major change and overcomes
his human flaws. However, because Walter represents a despised class, which
has been ridiculed on the stage, it was difficult for audiences not to impose
stereotypes with which they were most familiar. Hansberry recognized that
the audience brought into the theater “prior attitudes . . . from the world
outside. “In the minds of many,” she wrote, “Walter remains, despite the
play, despite performance, what American [racial] traditions wish him to be:
an exotic.”6
Hansberry was very aware of the tensions between her creation and the
audiences’ perceptions. In fact, she also believed that her play was flawed and
contained “dramaturgical incompletions”:
Fine plays tend to utilize one big fat character who runs right through the
middle of the structure, by action or implication, with whom we rise or
fall. A central character as such is certainly lacking from Raisin. I should
be delighted to pretend that it was inventiveness, as some suggest for me,
but it is, also, craft inadequacy and creative indecision. The result is that
neither Walter Lee nor Mama Younger loom large enough to monumen-
tally command the play. I consider it an enormous dramatic fault if no one
else does.7
When she wrote the screenplay, she attempted to “correct” this flaw by
providing greater context for Walter Lee’s dilemma in several scenes added

Political Radicalism and Artistic Innovation 43

to the original stage script. She inserts one particularly telling scene on a
Chicago street, which sets Walter’s frustration against a global backdrop of
freedom struggles. After learning that Mama has used a portion of the
insurance money as a down payment on a house, a dejected Walter leaves the
apartment. He comes upon a street orator, who is rousing a crowd of black
males by comparing their economic deprivation with the rising fortunes of
emerging African nations:
Well, my brothers, it is time to ask ourselves what the black man is asking
himself everywhere in this world today. . . . Everywhere on the African
continent today the black man is standing up and telling the white man
that there is someplace for him to go . . . back to that small, cold continent
where he came from—Europe! . . .
How long before this mood of black men everywhere else in the world
touches us here? How long! How much has to happen before the black
man in the United States is going to understand that God helps those who
help themselves? . . .
What is the difference, my friends—between the black man here and
every other man in the world? It’s what every one of you knows . . .
We are the only people in the world who are completelydisinherited! . . .
We are the only people in the world who own nothing, who make
nothing! I ask you, my friends, where are your factories . . . ?
. . . Where are your textile or steel mills? Heh? Where are your mighty
houses of finance? . . . Answer me, my brothers—Where are they?8
Freedom is hollow, the orator (and Hansberry) reminds us, without economic
power. However, this scene along with most of her additions ended up on
the cutting room floor as the producer and director adhered to the presumably
safer course, a replication of the successful stage play.
To mainstream critics of the 1950s, Hansberry was a housewife who came
out of nowhere to write this compelling play of the 1959 season. Many were
surprised by her articulate command of social and political issues. Born into
the comforts of the black upper middle class in 1930s Chicago, she hardly
seemed destined to cultivate revolutionary attitudes. However, her family
home was a cultural mecca where, as a child, she met black artists and leaders,
such as Paul Robeson and Langston Hughes. While her father’s real estate
business gave the family an affluent lifestyle, she came to know the stories
and struggles of working-class families through his tenants and the public
schools to which he sent her. She admired and envied the independence and
defiant attitudes of the latchkey children. The foundation for her political
views were laid in her childhood by a combination of influences: the strong
black pride taught by her father and mother; the tradition of fighting seg-
regation and discrimination modeled by her father’s legal challenge before
the Supreme Court of restrictive covenants in housing; and early association
with and influence by Ray Hansborough, a black Communist. Hansborough
did not school her in the doctrinaire views of the Communist party but rather

44 Social Protest and the Politics of Representation

nurtured in her democratic ideas of freedom and social justice for all people
and, especially, African Americans.
Hansberry chose to attend the University of Wisconsin at Madison, a
predominantly white university known for its progressive faculty, rather
than a black college (as had her parents and siblings), where the social
requisites reminded her of the high school sororities and activities of the
middle class that she so detested. At Wisconsin, she joined the Communist
party and, later, the Labor Youth League. She served as the president of the
Young Progressives Association, a campus-based national organization of
college students who campaigned for Henry Wallace and the Progressive
party in the 1948 election. Under her presidency, the campus chapter of the
YPA produced several dramatic productions with political import.
Bored and disappointed with college, Hansberry left after her second year
and moved to New York City, with her mother’s permission, to pursue “an
education of a different kind” in the progressive political and cultural circles
of the city. There, she took a course on Africa from W. E. B. Du Bois and
worked as associate editor with Paul Robeson on his newspaper, Freedom.
Robeson devoted the pages of his newspaper to the political upheaval and
exploitation of Africa; to Senator Joe McCarthy’s campaign against Com-
munists, which was engulfing many writers and artists; and to racial discrim-
ination in the United States. This job brought Hansberry into contact with
many international visitors, who came to speak with Robeson, and exposed
her to news stories affecting people of African descent all over the world.
It was impossible for a person of Hansberry’s consciousness to ignore the
momentous social and political events of the 1950s and 1960s. This period
marked the beginning of the Cold War between the U.S. and Soviet super-
powers, a rising demand by blacks for civil rights at home, and a growing
intransigence and rebellion by colonized peoples throughout the world.
When Robeson’s passport was revoked by the State Department, Hansberry
traveled as his representative to an international peace conference in Uruguay
and met there delegates from Central and Latin America and Korea, who
were resisting the wars being fought on their soil by the U.S. government.
She became an articulate spokespersonforthesecausesandenjoyedsomething
of a celebrity status in progressive circles back home because of her association
with Robeson and her experience in Uruguay. Her activities and associations
had already earned her an FBI file, but the bureau pursued her in earnest after
her trip to the peace conference and her marriage to Robert Nemiroff, known
to the FBI for his earlier involvement with Communist party activities.
The general public did not know of these associations. And, although
Hansberry did not hide her past, she did not broadcast it either, given the
tenor of the 1950s and the red-baiting propensity of some congressmen. But
she wrote for several leftist magazines, such as New Challenge and New Foun-
dations, using her own name rather than a pseudonym like some of her
contemporaries. And the FBI continued to collect her writings and to record
her activities as it was aware of them.

Political Radicalism and Artistic Innovation 45

 When her play reached Broadway, the bureau was especially anxious to
determine whether it was a subversive work so that the agency might antic-
ipate and possibly counteract any influence and effect it might have. The
agents who reviewed the play for her FBI file concluded that it “contains no
comments of any nature about Communism but deals essentially with negro
[sic] aspirations, the problems inherent in their efforts to advancethemselves,
and varied attempts at arriving at solutions” and that “relatively few [in the
audience] appeared to dwell on the propaganda message.”9 Hansberry would
have been amused by their conclusions. Perhaps because she avoided the catch
phrases of the Left and couched her ideas in the folk idiom of African Amer-
icans and, perhaps, because certain scenes that give the play a sharper political
edge were deleted, the revolutionary import of A Raisin in the Sun eluded the
FBI.
Had the agents paid closer attention to the scenes with Asagai, the African
intellectual who romances Beneatha, they might have responded differently
to the play. A Raisin in the Sun offered important clues to the positions
Hansberry would take in Les Blancs, a play that was produced posthumously
and that focuses on the inevitability of violent revolution when discourse
fails to produce positive action. The mere presence of Asagai as an African
intellectual signals the populist thinking of Hansberry. He attends college
in the United States but plans to return to make important social and political
changes in his native Nigeria, which is still under British colonial rule.
Asagai’s speeches, as well as Beneatha’s brief tutoring of her mother (just
before Asagai’s first visit to the Younger home) about the need to liberate
the African continent from the British and the French, are also intended to
educate an audience ignorant of African history and current affairs. Contact
with her uncle, William Leo Hansberry, one of this country’s earliest scholars
of African history and the East Coast advisor and contact for Ethiopian
students, had taught Hansberry that the African was much more than the
primitive, savage exotic portrayed in American films and novels. Beneatha,
modeled on a younger Hansberry, displays the romanticism about Africa
seen in earlier writings by blacks, but she also embodies the yearning for a
future informed by a sense of identity that proudly encompasses a more
accurate knowledge of the African past. Changing her hair style to natural,
donning tribal garb, and approximating Africandancerepresentinhumorous
fashion Beneatha’s attempts to embrace her heritage and are evidence of
Hansberry poking some good-natured fun at herself and the romantic im-
pulse. But Beneatha is not to be dismissed. For all her foibles and poor
judgment in asserting her atheism in her mother’s presence, she is a lightning
rod for the family’s attitudes about Africa, and she prepares the audience for
the real revolutionary-in-the-making: Asagai.
Even more telling in A Raisin in the Sun is the advice that Asagai imparts
to Beneatha regarding the uneasy progress and personal sacrifice often
brought by change and revolution and the connection that he makes between
African and African American aspirations. His story about the nature of
change, which many critics found distracting and unnecessary (indeed, it

46 Social Protest and the Politics of Representation

was left out of the film), unites Mama’s effort to improve the family’s lot by
buying a house with the struggle by African peoples to be free of colonial
rule. At that moment, Asagai becomes the spiritual son of Mama, both
inheritor and exponent of the ancestral and human impulse for freedom, and
Mama’s dream takes on broader implications.
Ideas only hinted at in A Raisin in the Sun emerge full-blown in Les Blancs
(1972—first performed posthumously), having grown in Hansberry’s con-
sciousness for many years. Because of her contact with her uncle, William
Leo Hansberry, she had been exposed to an Africa beyond the Tarzan stories
known to most Americans. As a youth, she met young African intellectuals,
who would later fight for their countries’ independence. She had a lifelong
habit of reading avidly everything in African studies available to her, from
Basil Davidson’s Lost Cities of Africa (1959) to Jomo Kenyatta’s study of the
Kikuyu, Facing Mt. Kenya (1965). She clipped articles from newspapers on
Kenyatta and Kenya’s struggle for independence during the early 1960s, the
successful guerrilla war for independence waged by the Algerians, Katanga
whites resisting the U.N. forces, postcolonial changes in the Congo, the
extremes of wealth and poverty in Nigerian cities, the revolt of Angolans
against the Portuguese, and U.N. reports on the effects of racial discrimina-
tion on economic development in Africa.
Africa of the 1960s was on the verge of revolution. Ghana had emerged in
1957 as the first independent African nation. Kenya was in a prolonged
struggle for its liberation and, after decades of seeking land reform andhuman
rights without success under an often brutal British rule, an underground
movement had formed, which vowed violent revolution against the whites.
The arrest of Jomo Kenyatta, who opposed violence, on charges of plotting
to overthrow the British, only exacerbated the situation as violence exploded
throughout the country. Hansberry, understanding this history from the
perspective of African peoples, spoke at rallies, wrote articles, and sent letters
to U.S. editors that criticized the characterization of Africa’s independence
movements as “Mao Mao” terrorism and that renamed them freedomfighters.
Africa was not that unusual a subject for African American writers. Harold
Isaacs, in his study of black American writers and their African ancestry,
analyzed the literary relationship of five major writers—Langston Hughes,
Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, and Lorraine Hansberry—
to the continent.10 However, most looked to Africa as part of a nostalgic or
romanticized past or as an escape from the brutalities of racism in the United
States. Like her predecessors and contemporaries, Hansberry had fantasized
about a romantic African past, having spent hours as a girl daydreaming
about her origins. The late Robert Nemiroff, Hansberry’s former husband
and literary executor, noted in an essay on Les Blancs that, as she wrote in her
unfinished, semiautobiographical novel, she believed:

in her emotions she was sprung from the Southern Zulu and the Central
Pygmy, the Eastern Watusi and the treacherous slave-trading Western
Ashanti themselves. She was Kikuyu and Masai, ancient cousins of hers

Political Radicalism and Artistic Innovation 47

 had made the exquisite forged sculpture at Benin, while surely even more
ancient relatives sat upon the throne at Abu Simbel watching over the
Nile.11

Hansberry, who at the time of Isaacs’s study had not yet written Les Blancs,
also believed that African Americans might gain inspiration fortheirfreedom
fight from their African ancestors and that the future of the peoples and their
continents are linked.
Set in an African country in the midst of rebellion and resistance against
colonial rule, Les Blancs is an uncompromising drama that reveals the terri-
fying consequences of the failure of meaningful dialogue. Hansberry exposes
her audience to the tragic choices that lead to armed resistance and violent
revolution: exploitationandoppressionperpetratedbygreedandsupremacist
beliefs and fed by the crippling actions of patriarchal liberals and the com-
plicity of organized religion. While the play charts the inevitability of vio-
lence when dialogue is used only to postpone, it does not shirk from nor
romanticize the price of resistance—no matter how justified.
To speak or write about exploitation and oppression in Africa during the
1960s, when Hansberry began this play, was to court controversy and the
wrath of many critics. However, as a student of African history and politics
and as an advocate for African independence from colonial rule, she saw the
tragic scenario unfolding: Western excuses for the continuation of colonial
oppression, mounting pressure by the resistance, and the inevitable blood-
shed that would happen if the people’s will was thwarted. “Radical” may be
an appropriate label for her views when cast against the prevailing ideas acted
out by the governments of the West, but “humane” seems equally reasonable
when one rejects notions of the inferiority of Africans. To continue the virtual
enslavement of these people was unconscionable to Hansberry.
The central character of the play is Tshembe Matoseh, who has returned
home for his father’s funeral and finds the Africans in violent, though not yet
open, rebellion against the colonists. Not unlike the Mao Mao movement in
the 1960s, the people of Tshembe’s tribe are waging silent, deadly warfare
against the settlers, killing families in the dead of night. The Africans have
come to this point only after many years of thwarted efforts to gain human
and civil rights through peaceful means. Upon his arrival, Tshembe is im-
mediately confronted with the expectation of his tribal associates to join the
resistance. He, however, has grown cynical and weary of the movement and
prefers to quickly dispense with his familial duties and return to his English
wife and son in London. But Tshembe is swept up by his own emotions, by
the revelation that his father was a leader in the resistance, and by an inten-
sifying series of events, which propel him to the wrenching decision to join
and help to lead the growing revolution.
Several characters represent the face of oppression. One of the most com-
pelling, the Reverend Torvald Neilsen, never appears on stage, but his
presence is felt as the founder of the mission where much of the play takes
place. Hansberry modeled this character on Albert Schweitzer, winner of the

48 Social Protest and the Politics of Representation

Nobel Peace Prize in 1952 for his work as a medical missionary in the Gabon
territory of West Africa. Greatly admired for bringing “civilization” to “the
dark continent” and establishing a hospital in the jungles of Lambarene,
Schweitzer was also a Renaissance man—holder of doctoral degrees in the-
ology, philosophy, and medicine; author of a number of important religious
texts; and principal of Strasbourg Theological College beforetheageofthirty.
During his lifetime, he was recognized as one of the world’s foremost au-
thorities on organ architecture, as an eminent Bach scholar, andasacelebrated
interpreter of Bach’s organ music.
Having studied John Gunther’s Inside Africa and various articles on
Schweitzer, Hansberry was also aware that his attitudes toward the Africans
he had chosen to help was typical of the West: highly paternal. Gunther,
who describes his visit to Lambarene, carefully balances Schweitzer’s rever-
ence for life and personal sacrifice (living in an African jungle) against his
authoritarianism and colonialist attitudes toward Africans. In a chapter on
that visit, he captures in Schweitzer’s words his beliefs about the African:
The Negro is a child, and with children nothing can be done without the
use of authority. We must, therefore, so arrange the circumstances of daily
life that my natural authority can find expression. With regard to the
Negroes, then, I have coined the formula: “I am your brother, it is true,
but your elder brother.”12
According to Gunther, Schweitzer loved the Africans only in the abstract.
“Heseems to be fonderoftheanimalsinLambarenethanthehumanbeings.”13
Hansberry’s use of Schweitzer as the source for the Reverend Neilsen allowed
her to unmask the seemingly benevolent and benign face of colonialism and
to reveal its despotic and cruel visage. The choice was risky, given the
veneration accorded Schweitzer in many parts of the Western world.
Much of Hansberry’sportrayalofthemissionisbasedonGunther’saccount.
Gunther reported, “No bush hospital can be tidy, any more than can a
farmyard in South Carolina. There will always be things out of place, and
innocent litter on the ground. But Schweitzer’s hospital was, I thought, the
most unkempt place of its kind I saw in all Africa.”14 In the play, Charlie
Morris, a white journalist who has just arrived at the mission in order to write
an article praising Neilsen, reveres the doctor and his work. When Morris
justifies the unsanitary, primitiveconditionofthehospitalwiththeargument
he has heard—that Africans would not come for treatment if it were differ-
ent—Willy DeKoven, one of the doctors who works at the mission hospital,
wryly comments: “One of the first things that the new African nations have
done is to set up modern hospitals when they can. The Africans go to them
so freely that they are severely overcrowded.”15
Schweitzer’s recorded attitudes support Hansberry’s depiction of the pa-
ternalistic, though seemingly benign oppression. In the play, Neilsen dis-
misses the tribal leaders as children when they bring a petition for a new
constitution that would permit Africans to sit in the legislature in proportion
to their numbers. “Dear children,” he smiles and says, “Go home to your huts

Political Radicalism and Artistic Innovation 49

before you make me angry. Independence indeed!”16 The brutal consequences
of this attitude are played out through the character of Major Rice, a cruel
settler who commands the local police force and who raped Tshembe’s
mother. The child of that assault, Eric, has become an alienated, lonely young
man seeking love through a homosexual relationship. Through Charlie Mor-
ris, the American journalist who constantly reveals his ignorance of African
affairs, Hansberry captures the naivete of the supposedly well informed
American. Morris does not realize at first the complicity of his country in
colonialism (it is U.S. or U.S.–made bombers and weaponry that defend the
forces of oppression from the resistance at the end of the play). When military
troops are housed at the mission at the insistence of the overtly racist Major
Rice, the benevolent, violent, and naive faces of the oppressors become one.
Madame Neilsen, wife of the reverend, stands in stark contrast to these
multiple expressions of oppression. Physically blind, she foreseesnevertheless
the impending conflagration and, as Tshembe’s surrogate mother and
teacher, urges him to become a warrior for his people.
Hansberry reserved some of her most piercing criticism for established
religion and its complicity with the forces of repression. As a child in Chicago,
Hansberry had seen photographs of the pope blessing Mussolini’s troops as
they set forth to attack Abyssinia. The military action was much criticized
at the family dinner table and among blacks in her home town. In the play,
when Tshembe discovers that Abioseh, his brother, is a novice in the Catholic
church and soon to be a priest, he excoriates him and the role of the church
in the colonization of Africans, calling Christianity only “another cult—
which has kept the watchfires of our oppressors for three centuries!”17 The
betrayal of the church is enacted in the play through Abioseh, who turns
informer and exposes Peter/Ntali, a leader of the resistance, who is then shot
on the spot.
Undoubtedly, one of the most radical aspects of this play is the position
that it takes on violent revolution. Some critics called it “propaganda” while
others asserted that it “advocated genocide of non-blacks as a solution to the
raceproblem.”18 It would havebeenquiteeasytoreducetheissueofrevolution
to a black-white issue, but Hansberry saw deeper. And she attempted and
achieved something much more difficult in Les Blancs: to chart the agonizing
journey that brings a people to the point of violent rebellion. Hansberry
remembered that the turning point in the South African struggle came with
the Sharpeville Massacre in 1960, an action that she protested along with
many others at the United Nations. In the play, there is no joy in Tshembe
when he finally takes up arms against the colonialists. He has killed his
brother, who betrayed their people, and the first shots fired at the mission
have taken the life of his surrogate mother, Madame Neilsen. The hyena-like
howl that pours forth from Tshembe as he holds her limp body in his arms is
a cry of pure agony at the tragedy of human waste that has and is about to
occur. Among the innocent and guilty are black and white; both will die in
this struggle. The Africans in this story have chosen armed rebellion reluc-
tantly and slowly. Ironically, the actions of Abioseh echo the warning from

50 Social Protest and the Politics of Representation

Asagai in A Raisin in the Sun (as well as that of Hansberry) that African
“winners” in the end will not guarantee peace and freedom, but the struggle
for independence and democratic freedoms for the masses is likely to continue
even as petty toadies of empire take over. The ideas in Les Blancs are a far cry
from the simplistic interpretations claimed by some of its early critics.
Artistically, Hansberry faced the challenge of depicting the visceral nature
of Tshembe’s choice, which goes beyond logic and rationality, while com-
municating the often subtle and indirect role that women play in freedom
struggles. A woman whose feminism was sharpened and supported by her
reading of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1947, French; 1953, English),
Hansberry was well aware of the cultural constraints placed on the depiction
of women and sought various ways to overcome these limitations in her
dramaturgy. She used acleverstrategytocommunicatethecompellingnature
of Tshembe’s final choice and to incorporate the powerful, though often
hidden, influence of women in political affairs, whilepresentingthesematters
to a Western audience for whom women’s roles (and black women, in partic-
ular) were primarily servile.
Typically, Hansberry looked to the classics—specifically, Shakespeare—
for a form grand enough to encompass the monumental questions raised in
this play and to give her characters and their dilemmas heroic stature. But
the classical model was built on male protagonists or individuals of great
wealth or power, whose actions affected the state or the lives of many people.
Hansberry’s desire to use this form for the ordinary human being posed
structural problems for her writing with which she would struggle through-
out her life. In her early drafts, for example, she had two major characters,
Candace and Tshembe, returning home to their father’s funeral. The two
became one male character, Tshembe, prompting some writers to question
whether Hansberry censored her feminist self or was unduly influenced by
her husband, Robert Nemiroff. The answer, however, may lie more with the
limitations of the form than with her sensibilities.
In fact, Hansberry used a very innovative device to overcome these restric-
tions in Les Blancs: the African woman warrior. This woman, who appears as
a warrior-dancer, is the only woman of African descent in the play (not
counting villagers, who may be added in the background). She can be seen
only by Tshembe and appears to him twice, carrying a spear and eventually
thrusting it into his hand. She represents the collective history of African
people and depicts through movement their slaughter and enslavement.19
She never speaks words, but her gestures communicate volumes. She has
appeared to Tshembe before; wherever he goes, he cannot escape her: the
streets of London, the subways of New York. A possessed Tshembe confesses,
“And whenever I cursed her or sought to throw her off . . . I ended up that
same night in her arms!”20 Her power over him is hypnotic and passionate.
When Charlie questions why Tshembe is behaving so strangely (since he
cannot see the warrior-dancer), Tshembe cries out, “Who! Who! When you
knew her you called her Joan of Arc! Queen Esther! La Passionara!”21 With
this last name, Hansberry references the Spanish Civil War and Dolores

Political Radicalism and Artistic Innovation 51

Ibarruri, known as La Passionara, whose words not only galvanized the
imagination of the republican resistance but who epitomized the spirit of
women throughout Spain. In his book on the Spanish Civil War, Richard
Kisch describes her:
She was then a tall dark woman with large eyes set deep under heavy black
eyebrows. She radiated a burning intensity which was reflected in her gift
of language. . . . La Passionara, like other mass leaders who were making
a name forthemselves as naturalsoldiers . . . knewhowtoseizethemoment
of action when it came.22
Unlike La Passionara, Hansberry’s woman warrior does not speak, but she
draws on an aesthetic more common to African performance in which the
gesture has equal if not greater meaning than the word. In that sense, the
female figure exhibits more strength than Tshembe, the major character, in
that she has power over him. It may seem like a risky strategy in a play so
filled with eloquent language and rhetoric, but the dancer’s “silence”actually
emphasizes the emptiness of words.
Tshembe and Charlie, two men representing the East and the West, the
developing and the developed country, have talked and talked and talked,
sparring often, showing respect for each other at times. But just as the talks
on the governmental level prove fruitless, so does the conversation between
Tshembe and Charlie as the revolution overtakes them all. Words do not
resolve the situation. Finally, action speaks—not in words but in violent,
revolutionary events. Had Hansberry retained Candace as a major, realistic
character, she would have been bound by words and the limitations of her
place as a woman. Had she rebelled against her place and assumed a leadership
role, her unusual position (at least in Western eyes) might have distracted
ultimately from the focus of the play. When the silent dancer is pitched
against the backdrop of Hansberry’s command of the word, the intentionality
and innovativeness of this figure becomes quite clear.
It is tempting to discuss this character primarily in the context of the
limited roles of women of the 1950s and the genius of creating in a woman
power that encompasses intellect, artistry, and emotion. While that argu-
ment is useful in understanding perhaps why Hansberry uses only onewoman
of African descent, it may obscure the real genius of this choice. In an
important sense, the dancer is more than woman—she embodies the spirit
of a great continent, of a people, and is both man and woman. In the play,
she also embodies the spirit of Tshembe’s father, who was a leader in the
resistance. Visually, she exhibits the movement and voluptuousness attrib-
uted to women while, at the same time, she carries a spear and calls Tshembe
to the warrior role most associated with men. The dancer-warrior, like all of
Hansberry’s characters in this remarkable play, is multilayered and complex.
It is also worth noting that the dancer pushes the boundaries of realism but
is credible within the play’s context because she can be seen as an extension
of Tshembe’s consciousness.

52 Social Protest and the Politics of Representation

Figure 2.2 Tshembe (Derrick Lee Weedon) contends with the spirit of his
homeland in the form of The Dancer (Melany Bell) in the Oregon Shakespeare
Festival’s 1998 production of Hansberry’s Les Blancs in the Angus Bowmer
Theatre. Directed by Timothy Bond, scenic design by Richard L. Hay, costume
design by Helen Qizhi Huang, lighting design by Dawn Chiang. Photo by David
Cooper.

Eric, Tshembe’s younger brother, represents another facet of Hansberry’s

radical views. Hansberry, who was a lesbian, believed that homosexuals may
comprise the last oppressed minority. She condemned homophobia both in
essays and letters. Eric is in a homosexual relationship with Dr. Willy
DeKoven. When Tshembe angrily asks if Eric is “his playtime little white
hunter,” a lonely Eric responds that DeKoven listens to him, cares for him,
spends time with him, while his brothers have been away. Eric is the product

Political Radicalism and Artistic Innovation 53

of Major Rice’s rape of his mother, so he was unable to seek solace with his
brothers’ father. Alienated from the familial relationships that have brought
Tshembe back, Eric is adrift—and his homosexuality alienates him even
more from the others at the mission.
When armed warfare breaks out, however, Eric is the first of his brothers
to join the native rebellion, and he takes a prominent role in the fight. While
Eric is not the focal point of the play, his inclusion in the freedom struggle
is a small footnote that reinforces Hansberry’s progressive views.
The popularity and success of recent productions of Les Blancs in Oregon
(see figure 2.2) and Baltimore, along with anniversary productions of ARaisin
in the Sun in both university and professional theaters confirm the compelling
nature of the plays and Hansberry’s ideas. Several decades after her death, the
human issues of freedom, equality, and independence; their relevance to
ethnicity, color, gender, class, sexuality, and sexual orientation; and the
artistic tools used to represent these issues in provocative and persuasive
forms remain challenges for the field of theater. Hansberry believed in the
social and political import of art, and she demonstrated her commitment to
this principle by crossing sacrosanct boundaries and taking intellectual and
artistic risks.

notes

1. Amiri Baraka, “A Critical Reevaluation: A Raisin in the Sun’s Enduring Pas-

sion,” in Lorraine Hansberry, “A Raisin in the Sun” and “The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s
Window” (New York: Vintage, 1995), 19.
2. Baraka 19.
3. Baraka 19.
4. Baraka 19–20.
5. Baraka 20.
6. Lorraine Hansberry, “Willy Loman, Walter Younger, and He Who MustLive,”
Village Voice (12 Aug. 1959): 7.
7. Hansberry, “Willy Loman,” 7.
8. Lorraine Hansberry, “A Raisin in the Sun”: The Unfilmed Original Screenplay(New
York: Plume, 1992), 132–134.
9. Lorraine Hansberry File, 100–44090–8 (Philadelphia: Federal Bureau of In-
vestigation, Feb. 5, 1959), 1.
10. Harold R. Isaacs, “Five Writers and Their African Ancestors,” in Part I,Phylon
21.3 (1960): 243–265; Part II, Phylon 21.4 (1960): 317–336.
11. Robert Nemiroff, “A Critical Background,” in Lorraine Hansberry, “Les
Blancs”: The Collected Last Plays (New York: Vintage, 1994), 27.
12. John Gunther, Inside Africa (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1955), 733.
13. Gunther 714.
14. Gunther 714.
15. Hansberry, Les Blancs, 113.
16. Hansberry, Les Blancs, 115.
17. Hansberry, Les Blancs, 61–62.

54 Social Protest and the Politics of Representation

18. Hansberry, Les Blancs, 133–134.
19. Hansberry, Les Blancs, 81.
20. Hansberry, Les Blancs, 80.
21. Hansberry, Les Blancs, 81.
22. Richard Kisch, They Shall Not Pass (London: Wayland, 1974), 103–104.

Political Radicalism and Artistic Innovation 55

 3

The Black Arts Movement

Performance, Neo-Orality, and the
Destruction of the “White Thing”

‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘
mike sell

It is worth recalling that a cofounder of the Black Panther Party for Self-
Defense—Bobby Seale—was at one time an actor in a San Francisco theater
troupe run by an up-and-coming playwright and director named Ed Bullins.
It is worth recalling because the relationships among institutions, commu-
nities, and the peculiar ontologies and epistemologies of performance are
foundational dynamics of both the Black Power and Black Arts movements.
Both movements devised Black Nationalist strategies to effectively respond
to the complications of race politics by the peculiar characteristics of the
American political scene in the 1960s, a scene dominated by a tendentiously
racist mass media, which seemed intent on transforming the social and civil
turmoil of the era into a multimedia spectacle.1 However, significant differ-
ences exist between the performance politics of the two movements. While
the Panthers attempted to seduce and exploit the media (and wealthyliberals)
by way of outrageous, blatant displays of hypermasculine “Blackness,” the
Black Arts Movement sought to evade white media, tolerant liberal wealth,
and Euro-American aesthetic traditions by taking their revolutionary, Af-
rocentric cultural program to historically African American colleges and
urban, geographically distinct, African American communities.2 These very
different negotiations of what Guy Debord calls the “society of thespectacle”3
were linked to very different understandings of the relationship between
political radicalism and artistic radicalism. While the Panthers utilized
alliances with radical and liberal communities of whites in pragmatic fashion
and basically avoided aesthetic questions, members of the Black Arts Move-
ment generally viewed such alliances as profoundly hazardous to their racial
separatist strategy and spent much time articulating an Afrocentric “critical
metaphysics,” a nonobjective, ethically oriented mode of artistic production
and reception. And while the Panthers saw the benefits of art primarily as a

56
means to an end (i.e., fundraising), Black Artists viewed art—as they viewed
African Americans themselves—as both the means and the end of revolution.

Roots, Rhythm, and Critical Metaphysics

Put schematically, the Black Arts Movement sought “to link, in a highly
conscious manner, art and politics in order to assist in the liberation of Black
people.”4 This was how Larry Neal explained the movement and its critical
aesthetic methods to readers of Ebony magazine back in the long, hot summer
of 1969. The fact that Ebony had devoted an entire issue to black art stands
as something of an anomaly: both a high-water mark of the movement’s
efforts to popularize its cultural program at the grassroots level and a rare
liaison with capitalist (better said, black capitalist)media.Suchrevolutionary
writings and reports in an ostensibly liberal, popular, publication such as
Ebony speak eloquently to the ways in which a theory and practice of cultural
empowerment cultivated by a small, elite coalition of college-educated,
radical, African American intellectuals struck a sympathetic chord with a
relatively large segment of African American society. As Neal made clear in
his Ebony essay, Black Art was nothing if it did not strive for “intimacy with
the people.”5 Black Art was a dynamism of representation and revolution, of
vanguardist experiment and the “souls of Black folk.”6
The efforts to dynamically interweave organizational development, polit-
ical activism, and racially exclusive cultural production by this revolutionary
separatist movement were justified by a philosophical project that aimed to
create a critical metaphysics that would help redefine and revive the ontolog-
ical, epistemological, and metaphysical bases of African American society,
particularly as they related to the relationship between the Black artist and
his (and it was a generally male and occasionally proprietary “his”) people.
The primary targets of this critical metaphysics were the art object and the
literary text, both viewed as linchpins of a Western power rooted in colonial
domination of cultural production. The commodity-oriented tendencies of
colonized cultural production were particularly galling toblackintellectuals;
thus, a primary target of the Black Arts Movement was not simply “con-
sciousness” but the production and circulation of things. The “white thing”
often cited by Black Arts critics and artists was quite literally that—a me-
nagerie of commodities.7 But it was also a cultural ethos, which justified
alienation in terms of the financial profit to be gained by the buying and
selling of people-as-things. As surely as commodities were destroyed during
the uprisings in Watts and Detroit, this ethos wasdestroyedbythetheoretical
and dramatic works of the movement. Neal and his colleagues from the
Muntu reading/performance group of North Philadelphia—a pivotal cell in
the production of a critical metaphysics at the service of a grassroots Black
Nationalist program—argued that objects and texts were not valuable in
and of themselves but merely as material components of a much broader
cultural, political, and economic renaissance. They were art “merely inciden-

The Black Arts Movement 57

tally,” since real value was to be found in the performances, artists, and
communities that surrounded the object and text.8
The paradox of their attack on text and object is that, while Black theorists,
poets, playwrights, and performers generated an avant-garde culture of un-
precedented acuity and popularity, the very success of their project has in
many ways guaranteed their invisibility within a fundamentally textual
literary and theater history. If, as Henry Louis Gates, Jr., has recently argued,
the Black Arts Movement was the shortest and least successful AfricanAmer-
ican literary renaissance,9 then I would assert that that is because the move-
ment attempted to displace the notions of value, permanence, and signifi-
cance, which ratify much of the academic establishment’s senseofliterariness,
historicity, and success. As James Stewart, also of Muntu, argued:
In our movement toward the future, “ineptitude” and “unfitness” will be
an aspect of what we do. These are the words of the established order—the
middle-classvaluejudgments.We mustturnthesevaluesinonthemselves.
Turn them inside out and make ineptitude and unfitness desirable, even
mandatory. We must even, ultimately, be estranged from the dominant
culture. This estrangement must be nurtured in order to generate and
energize our black artists. This means that he cannot be “successful” in any
sense that has meaning in white critical evaluations. Nor can his work ever
be called “good” in any context or meaning that could make sense to that
traditional critique.10
Stewart’s essay strikes a significant note of caution against how scholars
represent the Black Arts Movement. We are implicated in many of the
institutions and attitudes against which it struggled. The movement’s ex-
ploitation of performance and theater (1) explicitly attacked the materialism
of American culture, including its celebration of texts, especially novels, as
the epitome of cultural sophistication; (2) enabled a recreation and revision
of pretextual, orally based West African aesthetic and ethical systems rup-
tured during the Middle Passage; and (3) complemented the tactical and
strategic needs of organizational efforts by radical intellectuals in urban
ghettos and (4) valorized a number of already existing African American
cultural forms such as music, oral performance modes, food, clothing and so
on. As a result, the movement fits uneasily in the canons of Euro-American
culture and the relatively stable institutions of literary criticism and peda-
gogy.
If the artists and audiences of the Black Arts Movement discovered the soul
of Black liberation in the deconstruction and partial rejection of the art object
and the literary text, theyalsodiscoveredthatsuch“soul”isacutelyvulnerable
to economic and institutional backlash. Attempting to outmaneuver the
institutional and technological power of the white thing, Black artists for-
mulated a theory of culture and communication that, in some sense, guar-
anteed forgetting when their communities were disrupted in the early ’70s
and ’80s. Musician and critic Tam Fiofori captured this paradox in a profile
of Sun Ra in 1967: “Memory, like sentiment or emotion, can be replaced,

58 Social Protest and the Politics of Representation

diverted, or it can simply fade away.”11 While the movement founded its
critique upon performance in order to meet the complex demands of a
revolutionary cultural nationalist movement in the contextofmass-mediated
(or “spectacular”) capitalism, its demise was due to demands placed upon it,
which performance practices could only inadequately address, namely, the
demands of institutional permanence, mass communication, and real estate.
The origins of the Black Arts Movement are instructional in this regard,
for they reveal the way it is shaped by this complex dynamic of organization,
performance, and culturalproduction.Suchoriginsaremosteffectivelytraced
to a number of small, distinctively local communities of poets and intellec-
tuals, which gathered in Philadelphia, New York, and Oakland in the middle
years of the 1960s. Thesegroups pursued adiverserangeofprojects,including
research into African and African American folk, popular, and high cultures;
readings of the most significant political, cultural, and aesthetic theories of
their day (articulating what we would now call “cultural studies” almost a
decade ahead of the ground-breaking work of the Birmingham School);
concrete experimentation with poetic form; self-criticism; and consciousness
raising. Their sympathies, in contrast to most of the older African American
middle class, were not with Martin Luther King, Jr., or the Negro church
establishment from and for which he spoke. Liberator magazine, one of the
key forums for Black Arts Movement theory, was stridently anti-King. Their
sympathies fell to Patrice Lumumba, Fidel Castro, Ernesto “Che” Guevara,
and (always and essentially) Malcolm X.
The more significant of these reading circles include the Umbra Poets
Workshop, a group of young artists that met weekly on New York’s Lower
East Side from 1962 to 1965, published a short-lived poetry journal, and
gave readings just around the block from the famed Five Spot jazz club.12
The Bay Area saw a tenuously unified legal study, theater, and activist
collective gather under the banner of Black House. And, in North Philadel-
phia, there gathered what I believe was the intellectual community most
responsible for granting the Black Arts Movement lasting significance in
African American theater and performance history: the Muntu reading
group, a study circle of jazz musicians, poets, and critics that included Neal,
Stewart, and Charles Fuller.13 That these groups were communal gatherings
should not be overlooked by the historian; indeed, in the case of the Muntu
group, relationships had lasted since childhood.14 These groups (and there
were others in Detroit, New Orleans, Chicago,LosAngeles,andmanyAfrican
American colleges) functioned as crucial support networks, valuable sources
of criticism, and, most important (according to Tom Dent, a member of
Umbra and later cofounder of Blkartsouth), as performative contexts that
afforded a “level of communication with kindred spirits that wasn’t phony
or superficial.”15
While these small performance communities supplied potent theoretical
fuel for the articulation of a “Black Aesthetic,” the ignition point of the
institutional movement is best sited at the founding of the Black Arts Rep-
ertory Theater/School (BART/S) on 30 April 1965. BART/S was organized

The Black Arts Movement 59

by the increasingly ex-Beat poet LeRoi Jones with the financial aid of the
Harlem Youth Project (HARYOU-ACT, upon whose board African Amer-
ican actor and activist Roger Furman served); the practical aid of former
Umbra members Rolland Snellings (a.k.a. Askia M. Touré), Albert Haynes,
and William and Charles Patterson; and the ideological aid of the editorial
board of Liberator magazine, which included the elder statesman Harold
Cruse and the prodigious young critic and folklorist Larry Neal. The fund-
raising brochure for BART/S tells us that “as its name indicates, [the BART/
S] will be a repertory theater in Harlem, as well as a school. As a school it will
set up and continue to provide instruction, both practical and theoretical, in
all new areas of the dramatic arts.”16
For purposes of generating financial support, Jones held his ideological
cards fairly close to his chest; in reality, the “dramatic arts” that his school
was exploring went far beyond the practice and theory of the putatively
“phony” Anglo-Jewish dominated mainstream theater. As Neal described
the opening of BART/S, “The idea behind . . . this event . . . is to open a
dialogue between the artist and his people, rather than between the artist
and the dominant white society which is responsible for his alienation in the
first place.”17 As it became clear near the end of the movement’s “heroic
phase” (1965–1972),18 this dialogue was tacitly revolutionary, a volatile,
often contradictory dynamism of space, race, and representation.
Jones and his colleagues were attempting to create an American version of
the decolonization movements that had swept through Africa, CentralAmer-
ica, and Southeast Asia during the ’50s and ’60s, movements whose practical,
conceptual, and decidedly performative force Jones first recognized during
his visit to Cuba in 1960. Indeed, such an embodiment was necessarily a
performative one, for around the time Jones was assembling staff and capital
for BART/S, he was writing his seminal essay “The Revolutionary Theatre,”
an essay proclaiming that the theater:
must expose! Show up the insides of these humans, look into Black skulls.
White men will cower before this theatre because it hates them. Because
they themselves have been trained to hate. . . . Even as Artaud designed
The Conquest of Mexico, so we must design The Conquest of White Eye, and
show the missionaries and wiggly Liberals dying under blasts of concrete.
For sound effects, wild screams of joy, from all the peoples of the world.19
Combining a revolutionary and racially separatist nationalism with a polit-
icized, fundamentally Artaudian theory of performance allowed Jones, who
would soon change his name to Amiri Baraka, to articulate a critical meta-
physics that blended avant-garde experiment, postcolonial politics, and Af-
rican and African American cultural traditions. His hypothetical drama, The
Conquest of White Eye, perfectly embodied this volatile convergence. Riffing
off the “first spectacle of theTheatreof Cruelty,”20 acidlypunningon“whitey”
and “white eye,” Jones’s conceptual drama interwove the shock of agit-prop,
the antivisual bias of Artaud,andthepopulismofstreetfestival.Nevertheless,
we should be aware of the contradictions that plague his eclectic form of

60 Social Protest and the Politics of Representation

revolutionary performance. As explosive as it is, it fails to account for the
racist tendencies of the European avant-garde, which supplied someofJones’s
fundamental ideas about the nature and function of political theater. Thus,
while Baraka’s essay energized the Black Arts, it also modeled a profoundly
contradictory relationship to the tradition of avant-gardism.

“Real Estatic” and the Limits of Performance

For the authorities, the metaphysical niceties of BART/S were not nearly as
distressing as its shockingly frank (and decidedly theatrical) approach to the
“race problem.” Whether BART/S really embodied Jones’s theoretical prin-
ciples or managed to escape the contradictions inherent in the idea of a “Black
avant-garde” is moot. Of greater significance is the fact that angry, honest
art was being brought to working-class African Americans via street-corner
productions of plays such as Dutchman, poetry readings, and impromptu
performances by cutting-edge jazzmen such as Albert Ayler, Sun Ra, Ornette
Coleman, and John Coltrane. Not surprisingly, BART/S lost its funding
within the year as a federal investigation into alleged “mismanagement” of
antipoverty funds was initiated, purportedly by liberal whites and African
Americans (a constant target of Jones’s invective) out to“discreditanddestroy
all the militant and progressive forces in Harlem.”21 The demise of the
institution was also catalyzed by the intense infighting cultivatedbyWilliam
Patterson. As Jone described it many years later, “Even while we did our
heroic work of bringing the art, the newest strongest boldest hippest most
avant of the swift dark shit to the streets, you could look up at that building
and swear it was in flames.” 22 These flames were certainly fanned by Jones’s
very public “kill-Charlie” performances for the New York media establish-
ment. Essentially “cruel,” the hyperbolically violent rhetoric of his
movement-era poetry and his public appearances continues to obscure the
more nuanced, if no less revolutionary, theoretical work he and his colleagues
pursued behind the scenes of the racist society of the spectacle and beyond
the gaze of white media.
The death of BART/S was not the last time that the best lessons of Black
Art would be found in thefailureanddisappearanceofexemplaryinstitutions.
As Jones put it, “What was real survived the flame.”23 In fact, such failure
dovetailed with the political, economic, and cultural implications of a Black
Aesthetic intent on transformation rather than conservation, on spirit rather
than object. One immediate and well-known result of this founding/disap-
pearance was the rejuvenation of the Oakland, California, collective Black
Arts/West, now called Black House. Black House served briefly as both the
headquarters for the nascent Panther party and as a center for community
performances of community-created theater, poetry, and music. It hosted a
potent convergence of Black politics and performance. Among its founders
were Eldridge Cleaver (who later engineered the expulsion of the Black
Artists), Duncan Barber, Jr., Hillery X Broadus, Carl Boissiere, Ed Bullins

The Black Arts Movement 61

(who would be named Minister of Culture for the Panthers after his play In
the Wine Time met with critical success in New York), and Marvin X. The
astonishing promise of Black House was short-lived, however, as Cleaver-
instigated clashes over the desirability of an alliance with white radicals and,
perhaps more significantly, over the validity of radical aesthetics caused a
violent rift between the Black Artists and the more pragmatic Panthers.
The death of Black House—along with Bullins’s dissatisfaction with the
Bay Area’s theater scene—resulted in yet another significant institutional
event, for in 1967 Bullins was invited by Robert Macbeth to come to Harlem
for a tenure as playwright-in-residence of the New Lafayette Players. With
the Players (lacking a theater at the time of his arrival in Harlem and only
six years away from death by economic asphyxiation), Bullins cemented his
fame as a playwright, editor, and theorist, assembling the famed The Drama
Review special issue on Black theater, running the highly influential journal
Black Theatre, and writing some of his most important plays to date.
However, the impact of BART/S went well beyond these often-invoked
institutions. The impact was felt not merely in California and New York but
in those performance arenas that rarely make it into academic theater histo-
ries: community colleges, amateur groups, and regional professional theaters
away from the major urban and cultural centers of the U.S. The pumping
black heart of BART/S found sympathetic rhythms throughout the country,
resulting in a vast number of short-lived (and some long-lived) cooperative
community theaters, such as Black Arts/West of Seattle,StudioWattsWork-
shop of Los Angeles, the Dashiki Project Theatre of New Orleans, the Bed-
Sty Street Academy Workshop in Brooklyn, Black House of Philadelphia,
Concept East of Detroit (site of a memorable production of Baraka’s Slave
Ship), and the Yard Theatre of Kingston, Jamaica. Most of these theaters were
run on little more than enthusiasm and spare parts, and their place in our
collective memory is vague. In a sense, this historical invisibility was in-
tended; the desire to escape a certain philosophical, aesthetic, historiograph-
ical, and critical tradition was at the heart of the movement’s greatest con-
ceptual and practical triumph.
Larry Neal, for one, continually advised the Black community to “swim
on.” Like the African American archetype Shine, the Black community
needed to find its own “thing” (“Said the Captain: ‘Shine, Shine, save poor
me. I’ll give you more money than a nigger ever see.’ Said Shine to the
Captain: ‘Money is good on land and on sea, but the money on land is the
money for me.’ And Shine swam on.”24). Again, the issue and the dilemma
were autonomy: of institutions, of aesthetics, and of metaphysics. As Harold
Cruse carefully demonstrated in his opus, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual,25
unless the Black liberation movement was accompanied by “an ideological
and organizational approach to . . . the administration, the organization, the
functioning, and the social purpose of the entire American apparatus of
cultural communication,” that movement was bound to fail.26 Cruse’s com-
ments identify a crucial oversight of the Black Arts Movement, for it was the
lack of property ownership that helped doom the movement. As Wahneema

62 Social Protest and the Politics of Representation

Lubiano has pointed out, lacking a real “nation” in some sense forced Black
radicals into the “cultural solution.”27 Lacking real estate, an ideologically
unified model of community, and a sure foothold in the middle-class African
American community, the most advanced segments of the Black Arts Move-
ment chose the transient, situational, performative forms of avant-garde
poetry and theater to forward their goals. Lacking real territory, they pursued
an essentially idealist philosophy; however, this idealism was grounded in
the concrete, temporary spaces of public performance.

Theater/Culture/Revolution
What constituted “cultural revolution” for these artists and activists? And
what is the relationship of theater to the racially separatist revolution they
sought? The answer is to be found in the theater cooperatives modeled after
BART/S. The Black Arts Movement was, after all, a performance movement
as much as anything else, a movement that deemed the novel, “a passive form
. . . not conducive to the kind of social engagement that Black America
requires at this time.”28 Poetry, too, was to be transformed by revolutionary
signification and tactical necessity. That is to say, it was to be performed, the
text utilized as a kind of score. Like many, Neal viewed soul musician James
Brown as a model performer, at once popular, conscious, and infectiously
activist:
The poet must become a performer, the way James Brown is a performer—
loud, gaudy, racy. He must take his work where his people are. . . .
He must learn to embellish the context in which the work is executed;
and where possible, link the work to all usable aspects of the music. For
the context of the work is as important as the work itself. Poets must learn
to sing.29
For Charles Fuller (Muntu member, Neal’s close friend, and eventual winner
of the Pulitzer Prize for A Soldier’s Play [1981]), autonomy could only be
attained by way of a complete and mutual transformation of community and
artist. As he writes, “Each change must of necessity produce a change in the
Black writer who addresses his community.”30
While the concepts and practices of the movement would be refined and
resited in order to adequately comprehend the political, economic, and cul-
tural differences among African American communities, the basic urge be-
hind its manifestations remained the same: to formulate a theory and practice
of Afro-centric autonomy. This necessitated an emphatically theatrical ap-
proach to the interrelated questions of criticism and power. The critic could
no longer be disengaged from the community. The ivory tower was also a
white thing. Criticism is a power granted by the people to the critic, whether
in direct form (as in the gathering of people in the presence of a figure of
critical authority) or in indirect (as in the funding of critics through state
and private institutions supported by corporate philanthropy and use fees).

The Black Arts Movement 63

This is one reason why, in “The Revolutionary Theatre,” Jones explicitly
invokes Wittgenstein in order to ground his assertion that “ethics and aes-
thetics are one.”31 To Jones—an underestimated contributor to our growing
understanding of the roles that culture and performance play in domination
and liberation—aesthetics and oppression were inseparable. Utilizing a
Wittgensteinean logic the larger implications of which might have shocked
Wittgenstein, Jones asserts that escape fromoppressiondemandsthedestruc-
tion of an entire aesthetic tradition: the massive edifice known as “Western
philosophy.” In the revolutionary theater described by Jones, race politics,
critical metaphysics, and theatricality are coaxed into a realm where action,
not merely contemplation, is the litmus of artistic success. As he stated:
The liberal white man’s objection to the theatre of the revolution (if he is
“hip” enough) will be on aesthetic grounds [among these, it should be
noted, are issues of “success” and “longevity”]. . . . Americans will hate
the Revolutionary Theatre because it will be out to destroy them and
whatever they believe is real.32
If Jones’s theater showed victims and reminded its viewers that “they [the
viewers] are the brothers of victims, and that they themselves are victims if
they are blood brothers,”33 it was also the place where steely resolution and a
profoundly critical aesthetics took root. As Baraka concluded, “Not history,
not memory, not sad sentimental groping for a warmth in our despair” will
create the revolutionary culture.34
If not history, memory, nor sentimental groping, then why theater, which
seems to specialize in exactly those things? It is the great paradox of the Black
Arts Movement that it embraced as a tool precisely that which it most
radically and thoroughly criticized: the imposed theatricality of African
American life. Forced to perform in both figurative and literal senses, African
Americans have always been (if inconsistently and never wholly) under the
white gaze and by the white clock. Even its revolutionaries kowtowed ulti-
mately to television—witness the spectacular actions of the Panthers.
The choice of performance was mostly the result of economics, but it was
also a component of the anti-commodity project. Black artists were generally
distressed by the bourgeois theater’s encrypted historicism, its particular use
of memory and writing, its tendency to resolve social issues in individualistic
terms, and (in the era after World War II) its marginalization by television.35
But they were energized and empowered by the theater’s capacity to shape
time and space in contextually potent situations. However, put at risk by
this thorough going critique of Western aesthetics and space-time concepts
were certainty and permanence; for the theater challenges the collective
capacity to define and delimit the real and the illusory, the essential and the
transient. Along with the destructive capacity of the theater so acidly iden-
tified by Baraka came a more difficult search for the performative and insti-
tutional grounds upon which a distinctly black body and community could
be cultivated without mortgaging that body and community to Western
materialism and the contradictions of black vanguardism.

64 Social Protest and the Politics of Representation

 Grounding the Black Aesthetic
The blooming of an anti-Western, antimaterialist, “anti-objective” criti-
cism in the 1960s among Black artists is inseparable from the blooming of
Black theaters across the country at the time and the effort to theoretically
and practically create a “new orality,” a “Black Talk,” to recall Ben Sidran’s
important phrase.36 Attempting to evade the materialism, rationalism, and
medium-centered bias of white high and vanguard culture, theoretically
attuned artists such as Neal, Fuller, and James Stewart sought forms that
explicitly rejected the object as such and the objectivity that separated the
viewer from the viewed. The theater was a linchpin in the popular elabo-
ration of this critique. Thus, consideration of the Black Arts Movement’s
critical concepts and practices (and perhaps of the Black Power Movement
as well) should delve into the philosophical and practical complexities of
performance.37 And, as this project was launched in urban contexts char-
acterized by a high degree of absentee ownership, the consideration of per-
formance must delve into the dilemmas of property ownership. The link
between Black Art and theater/performance can be discovered in such di-
lemmas. The fundamental struggle of experimental theater groups is not
merely to create new forms—they must also pay the rent. It is within this
potentially crippling dynamic of property relations, subjectivity, and aes-
thetics that the nonobjective critique found a time and a space, a moment
of highest quality. In a theater under lease, with props and furnishings on
loan (if existing at all), stage design and acting theory were creatures of
profound economic crisis, devised to survive the collapse of fragile, threat-
ened institutions.
It is therefore not by accident that the Black Arts Movement founded its
politics on the valorization and exploitation of performativemodesofculture;
for theater and performance can answer specific sociopolitical needs, partic-
ularly to a community that is economically depressed and politically ad-
vanced. This was why Harold Cruse considered theater to be central to the
question of the Black revolution.38 While Black cultural expression had been
more or less forced to settle on performative forms as an expressive solution
to cultural, political, economic, and historical suffocation, such necessity
enabled powerful forms of resistance, including the effervescent, efflorescent
resistance of the temporary locale—of juke joint jams, theaters, church
events, street corner doo-wop, and barricades, which suggest the mobile
infinity of tactics described by Michel de Certeau in his discussion of pedes-
trians and post-Authorial readers.39 As Cruse reminded his younger com-
rades, the struggle for African America’s future was fought on the simulta-
neous fronts of economy, politics, and culture. That fight, Cruse demanded,
had to begin in the theaters of the inner city, those in Harlem first and
foremost.
Likewise, performance afforded a common conceptual ground forthethree-
headed struggle of antimaterialism, cultural retrieval, and urban organiza-
tion. For Larry Neal, whose untimely death in the early ’80s cruelly denied

The Black Arts Movement 65

the Black Aesthetic its full flowering within contemporary criticism, the
preeminence of theater and performance in the Black Arts and Black Power
movements was a matter of paying attention to one’s history. Discussing the
work of Baraka, Neal insisted that theater “is inextricably linked to the Afro-
American political dynamic. And such a link is perfectly consistent with
Black America’s contemporary demands. For theatre is potentially the most
social of all of the arts. It is an integral part of the socializing process.”40 It is
the theater that best exhibits the totality, Neal believed, the temporality, of
“Black men in transition.”41
There is an important distinction to be drawn between the notions of
theater/performance and its efficacy vis-à-vis the project of Black Nation-
alism developed by Cruse and Neal in the movement-era essays I have
cited. Whereas Cruse advocates the theater for practical reasons (i.e., that
it, more than any other art form, completely encompasses the cultural,
political, geographical, and economic needs of black liberation), Neal
seems to be indicating that the theater as process, as a way of being and a
way of knowing, is directly tied to black acculturation, self-criticism, and
liberation despite the existence of concrete institutions. Theater, for Neal,
is literally in the skin; Blackness is drama. The theater is “a bridge be-
tween [the community] and the spirit, a bridge between you and your
soul in the progression of a spiritual lineage.”42 So while Cruse focuses on
organizational concerns, such as property ownership and institutional de-
velopment (the practical failure of which doomed Black Art as a revolu-
tionary movement), Neal focuses on the special demands of Pan-African,
revolutionary subjectivity, a subjectivity that transcends the specific is-
sues that Cruse identifies—and that has survived the short-lived institu-
tions of the movement.43
The distinction is an important one for us to maintain, particularly if the
more radical implications of Black Art are to be understood; for that the
Black Arts as theory survived the death of the Black Arts as movement. When
the Nixon administration slashed corporate funding of experimental arts and
the economic crisis of 1973 laid low hundreds of community theaters across
the United States, the practical links forged between art and politics were
fatally sundered—but the theory survived in those educated by the Black
Arts Movement, proving that the people’s poetry is found in the people, not
in the texts. Even so, Hoover and Nixon’s Counter-Intelligence Program
(COINTELPRO) was devastating both practically and theoretically. In ad-
dition to careers and lives, the practical links among text, institution, and
performance were critically wounded by white backlash. The Black Arts as
theater transformed abstract aesthetic into movement, concept into politics.
But once those theaters and the momentary communities that they repre-
sented were destroyed, the Black Arts Movement crossed a horizon beyond
which European traditions of politics, aesthetics, historiography—andprop-
erty—could not clearly see.

66 Social Protest and the Politics of Representation

 The Black Aesthetic as Nonobjective
In the late ’60s, Maulana Ron Karenga demanded that Black Art “remind us
of our distaste for the enemy, our love for each other, and our commitment
to the revolutionary struggle that will be fought with the rhythmic reality
of a permanent revolution.”44 Such a rhythmic reality ill accords with the
traditions and trends of European aesthetics. Reflecting this iconoclastic,
jazz-inflected spirit, former Muntu member James Stewart, in “The Devel-
opment of the Black Revolutionary Artist” (the lead essay in Neal and
Baraka’s indispensable Black Fire anthology), reminds us, “The revolutionary
understands change.”45 Like Baraka in Blues People, Stewart saw the “death of
the artifact” in the Middle Passage as a conceptual and practical avenue into
cultural revolution. A revolutionary art, he concludes, must be like the
legendary temples of mud “that vanish in the rainy seasons and are erected
elsewhere.”46 “Likewise,” he tells us:
most of the great Japanese artistsof theeighteenthandnineteenthcenturies
did their exquisite drawings on rice paper with Black ink and spit. These
were then reproduced by master engravers on fragile newssheets that were
distributed to the people for next to nothing. These sheets were often used
for wrapping fish. They were a people’s newssheet. Very much like the
sheets circulated in our bars today.47
“Revolution is fluidity,” Stewart argues. Borrowing eclectically from Asian
mystical traditions, African American blues riffs, the African American
Baptist church, new jazz, and Voudoun, Stewart demonstrates that the rev-
olutionary artist is part of a proud line of “misfits estranged from the white
cultural present.”48 The Black artist, therefore, could not expect to be “suc-
cessful,” for in the context of cultural revolution, “ ‘ineptitude’and‘unfitness’
will be an aspect of what we do.”49
Fuller saw this spirit as energized by a “release from object,” the title of
one of his essays on aesthetic theory. Thinking of the relationship between
the thing and the labor to make the thing, he asks “if the sacrifice [of materials
in the construction of the art object] was greater than the need, or simply a
manifestation of that need—a tool, a service—something to demonstrate
how much was needed and which, once fulfilling the need, was abandoned.”50
The ability to answer this question was, for Fuller, the fundamental criterion
of revolutionary culture:
If we can swallow that Black writing in this country did not begin as object,
we can understand its present need to reflect the revolution its people are
engaged in, and see a fluidity.51
When the theme is Blackness, the perceptual habits that underwrite our
collective and individual capacity to make sense of the world—that is, the
criteria of aesthetics and philosophy—are put at risk. Nowhere is that risk
made more apparent than in Ed Bullins’s experimental play (“to be given

The Black Arts Movement 67

before predominantly white audiences”), The Theme Is Blackness. The script
runs complete as follows:
speaker: The theme of our drama tonight will be Blackness. Within
Blackness One may discover all the self-illuminating universes in creation.
And now blackness—
(Lights go out for twenty minutes. Lights up.)
Will Blackness step out and take a curtain call?
blackness52
It is easy to imagine the sense of confusion and discomfort this antithetical
thesis drama tried to inspire in its predominantly white audience when it
was first staged in 1967 at various sites in and around San Francisco. There
is a contradiction here that must be carefully noted. Though Theme easily fits
into the anti-objective trend of the Black Arts Movement, its utilization of
shock, audience discomfort, and the aggressive failure of assumptions traces
roots to the long tradition of Western avant-garde provocation, which goes
back to the European Symbolists, Futurists, and Dadaists.53 Cultural exclu-
sivism breaks down the moment a Black nationalist consciously or uncon-
sciously quotes Marinetti.
This very traditional vanguard desire to épater le bourgeoisie aside, The Theme
Is Blackness renders a more complicated, more fathoming judgment on the
interconnection of theater and racism than was ever accomplished by the
European avant-gardes. Read in the context of the antispectacular, anti-
objective theory articulated by Neal, Stewart, Fuller, and Baraka, The Theme
Is Blackness can be interpreted as targeting the long history of philosophical
inertia, technological expansion, and colonialism, which had given Bullins
and his community their riddled present. And while its totalizing urge (for
nothing is more totalizing than nothingness) may push aside more concrete
historical and cultural concerns (unlike Sonia Sanchez’s Malcolm/Man Don’t
Live Here No Mo, which will receive attention below), its attack on the
tendentiously abstracting, spectacular racism of the Enlightenment is effec-
tive indeed. Blackness in Bullins’s one act is a metaphysic all its own. We
shouldn’t forget that one possible outcome of Theme is the formation of a
group of conscious individuals fully prepared to produce their own cultural
event in the absence of the expected one. Performed before politically com-
mitted Blacks, the results might be memorable. Muntu is flexibility in
rhythm with social transformation and historical reclamation.
The addition of free jazz and sound effects by the Chebo Evans Third World
Three Black Trio in conjunction with the Black Arts/West company during
the play’s run underlines the central and most problematic fact of Bullins’s
theatrical-political gesture: its refusal to show and specify, and therefore, to
enmesh itself in the running intra-theatrical battle of realism, naturalism,
symbolism, minimalism, what-have-you-ism (not to mention its refusal to
communicate any specific political message). The theatrical gesture allows
for shock, discomfort, and/or flexible, communal, “soulful” response—Bul-
lins views the latter as tacitly nationalist. As Bullins makes clear in his essay

68 Social Protest and the Politics of Representation

“The So-Called Western Avant-Garde Drama,” the European tradition of
theatrical protest was a dead end, and it had to move beyond its basic
assumptions concerning text and performance space: “It would seem that in
America there is no way to break away from the historical (in the Western
sense) definitions of drama, though never-ending revolutions occur in theatre
which are usually inappropriately named ‘avant-garde.’ ”54 While this view
of theater was by no means original, the provocative suggestion that the
Euro-American theater tradition (including its avant-garde) is racist in its
most fundamental assumptions, techniques, and material certainly was. For
Bullins, the history of avant-garde theater mirrored the endless victimizing
round of a history dominated by Europeans and their “ways of seeing.” By
refusing to show “Blackness” to its “predominantly white audience”—or,
from another perspective, overwhelming the show with the shown—Bullins
implies that even the seemingly innocent act of watching theaterisembedded
in a tangled skein of oppression, ignorance, and political compromise. For
Bullins, Blackness simply exceeds the essentially theatrical frame of thewhite
thing.
When the lights go down and Blackness comes up in The Theme Is Blackness,
the conceptual and perceptual apparatus of white racism is hobbled. The “eye
of whiteness” is cast adrift, scattered on the scatological seas of a peculiarly
black history: The Conquest of White Eye/Whitey. Blackness swamps the viewer
and her small community, the audience. Unable to claim distance from the
stage, no longer able to exert its powers of judgment over the spectacle of the
Other, the eye of whiteness (an eye possessed not only by whites) is situated
in a context of fathoming ambiguity. Perhaps more significant, Bullins’s
ambivalently avant-garde gesture (which recalls John Cage no less than the
Greensboro sit-in) returns the viewer to his body. As we all know, even the
most cramped theater seats can be forgotten in the face of effective perfor-
mance. The discomfort of the situation in Theme is the result of the play’s
failure to alleviate the body through distracting or engaging dramatic action.
Most significant to my eyes—as inappropriate as those particular tools
might be in this context—is Bullins’s refusal to give his audience a sense of
dramatic progression. That is, Bullins’s play refuses to structure and the-
matize time or to make meaningful the object. Because the piece lacks the
traditional cues of drama (visual and verbal transformations in setting, char-
acter, and thesis), it lacks the “temporal shape” of traditional plays. As a
result, judgment (of character or moral action, for example) cannot cast its
glance over the scene: it cannot see at all. In the darkness, character does not
develop, crisis and consequence do not find dialectical resolution. Drama, as
it is traditionally known, fails to take hold; time does not concretize. The
theater, which always takes time, is pressed to its conceptual and formal
limits by Bullins’s one act. The bourgeois drama, the drama of judgment,
the drama of history, meets its end. The essentially linear parade of significant
individuals weathering significant events—a parade we associate with both
bourgeois historical narrative and bourgeois drama—is interrupted. Perfor-
mativity, in the original production,wassurrenderedentirelytotheaudience;

The Black Arts Movement 69

in the later, musical version, this performativity was augmented by free jazz.
Having taken away its sight and its sense of temporal progression, Bullins
utilizes theater to call the end of (white) history.55 When this call wassounded
before a politically astute, mostly Black audience (as it was at Black Arts/
West), this act of visual and temporal terrorism was given an improvisational
and decidedly less anarchic shape.
But even though it strikes against the conceptual foundations of European
culture, Bullins’s play is nonetheless characterized by an ahistorical and apo-
litical approach to the question of Black liberation (not the first nor last time
this would be the case). Certainly, The Theme Is Blackness is a concrete, critical,
theatrical gesture against racism. But it fails, at least prior to the addition of
music and effects, to synthesize thefreedomsofthemomentwiththedemands
of history and culture. The deep ground, the “Black (w)hole,” to cite Baker,56
of this critique is given a more concrete, more historically minded spin in
Amiri Baraka’s Slave Ship, productions of which by the Chelsea Theatre at
the Brooklyn Academy of Music and by Ron Milner’s Concept East in Detroit
during the late ’60s inspired a generation of Black artists. Like Bullins’s The
Theme Is Blackness, Slave Ship simultaneously confronts, exploits, andexplodes
the relations of visibility, race, and theatricality. But, unlike Bullins, Baraka
explicitly contextualizes the “shapelessness” of Blackness in the brutality of
slavery and the Middle Passage. Unlike The Theme Is Blackness, which utilizes
the nonobjective in a more totalizing, abstract, or free-jazz manner, Baraka’s
play situates the nonobjective within a determinant context. Nonobjectivity
is linked in Slave Ship both to West African culture and to a suffering that,
like the Holocaust, challenges the very possibility of memory and represen-
tation.
In the Chelsea Theatre’s production of Slave Ship, the eye of whiteness was
literally cast into the hold of racism’s epitomous metaphor, the slave ship,
and struggled like the captured Africans in the play, to find a place to stand,
a place to breathe, a place from which to make sense of the sensory assault.57
Assaulted by smells, assaulted by the violent sonic funk of director Gilbert
Moses’ and Archie Shepp’s free jazz score,58 the audience’s ability to judge
wasincapacitated. ThebodyandthecommunitywerethrownintoaBlackness
not unlike that exploited by Bullins in Theme.
But this disabling is not portrayed as wholly negative nor as wholly a
consequence of the Middle Passage. The use of strobe lights and extended
periods of darkness suggest a more positive theatrical-philosophicalprogram
similar to the jazz-inflected production of The Theme Is Blackness at Black
Arts/West. What Baraka allows us to see and hear in the flashing lights of
Slave Ship is a shuffling Uncle Tom, a liberal Preacher (symbol of faith in
historical progress and future justice) panicked by clamoring drums, seduced
and nauseated by the rich stench of the event, trapped in the strobes and stage
lights of a spectacle that threatens the very act of spectating. Embodied in
this stage image are the volatile ambiguities of the Black revolution as an
economic, political, and cultural structure. Somewhere among the precolo-
nial, oral-based cultures of West Africa referenced in the performance, the

70 Social Protest and the Politics of Representation

unimaginable sufferings of the Middle Passage evoked by the performance,
and the linear historical imagination of liberal Christianity deconstructed by
the performance is found the Artaudian cruelty of Slave Ship, the cruelty of a
Black nation being born, the cruelty of a cultural revolution explicitly de-
signed to dissolve the boundaries between ethics and aesthetics. Slave Ship
not only represents the act of cultural revolution, it is itself a concreteexample
of the Black Arts Movement’s nonobjective aesthetic and its complex, often
confusing relationship to history, economy, and activism.
Slave Ship is therefore not a social protest play. It does not seek to adjust or
reform existing institutions nor is its primary address directed toward the
oppressor. Likewise, it does not seek to appeal to the moral standards of the
oppressor nor to those of the oppressed. Quite the opposite, in fact: the play
revels in emotional excess, virtuosic jazz, intricately intertwined vocal per-
formances, and sudden, shocking vulgarity. Slave Ship is a counterspectacle
that attempts to create representationalstrategiestofundamentallychallenge
the conceptual, aesthetic, and ethical boundaries of Euro-American political
drama. It does not supplicate. It deconstructs, satirizes, and destroys. The
use of music, audience participation, and an offstage act of violence against
an invisible White Voice that echoes throughout the hold of the ship reflects,
in Harry Elam’s phrase, “the Black masses symbolically expung[ing] the
visible and invisible hegemony of the dominant culture.”59 The white thing
is never even allowed on stage.
The power of representation that Elam rightly considers one of the central
critical concerns of Slave Ship is not only a target of proposed revolutionary
action but also a contested terrain. The antinarratival bias of Baraka’s play
not only reveals to its audiences that the present condition of the African
American community is little different from that of slavery but also works
to create an alternative sense or structure of historicity, community, and
aesthetics. If the bourgeois tradition of protest drama, with its generallyrigid
narrative telos and its carefully timed deployment of ethical and progressivist
assumptions, possesses any relevance in the context of Slave Ship, it is only in
the sense of that which restrains the possibility for radical transformation.
Such assumptions represent a pale, fragile bulwark against, in Gwendolyn
Brooks’s heady phrase, “the noise and whip of the whirlwind.”60
The rarely discussed plays of Sonia Sanchez utilize similarly deconstructive
dramaturgical strategies to demonstrate the power available to a “whirlwind
commonwealth.” In particular, plays such as Sister Son/Ji (1969) and Malcolm/
Man Don’t Live Here No Mo (1972) sever the links among individualism,
heroism, and the monumentality of history. Perhaps more important, they
work to undermine such white things as the untainted hero, the resolved
crisis, and phallocentrism (things not always adequately undermined by
Sanchez’s male colleagues). Predicting the choreopoems of Ntozake Shange,
these plays utilize monologue and movement to highlight personality with-
out celebrating individuality. They are explicitly designed to cultivate mem-
ory and inspire activism. They are, with the addition of The Bronx Is
Next(1968), among the most acutely self-critical, resolutely revolutionary

The Black Arts Movement 71

plays of the Black Arts era, articulating a rigorously feminist attitude that
one rarely encounters among the plays and critical works of the movement.
They accomplish what other self-critical revolutionary dramas such as Rich-
ard Wesley’s Black Terror, the four plays by Edgar White collected in Under-
ground (1970), Oliver Pitcher’s The One (1971), and Bullins’s We Righteous
Bombers (1968) fail to accomplish: they deconstruct and question without in
any way diffusing the commitment to action. And, like The Theme Is Blackness
and Slave Ship, her plays challenge the relationship between the “seen” and
the “scene.”
Malcolm/Man is a notable children’s play in a movement that valued highly
such plays. And, like all effective children’s literature, it manages to be
profound without sacrificing simplicity. The piece is essentially a dance-
drama that takes place, as all of Sanchez’s plays do, in a never-ending “Now”
that reflects an urge much like that of Theme and Slave Ship: to render time
more malleable. A chorus of “3 sistuhs,” a “brotha (bout 14 or 15),” and a
“sistuh (bout 12, 13, or 14)” retell the life of Malcolm X. The tale is told by
the sistuh and brotha, who take on a variety of roles, the girl as various female
characters (“wite/amurica,” “malcolm’s future wife”), the boy as various
incarnations of X. The telling of the life is counterpoised to the chorus, which
takes the play into its narrative movements by singing:
we be’s hero/worshippers . . . we be’s death/worshippers . . . we be’s
leader/worshippers . . . but: we should be blk/people worshippers . . .
AND: some of us are leaderless toooooday . . . our homes are empty cuz
. . . malcolm/man don’t live here no mo.61
As in her other plays, Sanchez complements a major theme (X as exemplum)
with one or more minor themes (here, the loss of individuality caused by
worship of others and the lack of political and familial leaders). This com-
plementary dyad of major and minor themes is itself triangulated within a
“feminine focus,” to recall Ruby Cohn and Enoch Brater.62 X’s life is coun-
terpoised in the text by the strong presence of the sistuh and in performance
by the female chorus members. And, as in her other plays, Sanchez does not
conclude but, rather, she articulates a question. If The Bronx Is Next locates
its central question in the lies and violence directed toward women margin-
alized by the revolution (single mothers, prostitutes, elderly women), the
centering question of Malcolm/Man is the origin of X: “Malcolm, Malcolm,
where did u come from.”63 This question of origins is presented by Sanchez
as inseparable from a community of growing young women: the rotating,
fluid X is composed of five dancers, four of them female.
Thus, this search for the origins of X’s revolt—an emblematic source of
the Black Arts Movement—is not presented in hagiographic terms, is not
viewed as the rise of a heroic masculine individual, is not portrayed as a crisis
resolved by the traditional forms of dramatic denouement: tragic death or
comic marriage. Quite the contrary, the primary purpose behind Sanchez’s
use of dance and music in Malcolm/Man is to place the heroic example of X
within reach of the black child and her memory, to transform the historic

72 Social Protest and the Politics of Representation

figure of X into a kind of iconic “revolutionary spirit,” and to quite literally
frame that life within the transient, beautiful motions of dancing children.
The transformation of X into an accessible figure was accomplished by util-
izing a child actor to portray the man. The transformation into performative
spirit of the heroic individual constructed by X and Alex Haley in the
Autobiography (1964) was enabled by having the five performers periodically
return to the slowly rotating X formation with which the performancebegan,
momentarily obliterating the individual and foregrounding the icon-as-
dance. By transforming the potentially intimidating example of a revolu-
tionary hero into a role that can be performed by any child and that has to be
performed in careful cooperation with other actors, Sanchez avoids the po-
tentially antidemocratic tendencies of hero worship. By utilizing dance and
iconography, she foregrounds the importance of community cooperation and
collective beauty. X in Malcolm/Man is not as much a hero to be worshiped
as an ethos to be embraced in the spirit of the drum. This spirit is rather more
gentle than that which informs Bullins’s Theme or Baraka’s Slave Ship, but it
is no less impatient with the conceptual limitations and narrative habits of
Western metaphysics.

Historicizing the Black Arts Movement

For the majority of the Black Arts Movement’s constituency, there was no
middle ground between oppression and freedom, white and Black, text and
performance. And though contemporary criticism will find such binary
formulations problematic, we should not allow our own critical biases to
stand in the way of our understandings of the basic intentions of the Black
Arts. Though there were more than a few Black artists who challenged such
broad distinctions (Bullins and Neal among them), none finally abandoned
them, despite the contradictory implications of the binary. One was either
with the revolution or against, and the revolution, as Gil Scott-Heron com-
pelled us to understand, would not be televised.64 Spectatorship was the trap,
performance the key. The critical dilemma of history—that it is available,
as Jameson puts it, only in textual form65—is particularly troublesome vis-
à-vis the Black Arts Movement. The refusal of object, text, and spectatorship
in some sense guaranteed the Black Arts Movement’s lack of presence in the
history and criticism of American literature.66 On the other hand, it places
the movement well within the orbit of an avant-garde embedded in racist
colonialism.
If the movement was indeed short and unsuccessful (putting aside for the
moment artists such as Sanchez, Bullins, Nikki Giovanni, bell hooks, and
OyamO, who continue to produce excellent work, and those fundamentally
influenced by it, such as Toni Cade Bambara, Ntozake Shange, Alice Walker,
August Wilson, and Toni Morrison), it left behind a daunting legacy of
poems, plays, music, theory, and polemic, not to mention the legacy of its
most impressive achievement: the conceptualization and attempted imple-

The Black Arts Movement 73

mentation of a Black Aesthetic. If the movement was indeed short and
unsuccessful (and the bloody work of Nixon and Hoover’s COINTELPRO
should not be discounted when we consider the essentially aestheticquestions
of duration and success), it sounds signal lessons to those who wish to chal-
lenge the dominance of the white thing. What was left behind are objects
and desiccated memories, scripts for revolutionary performances yet to come.
The texts that remain tease criticism like museum fetishes, exactly the kinds
of ritual objects divorced from ritual context that Stewart and Fuller found
both deeply distasteful and profoundlyreactionary.Forwithoutsoul,without
the embodied sense of self-transformation that the movement sought to
implement, the movement itself becomes an object, a scholarly fetish. This
is a logic that cannot be escaped; it calls to question the ethical validity of all
scholarly work on the movement, including this essay, written by a white
scholar at a mostly white college.
For better and worse, the soul of the Black Arts Movement is bound to the
ontological and epistemological dilemmas of performance both in a tenden-
tiously racist “society of spectacle,” that makes any revolutionary gesture
contradictory, and in an academic tradition of literary-critical and literary-
theoretical work, which tends to have difficulty contending with the mo-
mentary, local dynamics of performance. Because it attempted to blur the
boundaries between the artist and the masses, between nations, between the
present, the past, and the future, and because it attempted to eradicate
Western notions of time and space, the Black Arts Movement itself seemed
to want to end like one of Bullins’s plays: in a blackness that permanently
confounds concept and narrative. Like the audience plunged into darkness,
the scholar of the Black Arts Movement should be sensitive to the fact that
the texts and objects she studies possess permeable boundaries, express past
conditions, and contain the possibility of performative moments that chal-
lenge the very notion of textuality and objectivity. Rigorous historicization
and contextualization of these texts is not merely a scholarly and pedagogical
option; it is fundamental to understanding. There are voices in these plays
and poems that are never explicitly indicated, title characters never named.
Like the fetish divorced from ritual—a continual concern of Black Arts
critics—the texts of the Black Arts Movement are ruins. Their subtext is a
community destroyed by economic backlash, provoked infighting, and a
vanguard sensibility incapable of escaping the tradition of the avant-garde
itself.

notes

I wish to express respect and gratitude to Yvonne “Baubie” Paschal for her patience
and inspiration. My understanding of the Black Arts Movement—and black liter-
ature in general—is deeply indebted to our conversations and collaborations.

1. The “society of spectacle” is a term coined by Guy Debord to characterize a

stage in capitalism in which the logic of commodity production dominatesallaspects

74 Social Protest and the Politics of Representation

of life. Such domination is enabled by the various mass media that developed dur-
ing and after the rise of totalitarian states in the 1920s and 1930s, media that have
become ends in themselves. See Debord, Society of the Spectacle (Detroit: Black and
Red, 1970).
2. Unlike the rest of the essays in this collection, mine will capitalize the term
“Black.” Among radical African Americans in the 1960s, “Black” was a proper name
that indicated both an ethnic and a political identity; the specificity of the term
demands its capitalization. “Black” differentiated what it named—whether art,
person, or politics—from “Negro” (a now antiquated term read by radicals to mean
“liberal” or “assimilationist”) and specified it in terms of the general category
“African American” (a term rarely used at the time). Thus, every “Black” artist was
an “African American,” but none were “Negroes.” Or to use the term in both its
contemporary and older senses, every “Black” artist was black, but not every black
artist was “Black.”
3. One should note that Debord’s notion of “spectacle” was formulated partly in
response to the violent uprisings in African American communities, which occurred
throughout the middle and late ’60s. See Debord, “The Decline and Fall of the
Spectacle-Commodity Economy,”inSituationistInternationalAnthology,ed.andtrans.
Ken Knabb (Berkeley, Calif.: Bureau of Public Secrets, 1989), 103–180. Debord
argues that the uprisingswere explicitresponsestoandattacksoncommodityculture.
4. Larry Neal, “Any Day Now: Black Art and Black Liberation,” Ebony 24 (1969):
54.
5. Ibid., 55.
6. This dynamism is aptly described by Stephen Henderson as an “interior dy-
namism,” which found empowering roots in the inner life of blacks. In “The Form
of Things Unknown,” Henderson identifies what he calls a “Soul Field,” which bound
the activities of artistic production and artistic reception in a “complex galaxy of
personal, social, institutional, historical, religious, and mythicalmeaningsthataffect
everything we say or do as Black people sharing a common heritage.” See Stephen
Henderson, Understanding the New Black Poetry: Black Speech and Black Music as Poetic
References (New York: William Morrow, 1973), 41. Houston Baker citesHenderson’s
essay as a key note in the definition of “an entirely new object of literary-critical and
literary-theoretical investigation.” See Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature:
A Vernacular Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1984), 74. Baker nonetheless
criticizes Henderson for his “impressionistic chauvinism”: “For it is, finally, only the
Black imagination that can experience Blackness, in poetry, or in life. As a result,
the creative and critical framework suggested by Henderson resembles, at times, a
closed circle” (81).
I would argue that the “romanticism” of Henderson and the various other voices
of cultural nationalism in the Black Arts Movement is mitigated when the critic
considers the central place of theater and performance in it. Rather than relying on
a pre-existing cultural identity, Black Arts performance hopes, rather, to establish a
cultural identity by constructing what Leslie C. Sanders has called “the Black terri-
tory,” created in the particular space-time matrix of a particular performance with a
particular audience. See The Development of Black Theater in America: From Shadows to
Selves (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988), 102. Rather than
nostalgically resurrecting a preexisting culture, Black Arts performance hopes to
invent, in Tejumola Olaniyan’s words, “a Black dramatic voice self-consciously
embedded in a cultural matrix.” See Scars of Conquest/Masks of Resistance: The Invention
of Cultural Identities in African, African-American, and Caribbean Drama (New York:

The Black Arts Movement 75

Oxford University Press, 1995), 4. Blackness, rather than being essential, is made
“retroactively actual,” a phrase I riff off Richard Schechner’s notion that:
the project coming into existence through the process of rehearsal . . . deter-
mines the past: what will be kept from earlier rehearsals or from the “source
materials.” . . . rehearsals make it necessary to think of the future in such a
way as to create a past.
See Between Theater and Anthropology (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press
1985), 39.
7. Larry Neal utilizes this term twice in his article “The Black Arts Movement,”
clearly indicating that “thingness” is not simply a concern about objects and com-
modities but about “white ideas and white ways of looking at the world.” See “The
Black Arts Movement,” Drama Review 12, no. 4 (1968): 30.
8. Larry Neal, “And Shine Swam On,” in Black Fire: An Anthology of Afro-American
Writing, ed. LeRoi Jones and Larry Neal (New York: William Morrow, 1968), 649.
9. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. “Black Creativity: On the Cutting Edge,” Time (10 Oct.
1994): 75.
10. James T. Stewart, “The Development of the Black Revolutionary Artist,” in
Jones and Neal 6.
11. Tam Fiofori, “The Illusion of Sun Ra,” Liberator 7, no. 12 (1967): 13.
12. See Michael Oren, “The Umbra Poets’ Workshop, 1962–1965: Some Socio-
Literary Puzzles,” in Belief vs. Theory in Black American Literary Criticism, ed. Joe
Weixlmann and Chester J. Fontenot (Greenwood, Pa.: Penkevill, 1986).
13. For discussion of Neal and Fuller’s theater, see Nilgun Anadolu-Okur, Con-
temporary African American Theater: Afrocentricity in the Works of Larry Neal, Amiri
Baraka, and Charles Fuller (New York: Garland, 1997).
14. For discussion of the Muntu group, see James Spady, Larry Neal: Liberated
Black Philly Poet with a Blues Streak of Mellow Wisdom (Philadelphia: PC International,
1989).
15. Quoted in Oren 193.
16. LeRoi Jones, “The Black Arts Repertory Theater School,” Liberator 5, no. 4
(1965): 21.
17. Larry Neal, “The Cultural Front,” Liberator 5, no. 6 (1965): 27.
18. I follow Kalamu Ya Salaam’s periodization in this regard. In 1965, BART/S
was founded, the first truly “Black” cultural institution. In 1976, John Johnson
decided to stop publication of Black World, a key Black Arts Movement publication.
See The Magic of Juju: An Appreciation of the Black Arts Movement (BAM) (Chicago:
Third World Press, forthcoming).
19. LeRoi Jones, “The Revolutionary Theatre,” Liberator 5, no. 7 (1965): 5.
20. The reference is to Artaud’s term for The Conquest of Mexico. See The Theater
and Its Double (New York: Grove, 1958), 128. Jones’s riff resituates Artaud in the
context of colonialism and the subjective demands of decolonization, an aspect of
Artaud’s work largely ignored in our time. An excellent and thorough discussion of
Jones’s appropriation of Artaudian dramaturgical/philosophical concepts can be
found in Sanders 126–131. See also Mance Williams, ed., Black Theatre in the 1960s
and 1970s (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1985), 20–24.
21. Daniel H. Watts, “Cong. Powell-HARYOU-ACT,” Liberator 5, no. 11
(1965): 3.
22. Amiri Baraka, The Autobiography of LeRoiJones(Chicago:LawrenceHill,1997),
458.

76 Social Protest and the Politics of Representation

 23. Ibid., 459.
24. Neal, “And Shine Swam On,” 637.
25. Harold Cruse, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual (New York: Morrow, 1967).
Cruse played a vital role in the Black Arts Movement by instilling a thoroughgoing
sense of historicism into his younger colleagues, particularly around the historically
vexed issue of the Black intellectual. The premiere party for the book took place at
the New Lafayette Theatre (ironically, only three days before it was burned down by
hard-core nationalists and forced to move).
26. Ibid., 14.
27. Wahneema Lubiano, “Black Nationalism and Black Common Sense:Policing
Ourselves and Others,” in The House that Race Built: Black Americans, US Terrain, ed.
Wahneema Lubiano (New York: Pantheon, 1997). Lubiano’s criticism does not take
adequate account of the “nonobjective” aesthetics of the movement. Other consid-
erations of the land issue include the letter from Rolland Snellings/Askia Touré to
Larry Neal, 2 June 1967 (Larry Neal Papers, New York Public Library), in which
Snellings argues for renewed attention to the South and a carefully planned deploy-
ment of Black Arts leaders to all parts of the country. As he puts it, “Our ‘nationalism’
only extends to Harlem, Philly, or Detroit for the most part. We are really regionalists
using the rhetoric of nationalists” (8). For further discussion of the “southern shift”
of the movement after 1970, see “Southern College Poets,” in Henderson, 185ff.;
Addison Gayle, Jr., “The Black Aesthetic Ten Years Later,” Black World(Sept.1974):
20–29; and Larry Neal, review of The Sound of Soul by Phyllis Garland, Negro Digest
(Jan. 1970): 43–47.
28. Larry Neal, “The Black Writer’s Role,” Liberator 6, no. 6 (1966): 8.
29. Neal, “And Shine Swam On,” 655.
30. Charles Fuller, “Black Writing is Socio-Creative Art,” Liberator 7, no. 4
(1967): 10.
31. Jones, “The Revolutionary Theatre,” 5.
32. Ibid.
33. Ibid., 6.
34. Ibid.
35. Georg Lukács criticized the bourgeois theater of his time in exactly such
terms:
The new drama . . . is bourgeois and historicist; we add now that it is a drama
of individualism. And in fact these three formulas express a single point of
demarcation; they merely view the parting of ways from distinct vantage-
points.
As a result, the drama “increasingly becomes an affair of the spirit [and] increasingly
misses the vital centre of personality.” See “The Sociology of Modern Drama,” trans.
Lee Baxandall, in The Theory of the Modern Stage, ed. Eric Bentley (NewYork:Penguin,
1986), 430.
36. Ben Sidran, Black Talk (New York: Da Capo, 1981). In this sense, the cultural
nationalism of the Black Arts Movement stands as a more positive project, notmerely
as a reaction against a general lack of nation status as described by Lubiano. The
emphasis on culture, in fact, serves as a strategic foil to the lack of property. Of course,
lacking long-term institutional development, such a strategy must ultimately prove
ill-conceived.
37. However, the distinction between the two movements is important to main-
tain. The Black Power Movement, emblematized by the Black Panthers, was at heart

The Black Arts Movement 77

a pragmatic, working-class movement, much more willing to entertain the role of
non-Blacks as allies in the struggle.
Black House was fatally wounded by this irresolvable difference (a difference, as
Cruse demonstrates in Crisis, that has claimed more than a few left-wing African
American organizations). As described in TDR’s special issue on black theater, a
long-term goal of Black House involved a confrontation among the theater audience,
black revolutionaries, and the Bay Area police force, a confrontation that failed to
occur because the organizers had been unable “to establish operational relationswith
Black revolutionaries in the Oakland area,” meaning specifically the Panthers. See
Drama Review 12, no. 4 (1968), 84. In reality, the Panthers (led by Cleaver) were
working toward the exclusion of both the artists and the cultural nationalists from
their ranks. The failure of Black House—heartbreaking after the enormously suc-
cessful Black Communications Project—supplied an all-too-clear answer to the
question, What would happen if a revolution happened and nobody came? The
tactical mistake aside, the plan was inspired—and, if it had succeeded, would have
supplied a model to other theaters hoping to ignite a truly revolutionary theater.
38. Cruse 68. For Cruse, the theater best enabled the development of historically
grounded cultural institutions. Most important, such theaters would be owned and
operated by Blacks for Blacks.
39. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berke-
ley: University of California Press, 1984).
40. Neal, “The Black Arts Movement,” 33–34.
41. Ibid., 34.
42. Neal, “And Shine Swam On,” 649.
43. I am not implying that Neal had no concern with institutional development,
which would be a patent absurdity. Quite the contrary, he and Cruse saw eye to eye
on that issue. The comparison between Cruse and Neal’s visions of the theater is
limited to the specific point concerning the tension between institutionalandcritical
visions of theatricality.
44. Maulana Ron Karenga, “Black Cultural Nationalism,” in The Black Aesthetic,
ed. Addison Gayle, Jr. (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1971), 38.
45. James T. Stewart, “The Development of the Black Revolutionary Artist,” in
Jones and Neal 5.
46. Ibid., 3–4.
47. Ibid., 4.
48. Ibid., 6.
49. Ibid.
50. Charles H. Fuller, “Black Writing: Release from Object,” Liberator 7, no. 9
(1967): 20.
51. Ibid.
52. Ed Bullins, “The Theme Is Blackness,” in The Theme Is Blackness: “The Corner”
and Other Plays (New York: Morrow, 1973). For further discussion of Bullins’s life
and work, see Samuel Hay, Ed Bullins: A Literary Biography (Detroit: Wayne State
University Press, 1997).
53. To understand the contradictions inherent in the notion of a Black avant-
garde, it is worth recalling that the birth of modern experimental theater was
formulated in terms that do not fit well with the demands of Black liberation. One
might recall, first of all, the metaphoric top-loading of “darkness” by the Symbolists,
particularly Maurice Maeterlinck, whose The Intruder explicitly links the horizons of
bourgeois culture (death, the extrafamilial, the timeless) with darkness. See The

78 Social Protest and the Politics of Representation

Intruder, in Doubles, Demons, and Dreamers: An International Collection of Symbolist
Drama, ed. Daniel Gerould (New York: Performing Arts Journal, 1985). In Italy,
the Futurists consistently linked the temporal rupture of avant-garde performance
with a racialized subject. See Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, “The Foundation and
Manifesto of Futurism,” in Art in Theory 1900–1990: An Anthology of Changing Ideas,
ed. Charles Harrison and Paul Wood (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1992), 145–
48, with its references to Marinetti’s childhood Sudanese nurse, as an example of the
cultural “ground” upon and against which the Futurist project was founded. We
should also recall the self-styled “primitivism” (“Negro rhythm,” as Hugo Ball had
it [quoted in Roselee Goldberg, Performance Art: From Futurism to the Present, rev. ed.
(New York: H. N. Abrams, 1988), 38]) of the Zurich Dadaists when considering
the ramifications of Bullins’s critique of avant-garde theater in the West. Richard
Schechner noted the divergence of Blacks Arts Movement theater from the experi-
mental trends of white countercultural theater in his introduction to the volume of
TDR devoted to Black Theater (edited by Bullins). He writes:
As I read over the material for this issue it became clear to me that the aesthetics
most commonly discussed in TDR—happenings, environmental theatre,new
kinds of criticism, regional theatre, actor training—are most lively in the
context of a certain segment of white American society. Most of these move-
ments are irrelevant to Black theatre. And some of them are viewed as “deca-
dent,” others as “oppressive.”
See “White on Black,” Drama Review 12, no. 4 (Summer 1968): 25–27.
54. Ed Bullins, “The So-Called Western Avant-Garde Drama,” Liberator 7, no.
12 (1967): 16.
55. For other discussions of historicism and its limitations, see Hayden White,
Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University, 1973), and The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and
Historical Representation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University, 1987). See also Dom-
inick LaCapra, Rethinking Intellectual History: Texts, Contexts, Language (Ithaca, N.Y.:
Cornell University, 1983). For an overview of White and LaCapra’s work and critical
responses to both, see Lloyd S. Kramer, “Literature, Criticism, and Historical Imag-
ination: The Literary Challenge of Hayden White and Dominick LaCapra,” in The
New Cultural History, ed. Lynn Hunt (Berkeley: University of California, 1989).
56. Baker 5.
57. Eugene Lee’s set design for the production utilized the principles of environ-
mental/Artaudian theater: it surrounded the audience with a set that suggested the
interior of an Atlantic slaver.
58. For discussion of the role of music in several productions of Slave Ship, see
Harry Elam, Jr., “Social Urgency, Audience Participation, and the Performance of
Slave Ship by Amiri Baraka,” in Crucibles of Crisis: Performing Social Change, ed. Janelle
Reinelt (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1996). See also Kimberly Benston,
“Vision and Form in Slave Ship,” in Imamu Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones): A Collection of
Essays, ed. Kimberly Benston (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.:Prentice-Hall,1978).Benston
characterizes Slave Ship’s music (composed by Archie Shepp) as reflecting “the entire
historical and mythical process of Afro-American being” (174).
59. Elam 22.
60.
Salve salvage in the spin.
Endorse the splendor splashes;

The Black Arts Movement 79

 stylize the flawed utility;
prop a malign or failing light—
but know the whirlwind is our commonwealth.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . .
It is a lonesome, yes. For we are the last of the loud.
Nevertheless, live.
Conduct your blooming in the noise and
whip of the whirlwind.

Gwendolyn Brooks, “The Sermon on the Warp-

land,” Blacks (Chicago: Third World Press,
1989), 454–456.
61. Sanchez 24.
62. Enoch Brater, ed., Feminine Focus: The New Women Playwrights (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1989).
63. Sanchez 24.
64. Gil Scott-Heron, “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” The Revolution
Will Not Be Televised (New York: BMG Music, 1988).
65. Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act
(Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University, 1981), 35.
66. This situation is not helped by the fact that, as of the writing of this essay,
many of the central texts of the movement are no longer in print (including almost
all of Bullins’s work). The political economy of publishing, so often criticized by
black artists, continues to restrain consideration of the movement’s political, eco-
nomic, and cultural project. This aside, one of the signal ironies of Gates’s critical
stance against the Black Arts Movement is that the first Black Studies program in
the country—San Francisco State University—was created by Black Student Union
president Jimmy Garrett (who cut his teeth as a playwright in Black Arts/West) and
Nathan Hare. Garrett wrote the highly influential play And We Own the Night (1968)
(its title borrowed from Baraka’s “State/meant,” The Le Roi Jones/AmiriBarakaReader,
ed. William J. Harris [New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1991] 169–170), one of
the pieces that toured with the Communications Project.

80 Social Protest and the Politics of Representation

 4

Beyond a Liberal Audience

‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘
william sonnega

In 1960 it was thought by a lot of black people and a lot of white

liberals that if the two cultures met and white Americans
embraced our [black] culture, if they got to know our music and to
know our dance, then somehow we could come to a better
understanding. But that was not the case. You could be KKK and
still watch Bill Cosby on Thursday nights.
Spike Lee1

For the past few years, I have been thinking and writing about theconundrum
Lee describes, and I have come to believe that his observations about the
failure of the performing arts to progressively transform race relations in the
United States are, for the most part, accurate. While many white Americans
are, of course, still trying to come to a better understanding of black culture
by embracing its various artistic forms, such embraces, however well-
intentioned, often appear to maintain the hierarchies of whiteprivilegerather
than contest the social and economic inequities on which they are based. The
wholesale commodification of black urban gangsta rap by white suburban
teens comes to mind as but one of many cross-cultural appropriations, which
do not substantively redress the exclusionary politics that divide the daily
lives of so many blacks and whites. In this respect, I have been interested in
how the epistemological question that Lee raises regarding the limits of cross-
cultural knowing is enacted in the embrace of contemporary black theater
by white audiences. Specifically, I have been looking at African American
theatrical productions in Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota, and their
relation to the predominantly white, socially and politically liberal cultural
landscape in which they are embedded.
Generally, my understanding of the term liberal in this context is derived
from a credo put forward by David Spitz and based upon John Stuart Mill’s
perspective on toleration in On Liberty; namely, that liberal attitudes are

81
founded upon the premise that acknowledgment of one’s limitations implies
acceptance of the limitations of others, which leads to open discussion for
discovering truth and remedying social ills.2 A white liberal audience, in this
sense, is one that will attend black theater, as black theater becomes a forum
in and around which such discussion may take place, a site where liberal
whites, by virtue of their presence, publicly acknowledge their limitations—
or Otherness—in the belief that such disclosure constitutes an important
contribution to a progressive multiracial politics. Implicit for such an audi-
ence is the notion that white or mainstream theater is normative while black
theater is “race theater,” a classification empowered, in part, by the privilege
that liberal whites associate with not being black. Yet, in the same spirit, a
liberal white audience may not see the blacks in black theater at all as Other
but as sites representative of cross-cultural commonality. Such attitudes may
be even more liberal, in fact, than those founded on a carefully constructed
Otherness, in that they presume that toleration is something liberals natu-
rally possess rather than seek to acquire.
In Minnesota, a white liberal audience is in these problematic terms one
that will attend the African American theatrical productions of St. Paul’s
Penumbra Theatre. As an October 1997 audience profile compiled by Pe-
numbra attests, the theater’s patrons are generally affluent, well-educated,
and white: nearly half (43 percent) reported annual household incomes of
$50,000 or more; one third (33 percent) reported having achieved a post-
graduate degree while 58 percent reported having achieved some college or
a bachelor’s degree. Seventy-eight percent of the audience was white.3 While
these demographics are not common to all theater audiences, they provide a
paradigm for considering the extent to which white attendance at black
theater constitutes progressive social behavior. The purpose of this essay is
not to conveniently target this behavior as hypocritical but rather to consider
how “muddy” the relationship of liberal advocacy and social action actually
is.4 Given that the American theater at present devotes a significant portion
of its resources to marking—and marketing—itself as liberal, particularly
where issues of race are concerned, my critique thus emphasizes challenges
facing black theater and a racial transformation of the American mise-en-
scène.

A Liberal Audience

In a theater on the floor below me, there is a rehearsal underway for a

production of Imamu Amiri Baraka’s Dutchman, a play that stages a mythic
confrontation between a black man and a white woman on a New York City
subway train. Before the rehearsal began, the play’s director, an African
American female student, expressed to me her deepest concerns about the
work, namely that, on our small, private, predominantly white liberal arts
college campus in the Midwest, the play will likely be attended only by those

82 Social Protest and the Politics of Representation

for whom Baraka’s penetrating discourse on sublimated black rage and its
misrepresentation by whites is a commonly read text, a given circumstance
of race relations in late 1990s America. In this spirit, the director confessed
her fears of preaching to the choir, of seeking to convert an audience that, if
not already converted, covets a culturally redeeming experience of conversion
with all the ritualized faith of the devout taking communion. She wondered
about how the audience would respond to Clay’s claim that the blues of Bessie
Smith are categorically misunderstood by Lula and by whites in general.
Would this provoke them, or encourage them to reward the moment with
yet one more perfunctorily politically correct (PC) nod of approval? Would
Clay’s prophecy to Lula—and all whites—that blacks will one day murder
whites if black culture continues to be colonized by “the great intellectual
legacy of the white man” challenge the audience to reconsider the politics of
assimilation, or reinforce the contention that such colonizations no longer
exist—particularly on liberal arts college campuses?5 Ultimately, in an in-
stitutional environment organized by rhetorical rather than actual construc-
tions of diversity, in which the nuanced, complicated subject positions of
personal experience are often strategically masked to prevent rather than
promote intercultural dialogue, what effect could Dutchman have on the
audience other than to reproduce a dominant cultural hegemony?
Such questions, central to critical pedagogy and postcolonial and antiracist
theory, are increasingly integral to contemporary theater criticism and prac-
tice. They resonated, for example, in the subtext of “On Cultural Power: The
August Wilson/Robert Brustein Discussion,” particularly when Wilson
stated, “The Lila Wallace–Reader’s Digest Fund did a tremendous disservice
to blacks by giving money to white organizations to encourage diversity
rather than directly to black theatres.”Theagenda, atthatmoment,addressed
precisely the ideological imperatives of white liberal cultural programming.
By marginalizing black theater within and through subsidies to white the-
aters, Wilson commented, whites are encouraged to construe intercultural
performance not as a contestation of the normative patterns that maintain
social, political, and economic inequities but as simply fulfilling part of a
liberal agenda for social change. “Mainstream theatres should do [black]
plays because they want to,” he remarked, “not because they have the funding
for it.”6
Such criticism of liberalism is no longer solely an artistic or academic
project. In the 1996 presidential election, for example, the term liberal itself
was regarded by both Republican and historically liberal Democratic strat-
egists as too fraught with derogatory connotations to productively charac-
terize any candidate’s platform. In such contexts, the term was often applied
generically to describe the allegedlyunethical,immoral,andinhumanebiases
of the mass media, thereby implicating the media of film, television, and
radio rather than failed liberal policies in the decline of literacy and the rise
of crime, among other social ills. In campaign rhetoric, liberal often became
a four-letter word, the “l word,” making its utterance a political taboo. This

Beyond a Liberal Audience 83

was especially true in Minnesota, where Democratic senator Paul Wellstone
was tagged “embarrassingly liberal” by his opponent and, later, “The Most
Liberal Man in America” by Republican campaign strategists.7
Satirical sketches of white liberals, once associated with Rush Limbaugh’s
monologues, now appear throughout mass media. In a sketch on a 19 January
1995 episode of “Saturday Night Live,” for example, four male office workers,
three white and one black, discussed their plans for the forthcoming holiday,
Martin Luther King, Jr., Day. As the three white men spoke enthusiastically
of spending the day watching basketball on television, drinking beer, and
gambling in Atlantic City, their black colleague offered each of them free
tickets to a marathon reading of Dr. King’s speeches. Fumbling, the white
men declined the tickets, then bestowed on their black colleague a series of
gifts, including a laptop computer, a wallet with several hundred dollars in
it, and, finally, another laptop, by way of compensating him for theirapparent
lack of sensitivity. Relieved, though rid of their possessions, the white men
then slunk sheepishly from the office as a black woman entered and asked the
black man, “How’d you do?” implying that she, too, had literally capitalized
on the guilt of white liberals.
The sketch is a summary par excellence of the kind of liberalism that may
shape the perceptions of many white spectators of contemporary blacktheater
in America. In assuming the audience is conversant with the traditional
liberal tenet of toleration and with how liberalism in the United States has,
since the late 1960s, been driven by social policies devised more to display
virtue than to solve social problems, the sketch satirizes the manner in which
liberal whites have sought to atone for the victimization of minorities. As
Shelby Steele observes, compassion has been reduced to a series of expedient
devices—group preferences, quotas, set-asides, redistricting,raceandgender
norming—that proclaim the good will of their creators while doing little to
end the discrimination that minorities face. What it has effected, Steele
argues, is a strategy of “compensatory deference” in which liberal whites,
rather than working to dismantle the infrastructures of institutional racism,
simply show deference to minorities in compensating them for their suffer-
ing—a maneuver that makes “deference synonymous with social virtue.”8
Once deference is socially virtuous in itself, the three white men in the sketch
are virtuous by definition, despite their resistance to spending a token moment
listening to the speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr. (As Bismarck once
remarked, “When you say that you agree to a thing in principle, you have
not the slightest intention of carrying it out in practice.”9) In concluding
with the black characters’ manipulation of white liberal privilege, the sketch
points to the inefficacy of compensatory deference and race-based tokenism
as strategies for social reform.
While these are wholly uncomplicated and overdetermined stereotypes,
they nonetheless signal the emergence of a broad-based critique of liberal
ideology in American culture. What does this critique portend with respect
to the constitution and disposition of theater audiences, especially toward
productions that are, by funding and design, committed to the inculcation

84 Social Protest and the Politics of Representation

of a greater degree of tolerance and understanding among people of diverse
racial and ethnic backgrounds? As Eugene Nesmith reported in American
Theatre, “The 1995–96 season schedules for the nearly 350 constituent com-
panies of Theatre Communications Group renders up a list of at least 50
major productions dealing with African American subject matter.”10 While
Henry Louis Gates, Jr., regards this as heralding a black “cultural glasnost,”
others, like Lou Bellamy, founder and artistic director of Penumbra Theatre
in St. Paul, question how such productions alter the stakes for black artists
and their works. “I tend to view the major institutions’ forays into this arena
as colonialist,” he writes:
Quite often they are guided by those who, because of their privileged
position, occupy and extend their control over my art. They tend to place
value on facets of my existence without understanding that existence in
totality. When institutions become arbiter and interpreter, they evenskew
my perception of myself. They, by virtue of their privilege, foster the idea
that those whom they choose to admit are more accomplished or more
talented because those artists chose to accept their “color-blind”invitation.
. . . I now have to fight to keep Penumbra from becoming a “farm team”
where well-funded artistic directors come to do “one-stop shopping” for
new ideas, talent and craft. And where managing and marketing directors
seek replacements for their dwindling and blue-haired whitesubscribers.11
While there are, of course, few artistic directors in America at present with
funds enough to do this kind of shopping, Bellamy nonetheless emphasizes
how black plays and performers are frequently perceived as attractive com-
modities by mainstream white theaters, which have made a commitment to
diversifying their repertoires. Between Gates and Bellamy sits the contem-
porary American theateraudience, agroup composedlargelyofwhiteliberals,
who often bring to their role the unquestioned assumption that, given the
persistence of racism in society, there is no alternative to institutionalizing
race as the basis of employment, law, education, and, of course, theatrical
representation. In this context, how does the critique of liberalism explicate
the relation of black theater and white audiences?

Liberal Conundra
Criticism of white liberal ideology unfolds in response to a complex matrix
of issues. Among them, the history of civil rights and contemporary ethical
debates about race, education, and the marketplace emerge as prominent
sites of inquiry. On the one hand, historiographic investigations seek to
account for the contributions of white liberals to the Civil Rights Movement,
with emphasis on the crucial but often blurred distinction between rhetorical
advocacy and political action. In her study of the Southern Conference Move-
ment, for example, Linda Reed writes that the attempt by white southern
liberals to create a more egalitarian society, in an era in which the majority

Beyond a Liberal Audience 85

of white southerners refused to consider racial equality, deserves a prominent
place in American history “because it illustrates the weaknesses of organi-
zations [that] refuse to take direct action in situations that call for revolu-
tionary means.” The Civil Rights Movement, she comments, showed that
basic reform requires “unseemly acts by masses of people—boycotts, dem-
onstrations, jailings—which [white liberal organizations] had neither the
numbers nor courage to undertake.”12
Similarly, John Kneebone writes of how white southern journalists, in the
wake of the Supreme Court’s 17 May 1954 declaration that racial segregation
in public schools is unconstitutional, sought to console their readers with
claims that segregation would survive for years, that “calm deliberation”
would therefore better serve the South than “angry reaction.” Desegregation
would come to the South because the region must obey the law, but the
change could take place gradually, without conflict. In tracing the evolution
of this discourse through a series of editorials that appeared from 1954 to
1958, Kneebone demonstrates how white southern journalists employed the
rhetoric of cultural relativism to suppress contradictions inherent in their
“moderate” stance. As journalist Virginius Dabney wrote, his argument
implied nothing “of bigotry or prejudice, and nothing having to do with
supposed racial superiority or inferiority.” Rather, blacks and whites alike
should desire “to preserve the ethnic and cultural heritage of one’s own race,
and not to have it diluted or destroyed through commingling with a race
that has a sharply contrasting background.” Kneebone finds that, through
compromises such as this, white southern journalists kept alive a liberal spirit
of toleration, yet, as Dabney’s editorials show, maintained a racist social
infrastructure as well. He concludes that the significance of this strategy was,
finally, that it ensured that white liberals would always control the cultural
agenda and rate of change in race relations.13
On the other hand, criticism of liberal ideology addresses how the contem-
porary attack on racism is often reduced to policy measures aimed at elimi-
nating racist institutional barriers or providing compensatory programs
designed to increase the cultural capital and skills of African Americans in
education and the marketplace. Its premise, as Henry Giroux points out, is
that liberal discourse in its various forms
rarely engages how white authority is inscribed and implicated in the
creation and reproduction of a society in which the voices of the center
appear either invisible or unimplicated in the historical and social con-
struction of racism as an integral part of their own collective identity.
Though the theoretical scope is broad and oversimplified here, Giroux for-
mulates a strategy that resists the contention that racism is solely explicit.
That it is also implicit becomes the basis for an argument that dominant
educational approaches to race and ethnicity, organized by the discourse of
multiculturalism, generally fail to conceptualize race and ethnicity as part
of a wider discourse of power and powerlessness. “Questions of representation
and inclusion suppress any attempts to call into question the norm of white-

86 Social Protest and the Politics of Representation

ness as an ethnic category that secures its dominance by appearing to be
invisible,” he notes. The invisibility of white culture, fashioned in the gaze
of liberal ideology, becomes for Giroux its defining and most powerfulaspect,
constituting white privilege even as it allegedly contests the practices that
construct it.14
Pondering similar concerns, Dinesh D’Souza writesthat“liberalism,which
began as an ideology of equal rights, has degenerated into the paternalism of
rigged results.” What is rigged are liberal policies designed to erase differ-
ences in academic achievement, economic performance, and crime rates be-
tween blacks and other groups. By routinely abridging standards for blacks,
such policies make it more likely that blacks will fail at tasks for which they
are inadequately prepared. While white liberals do not want blacks to fail,
D’Souza observes that many seem to behave as though, in every competition
that is not fixed, they expect them to do so. Like Kneebone, he references his
critique to the liberal embrace of relativism as a basis for proclaiming the
equality of all cultures while rejecting the classic racist assertion of white
civilizational superiority. Yet D’Souza rethinks relativism as that which also
makes it impossible for liberals to confront the issue of black cultural pa-
thology. To do so is seen as “blaming the victim,” while the desire to avoid a
genetic explanation forces liberals to blame group differences on racism.15
What this form of liberalism evinces is thus not the easily targeted hypocrisy
that Kneebone locates in white liberal journalists but a more epistemologi-
cally complex register of experience, one that ultimately prevents liberals
from supporting policies that uphold any standard of responsibility.
As Shannon Jackson emphasizes, to push beyond a “knee-jerked condem-
nation of the PC-inauthenticity of . . . those who do not ‘walk’ their ‘talk’ ”
is to acknowledge how muddy the relationship of rhetorical advocacy and
social action actually is. She writes:
Talking and walking, like all variations on the theory/practicedichotomy,
denote different registers of experience; they function imprecisely because
these registers can be so different and because that difference illuminates
conundra about intention, about consequence, and about what it is to be
knowledgeable about one’s actions.16
For D’Souza, such conundra are further exacerbated by the steady erosion,
since the 1960s, of liberal confidence in the ability of color-blind rules to
give blacks a fair chance to compete on their merits. Their faith in the efficacy
of policy shaken, white liberals are now left mainly to produce alibis for black
failure, abandoning activism for a litany of ritualistic apologies. D’Souzacites
a few of them: the “root causes” of poverty, the “bitter hoax” of the American
Dream, the mysterious disappearance of “meaningful” work, the prospect of
a “resurgence” of “hate,” the danger of “imposing one’s morality,” the need
to avoid “code words,” and how we should all “understand the rage.”17 For
D’Souza, this rhetoric takes on a comic aspect, and he questions whether it
is even believed by its advocates. In pointing out how self-deception thus
becomes one of liberalism’s primary modes, he claims that “many liberals

Beyond a Liberal Audience 87

may cease to believe in their own ingenious excuses and become like lawyers
who suspect, finally, that their client may be guilty.”18
While there may be little evidence to support D’Souza’s thesis, render-
ing it debatable at best, it nonetheless converges with other critiques
evoking general frustration with the liberal status quo and the intellectual
and moral bankruptcy of relativism as its ideological basis. The points at
which these critiques differ suggest the possibility of cultural theory that
allows for a more nuanced liberal subject position, one that does not nec-
essarily perpetuate both the white guilt and white self-righteousness that
constitute its condition. Generally, by drawing into focus the invisibility
of whiteness as a normative ethnic category, such criticism resists uncom-
plicated stereotypes of dominant members of society and counters the at-
tempts of white liberals to secure a disingenuous position outside their
own antiracist critiques. In this sense, the work of Reed and Kneebone
questions implicitly the viability of doing revolutionary cultural work in
mainstream theaters, while that of Giroux and D’Souza suggests how
problematically the good intentions of white liberal theatergoers are
translated as a coherent multiracial politics. From a Millian perspective, I
have characterized the white patron of black theater as liberal, as one who
desires entry into a progressive dialogue with black theater and culture, as
one who comes to the theater and says, “Here I acknowledge my Other-
ness, and in so doing imply that I accept you—community, theater, play,
and performer—as the Other. Can we talk?” Yet, as these critiques of lib-
eralism foreground, to what extent do these talks take place? On what ba-
sis does the experience of theatergoing retain—in Minneapolis/St. Paul,
for example—a socially transformative power?

Diversity Work
In the Twin Cities theater community, there have emerged in the 1990s two
primary approaches to representing race and ethnicity. To some extent, these
were articulated in the Wilson-Brustein discussion and are perhaps reflective
generally of a binary tension in thinking and performing about race in the
American theater just now. The approaches were clearly exemplified by two
productions: a 1991 staging of Death of a Salesman, directed by Sheldon Epps,
at the Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis (see figure 4.1), in which black actors
appeared in the central roles of Willy, Linda, Biff, Happy, and Uncle Ben
Loman; and a 1995 staging of Sally’s Rape, written and performed by African-
American performance artist Robbie McCauley, at Penumbra Theatre in St.
Paul.19 Both productions were immensely popular with audiences and gen-
erated considerable coverageandcontroversyinlocalmedia.Criticalreactions
to the Guthrie’s black Salesman focused on the ethical implications of pro-
moting diversity by color-blind casting a well-known play by a prominent
white author. Specific questions addressed the extent to which Willy Loman

88 Social Protest and the Politics of Representation

Figure 4.1 Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller, Guthrie Theatre, Minneapolis,
Minnesota, 1991. Willy Loman played by Mel Winkler; Howard played by Barton
Tinall. Photo by Michael Daniel.

is, as Miller has repeatedly insisted, a modern Everyman whose fall evokes
universal aspects of suffering, or a figure grounded deeply in the particular
ideology and cultural landscape of white middle-class America. If he is the
latter, as Bellamy and Wilson have argued, then the misrepresentation of the
Lomans as a black family only serves to further distort a white liberal percep-
tion of the actualities of black male, female, and cultural identities. Reactions
to Sally’s Rape, on the other hand, centered on the content and dynamics of
postshow dialogues, which were moderated by McCauley. In the dialogues,
white spectators were encouraged to publicly perform—for one another—
their real, imagined, or desired affiliations with both the represented and
actual histories of the rape of an African American slave woman, which
occurred more than one hundred years ago. What emerged frequently was a
series of uncomfortable confrontations—or silences—between liberal
whites, who sought to maintain that their cultural sensitivity was, in fact,
greater than others. Examples of each production illustrate the liberal con-
undra about intention, consequence, and consciousness that Jackson and
others have criticized.

Beyond a Liberal Audience 89

 A Black Everyman
In keeping with Miller’s minimalist concerns, Sheldon Epps’s Salesman was
set on the Guthrie’s large unadorned thrust with only a single platform
indicating the boys’ bedroom upstage and a towering row of apartments,
decaying and apparently vacant, at its rear. While there was nothing extraor-
dinary about the structural elements of the mise-en scène, they were none-
theless drawn into a sharp critical and cultural focus via the use of color. The
floor of the stage was painted red, green, and gold, resembling a multicolored
Jamaican or West African tapestry or a vast piece of Ghanaian kente cloth, the
“cloth of kings.” These colors were then picked up and highlighted by
identically colored projections emanating from the apartment windows, so
that the entire setting signified generally “Africanness” or, more specifically,
“African Americanness.” The Lomans were seen to have built their house,
quite literally, upon the cultural foundations of African ancestors. It should
be noted that, in the summer of 1991, when this production was staged it
was not uncommon to encounter kente cloth on the streets of Minneapolis
attached to jackets, hats, purses, and other items. Earlier that year, the
Dayton-Hudson Corporation, one of the Guthrie’s principal benefactors, had
introduced into its chain of upscale departmentstoresalineofgoodsimported
from West Africa, which included small sections of kente cloth, at $40 each.
Ironically, it is possible that some Guthrie spectators may have thus first
recognized the representation of kente cloth on stage not as a sign of the
Lomans’ African heritage but simply as one of many new products they had
discovered recently at the mall.
A variety of aspects of Miller’s play were similarly linked to other racially
constituted texts with which the Guthrie audience was likely to be familiar.
To begin with, the representation of the Lomans as a black family pointed to
the marginalization of blacks in American society as well as withinMinnesota
and the Guthrie itself. Surrounded by upper-middle-class white spectators,
the Lomans were isolated in the theater much the way the lower-middle-
class Jeffersons had been isolated on television in the 1980s following their
move to Manhattan’s affluent and predominantly white Upper East Side.
While this particular positioning strongly emphasized both class and race
differences between the Lomansandtheaudience—somethingatraditionally
cast production of Salesman at the Guthrie would of course not do—it did
not, in this context, contest these differences as detrimental to the status quo.
African Americans, after all, comprise only 3.6 percent of the Twin Cities’
population, making it common that many white residents could go for some
time without immediate contact with blacks.20 Thus, Epps’s Lomans mir-
rored and made oddly familiar the racial imbalance explicit in Minnesota
cultural life. Familiarity with such an imbalance does not always engender a
commitment to its rectification, however, and it may be that, for many
Guthrie spectators, the theatrical simulation of a black family in their midst
simply reinforced their sense of exteriority to actual blacks and their expe-
riences.

90 Social Protest and the Politics of Representation

 Epps’s revisioning likewise extended to Uncle Ben, whose tales of success
in the diamond mines of the African Gold Coast were radically reinterpreted
as a result. “I was going to find father in Alaska,” he tells Willy, but then
adds that he “had a very faulty view of geography . . . [and] after a few days
. . . ended up in Africa.” Delivered by an African American actor, these lines
consistently drew one of the largest laughs in the production. In addition to
the joke about Ben’s misguided travels, they signaled a search for racial
ancestry not explicitly stated in the text. Followed by Ben’s claim that he
had discovered their father as “a man with a big beard . . . sitting around a
fire . . . [playing] some kind of high music . . . [on] a flute,” the audience
once again laughed at how casting had cleverly rehistoricized both the absent
Loman father and Uncle Ben as patriarchal figures in a kind of “Roots”
miniseries saga. On the one hand, the fine sense of postmodern irony at play
in the scene signaled that other “alternative” pleasures were likely to be
produced as the result of intertextual layering. On the other hand, it legiti-
mized the processes by which white spectators drew upon stereotypical
associations of African Americans to produce those pleasures. Thus the pro-
duction ironically appeared to promote a fresh reading of Salesman while
reproducing yet one more stale pastiche of rearticulated racism.
The color-blind casting did not generate solely hip laughter, however. The
reenactment of Biff’s failure to pass high school math and earn a football
scholarship to the University of Virginia, for example, became poignantly
realigned with the narratives of many young black men whose academic and
athletic aspirations go, as a matter of survival, hand in hand. Here again, the
audience was asked to appreciate how deftly casting had sutured the Lomans
to an African American cultural context, while at the same time it reinforced
a particularly narrow perception of black male identity and its allegedly
innate athleticism. Happy’s proposed solution to his brother’s hard-luck
story inflated this perception further. “We form two basketball teams, see?”
he tells Biff. “We play each other. It’s a million dollars’ worth of publicity.
Two brothers, see? The Loman Brothers. Displays in the Royal Palms—all
the hotels. And banners over the basketball court: ‘Loman Brothers.’ Baby,
we could sell sporting goods!” As a pipe dream conjured by a young black
man, it is likely that Happy’s plan resonated for the liberal white audience
with a degree of irony greater than that indicated by the text. In other words,
if the production of meaning in the scene is contingent on the audience
knowing what Happy does not—namely, that the Loman brothers were not
born to succeed in business—to what extent did the color-blind casting also
emphasize that the Loman brothers were not born to succeed in business
because they are black? While there is not, of course, an easy answer to this,
D’Souza’s comments about the “rigged paternalism” of liberalism come to
mind. The possibility—however modest and fleeting—that color-blind
casting empowered the liberal white audience with the ability to eviscerate
the Lomans by referring them to stereotypes of blacks prevalent in the
dominant culture nonetheless problematizes such theater as an emblematic
site for “doing” diversity work. Racial stereotypes that resonate aroundrather

Beyond a Liberal Audience 91

than within a performance, that are referred to rather than represented, that
are not explicitly satirized or subjected to a self-reflexive critique position an
audience on a compelling, potentially transformative, yet dangerous, edge.
At stake is the extent to which the audience apprehends the presence of the
stereotypes and, if so, questions critically their function in the performance
and everyday life.
For example, when Willy comes to see his boss, Howard, about taking him
off the road, the negotiation of power in the scene was unmistakably drawn
along racial lines. Howard, in this context, provided a recognizable frame
through which Willy and his struggles could be regarded at a safe and,
perhaps, all-too-familiar distance; that is, the white boss informs the black
employee that his work is substandard and then fires him. The Lomans’
neighbors, Charley and his son, Bernard, provided similar frames through
which Willy’s identity could be formulated almost exclusively as a function
of race. When Bernard prepares to return to Washington, Willy confronts
him and asks, “Why didn’t [Biff] ever catch on?” Bernard then brieflyretraces
for Willy the chronology of Biff’s demise, concluding with the observation
that something devastating apparently happened to Biff while visiting his
father in Boston. In a traditionally cast Salesman, the negotiation of power in
this scene is potentially intense. Bernard, the studious boy next door, who
was never, according to Willy, “well liked,” has become a gifted young
attorney preparing to argue a case before the Supreme Court. His return
painfully signifies for Willy all that Biff and Happy have not become and all
that he has not become for them. When Bernard asks Willy, “What happened
in Boston?” the stage is thus set for the revelation of how Biff lost his faith
in his father, and ultimately in himself, after discovering Willy with his
mistress. That Bernard should be the one to propel this element of the plot
into motion is of course the heart and soul of the scene; the person Willy had
least expected to succeed, he now understands all too clearly, is directly in
control of his destiny.
In Epps’s production, Bernard, sporting the requisite briefcase and tennis
racket, was powerfully linked to the cacophony of contemporary critical
discourses regarding white male hegemony and the various means by which
it is reproduced. Looking for all the world like the youngest member of the
proverbial old boys’ club, Bernard embodied in this context not only the
rewards of disciplined work, as perhaps Miller had intended, but precisely
the privileges of being both white and male in the United States. Here Epps’s
focus was clear: Bernard and Willy sparred as icons in a microcosmic simu-
lation of the American social order: white versus black, rich versus poor,
oppressor versus oppressed.
In the pivotal Boston scene that followed, this focus was extended to
incorporate an examination of therole of genderandsexualityintheAmerican
racial equation. With the casting of Willy’s mistress as a white woman, the
scene elaborated directly on the various taboos associated with interracial
dating and how desire is driven at times by the allure of an exotic Other.
Following his meetings with Howard and Bernard, Willy’s pursuit of a white

92 Social Protest and the Politics of Representation

woman as an alternative to his black wife appeared in this context to be
motivated by his insatiable longing for status and respect in the culture of
his oppressors. His affair, as a result, signified less a desperate transgression
of exhausted marital boundaries than aconcertedattempttoidentify,affiliate,
and become one with the signs of white male authority. Thus, while The
Woman functions in Miller’s text primarily as an eroticized object onto
which Willy displaces his existential anxiety, in Epps’s production, she was
additionally objectified as a racially constituted trophy, whichWillybelieved
he deserved and had won. It may be that, of all of Epps’s revisions, the
representation of a black Willy Loman getting dressed after sex with an
anonymous white woman in a hotel room far from his home most provoca-
tively recontextualized Salesman within the particular culture of the Guthrie
and its audience. Here, it could not be denied that the production had
fundamentally destabilized the text and opened it to a greater range of
interpretive possibilities than it alone seemed capable of generating.

Redemptive Dialogue

In Sally’s Rape, Robbie McCauley and Jeannie Hutchins, a white performer,

collaborated in a highly visual, nonlinear narrative of the life of McCauley’s
great-great-grandmother Sally, a slave who was raped by her white master
solely to breed cheap field hands. By openly negotiating in their performance
a variety of tense physical and discursive spaces constituted by their racial
and cultural differences, McCauley and Hutchins challenged spectators to
do the same with the play itself: to confront, in personal terms, their rela-
tionships to both the represented and actual histories of the rape of an African
American slave woman. In short, the predominantly white audience was
asked to question the extent to which it had been complicit in Sally’s rape
and, finally, to articulate the terms of its complicity—or resistance to it—
in a postshow dialogue with McCauley and Hutchins.
The pivotal scene in Sally’s Rape had McCauley standing on an auction
block, stripped naked, embodying her great-great-grandmother, while
Hutchins led the audience in chanting, “Bid ’em in! Bid ’em in!” Then, in
an attempt to understand McCauley’s emotions,tangledintherepresentation
of Sally’s emotions, Hutchins climbed onto the auction block herself and
began to slip out of her own dress. However, just as she was about to complete
the action, she stopped, slowly pulled her dress back on, and stepped down.
The moment required little elaboration: Sally, McCauley’s great-great-
grandmother, had no choice; Hutchins did, and she refused to be degraded.
The postshow dialogues began there. McCauley and Hutchins brought
chairs to the stage, invited reactions from the audience, sat, and waited. More
traditionally staged productions at Penumbra, such as those of August Wil-
son’s plays, have seldom explored the relationship of black theater to white
audience as directly as Sally’s Rape. As moderator of the postshow dialogue,
McCauley sought to tactfully draw out of the audience the precise terms and

Beyond a Liberal Audience 93

conditions of its affiliation with the play. The following comments emerged
in several postshow dialogues in January 1995 and are representative of
differing modes of interactive discourse generated in the roughly hour-long
sessions.21
On one night, a black woman began emotionally: “This play is serious. I
mean, it got to me, you know? Black women back then had to keep their
heads on straight.” McCauley was appreciative but pushed the discussion.
“How do people survive?” she asked. “Partly we find out where we come
from, no matter how hard it is.” Another black woman objected to the nude
scene on the grounds that it was degrading to black women. McCauley,
having heard the criticism before, acknowledged the validity of the woman’s
feelings, then explained that she used nudity to shock in order to more
powerfully convey her great-great-grandmother’s lack of options, her isola-
tion. The audience nodded; the subject was dropped.
No white spectators contributed to this exchange. Was their silence a
gesture of respect, a polite acknowledgment of their exclusion from the
subject of black female identity and the politics of its representation? Or
was it a numbed PC silence, fueled by fear of rhetorically transgressing
vague but immutable borders, of appearing to be intolerant? While the
texts of such silences are elusive, their cultural contexts are perhaps less
so. Erika Thorne, for example, a Twin Cities “diversity and antiracism
consultant,” reveals just how conveniently a white audience’s silence in
the face of black theater may be theorized. In response to theater critic
Jayne Blanchard’s review of Everlasting Arms by Rebecca Rice, another Pe-
numbra production (May 1996) soliciting a high degree of audience in-
teraction, Thorne writes:

Here is Jayne Blanchard. She’s a European-American who shows little

evidence that she has worked to school herself in the culture and life reality
of citizens of color, and she attempts to critique a piece that powerfully
embodies the contemporary experience of an African American woman
raising a son in our racist culture. . . . You can’t critique art from others’
culture.22

Thorne, who is white, concludes that Blanchard should have been “honest
and realistic about her ability to write well about the event, and simply
bow[ed] out.” While Thorne does not specify on which aspect of Blanchard’s
review she bases her complaint, it may be that she found Blanchard’s conclu-
sion, likening the interactive play to “more of a community outreachprogram
or grief ritual cloaked in the trappings of abstract theatre,” sufficiently
egregious as to warrant comment.23 However vague her argument with
Blanchard, Thorne’s implicit warning to white spectators of black theater is:
if you are not black, or if you lack appropriate “diversity and antiracism”
training, keep quiet. The silence this predictable position enforces is a form
of compensatory deference, trading the discursive potentials of McCauley’s
project for a mute liberal posture.

94 Social Protest and the Politics of Representation

 On another night, a white man referred to the case of Thomas Jefferson,
who while president had several children with a slave who was also named
Sally. Picking up the thread, another white man added that,tohisknowledge,
“Jefferson apparently loved her.” McCauley came as close to anger as she
would get on this evening. “I’m harsh with that because of slavery,” she
replied. “I know what rape is during slave time, and I call that rape. If there
was so much romance, why didn’t Jefferson marry Sally and change history?
My great-great-grandmother had children by the master, and to her that was
supposed to have been something. But it was rape.” Following a brief silence,
the man squirmed; the audience applauded.
The collision and collusion of black and white histories in the exchange
and the manner in which they were focused by McCauley’s anger was a clear
threshold. On the one hand, McCauley had encouraged white spectators to
test the limits of their compassion for Sally by engaging in discussion. On
the other hand, her attempt to correct the respondent’s consciousness of
Jefferson ironically wound up inhibiting such tests, insofar as the audience
signaled its desire to defer to her authority and to reprimand the respondent
with a rousing round of applause. Perhaps this was not what McCauley had
intended, that a liberal audience should rally so uncritically behind her. For,
if such forms of disingenuous deference can be rationalized as socially virtu-
ous, all that can be said of the white man who claimed that “Jefferson
apparently loved [his slave]” is that he failed to provide appropriate compen-
sation.
Later in the discussion, a white woman revealed that, while researching
her family’s history, she had discovered she was related to a wealthy slave
owner, who had allegedly raped his slaves. She talked about how guilty the
discovery had made her feel, as if her own blood was contaminated by her
ancestor’s sins. Laughing nervously, she drew McCauley’s attention to the
irony of what she regarded as their coincidentalmeeting: McCauley’sancestor
was a slave who had been raped; her ancestor was a rapist of slaves. She
continued by thanking McCauley, indicating she understood just how dif-
ficult it was for her to talk about slavery given her own resistance to dealing
with it “from the other side, as it were.” McCauley listened carefully, then
thanked the woman for her contribution. “Slavery has affected us all so
deeply,” she said. “It’s a painful past, but you can’t throw it away and forget
it. This country was built on African slave labor, on Indian land, and we’re
all living with that history. How can we all admit that and talk to each other
about it?” Indeed, it appeared to be just what the white woman had done.
She had openly and honestly admitted her complicity in the birth of a nation
constructed via the systematic oppression of people of color, and she was
willing to talk about it. She had gone as far, in fact, as to infer a possible link
between her family and Sally’s rape. For the moment, it appeared that no
more direct admission of complicity and sincere expression of guilt could
exist in a dialogue about race than this.

Beyond a Liberal Audience 95

 Beyond a Liberal Audience
“Guilt makes us afraid for ourselves and so generates as much self-
preoccupation as concern for others,” declares Shelby Steele. “The nature of
this preoccupation is always the redemption of innocence, the reestablish-
ment of good feeling about oneself.” In this sense, Steele argues, guilt ulti-
mately promotes selfishness as it pushes us “to put our own need for innocence
above our concern for the problem that made us feel guilt in the first place.”
Thus, guilt also generates a pressure to escape the guilt-inducing situation.
Steele concludes:
When selfishness and escapism are at work, we are no longer interested in
the source of our guilt and, therefore, no longerconcernedwithanauthentic
redemption from it. Now we only want the look of redemption, the gesture
of concern that will give us the appearance of innocence and escape from
the situation.24
To what extent were whites in the audiences of Death of a Salesman and
Sally’s Rape engaged in pursuing such a look and gesture? While it is perhaps
likely that some hoped their presence and contributions to postshow dia-
logues would, in fact, exonerate them, maintain their innocence, or fulfill a
gesture of concern for African Americans, as Steele suggests, it is just as likely
that the productions redeemed the innocence of others by enabling them to
escape an immediate and troubling identification with a black Willy Loman,
or with McCauley and the represented and actual histories of her great-great-
grandmother’s rape. In this respect, Steele—like Giroux, D’Souza,andothers
critical of contemporary liberalism—articulates a greater degree of tension
in the white liberal subject than do overdetermined media stereotypes, yet
he fails to provide a theory for a liberal theater audience that does not
ultimately reproduce the hegemony of dominant culture.
If Lee’s observations about the failure of white audiences to come to a better
understanding of African American culture after three decades and more of
liberal individual and institutional support for the black performing arts are
thus, for the most part, accurate, such a theory is needed. The hypocrisies of
white liberalism in contemporary America are more complicated, more det-
rimental to the development of a coherent multiracial politics, than ever,
particularly, as I have suggested, in the theater. A theory for a liberal audience
must therefore be founded upon the premise that the hierarchies of white
privilege and racism are interlocking and provoke deep and complicated
reflection on the tenability of the liberal subject. Further, it must, most
importantly, indicate a practice that exposes, rather than recapitulates or
reinvents, racism. As the responses of white audiences to African American
theater productions in the Twin Cities reveal, the difficulty in developing
such a practice hinges not on a lack of good intentions but on the insidious
ways many liberal whites seem overtaken by the guilt of white privilege. At
the Guthrie and Penumbra, this guilt frequently causes whites to doubt that
white people have the authority to talk about race, to doubt that whites are

96 Social Protest and the Politics of Representation

a race, and to conclude that all whites can really do is listen. Such doubts are
debilitating and lead tothecreation of an audiencethathasneitherknowledge
of its principles nor any intention of putting them into service. As Edward
Abbey cautions, “Sentiment without action is the ruin of soul.”25 To move
beyond this audience is thus to acknowledge that the once-invigorating
liberal creeds seem exhausted, that toleration has failed to provide a sufficient
basis for cross-cultural understanding and respect, and that, ironically, an
intractable sense of guilt associated with privilege should not be alleviated
but should be interrogated continually, as a vital source of energy for racial
healing in America.

notes

1. Quoted in Pete Hamill, “Spike Lee Takes No Prisoners,” Esquire (Aug. 1991):
26.
2. David Spitz, The Real World of Liberalism (Chicago: University ofChicagoPress,
1982), 214.
3. Penumbra Theatre, “Audience Profile,” Oct. 1997.
4. Shannon Jackson used the term “muddy” to describe the relationship of liberal
“talking” and “walking” in “Performance and Deterritorialization: White Privilege,
Gender, Pedagogy,” a paper presented at the American Society for Theatre Research
annual meeting in Pasadena in Nov. 1996. I am grateful to Jackson for sharing this
paper with me and for her comments on my work.
5. LeRoi Jones, “Dutchman” and “The Slave Ship” (New York: William Morrow,
1964), 36.
6. William Grimes, “An Impassioned Debate on Black Theatre,” MinneapolisStar
Tribune (2 Feb. 1997): F9.
7. For discussion of how the 1996 elections defined liberalism through attacks on
Wellstone in Minnesota, see “The Last Living Liberal,” Economist (19 Oct. 1996): 31;
and David Corn, “No Holiday for the Busman,” Nation (21 Oct. 1996): 15.
8. Shelby Steele, “How Liberals Lost Their Virtue over Race,” Newsweek (9 Jan.
1995): 41.
9. Charles E. Silberman, Crisis in Black and White (New York: Vintage/Random,
1964), 3.
10. Eugene Nesmith, “What’s Race Got To Do with It?” American Theatre (Mar.
1996): 12.
11. Lou Bellamy, letter, 9 Aug. 1996. Bellamy originally sent this to Peter
Vaughn, theater critic for the Minneapolis Star Tribune, to clarify Penumbra’sposition
on color-blind casting.
12. Linda Reed, Simple Decency and Common Sense: The Southern Conference Movement,
1938–1963 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), xxv–xxvi.
13. John T. Kneebone, Southern Liberal Journalists and the Issue of Race, 1920–1944
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985), 220–222.
14. Henry A. Giroux, Border Crossings: Cultural Workers and the Politics of Education
(New York: Routledge, 1993), 116–117.
15. Dinesh D’Souza, The End of Racism (New York: Free Press, 1995), 528–531.
16. Jackson n. 2.
17. D’Souza 528.

Beyond a Liberal Audience 97

 18. D’Souza 531.
19. At the Guthrie, Death of a Salesman ran 19 June–8 Sept 1991; at Penumbra,
Sally’s Rape ran 11 Jan.–5 Feb. 1995.
20. U.S. Department of Commerce, 1990 Census of Population: General Popu-
lation Characteristics, Minnesota (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1992), 21.
21. See, for example, Mike Steele, “Dialogue on Difference,” Minneapolis Star
Tribune (26 Jan. 1995): 1E.
22. Erika Thorne, “You Can’t Critique Arts from Others’ Cultures,” St. Paul
Pioneer Press (22 July 1996): 5.
23. Jayne M. Blanchard, “ ‘Everlasting Arms’ Embraces Deep Emotions,”St.Paul
Pioneer Press (1 June 1996): 5D.
24. Shelby Steele, The Content of Our Character (New York: St. Martin’s, 1990),
84–85.
25. Quoted in Terry Tempest Williams, “Edward Abbey,” Outside (Oct. 1997):
140.

98 Social Protest and the Politics of Representation

“
“
Part II

Cultural Traditions, Cultural Memory,

and Performance
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 5

Deep Skin
Reconstructing Congo Square

‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘
joseph r. roach

I believe it to be a fact that the colored people of this country know

and understand the white people better than the white people will
ever know and understand themselves.
James Weldon Johnson

French historian Pierre Nora distinguishes between “places of memory,” the

modern repositories of social memory that range from monuments to theme
parks, and “environments of memory,” the predominantly oral systems of
cultural transmission in traditional societies. Among the several stimulating
problems raised by such a distinction is its segregation of one kind of people
from another. On the one hand, Nora imagines the literate yet increasingly
amnesiac inhabitants of the modernized lieux de mémoire, who patronize
stunted, artificial shrines to ethnic and national identity; on the other, there
are the old folks back home in the milieux de mémoire.1 In Cities of the Dead:
Circum-Atlantic Performance, I proposed some alternatives to Nora’s theories
of memory based on the model of intercultural performance.Suchanapproach
interrogates the familiar dichotomy of literacy and orality: it acknowledges
that speech and writing have produced one another interactively over time;
further, it imagines people who are possessed of various modes of commu-
nication living together at the same time, even—now and then, here and
there—in the same place at the same time. I found these to be the conditions
prevailing in the performance-saturated interculture of New Orleans, and I
attempted to demonstrate the ways in which that city “performs as a simu-
lacrum of itself, apparently frozen in time, but in fact busily devoted to the
ever-changing task of recreating the illusion that it is frozen in time.”2
Fundamental to the character of this complex and often contradictory
enterprise is the self-renewing energy of African American performance

101
traditions. They continuously and powerfully frustrate linear narratives and
positivist histories, Eurocentric fables in which the popular fiction known as
the dominant culture requires the segregation of the dead from theliving—as
well as speech from writing and “facts” from “myths”—in order to identify
itself with a spurious modernity.ThisisnotlimitedtoNewOrleans,although
it makes itself starkly visible there. One of the most important challenges
facing all scholars in theater and performance studies today is how to do
justice to the centrality of African American contributions to cultural life in
the United States. In terms of the performing arts, beginning but not ending
with jazz and modern dance, African American forms and those derived from
them constitute the mainstream, not the margin, and their history as such
has only begun to be written.
Writing that history is complicated, as are so many of our most worthy
national projects, by skin. Skin is the principal medium that has carried the
past into the present in the city of New Orleans and elsewhere, a continuing
odyssey mapped by the sinuous track of Plessy v. Ferguson through the heart
of America. Skin has been and continues to be not only a document but also
a performance, persisting as such notwithstanding the courageous resistance
of many unwilling participants in the bogus and cruel expansion of its
meanings. These meanings metastasize differences that are only skin deep
into what I am calling deep skin, a melanoma of the imagination: skin deepens
into the cancer of race when supposed inner essences and stereotypical be-
haviors are infected byitinthecollectivefantasiesofonepeopleaboutanother.
The malignancy of deep skin usually begins with a blank space or a kind of
erasure, which empties out the possibility of empathetic response, but this
cavity quickly fills with bizarre growths. First, deep skin becomes invisible;
then, after the passage of time—the twinkling of an eye is all that is re-
quired—it alone remains visible.
The consequences of deep skin are easy to deplore, difficult to escape. They
complicate the writing of history, especially the history of a practice as
evanescent as performance, because the authors of eyewitness accounts and
other documentary sources on which historians depend were distracted from
the cultural productions they observed by the skins not only of the performers
but also of the witnesses. Among the skin tones in the sources I have studied
most carefully, whiteness is at least as stubbornly intractable as nonwhiteness
because, as “the unexamined norm against which all differences are mea-
sured,” it is more likely to remain unacknowledged, “transparent,” however
deeply its diseased roots may be embedded in the mind of the beholder.3
Historians cannot remind themselves too often that when it comes to skins,
deep whiteness depends for its meaning on deep nonwhiteness. This dis-
avowed dependency raises the stakes of deep skin for those who consider
themselves white. No matter how compelling the performance might be,
the skin of the nonwhite performer deepens until art can be reduced to nature:
one man’s structure of musical temporality becomes another man’s natural
rhythm. The works are thus denuded of their context in a particular culture
and consigned to a limbo of essential skin.

102 Cultural Traditions, Cultural Memory, and Performance

 For these and many other reasons, the history of African American per-
formances must include their living memory, not only in the restrictive sense
of formal reconstructions of classic works (although that is necessary and
important) but also in the expansive sense of experiencing what Nora calls
“environments of memory.” The implications of this inclusiveness for his-
torians of performance are powerful. The built environment and dynamic
human geography of the circum-Atlantic cityscape itself becomes a perfor-
mance/document, unfolding at once as a scripted text (permanent paths,
borders, nodes, landmarks) and as an acoustical, kinesthetic event (markets,
parades, street music, carnivals). Valuable for their own sake, these events
also provide a context (and often an inspiration) for the works of individual
artists framed by more conventional performance venues. As the jazz virtuoso
Louis Armstrong said about growing up in the streets of New Orleans:“Yeah,
music all around you.”4
It is, in fact, the New Orleans historical site now named after Armstrong
that provides a concise case study of the struggle of memory and history in
the crucible of performance.
As a consultant on a documentary film project called Spirit Tides from Congo
Square, I was recently called upon to make suggestions about how to “recon-
struct” Congo Square. With initial funding by the Ford Foundation and
produced by author Jason Berry, the project has provided an occasion for a
practical test of the mediation between history and memory in representing
the African diaspora through performance. The name of Congo Square ap-
pears in virtually every account of the retention of Africanisms in American
culture and in most histories of jazz. Scholars know with as much certainty
as positive history can prove that, on this small plot of ground, slavesgathered
at carefully regulated times to sing and dance in a variety of musical styles,
including ones based on African or Afro-Caribbean forms (figure 5.1). The
“slave dances” continued well into the nineteenth century, and the square
became a celebrated tourist destination as well as a popular spot for Sunday
recreation by the locals. Although musicologists have failed to find positive
evidence of direct links between Congo Square and jazz, the belief that such
links did exist is strong in local tradition, reinforced in recent times by the
incorporation of the site into Armstrong Park and the location of the “Jazz
and Heritage” radio station WWOZ nearby. In the words of the Spirit Tides
project grant application:
Congo Square occupies mythical status in New Orleans history. From the
1790s through 1851, a small area along ramparts of the colony, now
encompassed by Louis Armstrong Park, was the site of Sunday dances by
slaves. The sustained presence of the dances left a deep mark on the city’s
folkways.5
It is in the documentation—and celebration—of those folkways that the
Spirit Tides project has cast its lot. The city is living evidence of its past, not
merely in the built environment but also in the acoustical and kinesthetic
ones. Therefore, the film will contain extraordinary footage and various

Reconstructing Congo Square 103

Figure 5.1 Slave ring shout, Congo Square, New Orleans. Courtesy Historic
New Orleans Collection, Museum Research Center.

commentaries on the role of jazz funerals, better known to locals as “being

buried with music,” in order to demonstrate the enduring power of African
musical and choreographic traditions in daily life today (see figure 5.2). It
will include graphic visual and acoustical accounts of the wave of “crack
funerals” in the 1990s—rites of passage wherein a number of young men,
whose violent deaths were blamed on cocaine-fueled drug wars, were buried
in low-down funk versions of the traditional New Orleans rituals.Supporting
fellow consultant J. H. Kwabena Nketia, director of the International Centre
for African Music and Dance in Ghana, I attempted to summarize the case
for the strategic inclusions of footage of contemporary performances, includ-
ing dance reconstructions, in the film:
This strategy foregrounds the problem that most interests me as an his-
torian of performance: the need to respect memories that remain in pos-
session of the living who, in opposition to an historic record that has been
selectively inscribed (and erased), continue to honor their dead as contem-
poraries. What I am suggesting here is deploying afrocentric as well as
eurocentric views of history and memory in order to treat thisextraordinary
subjectinthedepthitdeserves.Whenskepticsaskmeaboutreconstructing
historic performances, the first question I ask them in return is: What
makes you think they aren’t still going on?6
I further suggested that the memorial life of the city, contained in materials
as diverse as George Washington Cable’s novel The Grandissimes (1880) and
a contemporary debate about street performances, is as relevant to the recon-
struction of Congo Square as the more traditional documentary sources.
Above and beyond adding to the quantity of memories, these unconventional
sources suggest that there are better ways of remembering.

104 Cultural Traditions, Cultural Memory, and Performance

Figure 5.2 Alfred “Dute” Lazard funeral, New Orleans (1995). Photo by Michael
P. Smith.

In 1997–1998 residents of the increasingly gentrified historic New

Orleans French Quarter pushed forward an antinoise ordinance aimed at
curtailing the performances of the musicians who entertain passersby in
the tourist-filled streets. The law seemed to be aimed especially at the
“spasm bands,” which tend to draw their membership from teenagers
who reside in the predominantly African American community of
Treme, which is located across Rampart Street from the French Quarter.
Rampart Street, as its name implies, occupies the ground that once ac-
commodated the defensive palisade protecting the fortified colonial city
from its enemies without. Today, it separates the French Quarter not
only from the residential Treme neighborhood but from Armstrong
Park, which commemorates the site of Congo Square, which originally
stood just outside the city walls, not far from the cemetery. A city of
memory like New Orleans is literally layered with substitutions—pal-
impsests of adaptive use. In the case of Rampart Street, the palisade gave
way to a street, but the street threatens to become a wall once more. A
1998 letter to the editor of the New Orleans Times-Picayune proposed
just such a retrograde substitution in response to a perceived increase in
crimes perpetrated in the French Quarter by youths who then “vanished
into Treme.” The letter reads in part: “It seems to me that to control
criminal activity within the Quarter, the perimeter of the Quarter must
be controlled. This means numerous police cars on Rampart at all hours
observing and the questioning of suspicious-looking persons.” The au-
thor goes on to enumerate the characteristics of suspicious-looking per-

Reconstructing Congo Square 105

sons in rhetoric that clearly differentiates between those citizens whose
business it is to know and those whose proper fate it is to be known:
Let’s don’t pretend we don’t know what a suspicious-looking person is.
Anyone who has lived in New Orleans for more than a day knows the
characteristics of suspicious-looking persons—walking with apparently
no particular destination, constantly looking into cars, traversing the same
area again and again, that wild-eyed, drug-crazed predatory look, etc.
These people should be questioned and asked for ID.7
In an urban pleasure dome notorious for its public drunkenness, bustling
drug scene, and aimlessly strolling gawkers, the behaviors described here
need not by any means have originated outside the French Quarter. Yet the
author calls for a defensive “perimeter” along the precise axis laid down by
French military engineers in 1719, replete with armed sentries to challenge
the approaching strangers and to repel their attacks. In this letter, the word
skin need not be spoken because the quality of the bodily movements in the
urban space designated speak for themselves. The code remains intelligible
enough in the memorial organization of the cityscape that the proximity of
the words perimeter, rampart, and predatory alone will suffice to stand in for
skin and deepen it into race. Only somewhat more moderately coded rhetoric
issued from the mouths of proponents of the antinoise ordinance opposing
the “assault” on the French Quarter by members of the Treme brass bands.
The story that they are telling is getting very old.
Although it is set at the time of the Louisiana Purchase, George Washing-
ton Cable’s The Grandissimes is written from the authorial perspective shaped
by the catastrophe, contemporaneous with its writing, of the collapse of
Reconstruction and the rise of the Bourbon Redeemers. In this epoch, which
arguably has not yet ended as history and certainly not as memory, the culture
of race slavery was itself partially reconstructed by means legal and illegal.
Looking back to Jim Crow through The Grandissimes, as Cable looked back
to the early period of “Americanization” through his reconstruction of re-
membered events that remained visible in contemporary behaviors, it is
possible to imagine the present as a tangled web of consequences through
which the past effectively continues to perform itself.
In The Grandissimes, memory and history coalesce around a carefully placed
reconstruction of Congo Square. Cable published his ethnohistorical research
on the subject in Century Magazine (Feb. 1886) under the title “The Dance
in Place Congo,” but his fictional account, which includes an extensive
reconstruction of the social and cultural milieu of the surrounding city, is
ultimately a more trustworthy guide to the significance of the site. He
imaginatively evokes a comprehensive soundscape through his insertion of
notated musical examples and his descriptions of the conscious and uncon-
scious listening of many of the novel’s characters: “The cathedral clock struck
twelve and answered again from the convent tower; as the notes died he
suddenly became aware that the weird throb of the African song and dance
had been swinging drowsily in his brain for an unknown lapse of time.”8

106 Cultural Traditions, Cultural Memory, and Performance

Cable is reimagining a moment in time from which living memory has
receded, but the acoustical environment of the city, with church bells an-
swering spasm bands, is a tangible reminder that cities endure not only in
their buildings but through their performances.
In that regard, architect Benjamin Henry Latrobe’s eyewitness account
from 1819 generally supports the fictionalized details in The Grandissi-
mes. Walking up St. Peter Street in the French Quarter on a Sunday af-
ternoon, Latrobe became aware of “a most extraordinary sound,” which
he compared to “horses trampling on [a] wooden floor.” As he crossed
the street where the old rampart had stood and approached Congo
Square, he found five or six hundred “blacks” (his emphasis as he saw
only a few mulattoes). Typically, the Anglo-American city planner first
remarked on the skin color of the multitudes, then went on to deplore
their noise. The crowd divided itself into many smaller circles. In the
middle of each circle, couples or solo dancers performed. Musicians
played African drums and stringed instruments, which Latrobe later
sketched, and some sang in a language that the architect took to be Af-
rican. What his untutored ear heard as cacophony—horses stomping on
a wooden floor—was very likely a polyrhythmic, call-and-response cho-
rus of drums and voices, the master trope of the musical diaspora. La-
trobe responded with disgust, which was intensified by his fear at en-
countering so many unsupervised slaves together in one place: “I have
never seen anything so brutally savage,” he concluded.9 His attitude re-
flects a frequently noted ambivalence of Anglo-American spectators as
they performed their deep skin at the slave dances by telling each other
how scandalized they were even as they pushed and shoved to obtain a
better view. These spectators were privileged to witness the syncretic
production of African and Afro-Caribbean cultural practices, of which
the dances were but one aspect, at a key nodal point of a city astride the
crossroads of the emerging Atlantic world.
Once the location of Native American corn feasts, the patch of spare ground
that became Congo Square began in the eighteenth century as an unofficial
marketplace, where African slaves, Indians, and free people of color could
mingle with relative freedom, exchange their goods, and recreatethemselves.
In 1816, it was occupied by a Cuban impresario, Signore Gaetano, who
operated his whites-only Congo Circus there for many years. The name of the
square might have derived from this Havana-based melange of acrobats,
contortionists, and bear baitings. In 1820, a fence was added to control access
and contain the crowds. The many different names by which the square has
been known recall its contested history: Place des Negres, Place du Cirque,
Place Congo, Congo Circus, La Place Publique, Circus Public Square, Congo
Plains, Place d’Armes, P. G. T. Beauregard Park (after the Confederate gen-
eral), and, finally, Armstrong Park.10 During the 1840s and 1850s, the slave
dances dwindled and eventually ceased, butasthesquareemptiedout,smaller
spaces in neighborhoods around the city filled with music, dancing, and spirit
world practices, which occasioned complaints from the neighbors about the

Reconstructing Congo Square 107

noise.11 In the composition of the soundscape in an environment of memory,
whether shaped by law or by custom, even silence resonates with its own
aesthetic and social meanings.
Writing as the Redeemers intensified their efforts to exclude people of
color from every aspect of public life and to write them out of history, Cable
reconstructed Congo Square in a way that celebrated the African presence in
American memory while simultaneously exoticizing it as the locus of bizarre
noises and fantastic movements somehow linked to skin:
It was on a Sabbath afternoon that a band of Choctaws having just played
a game of racquette behind the city and a similar game being about to end
between the white champions of two rival faubourgs, the beating of tom-
toms, rattling of mules’ jawbones and sounding of wooden horns drew the
populace across the fields to a spot whose present name of Congo Square
still preserves a reminder of old barbaric pastimes. On a grassy plain under
the ramparts, the performers of these hideous discords sat upon the ground
facing each other, and in their midst the dancers danced. They gyrated in
couples, a few at a time, throwing their bodies into the most startling
attitudes and the wildest contortions, while the whole company of black
lookers-on, incited by the tones of the weird music and the violent pos-
turing of the dancers, swayed and writhed in passionate sympathy, beating
their breasts, palms and thighs in time with the bones and drums, and at
frequent intervals lifting, in that wild African unison no more to be
described than forgotten, the unutterable songs of the Babouille and Coun-
jaille dances, with their ejaculatory burdens of “Aie! Voudou Magnan!” and
“Aie Calinda! Dance Calinda!” (The Grandissimes 189)
This fictional account synthesizes the details Cable assembled in his Century
Magazine article. Although many subsequent authorities have quoted his
descriptions of the slave dances without questioning Cable’s methods, both
Johnson, in his definitive article on Congo Square, and S. Frederick Starr, in
his biography of composerLouisMoreauGottschalk,drawskepticalattention
to the novelist’s use of Médéric Moreau de Saint-Méry’s Déscription topograph-
ique de l’Isle Saint-Domingue (1797) and De la danse (1801).12 These sources
describe African-descended dances in Haiti, and Cable appropriated some of
their particulars into “The Dance in Place Congo” and The Grandissimes. But
why not? In opposition to the racial polarity championed by the Redeemers,
Cable’s goal was not to exalt the seamlessness of origins in a pristine local
culture but to comprehend its ethnic profusion: many Haitian refugees, free
and slave, arrived in New Orleans after the dislocations of the revolutionary
period, while smugglers defied the ban on importation and brought in slaves
directly from Africa. Eyewitnesses to the dances in Congo Square variously
report slaves playing drums, gourds, reed pipes, cow horns, violins, banjo-
like stringed instruments with African gods carved in the handles,marimbas,
horses’ jawbones, triangles, tambourines, and cremonas. They note costumes
of animal hides, fringes, ribbons, percale dresses, silk sashes, and “Turkish”
turbans of many hues. They observe dancers from at least four distinct tribal

108 Cultural Traditions, Cultural Memory, and Performance

groups, some with filed teeth, keeping their distance in separate circles.13
This reminds the unaware that no one arrived at a New World destination
from a monolithic place called “Africa” but rather from one or more particular
cultures on the circum-Atlantic rim.
In The Grandissimes, Cable takes advantage of the poetic license of fiction
to evoke memories that history too often undervalues. That is what makes so
compelling his careful placement of the Congo Square scene just before the
climactic moment of the capture, torture, and death of the semimythical
maroon Bras-Coupe. In Cable’s terms, this character claims a direct link to
Africa, but, like the dancers in the square, he embodies its memory in a series
of diasporic substitutions:

His name, he replied to an inquiry touching that subject, was ———

———, something in the Jaloff tongue, which he by and by condescended
to render into Congo: Mioko-Koanga, in French Bras-Coupe, the Arm Cut
Off. . . . He had made himself a type of all Slavery, turning into flesh and
blood the truth that Slavery is maiming. (The Grandissimes 170–171)

The blanks in Cable’s text record in print a lapse of living memory, but in
the space created by the absence of the words in the “Jaloff tongue,” another
African name stands in, only to be succeeded, in the process of memory as
substitution, by a French translation of the “Congo” name and then by an
English translation of the French. Colonial slave importation to French
Louisiana drew heavily on the peoples of Senegambia, and the Wolof (Djo-
laufs) of that region were regarded with special favor because of their bearing
and aptitude.14 The historic Bras-Coupe, “the greatest Bamboula dancer ever
to shake the earth in Congo Square,” whose slave name was Squire, became a
folk hero to slaves and a figure of awe and dread to slaveholders, who remem-
bered him as the “Brigand of theSwamp” after he“gatheredabandofrenegade
slaves and led them in nocturnal raids on the plantations in the neighbor-
hood.”15 Although it was widely believed that bullets passed right through
his body without effect, he was finally killed in July 1837, and his corpse was
publicly displayed. Cable juxtaposes his version of the story of the death of
Bras-Coupe to his reconstruction of Congo Square. In each instance, the
memory of Africa is displaced by substitutes that stand in for the romantic
but fugitive original.
With the depth of their white skins at stake, eyewitnesses and commen-
tators on the memory of Congo Square stress its violence. Even the liberal
Cable does so. In part, thissimplyexemplifiesanignorantresponsetocomplex
performance events by observers whose literacy blinds them to the techniques
of oral transmission through performance. They misrecognize the bodily
memory of restored behavior as spontaneous, “uncontrolled” expression. In
1826, Timothy Flint of Massachusetts published an account of a journey
down the Mississippi to New Orleans. He included a valuable description of
a slave dance, which clearly made a deep impression on this New Englander’s
imagination:

Reconstructing Congo Square 109

 The great Congo-dance is performed. Every thing is license and revelry.
Some hundreds of negroes, male and female, follow the king of the wake,
who is conspicuous for his youth, size, the whiteness of his eyes, and the
blackness of his visage. For a crown he has a series of oblong, gilt-paper
boxes on his head, tapering upwards, like a pyramid. From the ends of
those boxes hang two huge tassels, like those on epaulets. He wags his head
and makes grimaces. By his thousand mountebank tricks, and contortions
of countenance and form, he produces an irresistible effect on the multi-
tude. All the characters that follow him, of leading estimation, have their
own peculiar dress, and their own contortions. They dance, and their
streamers fly, and the bells that they have hung about them tinkle.16

Flint does not locate the source of the procession, which resembles in most
details a traditional New Orleans “Second Line” parade or jazz funeral, but
the descriptive phrase “Congo-dance” might point back in the direction of
Congo Square. Perhaps what is most significant about this passage, however,
is that the procession, with its “license and revelry,” its tintinnabulations,
and its vibrant choreography, has spilled out into the streets. In defiance of
the laws against slave assembly (other than in Congo Square on Sunday
afternoons), the procession follows a king, whose dark visage, framed by
fantastic headwear (see figure 5.3), leads the “multitudes” onward like a flag.
Predictably, Flint finds the skin not only dark but also deep: “The negro is
easily excitable, and in the highest degree susceptible of all the passions.”17
Deep skin has yet to relinquish its hold over the construction of the past.
The future is uncertain. A key strategy for scholars is to demonstrate both
the historical and contemporary roles of African American performance gen-
res. The most intense debate among the Spirit Tides consultants centered on
the difficulty of interpreting (and even the propriety of using) the “crack
funeral” footage. Details of physical movement, musical style, and ritual
practices informed the discussion, which resembled a panel of English pro-
fessors of different theoretical persuasions engaging one another over a con-
tested close reading of a difficult text. Some were fearful that the explicitness
of the material, which included a grieving mother dancing with abandon on
the coffin of her murdered son and scores of chanting teenagers spraying beer
over the casket, would “reinforce negative stereotypes” of African Americans.
In the cultural thrall of deep skin, that is not a trivial concern. Traditionalists
lamented the decline of the old jazz funerals and interpretedtheabandonment
of some of their more stately features as evidence of “social decay.” Apologists
for the crack funerals celebrated the astonishing adaptability of the venerable
rituals to accommodate themselves to a contemporary crisis in the commu-
nity.
I thought that the sincere misgivings of the traditionalists could best be
answered by citing Cable, Flint, Latrobe, and others who beheld the rites of
African American memory in the nineteenth century and found them licen-
tious or barbaric. At an Afro-Catholic interment in 1819, Latrobe stood
aghast at the spectacle of children pounding on a wooden coffin lid with

110 Cultural Traditions, Cultural Memory, and Performance

Figure 5.3 Chief Victor Harris. Spirit of the Fi Yi Yi. Photo by Keith Calhoun.

human bones, adding their din to the “noise and laughter,” which had
“become general by the time the service was over.”18 But the service was not
over. One of its most important prerequisites consisted of the ritual moment
that is now called “cutting the body loose,” which sets off a wave of lively
music and motion, a celebration of death as a means of joyously affirming the
continuity of the community on the occasion of marking the passing of one
of its own. The crack funerals revered this tradition in their own way.
What is needed at this moment is a heightened awareness of the city of
New Orleans—and other American cities—as a repository of perform-
ances of great beauty and world historic significance of which every citi-
zen can be proud. African-descended traditions are central among these
forms. Cable’s novel owes much of its best material to the pervasive pres-

Reconstructing Congo Square 111

ence of African performance traditions, a revealing instance of the collab-
oration of literate and oral techniques in the transmission of culture. Can
Congo Square be reconstructed without perpetuating the canard of deep
skin? If Rampart Street becomes a wall again, hope dwindles. But if the
old street can be reclaimed as a path between the past and the present by
appropriating it for jazz processions everyone can join, then the odds im-
prove. In this contest between places and environments of memory, the
name “Congo Square” has come to represent not only the preservation of
inspiring memories of Africa and the diaspora but, even more important,
the revitalization of African ways of remembering. If they were to grow
into general use, chances are that all peoples would come to know and un-
derstand themselves better as a result.

notes

1. Pierre Nora, “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire,” Represen-
tations 26 (Spring 1989): 7–75.
2. Joseph R. Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1996), 180.
3. Kwame Anthony Appiah and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., “White Skin, White
Masks,” in “The White Issue,” Transition: An International Review 73 (n.d.): 5.
4. Louis Armstrong, “Growing Up in New Orleans,” in New Orleans Stories, ed.
John Miller (San Francisco: Chronicle, 1992), 26.
5. Jason Berry, “Spirit Tides from Congo Square,” Planning Conference, 6–7Mar.
1998.
6. Letter to Jason Berry, 19 Mar. 1998, summarizing the panel discussion on
Spirit Tides from Congo Square, involving Samuel Floyd, Gwendolyn Midlo Hall,Jerah
Johnson, Sybil Kein, J. H. KwabenaNketia, BruceRaeburn,MichaelSmith,Michael
White, and Les Blanc.
7. New Orleans Times-Picayune, 11 July 1998.
8. George Washington Cable, The Grandissimes, ed. MichaelKreyling(NewYork:
Penguin, 1988), 96. Subsequent citations of this edition will be given in the text.
9. Benjamin Henry Latrobe, Journals, 1799–1820: From Philadelphia to New Or-
leans, ed. Edward C. Carter II, John C. Van Horne, and Lee W. Formwalt (New
Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1980), 203–204.
10. Jerah Johnson, Congo Square in New Orleans (New Orleans: Louisiana Land-
marks Society, 1995), 34.
11. Henry A. Kmen, Music in New Orleans: The FormativeYears,1791–1841(Baton
Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1966), 228–130.
12. Johnson 38, n. 42; Frederick Starr, Bamboula! The Life and Times of Louis
Moreau Gottschalk (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 41.
13. Johnson 37–40.
14. Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, Africans in Colonial Louisiana: The DevelopmentofAfro-
Creole Culture in the Eighteenth Century (Baton Rouge: Louisiana StateUniversityPress,
1992), 40–41.
15. Lyle Saxon, Edward Dreyer, and Robert Tallant, Gumbo Ya-Ya: A Collection
of Louisiana Folk Tales (1945; reprint, Gretna, La.: Pelican, 1988), 253.

112 Cultural Traditions, Cultural Memory, and Performance

 16. Timothy Flint, Recollections of the Last Ten Years, Passed in Occasional Residences
and Journeyings in the Valley of the Mississippi (Boston: Cummings, Hilliard, 1826),
140.
17. Flint 139.
18. Latrobe 302.

Reconstructing Congo Square 113

 6

“Calling on the Spirit”

The Performativity of Black Women’s Faith in
the Baptist Church Spiritual Traditions and
Its Radical Possibilities for Resistance

‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘
telia u. anderson

Here, in this here place, we flesh; flesh that weeps, laughs; flesh
that dances on bare feet in grass. Love it. Love it hard. Yonder they
do not love your flesh. They despise it. . . . Love your hands! Love
them. Touch others with them, pat them together, stroke them on
your face ’cause they don’t love that either. You got to love it, you!
And no, they ain’t in love with your mouth. Yonder, out there,
they will see it broken and break it again. What you say out of it
they will not heed. What you scream from it they do not hear. This
is flesh I’m talking about here. Flesh that needs to be loved. Feet
that need to rest and to dance; backs that need support; shoulders
that need arms, strong arms I’m telling you. . . . Saying no more,
she stood up then and danced with her twisted hip the rest of what
her heart had to say while the others opened their mouths and gave
her the music. Long notes held until the four-part harmony was
perfect enough for their deeply loved flesh.1

I ask no favors for my sex. I surrender not our claim to equality. All
I ask of our brethren is, that they will take their feet from off our
necks, and permit us to stand upright on that ground which God
designed us to occupy.2

I grew up in a Baptist church where people knew how to get the spirit. You
never knew when the woman next to you would get the spirit, and in an
instant, she would no longer be Mrs. Evans, or your best friend’s mother, or
your own mother, but Spirit and not answerable to any call other than that

114
of God’s. You could only move out of her way so that she could sway, jump,
and roll on down the aisle. Calling on the spirit was serious business; moved
by the rhythm of the music, the hollering of the choir, and the stamping of
the preacher, practically every Sunday a woman would “fall out,” shouting
and writhing with the power of the Holy Ghost. As a child, I was terrified
that I would “catch” it, too. In truly holy churches not just women but
children also caught the spirit. I was at once mystified and repelled by this
force, which caused women to raise themselves from their seats, to forget who
or where they were, to jump up and down with skirts raised (discarding all
conventions of modesty), to leave infants to fend for themselves in pews, to
shout, and to speak in unknowable languages. I was awed by the free reign
such a woman had; no one tried to get her to stop or even to restrain her. A
woman in the spirit was left alone to have her personal time with God (“My
God,” “Can’t nobody tell me aboutmyGod”); andifhervisitationinterrupted
the authority and privileged space of the preacher, so be it. By the time I
viewed this phenomenon as an adult, I had begun to realize that a black
woman’s most powerful weapon against the devastating effects of patriarchy
both within and outside of the church is her internal connection with the
divine.
In this article, I will explore how black women, through “calling the spirit”
(also known as “getting happy,” “shouting,” or “stomping”), operate a radical
Africanist performance strategy that accesses and enacts a personal and cor-
poreal divine authority, which challenges church patriarchy. Although this
practice is not exclusively the domain of women, it is one that achieves its
fullest expression and vibrancy when engaged by the mostly female congre-
gation of the black church. By extension, I will also show how black women
adapt this strategy of resistance to less-hallowed venues as well and, in so
doing, prove false the traditional European dichotomy of “sacred” and “sec-
ular” in a phenomenon through which black women’s bodies and spirits
signify, indeed, augur beyond their immediate, present circumstances. Al-
though the church may be the most sanctified arena for the evocation and the
“catching” of the Holy Ghost and may even be considered the primary source
for this expression, the Spirit, and the call of such, is not exclusively accessed
in the Lord’s House or, at least, not as this moniker is typically understood;
rather, the Spirit surges from within bodies and minds consecrated to this
holiness language and performance. Those who are not bound to the conven-
tions and strictures of their singular, present reality may be open to receiving
the call.
The unfortunate dialectic of sacred-profane has hindered a holistic exam-
ination of black religious practices in the past and, perhaps, still does. I will
attempt to bridge (or, at least, avoid replicating) this stubborn schism by
reasserting the fluidity of the boundaries of theblack churchand,particularly,
the theatricality of black women’s expression, irrespective of venue or envi-
ronment. With black women’s voices, bodies, spirits, and minds as movable
orchestration, black women can set up “church” anywhere. In addition,
drawing upon the work of discursive black female scholars, I will examine

“Calling on the Spirit” 115

black women’s spectacular glossolalic performances in which indecipherable
words of faith sound the most holy triumph of spirit over oppression.

Calling on the Spirit

Quoting Antonio Gramsci in his treatise on African American revolutionary
Christianity, Cornel West notes, “Any political consciousnessofanoppressed
group is shaped and molded by the group’s cultural resources and resiliency
as perceived by individuals in it.”3 Although the exigencies of the slave trade
and three centuries of captivity did not permit the cultural preservation of
captured Africans and instead brought about the total and complete destruc-
tion of an overwhelming number of their cultural resources, “one of the most
durable and adaptable constituents of the slave’s culture” was her religion.4
The openness and adaptability of African faiths to syncretism made them the
healthy provenance of charismatic forms of worship, which are still found in
the United States and in the African diaspora. Black people sustain an im-
pressive tradition of African worship, from rites of possession to the identi-
fication of a personal, corporeal relationship with the divine.5
The origin of this tradition easily traces to Africa from whence captives
brought their religious traditions and beliefs. However, as emphasized by
Albert J. Raboteau and other black religious scholars, the African expressions
of religious faith and worship are not so much “retentions” of old rituals as
revisions and adaptations born from the intervention of and interrelation
with white, European Christianity. Evangelical Protestantism of the eigh-
teenth and nineteenth centuries and, in particular, the revivals, permitted
and encouraged emotional, charismatic expressions of religious passion. In
the conversion to Christianity, the African religious heritage of the slave
survived through adaptation.6 Raboteau tells us:
Despite the prohibition of dancing as heathenish and sinful, the slaves
were able to reinterpret and “sanctify” their African tradition of dance in
the “shout.” While the North American slaves danced under the impulse
of the Spirit of a “new” God, they danced in ways their fathers in Africa
would have recognized.7
Soon, converted African slaves began setting up their own Christian
churches amidst virulent and frequently violent opposition from some
whites. Almost invariably, early black churches were under the watchful eye
of a white pastor, and the later ones operated under the threat of restrictions.8
As has been documented and revealed by Raboteau, the black ministry
rejected the obedience training disguised as religious catechism proffered by
white slave masters and clergy. Instead, slave ministers held secret meetings
in the woods (or gullies, ravines, thickets—“hush harbors”),9 where they
would preach sermons to fellow slaves.10 They readily seized upon interpre-

116 Cultural Traditions, Cultural Memory, and Performance

tations of the Bible that condemned the existence of slavery: “They’d pray,
‘Lord, deliver us from under bondage.’ ”11 Using scriptural texts as weapons,
some slave preachers even led revolts throughout the South.
Irrespective of its numerous doctrinal affiliations, the black church in its
myriad manifestations countered white brutality and degradation of African
Americans with, to borrow from Cornel West’s usage, a “prophetic” vision
of black triumph over their oppressors. Survival by slaves depended largely
on their resisting the white supremacist project, which, among other op-
pressions, cast them as grotesquely inferior beings without redemption. By
helping to steer the way to black freedom and by nurturing and supporting
one of the most crucial spaces of resistance and rejuvenation of African
American people—the black church—black women are, in large part, re-
sponsible for the cultural and spiritual survival of their people.
However, the black church has a long-standing tradition of gender in-
equality, in which black women have been unceasingly embattled. Histori-
cally, black male leaders of the church have insisted upon adopting the
resolutely patriarchal ministry of their white Christian forebears, even as
they strove to purify the white theologies of abject racist instruction. It is the
peculiar irony of the black church that, while scores of its members (of various
denominations) actively transformed an analysis of black oppression into an
ethic of black liberation, the churches continued to reinforce the dominant
culture’s sexual hierarchy, solidly installing black men in the upper ranks of
the church’s schema of privilege and power. As a result, black women have
been almost completely consigned to the position of subordinate. Women,
particularly in the nineteenth-century black Baptist churches, were not al-
lowed to become clergy, pray publicly, or attend business meetings in the
church. And African Methodist and Episcopal churches were no more pro-
gressive about extending equal ecclesiastical rights to women; for years,many
of these churches segregated church seating by gender: men in front, women
in back.12
In Righteous Discontent, Evelyn Higginbotham asserts that black Baptist
women’s organizations mobilized support for equal treatment of men and
women in the church and expanded the social and political realm of the
Baptist church: “Indeed, one could say that the Black Baptist Church rep-
resented a sphere for public deliberation and debate precisely because of
women.”13 Ten thousand black women attended the Baptist Women’s State
Convention in 1890, and “Women’s Day” church services owe their genesis
to this momentous event.14 Still, women faced an arduous battle for accep-
tance in the church. The first National Baptist Convention in 1895, which
brought together the largest group of black Americans ever assembled,
religious or secular, emphasized the needs and leadership of black men in the
church over that of the majority of black women, who buttressed their efforts.
Although black clergymen certainly recognized that women’s active partic-
ipation in the church helped them toward their goal of racial self-help and
self-reliance, they nonetheless refused to modify male-oriented traditions to

“Calling on the Spirit” 117

allow women their voice. Black men embraced the values of the larger
American society, seeking to provide themselves with “full manhood rights,”
while relegating women to a separate and unequal status.15
Like their male counterparts in counteracting Christian rationalizations
for slavery, black women in the National Baptist Convention used scriptural
texts to “validate, support, and legitimate their exhortations for equality.”16
Black women also held meetings in their homes to minister to each other. In
her dissertation on black female ministry of the nineteenth century, Gloria
Davis Goode documents the histories of African American women “who
viewed themselves as itinerant ministers, but who were not regarded as such
by their male counterparts nor recognized by church congregations.”17 Al-
though the development of women’s organizations is significant, and Hig-
ginbotham takes issue with an overemphasis on the “exceptional” female
congregant and/or minister, this chapter is more concerned with the behavior
of black females on the micro level of the church. The experience of at least
one of these “exceptional” women sheds light on the everyday practice of
resistance by less-noted black women in the church.
Sometime between 1803 and 1810, by moving with the spirit in church,
Jarena Lee becamethefirstfemalepreacheroftheAfricanMethodistEpiscopal
church. Previously, Lee had met with Richard Allen, the founder of the
African Methodist Episcopal church, and urged him to allow her to preach a
service in his church. Although relatively liberal with regard to women
parishioners at that time—Allen allowed women to hold prayer meetings
and to exhort the unsaved—he would not agree to a woman leading a ser-
mon. At first, Lee conformed to Allen’s wishes; after a short period, however,
she performed her faith as called by the Holy Spirit before hundreds of
witnesses:
Unrestrained in a church service in which the Spirit moved her, she leaped
to her feet and expounded on the preacher’s text. Instead of admonishing
her, Allen, the bishop, stated that he believed that she was called to preach
as much as any of the preachers present.18
In her autobiography, Jarena Lee recalled the moment of her catching the
Spirit: “During this the minister was silent, until my soul felt its duty had
been performed.”19 Many would-be female preachers adopted Lee’s method
of gaining the attention of the congregation by standing up in the middle of
a clergyman’s sermon and starting to preach. Women seized the moment
during any brief pause that the minister took, whether to catch his breath or
to collect his thoughts. Preaching spontaneously before a large congregation
became a tactic that women used against church officials who denied them
legitimate access to preaching. Theirs was an especially effectiveperformance
because ministers did not wish to suffer the embarrassmentof askingsomeone
to cease praising the Lord in church. Furthermore, women were not often
admonished for this activity because it was believed that the Holy Spirit had
come upon them, and therefore they were not personally responsible for
disrupting the service. Ministers of churches (who naturally opposed the

118 Cultural Traditions, Cultural Memory, and Performance

threat to their power and authority) had their doubts about the veracity of
the claims by these female devotees of the Spirit, but the strong tradition of
an experiential, personal relationship with the divine in the AfricanAmerican
community persuaded most people to believe. SaysGoode, “Tothesespiritual
women, real-life experiences were worth more than rigid doctrine and spec-
ulative theory because no one could deny the validity of another’s personal
testimony based on first-hand knowledge.”20 Once a woman performed in
this “guerrilla” fashion, if the congregants seemed to appreciate her message,
she may have been allowed to preach a sermon of her own.21
Unfortunately, the steadfast hierarchy of gender in the black church per-
sists. It is still inconceivable in most black churches for a woman to lead
worship services, to baptize, or in many cases, to even enter the pulpit. Even
though black women’s monumental importance to the black church can
hardly be overstated, an ecclesiastical glass ceiling still exists. Black women
abundantly occupy roles such as ushers, nurses’ aids, missionaries, assistants,
choir members, cooks, Sunday school teachers, and secretaries in the church,
but rarely, if ever, do they break through to assume the roles of bishop, pastor,
leader, deacon, steward, trustee, general officer, or director. Although black
women currently make up, on the average, two-thirds to three-quarters of
black church membership, the church patriarchy is not willing to relinquish
privilege and is reluctant to share power in any official capacity with its
overwhelmingly female congregation. Nonetheless, women of the church
constantly issue challenges to this authority, tapping a well of Africanist
cultural methodologies—dancing, singing, shouting—to forge a personal
relationship with God. Women call on the spirit, witness, speak in tongues,
lay on hands, heal, dance in praise, and sustain the communal spirit of others.
To be sure, the black charismatic church is alreadyadelineatedperformance
venue in which pastor and congregation engage in a spirited performance,
which undulates with rhythm, poetry, spectacle, and dance. The pastor is a
virtuoso of theatrical technique, letting his vocal timbre, dramatic gestures,
and palpitations assist in the dramatic development of his sermon. Most of
the formal elements of the church are created around his performance, in-
cluding when and how the choir sings, the musicians’ surreptitious playing
underneath his voice to signal the end of the sermon, the call to worship, and
the call to the altar. Furthermore, the preacher adopts and holds his position
with a text that legitimates and scripts his power: the Holy Bible. Says
Raboteau, “The Bible is more than a source of texts; it is the single most
important source of language, imagery, and story for the sermon.”22
However, in the charismatic spiritual tradition, women do not allow the
preacher the last word. Women subvert the scriptocentrism of the holy space
by emptying the text of predetermined meaning and fillingitwithanorganic,
physical significance, which reinterprets and redefines its original “objectiv-
ity.” Though the preacher decides on the entirety of the service, based on—
and improvised from—the Bible, women of the congregation push and pull
at the rhythm, pace, and meaning of the preacher’s presentation with their
own performance modalities. Women do not passively regard from their

“Calling on the Spirit” 119

pews; rather, they embellish and complete the words of the pastor. The
preacher may provide the text, but the ratification of the Word depends on
the vocal and bodily affirmation of the women. Preachers demand and depend
upon vocal and bodily feedback. The preacher’s delivery of the Word is
interrupted and indeed clarified by the shouts of women who say, “Go ’head
and preach, sir,” “What you say,” “Tell it,” “Hallelujah,” “Amen,” “Take
your time, man,” “Can I get an ‘Amen’?” and “You don’t hear me!” A service
is not complete without this antiphonal collaboration, commonly known as
“call and response” but perhaps more properly termed “call and call.”
Women also initiate calls and give commands to the preacher, who answers
them. Moreover, because they are not bound to preach the gospel, women
are free to improvise on the sermon, highlighting those phrases that resonate
the most with their own particular theospiritual objectives. These women
partially grasp the reins of control over the presentation of the holy Word
and, to some degree, appropriate the stage space. Once totally embodied in
the Spirit, women actually jump up and down, shout, cry, dance around their
pews, and then dance around the church, rupturing the predetermined logic
or rationale of the preacher. Once begun, these women are not stopped.
Because she is now apotheosized in the spirit, male authority is unable to
control her.
In “Beyond the Text: Toward a Performative Cultural Politics,” Dwight
Conquergood asserts:
Performance acts as an oppositional practice to hegemonic texts. The
borderlines between texts and performances, literacy and orality are highly
charged and determined within concrete, historical configurations of
power. [Yet performances] are transgressive. Performance recuperates
from the text oppositional force, some resistance to the textual imperial-
ism. . . . Performance remains an interruptive Other.23
As Conquergood notes, black women’s spiritual performance opposes and
interrupts the dominant canonical text and acts as a lever, which decenters
and destabilizes the scriptural authority of the Word. The performance
contributes to a participatory physiospiritual dialogics, which “unsettles
valorized paradigms and insists upon immediacy, involvement, and intimacy
as modes of understanding.”24 In the conscripted space of the church, black
women engage a repertoire of performance practices, which locateandoverlay
personal meaning onto the textual sanctioning of worship.
Calling on the Spirit, women challenge the doctrinal authority of the
preacher and the Word, writ as such, reifying its meaning with their flesh.
The women interrupt and break the rhythm of the sermon, telling their own
stories in the space of the Word and inserting their witness into the dynamics
of the message. At the same time, women physicalize the spaces within the
church, stretching conscripted spaces, which limit or define worship. In the
sacralspace, women resistthelinearityandpolaritythatdichotomizepreacher
and congregation. When women catch the Spirit at the end of a service, it is
not unusual for a preacher to descend from the pulpit in order to stomp, kick

120 Cultural Traditions, Cultural Memory, and Performance

his feet, or spin around, twirling his heavy robes in centrifugal fashion,
gathering momentum as he moves. In this moment, pastor and parishioner
are cocelebrants in an ecstatic performance, which decidedly shifts the focal
point of the sermon from the male-controlled altar to the female-inhabited
spaces of convergence below. This liturgical mise-en-scène demonstrates the
countervailing energy that subtly though defiantly constructs its own critical
devices. An exploration of black women’s performance of the spirit shatters
the Cartesian illusion of mind-body dichotomy, simultaneously mixing af-
fective and exegetical modalities of worship into vast, swirling, energized
localities. Through a sacred channeling of Scripture and Spirit, these women
vibrate with a gynopomorphic reading of the holy, irrevocably altering the
charge of the worship experience.

Performance and Authenticity

A natural consequence of the consideration of the fusion of corporal and

spiritual mechanisms in the practice of getting happy is the necessity to
examine the role of sexuality in praise. More than one female worshiper has
communicated her sexual attraction for a pastor by lifting her skirts high and
sashaying down the aisle in exaggerated spiritual fervor. But besides the
attraction between pastors and churchwomen, sexuality pervades the direct
call from above as well. One black woman whom I interviewed spoke about
having a personal, sensual relationship with Jesus, and many regard Him as
a lover or spouse in their lives. The familiar response “Nobody but Jesus”
echoes from the mouths of black women, as they deflect inquiries about their
love lives or the fathers of their children. Indeed, the Bible itself encourages
a spiritual sexuality, configuring the Christian church as the “brideof Christ,”
who waits patiently for the bridegroom to return and open the door of his
private chambers.25 In the Baptist church especially, the sermon, with the
steady, pulsating rise of emotion to a heightened catharsis and resolution
parallels sexual intercourse.26 To be “erotically honest,” as urged by Michael
Dyson in his essay “The Black Church and Sex,” the sexual component of
religious worship is not foreign to various denominations of the black church,
which have evolved from an African heritage that does not strictly demarcate
the sacred and the profane, the spiritual from the corporal.27 (Or, as Dyson
puts it, the “holy and horny.”)28 Undoubtedly, some pastors act in bad faith
around their sexuality and abuse their power over their female (and, perhaps,
male) congregants, a point that fully arrests Dyson’s attention in “The Black
Church and Sex.”29 He describes an unsettling personal experience in which
a fellow pastor inquired after a pretty, excitedly devout sister in the front
pew, who distracted his holier attentions with her “shouting and jiggling”
during the height of his sermon.30
However, more compelling than the dynamics of sexual conquest between
black men in power and black women subordinates in the church is the
question of how black female worshipers exercise control over this aspect of

“Calling on the Spirit” 121

their performance in the spirit and how they register control over the duality
of being both in communication with the divine and fully conscious of their
influence over their immediate environment. Although presumably theHoly
Spirit is present throughout the service, the performance of it abides by the
structure and ritual of the larger performance of church. It almost never
occurs in the early part of the service—during devotional prayer or the
welcoming of visitors. Some women and men may call out during thesetimes,
but the sustained shouting is reserved for some point during the height of
the sermon or near the conclusion. If a woman becomes particularly excited
and moves as though she may injure herself or others, other women (ushers
or nurses’ aids) will come to stand near her, guiding her away from objects
or people, if necessary, but never interrupting or attempting to curtail her
journey in the spirit. Most times, however, this is unnecessary. In my obser-
vations of women getting happy, very few have harmed themselves or others.
I have seen a woman jump up and down with a tiny infant bouncing in her
arms; when the deacons approached her, she handed over the child without
missing a beat in her rhythm.
Being conscious of one’s performance, however, makes it no less true or
authentic; cultural performances are both imitation and “real.”31 This is a
signpost of a traditional understanding of performance: an actor iscompletely
engrossed in the emotions of his character and yet acutely aware when he is
not standing in his light or when he must pause to wait for audience laughter.
Because of the importance placed on charismatic worship in the black church
and the almost compulsory nature of speaking in tongues in the Pentecostal
denomination, it is natural that some may mimic or go through the motions
of an experience that is not prompted on the visceral level. Although this
may be true in some cases, it would be incorrect to assess the performance of
black women in church as “fake” or only for the sake of garnering attention
from the pastor; like the stage actor, they are also desirous of influencing the
environments within which they perform. At the same time, it is critically
important to accept that the experience of the spirit is the undeniably central
phenomenon of calling on the spirit. As Lisa Wolford emphasizes in her essay
on Shaker women and possession ritual, ineffable matters must be understood
on their own terms and not phobically reinterpreted in a philologocentric
manner. One must accept alternate reality as social fact.32

The Sacred Within

Speaking in tongues, or glossolalia, first practiced by the apostles on the day
of the Pentecost, is one of the most sublime of performative rites in the black
church, practiced by only the most holy. This experience is the sine qua non
of Pentecostalism but also serves members of other denominations of black
people. Women who speak in tongues are messengers filled with the Holy
Spirit, uttering a divine immanent language. As “God’s mouthpiece,” they
speak an untranslatable and inimitable tongue. Speaking in tongues repre-

122 Cultural Traditions, Cultural Memory, and Performance

sents the presence of God and signals one’s election to a higher holy space. In
this way, a woman speaking in tongues rivals the presence and the authority
of a preacher who, at least initially, relies upon the efficacy of a written, static
text. By virtue of the fact that the sound of hearing someone speaking in
tongues is so compelling, women who speak in tongues detract attention
away from the pulpit. Although there is no prohibition against a preacher
speaking in tongues or catching the spirit, typically the onus to preach the
Word and to “rationally” lead obviates his engaging in an ecstatic experience
during the service that would hinder his clarity and focus. Therefore, women
dominate this most precious and spectacular manifestation of the spirit, and
theyuse its rare ontologicalinsighttohealthemselvesandtheircommunity.33
In this state, many women lay their hands on the afflicted, symbolically or
actually curing them of their diseases. The woman herself undertakes a sort
of eschatological journey, going to a place beyond her present, objective
reality and then returning, unable to describe it. Again, male leadership does
not intercede in the performance of this holiness language. Shecommunicates
directly without an intercessory and returns from that state unassisted. God
is most often pictured, imagined, and spoken about as male (and white, for
that matter)34 in traditionally theological terms, but, when speaking in
tongues, women as representatives of the presence of God substitute their
own flesh in the void. The presence of God (the Word) within their bodies
makes black women the Word, as in “in the beginning was the Word and
the Word was with God and the Word was God.” Their bodies mediate the
Word and metonymically become the Word, thereby reenacting the miracle
of the “Word made flesh” in every performance. No longer engaging in even
antiphonal collaboration, women speaking in tongues operate fromtheirown
script and are separate from the rest of the congregation, including other
people speaking in the ecstatic language. This phenomenon is not just tran-
scendent but is a transgressive act, which reforms and recontextualizes the
idea of church. These women rewrite the text in performance, subverting the
scriptocentrism of the Bible and its mores to speak directly to, from, and for
God.
In her essay “Speaking in Tongues: Dialogics, Dialectics, and the Black
Woman Writer’s Literary Tradition,” Mae Gwendolyn Hendersoninterprets
the “interlocutory or dialogic character” of black women’s discursive written
performance as an exemplary condition of “speaking in tongues.” Taking the
reader through such signature texts of black female authorship as Zora Neale
Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) and Toni Morrison’s Sula
(1974), Henderson forges a link between these rites of spiritual and literary
passage. Henderson states that black female writers’ negotiation of their
characters and the self-inscription of black female experience demands “dis-
ruption, rereading, and rewriting” of the literary canon as it simultaneously
bends the existing forms for conventional expression, making it possible for
black women writers to breach discourse with “the other(s).” More signifi-
cantly, expanding Bakhtin’s notion of “inner speech,” Henderson asserts that
black women’s literary glossolalia indicates and reflects an internal dialogue,

“Calling on the Spirit” 123

which engages the “plural aspects of self that constitute the matrix of black
female subjectivity.”35
According to bell hooks, “[d]eveloping a feminist consciousness is a crucial
part of the process by which one asserts radical black female subjectivity.”36
Hooks stresses the importance of black feminists aligning themselves with
a larger feminist movement and of “reading, studying, and engaging in
critical pedagogies” in order to acquire the knowledge needed to confront
and challenge sexism. Also, hooks tells us that a necessary part of self-
actualization is learning about those black women “who have dared to assert
radical subjectivity.”37 Although she makes strong arguments for the need
of black women to come together in a collective of feminist struggle, hooks
ignores the plurality of epistemologies to which black women have access.
One need not merely look inside a book or conduct an interview to gain
information about feminist agency; the knowledge also lies within. The tools
for radical transformation are not externally realized. Neither is the struggle
a unilateral event. Says hooks, “Bombarded with images representing black
female bodies as expendable, black women have either passively absorbed
this thinking or vehemently resisted it.”38 However, the example of black
women in the church demonstrates the multifaceted nature of resistance that
does not fit neatly into either category. Black women’s power must be un-
derstood as coming from a spiritual (and internal) as much as an intellectual,
emotional, and physical place. The power of the “oppositional” gaze, which
looks to resist, may not only look “out” to others but “in” to God, within
ourselves. The multiplicity of black women’s experiences requires a more
flexible model to accommodate our complexity.
Kimberlé Crenshaw arrives closer to the mark in this regard in her analysis
of how “Anita Hill’s status as a black female—at the crossroads of gender
and race hierarchies—was a central feature in the manner in which she was
(mis)perceived.”39 With regard to black women’s unique status, Crenshaw
asserts a concept of “intersectionality.” Black women are at once subjected
to the oppressive hierarchies of sexuality and race, a unique position that is,
in some ways, “unassimilable into the discursive paradigms of gender and
race domination.” Black women, therefore, want for a means by which to
relate the totality of our experiences as black women.40 Because of our inter-
sectionality, black women are outside many of the mainstream realms of
political resistance, including those of and by other black people. Moreover,
instead of just being doubly burdened, African American spiritual women
are triply burdened by virtue of their being black, female, and in the church.
The practice of glossolalia undoes the aforementioned uncomfortable ma-
trix of identities by removing the individual from the margins of a dominant
demarcation to a personal, divine place outside the configurations of known
speech. If black women’s howling or moaning is a prediscursive linguistic
“disruption,” awaiting entry into proper language,41 speaking in tongues
(like scat, rap, and other xenoglossa) is one of the most powerful forms of
postdiscursive speech that black women employ to disrupt the continuity of

124 Cultural Traditions, Cultural Memory, and Performance

known speech and to travel beyond theboundariesthatrestrictblackwomen’s
agency. Says Henderson:
As gendered and racial subjects, black women speak/write in multiple
voices—not all simultaneously or with equal weight, but with various and
changing degrees of intensity, privileging one parole and then another.
One discovers in these writers a kind of internal dialogue reflecting an
intrasubjective engagement with intersubjective aspects of self, a dialectic
neither repressing difference nor, for that matter, privileging identity, but
rather expressing engagement with the social aspects of self (“the other[s]
in ourselves”). It is this subjective plurality (rather than the notion of the
cohesive or fractured subject) that, finally, allows the black woman to
become an expressive site for a dialectics/dialogics of identity and differ-
ence.42
Henderson’s model for this process is centrifugal, one that passes through a
series of progressions that signify “intervention, appropriation,andrevision.”
Henderson’s ideal exemplifies what may be the aim of spirit praise in the
form of speaking in tongues—while combative, it does not exist merely in
unilateral opposition to oppressive gender practices in black churches, but
it is also a multifaceted, creative engagement of power, which varies its modes
of resistance and does not rule out collaboration. This “collaborative resis-
tance,” as I pose it, allows black women to confront destructive frameworks
in stages of combat that do not rule out self-transformation in the process.
The collaboration comes from the women joining their voices and bodies in
the same pattern of rejoice and from their uniting of their “intersubjective”
selves. Henderson’s interlocutory interpretation of black women’sexperience
prepares the way for an integrated understanding of black woman’s self,
“selves,” and community. The personal God embraced by black women in
the spirit also involves their sisters and brothers. Asserts James Cone, “The
‘I,’ then, who cries out in the spirituals is a particular black self affirming
both his or her being and being-in-community, for the two areinseparable.”43
This adaptive and collaborative model of resistance unites with that of a
long history of blacks withstanding white supremacist attacks on their cul-
tural practices. Historically, our black foremothers and forefathers adapted
African religion and religious expression in order to survive, indeed thrive,
in places hostile or indifferent to black exigencies for spiritual affirmation
and prayer. And, as many blacks before the nineteenth century were denied
the privilege to assemble before God or to openly congregate for prayer and
worship (after having our more charismatic, public, African forms of worship
outlawed), we learned to make our homes the temples of God and turned our
diversions into opportunities for fellowship. The most important marker of
God was the self and not an institutional structure, whether physical or
psychic:
By seeing themselves in the context of sacred time and sacred space,African
Americans in bondage were able to invoke the presence of God anytime

“Calling on the Spirit” 125

 and anyplace. Worship was not limited to a church; it could take place in
the fields, by a campfire, or when the individual was alone during the day.
The sacred time and sacred space created by African Americans in bondage
helped keep them permanently in contact with god.44
I have seen a woman get to “shouting” on a bus; I know that the ecstatic
performance that occurs inside the church is carried outside afterward, and
parishioners can sometimes get the Holy Ghost while in their cars. Black
women carry the experience of calling on the spirit with them into all of their
activities.
By intervening, appropriating, and revising, blacks have withstood many
assaults against their spiritual practices and cultural memory. In fact, the
means by which black women and men shout has evolved from previous
complex and varied modes of calling on the divine, in particular the ring
shout practiced by African slaves of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
in the South.45 In this African ritual of praise, slaves would walk or dance
around in a circle (or “ring”) outdoors, chanting, singing prayers, and stomp-
ing their feet until they became entranced and began to shout with the
“working of the Spirit.”46 However, white clergymen paled at the sight of
the “heathenish” ring shout and eventually banned the practice completely.
Once confined to square, contained, and linear space withinwoodenchurches,
where a ring shout or any kind of circular configuration of people was im-
possible, the ring shout went “up.”47 The appropriation of this new ritual
stage along with the intervention of blacks who had the creative genius to
revise the outward form of their religion to ensure the survival of the sacred
rite helped form bonds in the new world. And now, on a spirit-filled Sunday
in a black church, you can find women and men sending their praises upward,
feet and legs jumping upward, hands lifted upward, heads tilted and voices
calling upward, defying but at the same time incorporating the linear grid
of pew, aisle, sacristy, and European ritual practices.48

Womanist Spirituality
A crucial aspect of black women’s worship tradition, then, is that church is
as much a verb as a noun. Black women church. As modern day apostles, they
speak to and from the church within themselves. Church is a process, a
performance that is common to many black denominations, whose similar-
ities outweigh their differences. Emilie Townes speaks to this issue in her
book In a Blaze of Glory:
Womanist spirituality is not grounded in the notion that spirituality is a
practice separate from who we are moment by moment. It is the deep
kneading of humanity and divinity into one breath, one hope, one vision.49
Black women can and do have church anywhere: in beauty parlors, in the
street, on the dance floor, around the kitchen table, in conversations with

126 Cultural Traditions, Cultural Memory, and Performance

other sisters. The heightened emotion, the charismatic tongue, the jubilant
laughter, the moan, or the shout—“Girl! Lord, don’t you know!”—all point
to a charismatic calling of the spirit. In Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the
Sun, Mama goes to church right at home, intoning the gospel on her knees
and invoking the spirit to set right what has drastically and ineluctably gone
wrong. Playing the role of preacher, Mama attempts to cure her daughter’s
agnosticism, making her repeat antidotally, “In my mother’s house there is
still God. In my mother’s house there is still God. In my mother’s house there
is still God.”50 Black women embodied the roles of wife, sister, daughter,
and mother, combined them with a personal spiritual experience of God in
Christ, and understood themselves to be ministers in their homes.
A black woman’s witness is a potent mechanism, which achieves its efficacy
in the mutability and portability of her instruments: her body and her voice.
Black women perform their faith in a discursive milieu that does not heed
the parameters of time or space. Spirit is wherever they take it. In church,
this performance with its singing and shouting gets its fullest expression.
However, the spirit of resistance functions outside of institutional worship
in a more public and secular declaration of self and identity. Because of their
personal connection with the divine, black women’s calling the spirit occu-
pies a place of disclosure, rather than a place of reference. It is, as African
religious scholar Marta Morena Vega describes, “evidence of the sacred
within.”51 I would argue that one of the most sacred spaces in which sisters
of the spirit resist oppression is on the dance floor. Whereas in church they
shout, on the dance floor they lift their arms and shake their bodies in a
different version of praise dancing, which affirms their joy in the spirit. Black
women’s spirit call, even in secular practice, defies and counters hegemony,
reclaiming a space of identity and resisting representations of themselves in
public discourse.
In secular space, too, black women’s cultural performances, as much as
evoking a transcendent model, evoke a transgressive one, which breaks
through sedimented meanings and normative traditions, plunging us back
into the vortices of political struggle. From Josephine Baker’s audacious
banana dance to Judith Jamison’s frenetic dance Cry to Janet Jackson’s bo-
geling to MC Lyte’s “ruffneck” strut to Anna Deavere Smith’s speaking in
multiple tongues, black women subvert the prescribed order by invoking
the church attainable within their individual bodies. Some of these perform-
ances are problematic with regard to the commodification and objectification
of black women’s bodies in a white supremacist, capitalist media, but that is
precisely the point. Although black women may not crush the vise of racism
through dance, shouting, and the like, by calling on the spirit in whatever
idiom, they subvert the totality of its hold. It is not that black women are
completely free to perform as they wish within a given hegemonic arena, but
rather that they communicate with a force beyond their particular circum-
stances to salute the divinity within that propels and energizes their perform-
ances.

“Calling on the Spirit” 127

 As Toni Morrison so beautifully illustrates in the passage that began this
essay, black women have called on the spirit in dark, retiring places to sustain
themselves, their families, and their communities. Baby Suggs urges her
congregation to perform their affirmation, transcending the dual markings of
color and gender to attain an agency of the highest order—by discovering
the divine in themselves. In Righteous Discontent, Higginbotham cites the
development of women’s organizations within the church as responses to the
growing hostility toward and debasement of black women.52 Defendingtheir
names, these women resisted grotesque depictions of black women as mam-
mies, whores, sapphires, and tragic mulattoes. Today, we see the recalcitrance
of such name calling in the proliferation of bitches, hos, and welfare queens,
sounded from detractors as discursive as black rap artists to white politicians.
The defiance to love our own flesh and nurture our own spirits, as depicted
by Baby Suggs’s invocation, is as incumbent upon us now as a century ago.
A defining moment, which compelled me to work on this chapter, occurred
during one of the last times I joined my mom for church. The little girls of
this Pentecostal church, from the ages of about six to eleven, were doing a
praise dance before the sermon began which was designed to show their
devotion to God and their purity and faith to the congregation. As the girls
ran in their white dresses and white socks through the aisles of the church,
they became more and more entranced until, finally, one little girl, the
smallest one, caught the spirit. As an elder woman in the church grabbed
and held this small, shaking body in her arms, she prayed, “Dear God, protect
these young bodies that the devil may not take them.” Watching, I realized
that this was an invocation against violations of the flesh and the spirit within,
whether they be racism, sexism, or other forms of physical violence. The right
to possess one’s own body is a new achievement for black people but especially
for black women, whose legacy of slavery included rape and forced mother-
hood in addition to auctions, beatings, lynchings, and segregation. The
practice of loving one’s body and consecrating it to the spirit is in itself a
radical practice. By calling on the spirit in whatever context, black women
reterritorialize and decolonize the space prescribed for them. Perhaps Nto-
zake Shange puts it best in her play for colored girls who have considered suicide/
when the rainbow is enuf, “I found God in myself and I loved her. I loved her
fiercely.”53 In this physiospiritual truth lies a manifesto of freedom.

notes

1. Toni Morrison, Beloved (New York: Signet, 1991), 108.

2. Elizabeth Clark and Herbert Richardson, eds., Women and Religion: A Feminist
Sourcebook of Christian Thought (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), 208.
3. Cornel West, Prophesy Deliverance! An Afro-American Revolutionary Christianity
(Philadelphia: Westminster, 1982), 71.
4. Albert J. Raboteau, Slave Religion: The “Invisible Institution” in the Antebellum
South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 4.

128 Cultural Traditions, Cultural Memory, and Performance

 5. It is important to understand, as Iain MacRobert articulates in his essay “The
Black Roots of Pentecostalism,” that Africans brought as slaves to the Americas did
not arrive tabulae rasae “nor did forced acculturation totally eradicate their primal
religious beliefs.” Timothy E. Fulop and Albert J. Raboteau, eds., African-American
Religion: Interpretive Essays in History and Culture (New York: Routledge, 1997), 299.
6. We must bear in mind that, as Raboteau has urged us, these are not static
Africanisms, or retentions, but an adapted, “transformed” religious practice, which
has its roots in African orthodoxy. Raboteau, Slave Religion, 4.
7. Raboteau, Slave Religion, 72.
8. Raboteau, Slave Religion, 143.
9. Raboteau, Slave Religion, 215.
10. When a slave worshiper caught the spirit in these secluded environments, the
others would “quickly stop the noise by placing their hands over the offender’s
mouth” so as not to be detected by anyone. Raboteau, Slave Religion, 215.
11. Raboteau, Slave Religion, 217. This is a quotation from a former slave. From
B. A. Botkin, ed., Lay My Burden Down: A Folk History of Slavery (Chicago:University
of Chicago Press, 1945), 27.
12. Gloria Davis Goode, “Preachers of the Word and Singers of the Gospel: The
Ministry of Women among Nineteenth-Century African Americans,” Ph.D. diss.,
University of Pennsylvania (1990), 164.
13. Evelyn Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent (Cambridge, Mass.: HarvardUni-
versity Press, 1993), 121–122.
14. Higginbotham 62.
15. Higginbotham 3.
16. Higginbotham 135.
17. Goode 8.
18. Goode 169.
19. Goode 223.
20. Goode 239.
21. Goode 284. Another black female preacher of this era, Julia Foote (who was
ordained in 1898), began her ministry after an experience in which she fell to the
floor unconscious, was carried home, did not eat or drink for twenty hours, and saw
visions. Another black female minister, simply known as Elizabeth, was moved to
preach after moaning, praying, and having visions in which the savior came to talk
with her. Zilpha Elaw became “resplendent with light” after having a vision, and
when she awoke, she found hundreds of worshipers weeping from the Holy Ghost.
Jarena Lee herself, before approaching Richard Allen, experienced a prayerful trance
in which she found herself in her yard, standing with arms outstretched, without
having any conscious memory of arriving there (Goode 245).
22. Albert J. Raboteau, A Fire in the Bones: Reflections on African-AmericanReligious
History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995), 143. 143. However, it is true, as Raboteau also
asserts, that the black preacher must be known not just for the Word but for the
Word as performed. See Raboteau, A Fire in the Bones, 142.
23. Dwight Conquergood, “Beyond the Text: Toward a Performative Cultural
Politics,” paper presented at the Future of the Field Performance Studies Conference
at New York University, Mar. 1995.
24. Conquergood.
25. Black women are not unique in this. The pervasive use of sexual imagery in
possession cults has been demonstrated by I. M. Lewis in his important work, Ecstatic
Religion (New York: Routledge, 1989).

“Calling on the Spirit” 129

 26. Pentecostal churches, although just as charismatic if not more than Baptist
churches, appear to have a more cyclical structure and less of a steady rise to climax.
In the Pentecostal worship experience, the congregants sometimes get the spirit
during the early part of the service, something that is relatively rare in the black
Baptist church experience.
27. At the Performance Studies Conference at Northwestern University in 1996,
actress Joni Jones explained that her work with Yoruba women showed her the
importance of a sexual receiving of the spirit. She said that one cannot receive
possession with one’s legs closed. One must be sexually open for it to happen.
28. Michael Eric Dyson, Race Rules: Navigating the Color Line (New York: Vintage,
1996), 100.
29. Although I appreciate Dyson’s critique that black churches do not expressly
explore sexuality and that it is time for an honest and direct address of sex in the
black churches, I do not agree that black churches are in particular crisis with regard
to sexual repression. On the contrary, black churches go a long way to channel this
pent-up sexual arousal during the actual service so that inappropriate and destructive
venting of this energy is greatly deterred, if not alleviated. Dyson, 100, passim.
30. In the course of writing this chapter, I was apprised of a situation in which a
particularly handsome middle-aged preacher drew so many women into the spirit
with skirts flying high that his wife threatened to leave him. He decided to leave the
church instead.
31. This borrows from Judith Butler’s notion of performativity. See her Gender
Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990), and
Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York: Routledge, 1993).
32. Lisa Wolford, “Here Mother Leads Me: Ecstasy and Order in Shaker Women’s
Cultural Performance,” paper delivered at the Aug. 1998 conference of the Associ-
ation of Theatre in Higher Education in San Antonio, Texas.
33. Again, because men typically make up such a minority of the congregation,
one is much more likely to find a woman taking up this spectacular practice, but this
is not to say that men do not do it.
34. As any foray into a traditional black Baptist church will reveal, not onlywhites
but blacks, too, have pictured God as white. Until recently, romantic portraits of a
wan, pallid Christ adorned the walls of most of the sacristies and the stained-glass
windows. This was true even in the homes of many Christian blacks. Although this
is gradually changing, with some ministers hanging pictures of a black Christ or
God within the body of the church or the pulpit, the furor that such an action
provokes is evidence of black Christians’ internalization of a white God. In my own
black Baptist church, the placing of a portrait of a black Jesus was so offensive to
some of the elder members of the church that they made a public protest, and some
ceased to attend. In my mother’s church, where there is a growing young population,
the transition from a portrait of a white Jesus to a black one was more smooth. In his
provocative book, Is God a White Racist? (Boston: Beacon, 1998), William R. Jones
asserts that many blacks see God as white because, if God were black, then black
suffering would cease.
35. Mae Gwendolyn Henderson, “Speaking in Tongues: Dialogics, Dialectics,
and the Black Woman Writer’s Literary Tradition,” in Changing Our Own Words:
Essays on Criticism, Theory, and Writing by Black Women, ed. Cheryl A. Wall (New
Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1989), 17–18.
36. bell hooks, Black Looks: Race and Representation (Boston: South End, 1992), 57.
37. hooks 56.

130 Cultural Traditions, Cultural Memory, and Performance

 38. hooks 65.
39. Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Whose story is it, Anyway?: Feminist and Antiracist
Appropriations of Anita Hill,” in Toni Morrison, ed., Race-ing Justice, En-gendering
Power: Essays on Anita Hill, Clarence Thomas, and the Construction of Social Reality (New
York: Pantheon, 1992), 403.
40. Crenshaw 404.
41. Henderson 35.
42. Henderson 36–37.
43. James H. Cone, The Spirituals and the Blues (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 1995),
61.
44. Clarence Taylor, The Black Churches of Brooklyn (New York: Columbia Uni-
versity Press, 1994), 5.
45. Raboteau, Slave Religion, 68–75. Although Raboteau acknowledgesthatsome
scholars believe the ring shout to have only occurred in the Sea Islands of South
Carolina, he submits compelling evidence that this practice was actively engaged all
over the South.
46. Raboteau, Slave Religion, 68–69.
47. I thank Elmo Terry-Morgan, Artistic Director of Rites and Reason Theatre
in Providence, R.I., for this observation.
48. There are numerous examples of such adaptations. An interesting one is
capoeria, a martial arts system developed by African slaves in Brazil: once outlawed
by masters who feared their physical power, slaves adapted their practice fights to
appear like dancing (Robert Farris Thompson, lecture at Yale University, 1989).
The ring shout itself was an adaptation of an earlier form:
The shout is a fusion of two seemingly irreconcilable attitudestowardreligious
behavior. In most of Africa, dance, like singing and drumming, is an integral
part of supplication. . . . In the Euro-Christian tradition, however, dancing in
church is generally regarded as a profane act. The ring-shout in the United
States provides a scheme which reconciles both principles. The circular move-
ment, shuffling steps, and stamping conform to African traditions of suppli-
cation, while by definition this activity is not recognized as a “dance.”
Raboteau, Slave Religion, 339–340.
49. Emilie M. Townes, In a Blaze of Glory: Womanist Spirituality as Social Witness
(Nashville, Tenn.: Abingdon, 1995), 139.
50. Lorraine Hansberry, A Raisin in the Sun, in Black Theatre, USA, Vol. 2, James
V. Hatch and Ted Shine, eds. (New York: Free Press, 1996), 116.
51. Marta Morena Vega, lecture at St. Paul Community Baptist Church, Nov.
1997.
52. Higginbotham 192.
53. Ntozake Shange, for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is
enuf (New York: Macmillan, 1977), 63.

“Calling on the Spirit” 131

 7

The Chitlin Circuit

‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘
henry louis gates, jr.

The setting was the McCarter Theatre, a brick-and-stone edifice on the

outskirts of the Princeton University campus. On a hot, sticky evening in
June 1998, 500 members of the Theatre Communications Group—all rep-
resentatives of serious, which is to say nonprofit, theater—gathered for their
eleventh biennial national conference. The keynote speech was being deliv-
ered by August Wilson, who, at fifty-one, is probably the most celebrated
American playwright now writing and is certainly the most accomplished
black playwright in this nation’s history. Before he said a word, the largely
white audience greeted him with a standing ovation.
That was the conference’s last moment of unanimity. For here, at this
gathering of saints, the dean of American dramatists had come to deliver an
unexpected and disturbing polemic. American theater, Wilson declared, was
an instrument of white cultural hegemony, and the recent campaign to
integrate and diversify it had only made things worse. The spiritual and
moral survival of black Americans demanded that they be given a stage of
their own. They needed their very own theatres the way they needed sunlight
and oxygen. They needed integration the way they needed acid rain.
Wilson told his Princeton audience, in a quietly impassioned voice:
There are and have always been two distinct and parallel traditions in black
art: that is, art that is conceived and designed to entertain white society,
and art that feeds the spirit and celebrates the life of black America. The
second tradition occurred when the African in the confines of the slave
quarters sought to invest his spirit with the strength of his ancestors by
conceiving in his art, in his song and dance, a world in which he was the
spiritual center.
That was the tradition Wilson found to be exemplified by the Black Power
Movement of the sixties and its cultural arm, the Black Arts scene. Revolu-
tionary Black Arts dramatists, such as Ed Bullins and Amiri Baraka, were
models for authentic black creativity, Wilson maintained, and he placed
himself in their direct line of descent.

132
 “His speech was shocking and it was thrilling,” recalled Ricardo Khan, the
president of the Theatre Communications Group and the artistic director of
the country’s premier black repertory company, the Crossroads Theatre in
New Brunswick, New Jersey. Wilson is light-skinned, with sparse hair and
a close-cropped beard: to some in the audience, he brought to mind Maulana
Karenga (“Black art must expose the enemy, praise the people and support
the revolution”); to others, Ernst Blofeld (“Hot enough for you, Mr. Bond?”).
The black members of the audience started glancing at one another: heads
bobbed, a black-power sign was flashed, encouragement was murmured: “Go
ahead, brother,” “Tell it.” Many white audience members, meanwhile, began
to shift uneasily, gradually acquiring an expression compounded of pain and
puzzlement: After all we’ve done for him, this is how he thanks us? The world of
nonprofit theatre is tiny but intense, and, as soon became clear, Wilson’s
oration was its version of the Simpson verdict.
In the conversational ferment that ensued, almost every conceivable ques-
tion was given a full airing: Did Wilson’s call for an autonomousblacktheater
amount to separatism? Did race matter to culture and, if so, how much? Was
Wilson’s salvific notion of the theater—and his dream of a theater that would
address ordinary black folk—mere romantic delusion? In the course of much
high-minded hand wringing, practically the only possibility not broached
was that a black theater for the masses already existed—just not of an order
that anybody in the world of serious theater had in mind.
What attracted the greatest immediate attention was Wilson’s unqualified
denunciation of color-blind casting. To cast black actors in “white” plays
was, he said, “to cast us in the role of mimics.” Worse, for a black actor to
walk the stage of Western drama was to collaborate with the culture of
racism, “to be in league with a thousand naysayers, who wish to corrupt the
vigor and spirit of his heart.” An all-black production of Death of a Salesman,
say, would “deny us our own humanity.”
Not surprisingly, Wilson’s stand on this issue has found little acceptance
among working black actors, dramatists, and directors. Lloyd Richards—
Wilson’s long-time director and creative partner—has never thought twice
about casting James Earl Jones as Timon of Athens or as Judge Brack in
Hedda Gabler. Wole Soyinka, Nigerian playwright and Nobel Laureate,
staunchly declares, “I can assure you that if Death of a Salesman wereperformed
in Nigeria by an all-Eskimo cast it would have resonances totally outside the
mediation of color.” What’s more surprising is that many stars of the Black
Arts firmament are equally dismissive. “If O. J. can play a black man, I don’t
see any problem with Olivier playing Othello,” Amiri Baraka says, with a
mordant laugh. And the legendary black playwright and director Douglas
Turner Ward claims that many of Sean O’Casey’s plays, with their ethos of
alienation, actually work better with black actors.
But the dissent on color-blind casting was almost something of a footnote
to Wilson’s larger brief—that of encouraging the creation of an authentic
black theater. As he saw it, the stakes could not be greater. Black theater
could help change the world: it could be “the spearhead of a movement to

The Chitlin Circuit 133

reignite and reunite our people’s positive energy for a political and social
change that is reflective of our spiritual truths rather than economicfallacies.”
The urgency of this creed led to a seemingly self-divided rhetoric. On the
one hand, Wilson maintained that “we cannot depend on others,” that we
must be a “self-determining, self-respecting people.” On the other hand, this
self-sufficiency was to besubsidizedbyfoundationsandgovernmentagencies.
If Wilson’s rhetoric struck many of his listeners as contradictory—seeming
to alternate the balled fist and the outstretched palm—the contradictions
only multiplied upon further investigation. August Wilson, born Frederick
August Kittel, is in some respects an unlikely spokesman for a new Black
Arts Movement. He neither looks nor sounds typically black—had he the
desire, he could easily “pass”—and that makes him black first and foremost
by self-identification. (His father was a German-American baker in Pitts-
burgh, where he grew up.) Some see significance in this. The estimable black
playwright OyamO, né Charles Gordon, says, “Within our history, many
people who are lighter—including the very lightest of us, who can really
pass—are sometimes the most angry.”
Nor has it escaped comment that Wilson failed to acknowledge his own
power and stature within the world of mainstream theater: his works debut
at major Broadway theaters, and the white critical establishment has honored
them with a cascade of Pulitzer, Drama Desk, and Tony awards. The black
experimental playwright Suzan-Lori Parks, whose works include Venus and
The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World, says, “August can
start by having his own acclaimed plays premiere in black theatres, instead
of where they premiere now. I’m sorry, but he should examine his own house.”
One historical luminary of black theater charges that Wilson himself is the
problem to which he purports to hold the solution: “Once the white main-
stream theatre found a black artistic spokesman, the one playwright who
could do no wrong, the money that used to go to autonomous black theatre
started to dry up.”
And yet, on closer examination, sharply drawn lines of battle begin to blur.
Wilson’s oration provokedaswingeingrebuttalinAmericanTheatrebyRobert
Brustein, who is the artistic director of the American Repertory Theatre, the
drama critic for the New Republic, and a long-time sparring partner of Wil-
son’s. Brustein charged Wilson with promoting subsidized separatism:
“What next?” he asked. “Separate schools? Separate washrooms? Separate
drinking fountains?” With Anna Deavere Smith—herself a paradigm of
casting beyond color—serving as the moderator, the men continued their
debate Monday, 27 January 1977, in New York’s Town Hall. Critic Paul
Goldberger, writing in the New York Times, went so far as to declare that
“this is shaping up to be the sharpest cultural debate” since the Mapplethorpe
controversy. You would never guess that Brustein and Wilson areincomplete
agreement on the one subject that agitates them most: the disastrous nature
of the donor-driven trend to diversify regional theaters. Brustein dislikes the
trend because he believes that it supplants aesthetic considerations with
sociological ones. Wilson dislikes it because, as is trueof allmovementtoward

134 Cultural Traditions, Cultural Memory, and Performance

integration, it undermines the integrity and strength of autonomous black
institutions.
He has a point. George Wolfe, the producer of the Public Theatre, singles
out the Lila Wallace–Reader’s Digest Fund as having been “incredibly irre-
sponsible” in this regard. He goes on to explain:
It has created a peculiar dynamic where, you know, there was a struggling
black theatre that had been nurturing a series of artists and all of a sudden
this predominantly white theatre next door is getting a couple of million
dollars to invite artists of color into its fold.
(To be sure, the officials at the Lila Wallace Fund have also given money to
black companies like the Crossroads.) But Wilson wants to take things
another step and create black theaters where they do not currently exist. He
believes that any theater situated in a city with a black population of more
than 60 percent should be converted into a black theater. White board
members and staff would be largely retired in order to ensure what he believes
to be a cultural and moral imperative: art by, of, and for black people.
Unquestionably, Wilson remains in the grip of a sentimental separatism.
(I will own that it has an emotional grip on me, too, just a rather attenuated
one.) He says he has a lot of respect for the “do for self” philosophy of the
Nation of Islam; in the early seventies, he was briefly a convert although
mostly in order to keep his Muslim wife company. He is a man who views
integration primarily as a destructive force, one that ruined once vital black
institutions. He thinks back fondly to an era when we had our own dress
shops and businesses, our own Negro Baseball League. This segregated, pre–
Brown v. Board of Education era was, he will tell you, “black America at its
strongest and most culturally self-sufficient.” From his perspective, separate-
but-equal, far from being a perversion of social justice, is an ideal to which
we should aspire.
It is one thing to hear this view espoused by Minister Louis Farrakhan and
quite another to hear it advanced by August Wilson, a man as lionized as any
writer of his generation. It represents a romantic attempt to retrieve an
imaginary community in the wake of what seems to be a disintegration of
the real one. One of the functions of literature is to bring back the dead, the
absent, the train gone by; you might say that cultural nationalism is what
happens when the genre of the elegy devolves into ideology, the way furniture
might be kilned into charcoal.
Certainly, the brutal reductionism of August Wilson’s polemics is in stark
contrast to his richly textured dramatic oeuvre. Wilson first came to promi-
nence in the mid-1980s, with his fourth play, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom,
which director Lloyd Richards was able to move from the Yale Repertory
Theatre to the Cort Theatre on Broadway. There, Wilson’s dramatic and
verbal imagination galvanized critics, who heralded a major new presence on
the American stage. With Ma Rainey, an ambitious and still ongoing cycle
of plays came to public notice. Wilson’s aim is to explore black American
life through plays set during each of the decades of the century; most are

The Chitlin Circuit 135

situated in a black working-class neighborhood of Pittsburgh. Joe Turner’s
Come and Gone (1986), for example, takes place in 1911 and deals with the
sense of cultural loss that accompanied the Great Migration; The Piano Lesson
(which received the Pulitzer in 1987), set during the Depression, uses a
dispute over an inherited piano—once the possession of a slave owner—to
show that the past is never quite past. In Fences (a 1990 Pulitzer), which opens
in the year 1957, the grandiloquently embittered Troy Maxson is a former
Negro League baseball player, whonow works as agarbageman;thetrajectory
of his life has made a mockery of the supposed glories of integration.
Wilson’s 1990 play, Two Trains Running, takes place in a Pittsburgh
luncheonette in the late sixties:

wolf: I thought [the jukebox] was just fixed. Memphis, I thought

you was gonna get a new jukebox.
memphis: I told Zanelli to bring me a new one. That what he say he
gonna do. He been saying that for the last year.

If you are black, you cannot rely on the Zanellis of the world, as the characters
in the play learn to their detriment. But a great deal more than race politics
is going on here. An unruly luxuriance of language—an ability to ease
between trash talk and near-choral transport—is Wilson’s great gift; some-
times, you wish he were less generous with that gift, for it can come at the
expense of conventional dramaturgic virtues, like pacing and a sense of
closure. Even when he falters, however, Wilson’s work is demanding and
complex—at the furthest remove from a cultural manifesto.
But if Wilson’s avowed cultural politics are difficult to square with his art,
they come with a venerable history of their own. In 1926, W. E. B. Du Bois,
writing in his magazine, Crisis, took a dim view of “colored” productions of
mainstream plays (they “miss the real path,” he warned) and called for a new
black theater, for which he laid down “four fundamental principles”:

The plays of a real Negro theatre must be: (1) About us. That is, they must
have plots which reveal Negro life as it is. (2) By us. That is, they must be
written by Negro authors who understand from birth and continual asso-
ciation just what it means to be a Negro today. (3) For us. That is, the
theatre must cater primarily to Negro audiences and be supported and
sustained by their entertainment and approval. (4) Near us. The theatre
must be in a Negro neighborhood near the mass of ordinary Negro people.

What would such a theater look like? Wilson, of course, directs us to what
may seem the most plausible candidate: the dramatic art of the Black Power
era. That moment and milieu bring to mind a radicalized, leatherclad gen-
eration forging its art in the streets, writing plays fueled by the masses’
righteous rage: revolutionary art by the people and for the people. That is
certainly how the illuminati liked to represent their project. Baraka’s man-
ifesto on “The Revolutionary Theatre” provides a representative précis:

136 Cultural Traditions, Cultural Memory, and Performance

 What we show must cause the blood to rush, so that prerevolutionary
temperaments will be bathed in this blood, and it will cause their deepest
souls to move, and they will find themselves tensed and clenched, even
ready to die. . . . We will scream and cry, murder, run through the streets
in agony, if it means some soul will be moved.

Theater, precisely because of its supposed potential to mobilize the masses,

was always at the forefront of the Black Arts Movement. Still, it is a funny
thing about cultural movements: as a rule, they consist of a handful of people.
(The aesthetic, the constructivist, and the futurist movements were devoted
largely to declaring themselves, self-consciously, to be movements.) And, by
the late sixties, it was clear that the vitality of Black Arts drama had come to
center upon two New York–based theaters: the Negro Ensemble Company
(NEC), based downtown, under the direction of Douglas Turner Ward, and
the New Lafayette Theatre, based in Harlem, under the direction of Robert
Macbeth. Here was the full flowering of genuine black theater in this country,
the kind that would raise consciousness and temperatures, that promised to
make us whole.
“Populist modernism,” a phrase coined by literary scholar Werner Sollors,
characterized the regnant ethos of that time and place—its aspiration to an
art of high seriousness, which would engage the energies of the masses. But
between the ideals of modernism and those of populism, one or the other had
to give. OyamO—who, like many more senior luminaries of the Black Arts
Movement (Baraka and Ed Bullins among them), was affiliated with the
blacker and artier New Lafayette—recalls that the Harlem theater’s high-
flown airs were accompanied by paltry audiences. “Therewasacondescending
attitude toward this community, buttressed by the fact that it was getting
five hundred grand from the Ford Foundation every year,” he recalls. And
the NEC was similarly provided for. This is not to say that worthy and
important work was not created in these theaters: it was. But these companies
do provide a textbook example of how quickly beneficence becomes entitle-
ment, and patronage a paycheck.
So, the dirty little secret of the Black Arts Movement was that it was a
project promoted and sustained largely by the Ford Foundation. Liberal-
minded Medicis made it; in the fullness of time, they left it to unmake itself.
Bullins, one of the principals of the New Lafayette, remembers how that
particular temple—a magnificent structure on 137th Street, which the Ford
had converted from a movie house with the help of some tony theatrical
architects—was destroyed. He describes a meeting between a visiting pro-
gram officer from the Ford Foundation and the theater’s board. The visitor
noticed that there were no women on the board, and he asked about their
absence. Bullins both laughs and groans when he recalls, “And then some
great mind from Harlem, an actor, spoke up and said, ‘Oh, no, we don’t need
any women on the board, because every thirty days women go through their
period and they get evil.’ Then and there, I saw one million dollars start
sprouting wings and flapping away through the door.”

The Chitlin Circuit 137

 These days, of course, all nonprofit theater is starved for cash. And black
theaters are already out there, as someone like Larry Leon Hamlin could tell
you. Hamlin is the artistic director of the National Black Theatre Festival,
and by his count there are perhaps 250 regional black theaters in the United
States, about forty of which are reasonably active. Of course, most of Wilson’s
own plays gestated at places like the Huntington Theatre Company or the
Yale Rep before they were launched on the Great White Way. I asked Wilson
about this apparent contradiction. He explained that the Negro Ensemble
Company had fallen into decline by the early eighties: “It was not doing work
of the quality that we deserve, and there’s no theatre that’s since stepped into
the breach.” Wilson can sound as if he were boycotting black theaters for
artistic reasons, which is why some people in the black theater world cannot
decide whether he is their savior or their slayer. “I do good work,” he says,
his point being that his plays deserve the best conditions he can secure for
them. And, among white theaters, he says:
The rush is now on to do anything that’s black. Largely through my plays,
what the theatres have found out is that they had this white audience that
was starving to get a little understanding of what was happening with the
black population, because they very seldom come into contact with them,
so they’re curious. The white theatres have discovered that there is a market
for that.
The fact that part of Wilson’s success is owed to the appeal of ethnography
is precisely what disturbs some black critics: they suspect that Wilson’s work
is systematically overrated along those lines. “August is genuinely very
gifted,” Margo Jefferson, one of those critics, says:
Whites who don’t know the world whereof he writes get a sense of vast,
existential melodramas, sweeping pageants, and it’s very exciting, with
his insistence always that these people onstage are the real and genuine
black people. What happens with whites is that the race element is sig-
nalling them every minute, “You know nothing about this, you’re lucky
to be here.”
So, if you are looking for a theater of black folk, by black folk, and for black
folk—a genuinely sequestered cultural preserve—you will have to cross the
extraordinary dramas of August Wilson off your list. Nor would the Black
Arts scene, for all its grand aspirations, qualify: the revolution, it is safe to
say, will not be subsidized. You could be forgiven for wondering whether
such a black popular theater really exists. But it does, and, if populist mod-
ernism is your creed, it will probably turn your stomach. It is called the
Chitlin Circuit, and nobody says you have to like it. But everything in God’s
creation has a reason, and the Chitlin Circuit is no exception. PerhapsOyamO
brings us closest to comprehension when he despairingly observes an uncom-
fortable truth: “A lot of what they call highbrow, progressive, avant-garde
theatre is boring the shit out of people.” Not to put too fine a point on it.

138 Cultural Traditions, Cultural Memory, and Performance

The setting now is the Sarah Vaughan Concert Hall—built in 1925 as a
Masonic temple—on Broad Street in downtown Newark, New Jersey. It is
a chilly, overcast Sunday afternoon, closing in on three o’clock, which is when
the matinee performance of Adrian Williamson’splayMyGrandmotherPrayed
for Me is supposed to begin. In every sense, we are a long way from the
Princeton campus, the site of the despondency-drenched Theatre Commu-
nications Group conference (TCG). On the sidewalk, patrons are eating
grilled sausages and hot dogs. Older people make their way inside with the
assistance of wheelchairs or walkers; younger ones strut about and survey one
another appraisingly. There is much to appraise. These people are styling
out, many of them having come fromchurch:youseecloudliketulle,hatbands
of the finest grosgrain ribbon, wool suits and pants in neon shades. Women
have taken care to match their shoes and handbags; men sport Stetson and
Dobbs hats, kente cloth cummerbunds and scarves. There is a blue velvet
fedora here, electric blue trousers there, a Superfly hat and overcoat on a man
escorting his magenta-clad wife. Bodies are gleaming, moisturized, and
fragrant; cheeks are lightly powdered, eyes mascaraed. Broad Street is a poor
substitute for a models’ runway, but it will have to do until the theater doors
open and swallow up this impromptu village. There are nearly 3,000 seats
in the hall; within several minutes, most of them are occupied.
The Chitlin Circuit dates back to the 1920s, when the Theatre Owners
Booking Association brought plays and other forms of entertainment to
black audiences throughout the South and the Midwest. Although it had a
reputation for lousy pay and demanding scheduling—its acronym, TOBA,
was sometimes said to stand for “tough on black asses”—it was the spawning
ground for a good number of accomplished black actors, comics, and musi-
cians. TOBA proper had gone into eclipse by the decade’s end, yet the
tradition it began—the disparagingly named Chitlin Circuit—never en-
tirely died out. Touring black companies would play anywhere: in a theater
if there was one (sometimes they booked space on weekends or late at night,
when the boards would otherwise be vacant) or in a school auditorium if there
was not. Crisscrossing black America, the circuit established an empire of
comedy and pathos, the sublime and the ridiculous: a movable feast that
enabled blacks to patronize black entertainers. On the whole, these produc-
tions were for the moment, not for the ages. They were the kind of melodrama
or farce—or, often, both—in which nothing succeeded like excess. But the
productions were for, by, and about black folks, and their audience was not
much inclined to check them against their Stanislavsky anyway.
You do not expect anything fancy from something called the Chitlin
Circuit. Wilson—by way of emphasizing the irreducible differencesbetween
blacks and whites—had told the TCG members that “in our culinary history
we had to make do with the . . . intestines of the pig rather than the loin and
the ham and the bacon.” The intestines of the pig are the source of the delicacy
known as chitlins; it is a good example of how something that was originally
eaten of necessity became, as is the way with acquired tastes, a thing actively

The Chitlin Circuit 139

enjoyed. The same might be said of the Chitlin Circuit, for the circuit is back
in full flush and has been for several years. Black audiences throughout the
country flock to halls like the Beacon Theatre in New York, the Strand
Theatre in Boston, and the Fox Theatre in Atlanta. Those audiences are
basically blue collar and pink collar and not the type to attend traditional
theater, Larry Leon Hamlin adjudges. But, as the saying has it, they know
what they like.
The people behind the shows tend not to vaporize about the “emancipatory
potentialities” of their work or about “forging organic links to the commu-
nity”: they would be out of business if black folks stopped turningup.Instead,
they like to talk numbers. Terryl Calloway, who has worked as a NewEngland
promoter for some Chitlin Circuit productions, tells me about plays that
have grossed $20 million or more. “It’s no joke,” he says gravely.
“Good afternoon! Are you ready to have a good time?” This is the master
of ceremonies, warming up the Newark crowd. The play that ensues is a now-
standard combination of elements; that is, it is basically a melodrama, with
abundant comic relief and a handful of gospel songs interspersed.
So what have we turned out to see? It seems that the grandmother—stout
of body and of spirit—is doing her best to raise her two grandsons, as their
mother, Samantha, has fallen into crack addiction and prostitution. (When
we first see Samantha, she is trying to steal her mother’s television in order
to pay for her habit.) The older boy, Rashad, is devout and studious, but the
younger one, Ein, has taken up with bad company. Today is the day that he
and his best friend, Stickey, are to be inducted into the Big Guns, a local
gang headed by Slow Pimp. When Stickey is killed on the street by a member
of a rival gang, Ein sets out, gun in hand, to avenge his death. What is a
grandmother to do? Well, pray, for one thing.
Artistically speaking, My Grandmother Prayed for Me makes “Good Times”
look like Strindberg. The performances are loud and large; most of the gospel
is blared by said grandmother with all the interpretive nuance of a car horn.
So broad, so coarse, so over-the-top is this production that to render an
aesthetic evaluation would seem a sort of category mistake, like asking Julia
Child to taste test chewing tobacco. But it deals with matters that are of
immediate concern to the Newark audience, working class and middle class
alike: gang violence, crack addiction, teenage pregnancy, deadbeat dads. For
this audience, these issues are not Times op-ed page fodder; they are the
problems of everyday life, as real and close at hand as parking tickets and
head colds. It is also true that black America remains disproportionately
religious. (Count on a black rap artist—gangsta or no—to thank Jesus in his
liner notes.) So that is part of it, too.
On my way to the Sarah Vaughan Concert Hall, I bumped into Amiri
Baraka, who, when he learned my destination, gave me a gleaming smile and
some brotherly advice: “You’re about to step into some deep doo-doo.”Maybe
he is right, and yet I find myself enjoying the spectacle as much as everybody
else here. “You lost faith in the church, abandoned your kids, and I even
heard you were prostituting,” the grandmother tells her daughter. “Let me

140 Cultural Traditions, Cultural Memory, and Performance

tell you something. Them drugs ain’t nothing but a demon.” Samantha’s
response: “Well, if they a demon, then I’m gon’ love hell.” People laugh, but
they recognize the sound of a lost soul. So the two fabled institutions of the
inner city, the pusher and the preacher, must battle for Samantha’s soul.
There is a similar exchange between the good son and the one going bad:
rashad: Those boys you hang with ain’t nothing but a bunch of punks.
All y’all do is run around these streets beating up on people,
robbing people, our black folks at that. . . .
ein: If we so-called punks, why we got everybody scared of us? I’ll
tell you why because we hardcore. We’ll smoke anybody that
get in our way.
rashad: Hardcore? . . . Ain’t a thing you out there doing hardcore. Let
me tell you what hardcore is: hardcore is going to school, put-
ting your nose in a book getting an education. Hardcore is
going to church trying to live your life right for the Lord.
Hardcore is going to work every day, busting your behind
providing for a family. Look around you. Grandma provided
all of this for us, and she pray for us every day. Now that’s
hardcore.
This doubtless is not what Wilson has in mind when he speaks of the spiritual
fortification and survival that black drama can provide. All the same, the
audience is audibly stirred by Rashad’s peroration, crying out “Hallelujah!”
and “Testify!” The subject of racism—or, for that matter, white people—
simply never arises: in the all-black world depicted on stage, the risks and
remedies are all much closer to hand. That is one puzzle. Here is another: If
theater is dying, what do we make of these nearly 3,000 black folks gathered
in downtown Newark? The phenomenon I am witnessing has nothing in
common with Tony ‘n’ Tina’s Wedding, say, or dinner theater in Westchester,
which offers Damn Yankees over a steak and two eggs. It is true that black
audiences have always had a predilection for talking back at performances.
But more than that is going on in this theater: the intensity of engagement
is palpable. During some of the gospel numbers, there are members of the
audience who stand up and do the holy dance by their seats. However crude
the script and the production, they are generating the kind of audience
communion of which most playwrights can only dream.
In My Grandmother Prayed for Me, the deus ex machina is pretty literal.
When Ein sets off to seek vengeance, his grandmother and brother go in
search of him, joined by Samantha, who—having been visited by an angel
in the shape of a little boy—has seen the light. (“It was this voice, Mama,
this voice from Heaven. It told me that Ein and Rashad need a good mama.”)
The curtain rises on a gang-infested project. It appears that Ein, too, has seen
the light and laid down his gun. “I know I haven’t had the best things in
life,” he tells Slow Pimp defiantly, “but God gave me the best grandmother
in the world.” Slow Pimp does not take his defection well, but it is Rashad

The Chitlin Circuit 141

who catches the first bullet. Next, Slow Pimp turns his gat on the meddling
grandmother. She prays for divine intervention and gets it. The gun jams;
Slow Pimp is struck by lightning; the angel raises Rashad from the ground.
The audience goes wild.
Nobody said it was high culture, but historically this is what a lot of
American theater, particularly before the First World War, was like. Other
“ghettoized” theaters, for all their vibrancy, also ignored many of the criteria
for serious art—not least the Yiddish theater, a center of immigrant Jewish
life in New York at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of
the twentieth. Former New York Times theater critic Frank Rich says:
What we think of as the Yiddish theatre today was essentially popular
entertainment for immigrants. There were what we’d now think of as
hilarious versions of, say, King Lear, in which Lear lives. Or there were fairy
tales, about an impoverished family arriving on the Lower East Side and
ending up on Riverside Drive living high on the hog.
(There was also, he notes, an avant-garde Yiddish theater, based largely in
the Bronx, but that is a different, and more elevated, story.)
The fact that the audience at the Sarah Vaughan Concert Hall is entirely
black creates an essential dynamic. I mentioned elements of comic relief: they
include a black preacher greedy for the grandmother’s chicken wings; a randy
old man trailing toilet paper from a split seam in the back of his pants; the
grandmother herself, whose churchliness is outlandishly caricatured; endless
references to Stickey’s lapses of personal hygiene. All the very worst stereo-
types of the race are on display, larger than life. Here, in this racially seques-
tered space, a black audience laughs uninhibitedly, whereas the presence of
white folks would have engendered a familiar anxiety: Will they think that’s
what we’re really like? If this drama were shown on television—in any inte-
grated forum—Jesse Jackson would probably denounce it, the NAACP
would demand a boycott, and every soul here would swap his or her finery
for sandwich boards in order to picket it. You do not want white people to
see this kind of spectacle; you want them to see the noble dramas of August
Wilson, where the injuries and injustices perpetrated by the white man are
never far from our consciousness. (It should be mentioned that there are far
more respectable and well-groomed versions of gospel drama—most notably
Vy Higgenson’s Mama I Want to Sing and its progeny—that have achieved a
measure of crossover success, serving mainly as vehicles for some very im-
pressive singing. But they are better regarded as pageants, or revues, than
stage plays.) By contrast, these Chitlin Circuit plays carry an invisible racial
warning sticker: for domestic consumptiononly—exportstrictlyprohibited.
For the creators of this theater, there are other gratifications to be had. “I’ve
never made so much money in my life as I made when I did the forty or so
cities we did on the Chitlin Circuit,” James Chapmyn, one veteran of the
circuit, tells me. And Chapmyn was not even one of the top grossers. “The
guy that did Beauty Shop probably grossed $15 to $25 million in the Chitlin
Circuit,” he says. “These plays make enormous money.”

142 Cultural Traditions, Cultural Memory, and Performance

 Chapmyn is a blunt-featured, odd-shaped man, with a bullet head and a
Buddha belly. He’s thirty-six, and he grew up in Kansas, the son of a Baptist
minister. He tells me that he fell out with his father in his early twenties.
“He was adamant in teaching us to stand up for who we are, and who I am
happens to be a black gay man. He taught me to tell the truth,” Chapmyn
says, but adds that his father changed his mind when his son came out. “I
just wish you had lied,” the minister told his son. A resulting disaffection
with the church—and a spell as a homeless person—impelled him to write
a play for which he has become widely known: Our Young Black Men Are Dying
and Nobody Seems to Care (1990). His experience with the Chitlin Circuit was
decidedly mixed but still memorable.
Chapmyn, like everyone else who has succeeded on the Chitlin Circuit,
had to master the dark arts of marketing and promotion and to do so while
bypassing the major media. He genially explains the ground rules:
What has happened in America is that you have a very active African-
American theatre audience that doesn’t get their information from the arts
section in the newspaper, that doesn’t read reviews but listens to the radio,
gets things stuffed in their bulletins in church, has flyers put on their car
when they’re night-clubbing. That’s how people get to know about black
theatre. Buying the arts section ain’t going to cut it for us. That audience
is not interested in the “black theatre,” and the black-theatre audience is
not interested in reading that information. We use radio quite extensively,
because in our community and places we’ve gone, African Americanslisten
to radio. In fact, there’s kind of an unspoken rule on the Chitlin Circuit: if
a city doesn’t have a black radio station, then the Chitlin Circuit won’t
perform there.
But the Chitlin Circuit has a less amiable side; indeed, to judge from some
of the tales you hear, many of its most dramatic events occur off stage. The
inner-city version of foundation program officers are drug dealers withmoney
to burn, and their influence is unmistakable. Chapmyn says:
They do everything in cash. At our highest point, I know that after we all
got our money, we were still collecting in the neighborhood of $100,000
a week. That was cash being given to us, usually in envelopes, by people
we didn’t know. It was scary. . . . When I was in that circuit, I dealt with
a lot of people who didn’t have anything but beeper numbers, who would
call me with hotel numbers, who operated through post-office boxes, who
would show up at the time of the show and most of the time take care of
me and my people very well.
Not always, though. Chapmyn recounts:
In one city, I think we did three shows, and the receipts after expenses were
$140,000. My percentage of that was to be $65,000. I remember the
people gave me $5,000 and told me that if I wanted the rest I’d have to
sue them.

The Chitlin Circuit 143

He ended up spending the night in jail. “I was so mad I was ready to hurt
somebody,” he explains. “Somebody is going to tell me that they got my
$60,000 and they ain’t going to give it to me? I think I flipped a table over
and hit somebody in the face.”
Larry Leon Hamlin, too, becomes animated when he talks about the sleazy
world of popular theater. He tells me:
Contracts have been put out on people. If you are a big-time drug dealer,
it’s like, “These plays are making money, and I’ve got money. I’m going
to put out a play.” That drug dealer will write a play who has never written
a play before, will direct the play, who has never directed a play before.
They get deep with guns.
James Chapmyn says he dropped out of the circuit because of the criminal
element:
Here I am doing a play about all the things killing African-Americanmen,
chief among those things being the violence and the drugs, and I’m doing
business with people who are probably using the money they make from
drugs to promote my play. I had a fundamental problem with that.
Chapmyn, plainly, is a man with a mission of uplift. By contrast, many other
stars of the Chitlin Circuit have the more single-minded intent of pleasing
an audience: they stoop to conquer.
That might be said, certainly, of the most successful impresario of the
Chitlin Circuit, a man named Shelly Garrett. Garrett maintains that his play
Beauty Shop has been seen by more than 20 million people, that it is the most
successful black stage play in American history, and that he himself is “Amer-
ica’s number one black theatrical producer, director, and playwright.” Shelly
Garrett has never met August Wilson; August Wilson has never heard of
Shelly Garrett. They are as unacquainted with each other as art and commerce
is said to be. (Except for Fences and The Piano Lesson, both of which were
profitable, all of Wilson’s plays have lost money.)
Garrett is a handsome man in his early fifties, given to bright-coloredsports
coats and heavy gold jewelry, and there is about him the unquiet air of a
gambler. He was born in Dallas, Texas, worked there as a disk jockey, and
later moved to Los Angeles to begin an acting career. He made his debut as
a dramatist in 1986, with Snuff and Miniskirts. It played in the Ebony
Showcase Theatre in Los Angeles for about six weeks. The following year, he
staged Beauty Shop. After running on and off in Los Angeles, that show went
on tour, and, as Garrett likes to say, “The rest is history.” Garrett had his
audience in the palm of his hand and his formula at his fingertips; all that
was left was for him to repeat it with slight variation, in plays like Beauty
Shop Part 2, Living Room, Barber Shop, and Laundromat.
“It reminds you of the old commedia dell’arte stuff,” OyamO says of
Garrett’s approach to theater. “But it’s black, and it’s today, and it’s loud.”
He also makes the obvious remark that, “if a white man was producing Beauty

144 Cultural Traditions, Cultural Memory, and Performance

Shop, they would be lynching it.” Still, what Shelly Garrett does has a far
better claim to be “community theater” than what we normally refer to by
that name.
Garrett’s dramatis personae are as uniform as restaurant place settings. The
parts invariably include a mouthy fat woman, a beautiful vamp, a sharp-
tongued and swishy gay man, and a handsome black stud, who willultimately
be coupled with the fat woman. Much of the dialogue consists of insults and
trash talk. Other options and accessories may be added, to taste, but typically
there is a striptease scene and lots of Teddy Pendergrass on the mixing board.
The gay man and the fat woman swap gibes—“play the dozens”—during
lulls in the action.
Although Garrett’s plays adhere to pretty much the same situational and
narrative template, they are not dashed off. Garrett tells me, “I might rewrite
a show forty times, and I take so much time with them and the rehearsals
and the delivery of the lines that I just run actors crazy. I run them nuts. But
then, at the end, when they get their standing ovation, they love me.” A
strained chuckle: “Takes them a long time to love me, but finally they do.”
Garrett prides himself on his professionalism, which lifts him far above the
cheesier theatrical realm where drug-pusher auteurs and shakedown artists
might freelance. And there is something disarming about his buoyant, show-
me-the-money brand of dramaturgy.
Garrett is not the product of anyone’s drama workshop; he comes from a
world in which “the method” refers to a birth-control technique. He has seen
almost no “legitimate” theater, even in its low-end form: “I’m embarrassed
to tell people that I’ve never even seen The Wiz. On Broadway, I’ve seen Les
Miz, Cats, and—what was that black show that had Gregory Hines in it?”
His shows play to ordinary black people—the “people on the avenue,” as
Wilson wistfully puts it—and if these shows are essentially invisible to the
white mainstream, so much the better. “I have things in my show that black
people can relate to,” Garrett declares. “If you’re sitting in that audience and
something is happening on that stage that you can absolutely not relate to,
why are you even there?” Why, indeed?
In Beauty Shop, Terry (conservative, pretty) is the proprietor of the hair
salon; Sylvia (sexy), Margaret (fat), and Chris (gay) are stylists; Rachel (tall,
well-dressed) is a customer.
terry: Barbara Dell! Is that man still beating her?
sylvia: Punching her lights out! It must have been a humdinger
’cause her glasses were real dark!
terry: Well, if she’s stupid enough to stay there with him, she
deserves it!
rachel: I have never understood why a woman just takes that kind
of stuff off of a man.
margaret: I can’t understand a man raising his hand to hit a woman!

The Chitlin Circuit 145

 chris: I guess you wouldn’t. What man would be brave enough to
hit you?
Despite outrageous caricature, it does not seem quite right to call these plays
homophobic. The gay characters may be stereotyped, but so are all the others.
The bigots are not treated charitably, and the queen is always given the last
word. “You are an embarrassment to the male gender, to the Y.M.C.A., the
Cub Scouts, Boy Scouts, U.S. Army, and . . . Old Spice!” a customer tells
Chris in the course of a steadily escalating argument. Chris replies, “Now
what you need to do is go home and have a little talk with your mother! I wasn’t
always gay, I might be your daddy!” Politically correct it is not, but neither is
it mean-spirited. At the end, the fat woman is rewarded with a desirable
man. And, occasionally, there are even monologues with morals, in which
philandering males are put in their place by right-on women.
First and foremost, though, Garrett is a businessman. His production
company moves along with him; he refuses to fly but he has a bus that is fully
equipped with fax and phone. He is known for his skill in saturating the
black press and radio stations. He is also known for the money he makes
selling merchandise like T-shirts and programs. He can tell you that his
average ticket price is $27.50, that he rarely plays a venue with fewer than
2,000 seats, that a show he did in Atlanta netted about $600,000 a week.
(For purposes of comparison, the weekly net of hit “straight” plays—like
Master Class, Taking Sides, and so forth—is typically between $100,000 and
$200,000; the weekly net of hit musicals like Miss Saigon, Les Misérables, and
Sunset Boulevard is usually in the neighborhood of $500,000.) In New York,
Garrett’s Beauty Shop had weekly revenues of more than $800,000, and that
was for an eleven-week run, during which the show sold out every week but
one. Garrett remembers the time fondly: “They put me up at the Plaza in
New York. First black to ever stay at the penthouse of the Plaza. And I was
there for three weeks—the penthouse of the Plaza!”
To most people who both take the theatrical arts seriously and aspire to an
“organic connection” with the black community, Garrett is a cultural candy
man, and his plays the equivalent of caries. Woodie King, Jr., of New York’s
New Federal Theatre (which has had unusual success in attracting black
audiences for black theater), expresses a widespread sentiment in the world
of political theater when he describes Garrett as “an individual going after
our personal riches.” He says, “It’s not doing anything for any kind of black
community. It’s not like he’s going to make money, then find five deserving
women writers and put on their work. It’s always going to be about him.” It
is clear that, for dramatists who view themselves as producing work for their
community but who depend for their existence on foundation and govern-
ment support, Garrett is an embarrassment in more ways than one.
“Artistically, I think they’re horrible,” the Crossroads’ Ricardo Khan says
of the Chitlin Circuit’s carnivalesque productions:
I don’t think the acting is good, I don’t think the direction is good, I don’t
think the level of production is good. But I don’t put them down for being

146 Cultural Traditions, Cultural Memory, and Performance

 able to speak to something that people are feeling. I think the reason it’s
working is that it’s making people laugh at themselves, making them feel
good, and they’re tired of heavy stuff.

But his political consciousness rebels at the easy anodyne, the theatergoer’s
opiate. His own work, he says, aspires to raise consciousness and transform
society. He sounds almost discouraged when he adds, “But people don’t
always want that. Sometimes they just want to have fun.”
Nobody wants to see the Chitlin Circuit and the Crossroads converge. But
there is something heartening about the spectacle of black drama that pays
its own way—even if aficionados of serious theater find something disheart-
ening about the nature of that drama. So maybe we should not worry so much
about those Du Boisian yardsticks of blackness. That way lies heartbreak, or
confusion. Wilson and his supporters, to listen to them, would divvy up
American culture alongthecolorline,sortingoutpossessionslikeanamicably
divorcing couple. But, I insist, Wilson’s polemics disserve his poetics.
Indeed, his work is a tribute to a hybrid vigor, an amalgam of black
vernacular, American naturalism, and high modernist influences. (In the
history of black drama, perhaps only Baraka’s 1964 play Dutchman represents
as formidable an achievement, and that was explicitly a drama of interracial
conflict. By contrast, one of Wilson’s accomplishments is to register the
ambiguous presence of white folks in a segregated black world—you see
them nowhere and feel them everywhere.) There is no contradiction in
the fact that Wilson revels in the black cadences of the barbershop and the
barbecue, on the one hand, and pledges fealty to Aristotle’s poetics, on the
other. Wilson may talk about cultural autarky, but, to his credit, he does not
practice it. Inevitably, the audience for serious plays in this mostly white
country is mostly white. Wilson writes serious plays. His audience is mostly
white. What’s to apologize for?
By all means, let there be “political” art and formalist art, populism and
modernism, Baraka and Beckett, but let them jostleand collideinthecultural
agora. There will be theaters that are black—and Latino and Asian and what
you will—but, all told, it is better that they not arise from the edicts of
cultural commissioners. Despite all the rhetoric about inclusion, I was struck
by the fact that many black playwrights told me they felt that their kind of
work—usually more “experimental” than realist—was distinctly unwel-
come in most black regional theaters. Suzan-Lori Parks reminds me that she
did not grow up in the ‘hood: “I’m not black according to a nationalist
definition of black womanhood. . . . We discriminate in our own family.” As
a working dramatist and director, George Wolfe—who, in the spirit of
pluralism, says he welcomes all kinds of theaters, ethnically specific and
otherwise—admits unease about the neatly color-coded cultural landscape
that Wilson conjures up. “I don’t live in the world of absolutes,” Wolfe says.
“I don’t think it’s a matter of a black theatre versus an American theatre, a
black theatre versus a white theatre. I think we need an American theatre
that is of, for, and by us—all of us.”

The Chitlin Circuit 147

 You may wonder, then, what happens to that self-divided creed of populist
modernism: the dream of an art that combines aesthetic vanguardism with
popular engagement, the elevated black theater for which Wilson seeks
patronage. “People are not busting their ass to go and see this stuff,” OyamO
says bluntly, “and I keep thinking, if this stuff is so significant, why can’t it
touch ordinary people?” There is reason to believe that such impatience is
beginning to spread. Indeed, maybe the most transgressive move for such
black theater would be to explore that sordid, sullying world of the truly
demotic. Ed Bullins, the doyen of black revolutionary theater, regales me
with stories he has heard about Chitlin Circuit entrepreneurs “rolling away
at night with suitcases of money,” about the shadowy realm of cash-only
transactions. But the challenge appeals to him, all the same.
So, brace yourself. The Ed Bullins to whom Wilson paid tribute—as one
whose dramatic art was hallowed with the blood of proud black warriors—
now tells me he has been thinking about entering the Chitlin Circuit himself.
Call it populist postmodernism. Somehow, he relishes the idea of a theater
that would be self-supporting, one that did not just glorify the masses but
actually appealed to them. Naturally, though, he would try to do it a little
better. “The idea is to upgrade the production a bit, but go after the same
market,” he says eagerly. Now, that is a radical thought.

148 Cultural Traditions, Cultural Memory, and Performance

 8

Audience and Africanisms

in August Wilson’s Dramaturgy
A Case Study

‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘
sandra g. shannon

In what is perhaps one of August Wilson’s earliest published interviews

following the sudden notoriety thrust upon him by the Broadway success of
Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, he told Kim Powers about his aspirations for his
next work, Joe Turner’s Come and Gone: “My idea is that somewhere, sometime
in the course of the play, the audience will discover these are African people.
They’re black Americans, they speak English, but their worldview is Afri-
can.”1 Although Wilson’s designs for what was shaping up to be the third
play in his proposed ten-play series seemed clear enough, this early articu-
lation of his dramatic agenda, posited in 1984, continues to be the source of
problematic issues for a specific segment of the American theatergoing pub-
lic. That is, many of them subscribe to the fantasy-driven and ridiculously
fallacious American melting pot theory still embraced by diehard conserva-
tives such as Robert Brustein.2 Often woefully naive and culturally unin-
formed, this group regards any effort on Wilson’s part to demonstrate that
“these are African people” as an attempt to promote separatism and to wage
a somewhat arcane and contradictory cultural war against a country into
which they have assimilated and prospered.
At issue then—as it has been for centuries—is an imperialist world view
that automatically relegates Africa to the margins in matters regarding
aesthetics while foregrounding Eurocentric ideals. An extension of this ten-
dency to privilege one culture over another is also prevalent among black
theater audiences, in general, and among August Wilson’s audiences, in
particular, most noticeably manifesting in the refusal or inability on the part
of spectators and critics alike, white or black, to recognize the African in
African American. Though often advanced in the guise of sophisticated
theater reviews or passed off as informed intellectual discourse, the tendency
to devalue another culture’s aesthetic principles while waving the American

149
flag and advocating Euro-American standards is a dangerous one, which
needs to be exposed for what it is. Nigerian playwright, professor, and critic
Wole Soyinka argues in his important work Myth, Literature, and the African
World, “When ideological relations begin to deny, both theoretically and in
action, the reality of a cultural entity which we define as the African world
[and] to sublimate its existence in theirs, we must begin to look seriously
into their political motivation.”3 In what is perhaps the most cogent recent
articulation of thisWesterntendencytonegateanddenigrateAfricancultural
ideologies, Benny Sato Ambush goes to the heart of the matter in his essay
“Culture Wars,” which was published in African American Review’s Winter
1998 special issue on black theater. He observes:
This living in at least two worlds while claiming an African-derived
identity which refuses to abandon itself by assimilation into mainstream
Euro-centric culture is befuddling for many whites who, because of the
privilege their white skin carries, have not had to negotiate such dualities.4
Adding to this, Brenda Gottschild argues, “We desperately need to cut
through the convoluted web of racism that denies acknowledgement of the
African part of the whole.”5 Building on Gottschild’s observation, this essay
will demonstrate the African presence in August Wilson’s plays.
A close examination of Wilson’s confident prediction that his audiences
“will discover these are African people”6 reveals his pervasive tendency to
privilege memory over history in his work and, by so doing, establish a closed
communication system within a group unified by “blood’s memory.” As
Pierre Nora notes in “Between Memory and History”:
It [memory] remains in permanent evolution, open to the dialectic of
remembering and forgetting, unconscious of its successive deformations,
vulnerable to manipulation and appropriation, susceptible to being long
dormant and periodically revived. . . . Memory, insofar as it is affective
and magical, only accommodates those facts that suit it. . . . Memory is
blind to all but the group it binds.7
Regarded as such, certain moments in African American history are filtered
through Wilson’s memory and recovered on stage through performance. The
spectator’s ability to acknowledge and identify with Wilson’s Africa through
performances that respond to memory rather than history depends heavily
upon how effective are the actors’ portrayals of “gestures and habits, in skills
passed down by unspoken traditions, in the body’s inherent self-knowledge,
in unstudied reflexes and ingrained memories.”8
In addition to those who view the African American as an exclusively
American product whose affinities with Africa are, for all intents and pur-
poses, irrelevant, there is another issue: certain critics “just don’t get it.” That
is, the inability (or unwillingness) to recognize the African memory in its
rhythms, rituals, and other signifiers, which are conveyed in the dramatic
texts as well as in the performances of Wilson’s work, seriously impedes the

150 Cultural Traditions, Cultural Memory, and Performance

critic’s ability to understand their full import. On one level, Wilson’s plays,
such as Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, The Piano Lesson, and, to some extent, Ma
Rainey’s Black Bottom, Fences, and Seven Guitars, provide enough narrative
structure and cross-cultural appeal to engage most audiences. However, on
another, the African subtexts and the use of memory in his plays more often
than not go unnoticed and are, perhaps, dismissed as directorial flourishes
rather than acknowledged as components integral to the play’s inherent
message. Journalist Bill Moyers, for example, challenged Wilson to bring
more into focus this blurry zone between his notion of an Africanist agenda
and what his audiences should infer from its implementation in select plays.
His pointed questions—“What happens when you get in touch with that
African sensibility?” and “What does it mean to go back to Africa?”9—
situate the concerns and misconceptions around how this aesthetic manifests
and operates in Wilson’s plays.
Getting in touch with an African sensibility is, Wilson believes, a crucial
first step that African American artists must take in order to reorder, decon-
struct, and make sense out of a world not of the African American’s making.
It entails the simultaneous acts of rejection and subversion of Western aes-
thetics by rhetorical and performative means in order to create space in this
new world—also known as America—to realize the African nexus of his
identity. Wilson likens this process to “[searching] for ways to reconnect, to
reassemble” (JT xi).10 Moreover, the concept of “getting in touch with an
African sensibility” suggests that this mental responsiveness toAfricaalready
exists within today’s African American audiences, yet, for many, this sensi-
bility lies dormant, existing onlyon asubconscious level,orisevensuppressed
by denial or ignorance of its current relevance. The job of Wilson as play-
wright, then, is to tease out this suppressed African consciousness. In his
dramatic texts, this process entails the manipulation of language to evoke
familiar symbols, scenarios, and potentially recognizable Africanisms for
contemporary readers. In performance, this process entails, for the spectator,
aural and visual stimuli for reconstructing Africa, such as utterance, ritual,
suggestive movement and gesture, and stage machinery.
Closely associated in meaning to Moyers’s question “What happens when
you get in touch with that African sensibility?” is the other question, which,
apparently, is the source of confusion for him and for others who “just don’t
get it”: “What does it mean to go back to Africa?” Although thetwoquestions
seem to express essentially identical concerns, the second invites a careful
scrutiny of the Africa that Wilson constructs on stage for the modern African
American audience, an Africa that is quite different from the Africa that
exists for them as a geographically and historically distant continent. The
former is a material presence; the latter is a spiritually embodied idea. Hence,
in order to follow Wilson’s agenda, it is necessary to situate his concept of
Africa within the rhetorical and spiritual contexts of his dramatic universe.
Wilson is the first to concede to the impracticalities associated with a too-
literal interpretation of his back-to-Africa agenda. He explains:

Audience and Africanisms in August Wilson’s Dramaturgy 151

 If you take these people [African Americans] back over to Africa, they’ll
walk around trying to figure out what the hell’s going on. There’s no way
that they can relate to that. But the sensibilities are African. They are
Africans who have been removed from Africa, and they are in America four
hundred years later. They’re still Africans.11
Contrary to those who would argue that African Americans do not have a
separate and distinct culture, Wilson argues in his plays that “Africanisms
did survive the Middle Passage.”12
In addition to introducing new African space to allow for an African
sensibility, Wilson also constructs a new African, who announces his or her
presence on stage in ways not possible in the traditional, mainstream sense
of the dramatic text. Frequently, this “African” is not immediately recogniz-
able to modern audiences, accustomed as they are to simplistic sound bites
and prepackaged images. The ability to recognize any of Wilson’s characters
as African is bound intimately with the acquisition of an African sensibility;
the spectator must, for example, suspend preconceived notions associated
with Western logic and accept an African world view. JohnConteh-Morgan’s
concept of “objective materialism” offers help in understanding such poten-
tially overwhelming experiences in the play:
Traditional African drama does not really depend on the outcome of a plot
action, neither is it dependent on character portrayal. Characters are iden-
tifiable visually. In this respect the important factor is . . . the sheer power
and expressiveness of the [performers’] stage presence and acts. . . . Mean-
ing is not prosaically represented in words alone but . . . finds “objective
materialization” in movement, gesture, and sound.13
What, then, is the profile of Wilson’s reconstructed New World African?
What does it mean to be African? And what is this reconfigured dramatic
space, which he calls Africa, like in performance? The answers to these key
questions form the basis for this study. Thus, attention must be paid to the
impact of these new constructs upon the modern audience, African American
or otherwise.
For August Wilson, discovering, claiming, and foregrounding his own
African identity fuels both a personal and professional odyssey. Due to child-
hood circumstances in his native Pittsburgh—which involved a wayward
German father, a strong-willed and industrious mother, a house full of
siblings, and limited financial resources—Wilson had no choice but to
fashion his identity from the culture surrounding him and to define his
manhood according to terms dictated by his fate. Pittsburgh’s Hill District
informed the playwright’s African American mother, Daisy Wilson, as did
her recollections of her southern past, reinforced by the sights, the sounds,
the smells, the language of her life. By extension, the sensibilities of this
predominantly black urban environment influenced Wilson. Wilson and
many of the people he knew and grew up with had grandparents or great-
grandparents from the South, and, in some instances, they were aware of

152 Cultural Traditions, Cultural Memory, and Performance

actual slave ancestors. Thus, for the young Wilson, who came of age in an era
preoccupied by the concepts of cultural nationalism espoused by Malcolm X
and Elijah Muhammad as well as by the Black Arts and Black Power move-
ments, Africa became his center of gravity and a symbol for his mother’s
dominant heritage, a heritage that he wholeheartedly embraced.
At any given performance of an August Wilson play, it has become com-
monplace to see a largely white, middle- to upper-class audience pack the
houses. For me, the question arises: Must white audiences—or Asian audi-
ences, or Latino audiences, or African audiences, for that matter—see, un-
derstand, and appreciate the same African contexts that Wilson creates? Is
their experience of a play such as Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, for example,
somehow lessened if, for whatever reason, they do not see what is so African
about Herald Loomis? Or, if they cannot relate to the African rhythms
resurrected in the Juba, do they miss the true meaning of the play? Also, do
they miss out on the full meaning of Seven Guitars because they see Hedley
in a strictly literal sense? I realize that implicit in my line of questioning here
is the simplistic notion that only African Americans can understand August
Wilson. However, the issue I raise is not one of audience exclusivity; instead,
it is one of the performance’s communicative ability. A more appropriate
question may be: How do Wilson’s plays and performances actualize the
African presence he seeks?
Joe Turner’s Come and Gone (set in 1911) and The Piano Lesson (set in 1936)
feature Wilson’s efforts “to achieve the preservation of black African identity
through theater performance in terms that are quite reminiscent of ritual
theater.”14 Wilson’s Africa also emerges in less conspicuous ways and to a
lesser degree in other plays, such as Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (set in 1927),
Seven Guitars (set in 1948), Fences (set in 1957), and Two Trains Running (set
in 1969). The remaining play in Wilson’s current repertoire—Jitney! (set in
1971)—noticeably lacks African signifiers both in its text and in its perfor-
mance. In fact, Wilson admits in a recent interview that when Jitney! was
conceived and written in 1979, he had not yet adopted an artistic agenda
that advanced an African presence:
I don’t think it’s [African sensibility] there. Here again, it’s eighteen years
ago. I’ve become more different. I became more conscious of what I was
doing and wanting to do—to the extent that I determine the way the
characters act and the way that they talk.15
It stands to reason, then, that Africa looms largest in Wilson’s plays that
are set in close temporal proximity to the slave and preslave historical eras;
the African presence assumes a more subtle tone in plays that are set closer
to the present. Hence, one may discern a correlation between the level of
difficulty Wilson’s audiences experience seeing, understanding, and appre-
ciating his renditions of Africa with his plays’ evolution from the Reconstruc-
tion era to the Harlem Renaissance and Great Depression to the Civil Rights
and Black Power years to the decade of racial integration and the Vietnam
War. Distanced by time, censored by racism, buttressed by an oral tradition,

Audience and Africanisms in August Wilson’s Dramaturgy 153

and muted byamnesia—selectiveorotherwise—thehistoricalpastofAfrican
Americans now largely resides in memory. That collective memory or
“blood’s memory,” has become for him a dramatic landscape, a site of recon-
struction, a space that allows him to redefine African Americans’ identities
through the reimagination of their history. In his ground-breaking theoret-
ical study, Scars of Conquest/Masks of Resistance: The Invention of Cultural Iden-
tities in African, African-American, and Caribbean Drama, Tejumola Olaniyan
defines this same space between memory and history by calling it “an em-
powering post-Afrocentric space, a space that calls to and radically revises
the colonialist, triumphalist narrative of European modernity.”16
The failure to comprehend Wilson’s Africanist agenda has manifested in
several forms, and one early indication may be traced to the lackluster recep-
tion that Joe Turner’s Come and Gone received during its Broadway run in
1988. Despite his confidence about the play’s potential to mirror the Afri-
canness in his characters, Joe Turner fared much worse on Broadway than have
other Wilson works. I have noted elsewhere that Broadway audiences were
not impressed. In fact, the play had a comparatively short season (27 Mar.–
26 June 1988) at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre. This lack of enthusiasm, I
contend, was due not so much to the absence of a celebrity among its cast (as
in Fences) or to the play’sheavy tragicweightbuttotheplay’sdifficultpremise.
Many audiences found Wilson’s psychic protagonist and mystical flourishes
over their heads and left the theater more confused than enlightened.17
What was it that spelled doom for Wilson’s second play to reach Broadway
in four years? In 1984, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom had been an unequivocal
hit. However, this time, Wilson’s work was greeted by a tougher audience—
one apparently not impressed by spending an evening at thetheaterperplexed
about the playwright’s lessons on being Africans in America. Lloyd Richards,
who directed Joe Turner, the epic drama of post-Reconstruction African
Americans searching for their personal and collective identities while held
up at a boardinghouse in Pittsburgh, warded off speculations that the play
floundered because its cast did not include a star. He explained in a New York
Times interview that confusion about Joe Turner was due to “the depth and
difficulty of the play” and admitted that it “was a much more mystical play
than Fences, a much more challenging play. . . . It took you deeply into a
place where you had never been before. It made you work, and there are
people who go to the theater who don’t like to work.”18
One might argue that the short life of Joe Turner on Broadway was a
commentary on August Wilson’s creation of a “closed” performance. That
is, Joe Turner “anticipate[d] a very precise receiver and demand[ed] well-
defined types of ‘competence’ (encyclopedic, ideological, etc.) for their ‘cor-
rect’ reception.”19 In this sense, the relatively short run of the play was
inevitable, given the history of Broadway audiences’ lukewarm reception of
African-based dramas about black life. But also, I contend, the play did not
fare well because the mainstream audience was reluctant to leave its estab-
lished comfort zone of cultural awareness to examine life—even temporar-
ily—from another’s perspective. In order “to do justice to the African pres-

154 Cultural Traditions, Cultural Memory, and Performance

ence,” Brenda Gottschild favors such a reversal in the dominant point of
view. She conjectures, “What if we were to stand on our heads and assume
that our American culture is African-rooted, so that the European elements
could be regarded from an Africanist perspective?” She sees this revisionist
approach of viewing “European elements . . . from an Africanistperspective”
particularly useful in communicating the sometimes unconscious exercises
in cultural imperialism.20
Joe Turner’s Come and Gone serves as a paradigm, illuminating the prob-
lem between author and critics. Despite Wilson’s admission that Joe Turner
is his favorite play, it was reviewed harshly by critics who just did not get
it—the playwright’s infusion of Africanisms, that is. Herald Loomis, the
darkly clad, brooding tenant at Seth and Bertha Holly’s Pittsburgh board-
inghouse, bears the brunt of this negative criticism. Those theater critics
who detest his character argue that Loomis’s “violent rebirth [does not
make] dramatic sense,” that his religious vision is “so obliquely written, it
seems more like an LSD flashback,” that his character is “closed mouthed
and near crazy,” that “the playwright—or Jesus—had struck him with a
bolt of lightning,” and that “we’re left grappling for symbolic explanations
and metaphysical justification for his behavior, the knife he wields, and the
blood he sheds.”21 This catalog of complaints about Charles Dutton’s (Yale
Repertory Theatre) and Delroy Lindo’s (Broadway) portrayals of Loomis re-
veals how utterly confounded and ill-equipped these critics were to make
sense of the play. Director Lloyd Richards’s attempts to convey Wilson’s
stage note that Loomis is “a man driven not by hellhounds that seemingly
bay at his heels, but by his search for a world that speaks to something
about himself” were lost on these critics.22 In fact, Richards saw early on
that Loomis would pose problems for audiences and was relatively success-
ful during the play’s journey from Yale to Broadway in convincing Wilson
to alter the play in order to clarify the character’s uncertain motivation and
open-ended fate.23
The denunciations of Loomis’s character are commonplace among those
whose sensibilities remain blind to Wilson’s Africanistagenda.Nevertheless,
as one professor of African literature notes, “Afro-American mythology is not
‘strange,’ but a common, natural part of life.”24 Viewed according to certain
principles of African ritual performance, Dutton and Lindo situate their
characters outside the logic of Western thought and within the realm of
African sensibility, where “symbolic movements and actions, stylized ges-
tures, patterned dances, and even speech which is molded into a variety of
fixed forms, formulaic expressions, and tropes” are expected to be understood
as means of communication.25 Loomis’s morbid attire, sullen countenance,
ominous narratives of archetypal dimension, and shocking scenes of self-
scarification allow each particularity to enter his realm. Thus, withoutknowl-
edge of African rituals, superstition, religion, or music, which continue to
inform Africans in America, audiences are forced to assess Wilson’s work
using awkward yardsticks that contain little, if any, relevance to Wilson’s
intentions.

Audience and Africanisms in August Wilson’s Dramaturgy 155

 Understanding the actions, gestures, and motivations of Herald Loomis is
the toughest challenge of any Joe Turner audience. To regard the ominous
intruder as an embodiment of Africa requires careful attention to his role in
the play. Loomis’s prevailing sense of disorientation underscores the degree
of devastation he has suffered in the wake of an imposed seven-year work
detail, which separated him from his family and, by extension, from his
cultural base. When viewed through the lens of an Africansensibility,Loomis
personifies the aching consciousness of millions of slaves, who were uprooted
from their homelands, forced into subjugation, eventually emancipated, and
ultimately set out on the road to fend for themselves. He also mirrors the
suppressed anxieties of contemporary African Americans, who are haunted
by this indelible past. However, despite these African-based perspectives,
what has prevented modern audiencesandcriticsalikefromregardingLoomis
as the conscience of Africa are numerous signals that, in their eyes—and
according to Western logic—may be construed as evidence of possible de-
rangement rather than as clues to his symbolic importance. To audiences
who experience the play but lack African sensibility or cultural sensitivity to
Wilson’s agenda, Loomis’s nightmares, convulsions, fits of anger, shocking
displays of blasphemy, haunting attire, and foreboding appearance impede
their understanding of Wilson’s loftier regard for his dignity as an African.
Still, the majority of the negative assessments that have been compiled by
theater critics reveals their ignorance of Africanisms and cultural prejudice
and confirms a degree of laziness and shortsightedness regarding cultural
differences.
Not only have Herald Loomis’s Africanist meanings easily gone unnoted
or misconstrued in Joe Turner, but other manifestations of this aesthetic have
the potential to remain obscure to those insensitive to the culture revealed
in the performance text. These include, for example, the tenants dancing the
African-based Juba; the conjure man, Bynum, killing pigeons in Seth’s
garden and relating the tale of Shiny Man; Miss Mabel’s ghost actually
appearing before the child Reuben; and Loomis claiming to experience ata-
vistic visions of the Middle Passage and, ultimately, inflicting a wound upon
his body. Each of these episodes is steeped in African ritual and lore as well
as in symbolic aspects of African Americans’ slave past, and, taken together,
they underscore how the play can operate as a closed performance.
I was witness to intense reactions to one of August Wilson’s closed per-
formances when he visited Howard University in September 1995 to partic-
ipate in an open forum at the Ira Aldridge Theater. During the question-
and-answer session, a white woman rose from the predominantly African
American audience and admitted that she was unable to observe anything
African about the characters in a production of Joe Turner’s Come and Gone,
which she had recently seen, and asked that the playwright expand upon this
aspect of the play’s premise. Immediately, her question transformed the
dynamics of the Howard University audience from collegial and respectful
to belligerent and defensive. Before Wilson could address her question,
several vocal responses to her statements erupted from the crowd, as if, by

156 Cultural Traditions, Cultural Memory, and Performance

admitting her difficulties, she had somehowinsultedthisparticularaudience,
who evidently had no problems recognizing and accepting the likes of Herald
Loomis, Bynum Walker, and Martha Pentacost as Africans. Once the audi-
ence had recovered from the initial impact of this woman’s query, Wilson
responded—not to why she had difficulties seeing Africa but to what, ac-
cording to his agenda, the play should have revealed to her. In terms quite
similar to those he expressed in the interview with Moyers, Wilsonexplained:
We are Africans who have been in America since the seventeenth century.
We are Americans. But first of all, we are Africans. . . . We have different
philosophical ideas and attitudes, different values, different ideas about
style and linguistics, different aesthetics.26
I cannot recall ever having witnessed a writer, a playwright, a musician, or
a dancer being placed in the awkward position of having to explain why a
particular member of an audience did not get their meaning. Neither can I
recall any artist directly responding to such an honest though artistically
intrusive query. Frankly, had Wilson answered this woman’s question as
forthrightly as she had posed it, he would have likely offended her. In effect,
what she wanted to know was how could a white woman sit through a
theatrical performance of Joe Turner, sharing the same space as African Amer-
ican spectators, and totally miss that the people on stage were Africans?What
she revealed instead was that she—like other spectators of various races and
cultural backgrounds who share her struggle—had not grasped the mani-
festations of the Africa that Wilson’s plays embrace in performance. These
Africanisms do not announce their presence with drum beats, colorful cos-
tumes, or expressive dances. Neither are they conveyed in native African
tongues. Hence, recognition is not instantaneous or automatictoallmembers
of the audience.
Had Wilson chosen to respond to the woman more directly, his answer
might have been, “You don’t get it because the play was not intended for
you” or “You don’t get it because you lack the necessary African sensibility.”
As if to avert such a scenario, Wilson simply repeated his assertion that these
characters were undeniably African and left her to conjecture her own mean-
ing from this.
The imaginary African masks that the Charles family dons in Wilson’s The
Piano Lesson (1988) are less implicit and thus less atavistic than those at-
tempted in Joe Turner’s Come and Gone. With the notable exception of New
Republic critic Robert Brustein—whose well-known and widely proclaimed
rejection of Africanist ideologies prompted him to denounce the play as “the
most poorly composed of Wilson’s four produced works”27—critics and
audiences sensitive to the implications of the play, for the most part, do get
it. That they comprehend the ties that bind African Americans living in
1936 Pittsburgh with their slaveancestorsisduelargelytotheclearlydidactic
message of the play’s principal symbolic image: a piano, more than a century
old, carved with “African” symbols. Wilson is also more effective in con-
vincing his audiences that the Depression-era Charles family, which has put

Audience and Africanisms in August Wilson’s Dramaturgy 157

its roots in Pittsburgh, is actually composed of Africans living in America.
Wilson clarifies the ambiguities that he leaves open in Joe Turner. In The Piano
Lesson, he relies upon the speeches of a single character, Doaker Charles, to
reveal the crucial narrative of the family’s history, which has remained locked
in the piano. Conversations dominated by the sage uncle of the family create
clear connections between Africa then and Pittsburgh now as he carefully
delineates the experiences of his parents and grandparents: “See, now . . . to
understand why we say that . . . to understand about that piano . . . you got
to go back to slavery time. See, our family was owned by a fellow named
Robert Sutter” (PL 42). As self-appointed griot, he keeps Africa ever in his
family’s psyche as well as in the consciousness of the play’s audience.
A significant number of critics charge that The Piano Lesson is overwritten,
devoid of action, repetitious, chatty, excessive in characterization,and(before
Lloyd Richards was able to convince Wilson to add an extra scene to answer
the unresolved question of the piano’s final owner) lacked a resolution.28 In
addition, more than a few regard the supernatural intrusion of the ghost of
Robert Sutter as an artificial and forced device.29 On stage, this spirit an-
nounces its presence through the tinkling of the piano’s ivory keys, the
rustling of Berniece’s curtains, and the frightful stares and screams of those
who come upon it. Its presence is also confirmed in a physically exaggerated
wrestling match, during which it proves a fitting rival for the frantically
swinging, punching, tumbling Boy Willie. Thus, for many, Wilson’s Africa
hinges more upon the piano’s profound nonverbal visual message while the
supernatural addition of a ghost is relegated to the category of special effects.
Yet, just as the Charles family cannot so easily extract Sutter from the
piano, Sutter’s place in the Africa that Wilson reconstructs in The Piano Lesson
must be contended with as well. Although paradoxical in nature, Sutter, the
white relative of slave owners who bartered away Berniece’s and Boy Willie’s
ancestors for a piano, is an inextricable part of the Charles family’s Africanist
past. As such, he is also part of the slave-owning colonialism in Africanist
memory. Despite the baggage his ghost brings to the 1936 setting, he
remains, until exorcised, a part of the African portrait that Wilson summons
to the stage and recreates. Like the painful memories that plague Herald
Loomis, Sutter’s presence must be acknowledged before it can be understood
and overcome.
For audiences of Seven Guitars, another one of Wilson’sclosedperformances,
the ability to recognize Africa and Africans is far from unanimous. The play
has been written off as a disappointing hybrid offspring of Wilson’s previous
plays. From Ma Rainey, it inherits the ambitious though tragic blues musi-
cian; from Joe Turner, Two Trains Running, and Fences, it inherits the offbeat
mystic; and from The Piano Lesson, it inherits a credible manifestation of the
spiritual world. For example, in Seven Guitars, Hedley, the tubercular Ja-
maican sandwich vendor, perplexes New York Times reviewer Vincent Canby
to the extent that he calls him the “most troublesome” aspect of the play’s
Broadway performance.30 Hedley does not fit into a conventional scheme of

158 Cultural Traditions, Cultural Memory, and Performance

Western drama. The character is, therefore, “unimportant”anddeservessome
neatly summarized and witty dismissal by critics—in this case the appella-
tion “idiot savant.”31
But, despite the dismay of those who question Hedley’s relevance to Seven
Guitars, Wilson has remained faithful to his initial conception of this char-
acter as a modern-day reflection of Africa. Prior to the start of rehearsals at
the Goodman Theatre late in 1994, he told interviewer Tom Creamer:
Specifically, the character Hedley may carry inside him the largest African
response to the world with his concept of the messiah, with theunderstand-
ing that there’s a necessity for the messiah. In that sense he may be the one
who carriesthepoliticalawarenessthatblacksarenotfreeandareoppressed.
. . . Hedley may be the most African of the characters.32
Wilson’s views of Hedley as “most African” are antithetical to those who
deem him dramatically unworthy and point to the void between what the
playwright intends and what certain audiences simply fail to understand.
On stage, Hedley’s severelystoopedposture,hislaboredwalking,andgraying
hair visibly suggest a man in the twilight of his life, a man whose years have
revealed for him many of life’s secrets, which he now feels compelled to
impart. His desires to father a male child with the sensuous southerner and
to get money from the self-taught trumpeter, Buddy Bolden, to build a
plantation further underscore Africanist inclinations. However, despite this
deceptively uncomplicated viewofHedley, his character,likethoseofGabriel
(Fences) and Hambone (Two Trains Running), requires more sophisticated
understanding from the “culturally handicapped” audience in order for the
African stories to have any serious impact. While the effects of alcohol,
dementia, and various other mental impairments understandably lessen the
credibility of such characters, Wilson insists that any honest reflection of
African American culture must include the stories of these marginalized
individuals who, he argues, impart the most useful knowledge of African
cosmology, memory, and continuity. As such, Hedley is an example of an
Africanism in its most basic, most Wilsonian form.
Although the black and white high school students who shared the audi-
ence with me at the spring 1997 Center Stage production of Seven Guitars
found much to keep their attention for the three-hour performance, many
looked dazed as they entered the lobby following the final curtain. A few
broke the silence by recalling instances of humor as if to suppress thoughts
of the gruesome, bloody images of Hedley slashing the throat of a neighbor’s
rooster followed soon by a similar bloodletting gesture inflicted upon Floyd
Barton. They also chose to keep to themselves their immediate thoughts
about a man obsessed with receiving money from a long-dead musician to
buy a mythical plantation so that “the white man not going to tell me what
to do no more” (SG 24). The entire experience prompted me to ask, “What
is a teenager in 1997 (or any audience member, for that matter) to make of
these images?” What level of knowledge do we need in order to comprehend

Audience and Africanisms in August Wilson’s Dramaturgy 159

such a profound performance? As I watched this group exit the theater, I was
convinced that Seven Guitars had seriously shaken them. However,nonespoke
of Hedley or of Africa in their bewilderment.
The confused teenagers seemed to lack both the language and the cultural
sensitivity needed to articulate clearly an understanding of what they had
just experienced. This, of course, is saddening and problematic, for itstrongly
suggests that primary and secondary educational institutions are grooming
another generation of callous, apathetic, and culturally ignorant critics and
adult theatergoers to take the place of those now thriving in our adult
populations. How are plays of the black experience (or any other experience
other than white American) taught in these classrooms? Clearly, without
knowledge of African-based rituals and without awareness of the nuances of
African American history and culture, these youths—soon to become
adults—will remain stunned, speechless, and unable to make sense out of
much of what they see.
Perhaps because the symbolic backdrop of Africa lies so much in the
distance in Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, L. Kenneth Richardson (who directed
the Center Stage production of Ma Rainey during the fall 1990 season) chose
to compensate for this absence in Wilson’s 1930s play by adding an African
mime dancer. Sensing that Wilson’s play had somehow reneged on hisagenda
by not endowing a more imposing African presence, the director apparently
took it upon himself to add the Africanist dimension. At select moments
during the course of the more than three-hour performance, an embodiment
of African consciousness appears on stage, gesticulating half in the shadows
to ensure that the image of Africa remains present. Yet, much to the chagrin
of the capacity audience on the night I attended, this “tinkering,” as it has
been called,33 was overkill. Washington Times critic Hap Erstein concurred:
“It [the performance] certainly doesn’t need an added symbolic characterthat
Mr. Richardson calls Spirit Dancer, a high-stepping, tribal-minstrel appa-
rition to pop out on occasion and accentuate the obvious with his mute echoes
of the action.”34 Interestingly, while Erstein’s review of the play may have
mirrored some of the audience’s sentiments, his argument is significantly
weakened by his failure to stipulate his meaning of “obvious” within the
context of this performance. Moreover, his reasoning does not extend to the
next logical step: a clear explanation of what the African dancer does convey.
As is often the tendency of culturally uninformed critics, words can become
smoke and mirrors, behind which there is frequently little substance.
Despite popular rejection of this appended device, I believe that theAfrican
embellishments made by director Richardson were in accord with August
Wilson’s Africanist agenda. Richardson’s idea was to bridge the gaps he
anticipated in the largely white audiences’ ability to understand Wilson’s
African undertones. What the African mime dancer offered the Center Stage
audience was an invitation to view the performance they had just seen within
an African context informed by an African sensibility. From this site, the
motivations, actions, and eventual fates of the characters took on more cul-
turally specific meanings. Although silent, the dancer, who was garbed in

160 Cultural Traditions, Cultural Memory, and Performance

African headdress, mask, and beads, communicated with his body that Ma,
her band, and her two associates occupy the same space as their ancestors;
moreover, the dancer drew attention to the fact that the characters should
call upon their ancestors as they try to find their way in the racist America of
the late 1920s. As a result of their refusal to set aside Western logic, the
audience and critics, once again, opted to reject and dismiss as flawed this
Africanist symbol.
For the most part, observing the characters of Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom as
Africans seems to be less important for Wilson in this play, which hinges
upon a black man’s more immediate concerns for survival in the racist
recording industry of the late 1920s. Wilson must have realized that a too-
aggressive demonstration of an African presence could overshadow other,
equally pressing issues, including survival in a more modern environment.
Furthermore, it stands to reason that, as his repertoire of plays moves chron-
ologically toward the 1990s, Africa’s presence must correspondingly assume
more subtle forms. More important than establishing an African context in
Ma Rainey is an emphasis upon the band’s current sorry predicament, upon
Ma’s refusal to become a victim, and upon Levee’s deferred dream. One might
argue that getting to the root of each of these concerns involves going back
to their African connections, but this is not an immediate concern for spec-
tators, whose attention is focused upon the surface conflicts of the play. While
Africa resonates in the persons of Herald Loomis and Bynum Walker in Joe
Turner and in the etched-upon piano in The Piano Lesson, in Ma Rainey’s Black
Bottom, African sensibility becomes the subject of a built-in counternarrative,
at the center of which Wilson places Toledo, the philosopher-pianist and
eventual victim of homicide.
In Toledo, August Wilson creates a character who possesses exceptional
potential to effect positive change among his people, yet he is never really
able to rise to the occasion. This reflects the tradition of the revolutionary
antihero popularized in Amiri Baraka’s characters Walker Vessels (The Slave,
1964) and Clay (The Dutchman 1964). Toledo is apparently the only literate
and educated band member, yet he focuses his attention upon belittling
Levee’s intellect and pontificating pseudointellectual rhetoric about African
sensibility. When asked for marijuana, for example, he uses the occasion to
ostentatiously display his grasp of African concepts: “That’s what you call an
African conceptualization. That’s when you name the gods and call on the
ancestors to achieve whatever your desires are” (MR 32). At this moment in
the play, Toledo’s wisdom is not received well by the group, which deems it
to be irrelevant to their present circumstances.
As antihero, Toledo forms a counternarrative, which underscores a mis-
guided African sensibility. His nonwarriorlike demeanor and his seemingly
pretentious African idealism place him in opposition to Wilson’s pronounce-
ment that these characters are African. Toledo fails to use his knowledge of
Africa to assist his comrades in transcending their dead-end conditions;
instead, he flaunts it before them as evidence of his superior intelligence.
Understood in these terms, his death becomes the supreme payment he must

Audience and Africanisms in August Wilson’s Dramaturgy 161

render to appease the gods, for he has failed them. Outside of this African-
based logic, Toledo’s death may be perceived as the last link in a causal chain
of major disappointing events, which frequently culminates in black-on-
black violence. His death comes at the hands of Levee, an individual who has
witnessed his mother’s rape and his father’s murder and who has been duped
out of his song lyrics—all acts perpetrated by white men. But, rather than
focus his rage on the real oppressor, Levee makes Toledo his target.
Africa also finds indirect or built-in expression in the music of Ma Rainey’s
Black Bottom. The actors of the Center Stage production—coached by com-
poser Olu Dara to “become” musicians for this performance—negotiatetheir
own musical tunes during the mock rehearsalsessionstheyholdwhilewaiting
for Ma. In addition to their blues tunes, distinctly African sounds permeate
the production to convey the potentially explosive emotional undercurrents
of the male band members’ separate and collective fates. In a combined
mixture of rhythmical blues guitars, trumpets, and flutes, Dara attempted
to infuse the play with Africa’s presence by “[underscoring] various narrative
passages, including a deft blues tune that accompanies August Wilson’s text,
a ballad Rainey sings to her tired, hurting feet.”35 Taking his cues from his
“cultural ancestors in Africa and Mississippi,”36 Dara conjured up a musical
recipe for Ma Rainey made up of ingredients from his own cultural past. In
addition, Dwight Andrews, Wilson’s principal musician, whose long-time
role has been to select and fine-tune the musical accompaniments for the
plays, also locates Africa in the music by looking inward for the necessary
inspiration. He stresses “how people hear” in determining the most appro-
priate music for the contemporary audience. That is, he sees as his mission
not merely trying to create what Ma may have sounded like in the 1920s but
determining how to modify her music to permit the modern audience an
opportunity to go from patting their feet to comprehending the profound
narratives of these characters’ lives.37
A restaurant in Pittsburgh in 1969 is perhaps one of the least likely settings
to introduce African-inspired characters. On the surface, Wilson’sTwoTrains
Running appears to be the farthest removed from Africa, yet, just as in Joe
Turner’s Come and Gone, The Piano Lesson, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, and Seven
Guitars, Wilson tries to convince audiences that, in this play, too, “African-
isms did survive the Middle Passage.”38 The play presents a close look into
the lives of black people who come regularly to commune about their despair
in a Pittsburgh restaurant slated for demolition. The characters are a diverse
group, and several story lines compete for emphasis, ranging from the battle
of the restaurant owner to get a fair price from the city for his business to a
fragile yet poignant romance between an ex-convict, Sterling, and the res-
taurant waitress, Risa.
Because Two Trains Running is the most historically distant from Africa to
date, Wilson’s toughest challenge is evoking a sense of an African presence
in modern audiences. Previous experience seems to have taught him that the
African connection must be subtly conveyed. No doubt in order to elicit the
attention of the 1990s audience, which, I contend, has become somewhat

162 Cultural Traditions, Cultural Memory, and Performance

numbed by the impact of special effects offered by electronic media, Wilson,
in response, sought to modify his presentation of African sensibilities. As a
result, the most prominent image of Africa in Two Trains Running is a 322-
year-old woman, who never appears on stage. The Africanist embodiment is
unmistakably signified in Methuselah-like Aunt Ester, the neighborhood
faith healer and confidante. While her age is the historical equivalent of the
number of years Africans have been in America, her character, like memory,
defies exactness and, in fact, encourages belief in otherworldliness. Moreover,
since she is never present on stage, Aunt Ester embodies the collisions of
history and memory. Her looming presence in the minds of the characters
strongly suggests that she is a force with which Memphis Lee’s clients must
reckon. Her absence from the stage facilitates her role as the distant voice of
Africa, but her spiritual presence influences the behaviors on stage. She must
be sought after to give counsel and solace and her patrons must act on the
faith she supplies rather than on the logic of Western rationalism. We realize
that she has absorbed centuries of cultural knowledge and strength, which
she imparts on a pay-as-you-go basis. Although Ester never appears on stage,
the idea of her presence is highly significant to Wilson’s neo-Africanist
agenda. According to Wilson, “we have [in Aunt Ester] a tradition to re-
member and fall back on.”39 Her ubiquitous presence in the minds and
conversations of the characters is very much analogous to the modern and
practical role that Wilson wills between Africa and his contemporary African
American audience. Like the image of Africa, she need not surface as a literal
or visible presence in the play in order to affect the well-being of her followers
in Memphis Lee’s Home-Style Restaurant. Instead, though absent, she raises
the consciousness of the characters and the audience in subtle but profound
ways. She is the link, through thought and memory, to ancestral roots. She
is kept alive in the minds and imaginations of the characters and the audience,
and as long as they believe she can be of service to them, the African presence
hovers over us all.
Such is the ideal African world view that Wilson sketches in Two Trains
Running, yet as in each of the previous plays discussed, the ideal does not
always coincide with the real. When viewed through the lens of an Africanist
aesthetic, what is so often classified by certain critics as “muddled” and “out
of control,” becomes significant in Two Trains Running. If, for example, one
considers Brenda Gottschild’s assertion that “African-based cultural forms
and practices in the Americas . . . have signposts that differentiatethemfrom
European-based forms and practices,”40 we will have a more solid basis for
critiquing African-based works, such as those of August Wilson. When, for
example, we observe Aunt Ester from a spiritual rather than material per-
spective, we enter the African cosmology that Wilson intends. What appears
as “muddle” is redefined as ritual; what is taken for “out of control” is
reinterpreted as Africanist expressivity;whatisabsentfromthestagebecomes
present in the body; and what is seen as devoid of plot will be reconsidered
as the flexibility of the griot, the African storyteller roots. Similar enlight-
enment on differences too automatically perceived as weaknesses in Two

Audience and Africanisms in August Wilson’s Dramaturgy 163

Trains may result upon acknowledging Gottschild’s well-informed descrip-
tion of what shapes African performance. She notes:
Anotherexample [of opposing AfricanandEuropeanelementsinAmerican
culture] lies in African “dilemma” tales that illustrate a principle of con-
trariety, open-endedness, or living with opposition, without the necessity
of resolution or closure. These are stories that end with a question or call
for a discussion, rather than a solution.41
Mainstream critics who adhere to single standards of excellence need to
acknowledge the cultural signatures of other peoples and values. On those
who continue to question how much of this is African and how much is loss
of control, Paul Carter Harrison pins the label “sociologicalexplication[s],”42
and he attributes such misunderstanding to widespread indoctrination by
contemporary modes of thought:
Lost, for example, is the aesthetic appreciation of discontinuity—rather
than linear continuity—as a rhythmic device in the expressive modes of
African socialization, including the polymorphic orchestration of off-
beats, counter beats, and breaks in music and storytelling, and the visual
tension of asymmetrical patterns woven in West African Kente cloth and
the African-American quilts of the rural south.43
What several of the play’s critics claim to be plotless, motiveless, snail-paced
performances, Harrison redefines as “a polymorphic orchestration.” That is,
the unpredictable rhythms and patterns throughout Two Trains correspond
to the discordant nature that is so prevalent in an African aesthetic.
Fences (set in 1957) features muted African presence different from any
others discussed here. As may be deduced by the play’s Pulitzer Prize–
winning status and the widespread popularity of the domestic drama in both
theaters and anthologies, audiences as well as readers connect with the char-
acters and see themselves in the process. Moreover, the numerous universal
emotions evoked in Fences make it a play that crosses boundaries of time, age,
race, gender, and culture. The major story line does not limit itself to a
symbolic African landscape. Instead, it involves a garbage collector’s war
waged against himself, his coworkers, and his family for missing his dream
of playing major league baseball.
The play, however, reveals an African presence in basicalbeitsubtlefashion.
Troy Maxson’s war-injured brother, Gabriel, whose mental condition leads
Gabriel to believe that he is Archangel Gabriel and that he sees Saint Peter
on a regular basis, is the conduit through which Wilson transmits an African
sensibility in Fences. It is not coincidental that Gabriel is both mentally
challenged and spiritually gifted, as he joins a number of similar Wilsonian
characters whose sensitivity exceeds those around them, even if their mental
capabilities do not. As Gabriel attempts to blow his trumpet at the end of
the play to signal to Saint Peter to open the Pearly Gates for his brother, he
introduces another dimension of Fences heretofore unseen; he enters a spiritual

164 Cultural Traditions, Cultural Memory, and Performance

realm believed to be inhabited by his African ancestors, where the sound of
his horn is, in fact, quite audible. Here again, Wilson subverts Western logic
and interrupts the play’s naturalistic premise by stepping outside of the
borders defined by Eurocentric conventions.
Despite the best Africanist defense, however, this ending seemed to be an
awkward attachment for Broadway producer Carol Shorenstein, who threat-
ened to fire Lloyd Richards if he did not clip Gabriel’s final gestures. She
failed to see the significance of Gabriel’s ending and feared it would cause
doom for Fences in New York. Her decision went beyond personal taste; her
reservations also mirrored those of regional theater audiences, which could
not decipher Gabriel’s “slow strange dance” (F 101), his awkward attempt
to sing, and his failed efforts to blow his horn for Saint Peter. After months
of haggling among Wilson, Richards, and Shorenstein, the three finallymade
no changes to the script. As a result, Wilson’s agenda remained intact,despite
efforts by those unfamiliar with his objectives.
The gaps that exist between Wilson’s presentation of Africa on stage—in
performance and in dialogue—and his audiences’ ability to comprehend its
depths are not without reason. Filling in these gaps, however,requireshonest,
conscientious, and willful work on the part of critics and audiences (and
producers). Given the playwright’s personal quest to negotiate his own
African-German heritage, the problematic presence of Africa in his work
parallels his maturing awareness of the importance of Africa in claiming his
cultural background. Many of Wilson’s white critics have been less than kind
in their dissecting analyses of such devices, however, revealing evidence of a
disturbing lack of cultural sensitivity exacerbated by a refusal to consider
any other standards of excellence than their own. We must move beyond
one-dimensional critiques, which fail to acknowledge cultural diversity and
the plethora of cultural contributions.
August Wilson realizes a crucial and revolutionary role for Africa in his
works. No longer can the portrayal of negative stereotypes, such as those that
plague Ma Rainey’s Levee (“You don’t see me running around in no jungle
with no bone between my nose” [32]) or Joe Turner’s Seth (“that heebie-jeebie
stuff” [2]), define Africa for contemporary audiences. In order to advance
beyond this, we must recognize what Wole Soyinka refers to as “a prescriptive
validation of African self-apprehension,” what Paul Carter Harrison refers to
as the “African continuum,” what Tejumola Olaniyan refers to as “empow-
ering post-Afrocentric space,”whatBrendaGottschildreferstoas“revisionist
thinking,”44 and what August Wilson consistently refers to as “blood’smem-
ory.” The stage, as it has done historically, presents enormous opportunity
to effect change, and Wilson is in the forefront of playwrights who are
experimenting with performancetechniquestousherinanewactivist-artistic
era. In the initially unexplained convulsions of Herald Loomis, in the lively
Juba dance of his fellow tenants, in the bloodletting and chanting rituals of
Bynum and Hedley, and in the sage advice of the 322-year-old Aunt Ester,
Africa is summoned on stage.

Audience and Africanisms in August Wilson’s Dramaturgy 165

 notes

1. Kim Powers, “An Interview with August Wilson,” Theater 16 (1984): 53.
2. Robert Brustein has been August Wilson’s long-time adversary, harshly crit-
icizing the playwright as well as the former dean of the Yale School of Drama and
Wilson’s former director, Lloyd Richards, for using the Yale Repertory Theatre as a
steppingstone for Wilson’s plays before they proceeded to Broadway. Brustein is
director of the American Repertory Theater at the Loeb Drama Center, professor of
English at Harvard, and drama critic for the New Republic.
3. Wole Soyinka, Myth, Literature, and the African World (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1976), xi.
4. Benny Sato Ambush, “Culture Wars,” African American Review 31 (1998): 582.
5. Brenda Gottschild, Digging the Africanist Presence in AmericanPerformance(West-
port, Conn.: Greenwood, 1996), 3.
6. Powers 53.
7. Pierre Nora, “Between Memory and History,” in History and Memory in African
American Culture ed. Geneviève Fabre and Robert O’Meally (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1994), 285–286.
8. Nora 289.
9. Bill Moyers, A World of Ideas (New York: Doubleday, 1989), 172–174.
10. Following is the key to the list of play abbreviations used in this chapter:
F Fences
JT Joe Turner’s Come and Gone
JY Jitney!
MR Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom
PL The Piano Lesson
SG Seven Guitars
TT Two Trains Running
11. Quoted in Moyers 172.
12. James V. Hatch, review of Digging the Africanist Presence in American Perfor-
mance, by Brenda Gottschild, in African American Review 3 (Fall 1997): 540.
13. John Conteh-Morgan, “African Traditional Drama and Issues in Theater
Performance Criticism,” Comparative Drama 28 (1994): 12.
14. Amadou Bissiri, “Aspects of Africanness in August Wilson’s Drama:Reading
The Piano Lesson through Wole Soyinka’s Drama,” African American Review30 (1996):
111.
15. August Wilson, interview by author, tape recording, Baltimore, 25 Apr.
1996.
16. Tejumola Olaniyan, Scars of Conquest/Masks of Resistance: The Invention of Cul-
tural Identities in African, African American, and Caribbean Drama (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1995), 139.
17. Sandra G. Shannon, The Dramatic Vision of August Wilson (Washington, D.C.:
Howard University Press, 1995), 133.
18. Mervyn Rothstein, “Round Five for the Theatrical Heavyweight,” New York
Times (15 Apr. 1990): H8.
19. Marco De Marinis, “Dramaturgy of the Spectator,” Drama Review 31 (1987):
103.
20. Gottschild 6.
21. This series of exaggerated and off-baseassessmentsofHeraldLoomis’sphysical

166 Cultural Traditions, Cultural Memory, and Performance

bout with the demons of his past come from the following reviews: David Richards,
“The Tortured Spirit of ‘Joe Turner,’ ” Washington Post (9 Oct. 1987): B1, B12; David
Stearn, “ ‘Turner’ Comes to a Near Halt,” USA Today (29 Mar. 1988): 4D; and M. A.
Scherer, “ ‘Turner’ Never Comes at All,” Evening Capital (13 Oct. 1987): B10.
22. JT 14
23. DuringJoe Turner’s rehearsal for the 1986 production at Yale, Wilson, Rich-
ards, and several observers noted that the script ended with a lingering question as
to whether Herald Loomis “finds his song.” What audiences needed, according to
Richards, was a more emotionally rewarding catharsis afterLoomis’sfrustratedsearch
for his wife for much of the play. Yet it was not until Wilson sat through several
intensive rehearsals of the play that he discovered a solution for Loomis’s unsatisfying
depiction: “I came up with the idea of ending the first act with him on the floor
unable to stand up. When he stands at the end, you can read that as him finding his
song.” For more on the process of revising Joe Turner, see Tom Killens, “BlackTheater
Triumphant: A Dynamic Duo from the Yale Repertory,” The World and I (Dec.
1987), 236–239.
24. Bissiri 99.
25. Ibid.
26. Moyers 172.
27. Robert Brustein, “The Lessons of ‘The Piano,’ ” New Republic (21 May 1990):
29.
28. To learn more about the process of revising The Piano Lesson, see Irene Back-
alenick, “Fine-Tuning The Piano Lesson: An Interview with Lloyd Richards,” Theater
Week (16–22 Apr. 1990): 1–19.
29. Dwight Andrews, telephone interview by author, Emory University,Atlanta,
28 Aug. 1997.
30. Vincent Canby, “Unrepentant, Defiant Blues for Seven Strong Voices,” New
York Times (28 Mar. 1996): C32.
31. Ibid.
32. Tom Creamer, “Men with Knives and Steel and Guitar Strings’: An Interview
with August Wilson,” On Stage 9 (Goodman Theater Series, 1994–1995): E3.
33. Hap Erstein, “ ‘Ma Rainey’ Triumphs over Racism, Director,” Washington
Times (8 Oct. 1990): E3.
34. Ibid.
35. Stephanie Shapiro, “Olu Dara and All the World’s Music,” Evening Sun (16
Oct. 1990): D1.
36. Ibid.
37. See select reviews in Sandra G. Shannon, “Annotated Bibliography on Works
by and about August Wilson since 1992,” in May All Your Fences Have Gates: Essays
on the Drama of August Wilson, ed. Alan Nadel (Iowa City: Iowa University Press,
1994), 230–266.
38. Hatch 540.
39. William K. Gale, “August Wilson’s Vision of Light at End of the Tunnel,”
Providence Journal-Bulletin (6 Apr. 1990): D5.
40. Gottschild 7.
41. Ibid., 8.
42. Paul Carter Harrison, “August Wilson’s Blues Poetics,” in August Wilson:
Three Plays (Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh University Press, 1991), 295.
43. Ibid.
44. Soyinka xii; Harrison 292; Olaniyan 139; and Gottschild 6.

Audience and Africanisms in August Wilson’s Dramaturgy 167

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Part III

Intersections of Race and Gender

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 9

Black Minstrelsy and

Double Inversion, Circa 1890

‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘
annemarie bean

miss johnsing: Is that you, Dinah Dewdrop?

dinah: It am.
miss j: And how do you find yourself, this evening?
dinah: I ain’t been lost, as I knows on, Miss Johnsing.
miss j: I mean, Dinah, how is your health? How do you feel?
dinah (shaking her head): I’s sorry to say, Miss Johnsing, dat I’s a leetle
off color dis night.
miss j: That is a melancholic fact, Dinah.
topsy: ‘Pears like we’s all on us a bit shady, dis ebenin’!1

The above exchange comes from Jolly Joe’s Lady Minstrels, a minstrel guide
“written, compiled, and edited in the sole interest of cheerfulness from the
most jovial sources, and arranged with a particular eye to the needs of female
negro minstrels.”2 Jolly Joe’s Lady Minstrels was published in 1893, a
significant moment in the history of nineteenth-century American blackface
minstrelsy,3 as there was an increasing number of professional and amateur
white minstrel guides published, including Frank Dumont’s The Witmark
Amateur Minstrel Guide and Burnt Cork Encyclopedia (1899) and The Boys of
New York End Men’s Joke Book (1902).4 Minstrel guides were virtual compen-
diums on how-to-make-a-minstrel-show, with short introductory essays on
the history of minstrelsy, front- and back-of-the-book advertisements for
fright wigs and burnt cork makeup, and instructions on the form and material
of minstrelsy. Jolly Joe’s Lady Minstrels is a typical example, offeringdirections
on costumes and makeup and a section on “Specimen Jokes, Stories, and
Conundrums.”
Not only were the amateur minstrel guides detailed lessons on how to be
a minstrel, they also served the additional purpose of telling the reader how

171
to be an Other, in the classical Homi Bhabhan sense of Othering as an
ambivalent act of love and subjection.5 The opening exchangebetweenDinah
Dewdrop, one of the end women (the others are Sukey, Rosy, and Topsy),
and Miss Johnsing, the interlocutor, is significant as a representativeexample
of these lessons in Otherness as outlined in the 1890s minstrel guides. Miss
Johnsing speaks in mannered words and diction; Dinah answersherquestions
in an interpretation of black dialect. The conversation concerns Dinah’s
health. “How is your health?” Miss Johnsing inquires. Dinah replies, “I’s a
leetle off color dis night.” The emphasized observation “off color” is meant to
set up the first laugh for the audience, which the comic character Topsy
delivers: “ ‘Pears like we’s all on us a bit shady, dis ebenin’!” Topsy, a character
borrowed from Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), uses color
as a mark of social inclusion, for the minstrels and the audience know that
everyone onstage is blackened by burnt cork, not by race. The wink to the
audience is based in the mutual understanding that we (the performers) are
different from you (the audience) but only because we (the performers) are
putting on a show, an act, a minstrel show in blackface. This knowledge—
that everyone is “shady,” but no one is truly “black”—is an important
distinction in deriving pleasure for the white audience and white performers.
The joke material on the minstrel stage can be said to display, as Sigmund
Freud identifies, “the most social of all the mental functions that aim to yield
pleasure.”6
The first characteristic that is standard to minstrelsy jokes is comicmaterial
about color. With the increase in amateur minstrel publications, such as Jolly
Joe’s Lady Minstrels, in the 1890s, color or, more specifically, changing one’s
color for the amusement of yourself and others had become more and more
popular and accessible to the larger public. Amateur performers exercised
their abilities to change their color because they could, and because the
allowability for and humor of “blacking up” had been amusing since min-
strelsy’s beginnings in the late 1820s.
I would like here to clarify what I will call the performance of color in
minstrelsy. My employment of color rather than race or ethnic group is derived
from the usage of the minstrels themselves: they were presenting a body
literally colored, blackened, and sociologically defined by white culture. In
the oft-quoted 1903 words of W. E. B. Du Bois: “The problem of the twen-
tieth century is the problem of the color-line,—the relation of the darker to
the lighter races of men.”7 Du Bois makes the distinction that what has been
problematized in the nineteenth century, as it continued to be in the twen-
tieth, is the space where colors confront each other. Du Bois marked a line as
this space of encounter; minstrelsy designated the popular stage as the locus
of color contention.
Minstrelsy was not an ethnography-based performance, nor was it based
in any way in the authentic presentation of African American cultural life.
There is significant discussion that some of early minstrelsy was based in
direct contact between white minstrel performers and African Americans,
which can be traced most notably in the adaptation of the West African

172 Intersections of Race and Gender

instrument of the banjo by white minstrels. Ultimately, it was not a concern
of the minstrels to present a race with a culture, but rather, to present a color,
as in “This is how people of this color act.” As is well documented, the “color”
of blackness would designate a race inferior in mid–nineteenth century
anthropological papers, which were supported by highly questionable sci-
entific conclusions based on measurements of head size, for example.8 Show-
ing a knowledge of the tenor of the times, blackness(mostoften),Chineseness,
Native Americanness, Japaneseness, Irishness, and Dutch/Germanness were
usedbywhiteminstrelstoentertainaudiencesthroughwell-establishedtypes
of humor and nostalgia.9 At best, these stereotypes limited the range of
images of those ethnicities in minstrel performance; at worst, they contained
and constricted them.
In addition to performing color, beginning in the 1840s, white male
minstrels used gender as a transgressive space of performing Otherness. The
mutability of color coupled with the changeability of gender furthered the
white minstrels’ promotion of color and gender as being primarily theatrical
and of entertainment as a type of mimicry or mimesis, an “almost, not-quite”
relationship with the subject, the African American woman. When, around
the 1840s, white minstrels performed African American women to illustrate
satisfaction or disappointment in an African American male-female relation-
ship (often the material of blackface minstrelsy songs), they wrote songs
similar to “Miss Lucy Long”:
I’ve come again to see you,
I’ll sing another song,
Jist listen to my story,
It isn’t very long.
Oh take your time Miss Lucy,
Take your time Miss Lucy Long.
Oh! Miss Lucy’s teeth is grinning,
Just like an ear ob corn,
And her eyes dey look so winning
Oh! would I’d ne’er been born.
If she makes a scolding wife,
As sure as she was born,
I’ll tote her down to Georgia,
And trade her off for corn.10
Blackface minstrelsy songs about the relationships between African Amer-
ican men and women were called wench songs; the female impersonators who
would perform the songs were the “wenches.” Ultimately, the lyrics estab-
lished the types of African American women portrayed. In the example of
the several versions over thirty years of the comic love song “Miss Lucy Long,”
probably the first wench song, we can observe a genealogy of the portrayal of
African American women by female impersonators in white minstrelsy. At
every stage, the title character of the song is always warned by her lover to
behave as a good wife, or she will be sold or abandoned.11 She responds to his

Black Minstrelsy and Double Inversion 173

words by grinning, her teeth as white as snow, speechless. In Love and Theft,
Eric Lott notes that no one has been able to prove that the early wench actually
sang in the sketches that included her as a character; rather, she became the
“lyric and theatrical object of the song” and of the entire theater arena.12 The
female impersonator, therefore, was established as a thoroughly contained
and constrained African American woman.
Given the history of female impersonation in minstrelsy, it is intriguing
to consider how the performances of color and gender continued once white
women were allowed to participate in minstrelsy. White women negotiated
their colorized and genderized space in several ways. First, they used white
womanhood as a contrast to black womanhood. Second, they presented the
woman’s body in an inverse of female impersonation by performing as white
men. By the time of the amateur minstrel movement in the 1890s, full-scale
participation and acceptanceofwomenonstageinprofessionalminstrelshows
was established. Women had been appearing as performers and audience
members since the post–Civil War era in concert saloons and variety halls,
where “leg shows,” extravaganzas such as The Black Crook, and Lydia Thomp-
son’s burlesquing British Blondes were featured.13 On the minstrelsy circuit,
Gertie Granville performed with Tony Hart, her husband, beginning in
1882, often with both spouses playing female roles (see figure 9.1). There is
a photograph of Hart in blackface drag gently reprimanding Granville, who
is dressed as a Little Eva character, the popular young heroine of Uncle Tom’s
Cabin.14 The circa 1882 photograph captures a moment in the continuum of
gender impersonation in blackface minstrelsy. Hart, a white man costumed
as an African American woman, poses with his wife, a white woman dressed
as a white child with an oversized doll. Hart is very much in the low-comedy
Funny Old Gal role of white minstrelsy, recalling the comic Dame character
in burlesque.15 He wears dark Victorian-era women’s clothing over his big
frame; a wig is piled high on his head; and his face and arms are blackened.
Granville is dressed as girlishly as possible; she wears a knee-length, light-
colored dress that exposes her legs; and her blonde hair is loose and flowing.
Both performances of color and gender exhibit the limits of transgression
imposed on women of the popular stage at this time. Hart, the epitome of
white minstrelsy’s comic female impersonator, shares the stage with min-
strelsy’s—and the American popular stage’s—future female presence: the
childlike, ultrafeminized girl-woman with nice legs.
Returning to the excerpt that opened this chapter, the character of Dinah
Dewdrop could be costumed similarly to Tony Hart, with one exception.
Jolly Joe’s Lady Minstrels was written for white women to portray African
American women. In fact, white women on stage transgressing racial bound-
aries was encouraged in Jolly Joe’s Lady Minstrels by the implied endorsement
of an African American man, Jolly Joe, whose face is grinning on the cover.
In the 1890s, the female body on the popular stage had expanded possibilities
compared to her counterpart earlier in the century. One of those areas of
expansion was to represent the female body in the form of a male body:

174 Intersections of Race and Gender

Figure 9.1 Tony Hart and Gertie Granville (n.d.). Courtesy Harvard Theatre
Collection, Houghton Library.

It was in the early [18]90s that the male imps [impersonators] started to
give an honest impersonation. The gals with fine shapes naturally showed
off men’s clothes in a way that no man ever could.16
In a chapter entitled “She-He’s and He-She’s,” former vaudevillian Joe
Laurie, Jr., expresses great admiration for the work of male impersonators in
turn-of-the-century vaudeville. Laurie implies that male impersonation did
not develop out of a need for male partners on the vaudeville stage but rather
from a desire for the audience to see women’s “fine shapes” in closely tailored
men’s clothes. During her performance as a male impersonator, as she sang

Black Minstrelsy and Double Inversion 175

and played instruments, flirted, and danced with female partners, the
woman’s body could always be reassuringly seen through a shapely veil, albeit
of masculinity.
In my considerations of minstrelsy’s use of the performances of color and
gender as a means of entertaining and sentimentally transporting its audi-
ences, I have been intrigued by the recent work of Susan Gubar on what she
terms “racechange.” White minstrels, Gubar notes, performed a racechange
in blackface, which begantheAmericanuseoftheblackOtherinacommodity
fetish relationship.17 Gubar notes that, unlike the commonly used term
passing, which has been used to describe the act of “passing for white” by
light-skinned African Americans in a quest for less discriminatory lives, a
racechange is a much more expansive notion of “the traversing of racial
boundaries, racial imitation or impersonation, cross-racial mimicry or mu-
tability, white posing as black or black passing as white, pan-racial mutu-
ality.”18 In the case of minstrelsy, however, there has been little discussion
so far about the transgression of gender paralleling the performance of color
on the stage. In effect, one could both further complicate and support Gubar’s
argument marking white minstrelsy as an example of racechange with sub-
stantiation of how white minstrels portrayed African American women on
the minstrelsy stage: a “race and gender change.” The commodity fetishism
that occurs in white minstrelsy when we also consider gender impersonation
therefore becomes doubled in its meaning and scope.
There were also minstrelsy performers who chose to change their color,
although it would seem not to be necessary to do so: African American
minstrels. Active primarily during late minstrelsy,19 they tapped intoa desire
by American audiences to laugh at performances of color and gender. When
African American minstrels accessed the popular entertainment stage, they
eventually changed the words, jokes, and look of minstrelsy,20 but they also
maintained its premises of performing color and performing gender for the
amusement and nostalgia of their audiences.
A report in the New York Clipper in 1858 states that a “colored operatroupe”
performed vocal and instrumental songs in the Queen’s Concert Rooms in
London. “The personal appearance of the parties was extremely ludicrous,
but they sang well, and many of their melodies and songs are ‘taking,’ and
likely to become favorites,” the writer concludes.21 The first black minstrels
probably existed as early as the 1850s, although it was not until after the
Civil War that black performers, including minstrels, were prevalent on the
American popular stage.22 Initially, black minstrelsy tapped into the suc-
cessful elements of white minstrelsy: “ludicrous” appearance, well-executed
music, and catchy tunes. As was the case in white minstrelsy, the skills
demanded in black minstrelsy were multiple: black minstrel and vaudeville
star Tom Fletcher recalled, in his book 100 Years of the Negro in Show Business,
“In those days you were not hired or even considered in show business unless
you could sing, dance, talk, tumble or play some instrument in a brass
band.”23 Despite the demanding artistic requirements, African Americans
clamored for the few spots available in black minstrelsy groups; in 1894,

176 Intersections of Race and Gender

2,000 African Americans applied for forty minstrelsy slots in a new troupe.24
The appeal of the minstrelsy stage to African American performers and
audiences needs to be examined more closely. Thomas Riis suggests that the
oral culture elements of “exaggeration and [the] grotesque” integral to min-
strelsy appealed to the African-based culture of African Americans.25 What
can be said is that minstrelsy offered opportunities for both trained and
untrained musicians and performers on a grand scale. As James Weldon
Johnson, a former black minstrel, reflected on minstrelsy’s mixed legacy, he
wrote on its dualistic nature in African American cultural production:
Minstrelsy was, on the whole, a caricature of Negro life, and it fixed a stage
tradition which has not yet been entirely broken. . . . Nevertheless, these
companies did provide stage training and theatrical experience for a large
number of coloured men. They provided an essentialtrainingandtheatrical
experience, which, at the time, could not have been acquired from any
other source. Many of these men, as the vogue of minstrelsy waned, passed
on into the second phase, or middle period, of the Negro on the theatrical
stage in America; and it was mainly upon the training they had gained
that this second phase rested.26
A glance at the names of the early black musical performers and composers,
those of Johnson’s “second phase”—Bert Williams, George Walker, Will
Marion Cook, J. Leubrie Hill, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Jesse Shipp, Bob Cole,
J. Rosamond Johnson, and James Weldon Johnson himself27—offers a sense
of the creative potential fed by black minstrelsy. I am not suggesting that
minstrelsy provided the only means to the end of performance, as it has been
noted by many, including Johnson, that African American performers were
successful far from the minstrelsy stage. Instead, with the participation of
black minstrels, minstrelsy can be said to have given American culture two
legacies: one of creativity and one of resilient stereotypes. Ultimately, there
was a certain pride in the African American population at the popularity of
the college-affiliated singing troupes, such as the Fisk Jubilee Singers and
the Hampton Singers, and “our own colored minstrels earn[ing] honorable
reputation and some money.”28
With the advent of their popularity came the return, at least performa-
tively, of the “Negro” back to the plantation. Offering “trueness” and “real-
ness” by the very nature of the fact that they were not just “acting black” but
were black, the black minstrels advertised themselves as authentic. To prove
this assertion, they restaged old minstrelsy classics out of vogue before the
Civil War. The two rival black minstrelsy troupes, Haverly’s Colored Min-
strels and Callender’s Consolidated Colored Minstrels, featured plantation
scenes par excellence; at one point, Haverly’s even exchanged minstrelsy’s
opening formation of a semicircle for a full-scale staging of a plantation scene
in the South.29 Ironically, the black minstrels became overdetermined in
their “niggerness” precisely at the moment that they were achieving greater
visibility as performing artists. They, in all likelihood, were building upon
the popularity of the slave dramas of the earlier part of the century, such as

Black Minstrelsy and Double Inversion 177

Darling Nelly Gray (1856), William Wells Brown’s Escape; or, A Leap to
Freedom (1858), and the many versions of Uncle Tom’s Cabin being performed
simultaneously throughout the country in the 1850s,30 as well as upon the
touring company combinations of the Hyers Sisters, Anna Madah and Emma
Louise, who toured in the 1870s and 1880s and featured songs such as the
following, written by white minstrel songster Charles A. White expressly
for Emma Hyers:
Oh golly, aint I happy!
De Yankee’s day hab come;
I hear de shout of freedom,
I hear dar fife and drum;
Dar’s gwine to be a smash-up
Dis chile is gettin’ shy,
She’ll leab de old plantation,
Old cabin home, good-by.31
As Thomas Riis notes, emancipation is seen in this song to be a mixed
blessing.32 Similar in its nostalgia to many white minstrelsy songs, “Good-
by, Old Cabin Home” permits the urban audiences of minstrelsy to locate
the South as a place of structured contentment, where people knew their
place and were relatively happy with their designation. The revitalized use
of the plantation scenario by African American minstrelsy troupes differed
from the early white minstrelsy use of the plantation in its ambivalence. As
in the case of the song “Good-by, Old Cabin Home,” African Americans
lamented leaving their southern homes but leave them they did.
In these theatrical southern worlds of African American minstrelsy, does
gender receive the same type of ambivalent performance as color? In a word,
yes. Female impersonation was present in black minstrelsy, according to
Robert C. Toll, as were all aspects of white minstrelsy: “black ‘sweet’ singers,
graceful prima donnas, refined dancers, pompous interlocutors, and wise-
cracking endmen.”33 Yet I have found little documentation that suggests
that the female impersonator in black minstrelsy was central to the enter-
tainment of the primarily black audiences. As Toll, Henry Sampson, Mel
Watkins, Thomas Riis, James Weldon Johnson, and Eileen Southern have
pointed out, African Americans who attended black minstrel shows were of
the working class and familiar with laughing at stereotypes because they
were based in comedy, not in realistic portrayal.34 The white female imper-
sonator, especially as the prima donna in late minstrelsy, based her perfor-
mance in believability, similar to contemporary female impersonators.35 It
is possible that black minstrelsy audiences chose to see actual light-skinned
African American women as the “leg show” elements of the black minstrelsy
show, rather than those who were mimicking femaleness (see figure 9.2).
Black minstrelsy blended into black musical revues and vaudeville, so it is
somewhat difficult to discern a continuum in terms of gender impersonation
from white to black minstrelsy. However, it seems that female impersonation
of the prima donna type was not performed by any of the major black

178 Intersections of Race and Gender

Figure 9.2 The Smart Set (1901). Courtesy Hatch-Billops Collection.

minstrels, including Sam Lucas, Billy Kersands, Ernest Hogan, Tom Mc-
Intosh, or Tom Fletcher. This contrasts with white minstrelsy, where such
notables as George Christy and William Henry Rice regularly portrayed
highly dressed and stylized mulatta women. I have found evidence of one
comic female impersonator in black minstrelsy, Andrew Tribble.36 Tribble,
who may or may not be the cross-dressed male in figure 9.2, seems to have
excelled in playing female comic roles. He was born in 1879 in Kentucky,
and his first role on stage was as a “pickaninny.” When he reached adulthood,
he left the stage and married, but he returned to performing in Chicago in
1904. Tribble worked in a music hall and was subsequently hired to work at
the famous Pekin Theatre, where Robert Motts had established a highly
regarded resident company of African American actors, which included, at
various times, Charles Gilpin, Flournoy Miller, and Aubrey Lyles.37 It was
at the Pekin that “Tribble slipped on a dress and the audience screamed at
his performance.”38 Bob Cole, J. Rosamond Johnson, and James Weldon
Johnson saw him there and cast him in their second work, The Shoo-Fly
Regiment (1906). Tribble, about five feet, four inches tall, constructed the role
of Ophelia Snow: “a single-minded woman, careless,kindly,tough,andabove
all desirous for an affair of the heart just the same as her sisters blessed with
more beauty.”39 “Ophelia, the Village Pride,” wrote another reviewer, “was
exceedingly well done. All must give it to Tribble, he is the goods. His
characterization was great.”40 Tribble would repeat variations on this role
throughout his career. Another character Tribble cross-dressed for the show
was Sis Hopkins, cited by one reviewer as “the most interesting feature of the
cast.”41 Another hit of the show was a comic romantic duet that Tribble sang

Black Minstrelsy and Double Inversion 179

with Matt Marshall, entitled “Who Do You Have?” It was, in the words of
one reviewer, “screamingly funny, and as well rendered as anything which
has been seen here in many moons.”42
Tribble was also in the next Cole and Johnson production Red Moon (1908).
His reviews for this production were not as favorable as the ones for The Shoo-
Fly Regiment, possibly because Tribble was performing a low-comedy char-
acter, who was ill-suited for a “show [that] seem[ed] to be above such parts.”43
Tribble appears to have been caught on the cusp of the movement from
vaudeville to black musical show/revue, although he does perform similar
cross-dressed characters in Shuffle Along (1921) and Put and Take (1921).44
Tribble also worked with The Smart Set, the Eddie Hunter Company, the J.
Leubrie Hill Company, and the Miller (Quintard) and Slater Company before
his death in 1935.45
In his female impersonations, Tribble seems to have relied on the comedic
elements solely. He was not presenting the prima donna character of white
minstrelsy, whose allure was in the convincing portrayal of her realness.
Tribble, and probably other female impersonators in black minstrelsy yet to
be rediscovered, brought the performance of color and gender of minstrelsy
into a realm of being “screamingly funny” for the audiences, which included
both African American women and men; his performances were about“us”—
African American men and women and their relationships—not about
“them.” His legacy is almost certainly alive in twentieth-century comedians
such as Flip Wilson, whose smart-talking Geraldinecharacterwasimmensely
popular on his television variety show (1970–1977).46 The comedy of Wil-
son’s gender impersonation was similar to Tribble’s in that it based itself in
the social and political satire of gender. This type of humor was similar to
that used by white minstrels in comic female impersonation and achieved
like results: a determined break from the constraints imposed by gender roles
in society and a political comment on the increasing ambivalence of men
about the changing social roles of women.
In addition, black minstrelsy commented on white minstrelsy’s perform-
ances of color and gender by narrowing the scope of female impersonation.
Gender impersonators such as Tribble were primarily comic in purpose and
did not in any way thrive on the ambivalence of whether or not Tribble was
truly a man or a woman. Tribble, in his “screamingly funny” female portray-
als, both expanded the importance of humor in his performances and neatly
contained the oft-present dual purpose in white minstrelsy of denigrating
the subject of the performances—African American women—and the ve-
hicle of the performance: his own African American male body.
Further extending the ways in which African American gender imperson-
ation inverted the performance of color and gender of African Americans as
constructed by white minstrelsy are performances of African American male
impersonation. After the Hyers Sisters broke the gender barrier, all-black
musical shows, such as The Creole Show, put on by Sam T. Jack’s Creole
Company in 1890–1897, and Darkest America (1896), departed from and
depended on the minstrelsy format, featuring plantation scenes as well as

180 Intersections of Race and Gender

original songs and dances.47 The Creole Show is also significant as it was the
first show that employed a large number of African American women per-
formers. Extravaganzas with burlesque elements, complete with songs called
“minstrel spirituals” (combining elements of the most popular forms of
African American entertainment, minstrelsy and concert singing), and mu-
sical revues toured the country.AfricanAmericanfemaleminstrelsperformed
male impersonation during this active period of the 1880s and 1890s.
As noted previously with the African American male minstrels, gender
impersonation can be seen as an inversion of the performances of color and
gender that were developed by white minstrels. First, the male African
American minstrels did only comic female impersonation; they did not
continue the tradition of high-style drag developed by the male prima donnas
of the white minstrelsy stage. Second, the women of African American
minstrelsy featured a small faction of performers who donned male costume
and played male roles. These performances by theAfricanAmericanminstrels
inverted (and, in the case of the women, double inverted) the notions set up
by white minstrelsy: that the African American male body was deformed,
overdetermined, and emasculated and that the African Americanfemalebody
was highly sexualized and whorish. When performed by African American
female minstrels, gender impersonation doubly inverted the representations
of blackness rendered by white minstrelsy. White minstrelsy stereotyped
African American women as comic and/or whorish; African American male
impersonators chose to perform their female selves throughmaleness,thereby
eradicting any connection with the stereotypes previously generated. African
American male impersonators’ double inversion of color and gender directly
tapped into the anxieties that the dominant culture had about African Amer-
ican women and men. By changing the nature of those characterizations,
black minstrelsy, in effect, negated their “coloring” and asserted themselves
as a race with first, a proud history, and second, an exciting present. African
American performing artists could impressively participate, in numbers
higher than the percentage of blacks in the general population, and electrify
their audiences with new notions of what a black man or woman performer
was capable of on stage.
I have become intrigued by a small, vibrant group of African American
female minstrels and vaudevillians who worked from the 1890s to the 1910s,
some of whom performed male impersonation. Black female minstrels in-
verted the blackened-up female impersonators’ characterizations of black
women in two ways. First, although they were women, they did not play
only women; they showed that their bodies were suited to playing both
genders and to subverting the dominance of minstrelsy’s containment of the
black female body as fixed, unmoving, and confined to the two categories of
mulatta or mama. Second, they reclaimed minstrelsy’s black dandy charac-
terization (overly dressed, urban black male) by reinscribing him into a
sophisticated “race man” worthy of the upcoming Jazz Age. Strutting in top
hats, twirling canes, and dancing in elegantly choreographed numbers, black
female minstrels playing black men and women performedacounternarrative

Black Minstrelsy and Double Inversion 181

to white minstrelsy’s violent portrayals of African American relationships.
It is impossible to know if the black female minstrels, especially the male
impersonators, actively pursued performing this race and gender inversion
of white minstrelsy; however, I would like to approach their work by distin-
guishing, theoretically at least, their performances as social commentaries
on the racist and sexist images of black men and women, which were the
staple material of white minstrelsy. By contrasting the gender impersonation
of white minstrelsy with these inverted portrayals, African American min-
strels manipulated the rules of performance established by white minstrelsy.
Their performances of color and gender were doubly transgressing, and they
changed the scope of what transgression on the minstrelsy stage had been
thus far.
African American male impersonators commented on their times and
turned inside out the performance history of stereotypical characterizations
of African American men and women on the popular stage. During this late
stage of minstrelsy (which was evolving into vaudeville), there were several
African American women minstrels who specialized in male impersonation.
They included Florence Hines (active in the teens and twenties); Ida Forsyne
(Howard) (b. 1883–d. early 1980s); Alberta Whitman of the Whitman
Sisters (b. 1888–d. 1964); and Aida Overton Walker (1880–1914). It will
come as no surprise to anyone who has studied nineteenth-century African
American popular entertainment that there is little extant material available,
especially on women performers. Through the use of primary and secondary
sources, I have attempted toconstructthebeginningsofaperformancehistory
of these African American minstrel/vaudeville performers. However, my
primary goal is to present their performance of male impersonation as a
counterbalance to several portrayals in white minstrelsy. The male imper-
sonations performed by these women seem to have reflected upon the dandy
character popular in white minstrelsy. Emasculated, overly dressed, urban,
and ineffectual, the black dandy in white minstrelsy was a “Dandy Jim from
Carolina” (1843), more concerned with his ridiculous appearance than any-
thing else. The African American women gave a different spin to the dandy
character when they made him into a Jazz Age sophisticate, resplendent in
black topcoat, tails, twirling a cane and donning a top hat.
One of the best examples of the sophisticated image of black maleness as
performed by black female minstrels is the male impersonation of Alberta
(or “Bert”) Whitman (see figures 9.3 and 9.4). Describing the Whitman
Sisters troupe on 12 February 1910, the New York Clipper stated:

The Whitman Sisters and Billy Kersands’ vaudeville company play Lag-
man’s Theatre, Mobile, Alabama. The WhitmansincludeMabel,manager;
Essie, contralto soloist; Alberta, prima donna; Mattie (adopted sister); and
Baby Alice. They are assisted by the boy comedian Thomas Hawkins, who
replaces Willie Robinson; William Loften, comedian; and Walter Smith,
trap drummer. Billy Kersands is assisted by his wife, Louise, and B. E.
Edwards, tenor soloist.48

182 Intersections of Race and Gender

Figure 9.3 “The Whitman Sisters in Their Newest and Peppiest Musical
Comedy, High Speed” (1928). Courtesy Hatch-Billops Collection.

Figure 9.4 “The World Famous Whitman Sisters” (1928). Courtesy Hatch-
Billops Collection.
 Alberta Whitman was a male impersonator throughout her successful
career on the vaudeville circuit. The Whitmans hailed fromLawrence,Kansas
(birthplace of George Walker, 1872?–1911, husband of Aida Overton Wal-
ker and Bert Williams’s partner) and were the daughters of a well-known
minister. Despite Walker’s efforts, the Whitmans were not allowed to be-
come professional until after their schooling, which included five years at the
New England Conservatory of Music. They first worked with their father on
an evangelical tour, and then Essie and Mabel formed an act called the
Danzette Sisters in 1899–1900. In 1900, the Whitman Sisters Novelty
Company began its career as a group in the Augusta (Georgia) Grand Opera
House. Their mother managed the group at that time; by 1904, Mabel took
over the management, and they changed the group’s name to the Whitman
Sisters New Orleans Troubadours. Their debut in New York in 1906 was
with the encouragement of Will Marion Cook. They worked the Keith and
Proctor, Poli and Fox, and Theatre Owners Booking Association (TOBA)
circuits, as well as most theatrical houses. They were truly successful by 1910,
occasionally reconfiguring themselves so that several sisters could work in-
dependently. Known for their talent and beauty, “These bright, pretty mu-
latto girls . . . have wonderful voices. . . . The sisters play banjo and sing
coon songs with a smack of the original flavor. Their costuming is elegant;
their manner is graceful and their appearance striking in a degree as they are
unusually handsome,” wrote one Alabama reviewer early in their careers.49
Often billed as a “coon” act, the Whitmans added boy dancers Willie Rob-
inson and “Pops” Whitman (Alice’s son) in the ‘20s; the latter was billed as
a child prodigy. A “Befoh De Wah” act was reviewed in 1907; in it, the
Whitmans seem to have parodied the plantation scenes so necessary to early
black minstrelsy.50 At this point in vaudeville, the Whitmans were credited
with giving the audience a performance “quite different from what we have
learned to expect when a Negro turn is announced.”51
The information about Alberta Whitman is sketchy beyond the facts of
the company as a whole. According to photos, she seems to have performed
duets with her sister Alice in the clothes of a well-dressed black man of the
period, complete with hat and cane. Unlike the rest of the Whitmans, I have
found no documentation regarding what Alberta did after thecompanybroke
up in the 1930s. Mabel died in 1942, Essie in 1963, Alberta in 1964, and
Alice in the 1970s.52
Alberta Whitman is one of the most intriguing examples of male imper-
sonators. In figure 9.4, she presses herself against her flapper-costumed sister
Alice on the right side of the flyer; on the left side, also with Alice, she sits
in a tuxedo with her legs open and her arms spread confidently, while Alice
crosses her legs and clasps her hands on top of them. This flyer, from 1928,
was augmented by someone who typed, “Bert Whitman, dresses in Man’s
Suit. Bert Whitman is a woman.” Bert Whitman presented her audiences an
African American woman who broke out of the stereotypes of both African
American men, as caricatured by the dandy, and women, as demonstrated by
the white female impersonators; she developed a performance of color and

184 Intersections of Race and Gender

gender that directly inverted her white male predecessors’ performances of
color and gender.
Primary or even secondary material on other male impersonators is even
more elusive than that on Alberta Whitman, but what exists is equally
interesting. Florence Hines was called the American Vesta Tilley, after the
popular British male impersonator.53 A review of Richards and Pringle-
Rusco and Holland’s Big Minstrel Festival in 1899 remarked: “As a male
impersonator, Miss Hines is fine.”54 Hines also performed in The Creole Show
(1890–1897). The format was similar to a minstrel show, and Hines, as a
male impersonator, was the interlocutor, surrounded by women in a semi-
circle (pre-dating a similar performance by Aida Overton Walker and the
Porto Rico Girls discussed later in this essay).55 At one time, Hines also
played one of three Conversationalists, who were dressed in male attire.56 In
The Ghost Walks: A Chronological History of Blacks in Show Business, 1865–
1910, Henry T. Sampson lists Hines in many shows through the teens and
twenties, but I have been unable to find any additional biographical data on
her.
Another African American woman who performed male impersonation
was Ida Forsyne. Forsyne (b.1883–d.early 1980s) was known for two roles
during her career: Topsy (she was billed as Topsy throughout her tour of
Europe in 1906–1914) and as a Russian dancer.57 Herbig breakhadhappened
in 1899, when she was billed with the Black Patti troupe, with which she
appeared in Dreamland as “Kaffir queen, dressed in a shade of green” and was
reviewed as having “danced ‘Maiden of Timbuctoo,’ quite as fascinating as
ever.”58 She also worked with The Smart Set in 1903 and had a solo in Will
Marion Cook’s The Southerners (1904). Apparently, she began to find difficulty
working in the teens and twenties, possibly because stage work was often
reserved for light-skinned women. Therefore, she took a job as Sophie
Tucker’s maid in 1920–1922 and was paid $5 a week. In 1927, Forsyne again
worked on the TOBA circuit with Bessie Smith. One of her last known jobs
in show business was a role in Oscar Micheaux’s The Underworld (1935).59 As
a member of the Negro Actors Guild’s executive board, Forsyne remained
active beyond her years as a performer.60 The most common photo of Ida
Forsyne, included in Milton Meltzer and Langston Hughes’s black enter-
tainment book, sports a caption stating that she taught Jerome Robbins how
to choreograph the cakewalk.61 The photo features her in male costume
similar to that worn by Alberta Whitman. And, like Bert Whitman, Forsyne
exudes male-associated confidence in her photo, with a cane on her arm and
her legs spread wide.
Aida Overton Walker (also known as Ada Overton) was one of the greatest
performers to bridge the performance gap between black minstrelsy and
vaudeville. Unlike the previously mentioned African American male imper-
sonators, there have been several excellent articles written exclusively on
Walker and her signature dance, the cakewalk.62 Walker began her career
with the concert singer Sissieretta Jones, known as the Black Patti, and her
Troubadours. She met George Walker, her future husband, and his comedy

Black Minstrelsy and Double Inversion 185

partner, Bert Williams, when they all posed for photographs for a trade card
sponsored by the AmericanTobaccoCompanyin1898.WilliamsandWalker
were pioneers in introducing ragtime to their vaudeville work, and Aida
Overton helped them introduce the cakewalk, a dance reminiscent of slave
mockery of white society, which was then used by the white minstrels in
their frenetic walkarounds.63 During her short lifetime, Aida Overton Wal-
ker became the principal delineator of the cakewalk, but she also was respon-
sible for all of the choreography of the Williams and Walker revues. As a
result, she contributed to the changeover from the “coon” show to black
musical revues, as dance was as integral to the work of Williams and Walker
as was the music and comedy.64
An exceptional example of male impersonation was the pinch-hitting role
performed by Aida Overton Walker upon the advanced illness of her husband
George Walker, during the extended run of Bandanna Land (1907–1909).
Centered around the character of a minstrel show player named Skunkton
Bowser (played by Williams) and his partner, Bud Jenkins (played by Wal-
ker), Bandanna Land featured routines similar to minstrelsy interlocutor and
endmen setups and a cakewalk as well. This old minstrelsy material was
reconfigured by Williams, Walker, Aida Overton Walker, Jesse Shipp, Alex
Rogers, and Will Marion Cook.65 In February 1909, Walkerbeganstuttering
and forgetting his lines, symptoms of his illness of syphilis. Aida Overton
Walker had prepared for this moment by practicing George’s roleincostume,
spawning several cartoons. Walker never saw his wife perform “Bon Bon
Buddy,” his signature song.66
After Walker’s death in 1911, Aida Overton Walker mostly worked as a
choreographer, but sometimes she continued to impersonate males. At a
1913 benefit, she appeared with the Porto Rico Girls and the Happy Girls:
As a fitting finale, Miss Walker, in male attire, rendered several old favorite
selections, reinforced by the female members of the Porto Rico Girls and
the Happy Girls act. When the curtain descended, Miss Walker stood out
in bold relief, with the girls forming an effective background. The picture
was a pretty one.67
As with the male impersonation of Florence Hines in The Creole Show, Aida
Overton Walker is surrounded in this performance by African American
women. The African American woman on stage, therefore, was marked as
either male (Walker) or female (the Happy Girls). Black femaleness was
malleable, not fixed or contained.
It is certainly possible, given the proliferation of black male impersonators
in vaudeville, that these women were deftly performing one of many stock
roles. Of course, that could also be said for the female impersonators in white
minstrelsy. African American male impersonators inverted a theatrical play-
ing out of dominance, turning over and around the assertion of power by the
white male. They challenged the gendered metaphor that they inheritedfrom
white minstrelsy on a small but significant scale. The importance of their
challenge is related to the performances of white male impersonators in

186 Intersections of Race and Gender

British vaudeville such as Vesta Tilley, Annie Hindle, Ella Wesner, Blanche
Selwyn, and Bessie Bonehill,68 who reconstituted women’s bodies and
marked them as almost male, as opposed to hyperfeminine. Also, when
discussing male impersonation in black minstrelsy and vaudeville, it is
important to consider the practicalmatterofthestagingandmaterial.African
American female minstrels may have portrayed African American males for
practical reasons based in available personnel. The Whitman Sisters often
staged plantation scenes, as were popular in the late days of minstrelsy, and
Alberta may have chosen to portray a male to round out the domestic drama.
However, once the company enlarged, Alberta continued to play male char-
acters, even though the company included grown men and boys. Florence
Hines seems to have chosen to perform her male impersonation throughout
her long career, and Ida Forsyne must have done male impersonation at least
once, according to pictorial documentation. And, as has been stated, Aida
Overton Walker donned male attire in performance even when she was no
longer substituting for her husband.
Unfortunately, any legacy left by the male impersonator in African Amer-
ican minstrelsy and vaudeville is not as prevalent as white minstrelsy’s tragic
mulatta or the infantile black man. The theatrical legacy that minstrelsy has
left continues to require that the woman on stage—especially the black
woman—carry the fantasies of the social order. However, there have been
African American women performers who have taken on the act of double
inversion—restaging the bodies of the African American woman and man
through male impersonation. Consider Josephine Baker, who, in one famous
photograph, is tuxedoed, with top hat firmly and attractively placed to
complement her smile. In Phyllis Rose’s biography of Baker, the caption
attached to this picture is “No more bananas.” Rose refers to Baker’s famous
dance, in which the costume consisted solely of a skirt made of bananas,69
and she acknowledges in this caption a legacy of the African American male
impersonators. Baker, like her foresisters, chose to approach her sexuality on
her own terms, reforming and expanding the potential of her image through
her body beyond what the audience expected of her as an African American
woman on the popular stage.
If we return now to the historical moment of Jolly Joe’s Lady Minstrels, we
can see that, at the same time that this and many other amateur minstrel
guides were defining forreaders howto“beblack”byspeakinginanonsensical
dialect and by wearing fright wigs and burnt cork make-up, African Amer-
ican minstrels were showing audiences that minstrelsy was just a show, a
pretense, a performance of color and gender rather than a presence of African
American culture, even when performed by African Americans. White min-
strelsy came close to defining how the minstrelized black body should sound
and appear, but it did not succeed in its latent desire to contain and constrict.
This attempt to define the African American staged blackOtherwasthwarted
by the nuanced, rebellious, skilled, and, in the case of the African American
male and female impersonators, doubly inverted performances of restaging.
Ultimately, what African American minstrels created was a new form of

Black Minstrelsy and Double Inversion 187

theater based in the skills of the performers, not in their ability to conform
to stereotypes.

notes

1. Mrs. H. M. Silsbee and Mrs. J. B. Horne, Jolly Joe’s Lady Minstrels: Selections for
the “Sisters” (Boston: Walter H. Baker, 1893), 7.
2. Ibid., cover.
3. For the purposes of this chapter, blackface minstrelsy or minstrelsy is minstrelsy
performed by either whites or African Americans. White minstrelsy is minstrelsy
performed by whites, and black minstrelsy is minstrelsy performed by African Amer-
icans.
4. Frank Dumont, ed., The Witmark Amateur Minstrel Guide and Burnt Cork En-
cyclopedia (Chicago: M. Witmark, 1899), and Anon., The Boys of New York End Men’s
Joke Book (New York: Frank Tousey, 1902). For an in-depth discussion of the social
values contained in minstrel guides and other nineteenth- and twentieth-century
publications, see Brooks McNamara, “ ‘For Laughing Purposes Only’: TheLiterature
of American Popular Entertainment,” in The American Stage: Social and Economic Issues
from the Colonial Period to the Present, ed. Ron Engle and Tice L. Miller (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1993), 141–158.
5. Homi Bhabha, “The Other Question: Stereotype, Discrimination and the
Discourse of Colonialism,” in Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge,
1994), 66–84.
6. Sigmund Freud, “Jokes, Dreams and the Unconscious,” in Jokes and Their
Relation to the Unconscious, trans. James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1960), 179.
7. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, in Three Negro Classics, ed. John Hope
Franklin (New York: Avon, 1965), 221.
8. In the early twentieth century, Franz Boas put an end to the notion that there
exists racial hierarchy, noting that every race has its own variance of body types,
languages, and cultural production. See Roger Sanjek, “The Enduring Inequalities
of Race,” in Race, ed. Steven Gregory and Roger Sanjek, (New Brunswick, N.J.:
Rutgers University Press, 1994), 1–17.
9. See Robert C. Toll, “Social Commentary in Late Nineteenth-Century White
Minstrelsy,” in Toll, Blacking Up: The Minstrel Show in Nineteenth-Century America
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1974), reprinted in Inside the Minstrel Mask:
Readings in Nineteenth-Century Blackface Minstrelsy, ed. Annemarie Bean, James V.
Hatch, and Brooks McNamara (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press,
1996), 86–110.
10. Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 160.
11. The lyrics printed are from 1842, according to Lott 160. Lott also excerpts an
1848 version (160). An 1843 version of “Miss Lucy Long” appears in Hans Nathan,
“The Performance of the Virginia Minstrels,” in Dam Emmett and the Rise of Negro
Minstrelsy (Oklahoma City: University of Oklahoma Press, 1962), reprinted in Bean
et al. 38–39. Robert B. Winans notes the full lyrics of the 1842 version excerpted
by Lott in his article “Early Minstrel Show Music, 1843–1852,” in Musical Theatre
in America: Papers and Proceedings of the Conference on Musical Theatre in America, ed.
Glen Loney (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1984), reprinted in Bean et al. 151.
12. Lott 160.

188 Intersections of Race and Gender

 13. Laurence Senelick, “Boys and Girls Together: SubculturalOriginsofGlamour
Drag and Male Impersonation on the Nineteenth-Century Stage,” in Crossing the
Stage: Controversies on Cross-Dressing, ed. Lesley Ferris (London: Routledge, 1993), 90.
14. The novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin was adapted for the stage in hundreds of produc-
tions across the United States and around the world from the mid-1850s to the turn
of the century. See Thomas Riis, “The Music and Musicians in Nineteenth-Century
Productions of Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” in American Music 4, no. 3 (Fall 1986): 268–286.
15. Laurence Hutton, Curiosities of the American Stage (New York: Harper & Broth-
ers, 1891), 157. For a further description of female impersonation in Americanwhite
minstrelsy, see Annemarie Bean, “Transgressing the Gender Divide: The Female
Impersonator in Nineteenth-Century Blackface Minstrelsy,” in Bean et al. 245–256.
16. Joe Laurie, Jr., Vaudeville: From the Honky-Tonks to the Palace (New York:
Henry Holt, 1953), 93.
17. Susan Gubar, Racechanges: White Skin, Black Face in American Culture (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 45.
18. Ibid., 5.
19. “Early minstrelsy” is defined from the purported (as opposed to documented)
first minstrelsy performance of “Jumpin’ Jim Crow” by T. D. Rice c. 1828 to the
beginning of the Civil War in 1860. “Late minstrelsy” is defined as post–Civil War
minstrelsy. Both definitions are mine, culled from various sources, such as Lott, and
Toll.
20. See Marian Hannah Winter, “Juba and American Minstrelsy,” Dance Index 6
(1947), reprinted in Bean et al. 223–244; Eileen Southern, The Music of Black
Americans (New York: Norton, 1971), 4–24, 100–104, 259–270; Southern, “The
Georgia Minstrels: The Early Years,” Inter-American Music Review 10, no. 2 (1989),
reprinted in Bean et al. 163–175; Winans, 141–162; Mel Watkins, “Slavery,” in
Watkins, On the Real Side: Laughing, Lying, andSignifying—:TheUndergroundTradition
of African-American Humor (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994), 45–79; andRichard
Kislan, Hoofing on Broadway (New York: Prentice Hall, 1987), 12–23.
21. New York Clipper (31 July 1858): n.p.
22. Toll 195; Southern, Music of Black Americans, 259.
23. Tom Fletcher, 100 Years of the Negro in Show Business (New York: Burdge,
1954), 53.
24. Toll 219.
25. Thomas Riis, Just before Jazz: Black Musical Theatre in New York, 1890–1915
(Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1989), 6.
26. James Weldon Johnson, Black Manhattan (New York: Da Capo Press, 1991),
93.
27. John Graziano, “Sentimental Songs, Rags, and Transformations: The Emer-
gence of the Black Musical, 1895–1910,” unpublished manuscript, 211, possession
of the author.
28. New York Globe (3 May 1884): n.p.
29. Toll 205.
30. Riis 7–8.
31. Ibid., 9–10.
32. Ibid., 10.
33. Toll 251.
34. Toll 195–233; Henry T. Sampson, Blacks in Blackface: A Sourcebook on Early
Musical Shows (Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow, 1980), 1–20; Watkins 104–133; Riis 3–
28; Johnson 94–125; and Southern, Music of Black Americans, 259–270.

Black Minstrelsy and Double Inversion 189

 35. Esther Newton, Mother Camp: Female Impersonators in America (Chicago: Uni-
versity of Chicago Press, 1979), 5.
36. Most of the evidence I have found on Tribble is cited by Henry T. Sampson,
The Ghost Walks: A Chronological History of Blacks in Show Business, 1865–1910
(Metuchan, N.J.: Scarecrow Press), 1988, and Sampson, Black in Blackface. However,
serious questions have been raised as to the accuracy of Sampson’s newspaper and
broadside citations in terms of dates and issues. Wherever possible, I have double-
checked Sampson’s data; however, given the scope of his research, this has not always
been feasible. The questioning of Sampson’s work is not about the quotes, which are
probably accurate, but rather about exact dates and locations.
37. Sampson, Blacks in Blackface, 280.
38. Sampson, The Ghost Walks, 434.
39. Ibid.
40. Ibid., 394.
41. Riis 134.
42. Sampson, The Ghost Walks, 363.
43. Ibid., 394.
44. Bernard Peterson, Jr., A Century of Musicals in Black and White (Westport,
Conn.: Greenwood, 1993), 282.
45. Sampson, Blacks in Blackface, 436.
46. Watkins 20–21; 523–525.
47. Sampson, Blacks in Blackface, 4.
48. New York Clipper (12 Feb. 1910).
49. Sampson, The Ghost Walks, 245.
50. Ibid., 386.
51. Ibid., 445.
52. Eileen Southern, Biographical Dictionary ofAfro-AmericanandAfricanMusicians
(Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1982), 401.
53. Laurence Senelick, “The Evolution of the Male Impersonator on the
Nineteenth-Century Popular Stage,” Essays in Theatre 1, no. 1 (1982): 39–40.
54. Sampson, The Ghost Walks, 183.
55. Riis 12.
56. Peterson 136.
57. Fletcher 177; Sampson, Blacks in Blackface, 364.
58. Sampson, The Ghost Walks, 288.
59. Sampson, Blacks in Blackface, 366.
60. Mary Mace Spradling, In Black and White: Supplement (Detroit: Gale Research,
1985), 162.
61. Langston Hughes and Milton Meltzer, Black Magic: A Pictorial History of the
Negro in American Entertainment (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1967), 73.
62. See Richard Newman, “ ‘The Brightest Star’: Aida Overton Walker in the
Age of Ragtime and Cakewalk,” Prospects: An Annual of American Cultural Studies 18
(1993): 465–481; and David Krasner, “Rewriting the Body: Aida Overton Walker
and the Social Formation of Cakewalking,” Theatre Survey 37, no. 2 (Nov. 1996): 67–
92.
63. Newman 466–467.
64. Riis 113–124.
65. Ibid., 117.
66. Ann Charters, Nobody: The Story of Bert Williams (New York: Macmillan,
1970), 123. Aida Walker began performing her husband’s role in Bandanna Land in

190 Intersections of Race and Gender

early 1909, during the Williams and Walker Company’s second New England tour.
George Walker grew ill during the tour and never recovered. He died in 1911. Aida
performed “Bon-Bon Buddy” for approximately three months, from February to
April.
67. Eric Ledell Smith, Bert Williams: A Biography of the Pioneer Black Comedian
(Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 1992), 165–166.
68. Senelick, “Evolution of the Male Impersonator,” 30–44.
69. Phyllis Rose, Jazz Cleopatra: Josephine Baker in Her Time (New York: Double-
day, 1989), 97.

Black Minstrelsy and Double Inversion 191

 10

Black Salome
Exoticism, Dance, and Racial Myths

‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘
david krasner

[The black female] is there to entertain guests with the naked

image of Otherness. They are not to look at her as a whole human
being. They are to notice only certain parts. Objectified in a
manner similar to that of black female slaves who stood on the
auction blocks while owners and overseers described their
important, salable parts, the black women whose naked bodies
were displayed for whites at social functions had no presence. They
were reduced to mere spectacle. Little is known of their lives, their
motivations. Their body parts were offered as evidence to support
racist notions that black people were more akin to animals than
other humans.1

Absence and Presence in Early Modern Black Dance

Though black women played a pivotal role in the development of modern
choreography, dance scholars have largely ignored their contributions.Roger
Copeland, for instance, maintains that the “founding mothers” of modern
dance are a corps of elite white dancers: Isadora Duncan, Loı̈e Fuller, Ruth
St–Denis, Doris Humphrey,andMarthaGraham.2 HelenThomasaddsMaud
Allen to the pantheon of “major forerunners of American modern dance,”3
and Elizabeth Dempster identifies Duncan, Fuller, St–Denis, and Allen as
choreographers who developed “a decisive and liberating break with the
principles and forms of the European ballet.”4 According to Jane Desmond,
St–Denis, Fuller, and Duncan are “always cited” as “the three ‘mothers’ of
modern dance,”5 while Mark Franko affirms the popular idea that Duncan
was the “founding mother” of modern dance, responsible for the “organic
society” that challenged the “Victorian experience of female culture.”6

192
 Notwithstanding their accomplishments, labeling early twentieth-
century white dancers alone as the “founding mothers” of modern choreog-
raphy is a limited view. By ignoring, among others, Dora Dean, Josephine
Baker, Katherine Dunham, Florence Mills, Judith Jamison, and Pearl Pri-
mus, African American women are barred from the historical record. Yet the
evidence is unequivocal: black women contributedsignificantlytotheorigins
of modern dance. Lewis Erenberg maintains that during the early twentieth
century, social dance, which originated in black communities, “began mak-
ing [its] way out of . . . special enclaves and into upper-middle-class life.”7
In addition to social dancing, black women, as this essay will demonstrate,
also choreographed “classical” modern dance.
Despite the fact that black Americans, as Ann Douglas asserts, “have
contributed more to popular culture in proportion to their numbers than
white Americans,”8 black female choreographers have received little atten-
tion. The absence of black women in dance historiography comes as no
surprise; Brenda Dixon Gottschild observes that the “historical, systematic
denial and invisibilization of the Africanist presence in American culture”
have extended itself into virtually every field.9 Thomas DeFrantz asserts that,
for black dancers, the absence of attention to African American performances
has “contributed to the historical displacement of dance created by African-
American[s].”10 Katrina Hazzard-Gordon similarly laments the exclusion of
black contributions, saying that despite a sizable body of literature on dance,
“none of it has focused on the sociohistorical context from which African-
American secular social dance has emerged.”11
It is not my intention to dwell on the reasons for the paucity of black female
representation in dance historiography, although a lengthy treatment of this
topic would surely deepen our understanding of how and why black women
came to be excluded.12 Here, I will examine the significance of Aida Overton
Walker’s Salome performances in 1908 and 1912. In examining Walker’s
choreography, we shall discover how Walker negotiated her creativitywithin
a complex period. Rooted in her choreography is the expression of the black
woman’s struggle, a struggle to gain control over her representations by
adapting, absorbing, andchallengingtheprevailingstereotypesoftheperiod.
Neither Walker’s choreography nor her response to stereotypic caricatures
were uniform; however, investigating how Walker dealt with the slippery
slope of identity and subjectivity will, I hope, prove revealing.

Modernism, Primitivism, and Black Dance

Why do they see a colored woman only as a gross collection of desires, all
uncontrolled, reaching out for their Apollos and the Quasimodos with
avid indiscrimination?13
During the 1910s, dance enjoyed enormous popularity. Lewis Erenberg
observes that, during this period, the increase of dances “with such exuber-

Exoticism, Dance, and Racial Myths 193

antly unpretentious names as the turkey trot, Texas tommy, bunny hug,
monkey hug, lame duck, fox trot, and tango” helped to give social dancing
“the appearance of a mania.”14 Ann Wagner adds that changes in urban life
and class distinctions “fostered the unprecedented popularity of dancing
between 1910 and 1914.” Working-class women and men, Wagner main-
tains, “tended to frequent the new public dance halls, and members of the
middle and upper classes enjoyed the growth of cabarets after 1910.”15
Despite the racism of the time, enthusiasm for dance encouraged whites to
look to black culture for examples of modern choreography.
Asa resultof both theemerginginterestindanceandtheriseofstereotyping
of blacks during the early twentieth century, black culture took shape as a
resistance to and appropriation of racism. According to Mark Reid, black
culture has surfaced “within and around the competing tensions,” which
yielded the desire “to appropriate, negotiate, andresistmainstreamAmerican
and European cultures.”16 In his designation of Booker T. Washington as
“the quintessential herald of modernism in black expressive culture” circa
1895, Houston A. Baker, Jr., maintains that Washington maneuvered
through Jim Crowism and racist stereotyping by “crafting a voice out of tight
places.”17 The notions of “competing tensions” and “tight places” were cer-
tainly applicable to the conditions facing black female modern dancers, who
had to contend with a host of stereotypes. K. Sue Jewell avers that culturally
induced images of black women as mammy or jezebel “are at the very foun-
dation of the problem of African American women’s limited access to societal
resources and institutions.”18 In her 1925 contribution to The New Negro,
Elise Johnson McDougald makes the point clear: black women, she observes,
realize “the shadow” that looms over them; instead of signifiers indicating
African American beauty, “the grotesque images” of Aunt Jemimas on street-
car advertisements, she says, “proclaim only an ability to serve, without grace
of loveliness.”19 For black women dancers, the deck was clearly stacked:
stereotypes often prevented them from enjoying success even during a period
of newfound interest in dance. Notions of sexuality in dance worked to
reinforce the negative image of black women as primitive and inferior.
Historically, black people were bartered on the auction block as specimens
of “primitive” physicality. This attitude of display and fascination did not
recede following the demise of slavery; blacks continued to be mythologized
as hyperlascivious and sexually debased.20 In addition to minstrelsyandwhite
folklore depicting black males as sexual predators and black females as per-
missive, stereotyping gained further ground during the late nineteenth cen-
tury as Anglo-Europeans put more stock in the social sciences of the time.
Art historian Richard Powell reminds us that, for white ethnographers of the
late nineteenth century, the inferior status of black peoples in the Western
hemisphere was evidence that “all blacks were cut from the same coarse
‘biologically-determined’ cloth.”21
At the turn of the century, social Darwinism found a new way of packaging
racism. It was argued that a duality in human species pitted (advanced) white
civilization against (primitive) people of color. For ethnologists, Western

194 Intersections of Race and Gender

advances in science and technology suggested that other races were still
clinging to a primitive past. According to Colin Rhodes, “By insidious
reasoning, tribal societies were often not even credited as emerging civili-
zations, but as evolutionary cul-de-sac, arrested in their development at some
nebulous point in the past, at once contemporary and ancient.” As a conse-
quence, African Americans could be viewed as “the sociological ‘missing
link,’ preserved, living examples of the ‘childhood of humanity.’ ”22 Primi-
tivism began to represent a number of aesthetic and cultural myths—de-
monism, fauvism, masks, voodoo, cannibalism, exoticism, eroticism—
which evoked images of unrestrained sexuality, wildness, and passion. Build-
ing largely on Enlightenment and, specifically, Rousseauian celebrations of
the natural innocence of the “noble savage,” racial ideology gained further
prominence in the early twentieth century owing to the rise of what Marianna
Torgovnick calls the “primitive trope.” According to Torgovnick, the so-
called primitive is represented as a series of childlike tropes, a combination
of our wild selves and subconscious forces, which are “libidinous, irrational,
violent, dangerous.”23 Primitive peoples were allegedly in tune with nature’s
harmony. The primitive trope allowed for the reduction of black culture to
either inferiority or idealization; primitives may be childlike and violent,
but they may also be “noble savages.” Hayden White emphasizes the point
when he states:
Savages were either a breed of super animals (similar to dogs, bears, or
monkeys), which would account for their violation of human taboos and
their presumed physical superiority to men; or they were a breed of degen-
erate men (descendants of the lost tribes of Israel or a race of men rendered
destitute of reason and moral sense by the effects of harsh climate).24
Either way, people of color were caught in a culturally manufactured double
bind, relegated to the lowest rung of the evolutionary ladder, yet looked to
as a source of visceral entertainment as well.
Despite negative stereotyping, primitives were thought to enjoy a closer
relationship to subconscious impulses, childish innocence, and sexuality. In
an increasingly mechanized world, primitivism, rooted in simple “nature,”
offered an alternative to urban life. Primitivism emerged as a reaction to an
increasing alienation from an industrialized world, what Robert Coles and
Diane Isaacs call a “cultivating primitivism,” which served as an alternative
“to modern technological society,” which shaped the primitivist cult into
“artistic themes, images, and symbols.”25 Primitivism supported artists and
social theorists who attemptedtoinculcatesimplevaluestoaculturesuffering
from industrialization and dehumanization. This led to a “fetishization” of
the primitive: primitivism’s relation to the supposed early evolutionary
stages of human development afforded Western culture a sense of superiority
to other groups while simultaneously observing the roots of evolution. Ac-
cording to Harold Isaacs, white ethnographers, despairing over the lack of
“nobility” in modern white civilizations, began to search for it in “primitive
black savagery.” But there was more underlying their motives: a reach for

Exoticism, Dance, and Racial Myths 195

what Isaacs calls the “primeval mysteries, the jungle depths,” and “the Freud-
ian ‘id’ personified in the naked black man in his natural state and setting.”26
Jeffrey Weeks underscores the hypersexuality embedded in primitivism,
maintaining that sexuality presented the black person “as lower down the
evolutionary scale than the white: closer to the origins of the human race;
closer, that is, to nature.” As a consequence, the attraction of the primitive,
Weeks maintains, was based on a “subliminal feeling that the people there
were indefinably freer of the constraints of civilization.”27
During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, primitivism
offered whites an alternative to puritanical mores. If American Victorians of
the 1870s and 1880s delineated societies as either civilized or savage and
divided races according to black and white, then American modernists of the
early twentieth century enjoyed the distinction by exoticizing blacks. Prim-
itivism evolved into myth, often referred to as Orientalism, with the common
thread being the symbolically sexualized representation of the nonwhite
body. Sander Gilman’s essay on theiconography offemalesexualitymaintains
that the perception of the prostitute “merged with the perception of the
black” and that this perception created the “commonplace” notion that the
so-called primitive black woman “was associatedwithunbridledsexuality.”28
African American women symbolized the exotic, erotic, and sexually lasciv-
ious. For many white men, they represented an image of foreignness and a
“colorful” panacea for an overworked, over-industrialized culture looking to
spend its disposable income on entertainment.
The vertical arrangement of ethnicities—whites on top, others on the
bottom—created as a part of new taxonomies, was not only demeaning, but
it allegedly placed blacks closer to impulse, spontaneity, and nature. In 1930,
psychologist Carl Jung warned that the “inferior man exercises a tremendous
pull upon civilized beings who are forced to live with him, because he
fascinates the inferior layers of our psyche, which has lived through untold
ages of similar conditions.” As Jung put it, to “our subconscious mind contact
with primitives recalls not only our childhood, but also our prehistory.” He
goes on to say that it “would not be difficult to see that the Negro, with his
primitive motility, his expressive emotionality, his childlike immediacy, his
sense of music and rhythm, his funny and picturesque language, has infected
American behavior.”29
By the twentieth century, primitivism became a catchall phrase defining
blacks. Not only were African Americans identified with primitivism, but
the implication was that primitivism was an artistic attribute. The notion
emerged that black writers, performers, and artists were “real,” capable of
expressing a racial uniqueness that incorporated authenticity, amateurism,
and primitivism. The combination of alleged authenticity and primitivism
validated the abilities and talents of African Americans. By the 1910s, the
amalgamation of amateurism, primitivism, and atavism into a unified con-
cept of black art, literature, and performance took root; by the 1920s and
1930s it became conventional wisdom. Black people were perceived to have
greater access to the subconscious, behave more “authentically,” and were

196 Intersections of Race and Gender

more in touch with their spiritual and sensual nature than whites. No matter
how manipulative and misleading, the alleged validity of these ideas afforded
some African American artists and performers an opportunity to take advan-
tage of the situation. For many, primitivism provided an entry into main-
stream culture. Left with little choice but to conform to inaccurate and
exaggerated representations or be denied opportunities, some black artists,
writers, and performers accentuated the so–called jungle rhythms of black
art in order to accommodate the demands of their white audiences. White
patrons, eager to associate with what they perceived to be the “real thing,”
paid for black entertainment. For black women, the problem of sexism added
to the racism of the time, making it difficult for black female artists to find
creative outlets that went beyond the limitations of stereotyping.
The assumption that black women are “primitive”—sexually obsessed and
erotically out of control—is undoubtedly a canard. The falsification involves
the attempt to subordinate racial groups for controlling purposes. In response
to primitivism, the black middle class eschewed depictions ofblacksexuality.
The early twentieth century began as a period of “racial uplift,” in which the
black middle class, among other things, forged a campaign against erotic
displays. Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham explains that, given their limited
access to educational and income opportunities, many black women at the
time “linked mainstream domestic duties, codes of dress, sexual conduct,
and public etiquette with both individual success and group progress.”30
Club movements, church organizations, and other middle-class collectives
during the early twentieth century developed what Hazel Carby calls the
“policing” of the black woman’sbody, arejectionofanyindicationofsexuality
in favor of self-restraint ethics, social service, and church participation. Ac-
cording to Carby, “the denial of desire and the repression of sexuality”became
commonplace for many black writers and intellectuals during the early
twentieth century.31 Kevin Gaines notes that the racial uplift ideals of the
time were presented as a form of cultural politics “in the hope that unsym-
pathetic whites would relent and recognize the humanity of middle-class
African Americans.”32 Showered with sexual and racial stereotypes, black
women campaigned for respectability and moral authority. For example in
1904, Fannie Barrier Williams wrote that the black woman’s “grave respon-
sibility” to maintain bourgeois respectability was essential because “the
Negro is learning that the things that our women are doing come first in the
lessons of citizenship; that there will never be an unchallenged vote, a re-
spected political power, or an unquestioned claim to position of influence
and importance, until the present stigma is removed from the home and the
women of the race.”33 We see, then, that black female dancersfacedadditional
prejudices fostered by bourgeois values within the black community itself.
Yet, however much primitivism carried the stamp of inferiority, the prim-
itive trope was also used by many to promote an aesthetic. No excuses will
be ventured on behalf of primitivism; it was part of a racist ideology and
must be seen as such, contributing to a mendacious epistemology of racial
identity. Moreover, dancing’s eroticism, which is fostered by the male gaze,

Exoticism, Dance, and Racial Myths 197

adds to the already reified and objectified female body. Luce Irigaray reminds
us that investment in the gaze “is not privileged among women as it is among
men.” For Irigaray, “The eye [L’oeil], more than the other senses, objectifies
and masters.” Given the ability of the gaze to distance and control, the
“predominance of the gaze [du regard] over smell, taste, touch, sound, has
brought about an impoverishment of corporeal relations.”34 By objectifying
women, the gaze enables the dominant society to turn sexuality into a com-
modity. Black women once again become bartered flesh to be observed and
mastered.
Still, it is important to understand the significance of primitivism. Simply
put, since black women were mythologized as oversexed, many white and
black males were attracted to their stage performances. Many dancers, black
and white, exploited the notion of “fetishized” sexuality to varying degrees
for commercial gain. The fact that certain performers took advantage of
prevailing ideas can neither be ignored nor absolutely condemned. Those
living in communities and circumstances where biases restrict advancement
cannot always depend on the ethical high ground for sustenance; to survive,
oppressed people often realize that only a diverse and sometimes compro-
mising mode of existence can offer the hope of material subsistence. It is easy
to dismiss dancers who capitalized on primitivism as exploitative by their
capitulation to racist neologisms; it is more difficult to accept the fact that
the oppressed must often turn adverse conditions to their advantage. Hazel
Carby observes that thereis “a touchinessamongfeministsaboutrepresenting
black women as complex.” For Carby, “[P]eople are happier if you portray
[black women] as morally superior because of suffering or victimization.”
But in doing so, Carby asserts, feminist scholars “deny their complexity,
their dangerousness, their refusal to be policed.”35 This is not to say that
critiques of primitivism are invalid. Instead, critiques ought to be broad
enough to include observations on how oppressed people made innovative
use of the narrow frames allotted them.
Caught between competing urges to express creativity and to thwart the
stereotype, black female choreographers were simultaneously under scrutiny
for their erotic movements and under pressure to choreograph according to
the current vogue. It is perhaps for this reason that Josephine Baker, rejecting
American morality, departed for Europe. Wendy Martin points out that once
Baker arrived in Paris in the 1920s, she secured her status by creating a danse
sauvage, which “played with the paradigm of the black exotic.”36 Free from
Puritan morality, Baker exploited a European primitivism that was no less
racist; it was simply less inhibited. Baker was not, however, the first chore-
ographer to come to grips with the primitive trope. Aida Walker not only
endured the idea of primitivism in America; she continued to choreograph
within an American cultural framework replete with racial codes. Walker
negotiated a minefield of representations while simultaneously developing a
unique choreography.

198 Intersections of Race and Gender

 “Barefoot Classical Dancer” and
Middle-Class Respectability

It took a long time for the disreputable creativity of black artists to climb
down from the plinth of primitivism and natural spontaneity and win a
different status as modern art.37

Aida Overton Walker’s objective was to lift black women’s choreography

into the modern world. At a time when black women were compelled to rein
in their expectations and bridle their imaginations, Aida (sometimes spelled
Ada) Walker (1880–1914) did the opposite. During her career she made her
presence felt in several ways: she was an accomplished cakewalker, teaching
the cakewalk to elite, white society; she established herself as the highest
paid and most popular female actress, singer, and dancer of the Williams and
Walker vaudeville company; she choreographed all of the Williams and
Walker shows, including In Dahomey (1902–1905), Abyssinia (1905–1907),
and Bandanna Land (1907–1909); and she was considered one of thebrightest
stars on the vaudeville stage. Despite the overwhelming presence of the male
stars in her company—the famous comedian Bert Williams and her husband,
George Walker—she managed to gain recognition as a consummate per-
former during the first decade of the twentieth century.38
Walker sought recognition as a consummate choregrapher, and to this end
she joined the Salome craze, the vogue of choreography based on the biblical
story. Percival Pollard of the New York Times dubbed the craze itself “Salo-
mania.”39 Popularized in the United States and Europe by white dancers
during the early twentieth century, the Salome dance enjoyed great success.
By adding it to the Williams and Walker production of Bandanna Land Aida
Walker challenged the accepted notion that only white women could dance
the modern “classics.” Nevertheless, she had tosuppress theeroticcomponent
of her dancing. As a result, her choreography, although notable for its grace,
was also known for its propriety. Walker had to be especially careful not to
offend black audiences, while she simultaneously refused to succumb entirely
to prudery. She affected the bourgeois norms of good taste, which meant she
submitted her costume to a regime of concealment and restraint. Yet, she
also wore exotic and provocative costumes frequently attributed to modern
white dancers. As a well–known member of the Harlem community, Walker
was likely to be under considerable pressure to conform to a middle–class
society caught up in social propriety and racial uplift, while simultaneously
she felt compelled to join her fellow white female dancers by presenting her
version of “Salomania.” The cultural influences that informed her perfor-
mance exerted considerable and contradictory pressures, creating a unique
style, which, as the following reviews will reveal, might have been misinter-
preted as obtuse. On the one hand, she stressed the abstract, hiding her
sexuality and casting off the visibility of her body. On the other hand, she
emphasized the sensual and exotic, which puts the body in full view. Her

Exoticism, Dance, and Racial Myths 199

dance probably changed often, given the improvisatory nature of her work,
the touring circuit she followed, and the demands of each city and town she
performed in. Some cities had strict puritanical codes of conduct while others
loosened restrictions. The rising imposition of Jim Crow laws also made
performing a complicated affair; some cities she toured had lax racial restric-
tions while others imposed strict curfews and boundaries for African Amer-
icans. In other words, sometimes her expressions of sexuality were fully
conveyed, while at other times a more modest approach was required. The
racial and sexual codes of each city compounded for Walker the difficulties
involved in the dance.
Beginning in 1908, versions of the Salome dance were performed through-
out New York. Current Literature reported in October 1908 that there were
“no less than twenty-four vaudeville dancers in New York alone who give
their interpretation of the daughter of Herodias, and from the Empire City
the Salome epidemic is spreading over the rest of the country.”40 Around the
turn of the century, the popular figure of Salome epitomized the inherent
sensuality and, according to some, perversity of women. Bram Dijkstrawrites
that Salome became the image “of women as serpents, as brute nature’s virgin
dancer,” whose only reason for existence “lay in the movements of the arms,
the legs, of the supple body and the muscular loins, born indefinitely from a
visible source, the very center of dance.”41 According to Ewa Kuryluk,Salome
represented the archetype “of a terrible femininity and fin-de-siècle femme
fatale,” but her representation also symbolized “the obscure paradoxes of
unconscious desires and fears.”42 For many fin-de-siècle artists, writes Fran-
çoise Meltzer, Salome symbolized both “the virgin and the devouress.”43
Salome’s popularity was closely tied to what Megan Becker-Leckrone calls
the “myth’s textual genealogy,” in which Salome denoted “the conventional
notion of fetishism which surrounds the Decadent femme fatale.”44 Elaine
Showalter raises the significant point that Salome was an important figure in
the history of dance because women who danced the role found themselves
“conflated with Salome in the public mind and condemned for lasciviousness
and perversity.”45 Once marked as a Salome dancer, the performer had a
difficult time shedding her association with the role.
In addition, Walker had to contend with a parody of her Salome dance by
her co-star, Bert Williams, in the same show. Williams viewed the Salome
craze as an opportunity in Bandanna Land to burlesque the dance, cross–
dressing and imitating the gestures commonly associated with the chore-
ography. This was intended to add levity to the show, but it also had the
effect of undermining the seriousness of Walker’s intent. Still, Walker in-
troduced her version of Salome in 1908, working it into Bandanna Land.
Despite the implications of her Salome as both femme fatale and primitive,
Walker likely considered the dance as the perfect opportunity to align herself
with both modern dance and highbrow art. It was highly unusual for a black
Broadway show to include modern dance, but Walker was determined to
position herself within the establishment of white female modern dancers.

200 Intersections of Race and Gender

 Critical responses to Walker’s Salome were predictably mixed. The fact that
she was a black woman dancing a provocative character probably influenced
Walker to downplay the erotic, or so it would appear, judging from the
reviews of her choreography which emphasized her modest costume, lack of
vulgarity, and gracefulness. According to black theater critic Lester A. Wal-
ton, Walker’s Salome costume and dance music “all come up to expectation,
but in comparison with some of the other dancers Miss Walker’s interpre-
tation showed to a disadvantage.” For Walton, white choreographers“danced
more with their body” than Walker, and this, he notes, led them to be more
“vulgar.” Walton praised Walker’s “desire to make ‘Salome’ a cleaner dance
and void of suggestiveness, but in so doing she gives a version that is mild in
comparison.”46 Perhaps because of her restraint, Walker chose to emphasize
the dramatic elements over the suggestive in her choreography. For example,
one reviewer remarked that in Walker’s 1908 version of Salome, the
feet began to move, and the arms to sway, and the limbs to portray the
passion of motion. And suddenly, at the height of the mad, intoxicating
dance, a curtain was drawn and a ray of light fell on the head of the Baptist.
The effect was electric, and so was the vision of the head for the dance. It
struck her wild joy as with a blight, crushed her consciousness of power
and flung her to the ground in defeat.47
In the 1908 version (figure 10.1),48 her persona is audacious, with her hair
projecting an African style and her dress bejeweled and spangled. Her ap-
pearance in Boston (figure 10.2),49 suggests a similar approach: exoticjewelry
and defiant stance. At least one Boston reviewer was particularly struck by
Walker’s creative interpretation and, at the same time, the modesty of her
costume. Walker, the reviewer reports, “does not handle the gruesome head,
she does not rely solely upon the movements of the body, and her dress is not
so conspicuous by its absence.” The reviewer praised Walker for “the fact
that she acts the role of ‘Salome’ as well as dances it. Her face is unusually
mobile and she expresses through its muscles the emotions which the body
is also interpreting, thus making the character of the biblical dancer life-
like.”50 Another reviewer commented on Walker’s modest costume, writing
at the time that her dance “is a very properly draped Salome, but the dance
is interesting because of the rare grace and skill of the performer.”51 Still,
another critic emphasized Walker’s restraint, noting:
Miss Walker’s Salome is something like the others, being more modest,
but quite as meaningless. Grace it has in abundance, but most of the
weirdness and barbaric grandeur is supplied by the trap man of the or-
chestra, who beats with vigor upon what we assume to be a large dishpan.
There are a few wild figures, and much is made of the sinuous parade which
most dancers conceive to have been characteristic of the foul-minded
daughter of Herodias, but there is nothing of the hoocha-ma-cooch effect
which adds a suggestion of sensuality to the exhibitions of other Salomes.52

Exoticism, Dance, and Racial Myths 201

Figure 10.1 Walker’s 1908 version of Salome, from a drawing by the artist Moe
Zayas in the New York World (30 Aug. 1908), metropolitan section, p. 2. Also
found in the Williams and Walker file, Billy Rose Theatre Collection, New York
Public Library at Lincoln Center, Astor, Lenox, Tilden Foundation.

It is clear from the caricature by Moe Zayas, the photograph, and the reviews
that Walker wanted a Salome that was more dramatic but less erotic than her
contemporaries.
In considering Walker’s second, 1912 version of Salome (figure 10.3),53 a
comparison can be usefully made between Walker and one contemporary,
Isadora Duncan. Although Duncan has received considerableattention,Wal-
ker, who continually broke new ground in choreography, has not. Like
Duncan, Walker saw herself as a modern classical dancer in a quest for
innovative ways of using her body to express her creativity. It is also likely
that Duncan’s presence in the United States influenced Walker. In her essay
“Reconsidering Isadora Duncan and the Male Gaze,” Ann Daly writes that,
when Isadora Duncan “toured America in 1908, 1909, and 1911, her repu-
tation as the ‘Barefoot Classical Dancer’ had preceded her from Europe.”54

202 Intersections of Race and Gender

Figure 10.2 Walker’s appearance in Boston, circa Sept. 1908. Clipping file
(1908), Billy Rose Theatre Collection, New York Public Library at Lincoln Center,
Astor, Lenox, Tilden Foundation.

203
Figure 10.3 Walker’s 1912 version of Salome, from a drawing in Lester A.
Walton, “Miss Walker in Salome,” New York Age (8 Aug. 1910): 6. Artist
unknown.

Daly maintains that, whatever audience expectations of Duncan there were,

“they were confounded by [Duncan’s] actual performance” and her resistance
to current conventions.55 Daly asserts that “Duncan was one of America’s
first self-made women. She was constantly re-imagining herself, bothonstage
and in her interviews.”56
Much the same can be said of Aida Walker. Before Duncan became famous,
Walker re–imagined herself from vaudeville star to cakewalker, and from
actress to modern dancer. She was, in fact, a self-made woman at a time when
black women had neither power nor agency. Yet she found ways to express
her creativity. Her dance, for example, was less entertainment (showing off

204 Intersections of Race and Gender

her legs, for instance), and more artistry. Rather than emphasizing the show
of body parts, Walker sought to convey her imagination and emotional
conviction as an expression of her aesthetic values and artistic ideas. As the
drawing of her 1912 Salome choreography shows, Walker, like Duncan, was
a “barefoot classical dancer” dressed in a loose-fitting outfit, projecting her
swaying arms and feet lightly and with grace. Walker executed her second
version in flowing movements in which improvisation and spontaneous
emotions were marked features. From the drawings and photographs we can
see a departure from her 1908 version. By 1912 she was free of the presence
of Bert Williams, who parodied her performance and undermined her inter-
pretation, and she was free of the Williams and Walker Company in general.
Since the death of her husband George Walker in 1911, Aida Walker was
on her own, performing solo acts that toured throughout the country. After
appearing in Bob Cole’sproductionofTheRedMoon(1909–1910)andnursing
her husband during the final year of his life, Walker traveled the United
States singing, dancing, and performing comedy. By 1912, she revised her
Salome dance, making it the unique feature of her one–woman show. The
1912 image portrays her as light, airy, and energetic. Her hands areexpressive
and her body appears to be in fluid motion. Her costume was similar to the
outfits worn by Isadora Duncan—a chemise that flowed—but it also covered
much of her body, unlike that of other Salomes. It is conceivable that Walker
was attempting to imitate Duncan’s performance while adding her own,
considerably more modest, interpretation. In Walker’s second version, she
appears to be rising into the air, in contrast to an earth-oriented, knees-bent,
hip-centered choreography of her first version. Her lithe body conveys poise
and passion.
Walker clearly crafted her interpretations: the 1908 version incorporates
the garish jewelry and Jewish emblems bound up with Salome’s biblical
representation, while the 1912 image represents Walker in modern dance
costume and gesture. In all her representations, there is an impression of
individuality and awareness of the current scene; she is presenting her own
version of Salome, while simultaneously incorporating the interpretations of
white dancers. Her dance created a hybrid aesthetic, influenced by race,
gender, and current fashion.
Despite Walker’s efforts to gain acceptance, her choreography was paid
little attention at the time. The reasons have to do with race and emanate not
just from the usual expected sources but also from her fellow dancers. White
choreographers, particularly Isadora Duncan, deliberately designed their
choreography antithetically to the so-called primitivism of black dancers.
For example, in her autobiography, Duncan claimed that black jazz rhythm
“expresses the primitive savage” and that “the ape-like convulsions of the
Charleston,” like the “inane coquetry of the ballet, or the sensual convulsion
of the Negro,” are antithetical to the noblest forms of dance.57 Elsewhere
Duncan notes that, if America had adopted her school and theoriesofdancing,
“this deplorable modern dancing, which has its roots in the ceremonies of
the African primitive, could never have become dominant.”58 By incorpo-

Exoticism, Dance, and Racial Myths 205

rating the popular dance of Salome into her repertoire, Walker may have been
seeking an artistic response appropriate to her white contemporaries.
For several modern choreographers, Salome represented modern dance. By
dancing Salome, Walker sought the legitimacy that a modernist aesthetics
might offer. In the summer of 1912, after a sixteen-week tourofhervaudeville
show across the Midwest, she returned to New York, where impresario Oscar
Hammerstein offered her the opportunity to reappear in the role of Salome at
his Victoria Theatre on Broadway. In a review titled “Victoria’s Show Pleases
Crowds,” Robert Speare reported that Walker “is the only colored artist who
has ever been known to give this dance in public.” Walker, he said, “fully
lives up to expectations and gives a graceful and interesting version of the
dance.”59 Variety was less complementary; criticizing Walker for turning her
Salome into a social Tommy dance, the reviewer reported that the “setting
looked real nice, and the music was really pleasant, but Miss Walker isn’t
going to do herself any good coming into Hammerstein’s as ‘Salome’ with
the dance she has been doing for the past couple of years.”60 Commenting on
her performance, Stage Pictorial noted that Walker may have been influenced
by Duncan and others when it reported that Walker “shows that she had
studied the part and perhaps had also seen several other women in it. She was
good without being great.”61 Vanity Fair published a précis to Walker’s 1912
production that identified her “pantherine movements” as having “all the
languorous grace which is traditionally bound up with Orient dancing.”62
The reference to “Orient dancing” reflected the popularity of Orientalism,
which was in vogue as symbolic of exoticism, otherness, and mystery.63 One
reviewer went so far as to consider Walker’s Salome a revival of ragtime. A
“ragtime Salome” by “Miss Aida Overton Walker,” reported the New York
Herald, is the result of “the characteristic dance of her race.” Judging from
the applause, the reviewer wrote, “the revival pleased the spectators”:
Miss Walker was most effective in her dance when thecurtainrose,showing
her in Oriental costume standing at the top of a short flight of steps. She
was graceful and wore her costume well.64
Walker danced in Broadway theaters and major theatrical playhouses
throughout the United States. Although there are no extant playbills of her
1912 performance of Salome at Hammerstein’s Victoria Theatre, the produc-
tion was probably attended by a crowd eager to witness her interpretation of
the sophisticated modern dance. The performance referred to a biblical tale,
and Walker’s dancing attempted to express a story, a plot, and an aesthetic
representation commonly found among modern choreographers of the time.

Creating Dance out of Patchwork Quilts

History is more than the accumulation of new data and facts. It is not
enough to simply add a few black women to the existing story and stir.65

206 Intersections of Race and Gender

Walker sought recognition as achoreographer.Atatimewhenblackwomen’s
expectations were severely limited, Walker knew what she wanted and set
out to obtain it. Because of the multifarious influences on their work, she
developed her choreography in patchwork fashion, borrowing elements from
white dancers, drawing on vaudeville and black traditions of dance, and
fusing these together, always with a combination of instinct, reflection, and
meticulousness. Every gesture she incorporated into her choreography had
double, sometimes triple meanings, and she not only had to weigh the
significance of these meanings but also had to consider their ramifications
for the image of black women collectively.
The complexities that black women faced have been summed up by Mae
Henderson, who writes that, through “the multiple voices that enunciate her
complex subjectivity, the black woman writer [and dancer] not only speaks
familiarly in the discourse of the other(s), but as Other she is in contestorial
dialogue with the hegemonic dominant and subdominant or ‘ambiguously
(non)hegemonic’ discourses.”66 Walker was in contestorial dialogue with the
dominant society’s established expectations and her desire for creative ex-
pression. She chafed against the limitations imposed upon her and sought
ways to circumvent, resist, and defy convention. She dared to dance what was
the domain of white dancers, crossing the racial divide and with it coura-
geously encountering all the dangers such crossings implied. Walker strug-
gled against the constant imposition of being the Other: the “black” Isadora
Duncan, the objectified sexual object, and the marginalized dancer unrecog-
nized by both peers and critics. As a black female dancer, she remained on
the outside.
Yet Walker did not passively accept the limitations that society sought to
impose upon her; she fought for legitimacy and the right to perform. She
expressed her creativity definitively. In so doing, Walker developed ways of
manipulating cultural conventions, what Elizabeth Fox-Genovese calls a
manipulation of language and gesture by which black women “speak in a
double tongue, simultaneously associating themselves with and distancing
themselves from the dominant models of respectability.”67 Walker’s career
is located in the specificities of the representation of black women’s sexuality
at the time. She expressed herself in a “double tongue,” fearlessly exploiting
the notions of primitivism and the exotic; but, for her, there was also the
importance of being taken seriously as an artist. Vaudeville actor and writer
Salem Tutt Whitney knew Walker and in 1920, six years after her death, he
wrote the following eulogy:

Aida Overton Walker was one of the brightest, sweetest, most loveable,
sagacious, talented and intelligent women who ever graced the ranks of
show business. By force of ability, diligent study, strenuous work, tenacity
of purpose and an almost superfluity of talent, she climbed to the top–
most rung of the theatrical ladder, without a white or colored peer in her
line. And then, she ran afoul of the color line. . . . Where her white sisters

Exoticism, Dance, and Racial Myths 207

 flourished she was not permitted to lead, nor would she condescend to
follow.68
Walker sought to enter the master’s house, as it were, of high-brow art and
reinvent that art from her own perspective. Despite the lack of recognition
and the paucity of raw data, Walker’s contribution to modern choreography
is significant.

notes

1. bell hooks, “Selling Hot Pussy: Representations of Black Female Sexuality in

the Cultural Marketplace,” in hooks Black Looks: Race and Representation (Boston:
South End, 1992), 62.
2. Roger Copeland, “Founding Mothers,” Dance Theatre Journal 8, no. 3 (1990):
6–9, 27–29.
3. Helen Thomas, Dance, Modernity and Culture: Explorations in the SociologyofDance
(London: Routledge, 1995), 24.
4. Elizabeth Dempster, “Women Writing the Body: Let’s Watch a Little How
She Dances,” in Bodies of the Text: Dance as Theory, Literature as Dance, ed. Ellen W.
Goellner and Jacqueline Shea Murphy (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University
Press, 1995), 27–28.
5. Jane C. Desmond, “Dancing Out the Difference: Cultural Imperialism and
Ruth Saint Denis’s ‘Radha’ of 1906,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society
17, no. 1 (Autumn 1991): 30.
6. Mark Franko, Dancing Modernism/Performing Politics (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1995), 2.
7. Lewis A. Erenberg, “Everybody’s Doin’ It: The Pre–World War I Dance Craze,
the Castles, and the Modern American Girl,” Feminist Studies 3, no. 1/2 (Fall 1975):
156.
8. Ann Douglas, Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s (New York:
Noonday, 1995), 399–400.
9. Brenda Dixon Gottschild, Digging the Africanist Presence inAmericanPerformance,
Dance and Other Contexts (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1996), 50. Future references
to this work will be listed in the text with page number(s) in parentheses.
10. Thomas DeFrantz, “Simmering Passivity: The Black Male Body in Concert
Dance,” in Moving Words: Re-Writing Dance, ed. Gay Morris (London: Routledge,
1996), 107.
11. Katrina Hazzard-Gordon, “Dancing under the Lash: Sociocultural Disrup-
tion, Continuity, and Synthesis,” in African Dance: An Artistic, Historical and Philo-
sophical Inquiry, ed. Kariamu Weish Asante (Trenton, N.J.: Africa World, 1996),
101.
12. What is particularly intriguing is the notion of “founding mother” in the
identification of white choreographers. The exclusion of black women from the realm
of “motherhood”—sources of original creativity who spawned “children,” or follow-
ers—deserves critical attention.
13. Marita Bonner, “On Being Young—a Woman—and Colored,” Crisis 31, no.
2 (Dec. 1925): 64.
14. Lewis Erenberg, Steppin’ Out: New York Nightlife and the Transformation of
American Culture, 1890–1930 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1981), 150.

208 Intersections of Race and Gender

 15. Ann Wagner, Adversaries of Dance: From the Puritans to the Present (Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 1997), 255.
16. Mark A. Reid, PostNegritude Visual and Literary Culture (Albany: State Uni-
versity of New York Press, 1997), 13.
17. Houston A. Baker, Jr., Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance (Chicago: Uni-
versity of Chicago Press, 1987), 37, 33.
18. K. Sue Jewell, From Mammy to Miss America and Beyond: Cultural Images and
the Shaping of U.S. Social Policy (London: Routledge, 1993), 12.
19. Elise Johnson McDougald, “The Task of Negro Womanhood,” in The New
Negro, ed. Alain Locke (1925; reprint, New York: Atheneum, 1992), 369–70.
20. The debate over sexuality continues; see, for instance, Michael Marriott,
“Black Erotica Challenges Black Tradition,” New York Times (1 June 1997):
41, 42.
21. Richard J. Powell, Black Art and Culture in the 20th Century (London: Thames
and Hudson, 1997), 24.
22. Colin Rhodes, Primitivism and Modern Art (London: Thames and Hudson,
1994), 16.
23. Marianna Torgovnick, Gone Primitive: Savage Intellects, Modern Lives (Chicago:
University of Chicago, 1990), 8.
24. Hayden White, “The Noble Savage Theme as Fetish,” in White, Tropics of
Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,
1978), 187–188.
25. Robert A. Coles and Diane Isaacs, “Primitivism as a Therapeutic Pursuit:
Notes toward a Reassessment of Harlem Renaissance Literature,” in The Harlem
Renaissance: Re-valuations, ed. Amritjit Singh et al. (New York: Garland, 1989), 3.
26. Harold Isaacs, The New World of Negro Americans (New York: John Day,1963),
233.
27. Jeffrey Weeks, “The Body and Sexuality,” in Modernity: An Introduction to
Modern Sciences, ed. Stuart Hall et al. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 378.
28. Sander L. Gilman, “Black Bodies, White Bodies: Toward an Iconography of
Female Sexuality in Late Nineteenth-Century Art, Medicine, and Literature,” in
“Race,” Writing, and Difference, ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1986), 248.
29. Carl G. Jung, “Your Negroid and Indian Behavior,” Forum 83, no. 4 (Apr.
1930): 196.
30. Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, “African-American Women’s Historyandthe
Metalanguage of Race,” Signs: Journal of Women on Culture and Society 17, no.2 (Winter
1992): 271.
31. Hazel Carby, “ ‘It Jus Be’s Dat Way Sometime’: The Sexual Politics of
Women’s Blues,” in Unequal Sisters: A Multicultural Reader in U.S. Women’s History,
ed. Vicki L. Ruiz and Ellen Carol DuBois (New York: Routledge, 1994), 332.
32. Kevin K. Gaines, Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership, Politics, and Culture in
the Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 3.
33. Fannie Barrier Williams, “The Club Movement among the ColoredWomen,”
in Voice of the Negro 1, no. 3 (Mar. 1904): 102.
34. Luce Irigaray, quoted in Les femmes, la pornographie, l’érotisme, ed. Marie-
Françoise Hans and Gilles LaPouge (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1978), 50, my own
translation.
35. Hazel Carby, quoted in Phyllis Rose, “Exactly What Is It About Josephine
Baker?” New York Times (10 Mar. 1991): 2:31, 35.

Exoticism, Dance, and Racial Myths 209

 36. Wendy Martin, “ ‘Remembering the Jungle’: Josephine Baker and Modernist
Parody,” in Prehistories of the Future: The Primitivist Project and the Culture of Modernism,
ed. Elazar Barkan and Ronald Bush (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press,
1995), 311.
37. Paul Gilroy, “To Be Real: The Dissident Forms of Black Expressive Culture,”
in Let’s Get It On: The Politics of Black Performance, ed. Catherine Ugwu (Seattle,Wash.:
Bay Press, 1995), 21.
38. For a history of Aida Overton Walker, see Richard Newman, “ ‘The Brightest
Star’: Aida Overton Walker in the Age of Ragtime and Cakewalk,” Prospects: An
Annual of American Cultural Studies 18 (New York: Cambridge University Press,
1993): 464–481; and David Krasner, “Rewriting the Body: Aida Overton Walker
and the Social Formation of Cakewalking,” Theatre Survey 37, no. 2 (Nov. 1996): 66–
92.
39. Percival Pollard, “The Regnant Wave of the Sensational Dance,” New York
Times (23 Aug. 1908): 5–7. See also “The Call of Salome: Rumors that Salome Will
Have a Free Hand this Season,” New York Times Magazine (16 Aug. 1908): 4.
40. “The Vulgarization of Salome,” Current Literature 45, no.4 (Oct. 1908): 437.
For information on the Salome dance, see Ann Daly, “Isadora Duncan and the Male
Gaze,” in Gender and Performance, ed. Laurence Senelick (Hanover, N.H.: University
Press of New England, 1992), 248; Elizabeth Kendall, Where She Danced (New York:
Alfred Knopf, 1979), 74–90; Elaine Showalter, Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture
at the Fin de Siècle (New York: Penguin 1990), 144–68; and Richard Bizot, “The
Turn-of-the Century Salome Era: High– and Pop–Culture–Variations on the Dance
of the Seven Veils,” Choreography and Dance 2, no. 3 (1992): 71–87.
41. Bram Dijkstra, Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-Siècle
Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 385.
42. Ewa Kuryluk, Salome and Judas in the Cave of Sex (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern
University Press, 1987), 189.
43. Françoise Meitzer, Salome and the Dance of Writing: Portraits of Mimesis in
Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 18.
44. Megan Becker-Leckrone, “Salome: The Fetishization of a Textual Corpus,”
New Literary History 26, no. 2 (Spring 1995): 242.
45. Showalter 159.
46. Lester Walton, New York Age (27 Aug. 1908): 6.
47. “Salome Dance Seen in Bandanna Land,” Boston Herald (6 Sept. 1908): 8.
48. From a drawing in the New York World (30 Aug. 1908), metropolitan section,
2.
49. Publicity photo with handwritten mark: Boston Herald (3 Sept. 1908): n.p.,
Billy Rose Theatre Collection (Robinson LockeCollection),NewYorkPublicLibrary
at Lincoln Center, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundation. Future references to this
collection will be listed as BR.
50. Undated clipping, titled “Boston to Have Dance of Salome,” BR.
51. “Bandanna Land,” Boston Globe (6 Sept. 1908): 2.
52. Unidentified clipping, noted “Chicago” (Jan. 1909), BR.
53. From a drawing in Lester A. Walton’s essay “Miss Walker in ‘Salome,’ ” New
York Age (8 Aug. 1912): 6.
54. Daly 247.
55. Daly 249.
56. Daly 254.
57. Isadora Duncan, My Life (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1927), 341, 342.

210 Intersections of Race and Gender

 58. Isadora Duncan, “Dancing in Relation to Religion and Love,” Theatre Arts
Monthly 11, no. 8 (Aug. 1927): 590–591.
59. Robert Speare, “Victoria’s Show Pleases Crowds,” New York Telegraph (6 Aug.
1912), BR.
60. Variety (9 Aug. 1912), BR.
61. “A Salome of Color,” Stage Pictorial (1912), BR.
62. Vanity Fair (3 Aug. 1912), BR.
63. For a discussion of orientalism and modern dance, see Desmond, 39–42, and
Amy Koritz, “Dancing the Orient for England: Maud Allen’s ‘The Vision of Sa-
lome,’ ” Theatre Journal 46, no. 1 (Mar. 1994): 63–78.
64. “Ragtime Dance for New Salome,” New York Herald (6 Aug. 1912): 10. There
appears to be a discrepancy in the descriptions of Walker’s 1912 Salome. Some
reviewers speak of her “modern” dance costume while others refer to her “Oriental”
costume. Walker probably changed costumes frequently during her performances
and experimented with various outfits and styles.
65. Darlene Clark Hine, Speak Truth to Power (Brooklyn, N.Y.: Carlson, 1996),
56.
66. Mae Gwendolyn Henderson, “Speaking in Tongues: Dialogics, Dialectics,
and the Black Woman Writer’s Literary Tradition,” in Reading Black, Reading Fem-
inist: A Critical Anthology, ed. Henry Louis Gates (New York: Meridian, 1990), 120.
67. Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, “BetweenIndividualismandFragmentation:Amer-
ican Culture and New Literary Studies of Race and Gender,” in American Quarterly
42, no. 1 (Mar. 1990): 20.
68. Salem Tutt Whitney, “How to Join a Show,” Competitor 1 (1920): 71.

Exoticism, Dance, and Racial Myths 211

 11

Uh Tiny Land Mass Just

Outside of My Vocabulary
Expression of Creative Nomadism and
Contemporary African American Playwrights

‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘
kimberly d. dixon

Journeying is as much sideways and in the standing still as it is

‘backwards and forwards.’1

Ham Bone Ham Bone where you been

Roun thuh worl n back a-gain
Ham Bone Ham Bone whatcha do?
Got uh chance n fairly flew.2
African American cultural history includes within it an extensive expatriate
tradition. Scholars often foreground the stories of famous African American
writers, such as James Baldwin, Richard Wright, and Chester Himes, who
left America behind to seek out new homes abroad for themselves and their
work and who produced work with themes and stories that frequently re-
flected their expatriate status. While these writers are deservedly prominent
both for their literary merit and for the influence their lives and careers have
had on African American and other cultures, their status as representatives
of the African American expatriate tradition is misleading. Their common
gender and association with a single genre create an image of the African
American expatriate writer as being male and a novelist.3 Furthermore, the
fact that these writers’ identitiesas AfricanAmericanexpatriatesweresecured
during the 1950s and 1960s leads some scholars to suggest that the African
American expatriate tradition died when they did.4 Perhaps most significant,
these histories frame literal, physical migration as the only means of move-
ment and repositioning embraced by African American artists. Certainly,
people of African descent—artists or not—have employed literal, physical

212
migration as a method of improving their circumstances, and many continue
to do so. There are the examples of Baldwin and others, as well as the historical
instances of blacks’ mass exodus from the southern United States, the move-
ment from cities to suburbs, and, most recently, the move of many African
Americans from the North (back) to southern states. However, the better
lesson offered by the African American expatriate tradition is that of move-
ment as an aid to creative expression—or even as the expression itself. Since
African American artistic expatriation actually stands as part of a larger
pattern of African Americans’ continuous migration, the experience of mi-
gration is as much a shared cultural memory as an individual experience. As
a result, the migratory phenomenon is available even to nonmigratory artists
as an element in black history, which can be explored creatively.5
The historical fact of African American writers’ movement across geo-
graphical borders has symbolic resonance, not just historical significance. It
is a point of reference in African American cultural history, whichallartists—
not just expatriates—can incorporate into the form or content of their ex-
pression. Correspondingly, analyses of works by African American play-
wrights should also consider expatriation and other geographical movement
as another possible discursive mode. Again, the investigation of an African
American’s artistic migration is not dependent on evidence of such literal
migration in that artist’s own life; instead, such an investigation considers
evidence in the artist’s stories, structures, and characterizations, exploring
the presence and expression of creative nomadism in the artist’s work.
One contemporary African American playwright whose work demands
consideration as an expression of creative nomadism is playwright Suzan-
Lori Parks. Parks elicits passionate responses to her distinctive dramaturgy,
a style full of nonlinear progressions, distilled language, iconic characters,
and abstract settings. Theater audiences seem at once intriguedandfrustrated
by this playwright’s refusal to slip quietly into their erected houses of expec-
tations for theater, particularly their expectations for theater written by
African American women. This essay will examine the presence and influence
of nomadic themes in Parks’s work, not only for the insight that nomadism
can offer into Parks’s particular dramaturgy but also as a way to begin
exploring the viability of the concept of creative nomadism in the analysis of
theater by other African American playwrights. The concept will be exam-
ined according to two basic measures: movement and homelessness. I have
selected these two states of being because they are held in common across the
various instances of blacks’ continuous migration. In addition, they lend
themselves to the simultaneous consideration of both physical/literal states
and metaphorical or psychic ones; both “movement” and “homelessness” are
easily understood in terms of concrete objects and abstract consciousnesses.
Such simultaneity nicely parallels not only the connection between creative
nomadism and historical migration but also the combination of literalness
and abstraction that is at the heart of theater and performance.
The consideration of Parks’s illusions of and allusions to nomadism is in
keeping with previous criticism of her work; it, too, assumes a purposefulness

Expression of Creative Nomadism 213

to her writing style’s complexity.6 More important, it is a way of examining
her plays’ combinations of words, sounds, actions, and behaviors by working
with rather than against their kaleidoscopic nature. As Parks herself points
out, her works’ meanings are ever-shifting,7 so critical analysis of that work
must be similarly nimble. Parks’s work reaches the audience member not as
a framed painting or even as a picture show as much as the flashing colored
horses of a carousel. Standing beyond the gate of the ride, we may detect the
occasional horse among the stampede circling by, but we will miss much
detail. However, if we are able to stand on the turning platform, we will see
their spangled saddles, carved manes, and painted-on eyes. Better still, we
will sense each horse’s individual vertical movement against our circular one.
Finally, in the midst of the music and spinning, we will realize that the
supposedly stationary crowd waving us on appears to be moving as well; their
stability is actually an illusion dependent on perspective. The concept of
African American creative nomadism is one means by which to become riders
on that carousel, not onlookers beyond the gate. It encourages us to uncover
the richness in Parks’s plays by operating from the same logic of movement
and homelessness that has played a significant part in African American
cultural history, the same logic that Parks explores in her plays.
The nomadism of Parks’s work can be understood not only as a product of
the migratory history of black people but also as an expression of postmod-
ernism’s preoccupation with migration, exile, and shifting identities.8 Rosi
Braidotti’s concept of nomadic subjects is one example of this discourse.
Although Braidotti’s original application involved the female feminist sub-
ject, because there is a concern for the intersection of identities at the heart
of Braidotti’s theory, I believe that it naturally extends to a subject whose
gender and race identity overtly shape her nomadism. Such a subject is just
as likely as Braidotti’s original figure to seek to develop new frameworks and
images in which to conceive of subjectivity, ones that would recognize the
possibilities in supposed contradictions and allow affirmation in a resistant
context. Meanwhile, a playwright’s cultural production is simply another
model for how the nomadic subject employs imagination to act against “the
settled and conventional nature of theoretical and especially philosophical
thinking” and develop a new epistemology, this time by theatrical and
performative means. 9 Parks and others are merely demonstrating their mul-
tiple literacies in the languages of stage narrative. In fact, Parks’s theater
setting is perhaps an ideal one in which to explore nomadic subjectivity
because of its abstracted nature. After all, Braidotti describes the shifting
and relative nature of the nomadic existence as contributing to a nomadic
consciousness, which is based on a transmobility of thought and identity
rather than of the physical self:

Though the image of “nomadic subjects” is inspired by the experience of

peoples or cultures that are literally nomadic, the nomadism in question
here refers to the kind of critical consciousness that resists settling into
socially coded modes of thought and behavior. Not all nomads are world

214 Intersections of Race and Gender

 travelers; some of the greatest trips can take place without physically
moving from one’s habitat. It is the subversion of set conventions that
defines the nomadic state, not the literal act of traveling.10
This “critical consciousness” allows the nomadic subject to resist settling
and to instead subvert socially coded modesand setconventions.Thenomadic
subject is an active agent, therefore; she is not simply buffeted by social forces,
which hold standards the nomad cannot meet, but rather the nomadic subject
critically evaluates those standards and rejects them as she sees fit.
Parks’s position as a nomadic artist-subject at the close of the twentieth
century and the opening of the twenty-first makes her part of the continuing
pursuit of new frameworks and images. As only two examples, the feminist
theater and black theater movements of the late 1960s and early 1970s were
cultural movements that set out to subvert normative conventions in efforts
to defend African Americans and women against misrepresentation, deni-
gration, and other attacks found in more established cultural practices. One
of the aspects of traditional Western theater that these movements rejected
was the structure of dramatic realism; black and feministtheaterpractitioners
argued that this form could neither accommodate the exploration of new
identities and consciousness nor incorporate alternative performance modes,
both of which were deemed essential to the movements’ political agendas of
black and women’s liberation, respectively.11 In response, the feminist and
black theater movements brought about conceptual and practical changes
which continue to circulate more than thirty years later, including their
contribution to current expressions of nomadic consciousness in American
theater. Therefore, Parks’s use of nonlinear narratives and nonstandard En-
glish are examples of an artist’s individual vision, but they also speak to and
from a broader cultural climate, which has been shaped in part by blacks’ and
women’s liberation movements as well as by postmodernist discourse. For
example, Parks’s use of characters and created moments mirrors both black
cultural history and contemporary postmodernism, as well as the intersection
of the two. In fact, Parks could be said to be theorizing on—not just re-
flecting—the relationship of postmodern and African Diaspora discourses
through invocations of travel metaphors and psychic displacement and ref-
erences to blurred points of departure and final destinations.12
Ham Bone Ham Bone where you been
Roun thuh worl n back a-gain
Before turning to a detailed examination of Parks’s plays, it is necessary to
spend some time defining in greater detail the world in which Parks and
other contemporary African American playwrights are working. There are
three aspects of their identity that potentially affect their expression of a
nomadic subjectivity: their status as postmodern, social, and professional
subjects. Furthermore, issues of race and gender identity are constant influ-
ences in all three of those identities and can further affect their nomadic
subjectivity.

Expression of Creative Nomadism 215

 Along with their location in a postmodern context,includingtheaftermath
of feminism’s and black nationalism’s social and cultural movements, con-
temporary African American artists also exist in a postcolonial environment.
Specifically, these artists’ nomadic subjectivity is in keeping with postmod-
ern and postcolonial discourse on the renegotiation of positionality by the
monolithic West and its subjects. No longer are oppressor-oppressed or self-
Other precise or permanent identities. Subjects now frequently resist their
disadvantaged position, while the monolith now finds it fashionable to ex-
amine its own oppression at the hands of individuals or the social systems at
large. Says Una Chaudhuri of these developments: “[H]uman beings can be
said to be returning to a nomadic form of existence. . . . ‘Who am I’ is firmly
anchored in a new form of ‘where am I?’ ”13 African American women (artists)
are not the only holders of this nomadic consciousness, of course, and neither
they nor members of other groups are nomadic at all times. Still, Chaudhuri’s
description suggests a widespread perception of nomadic subjectivity, which
may encourage the contemporary African American artist’s exploration of
her own nomadism. In this climate, identity—even that of a “minority” or
“Third World” person, vulnerable to extensive stereotyping—is no longer
seen as a concrete essence that transfers unchanged into all settings; now, it
is understood as determined in great part by each environment. It is only
natural that the artistic identities of contemporary playwrights—their writ-
ing styles and their characters’ language, behavior, movement—would be
similarly affected.
To be sure, an illusion of a “home” and the relativity it brings to our
understanding of subjectivity are key to this climate. Liz Bondi describes the
modern condition of displacement and continual homelessness as requiring
a home as a reference point: “The metaphor of position is deployed to capture
both the multiplicity and internal fracturing of identities, while the concept
of subject reminds [us] that we still operate with narratives of our individual
integrity.”14 A subject’s individual integrity is that psychic home fromwhich
excursions can be measured.
But again, though it has a wide reach, postmodernism’s pervasive insta-
bility is particularly powerful for people of color and other marginalized
groups for the ways in which it allows the expression of alternative sub-
jectivities.15 It enables the necessary shift in consciousness away from pos-
sibly oppressive established patterns and goals and toward an inclusive,
broader view. Gloria Anzaldúa names this a “tolerance for ambiguity”;16
others have named it “awareness of simultaneous dimensions,”17 “multi-
cultural competence,”18 or “trying to face (at least) two ways at once.”19
Whatever the term, contemporary African American artists’ creative no-
madism is the movement among and through social and cultural insti-
tutions in much the same way that literal nomadism is movement
through well-defined territories in search of food or other resources. The
invention of new creative frameworks and images is those artists’ search
for sustenance for their artistic life in the face of harsh conditions of cen-
sorship, ignorance, prejudice, or other restrictive forces. Playwright Nto-

216 Intersections of Race and Gender

zake Shange is one of several African American writers to offer an illus-
tration of this in her rebellion against so-called standard English. Shange
points to her exploration of other cultures’ literature as one way to “escape
what I really feel to be one of our [black women writers’] primary prisons,
which is the English language.”20 Shange and others have escaped this
and other prisons by moving away from the established patterns of some
cultural practices and by incorporating others in new or unexpected ways.
Their migration within and among those practices results in an ambigu-
ous positionality and a free-moving consciousness.
I want to underscore this potential for freedom in nomadism. The contem-
porary African American artist’s nomadic consciousness should not be
thought of negatively, as yet another coping mechanism that is the conse-
quence of the history of African American ostracism from mainstream(white)
society. It is not simply another variation on Du Bois’s concept of a double
consciousness, which is the unfortunate result of warring ideals. Nor is it a
handicap in need of correction or compensation, a condition under which the
nomadic subject must endure an endless friction. Rather,thenomadicsubject
frequently enjoys a positive vantage point because of her nomadism, a valid
alternative to a traditional subjectivity.21 Nomadic subjectivity could even
be understood as a more evolved and enlightened consciousness.22 In that
understanding, what might otherwise be seen as Parks’s confused combina-
tion of seemingly mismatched black vernacular English and absurdist thea-
ter, for example, can instead be understood as a liberating hybridity. Her
complex writing style is not theresultof her failuretothriveortobewelcomed
in one cultural world or another but of her nomadic negotiation between
them. Again, such an interpretation is possible in part because of the overall
tolerance for ambiguity in contemporary society. At the same time, it hinges
on decades of restrictive definitions of cultures and identities in this country,
definitions that first created the illusion of the boundaries that nomadism
transgresses. Nevertheless, nomadic subjectivity is now a viable expression
of identity, one that contemporary African American artists, such as Parks,
employ effectively.
What of race’s direct influence on African American artists’ nomadic sub-
jectivity? One aspect of their racial identity that can significantly affect their
nomadicconsciousnessissocialclass.23 Highereconomicclassbackgrounds—
and the educational opportunities that frequently accompany that status—
can lead to a worldliness that facilitates a creative nomadism; in a sense, an
artist’s psychic travel is aided by her knowledge of the geography of the
“worlds” of technique and subject matter with which she might create.24 As
alluded to earlier, however, the expression of a nomadic subjectivity was not
always seen as potentially beneficial. For example, in his 1950s study of the
black middle class, E. Franklin Frazier stated:

Becauseof theirsocial isolationandlackofaculturaltradition,themembers

of the black bourgeoisie in the United States seem to be in the process of
becoming nobody.25

Expression of Creative Nomadism 217

Yet I would argue that many of Frazier’s generation of subjects necessarily
developed a hybridity and agility in their cultural practices, which enabled
them to negotiate between black and non-black worlds. They were becoming
“everybody” as much as “nobody.” Furthermore, these strategies sowed ben-
efits and consequences that contemporary generations of African Americans
are now reaping; the chameleonlike quality, which Frazier interprets as
“nobodyness,” is the foundation for today’s nomadic artist and the creative
nomadism of her work. For example, where Frazier blames the education of
the black middle class for uprooting those blacks from “ ‘racial’ traditions
or, more specifically, from [their] folk background,”26 the 1960s and ’70s
saw the development of prominent programs in black studies at the very
institutions most likely to attract children of that economic class. This
provided these African Americans with exposure—though late and quali-
fied—to Frazier’s “racial traditions” and contributed to the formation of a
nomadic subjectivity in today’s middle class and, therefore, contributed to
that same subjectivity in the African American community at large.27 Quite
naturally, this affected cultural production. Trey Ellis describes how the
ripple-effect played out in what he calls the “New Black Aesthetic”:
For the first time in our history we are producing a critical mass of college
graduates who are children of college graduates themselves. Like most
artistic booms, the [New Black Aesthetic] is a post-bourgeois movement
driven by a second generation of middle class. . . . We now feel secure
enough to attend art school instead of medical school.28
Ellis goes on to describe the new generation of middle class African American
artists, of which Parks is one,29 as feeling no obligation to either a Black Arts
legacy or a mainstream aesthetic. His discussion of the hybridity in contem-
porary African American artists’ consciousness further illuminates the con-
temporary African American artist as nomad by showing how social class can
help shape nomadic consciousness.
Along with race identity and postmodern context, the nomadic subjectiv-
ity of the contemporary African American playwright is also determined by
her identity as a writer for theater. Certainly, the kind of literal homelessness
common to an American playwright’s life (full of comings and goings to
various productions, workshops, and readings) is a factor. Beyond that, how-
ever, theorists suggest that contemporary authorship and American theater
practice are both dominated by an assumption of fractured identity and
constant movement. Keith and Pile invoke deCerteau’s thesis that everystory
is one of travel, “a spatial practice,”30 while Chaudhuri asserts that human-
kind’s return to a nomadic existence has resulted in a modern drama based
on “a principle of dispersal, of dissolution.”31 Contemporary writing has—
or is seen to have—inherent in it the two basic nomadic elements of move-
ment and homelessness. I stated earlier that postmodernism’s ambiguous
notions of identity include the renegotiation of social roles and investigation
of their constructedness and symbolic force. Accordingly, representations of
race and gender in contemporary drama are affected by this climate, and

218 Intersections of Race and Gender

many African American playwrights work to capture the ambiguities with
characters who hover somewhere in between, or even outside, traditional
categorizations.
At the same time, artists’ dramatic representations are also shaped by the
gender and racial circumstances surrounding African Americans’ literal
movement. Historians, including Darlene Clark Hine, have documented
how African American men and women had markedly different experiences
during the Great Migration of the 1920s;32 despite changes in social stan-
dards, it is likely that there were gender-based differences during other
migratory periods as well. Along with these factual influences, there are also
social narratives (often myths), which circulate about the mobility of African
American women versus nonblack women or African American men. For
example, some feminists point to African American women’s long history of
work outside the home as evidence of their liberated, mobile womanhood
(although it was just as often the result of economic need, potentially contin-
uing the women’s experiences of racism and sexism). Others argue that
contemporary African American women are more successful economically
and educationally than African American men because they are thought to
be less threatening and are thereby allowed to navigate mainstreamAmerican
society. In both cases, African Americans’ mobility is understood in relation-
ship to both their race and gender. Likewise, then, African American play-
wrights’ nomadic subjectivity must also be framed by both factors.
Playwriting as a genre of creative nomadism is also determined by issues
of race and gender. For example, the black theater and feminist theater
movements, which contributed to today’s nomadism, were dominated by
black males and white females, respectively. As a result, although contem-
porary African American women playwrights, such as Parks, clearly have a
connection to both eras and the new dramatic forms they encouraged, these
playwrights must first rework those movements’ reworking in order to define
a place for their own creativity. Their nomadic experience as theater profes-
sionals is similarly intensified. Some argue that “minority” playwrights,
including African American women, are even more transient than others in
this age of multiculturalism; there is a market within the regional theater
system for such playwrights, so they are constantly shuttled back and forth
among theaters’ “second stages,” festivals, or workshops.33 Playwright Anna
Deavere Smith says of the predicament of black women theater artists:
It’s all well and good if an artistic director says, “I want you to come work
here,” but it’s much bigger than that. It’s back to this thing: Are there any
homes for black women? . . . If we are nomadic, why is it that we are walking
and walking and walking and not finding a place to rest?34
Dramaturg and critic Sydné Mahone offers some answers in the introduc-
tion to her anthology of the work of contemporary African American women
playwrights. She describes such playwrights as living in the “hostile” envi-
ronment of the mostly “white patriarchal institution” of American theater,
an environment in which “hostility towards African-American women writ-

Expression of Creative Nomadism 219

ers and ‘others’ has been expressed, not through malevolence, but more
dangerously through avoidance and neglect.” And yet, Mahone points out,
even those few “others” who may manage to thrive in the hallowed halls of
mainstream theater may be reluctant to do so, since marginalization is often
taken as a sign of true artistry:
One could argue that [exceptional African American women writers’]very
extraordinaryqualitiesjustifytheir‘outsider’status;toincludethemwould
somehow compromise or corrupt their integrity, thus diminishing their
power to challenge the status quo.35
So, one way that contemporary African American women playwrights ne-
gotiate between the rock of exclusion and the hard place of assimilation is
the proven strategy of constant movement. Deavere Smith attributes black
women playwrights’ homelessness to gender identity’s influence on their
craft and on the demands they make of American theater practice. I would
argue that it is, in fact, the combination of race and gender that influences
and demands.36
Racegender is a definite factor in the contemporary African American
woman playwright’s exploration of a nomadic subjectivity, because of both
the playwright’s identity and the identity representations in her work.37 It
shapes how the basic elements of movement and homelessness are understood
by invoking histories and discourses around race or gender that frame them
in certain ways. For example, a play that features a black woman on a cross-
country trip alludes—purposefully or not—to historical instances of black
women’s geographic travel, and the circumstances behind those instances are
very different from historical instances of black men’s, white men’s, or white
women’s travel. Nevertheless, depending on the artist and the particular
play, the influence of racegender issues varies: for some, it may serve as the
vehicle in the journeys of nomadic subjectivity and consciousness, for others
only as accompanying baggage. Parks tends to treat her characters’ racegen-
der, like their other characteristics, as emblematic. Regarding gender, she
places her characters in superficially conventional roles, such as wife (Black
Woman with Fried Drumstick in Last Black Man), mother (Mrs. Sergeant
Smith in Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom), sister (Molly/Mona,
Charlene/Chona, Veronica/Verona in Imperceptible Mutabilities); husband (Lu-
cius in Betting on the Dust Commander), father (Mr. Sergeant Smith in Imper-
ceptible Mutabilities), son (Brazil in The America Play). Regarding race, Parks’s
characters often resemble icons of blackness (Black Man with Watermelon,
Old Man River Jordan, Queen-Then-Pharaoh Hatshepsut in Last Black Man)
or nonblackness (Abraham Lincoln–impersonator The Foundling Father in
The America Play). And yet, because of the surreal nature of Parks’s created
worlds, her characters seem somewhat removed from social conventions
surrounding race and gender. Furthermore, Parks’s story lines rarely center
around race or gender issues alone. Even in Last Black Man and, morerecently,
Venus (two plays that focus on clearly racegendered main characters), Parks
skillfully embeds these loaded figures in layered studies of other, seemingly

220 Intersections of Race and Gender

non–racegender-based ideas. Still, at the same time, Parks’s treatment of
issues such as memory, death, and desire reveals how these issues are shaped
by factors like racegender identity.38 Her work provides an example of the
complications that racegender brings to African American artists’—partic-
ularly women artists’—expression of that subjectivity.
I have divided the factors in the contemporary African American play-
wright’s creative nomadism into the influences of postmodernism, social
class, and profession, with racegender a factor in all three. However, I do not
mean to imply a primacy of influences. More likely, any set of forces can move
into position at a given moment, necessarily displacing another set. In this
way—and true to a nomadic subjectivity—tensions that might otherwise
arise through categories’ jockeying for a permanent superior position are
resolved through a negotiation of perspective. For example, from the per-
spective of “mainstream American” theater, playwright Adrienne Kennedy’s
1960s surrealist psychological dramas could be seen as a move away from the
traditional, linear narratives of the few other African American women play-
wrights recognized at that time by the mainstream, such as Lorraine Hans-
berry or Alice Childress. From the perspective of the contemporaneous Black
Nationalist theater, however, the form could be a departure from the polit-
ically overt and macho plays most often associated with the Black Theater
Movement. While some might argue that Kennedy’s relevance to both
streams ultimately makes her relevant to neither, by approaching her work
as an expression of a nomadic subjectivity, both perspectives—and possibly
others—can be accommodated. Once again, the nomadic subject’s creative
nomadism must be evaluated according to distance and relationship to a
given “home.”39
Ham Bone Ham Bone whatcha do?
Got uh chance n fairly flew.
Parks offers an appropriate study of creative nomadism and contemporary
African American playwrights because of her representative qualities. First,
she achieved significant visibility in American theater during the 1990s,
moving beyond the status of an “emerging” playwright to enjoy a level of
artistic and career maturity. Parks has a distinctive voice among contempo-
rary American playwrights in general, and she resists pigeonholing when
grouped with other African American, female, or African American women
playwrights in particular. Furthermore, Parks’s success has been primarily
in mainstream (white- and male-dominated) American theater, and yet her
work routinely incorporates issues of African American and female identity.
This combination of position and subject matter highlights the function of
race and gender in Parks’s work and suggests particular consequences for her
expression of a creative nomadism. Finally, I consider Parks’s work to be, to
borrow Sydné Mahone’s words, “compelling, thought-provoking and stylis-
tically fresh.”40 Her work demands the spectator’s and reader’s full attention
with an intricacy of language and action that invites second and third inter-
pretations. As mentioned earlier, Parks endures/enjoys somewhat of a repu-

Expression of Creative Nomadism 221

tation for creating works whose meanings are difficult to uncover, although
she finds the search for meaning a misguided one:
I’ve had so many interviews where someone would say, so what does it
mean? . . . That’s basically saying, you’re being obscure and why don’t you
tell us what you want, what you really mean, thinking the writer has some
sort of agenda that hides somewhere behind or underneath the text or
behind the production somewhere. . . . Instead of saying, what does that
mean? which is already a sentence that is outside of the play, ask[s] you to
fill in some blanks, it means this—that’s an equation that’s outside of the
play. Stick to the play.41
Again, an investigation into creative nomadism in Parks’s work is one way
to reframe ambiguities as dramatic strategy, thereby “sticking to the play.”
It can help in the move away from a preoccupation with meaning to an
occupation with the play experience.42
Parks’s exploration of nomadic subjectivity is set in worlds of constant
movement and change, worlds full of permeable boundaries, which her
characters and stories negotiate easily. The two main sets of boundaries that
Parks subverts are those of space and time. Parks’s exploration of the bound-
aries of space are best exemplified by her articulation of a Third Kingdom in
Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom (1989); the Third Kingdom
exemplifies one set of characters’ condition of movement and homelessness.43
Character Over-Seer traces the genesis of this condition and the meaning of
the play’s title: “Half the world had fallen away making 2 worlds and a sea
between. Those 2 worlds inscribe the Third Kingdom.”44 This Third King-
dom immediately conjures up images of the “real” so-called Third World
and its anonymous inhabitants of color. There, too, the space is hemmed by
two worlds: the Old and the New. And, as with the Third Kingdom, in order
for Third World inhabitants to reach either of the other two worlds, they
must cross geographical, cultural, philosophical, even chronological seas.
Perhaps more than the term “world,” however, Parks’s Third Kingdom
suggests an autonomy in that third space. Although it may be unknown and
annoyingly distant to First and Second World on-lookers, the idea of a
kingdom implies that it holds a good deal of space, cultures, and beliefs of
its own, which its subjects can navigate. Furthermore, the movements and
transformations of the kingdom’s subject may be imperceptible, but they are
real nonetheless. In this formulation, those who brave the sea can no longer
be presumed to be trading homelessness for home; Parks’s having set an entire
play in that homeless space necessarily reverses that presumption. The piece
explores the way in which those who migrate from the Third Kingdom are
actually leaving a home of homelessness. Such a contradiction is perfectly
acceptable within the context of creative nomadism. Says Braidotti,
“[N]omadism consists not so much in being homeless, as in being capable of
recreating your home everywhere.”45 In Imperceptible Mutabilities, Parks not
only writes new spaces for her characters but actually reinscribes our notions
of the connection between space and the individual inhabitant.

222 Intersections of Race and Gender

 Parks’s work also alludes to historical, literal migrations. Imperceptible Mu-
tabilities deals most explicitly with the black Atlantic slave trade as a catalyst
for Parks’s characters’ nomadic consciousness, but this and other works also
introduce other periods in black migration.46 Blacks have repeatedly shown
themselves capable of recreating their homes wherever they land, and Parks
crafts plays that embody that tradition. She preserves her characters’ agency
even in their state of limbo and thereby champions the freedom of nomadic
consciousness.47 She allows her characters to showcase this liminal space as a
valid—though compromised—place in which to exist. She leads us to re-
consider African Americans not as homeless residents of a strange land but
as nomadic subjects of a different kingdom.
Meanwhile, Parks employs a dramatic strategy of repetition and revision
in order to thin conventional boundaries of time. The strategy allows her to
create dramatic moments, which are then repeated with just enoughvariation
to demonstrate the tenuous relationship between inertia and change. Says
Parks:
“Repetition and Revision” is a concept integral to the Jazz esthetic [sic] in
which the composer or performer will write or play a musical phrase once
and again and again; etc.—with each revisit the phrase is slightly revised.
“Rep & Rev” as I call it is a central element in my work48 . . . a text based
on the concept of repetition and revision is one which breaks from the text
which we are told to write—the text which cleanly ARCS. . . . In such
plays we are not moving from A→B but rather, for example, from
A→A→A→B→A. Through such movement, we refigure A.49
Rep and rev is particularly effective when applied to dialogue: a character’s
lines may be identical at two different points in aplay, and yetintherepetition
the audience member or reader is forced to contemplate why the lines were
repeated. Part 2: Third Kingdom of Imperceptible Mutabilities ends this way:
kin-seer: You said I could wave as long as I see um. I still see um.
over-seer: Wave then.
Later in the play, during Third Kingdom (Reprise), the characters repeat the
lines, but the scene continues for several more moments in a frenzy of drown-
ing, waving, and sailing away. The changed context gives the identical lines
different resonances: a peaceful tableau in Part 2 becomes the image of an
oblivious Kin-Seer making a pointless gesture while a detached Over-Seer
looks on in the Reprise. As another example, at the close of the first panel in
Last Black Man, Black Woman with Fried Drumstick and Black Man have
this exchange:
black woman: They eat their own yuh know.
black man: HooDoo.
black woman: Hen do. Saw it on thuh Tee V.
black man: Aint that nice.50

Expression of Creative Nomadism 223

This exchange is immediately repeated at the start of the next panel, with
revisions; the same words are now spoken between Black Woman and the
rest of the ensemble. With that change—and an upper case “hoodoo” for
emphasis—the words mutate from a simple performance of misconjugation
in Black Vernacular English (BVE), to a performance of a political commen-
tary, quite possibly about media misrepresentation of African Americans as
savages and the general population’s complacency about it.
As a final example, Parks has drawn an “equation” for Imperceptible Muta-
bilities that shows the outlines of “USA” and of “Africa” with a note to “solve
for X.” X is represented by a double-headed arrow placed in between the two
land masses: “↔.”51 In geometry this symbolizes the space between two
points, but the figure also leads the eye back and forth along the arrow’s axis
never allowing it to rest for too long on one side or the other. Parks’s rep and
rev gives her audience firsthand experience of nomadic consciousness; time
passes, and yet we are brought “back” to an earlier moment—where we
started. Or are we? Or are we in both moments at once? And does it matter?
The rep and rev technique collapses time and causes the reader/spectator to
experience nomadism’s constant movement back and forth between different
points of being.
Not only are Parks’s constructions of time and of space blurred within their
own conventional boundaries, but the two sometimes appear to bleed into
each other as well. Thus the line “The black man moves his hands.—He
moves his hands round. Back. Back. Back tuh that” seems to refer to a
movement both back to a position and back to a moment. This, too, echoes
blacks’ literal nomadic experiences, such as the current trend for northern-
based blacks to move “back” to the South, to a “simpler time.”
Now (in Parks’s collapsed sense of the word), with an environment of
shifting time and space established, Parks explores the various aspects of
nomadic subjectivity, the nomad’s states of mind or ways of understanding
the world. First, Parks portrays the nomadic figure at rest, during which he
or she exhibits the qualities of double-consciousness and self-reflexivity de-
scribed by Du Bois, Mitchell, and others.52 She presents characters who
combine self-perception with an awareness of how they are perceived by
others; rather than a solely introverted consciousness, Parks’s characters also
face outward. One manifestation of that outward stance is the way in which
Parks’s characters speak about themselves. In Last Black Man, the central
character, Black Man with Watermelon, has a refrain: “The black man moves
his hands.” With each repetition and accompanying gesture during the play,
the character not only demonstrates his self-gaze, but he also shows that he
is aware of our and his fellow characters’ spectatorship. By speaking in the
third person, he has adopted a narrative voice that mimics the point of view
of the other characters and the audience, who are all witnessing his action.
As the character speaks this line, then, we see his nomadic consciousness at
work as he moves between his own psychic space and that of his observers. In
other characters, meanwhile, Parks sometimes goes as far as to confine the

224 Intersections of Race and Gender

distance between self and others fully within a character; the character be-
comes her own spectator:

kin-seer: I was standin with my toes stuckted in thuh dirt. Nothin in

front of me but water. And I was wavin. Wavin. Wavin at my
uther me who I could barely see. Over thuh water on thuh
uther cliff I could see my uther me but my uther me could
not see me. And I was wavin wavin wavin sayin gaw gaw gaw
gaw eeeeeee-uh.53 . . . My uther me then waved back at me
and then I was happy. But my uther me whuduhnt wavin at
me. My uther me was wavin at my Self. My uther me was
wavin at uh black black speck in thuh middle of thuh sea
where years uhgoh from uh boat I had been—UUH!54

The last moment in this passage (referring to both literary and geographical
meanings of passage) captures the nightmare most nomadic subjects expe-
rience at one time or another: the inability to find one’s true self amid the
different homes and constant movement. In this passage, the character adopts
a new perspective only to mistake her for another.
In the midst of their displacements, migrations, and journeys, it is a
struggle for Parks’s characters to keep sight of the literal or psychic shore.
Parks depicts the complications of the African-descended nomad’sprivileged
standpoint, where sight does not necessarily mean vision or understanding,
or worse yet, where vision is ultimately thwarted by inadequate language:

yes and greens black-eyed peas cornbread: Whatcha seen

hambone girl?
black woman with fried drumstick: Didnt see you. I saw
thuh worl.
queen-then-pharaoh hatshepsut: I was there.
lots of grease and lots of pork: Didnt see you.
black woman with fried drumstick: I was there.
black man with watermelon: Didnt see you.55

In these lines, Parks reminds us of the various instances of historical and

contemporary black invisibility. Along with these ideas of large-scalesocietal
misrepresentation or omission of a black presence, however, the passage also
suggests that similar invisibility is occurring in the relationships between
individual people. Parks’s characters suggest that, in both contexts,theliteral
and nonliteral selves are not seen and that the attempt to speak to that gap
can be little more than vague and repetitive.56
Another of the nomadic subject’s states of being that Parks explores is that
of immobility. In Part 1 of Imperceptible Mutabilities, appropriately entitled
“Snails,” Parks presents three sisters threatened by an infestation of inertia
as well as roaches. (Throughout “Snails,” the sisters frantically chase and kill

Expression of Creative Nomadism 225

the insects and even summon a pesticide specialist, yet they are “splatting”
bugs until the end.) They seem torn between the desire and ability to escape
their situation and immobility. Molly/Mona’s ability to move is a tangle of
contradictions. She quits a job because she cannot speak in standard En-
glish—“ ‘Talk right or youre outta here!’ I couldn’t. I walked.”—yet she
cannot leave the apartment: “Once there was uh me named Mona who wanted
tuh jump ship but didnt.”57 Charlene/Chona, meanwhile, seems resigned to
her inactivity. She states: “Once there was uh woman who wanted tuh get
uhway for uhwhile but didnt know which way tuh go tuh get gone. Once
there was uh woman who just layed down.”58 Ostensibly, Charlene/Chona’s
line is a response to Veronica/Verona’s asking where Molly/Mona was, but
since the quoted line is said several moments after the question is asked and
after Charlene/Chona has already given an answer, she seems to implicate
herself as well.
Only Veronica/Verona seems to have resolved the conflict between a desire
to move and a failure to do so. At the end of the section, she delivers a
monologue about her love for animals and how, as a child, she had a black
dog named Namib, who refused to behave and eventually ran away. She tells
us that, many years later, whileworkinginaveterinaryhospitalasaeuthanasia
specialist, she came across another black dog, who presumably was also a
wanderer. After putting the dog down, she performs an autopsy “because I
had to see I just had to see the heart of such a disagreeable domesticated
thing.” What Veronica/Verona finds causes her to realize that the source of
the nomadic instinct is not a physical abnormality. “Nothing different.
Everything in its place. Do you know what that means? Everything in its
place. Thats all.”59 This sister has discovered that the condition is undetect-
able and therefore inexplicable. Through her story, Parks suggests that no-
madic subjectivity is more dependent on a certain consciousness than on a
physical characteristic. This, too, is in keeping with the tradition of African
American migration. Writer James Baldwin explained his decision to ex-
patriate this way: “I left America because I doubted my ability to survive the
fury of the color problem here. . . . I wanted to prevent myself frombecoming
merely a Negro; or, even, merely a Negro writer.”60 This is a complaint
common to many African American artists, expatriate or not, in Baldwin’s
time and since. Its prevalence reminds us that the power in an artist’s literal
or creative migration comes not so much from the arrival at a new location
as from ways in which that location allows her to see herself as an artist.
Baldwin’s comment suggests that the geographical journeying of earlier
expatriates was ultimately superseded by the journey of the mind from one
identity consciousness to another.
Of course, some characters are not simply incapable of developing a no-
madic consciousness but actually resist doing so. In Part 4 of Imperceptible
Mutabilities, Mrs. Sergeant Smith boasts how she is able to travel by bus to
visit her husband on the military base without looking the least bit dishev-
eled: “I was just as proud. ’Ain’t traveled a mile nor sweated a drop!’ ”61 She
repeats her husband’s words, a compliment that erases her movement.

226 Intersections of Race and Gender

 True to her commitment to movement, Parks not only presents states or
nonstates of nomadic consciousness but also the progression away from in-
ertia. Characters are regularly located within one setting for most of the play,
and yet there is frequent talk of someone’s recent arrival or imminent depar-
ture. As examples, both Last Black Man and The America Play feature themes
of death and dying. In the former, Black Man with Watermelon has endured
multiple executions; in the latter, the lead character, The Foundling Father,
has died, leaving his wife and son to make their living “keeping secrets for
the dead” and attending funerals as a professional mourner, respectively.
Parks frames these characters’ travel back and forth across the lines of life and
death as the ultimate in arrivals and departures. Even as they move, however,
Parks’s characters continue to question movement’s effectiveness as a means
of agency for themselves and others. In Last Black Man, characters question
Black Man’s destination after death: “Where he gonna go now that he done
dieded? . . . Where he gonna go tuh wash his hands?”62 Other characters say
of their own movement: “There is uh tiny land mass just above my reach. . . .
There is uh tiny land mass just outside of my vocabulary.”63
In fact, one of the most obvious signs of nomadic consciousness in Parks’
work is her characters’ use of language, particularly of BVE. Parks manages
to dismantle the structure of both standard English and BVE so that her
characters’ written text is filled with jolting (mis)spellings and cryptic no-
tations for sounds, which transform, in performance, into speech that is both
natural (punctuated by rhythms, pauses, and vocal interjections) and height-
ened (able to capture the poetry and potential for layered meanings in natural
speech). Parks’s description of her use of language speaks to some of the bars
and spaces-between-bars of the prison of language that Shange described:
[H]ow do I adequately represent not merely the speech patterns of a people
oppressed by language (which is the simple question) but the patterns of
a people whose language use is so complex and varied and ephemeral that
its daily use not only Signifies on the non-vernacular language forms, but
on the construct of writing as well. If language is a construct and writing
is a construct and Signifyin(g) on the double construct is the daily use,
then I have chosen to Signify on the Signifyin(g).64
Parks’s choice to “Signify on the Signifyin(g)” through her characters’ lan-
guage is a move toward what sociologist Paul Gilroy describes as the “liber-
ation of culture, especially language, as a means of social self-creation.”65 In
that way, her use of language mirrors her use of time and space: as a means of
creative freedom. Braidotti labels such strategic use of language “linguistic
nomadism”; within this construction, Parks manipulates the languages of
conventional English, BVE, drama’s text, and theater’s performance to create
spaces and propel bodies:
before columbus: Back then when they thought the world was flat
they were afeared and stayed at home. Theywanted
to go out back then when they thought the world

Expression of Creative Nomadism 227

 was flat but the water had in it dragons of which
meaning thesedragonstheywereafearedbackthen
when they thought the world was flat. They stayed
at home. Them thinking the world was flat kept
it roun. Them thinking the sun revolved around
the earth kept them satellite-like. They figured
out the truth and scurried out. Figuring out the
truth put them in their place and they scurried out
to put us in ours.66
Parks’s nomadic subjects are left with a sense of regret over their lost selves
and ambiguous progress; again, we can hear these words in terms of blacks’
various forced and voluntary migrations: “And I whuduhnt me no more and
I whuduhnt no fish. My new Self was uh third Self made by thuh space in
between. And my new Self wonders: Am I happy? Is my new Self happy in
my new-Self shoes?”67 This element of regret, of questioning whether one is
better off before or after the journey, is the only fitting conclusion that Parks
can offer. It necessarily complicates her portrait of African Americans as
nomadic subjects by underscoring that their movement is not simply a
reaction to outside forces but an implication and consequence of their own
agency. It preserves the value of their fictive nomadism—and thus the value
of Parks’s creative nomadism—by revealing the choice inherent in it. As the
above passages demonstrate, nomadism does not promise a positive outcome
or better destination, only their possibility.
Nomadism does promise new times, spaces, and options, however. Parks’s
characters may express disappointment with the consequences of their mi-
grations, yet regret does not eradicate the value of having begun the journey.
If anything, it serves as a reminder that the most effective migration must
manage to preserve a connection to a homeplace. bell hooks states that those
nomads who do survive the journey “passionately holding on to aspects of
that ‘downhome’ life we do not intend to lose while simultaneously seeking
new knowledge and experience” are those best prepared to “invent spaces of
radical openness.”68 By allowing her characters to express regret over their
own nomadism, Parks creates figures who are at once holding on and seeking
new knowledge. They reside in the spaces of radical openness created by their
own nomadic consciousness. I would argue, further, that the nomadism of
Parks’s characters reinforces Parks’s own nomadism as a contemporary Afri-
can American woman playwright. Her works operate on stage as open spaces
in which language, plot, and characterization are in a constant state of
movement. Parks’s plays shadow the author’s own perpetual state of creative
middle passage, then, between the influences of her African American
woman, postmodern subject, and theater artist identities.
Roun thuh worl n back a-gain
So this is not necessarily even an account of travel. For to travel implies
movement between fixed positions, a site of departure, a point of arrival,

228 Intersections of Race and Gender

 the knowledge of an itinerary. It also intimates an eventual return, a
potential homecoming. Migrancy, on the contrary, involves a movement
in which neither the points of departure nor those of arrival are immutable
or certain.69
black woman with fried drumstick: You comed back.
black man with watermelon: —Not exactly.70
Suzan-Lori Parks renegotiates the boundaries of the African American
migratory tradition just as she does the boundaries of time and space, form
and content. In Black Looks: Race and Representation, hooks describes “critical
remembering” as a way to interrogate the past.71 Parks’s explorations of the
strengths and weaknesses in nomadic subjectivity do indeed recall the history
of African American artistic expatriation. At the same time, her efforts are
creating a record by which to critically remember contemporary African
Americans’ nomadic consciousness and African American artists’ creative
nomadism.
Again, the key is to approach African American artists’ nomadism not
solely as a makeshift solution to social and aesthetic oppression, the in-
stinctive reaction of a people under attack. Rather, analysis must con-
sider this nomadism as a form of creative agency. Parks has created
works too visionary, too invigorating, too much of a theatrical spectacle,
and too blessed with humor to be subject to accusations of being aimless
and disorderly. At the same time, her works are constructed too care-
fully to be viewed simply as the product of sheer instinct. The concept
of African American artists’ creative nomadism offers a way to explore
her plays’ characteristics critically rather than apologetically, thereby
producing more complex, satisfying analysis. Similarly, other African
American artists’ works, the form or content of which seem to have been
made kaleidoscopic or even incoherent by the influences of postmodern-
ism and the artist’s compound identities, can also benefit from careful
application of the nomadic concept. Through it, critics and audiences
alike can better respect, appreciate, even give in to such works’ chal-
lenges, moving with them rather than trying to clip their wings.
Ham bone ham bone whatcha do?
Got uh chance n fairly flew

notes

1. Barnor Hesse, “black to Front and black Again: Racialization through Con-
tested Times and Spaces,” in Place and the Politics of Identity, ed. Michael Keith and
Steve Pile (New York: Routledge, 1993), 179.
2. Suzan-Lori Parks, The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World
(1992), 123.
3. All three of these authors wrote in other forms, including political essays,
autobiographies, and even drama, but they are best known as novelists.Also,Baldwin

Expression of Creative Nomadism 229

doescomplicatethisconstructionoftheAfricanAmericanartistexpatriatesomewhat,
by both his longevity and the diverse body of his work. See Ursula Broschke Davis,
Paris without Regret: James Baldwin, Kenny Clarke, Chester Himes and Donald Byrd(Iowa
City: University of Iowa Press, 1986), 3; and Bryan R. Washington, The Politics of
Exile: Ideology in Henry James, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and James Baldwin (Boston: North-
eastern University Press, 1985), 15.
4. See Davis ix; Michael Fabre, From Harlem to Paris: Black American Writers in
France 1840–1980 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991), 337.
5. An analogous example would be a woman artist’s creative exploration of the
act of giving birth, although she herself may be childless.
6. See Alisa Solomon, “Signifying on the Signifyin’: The Plays of Suzan–Lori
Parks,” Theater 21, no. 3 (Summer/Fall 1990): 73–80; Alvin Klein “About Women,
about Pedestals,” New York Times (31 Mar. 1996): 13, 21. Steven Drukman, “Suzan-
Lori Parks and Liz Diamond: Doo-a-diddly-dit-dit,” TDR 39, no. 3 (Fall 1995); and
Alice Rayner and Harry J. Elam, Jr., “Unfinished Business: Reconfiguring History
in Suzan-Lori Parks’s The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World,”
Theatre Journal 46, no. 4 (Dec. 1994): 447.
7. Parks describes her plays as “plutonium” because that element “moves . . . is
alive” (Drukman 63).
8. This connection to postmodernism also justifies my study’s emphasis on con-
ditions of homelessness and continuous movement, rather than on markers of per-
manence and a completed physical journey. Like the transition from literal to meta-
phorical expatriation, this emphasis makes the necessary room for broader
connections, including the relative and ambiguous nature of terms such as movement
and home in this time of supersonic jets and virtual reality.
9. Rosi Braidotti, “Introduction: By Way of Nomadism,” in Braidotti, Nomadic
Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1994), 4.
10. Ibid., 5. See also Jill Dolan, Feminist Spectator as Critic (Ann Arbor: University
of Michigan Press, 1988); and Addison Gayle, Jr., ed., The Black Aesthetic (NewYork:
Doubleday, 1971).
11. See Jill Dolan, The Feminist Spectator as Critic (Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press, 1988); and Addison Gayle, Jr., ed., The Black Aesthetic (New York:
Doubleday, 1971).
12. Parks acknowledges many critics’ resistance to seeing her as a theorist, how-
ever, and attributes it to “what we allow ourselves—we, meaning the world, black
people included—what we allow black people to do and one of them is not theory”
(Drukman 61). Fortunately, thefollowingscholarschallengethislimitedpermission,
exploring ways in which African American (women) have traditionally developed
theories through overlooked means, such as artistic expression: hooks, Talking Back:
Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black (Boston: South End, 1989); Barbara Christian,
“The Race for Theory,” Feminist Studies 14, no. 1 (1988): 67–79; and Patricia Hill
Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, andthe PoliticsofEmpowerment
(Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1990).
13. Una Chaudhuri, Staging Place: The Geography of Modern Drama (Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 1995), 4.
14. Liz Bondi, “Locating Identity Politics,” in Place and the Politics of Identity, ed.
Michael Keith and Steve Pile, (New York: Routledge, 1993), 98.
15. bell hooks states: “Postmodern critiques of essentialism which challenge
notions of universality and static over-determined identity within mass culture and

230 Intersections of Race and Gender

mass consciousness can open up new possibilities for the construction of self and
assertion of agency.” hooks, “Post-Modern blackness,” in hooks, Yearning: Race,
Gender, and Cultural Politics (Boston: South End, 1990), 28.
16. Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco:
aunt lute books, 1987), 79.
17. Edward Said, “Reflections on Exile,” in Out There: Marginalization andContem-
porary Cultures, ed. Russell Ferguson, et al. (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, and New
York: New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1990), 366.
18. Ella Pearson Mitchell, “Du Bois’ Dilemma and African American Adaptive-
ness,” in Lure and Loathing: Essays on Race, Identity, and the Ambivalence of Assimilation,
ed. Gerald Early (New York: Penguin, 1993), 266.
19. Paul Gilroy, The BlackAtlantic:ModernityandDoubleConsciousness(Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993), 3.
20. Quoted in Sydné Mahone, ed., Moon Marked and Touched by Sun: Plays by
African-American Women (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1994), 325.
21. Paul Gilroy asserts that members of the African diaspora enjoy a privileged
standpoint, which is “a response to the successive displacements, migrations, and
journeys (forced and otherwise) which have come to constitute these black cultures’
special conditions of existence” (Gilroy 111).
22. Similar arguments have been made in feminist camps as women of color have
asserted that they can contribute greatly to the efficacy of feminist movements and
theory because of their perspective as a “double minority,” which requires their
negotiation between at least two worlds. Seethefollowingfordiscussionsofdifference
and African American feminism: Elsa Barkley Brown, “African-AmericanWomen’s
Quilting: A Framework for Conceptualizing and Teaching African-American
Women’s History,” in Black Women in America: Social Science Perspectives,ed.Micheline
R. Malson et al. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988); Brown, “ ‘What Has
Happened Here’: The Politics of Difference in Women’s History and Feminist
Politics,” in “We Specialize in the Wholly Impossible”: A Reader in Black Women’s History,
ed. Darlene Clark Hine et al. (Brooklyn N.Y.: Carlson, 1995); and Deborah K. King,
“Multiple Jeopardy, Multiple Consciousness: The Context of a Black Feminist Ide-
ology,” in Malson et al. Similarly, cultural critics, including Trey Ellis and Greg
Tate, argue that contemporary African American artists benefit from a hybridized
sensibility, which allows them to employ whichever creative influences they choose,
regardless of whether those influences are seen as “black” or not. See Trey Ellis, “The
New Black Aesthetic,” Callaloo 12, no. 1 (Winter 1989); and Greg Tate, “Nobody
Loves a Genius Child: Jean Michael Basquiat, Flyboy in the Buttermilk,” in Tate,
Flyboy in the Buttermilk: Essays on Contemporary America (New York: Simon & Schuster,
1992), 231–244.
23. I refer to social class as an aspect of racial identity rather than as its own separate
category because of how race shapes the expression of social class.
24. Privileges of education and economic status are not unique to African Amer-
icans, of course. However, this group’s history of oppression and still-complicated
presence in this country have caused the notion of privilege to have unique applica-
tions as compared to other racial groups. Albert Murray reminds us that African
Americans’ continued exposure to discriminatory practices has affected our achieve-
ment such that the clean class divisions according to income or educationlevel,which
are usually applied to white Americans, are impossible for black Americans. See
Murray, “The Illusive Black Middle Class,” in The Omni-Americans: Some Alternatives
to the Folklore of White Supremacy (New York: Vintage, 1970), 94–96.

Expression of Creative Nomadism 231

 For additional analyses of the particular circumstances of the African American
middle class, see Bart Landry’s sociological study, The New Black Middle Class(Berke-
ley: University of California Press, 1987); Annie S. Barnes’s The Black Middle Class
Family: A Study of Black Subsociety, Neighborhood, and Home in Interaction (Bristol, Ind.:
Wyndham Hall, 1985); and Charles T. Banner-Haley’s cultural critique, The Fruits
of Integration: Black Middle Class Ideology and Culture, 1960–1990 (Jackson, Miss.:
University Press of Mississippi, 1994).
25. E. Franklin Frazier, Black Bourgeoisie (New York: Free Press, 1957), 26.
26. Ibid., 24.
27. Ironically, more than four decades after Frazier’s writing, there continues to
be the assumption that a true black consciousness is inextricably tied to the cultural
and economic status of lower-class blacks.
28. Ellis 237.
29. Parks earned a B.A. at Mount Holyoke College and received her professional
training at the prestigious Yale School of Drama.
30. Keith and Pile, 16.
31. Chaudhuri 5.
32. See Darlene Clark Hine et al., eds., Black Women in United States History: From
Colonial Times to the Present (New York: Carlson, 1990).
33. Mahone describes it as a “purgatory phase,” which becomes a “ghetto of
multiculturalism” based on a “sharecropocracy model” (Mahone xx).
34. Quoted in Ibid., 359.
35. Ibid., xvi, xvii.
36. Using Said’s formulation, Iain Chambers tells us that migrancy is “a form of
picking a quarrel with where you come from”; it requires homes, which Saiddescribes
as “provisional.” I am inclined to think of American theater traditions as provisional
homes with which contemporary African American women playwrights are often
quarreling through their work and existence as artists. Chambers, Migrancy, Culture,
Identity (New York: Routledge, 1994), 2.
37. The term racegender acknowledges how American ideas about masculinity
and femininity have been and continue to be shaped by ideas about race and vice
versa.
38. Last Black Man is a rich example: the death of the last black man in the whole
entire world is framed as a media event through the intermittent interruptions of
Voice on Thuh Tee V. His death is significant enough for nine other cultural and
historical figures to gather to commemorate it. Even the black man himself has
returned from the dead to tell the tale. We learn that the violent death(s) of this
fictional last black man echoes the deaths of countless actual black men in world
history. His death(s) at once stand(s) in for, and exemplifies, the others. An audience
member who does not know the history of black male persecution could still appre-
ciate the ways in which the story moves through time and place, how its language
navigates between sound and meaning, how the structure twists and turns in on
itself, and how all this functions in an exploration of death and dying. But only by
recognizing Parks’s allusions to racegender history, as well as her other allusions, can
that spectator appreciate the play’s full meaning.
39. In The Politics of Exile, Washington observes that the American restrictions
on African American authorship, which pushed Baldwin to exile himself to Paris,
also forced the author “to write America from a distance” (Washington 126).
40. Mahone xvii.
41. Drukman 61–62.

232 Intersections of Race and Gender

 42. Again, Parks is not the only example of a contemporary African American
woman playwright whose work displays a connection to nomadic subjectivity. Play-
wright/performer Anna Deavere Smith’s On the Road series provides one important
instance of nomadic consciousness through its interview-based portraits of various
members of a community in conflict. Unlike Parks’s work, however, the process of
creation and performance—rather than the content of the works—is what ties
Smith’s pieces to matters of nomadism. Smith’s pieces work becauseofhowuncannily
she is able to fully embody the different voices of her subjects and how carefully she
juxtaposes those different voices in one performance. These effects depend on the
illusion—however momentary—of static, discrete identities and moments. In fact,
the “stories” of Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992, Fires in the Mirror, and her other works
are based in large part on how the illusion of static identities can lead to conflicts
between groups. Parks, on the other hand, assembles characters and stories that revel
in the fact that identities and places are highly mobile and integrated. She creates
works that inhabit the margins between, thereby demonstrating the sometimes
liberatory, sometimes debilitating consequences. Other contemporary African
American women playwrights whose works encourage an exploration of their no-
madic sensibility include Kia Corthron, Pearl Cleage, Ntozake Shange, and prede-
cessor Adrienne Kennedy.
43. Critic Alisa Solomon argues that Parks shows African Americans “in a per-
petual state of middle passage.” Solomon, “Signifying on the Signifyin’: The Plays
of Suzan-Lori Parks,” Theater 21, no. 3 (Summer–Fall 1990): 79.
44. Suzan-Lori Parks, The America Play and Other Works (New York: Theatre
Communications Group, 1995), 39.
45. Braidotti 16.
46. For example, The America Play, with its Lincoln impersonator and the wife
and son who trail behind, suggests blacks’ migration to the West in the late 1800s
or even the migration of black performers in traveling minstrel shows. bell hooks,
“Choosing the Margin as a Space of Radical Openness,” in hooks, Yearnings, 145–
153.
47. See bell hooks, “Choosing the Margin,” as a Space of Radical Openness,” in
hooks, Yearnings, 145–153.
48. Is it merely coincidence that Parks’s nickname seems to suggest accelerated
motion?
49. Parks, The America Play, 8–10.
50. Ibid., 109.
51. Ibid., 12. In another essay, Parks references the African concept of time as
described by theologist and philosopher John S. Mbiti, in which inhabitants of the
past—the dead—can also enter the present (ibid., 5).
52. Solomon argues that, through disjointed narrative and disembodied speech,
Parks stages Du Bois’s double-consciousness itself rather than staging stories about
people struggling with such consciousness (Solomon 74).
53. Glottal stops and wheezes to simulate the sound of strangling or drowning.
54. Parks, The America Play, 38.
55. Ibid., 103.
56. Interestingly, this exchange is repeated later in the play (ibid., 123). What
was at first a discussion about black female invisibility in a new combination of male
and female characters becomes one of male invisibility.
57. Ibid., 26.
58. Ibid., 30.

Expression of Creative Nomadism 233

 59. Ibid., 36–37.
60. Quoted in Washington 20.
61. Parks, The America Play, 60.
62. Ibid., 111.
63. Ibid., 116.
64. Quoted in Solomon 75. Such double meaning is typical in African American
vernacular speech—frequently referred to as signifyin’ or signification.Literarycritic
Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and linguist Claudia Mitchell-Kernan offer classic studies
on this subject. See, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., The Signifying Monkey: A Theory ofAfrican-
American Literary Criticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988); and Claudia
Mitchell–Kernan, “Signifying as a Form of Verbal Art,” in Mother Wit from the
Laughing Barrel: Readings in the Interpretation of Afro-American Folklore, ed. Alan
Dundes (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1973), 310–328.
65. Gilroy 124.
66. Parks, The America Play, 103.
67. Ibid., 39. According to Said, exiles have an “essential sadness” that can never
be overcome, and triumphant moments in exile are only doomed attempts to combat
the “crippling sorrow of estrangement . . . , undermined by the loss of something
left behind for ever” (Said 357).
68. hooks, “Choosing the Margin,” 148.
69. Chambers 5.
70. Parks, The America Play, 108.
71. bell hooks, “Loving Blackness as Political Resistance,” in hooks, Black Looks:
Race and Representation (Boston, South End, 1992), 19.

234 Intersections of Race and Gender

 12

Attending Walt Whitman High

The Lessons of Pomo Afro Homos’ Dark Fruit

‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘
jay plum

Pomo Afro Homos (Postmodern African American Homosexuals) was a San

Francisco–based performance group founded in November 1990 by Brian
Freeman, Djola Bernard Branner, and Eric Gupton. The three performers
met as part of the support group Black Gay Men United. Among its twenty-
some members was the late filmmaker Marlon Riggs, whose 1991 film,
Tongues Untied (in which Branner appeared and for which Freeman served as
executive producer), inspired the trio to form a company. In January 1991,
the Pomos debuted Fierce Love: Stories from Black Gay Life at Josie’s Cabaret
and Juice Joint, a performance space located in San Francisco’s CastroDistrict
that is well-known for producing queer work. That year, the production
traveled to Seattle, Chicago, and Los Angeles before the group received an
invitation from George C. Wolfe to appear as part of Moving beyond the
Margins: A Festival of New Voices at the Joseph Papp Public Theater in New
York. Dark Fruit, the group’s second and only other collaboration, received
a workshop production at the Public on 14 December 1991. Fierce Love and
Dark Fruit subsequently toured in repertory throughout the United States
and Great Britain over the course of the next four years. Marvin K. White
joined the company in 1993 during Gupton’s brief sabbatical. The group
officially disbanded in 1995 to pursue individual projects.1
Although the Pomos’ existence as a performance company was short-lived,
its contributions to the creation of a black cultural politic no doubt will be
long-lasting. The early 1990s witnessed a virtual explosion of cultural activ-
ity by gay black artists. This network of politicallycommittedartistsworking
in film, fiction, dance, and theater reexamined the complexities of gay black
life and created a sense of community that reinvigorated the more general
notion of what political communities can look like. Brian Freeman notes, for
example, that Fierce Love was a “warm and cuddly show” about the diversity
of black gay male lives, whereas Dark Fruit is “more about ambivalence and

235
things that are not right within our community and within the larger com-
munities we travel through.”2 Indeed, the seven sketches in Dark Fruit
(“Aunties in America: Epiphanies ’n Roaches,” “Last Rights,” “Black and
Gay: A Psycho-Sex Study,” “Sweet Sadie,” “Doin’ Alright,” “Tasty,” and
“Chocolate City, U.S.A.”) stage a larger conversation about racial and sexual
politics in the United States and theater’s potential to reimagine how those
politics might play themselves out.3
Dark Fruit opens with “Aunties in America,” an imagined conversation
among the black gay characters from three critically acclaimed Broadway
productions: Belize from Angels in America (1992–1993), Paul from Six
Degrees of Separation (1990), and Jacob from La Cage aux Folles (1983). After
describing their respective relationships with Missy Kushner, Missy Guare,
and Missy Fierstein, the three figures don kerchiefs to transform themselves
into stereotypical mammies. Dark Fruit closes with a litany of letters ad-
dressed to institutions like the African American church; activist organiza-
tions like ACT-UP, Queer Nation, and Gay Men’s Health Crisis (GMHC),
and cultural figures from Leonard Jeffries and Magic Johnson to Bill and
Hillary Clinton. The letters read in “Chocolate City, U.S.A.” protest the
failure of society at large to acknowledge the presence of black male homo-
sexuality, let alone AIDS as an issue affecting gay black men. At the end of
the piece, the Pomos throw the letters into the air as Tina Turner’s “We Don’t
Need Another Hero” plays over the sound system. Together, “Aunties in
America” and “Chocolate City, U.S.A.” frame the production’s largerinterest
in exploring how representations of gay men generally are marked “white”
and how representations of African Americans generally are marked
“straight.” If gay black men are represented at all, the Pomos suggest, they
are usually depicted as stereotypical figures, like mammies.
“Aunties in America” specifically brings a critique of assimilationist pol-
itics to the theater, challenging generalizations like literary critic John M.
Clum’s conclusion in the revised edition of Acting Gay that the American
theater experienced a “lively renaissance” during the 1990s because of the
success of so-called gay plays like Angels in America.4 When Millennium
Approaches received the 1993PulitzerPrizefordrama,TonyKushnerheralded
the award as a sign that the 1990s marked a “break-through decade” for plays
with gay themes: “This is a play about being gay, and I think it’s a great
thing that the [Pulitzer] jury decided to recognize it in this way.”5 What
both Kushner and Clum fail to recognize is that the image of gay culture
in Angels in America comes at the expense of an Other. Kushner may be
correct in claiming that Millennium Approaches is a “play about being gay,”
but the Pomos suggest that it more accurately is a play about being white
and gay.
In his discussion of Angels in America, David Román notes that “of all the
major characters, Belize seems to lack an interiority. We mainly see him in
relation to the other characters, who are all white, never quite getting a sense
of his inner life or outer journey.”6 Belize is a supporting character in Angels
in America, whose roles as faithful friend, surrogate mother, and nurturing

236 Intersections of Race and Gender

caregiver transform him into what the Pomos might describe as a desexed
mammy. Belize, moreover, carries the burden of being the sole representative
of racial difference. He sums up his predicament in Perestroika: “I am trapped
in a world of white people. That’s my problem.”7 In the published text, the
line occurs following a series of recognitions in which Prior identifies Joe as
Harper’s “gay” husband, and Joe identifies Belize as Roy Cohn’s nurse. “We
all look alike to you,” Belize tells Joe in an attempt to hide behind the mask
of racial stereotypes.8 As staged in George C. Wolfe’s production on Broad-
way, Belize literally hides behind a scarf, which he finally drops to comment
on his role in the drama. The act momentarily disrupts the production’s flow,
but it is quickly smoothed over by the narrative’s forward drive.
The Pomos are of the opinion that Angels in America fails to examine fully
the complexity of difference within its dramatic universe.9 In his performance
as Belize in the Pomos’ “Aunties in America,” Brian Freeman takes up the
mask of racial stereotypes. This time, however, the mask gives the performer
license to comment on the whiteness of Angels in America. The scene opens
with Belize’s reenactment of the angel’s entrance at the end of Millennium
Approaches. He then describes the appearance of what, in Kushner’s text,
represents the divine “Continental Principality of America”: “The last Miss
Ann Angel: white dress, white wings, white halo, white attitude, white
everything—looks like a flying igloo. Miss Thing comes crashing through
the ceiling.”10 The description points to the whiteness of the angel as well as
to the whiteness of Angels in America more generally. For example, Paul and
Jacob wonder why the angel crashes through the ceiling rather than using
the front door. “You know white folks,” Belize explains. “Then everywhere
you look feathers, plasters, epiphanies, and roaches.” Paul asks, “Now who’s
going to clean that up?”11 Belize looks at him, not having to answer. After
all, they both know white folks.
Through “Aunties in America,” the Pomos suggest that whiteness is so
pervasive in plays like Angels in America that it is rendered invisible as a
particularizing quality. If Richard Dyer is correct in claiming that “any
instance of white representation is always immediately something more
specific,”12 then Kushner’s description of Angels in America as a “play
about being gay” risks a representation of gay culture in late twentieth-
century America in which the Other is reproduced as the Same. Nor is
Angels in America an isolated example. In her discussion of the W.O.W.
Cafe, Kate Davy suggests that the issue of whiteness is endemic to lesbian
and gay performance: “Performing sexuality excessively as an oppositional
strategy . . . depends on racial encoding.”13 Davy argues that lesbian and
gay culture reproduces hegemonic structures and values, specifically the
values of white middle-class respectability, in part because the constant
revaluing of assimilation as the goal of the lesbian and gay cultural move-
ment. As the lesbian and gay movement struggles with the politics of vis-
ibility, it must ask what remains invisible in the quest for recognition
and respectability.
With “Aunties in America,” the Pomos expose the operations of whiteness

The Lessons of Dark Fruit 237

by talking back to the roles scripted for gay black men by Kushner, Guare,
and Fierstein. In effect, to paraphrase Homi K. Bhabha, the act of mimicry
becomes an act of menace.14 In effect, the Pomos respond to the place for gay
black men created by Kushner, Guare, and Fierstein. “Missy Kushner has
me up there every night reading those kids’ asses or wiping their butts,” says
Belize. “It’s all the same to me. In part two I get to wipe Roy Cohn’s butt.
Find an epiphany in that!”15 Paul (Djola Branner) similarly finds his fate in
Six Degrees of Separation lacking as an epiphany, describing himself as “some
kind of Hattie McDaniels meets Mandingo biotech fruit.” First, he has to
feed them, then he has to sleep with them. “Do I look like some anecdote to
dine out on to you?”16 Far worse is Jacob’s(Marvin K.White)plight,however.
He is trapped in a world of dinner theater productions of La Cage, where he
is put through a “Butterfly French Maid McQueen” routine eight times a
week: “I can live with the eye bugging and noble caretaker nonsense. But,
children, it hurts my pride so bad, night after night, to put on heels and have
to walk around like the last Steppin’ Jungle Bunny Fetchit!” They all agree
that “a black drag queen in her first pair of pumps can out sashay/chante
Naomi, Cindy, and Claudia.”17 Ultimately, Belize, Paul, and Jacob take
solace in their time away from what is sometimes an isolating and lonely
existence. “But what we gonna do?” Belize asks. “Quit?”18 They pause, then
laugh in unison.
The resoundingly negative and defiant response to the possibility of quit-
ting reveals a conscious decision on the part of the characters not to retreat
but to engage the conditions of their oppression. Like the characters they
perform in “Aunties in America,” the Pomos confront the images that disem-
power gay black men and find agency by momentarily seizing control of the
discourse. They speak through the figures of Belize, Paul, and Jacob without
becoming them or validating the stereotypes their dramatic alter egos rep-
resent. The space between these racialized images and their embodied mean-
ings in representation creates a Brechtian distance among spectators that not
only forces them to confront their empowerment/disempowerment through
such images but also allows them to begin to imagine how difference can
transform how we understand identities and communities.
In the gestus of American politics, tensions between difference and same-
ness historically have manifested themselves in debates about racial integra-
tion and segregation and, more recently, in the anti-assimilationist critique
of liberation politics found in contemporary queer theory. The political
strategies of assimilation and integration are limited to the extent that they
are based on a myth of an American common culture that seeks equality
through the disavowal of differences. The categories of race, gender, class,
and sexuality unarguably are sites of discrimination, but they are also the
terms used by disenfranchised groups to mark their presence and to mobilize
as communities.
So-called identity politics became an “issue” in the 1990s in large part
because of the crisis of agency that black cultural critic Kobena Mercer
associates with an:

238 Intersections of Race and Gender

 atomistic and essentialist logic . . . in which differences are dealt with one-
at-a-time and which therefore ignores the conflicts and contradictionsthat
arise in relation within and between the various movements, agents, and
actors in contemporary forms of democratic antagonism.19

The so-called “Rainbow theory” of multiculturalism feeds a pluralistic im-

pulse in which the categories of identification are predetermined and un-
changeable, overlooking the intersection of variousfactorsintheconstruction
of social and political identities as well as the negotiability of any identity
claim.
“Aunties in America” takes queer cultural politics to task for the repro-
duction of hegemonic structures that privilege white men. Dark Fruit, how-
ever, also challenges an essentialism in black cultural politics found in au-
thenticating claims of masculinity that deny differences within the race.
The virulent masculism and homophobia beneath claims to an “authentic”
blackness perpetuate a cycle of internalized racism and sexual alienation
among African Americans. In the monologue “Tasty,” Marvin K. White
explores the effects of internalized racism on the desire of gay black men for
one another. White shares the story of his first sexual encounter with another
gay black man, an attractive African American executive he met during a
temporary assignment at an integrated corporation. Finding themselves
working late on a Friday night, the business executive invites White over to
his apartment, where one thing leads to another. For White, the sex was the
“most powerful experience of [his] life”: “I just laid there, my head on his
chest, and I thought, my God, how perfect. The act of love. Me and this black
man together in this room. The first black man in my life.”20 The elation
quickly dissipates, however, when the man’s white lover comes home. White
gathers his things and leaves, turning down their invitation to stay. On
Monday, he receives a phone call from the executive, who apologizes and tells
White: “I could never be with a black man you know. But every once in a
while I need a little taste.”21
The need for a “little taste” is symptomatic of an internalized racism that
denigrates gay black men as sexual objects. Kaja Silverman maintains that,
within the mise en scène of desire, identification allows the ego to transform
itself into the desired object.22 If this is the case, then the desire of the African
American executive to be with a white lover is an act of disavowal that betrays
a desire to be white. Imaginary identifications, however, are also “capable of
transforming the ideological import of unconscious desire, or even ofpushing
the latter in new directions.”23 White, for example, experiences a black man
loving another black man as a form of “perfect love.” It is this scene, as Marlon
Riggs suggests at the end of Tongues Untied, that may be “the revolutionary
act.” Black on black love is revolutionary because it defies the claim of
whiteness as being the object of desire.
Indeed, love between two black men (or two black women) reveals the ways
in which race is intimately linked with desire (i.e., race is desire) and chal-
lenges an ideology in which racial categories are seen as natural and fixed. At

The Lessons of Dark Fruit 239

the same time, the expression of desire between two gay black men challenges
masculinity’s claim to being something more than a social performance.
Concerns about a crisis of masculinity actually reveal a deep-seated anxiety,
whichBhahbatakes as “a‘sign’ofdangerimplicit/onthethresholdofidentity,
in between its claims to coherence and its fear of dissolution.”24 When forced
to confront the knowledge posed by difference, the rigid codes of masculinity
require that difference be denied, disavowed, or (if need be) punished.
Brian Freeman’s monologue, “Doin’ Alright,” is a saturated moment in
Dark Fruit, which explores the consequences of a virulent black masculinity
on gay black men through the lived experience of a black drag queen.Freeman
relates his chance encounter at a gay working-class bar in Boston with a
childhood friend named Dennis, now a Donna Summer lookalike going by
the name Denise. Denise ultimately is killed by the leading cause of death
among gay black men. But it is not what you think, he tells the largely white
audience during a 1993 performance at New York University. The pre-
sumption that Denise died from AIDS complications privileges sexual iden-
tification in such a way that it ignores the intersection of sexuality with other
factors, like race and class, in the construction of social identities. Denise was
killed because she was in the wrong place at the wrong time, and, as Freeman
notes: “When you’re poor, black, effeminate, and gay, life is the wrong place at
the wrong time.”25
Henry Louis Gates, Jr., attributes intraracial violence against gay black
men to the sexualized definition of nationalism inherited from the Black
Power Movement of the 1960s and 1970s.26 Within the radical definitions
of self and nationhood espoused by the Black Nationalists, masculinity was
the unquestioned norm from which any deviation was regarded as a betrayal
of the race. Gates notes that Black Nationalism and homophobia are inti-
mately linked in a passage from Home in which Amiri Baraka (then LeRoi
Jones) states in no uncertain terms: “Most white men are trained to be fags.”27
The sentence casts homosexuality as a “white man’s disease” or, more accu-
rately, as a social performance that trains white men how to be white.
Baraka is a key figurein conventionalnarrativesofAfricanAmericantheater
history. Larry Neal, for instance, credits Baraka with “radically reordering
the internal structure of black theater” with his 1964 play, Dutchman.28
Baraka arguably broke with the conventions of social realism characteristic
of earlier African American drama. His was a functional aesthetic “implicitly
but very clearly addressed to the radical sector of black sociopolitical con-
sciousness.”29 If Dutchman enacts the revolutionary values of Black Power, it
does so through a violent, masculinist rhetoric that erases differences within
the race. The play displaces stereotypes about the excessive sexuality of black
men onto the figure of an oversexed white woman named Lula, who seduces
the representative figure of Clay into believing that he can escape a history
of social exclusion. Clay, however, cannot escape a history of racial genocide
without the violent revolution triggered by the “simple act” of murder.30
The ritual sacrifice of Clay at the hands of Lula depicts racial conflict in highly

240 Intersections of Race and Gender

sexualized and gendered terms. Dutchman clearly distinguishes between an
“us” and a “them” in an attempt to remove barriers to social awareness.
While critics applauded Dutchman for revealing the violence done to Af-
rican American men, they were decidedly mixed in their reception ofBaraka’s
The Toilet (which opened less than nine months after Dutchman’s premiere in
1964). The Toilet documents the punishment of a white high school student
named Jimmy Karolis, whose love letter to a black male studentisintercepted
by his friends. The letter is addressed to Foots, the unofficial leader of a group
of African American youth. Foots’s efforts to convince his friends to cease
Karolis’s “flushing” lose out to the group’s collective need to reinforce its
heterosexuality. Indeed, the group is startled to learn that the intercepted
letter may have been welcomed by Foots. Karolis reveals an intimacy when
he asks the young black man whether his name is Foots or Ray: “Ray, you
said your name was. You said Ray. Right here in this filthy toilet. You put
your head on me and said Ray.”31 As the group brutally beats him, Karolis
insists that “his name is Ray, not Foots. You stupid bastards. I love somebody
you don’t even know.”32
Mainstream critics found The Toilet disturbing, particularly its profane
language and excessive violence. Robert Vorlicky suggests that critics failed
to grasp the complexity of the work, pointing only vaguely to race and class
as the themes of a play in which “the conflict is less with whiteness than with
gender and sexual identity.”33 The Toilet arguably stagesacrisisofmasculinity
in which one of the group’s own is suspected of not being the “same.” That
difference needs to purged. The final tableau of the piece is striking, however,
and is a curious choice from a playwright who, two years after The Toilet’s
opening, claimed most white men are trained to be fags. The play ends with
Ray returning to comfort the badly beaten Karolis.
Where Dutchman and The Toilet dramatically illustrate the need to re-
move barriers to social awareness (even though they risk, at times, the
subjugation of other groups), Dark Fruit examines the effects of the at-
omistic and essentialist logic of identity politics on relationships that
cross categories of difference. Djola Branner’s “Sweet Sadie” tells the story
of Branner’s troubled relationship with his mother, who emotionally
abandoned him as a child and who now suffers from Alzheimer’s disease.
Branner is seated on a bench for most of the monologue. As he shifts
weight and changes poses, the lines between characters blur: Branner’s
mother becomes his childhood self; his childhood self becomes his adult
self; his adult self becomes his mother. Branner’s performance realizes a
prelapserian moment, when the subject’s sense of self is contiguous with
his/her environment, staging the “messy space” of identity to mark the
failure of the body to secure one’s subjectivity. Branner never disappears
into his environment, nor does he “become” his mother in the Stanislav-
skian sense. Their relationship remains in flux. At one point during the
piece, Branner steps into the audience to speak in what the stage direc-
tions indicate is the voice of the “universal black mother”:

The Lessons of Dark Fruit 241

 You are one selfish and ungrateful man. How could you even think of
saying those things about your mama? Have mercy! Blasphemy! That’s
what it is. She’s the one who pushed you from her womb, and you know
she did the very best she could. You even changed the name she gave you.
What the hell is a “Djola”?34

The use of the universal black mother as the interlocutor between Branner
and his mother unfortunately risks the reinscription of the trope of the black
welfare mother, who becomes the scapegoat for the plight of the black male,
as well as the reinscription of a psychological explanation of male homosex-
uality as compensation for the absence of male role models (read: straight)
during childhood. According to these narratives, Sadie’s six-year-old son will
grow up to be gay because he was fatherless and “abandoned” by his mother
during his youth.35 “I believed for some time that I didn’t love her,” Branner
tells the audience. “This woman who tossed me onto the earth to fend for
myself. Who never said, ‘I love you.’ ”36
Following his departure from the Pomos, Branner developed the
monologue into a full evening. In the expanded version, Branner comments
that no one seems able to understand his relationship with his mother, let
alone his need to tell his dying mother that he wants to write a performance
piece about their lives together. “The pain is only an illusion,” he repeats as
a mantra throughout the performance. He finally realizes that the pain is
only an illusion because beneath the pain, there was love. Both versions of
“Sweet Sadie” point to the difficulties of overcoming preconceptions about
social positions without falling into stereotypes, as well as to the difficulty
of representing something as fundamental as the relationship between a gay
black man and his mother outside controlling cultural narratives.
“Sweet Sadie” and Dark Fruit more generally suggest that performance can
have a role in transforming the ways that identity politics get played out in
the United States. Indeed, as Susan Stewart explains, “We will not change
the subjective and social terms of representation without a more dynamic
aesthetic practice.”37 The controversysurroundingtheexclusionofthePomos
from the National Black Theatre Festival (NBTF) in 1991 and 1993 effec-
tively illustrates the power of representation as well as the stakes when certain
representations are made to appear. In justifying the exclusion of the Pomos
from the NBTF, festival director Larry Hamlin maintained that the Pomos
were not invited to participate because the inferior quality of the videotapes
submitted by the group made it difficult to evaluate their work. The tapes
also were submitted after the application deadline. Freeman insists, however,
that the Pomos were “banned” from the NBTF because the homosexual
content of their work made them too controversial to be included in Hamlin’s
“Parade of Stars.” Most of the celebrities who attend the festival are invited
not to perform but to take part in nightly receptions, which in 1993 included
a tribute to Sidney Poitier.38 It seems that Hamlin has substituted an assim-
ilationist politic for the separatism once espoused by Black Nationalists. But
the erasure of sexual difference is an expensive price to pay in representing

242 Intersections of Race and Gender

“community,” enacting what Jewelle Gomez characterizes as an internalized
oppression and political smugness that leaves everyone in a vulnerable posi-
tion.39
In a 1993 op-ed piece in the New York Times, Donald Suggs and Mandy
Carter write about an alliance formed between the religious right and con-
servative churches in Cincinnati, which wanted to prevent social reforms that
would secure the rights of lesbians and gay men. Through Gay Rights, Special
Rights, a videotape produced by conservative groups, which juxtaposes visual
images from the black and gay liberation movements, the right has propa-
gated notions that gay rights and black rights inherently conflict. More
significantly, the videotape suggests that the call for gay rights is in effect a
demand for “preferential treatment” based on the sexual orientation of an
elite minority comprised largely of white men.40
Politics makes strange bedfellows. Preferential treatment is a charge fre-
quently evoked to denounce affirmative action programs. The failure of gay
activists and black religious leaders to look beyond their immediate concerns
validates claims that marginalized interest groups are self-serving and, more
disturbingly, it prevents them from imagining a revitalized sense of com-
munity based on shared struggles. Cathy Cohen concludes that “the process
of movement-building [should] be rooted not in our shared history or iden-
tity, but in our shared marginal relationship to dominant power which
normalizes, legitimizes, and privileges.”41 It is in this way that politics has
the potential to make queer bedfellows.
Brian Freeman imagines the possibility of a coalitional politic that crosses
identity positions in his journey to “Chocolate City, U.S.A.” Freeman and
his lover travel to the National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay
Rights: For Love and For Life We Are Not Going Back. Quickly losing his
companion among the 650,000 marchers, Freeman stands on the sidelines
watching various banners pass by. He is moved by the demonstration of
solidarity among the groups and particularly by Whoopi Goldberg’s com-
passion and political commitment to issues that touch all our lives. “Today
Whoopi Goldberg is beautiful because she has pushed Jimmy Maness, a
person with AIDS, the entire length of this March in a wheelchair.”42 Later
that day, she asks the crowd at the rally to join her in asking: “How long is
it going to take before people get smart, huh?”43 Goldberg’s words and
actions resonate because they are based on a shared experience of marginali-
zation that does not reinscribe differences among groups but directs its
critique at the institutions of power that inscribe those differences.
Nowhere is this critique more powerfully enacted in Dark Fruit than in
Freeman’s “Black and Gay: A Psycho-Sex Study.” According to the program
notes from a 1993 performance at NYU, the piece is “adapted 99 percent
from an actual 60s pulp/porn pseudoscience novel, Black and Gay: A Psycho-
Sex Study by Victor Dodson.” Dodson serves as the narrator of the piece,
presenting a “scientific” lecture (complete with charts and slides of black
male nudes from gay pornography) about the ability of gay black men to
“adjust normally” to white gay culture:

The Lessons of Dark Fruit 243

 Our research indicates that the majority of Negro homosexual males seem
to prefer sexual relations with Caucasians rather than with members of
their own race. Furthermore, many white homosexuals very often prefer
their sexual partners to be Negroid.44

To support his claim, Dodson presents the dramatized case study of Cliff, a
model black student from a single-parent household in Shantytown, who has
been bused to a predominantly white high school on the other side of the
tracks. Cliff becomes the desired object of a white jock/integrationist named
Paul, who wants nothing more than to call Cliff “friend”: “How can we hope
to change the world, Cliff, if we don’t start right here at Walt Whitman
High?”45 At first reluctant, Cliff eventually consents to meet Paul for a “man
to man” talk and stroll by the river. The young men quickly give in to their
passions, dropping their pants and rubbing their Fruit of the Looms against
each other. Here is “a fine example of the seeds of racial tolerance being
planted,” Dodson concludes.46
Walt Whitman is a queer place, as the allusion to the nineteenth-century
American poet suggests. The name, however, also has another and equally
significant meaning in terms of the representational history of racial politics
in the United States. Walt Whitman High School was the setting for the
award-winning television series “Room 222.” Aired on ABC from 1969 to
1974, the television drama looked at the experiences of students, faculty, and
staff at an integrated high school in Los Angeles through the eyes of an
African American teacher, whose history class meets in Room 222. Phillip
Brian Harper suggests that African American viewers regarded the series as
not so much about social integration as about social differentiation among
various socioeconomic groups. Aware of the difficulties of representing a
single African American community, “Room 222” presented a multiplicity
of black subjectivities.47
Like “Room 222,” “Black and Gay” resists integration as a resolution of
racial differences, using theater to frame the contradictions and limitations
of its liberal foundation. Walt Whitman is invoked in the performance piece
to challenge the claim that integration allows gay men of color to “adjust
normally” to a culture defined and controlled by white gay men. Cliff’s
relationship with Paul is far from equal. When the young men are discovered
by Miss Emory, the high school’s sex education teacher, Cliff is the one
blamed for corrupting the innocent white man. “You can take the boy out of
Shantytown, but you can’t take the Shantytown out of the boy,” says Miss
Emory.48 Paul goes home holding his head in shame, but the consequences
for Cliff are more severe. He loses Miss Emory’s recommendation for the
state’s Booker T. Washington Scholarship. That night, Cliff runs away from
home to lose himself in the “homosexual jungle they call New York City.”49
“Black and Gay” effectively demonstrates how social identities and rela-
tionships are constructed by the discourses of institutions like education and
science. “Viewed as a normative and social force,” Steven Seidman writes, for
example, “science has the effect of drawing moral boundaries, producing

244 Intersections of Race and Gender

social hierarchies, and creating identities.”50 Just as classic stage realism
requires a stable referent to assure the spectator of the “truth” of its represen-
tation, science requires a control to produce its sense of “truth” and to obscure
the assumptions it makes. “BlackandGay”quotestheinstitutionaldiscourses
of science and education (in the Brechtian sense of the term) to queer the
process of normalization that they attempt to ensure. The pseudoscientific
language of Dodson’s supposedly objective study of black homosexuality is
demystified with the camp narrative and the pornographic slides of black
male nudes. At one point during the NYU performance, Freeman stepped
out of his role as Dodson to respond to the audience’s laughter. He suggested
that our reactions revealed a familiarity with these photographic images. The
moment was a transformative experience in which, as Elizabeth Wright
argues in her discussion of the Brechtian comic:
The spectator’s own subjectivity is brought into question along with the
representations on the stage; the desires of the body are . . . reached so that
it awakens to an understanding of its own socialization and the discovery
of its political repression.51

The spectatorial gaze becomes an object of the Pomos’ performance, and,

in much the same way that Robert Mapplethorpe’s photographs of black
male nudes are as much about the agency of the photographer as they are
about the fetishized subjects in the photographs, the spectator is made aware
of his/her “seeing” and “being seen.” The identity of the spectator is rendered
multiple and fractured as my psyche becomes the object of the spectator’s
eye. And, as the gaze becomes the object of the performance, “I” disappear.
Identification can be an act that appropriates the Other as the same or in
which the subject imagines becoming the object of his desire. The subject,
however, can also be transformed by an encounter with an Other, depending
on the position that he/she takes within that mise-en-scène. Indeed, an
identification not as but with another can reimagine social as well as political
relationships. The “I” becomes a “we” in which difference is not assimilated
by a common culture but transformed into a radical politic informed for the
present as well as the future. In the end, how can I—how can we—hope to
change the world if we do not start right here at Walt Whitman High?

notes

1. In 1996, Branner toured the United States with Sweet Sadie,anexpandedversion

of a monologue originally presented as part of Dark Fruit. Between 1997 and 2000
Freeman performed in Civil Sex (1997–2000), a performancepiecehecreatedthrough
original research about civil rights leader Baynard Rustin.
2. Brian Freeman, quoted in Stephen Holden, “In the Margins of Two Minorities:
A Double Fringe,” New York Times (23 July 1993): C3.
3. My discussion of Dark Fruit is based on the performance I attended at New
York University’s Loeb Student Center, 21 Sept. 1993.

The Lessons of Dark Fruit 245

 4. John M. Clum, Acting Gay: Male Homosexuality in Modern Drama, rev. ed. (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 281.
5. Tony Kushner, quoted in Greg Evans, “Angels Proves a Box Office Blessing,”
Variety (19 Apr. 1993): 58.
6. David Román, Acts of Intervention: Performance, Gay Culture, and AIDS (Bloo-
mington: Indiana University Press, 1998), 213.
7. Tony Kushner, Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes, part 2:
Perestroika (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1993), 93. Emphasis in
original.
8. Ibid., 92.
9. Framji Minwalla complicates the function of Belize as the only person of color
in Kushner’s dramatic universe in “When Girls Collide: Considering Race in Angels
in America,” in Approaching the Millennium: Essays on Angels in America, ed. Deborah
R. Geis and Steven F. Kruger (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997),
103–117. Minwalla suggests that Belize serves not only as a mouthpiece for Kushner
but as his ethical touchstone: “By locating a black man at the ethical center of his
fictive universe, and then playing his other characters off him, Kushner makes
identity, especially racial and gendered identity, one of the central facets of hisdrama.
Belize occupies that space against which we gauge the ideology, morality, actions—
perhaps even the very humanity—of Kushner’s other inventions” (104). Minwalla’s
reading significantly differs from the critique made by Freeman in “Aunties in
America.” Together, I believe, the two positions illustrate the extent to which Angels
in America is a culturally rich text that invites discussions of numerous identity
positions.
10. Pomo Afro Homos, Dark Fruit, in Staging Gay Lives: An Anthology of Contem-
porary Gay Theater, ed. John M. Clum (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1996), 323.
Emphasis in original. Unless indicated otherwise, all quotations are from the pub-
lished text.
11. Ibid., 324.
12. Richard Dyer, “White,” Screen 29 (Autumn 1988): 47.
13. Kate Davy, “Outing Whiteness: A Feminist Lesbian Project,” Theatre Journal
47 (May 1995): 195. Emphasis in original.
14. Tony Kushner, Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes, part 1:
Millennium Approaches (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1993), 118;
Homi K. Bhabha, “The Other Question: Difference, Discrimination and the Dis-
course of Colonialism,” in Literature, Politics,andTheory:PapersfromtheEssexConference,
1976–1984, ed. Francis Barker et al. (New York: Methuen, 1986), 149.
15. Pomo Afro Homos 324.
16. Ibid.
17. Ibid.
18. Ibid., 325.
19. Kobena Mercer, Welcome to the Jungle: New Positions in Black Cultural Politics
(New York: Routledge, 1994), 289. Emphasis in original.
20. Pomo Afro Homos 338.
21. Ibid. Emphasis in original.
22. Kaja Silverman, Male Subjectivity at the Margins(New York:Routledge,1992),
337.
23. Ibid.
24. Homi K. Bhabha, “Are You a Mouse or a Man?” in Constructing Masculinity,

246 Intersections of Race and Gender

ed. Maurice Berger, Brian Wallis, and Simon Watson (New York: Routledge,1995),
60. Emphasis in original.
25. Pomo Afro Homos 337. Emphasis added. Another telling moment occurred
during the discussion following the performance at NYU when Freeman had to
reassure the audience that the reason for Gupton’s brief hiatus was not that he was
“sick” (as if the only reason a gay man would take a break from performing was that
he was HIV-positive).
26. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., “The Black Man’s Burden,” in Black Popular Culture:
A Project, ed. Gina Dent (Seattle, Wash.: Bay Press, 1992), 79.
27. LeRoi Jones, “American Sexual Reference: Black Male,” in Jones, Home: Social
Essays (New York: William Morrow, 1966), 216.
28. Larry Neal, “Into Nationalism, Out of Parochialism,” in The Theatre of Black
Americans: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Errol Hill (New York: Applause, 1987),
296.
29. Ibid.
30. LeRoi Jones, Dutchman, in “Dutchman” and “The Slave”: Two Plays (New York:
Morrow Quill, 1964), 35.
31. LeRoi Jones, The Toilet, in “The Baptism” and “The Toilet” (New York: Grove,
1966), 60.
32. Ibid.
33. Robert Vorlicky, Act Like a Man: Challenging Masculinity in American Drama
(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995), 114.
34. Pomo Afro Homos 335.
35. For more on the black matriarch, welfare queen, and other controlling images
of black womanhood, see Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge,
Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1990); for an
insightful critique of psychological discourses of male homosexuality, see Eve Ko-
sofsky Sedgwick, “How to Bring Your Kids Up Gay: The War on Effeminate Boys,”
in Tendencies (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1993), 154–64.
36. Pomo Afro Homos 335.
37. Susan Stewart, “The State of Cultural Theory and the Future of LiteraryForm,”
Profession 93 (1993): 3.
38. For an excellent analysis of the tensions between Freeman and Hamlin, see C.
Carr, “Show Me the Way To Go Home,” Village Voice 17 Aug. 1993): 37.
39. Jewelle Gomez and Barbara Smith, “Talking about It: Homophobia in the
Black Community,” Feminist Review 34 (Spring 1990): 47–48.
40. Donald Suggs and Mandy Carter, “Cincinnati’s Odd Couple,” New York Times
(13 Dec. 1993): A17.
41. Cathy Cohen, “Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens: The Radical Poten-
tial of Queer Politics?” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 3, no. 4 (1997):
458.
42. Pomo Afro Homos 340.
43. Ibid.
44. Ibid., 325.
45. Ibid., 329.
46. Ibid., 327.
47. Phillip Brian Harper, Are We Not Men?: Masculine Anxiety and the Problem of
African-American Identity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 165–66.
48. Pomo Afro Homos 332.

The Lessons of Dark Fruit 247

 49. Ibid.
50. Steven Seidman, “Identity and Politics in ‘Postmodern’ Gay Culture: Some
Historical and Conceptual Notes,” in Fear of a Queer Planet: Queer Politics and Social
Theory, ed. Michael Warner (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993),
109.
51. Elizabeth Wright, Postmodern Brecht: A Re-Presentation (London and New
York: Methuen, 1989), 62.

248 Intersections of Race and Gender

“
“
Part IV

African American Performativity and

the Performance of Race
This page intentionally left blank
 13

Acting Out Miscegenation

‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘
diana r. paulin

Because of the ways that black-white, or interracial, intimate affairs have

symbolized both explicit acts of racial transgression and implicit threats to
essentialized racial categories in the United States, their representation cre-
ates space for complex readings of racial identities. The ambivalent and
liminal space in which interracial desire is most frequently represented does
not merely complicate race, it functions as a place for more productive and
multivalent articulations of black and white subjectivities.
Bartley Campbell’s 1882 play, The White Slave, demonstrates how repre-
sentations of (black-white) interracial liaisons in late nineteenth- and early
twentieth-century U.S. drama and fiction invoke anxieties about the impact
of cross-racial contact, while they simultaneously rehearse the multiple pos-
sibilities of these transgressive relationships. In keeping with these ideas, in
this chapter, I explore how Campbell’s play complicates black and white by
“playing out” the possibility of erotic cross-racial relations. At the same time,
I consider how the logic of the play’s narrative, through a multitude of
intricate plot twists and unexpected revelations, undermines the legitimacy
of interracial liaisons, thereby helping to minimize theirdisruptivepotential.
By focusing on the explosive and contested space of representation in The
White Slave, my reading foregrounds historical moments when blackness and
whiteness are destabilized. Rather than examining blackness or whiteness as
discrete, self-contained categories, I consider how Campbell’s historical rep-
resentation of cross-racial affairs emphasizes the mutual formation of those
polarized racial identities. In doing so, my reading complicates and reeval-
uates current antiessentialist debates about the construction of racial iden-
tities; I locate moments in Campbell’s historical representation that dem-
onstrate how the interstices created by the intersection of black and white
subjectivities not only produce destabilizing racial formulations but also
enable us to rethink how race is enunciated in multiple and particular loca-
tions.
The White Slave engages in multiple racial performances and depicts race
in performative terms. That is, the play presents an interracial liaison that is

251
part of a broader performance—a performance of multiply articulated racial
subjectivities, of miscegenation, of hierarchical power relations—which si-
multaneously challenges and reinforces what it attempts to represent.1 The
contradictions produced by these cross-purposes demonstrate the ambiva-
lence that usually characterizes depictions of interracial encounters. For,
while most nineteenth- and early twentieth-century fictional portrayals of
cross-racial relationships indicate that they will fail, they also leave many of
the conflicting issues and possibilities generated by the liaison unresolved
and unexplored. This ambiguity not only complicates these representations
of intimate black-white unions, it also provides a starting point for rearti-
culating the complexity of racial identities that are, more often than not,
defined in opposition to each other.
Building on Judith Butler’s performative theories, I utilize the notion of
performativity to describe the process of historical sedimentation, which
naturalizes and reinforces static definitions of black and white subjectivities
in the United States.2 When representations of interracial contact articulate
desire that challenges established racial boundaries, they also directly chal-
lenge strict definitions of black and white. Although temporary,thepotential
explosion of the rigid categories of black and white threatens the discursive
and social schemata that rigidify these identities. Thus, by identifying par-
ticular enactments of interracial desire as performative, this reading inter-
rupts the process of enunciation, which attempts to reinscribe black and
white subjectivities into the dominant and regulatory “norms” of racial
identification.3
This examination links the disruptive impact of interracial representations
on racial subjectivity with the contested spaces actualized by performance.4
Like the productive space of performance, representations of interracial un-
ions allow for a playing out of the complexities of real life in a contained
sphere. Similar to staged productions, which invite analyses of the subjects
they portray because of the ways in which they frame norms that usually
remain unmarked, my reading of this representation of black-white inter-
racial desire reevaluates static definitions of black and white identities by
foregrounding the conventions that constitute them.
Although dramatic depictions of lived experience and racial (black-white)
identities cannot be collapsed into a catchall category called theperformative,
particular representationsofracialsubjectivitycan,andoftendo,demonstrate
the different ways in which race is performed. The performative lens helps
to focus readings of racial subjectivity on the intersection of race’s staged
portrayals and lived embodiments.5 Thespaceinbetweentheconstructedness
and materiality of racial subjectivity functions as a site in which the symbolic
and productive power of performance can be identified and interpreted. The
interpretive grid of performance provides a useful strategy for evaluating the
significant ways that cultures and societies not only establish “who and what
they are” (following Joseph Roach) but also reinvent themselves now and in
the future.6 This articulation of performance reinforces my claim that per-
formed representations of interracial unions allow for a rehearsal of relations

252 Performativity and the Performance of Race

that are prohibited in society. Taboo subjects and behavior, such as interracial
alliances, are often perceived as less threatening when they are performed or
imagined in a staged arena because they can be dismissed as fictional and,
therefore, less real. Still, each staged enactment of these historically embed-
ded black-white unions provides space for different possibilities, or what
Richard Schechner refers to as “virtual alternatives,” which extend beyond
the limits of the narratives in which they are produced.7

Contextualizing Miscegenation
A brief historical overview of responses to miscegenation in the United States
provides a context that promotes layered readings of dramaticrepresentations
of cross-racial liaisons. The word miscegenation—a derogatory term for cross-
racial sexual relations—was popularized in the United States by proslavery
journalists David Croly and George Wakeman in 1864. Their inflammatory
pamphlet, Miscegenation: The Theory of the Blending of the Races, Applied to the
American White Man and Negro, purposefully played on the fears of many
white Americans by disingenuously advocating interracial marriage and by
suggesting that mixed races were superior to “pure” ones.8 Although cross-
racial liaisons were not new, and sexual relations between white planters and
their black slaves were tenuously accepted by the dominant society as one of
the unfortunate evils of slavery, this sensational document stirred up many
anxieties about the negative effects of black and white sexual contact.9
Immediately following Emancipation in the United States (1863) and
continuing well into the twentieth century, contradictory and competing
discourses about miscegenation and “the Negro problem” circulated in al-
most every realm of society, including politics, the media, academia, popular
culture, and science. Whitesupremacistssuggestedthattheinnateinferiority
of blacks not only caused the failure of Reconstruction but also reinforced
the need for segregation and white domination.10 These racist theories were
supported and “documented” in a variety of texts, including John H. Van
Evrie’s 1864 propagandistic pamphlet, Subgenation: The Theory of the Normal
Relation of the Races; An Answer to “Miscegenation,” and Alfred P. Schultz’s
1908 reactionary study, Race or Mongrel, which argued that “the fall of the
nations is due to intermarriage with alien stock.”11 Advocates of these racially
prejudiced ideologies also supported the notion that sustained contact be-
tween whites and blacks would contaminate white society and that whites’
only hope for survival was the eventual “extinction”—or, if not extinction,
segregation—of the “weaker,” in the social Darwinian sense, black popula-
tion.12 Many sympathetic whites supported paternalistic policies toward
blacks but were quick to disassociate themselves from charges that they were
promoting social equality and intimate relations between blacks and
whites.13 Significant portions of the black community also supported anti-
miscegenation rhetoric and were proponents of conservative ideologies that
promoted racial separation.14 Although these theories supported racial seg-

Acting Out Miscegenation 253

regation explicitly and implicitly, they could not erase the fact that a signif-
icant percentage of the population lived in bodies that contained “evidence”
of miscegenation. Both literally and symbolically, these mixed-racebodies—
usually depicted as “tragic” mulattoes, quadroons, or octoroons—repre-
sented interracial sexual unions. Despite increased numbers of lynchings and
the heightened animosity of whites toward any person who contained even
“one drop”15 of black blood, black-white sexual relations continuedtodisrupt
the dominant discourse, which argued for racial purity and white suprem-
acy.16

Re-Viewing The White Slave

Bartley Campbell’s The White Slave17 is representative of the complex and

sometimes contradictory articulations of the tense racial, gender, class, and
sexual politics of the late nineteenth-century United States.18 My investi-
gation identifies moments in the play in which race and interracial unions
emerge as both performative and embodied representations of the many
anxieties that black-white interracial “transgressions” generate(d).
The following description of The White Slave from the St. Louis Republican
summarizes the play’s elaborate plot and provides some insight as to how it
was received and understood when it opened in 1882:
An interesting girl in a Southern home grows up in the belief that she
is an octoroon. Under the conditions of this supposed taint of blood she
falls as a slave into the hands of a man who would betray her. She has
a lover who aids her escape, and the business of the play is chiefly con-
cerned with her perils undergone to avoid degraded bondageandpollution,
and incidents which uncover facts that finally prove her to be a white
woman.19
This melodramatic piece, set on Big Bend Plantation, somewhere in Ken-
tucky, opens with plantation owner Judge Hardin lying on his deathbed
saying his final good-byes to his family, friends, and slaves. We quickly
discover that his unmarried daughter, Grace, died in Italy just after giving
birth to her daughter, Lisa. We also learn thatLisa’sbiologicalfather,Marquis
De Bernaugre, fled to France from Italy, abandoning both mother and daugh-
ter. Because Judge Hardin does not want to sully his family name by ac-
knowledging that his daughter had a child out of wedlock (and with a
“foreigner,” no less), he and his quadroon slave, Nance, bring Lisa back to
Big Bend Plantation and pass her off as Nance’s octoroon daughter.20 Despite
Nance’s pleas for the judge to tell Lisa that she is a “free born white woman”
(WS 209), he remains silent and threatens to haunt her from the grave if she
does not keep his secret.
After the judge’s death, his adopted son, Clay Britton, almost loses the
plantation because of his gambling debts. In order to save the land, he sells
all of the slaves to his disreputable “friend,” Bill Lacy. It turns out that Lacy

254 Performativity and the Performance of Race

engineered a scheme wherein he encouraged Clay to risk all of his money so
that Clay would have to sell most of his grandfather’s property in order to
avoid bankruptcy. Lacy’s underlying motive for befriending and manipulat-
ing Clay is his desire to purchase the prized octoroon, Lisa, and force her to
become his concubine on his own plantation in Mississippi. Clay, who loves
Lisa regardless of her slave status, tries to stop Lacy from buying her and is
arrested for interfering with the allegedly legal transaction.Then,Claybreaks
out of jail, locates Lisa, and helps her escape from Lacy’s plantation. At the
climax of the play, Lacy discovers Lisa and Clay fleeing and tries to recapture
her just as the steamer on which they are escaping mysteriously catches fire.
Miraculously, Clay and Lisa avoid harm by floating to safety on a detached
piece of the burning ship. In the final scene, a lawyer hired by the deceased
judge’s sister-in-law (Mrs. Lee) reveals the truth about Lisa’s identity—that
she is really white—so that she and Clay can get married, repossess their
slaves, and return to Big Bend Plantation.
In addition to this intricate plot full of unlikely coincidences, this piece
relies on several of the conventional tragic octoroon tropes, which were well-
established by 1882. The most common characteristics of thetragicoctoroon/
mulatto narratives were that s/he was handsome and admired by many but
alienated from both white and black communities because of her/his tragic
difference. Usually, her/his young life ended in an untimely death caused by
suicide, murder, or some incurable disease.21 Besides the obvious similarity
to Dion Boucicault’s 1859 piece, The Octoroon; or, Life in Louisiana,Campbell’s
play invokes and then transforms many of the conventions associated with
this type of “racial melodrama.”22 Several nineteenth-centuryreviewersmade
note of their familiarity with the narrative in their responses to the play,
asserting that this story was hardly original and that Campbell had obviously
“kidnapped” the idea from other depictions of similar subjects.23 Lisa’s role
as the tragic octoroon doomed to death not only recalls earlier incarnations
of this tradition, it also pre-dates twentieth-century redeployments of a
similar figure in works by black writers, such as Langston Hughes’s play
Mulatto: A Tragedy of the Deep South, (1928/1935), Nella Larsen’s novelPassing
(1929), Adrienne Kennedy’s play Funnyhouse of a Negro (1964), Rita Dove’s
verse play The Darker Faces of the Earth: A Verse Play in Fourteen Scenes (1994),
and Dorothy West’s novel The Wedding (1995).24
Like these later writers, Campbell reshapes tragic octoroon/mulatto con-
ventions so that they address the specificities of his contemporary context.
His postbellum articulation of miscegenation and his reformulation of its
common narrative tropes produce a text that engages contemporary social,
political, juridical, and even scientific discourses, which informed readings
of his play. Rather than presenting a clearly identifiable stance on current
debates, such as racial purity and the future of the United States after “failed”
Reconstruction, Campbell’s play entices its audiences with referencestothese
explosive issues and reproduces them within the imaginative and somewhat
distanced space of the stage. A significant number of reviews from 1882
reiterate this point by claiming that Campbell’s main purpose was to appeal

Acting Out Miscegenation 255

to as many people as possible without alienating anyone. For example, an
unfavorable review stated that Campbell “is careful to produce nothing that
will be caviare to the meanest capacity” and that he
recognizes the fact that in a high-pressure age like this men who have been
at business all day do not want to be bothered with too much thought
when they visit the theatre at night. Mr. Campbell, consequently, abstains
from giving them anything that might by any chance be provocative of
thought, or make any intellectual demand upon an audience.25
Another judicious review made the same observation butcoucheditsresponse
in terms that emphasized the play’s apparent neutrality, claiming that “there
is not the least sectional bias or coloring about it. It is not warped in the
interest of section or party.”26 Both reactions suggest that Campbell avoided
presenting material in a confrontational or offensive manner in order to please
his audiences. They also indicate that he was willing to tone down and revise
any potentially controversial issues in order to avoid conflict.

Role Reversal: Whitewashing Slavery

The most evident transformation that Campbell presents in The White Slave
is his use of a white character to play the role of the vulnerable octoroon. Not
only does this revision of the traditional tragic octoroon figure invert that
convention, it also indicates that both whiteness and blackness are positions
that can be temporarily inhabited and performed in certain situations.Rather
than introduce the miscegenated or octoroon body of typical narratives about
interracial transgressions, Campbell invokes “pure” white womanhood as the
underlying “appeal” that generates Clay Britton’s and Bill Lacy’s attraction
to Lisa; she looks like a white woman and acts like an educated, elite, white
lady. Other characteristics also point to her familiarity with the trappings of
the landed class. Her speech is highly standardized if not excessively formal.
She uses flowery alliterative language throughout the play, which distin-
guishes her from others, as in her elaborate description of the nights she,
Clay, and Nance were marooned on a deserted island after barely escaping
from the burning ship. Music accompanies Lisa’s lyrical lamentations: “How
long and lonesome the night has been—the second we have spent on this
desolate island with only a dreary waste of rushing waters in our ears,” she
bemoans (WS 238). Her speech demonstrates a refinement expected only
from those of the upper echelons of society. Unlike the other black characters
and the nonaristocratic white characters in the play, Lisa does not speak in
dialect, which would have been an easily recognizable marker of race and
class distinctions.27
It is only through other characters’ words and gestures, as well as the racial
hierarchy that the play establishes, that Lisa’s “nonwhite” status is fully
recognizable. Both black and white characters respond to her as if she were

256 Performativity and the Performance of Race

white (by subordinating themselves to her); this behavior indicates that her
almost-white appearance and graceful demeanor diminish any characteristics
that other characters or white audience members could associate with her
slave status and supposed black ancestry. Black members of Big Bend Plan-
tation reinforce Lisa’s ambiguous role by treating her as though she were
extraordinary; at the same time, however, they also resist the urge to label
her white, at least until it is authorized by her racial unveiling in the final
scene of the play.
For upper-class whites, Lisa’s elite decorum is unsettling. Mrs. Lee, a white
woman of an older generation and a relative of the late judge, articulates this
uneasiness when she expresses her disapproval of the late judge’s decision to
give Lisa “the training of a lady,” which “created a great deal of scandal” (WS
204). Not only is Mrs. Lee insulted because Lisa has mastered the etiquette
of aristocratic white women successfully, but she is also intimidated by Lisa’s
ability to transgress the boundaries of her lower status. Revealing her own
insecurity, Mrs. Lee consistently remindsLisathather“dropofAfricanblood”
marks her as inferior: “You forget who you are,” she admonishes Lisa, “Your
white skin and dainty rearing cannot obliterate the fact that you belong to a
race of slaves” (WS 206). Mrs. Lee’s juxtaposition of the terms dainty and slave
both invokes numerous behavioral standards established for elite white
women (refinement, chastity, submission to patriarchs) and places them at
odds with the roles assigned to slaves (licentious, hard laboring, primitive).
Her use of the term slave reminds Lisa that her classification as chattel and as
black cancels out those intimations that she may belong to the category of
(white) lady. Black women, whether or not they performed gentility suc-
cessfully or even looked white, were still considered part of an inferior class
in the 1880s.28 However, the fact that Mrs. Lee must reiterate Lisa’s subor-
dinate role indicates that Lisa’s liminal position poses a threat that must be
consistently identified and policed in order to maintain the racist hierarchy
of the old South.
In contrast, Letty, Mrs. Lee’s daughter, suggests that the racist ideas ex-
pressed by her mother are inappropriate, at least in those explicit terms, when
she scolds her mother for making this type of derogatory remark and consoles
Lisa: “She will be sorry some day. Please forget it” (WS 207). Here, Letty
acknowledges that her mother’s position is distasteful; at the same time, she
relegates any possible reformation of those bigoted convictions to the distant
future of “some day.” This difference in thinking between two white women
who share the same familial and class status represents a subtle shift in racial
rhetoric. Without articulating any overt argument about how to treat blacks,
their mild disagreement suggests that a compassionate and civil attitude
might be more effective than the reactionary approach of the past. This
“kinder, gentler” approach masks the inherent racism and patriarchal struc-
ture that continues to keep blacks, among others, in their place without
recalling the unpleasant memories of the Civil War and Reconstruction,
which both southerners and northerners seemed to want to either deny or

Acting Out Miscegenation 257

forget.29 Letty’s supposedly sympathetic attitude allows her to appease Lisa
while simultaneously maintaining her superior position and upholding the
status quo.
By avoiding conflict, Letty is also free to focus on solidifying her own
position in the social and patriarchal structure. In fact, both Letty and her
lover, Jack, seem to represent a differentoption forwhitesoutherners.Neither
one of them has inherited property, forcing both of them to forge a new path
as “liberated” members of the “new” South. Despite the fact that Letty is
aristocratic and Jack is working class, they plan to get married and fend for
themselves rather than rely on any inheritance from the old plantation legacy.
Both feel that they can overcome their class differences and that Jack should
be treated as Letty’s social equal. Jack reiterates this point by confronting
Mrs. Lee, Letty’s mother. In his defense, he declares: “You object to my suit
because I am poor; but poverty is not perpetual, and with her love to fight
for, I am certain to make my way” (WS 218). This claim to self-sufficiency
suggests that, now that slavery is a relic, all capable men will be able to reap
the benefits of hard work, and the democratic vision can be recuperated.30
This philosophy was particularly significant because many racists arguedthat
blacks failed to prosper not because of the racist oppressive systembutbecause
of their innate inferiority. This unapologetic assertion of the supremacy of
white male potential and free-market individualism also distinguishes “hon-
orable” white men from “guilty,” predatory, degenerate white male figures,
represented by fictional characters like Simon Legree from Harriet Beecher
Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, whose status and power relied on the racial hier-
archy established by the southern plantation economy. It also elevates the
former group of white men by suggesting that all blame for the unspeakable
practices of slavery, such as the forced sexual liaisons with black women,
which produced a large percentage of mixed-raced slaves, should be attrib-
uted to this morally deficient group of white men.31 The placement of all
accountability on lower-class white men also evades the issue of white female-
black male liaisons, which also threatened the racial and patriarchal order
and complicated property inheritance issues.32 This differentiation between
“good” and “bad” white men redeems the virtues of whiteness, patriarchy,
and landed-class aspirations, while simultaneously rejecting the corruption
associated with the history of slaveholding.

Cross-Racial Performance
Although Campbell’s focus on the restoration of white virtue seems to dis-
place anxiety about the history of black-white relations in the South, Lisa’s
multivalent role continues to invoke these issues. Her indeterminate racial
status refuses easy categorization. On the one hand, Lisa could be character-
ized as a surrogate for black womanhood because she takes on the position of
property usually assignedtoblackslaves.Ontheotherhand,shedemonstrates
a type of “delicacy,” which was equated with upper-class white womanhood

258 Performativity and the Performance of Race

in the nineteenth century by such ideological directives as the “Cult of True
Womanhood.”33 Lisa moves in between these polarized definitions of wom-
anhood. She also invokes nineteenth-century protofeminist discourse, which
frequently conflated theposition of white womenwiththepositionofslaves.34
Contemporary white women may have identified with a character like Lisa
more readily because she looks and acts like a free-born white aristocratic
woman but is treated more like a piece of property than a person. She literally
embodies the slave status that white women often used metaphorically to
describe their limited rights and second-class citizenship. Still, Lisa’s mo-
bility and her reenactment of these historical representations of feminized
whiteness and blackness also challenge these definitions in various ways.
Lisa embodies the role of the tragic octoroon temporarily, only to emerge
as something else at the end of the play when her “authentic” whiteness is
unveiled. However, far from establishing the certainty of her white racial
ancestry, her misidentification as an octoroon places both her blackness and
her whiteness into the realm of the performative. If her owners and peers
impose the category of octoroon on her without any “evidence” of black
ancestry, it seems logical that she can also take on the position of a white
woman just as easily even if she does possess “one drop” of black blood; there
is no “proof” that she is really white either. In both cases, she performs the
role that is assigned to her rather than producing some authenticating doc-
umentation of her genetic makeup. Neither category—black or white—
fully contains or confirms Lisa’s race; as a result, her performativity, rather
than her genetic makeup, constitutes her racial identity.
Whether Lisa is placed into the position of slavery by her grandfather
because, for him, blackness masks or incorporates her illegitimacy or whether
she is reclassified as white because of her mother’s white status, her ability to
pass in both situations invites a subtle critique of biologically based racial
definitions. However, the fact that she is bought and sold also provides a
powerful reminder of the material impact of the position that she has been
assigned. Lisa’s successful performance as octoroon is buttressed by Judge
Hardin’s power to place Lisa into that category by his will, literally and
figuratively, rather than by any genetically determined proof. His status as
patriarch and landowner enables him to govern all the members of his private
domain. Additionally, since Judge Hardin is dead, and Nance has been
terrorized into remaining silent, Lisa has neither the knowledge nor the
authority to contest her slave status.
What complicates this performance even further is that the actress who
plays the role of the white-looking and -acting octoroon is actually white.
Thus, it is only through the roles established within the framework of the
performance, as well as through the audience’s familiarity with the racial
hierarchy that informs the play’s characterizations, that her racial differences
are expressed. Moreover, audiences, despite their knowledge of her undis-
covered whiteness, would have had to engage in Lisa’s temporary status as
octoroon, as well as in her eventual emergence as white. These multiple layers
of performance help to produce complex readings of race represented both

Acting Out Miscegenation 259

by the character Lisa and by the actress who plays her; as a consequence,
audiences would have been compelled to read different markers of blackness
and whiteness at different points throughout the performance. It is not until
the final scene of The White Slave that whiteness and blackness no longer
function as liminal and performable parts of Lisa’s identity but emerge as
fixed identities, always already present in the cultural lexicon.

Foiled Again: Restoring Whiteness,

Dislocating Blackness

In addition to fixing her racial identity, the confirmation of Lisa’s whiteness

at the end of the play is finally what allows her to transcend the boundaries
of the traditional tragic narrative that she inhabits. Unlike the typical octo-
roon figure, who dies tragically at the end of the story, Lisa is allowed to live.
By characterizing her role as naturally superior to more conventional repre-
sentations of fragile octoroons, Campbell prefigures her transcendent white-
ness. In contrast to quadroon Nance and octoroon Daphne (Bill Lacy’s en-
slaved concubine), who are abused and condescended to by white men, Lisa
remains defiant and self-assured in her interactions with whites and blacks.
Her assertiveness differs from the required subservience of other slave women
in the play, who are expected to submit to advances from and attacks by white
owners and overseers. Even Lisa’s romantic advances toward her lover, Clay,
are presented as signs of her strength and romantic savvy. This noble char-
acterization of Lisa’s actions differs from more conventional and stereotypical
representations of black women. If the same behavior were attributed to an
identifiably black woman at all, they would most likely be represented as
comic or even brutish. Lisa also refuses to become the concubine of a man she
does not love, distinguishing herself from many black women, who were
forced into sexually exploitative relationships with white men in the slave
system. She states: “A woman cannot fall lower than to live with a man she
does not love—cannot even respect” (WS 228). Here, she establishes a high
moral standard, which many black woman were not in a position to meet.
This assertion points directly to the vulnerability of the real octoroon char-
acter in the play, Daphne. In contrast to Lisa, Daphne is compelled to serve
as Lacy’s mistress, to endure his constant abuse, and to bear his child.
Unlike her subjugated “sisters,” who are forced to inhabit the inferior
status assigned to them permanently because they are black, Lisa’s temporary
and liminal status enables Campbell to characterize her differently. Lisa
functions as an effective surrogate for black and white women because she
possesses mobility that they will never attain. She can present the tragedy of
black women’s lives at the same time that her whiteness radically transforms
her position. Still, her body functions as a site for all of the transgressive
desires that white audiences identified with black bodies. In a sense, what
makes Lisa’s apparent whiteness more tantalizing is the unidentifiable part
of her that has been labeled black. This unmarked blackness also invokes

260 Performativity and the Performance of Race

both the “contaminated” status of Daphne and Nance—the actual mixed-
race female slaves in the play—and the slave condition of other black char-
acters in the play.35 Despite the multiple significations that Lisa’s symbolic
blackness produces, in the end, her “legitimate” whiteness asserts its cultural
authority.
Emphasizing the primacy of Lisa’s role and the displacement of their own
servitude, black characters are more concerned with her suffering than their
own. Time after time in The White Slave, black slaves break into song and
dance or engage in comic dialogues, providing a backdrop similar to a
minstrel show. These conventions would have been familiar to contemporary
audiences because of the well-established tradition of minstrel performances,
which were eventually absorbed by other forms of popular entertainment
(musicals, vaudeville) at the end of the nineteenth century.36 This indirect
invocation of stereotypes popularized by the blackface minstrel tradition
reinforces essentialized formulations of blackness (“zip coon,” contented
slave, “yaller gal”), further distinguishing the “authentic” blackness of the
other slaves from Lisa’s counterfeit representation.37 Reiterating the fre-
quency with which blacks were placed in the role of objectified spectacle, one
nineteenth-century reviewer includes the play’s representations of black
bodies in a list of common props and trappings characteristic of this type of
production. He recalls:
The action, plots, and counterplots, characters, serious and humorous
passages, crowd the scenes of the play. . . . There are plantation scenes and
songs, and banjo-playing and dances and the African of every age and
shade.38
Black characters are conflated into flat stereotypes so that they remain part
of the scenery. Campbell contrasts Lisa with this type of black-identified
behavior by foregrounding her refined persona, placing her in a transcendent
role. In effect, the “blackface” chorus provides the spectacular entertainment
and emotional background for Lisa’s drama.39
This minstrelization of the real black characters deemphasizes increasing
anxiety about the contaminating impact of free blacks by reducing them to
comic and subordinate backdrops.40 Moreover, none of the black male char-
acters, who were the main objects of alarmist antimiscegenation attacks, ever
express any desire for Lisa; they are safely paired off with other black female
characters in the play.41 Their subservient roles indicated that ordinaryblacks
were willing to maintain their servant status and would not overstep the
established racial boundaries. Even the music—sad spirituals or happy banjo
strumming—that frames the narrative and interrupts the dialogue helps to
widen the gap between the comic entertaining role of the “happy darkies”
and the tragic drama of “almost” white Lisa. And, Lisa’s “blackface” perfor-
mance is so muted thathercharacterizationinvokesitsproximitytowhiteness
(a kind of whiteface) more than anything else.
Despite this apparent displacement of blackness, its symbolic power still
has a disruptive, albeit temporary, impact on the white characters. Because

Acting Out Miscegenation 261

of Lisa’s invisible drop of black blood, Bill Lacy is able to purchase her, and
Clay Britton is imprisoned for helping her. In fact, once Clay assists in Lisa’s
escape from Lacy’s plantation, he becomes a fugitive like her. He loses the
rights afforded white people and enters the realm of slave status, temporarily.
This placement of Clay and Lisa into subjugated positions displaces black-
ness, erases the issue of slavery, and enables white figures to appropriate the
burdens of blacks. First, they take on the role of fugitives, which transforms
them into mistreated victims. Then, they easily shed this vulnerable position
in order to reoccupy their stations as sanctioned white people. Or, as the
steamboat captain asserts after a quick appraisal of Lisa’s appearance, genteel
comportment, and white male companion: “This lady is a genuine white
woman!” (WS 236).
The authentication of Lisa’s “genuine whiteness” at the end of the play and
the restoration of her family property provide a conciliatory resolution,which
conventional tragic octoroon narratives did not furnish. The symbolic re-
moval of the contaminating drop of black blood from her body enables Lisa
to enter the safe realm of whiteness legitimately. She and Clay occupy their
positions as the benevolent masters of the idyllic plantation of the past almost
effortlessly. With the legitimacy of their alliance restored, the moral outrage
of Lisa’s unjust treatment is foregrounded rather than the racist ideology that
endorses slavery and prohibits cross-racial unions.42
Their newly acquired roles represent a restoration of antebellum racial,
gender, and class order in the South. Campbell’s play conflates Lisa’s mirac-
ulous shift from being owned (property) to owning (property holder) with
her reclassification as white so that the play’s conclusion supports the notion
that all possessions, which were confiscated from white landowners during
and after the war, should be returned to their “rightful” owners. It also
suggests that only a select group of whites, those who have demonstrated
their legitimacy and moral aptitude, deserve the rights associated with the
position of property holder. The other implication is that blacks, so recently
emancipated from the status of chattel, are not yet ready to assume the
responsibility of ownership, especially self-governance. Rather than chal-
lenging the inherent racism of these patronizing justifications for slavery,
this ending reestablishes the legitimacy of the slave system’s racial hierarchy
and idealizes the benevolent masters of the not-so-distant past. In a sense,
blackness is the foil against which whiteness is reasserted.43 It serves as the
literal and symbolic justification for maintaining white hegemony.
This nostalgic recreation of the antebellum racial hierarchy emphasizes the
desire of many white (male) Americans to bury the conflicts of the past and
to (re)establish their dominant position in the increasingly diversified and
competitive U.S. society.44 Supporting this move, an 1882 review describes
the romanticizing effect and “collective amnesia” that Campbell’s play pro-
duces: “Campbell has gathered up and put in its construction all that is worth
saving of the old Southern society and the conditions of plantation life and
property in the past and gone slavery system.”45

262 Performativity and the Performance of Race

 All that is not worth saving—the actual octoroon character, (Daphne), the
threat of interracial desire, the lecherous white male, the immorality of
slavery—seems to fade into the background of the play and into the irretriev-
able memory of the reviewer. In fact, Daphne’s and Lacy’s fates represent the
typical punishment for carrying out intimate interracial affairs: they both
die. Bill Lacy murders Daphne because she stops him from preventing Lisa’s
escape from his plantation; the Sheriff then shoots Lacy for resisting arrest,
for interfering with Lisa’s rescue, and for attempting to defile Lisa when she
was held captive on his plantation. Lacy’s punishment punctuates the force
behind racial categorization by demonstrating the material impact of Lisa’s
shift from octoroon to white. When she occupies the position of octoroon,
the law supports Lacy’s exploitation of her, but when she moves into the
category of white, Lacy’s predatory sexual advances become criminal. Still,
Lisa’s status depends on her classification, whereas Lacy’s is already tainted
by his alliance with a black-identified woman (Daphne) and his overall
characterization as morally weak. Unlike Lisa and Clay, Lacy and Daphne
represent contaminated bodies, which can neither be cleansed nor recuper-
ated. Lacy and Daphne function as foils to Lisa and Clay because they engage
and fulfill the cross-racial desires that Lisa and Clay merely act out. Lacy’s
ability to express his white male desire for Daphne, the exoticized octoroon,
contrasts with the denial and unfulfilled fantasy that his attempted sexual
liaison with Lisa represents. Lacy’s and Daphne’s bodies are contaminated
irreversibly because they have engaged in interracial sex and have produced
a “miscegenated” child. Their literal and symbolic deaths in the play help to
maintain Lisa’s purity and to eliminate the cross-racial eroticism that their
presence invokes.
Although the other black characters do not die, they do disappear by
returning to their prescribed roles as slaves on Big Bend Plantation. One
could also argue that the more explosive form of interracial relations—
between black men and white women—remains invisible and unspeakable.
This would have been pertinent in the 1880s, when racist white southerners
used alarmist rhetoric about the danger of free black men rapingwhitewomen
in the South to justify violence against blacks.46 In fact, this extremely
transgressive form of interracial union is arguably what this post-
Reconstruction narrative is really displacing. Most white male–black female
relationships were not considered bad by slave owners because they repro-
duced the slave population, according to the law that stated thatthecondition
of the child follows the conditionofthemother(theyremainslaves).However,
white female–black male liaisons were viewed as a direct threat to white
southern patriarchal authority, since, technically, those children could share
the free status of their white mothers.47
Rather than addressing this issue, the narrative circumvents black male–
white female liaisons by focusing on the ways in which the crisis of Lisa’s
misclassification as octoroon gets played out as a competition between the
two central white male characters, Bill Lacy and Clay Britton, for ownership

Acting Out Miscegenation 263

of her body. Unlike the slaves and most antebellum white women, Lacy and
Clay are authorized to navigate the “marketplace” and all that it represents
in U.S. culture from positions of power. As legitimate property holders, their
actions, intentions, and right to possess Lisa are never challenged. By refo-
cusing the destabilizing impact of Lisa’s counterfeit octoroon status on these
white male characters, the narrative formulates the question of Lisa’s liminal
racial status in terms of white male identity and desire, while it also precludes
any articulation of desire between black men and white women.
Even Lisa and Clay’s mimetic cross-racial relationship is “whitened” and
forced into the background by Lisa’s transformation from octoroon to white.
The legal status of their union changes along with Lisa’s racial classification
because she is now permitted to marry Clay legally. This difference from the
slaves, whose unions were not authorized by the state, reinforces both the
forbidden nature of their earlier alliance and the legitimacy of their current
relationship.
Lisa’s racial transmogrification from black to white also indicates that the
desirability of octoroon women is fueled by a desire for both pure whiteness
and exotic blackness. Lisa’s character represents this multifaceted appeal for
she occupies a different or even “interesting” category, as she’s referred to in
one of the nineteenth-century reviews, while she simultaneously embodies
an idealized model of whiteness. She and Clay enter into a transgressive
relationship because she has the status of octoroon but, eventually, she
emerges as white, which simultaneously permits and sanitizes the mythos of
their cross racial affair. Lisa and Clay’s counterfeit interracial encounter
replicates and replaces Lacy and Daphne’s genuine interracial union, sug-
gesting that Lisa and Clay’s enactment of cross-racial love was a performance
rather than an actualization of transgressive desire. Moreover, Lisa’s role as a
tragic octoroon and the desire that she evokes is eventually defused when her
contaminated status is removed by the official exorcism of any blackness
associated with her body. This symbolic purification of Lisa’s body affirms
her whiteness and eradicates the threat of the mixed-race body, the misce-
genated body.

Unsettling Conclusions
This depiction of the tragic octoroon and the destructive effects of cross-racial
relations remains part of the performance and, therefore, indicates that none
of the characters necessarily represents realities beyond the stage. However,
the performance intersects with lived experiences and provides a powerful
reminder that transgressive interracial liaisons and mixed-race individuals
exist and create (and experience) similar disruptions in real life.48
Despite the triumph of white racial supremacy at the end of the play, the
ambiguous performances of miscegenation represented in The White Slave
attest to the unresolved anxieties that interracial unions and miscegenated
bodies generate(d). Even within the context of Campbell’s conciliatory play,

264 Performativity and the Performance of Race

conventional tropes about transgressive cross-racial liaisons emerge in rela-
tion to a broad matrix of historically grounded racial discourse,whichinforms
representations and resists reductive readings. One might also argue that it
is only because white male–black female relations were institutionalized and
reproduced through the slave system that Campbell’s representation is rec-
ognizable, imaginable, or acceptable to its viewers.
The ambiguous space between Campbell’s safe solution to transgressive
interracial desire and the explosive responses surrounding the issue of mis-
cegenation indicate that Campbell’s imaginative formulations of cross-racial
unions should be read as performative, rather than as accurate depictions of
reality. Therefore, it is possible to re-view them in order to better understand
the cultural and historical conditions that informed them. By examining the
way in which black-white boundaries were never firmly in place in the
nineteenth century and were always contested, it becomes clearer how at-
tempts to fix race were and continue to be strategic methods of policing
individual lives. This analysis makes more visible the way in which Camp-
bell’s representation reconstructs the tragic mulatto and the black-white
love-as-impossible conventions in order to reinforce particular ideological
impulses, such as post-Reconstruction northern-southern reconciliation,
white hegemony, and black inferiority. Reevaluating this representation in
terms of its performance and reformulation of those limited narratives is
useful in that it offers alternative possibilities, which disrupt reductive ar-
ticulations of race and interracial desire. Rather than arguing that these
historical enunciations of racial complexity merely reinforce contemporary
discussions, my interpretation demonstrates how these debates were already
being tested and negotiated in late nineteenth-century narratives; it takes
into account the intersecting lives and competing histories of those impli-
cated in and by this representation, as well as identifies the layered articula-
tions of black-white subjectivities that it generates.

notes

An earlier version of this chapter was presented as part of the Race as a Device: The
Performance of Race and Ethnicity in Theatre panel at the 1996 Association for
Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE) conference in New York City. I would like to
thank Kandice Chuh, Harry J. Elam, Jr., David Krasner, and Yvonne Yarbro-
Bejarano for their generous readings and helpful suggestions on this chapter.
1. See Forrest G. Wood, Black Scare: The Racist Response to Emancipation and Recon-
struction (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), 53–79.
2. My application of this theoretical frame intersects with Judith Butler’s for-
mulation of performativity, which can be understood as the “reiterative power of
discourse to produce the phenomena that it regulates and constrains,” in Butler,
Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York: Routledge, 1993), 2.
3. My use of regulatory norms that are reproduced in mainstream discourse is
informed by Butler’s discussion of performativity in Bodies that Matter, especially in
her introduction and her chapter on Nella Larsen’s Passing (Butler 1–23, 167–185).

Acting Out Miscegenation 265

 4. Here, the term performance takes into account social performance and the par-
ticularities of organized and/or theatrical performance along the lines of Elin Dia-
mond’s theory. In her introduction to Performance and Cultural Politics, ed. Elin
Diamond (New York: Routledge, 1996), Diamond theorizes:
Performance . . . is precisely the site in which concealed or dissimulated con-
ventions might be investigated. When performativity materializes as perfor-
mance in that risky and dangerous negotiation between a doing (a reiteration
of the norms) and a thing done (discursive conventions that frame our inter-
pretations), between someone’s body and the conventions of embodiment, we
have access to cultural meanings and critique. (5)
5. I am indebted to those performance critics whose work has sharpened both the
field and my own understanding of performance/dramatic studies, including, but
not limited to, Marvin Carlson, Una Chaudhuri, Coco Fusco, Paul Gilroy, Peggy
Phelan, Sandra L. Richards, Amy Robinson, and Eve Sedgwick.
6. Joseph Roach argues that performancecharacterizesthe“powerfulwayinwhich
cultures set about the necessary business of remembering who and what they are . . .
of making them into who and what they are, and even into who and what they might
someday be.” Roach, “Slave Spectacles and Tragic Octoroons: A Cultural Genealogy
of Antebellum Performance,” Theatre Survey 33, no. 2 (Nov. 1992): 168.
7. Richard Schechner, Performance Theory (New York: Routledge, 1988), 184.
8. David G. Croly and George Wakeman, Miscegenation: The Theory of the Blending
of the Races, Applied to the American White Man and Negro (London: Trubner, 1864).
See also Wood, 53–79 and George Fredrickson, The Black Image in the White Mind:
The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817–1914 (Hanover, N.H.:
Wesleyan University Press, 1987), 171–174.
9. Fredrickson, 171–172, and Eva Saks, “Miscegenation Law,” Raritan 8, no. 2
(Fall 1988): 42.
10. See Fredrickson 228–255.
11. See Alfred P. Schultz, Race or Mongrel (Boston: L. C. Page, 1908), title pg; and
John H. Van Evrie, Subgenation: The Theory of the Normal Relation of the Races; An
Answer to “Miscegenation” (New York: J. Bradburn, 1864).
12. Fredrickson suggests that social Darwinism solidified racist claims that
(mixed-race) blacks were physically and intellectually inferior and would eventually
disappear as a species. Fredrickson 228–255.
13. See George Washington Cable, “The Negro Question,” in The Negro Question:
A Selection of Writings on Civil Rights in the South by George Washington Cable, ed. Arlin
Turner (New York: W. W. Norton 1968), 119–154.
14. Kevin Gaines, in Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership, Politics, and Culture in the
Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), claims,
“For the black South . . . theories influenced by scientific racism and eugenics pos-
iting the immorality and degeneracy of mulattoes also provided an additional basis
for arguments against intermarriage” (58). He also argues that, for many blacks,
racial purity equaled racial respectability and that black responses to interracial
unions were related to an overall desire to demonstrate and practice high standards
of morality to disprove white accusations of black inferiority (121–125).
15. The “one-drop” rule stated that a person was considered black as long as she
contained any percentage of black blood, even one drop. See Gaines 50.
16. For examples of antimiscegenation rhetoric and attacks on blacks, see Ida B.

266 Performativity and the Performance of Race

Wells-Barnett, On Lynchings: Southern Horrors, A Red Record, Mob Rules in New Orleans,
ed. William Loren Katz (Salem, N. H.: Ayer, 1987).
17. Bartley Campbell, The White Slave, in “The White Slave” and Other Plays,1882–
1909, vol. 19 of America’s Lost Plays, ed. Napier Wilt (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton
University Press, 1941), 199–248. Subsequent references will be included paren-
thetically in the text.
18. After the failure of Reconstruction and an attempt to reconcile white America
(despite class differences, an increasing immigrant population, competition for jobs,
the rise of new industries, westward expansion, political shifts, and a large free black
population), race had many competitors to capture national attention and inspire
public debate. Robert Toll describes this shift in national issues in his discussion of
the history and evolution of minstrelsy performances in Blacking Up: The Minstrel
Show in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press,1974),125–
127, 135, 148, 160–163.
19. “Pope’s Theatre—The White Slave,” St. Louis Republican (24 Oct. 1882): 9.
20. During the 1880s, “foreigners” could easily represent immigrants, who were
competing for jobs and diversifying the U.S. population. By removing him from the
narrative, Campbell displaces this volatile issue so that neither the characters nor the
audience has to address it. Toll discusses the threat of immigrants to the notion of a
consolidated (democratic) white male class in Blacking Up, 186.
21. Some examples of these texts include William Wells Brown, Clotel; or, The
President’s Daughter, (1853), in Three Classic African-American Novels, ed. Henry Louis
Gates, Jr. (New York: Random House Vintage Classics, 1990), 3–224; Gertrude
Stein, “Melenctha” (1909), in Three Lives (New York: Signet–New AmericanLibrary,
1985), 81–238; Pauline Hopkins, Contending Forces: A Romance Illustrative of Negro
Life North and South (1899), in The Schomberg Library of Nineteenth-CenturyBlackWomen
Writers, ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988); and
William Faulkner, Light in August (1932) (New York: Vintage–Random House,
1990). For more examples, consult James Kinney, Amalgamation! Race, Sex, and
Rhetoric in the Nineteenth-Century American Novel (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood,
1985); Judith R. Berzon, Neither White nor Black: The Mulatto Character in American
Fiction (New York: New York University Press, 1978); and Werner Sollors, Neither
Black nor White Yet Both: Thematic Explorations of Interracial Literature (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1997).
22. Susan Gillman defines race melodramas as those texts that use the excesses of
melodrama to “express and explore the ideologies of race and race analysis,” which
connect the worlds of fact and fiction, imagination and politics. See The American
Race Melodramas, 1877–1915 (forthcoming), 3, and Gillman, “The Mulatto: Tragic
or Triumphant? The Nineteenth-Century American Race Melodrama,” in Culture of
Sentiment: Race, Gender and Sentimentality in Nineteenth-Century America, ed. Shirley
Samuels (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 221–243.
23. For example, in the Chicago Daily News of 30 Oct. 1882, the reviewer stated:
“Bits of Uncle Tom, The Octoroon, Kit, and The World, and other sensational
dramas have been kidnapped, uglified, attenuated, and melted in the Campbellean
stewpan, warmed up with the gentle heat of the Bartlean genius” (quoted in Wilt
lxxxi).
24. Rita Dove, The Darker Faces of the Earth: A Verse Play in Fourteen Scenes(Browns-
ville, Oreg.: Story Line Press, 1994); Langston Hughes, Mulatto (1935), in Black
Theatre USA: Plays by African Americans: The Recent Period: 1935–Today, rev. ed., ed.

Acting Out Miscegenation 267

James V. Hatch and Ted Shine (New York: Free Press, 1996), 4–23; Adrienne
Kennedy, Funnyhouse of a Negro (1964), in Hatch and Shine, 333–343; Nella Larsen,
Passing (1929), in An Intimation of Things Distant: The Collected Fiction of Nella Larsen,
ed. Charles R. Larson (New York: Anchor, 1992), 163–276; and Dorothy West, The
Wedding (New York: Doubleday, 1995).
25. “The White Slave at Hooley’s,” Chicago Tribune (31 Oct. 1882): 7.
26. “The White Slave,” St. Louis Republican (29 Oct. 1882): 3. For some other
examples, see “The White Slave,” Chicago Daily News (30 Oct. 1882);“The White
Slave,” New York Daily Tribune (4 Apr. 1882); “The White Slave,” New YorkDramatic
Mirror (8 Apr. 1882); and “Of the Premiere ‘The White Slave,’ ”New York Illustrated
Times (22 Apr. 1882). In an interview, Bartley Campbell admitted that he borrowed
material from other plays and transformed it for his own purposes:
I don’t mind the charges they make about my cribbing from Uncle Tom and
The Octoroon—see?—because that was just what I did—see? I took the meat
out of both—eh?—added a little sauce and spice—eh?—and there you had
it see? This morning I’ll make some changes where they are needed—see?—
cut out some of the talk in the first part and spice her up at the end. “News
and Interviews.” (New York Mirror [8 Apr. 1882]: 7)
27. In Aristocrats of Color: The Black Elite, 1880–1920 (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1990), Willard Gatewood asserts that, like elite whites, blacks
were very conscious of decorum and adhered to a strict set of codes (what he also refers
toas a“genteelperformance”); theuseofproperEnglishwasoneofthemostsignificant
indicators that one belonged to “polite society.” He states: “Perhaps nothing was so
indicative of one’s degree of gentility as one’s use of language” (143).
28. In A Voice from the South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 32, 96,
Anna Julia Cooper emphasizes the fact that “Negro women” were not considered
“ladies” and that the racial/gender hierarchy that was in place at the end of the
nineteenth century distinguished “white ladies” from “colored people” (which in-
cluded black men and women).
29. After Reconstruction and the Democratic take-over of the South, the rest of
the country watched as black civil rights were reversed and white supremacy reigned
again in the South. In America’s Reconstruction: People and Politics after the Civil War
(New York: Harper Collins, 1995), Eric Foner and Olivia Mahoney claim:
Despite its expanded authority over citizens’ rights, the federal government
stood by indifferently as the Southern states effectivelynullifiedtheFourteenth
and Fifteenth Amendments and, beginning in the 1890s, stripped African-
Americans of the right to vote. (134)
30. Foner and Mahoney describe the dismantling of black rights duringtheperiod
after Reconstruction in America’s Reconstruction, 134–135. This led to more racist
policies at the end of the nineteenth century, such as Plessy v. Ferguson, and reinforced
racist theories that claimed that black inferiority was to blame for inequalities.
31. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, this argument is still relevant
in the light of new information about Thomas Jefferson’s illicit affair with his young
slave Sally Hemmings. Recent DNA evidence linking descendants of Hemmings’s
family to Jefferson was produced, which indicated thatthisaffair,deemedimprobable
by many historians, did indeed occur. This evidence that Jefferson engaged in cross-
racial sex disrupts his reputation as a model of morally upright (white American)

268 Performativity and the Performance of Race

manhood. See Dinitia Smith and Nicholas Wade, “DNA Test Finds Evidence of
Jefferson Child by Slave,” New York Times (1 Nov. 1998): 1.
32. See Martha Hodes, White Women, Black Men: Illicit Sex in the Nineteenth-Century
South (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1997), for a description of the
conflicts and legal battles that arose when descendants of black male–white female
unions made property claims.
33. For a useful explanation of this nineteenth-century position, assigned to elite
white women by the “Cult of True Womanhood,” as well as a thoughtful critique of
its claims and contradictions, especially in relation to black women, see Hazel Carby,
Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Novelist (London:Oxford
University Press, 1987).
34. See Karen Sánchez-Eppler’s chapter, “Bodily Bonds: The Intersecting Rhet-
orics of Feminism and Abolition,” in Touching Liberty: Abolition, Feminism and the
Politics of the Body (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).
35. As an argument against intermarriage, both blacks and whites often claim-
ed that a mulatto or any mixed-race individual was corrupt, sullied, and inferior
to anyone with “pure” blood (see Fredrickson 173–174, 321 and Gaines 58,
121–25).
36. See Toll 134–55, 263.
37. In Blacking Up, Toll explains that white northernersdidnothavemuchcontact
with blacks so their views of blacks were often based on the caricatures they saw in
minstrel performances, which were flat types that emphasized the subordinate po-
sition of blacks. He also explains that, once blacks were able to perform as minstrels,
they were perceived to be more authentic portraits of what blacks were really like
rather than performances of black stereotypes (75–78).
38. “The White Slave,” St. Louis Republican (29 Oct. 1882): 9.
39. The notion of the spectacular element of Campbell’s production also raises
the question of how this play would have been categorized at the time. More than
one nineteenth-century reviewerremarked thathisplaycombinedminstrelsy,jubilee
singing, drama, sensationalism, and comedy; it included aspects of several different
forms of entertainment in order to captivate audiences. Like white minstrel perform-
ers, who moved away from black subjects except to present nostalgic plantation
portraits, he also deemphasized the racial issue by placing blackness into the back-
ground. Whether audiences would have also been familiar with melodramatic con-
ventions or would have anticipated the reconciled outcome of the play, audiences
attended these performancesto experienceboththetitillationofsomethingforbidden
and the satisfaction of seeing everything returned to its appropriate place. Robert
Toll’s discussion of the changes in minstrel performances (more lavish, larger com-
panies) supports this claim by indicating that minstrelsy had to compete with other
forms of entertainment toward the end of the century (Toll 134–155, 263).
40. The desire to assure whites that blacks were willing to remain in their place
was particularly relevant in the 1880s after Reconstruction. Whites from the North
and the South did not want contact with blacks, except when they were being
entertained.
41. Marriage was not a legal option for slaves, which meant that blacks had no
legal recourse for transferring property to their children or to their wives.
42. In the St. Louis Republican, the reviewer asserted that Lisa’s fate is considered
more tragic because she is white and has had to suffer the cruelties of slavery: “The
effects of her treatment as a bond woman and beautiful are thus intensified tenfold,
and the sympathy for her grows wonderfully strong” (29 Oct. 1882, 3).

Acting Out Miscegenation 269

 43. For an informative discussion of the reassertion of hegemonic whiteness in
relation to racial Others (colonizers and postcolonial subjects), see Homi K. Bhabha,
The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994).
44. Fredrickson, 198–227.
45. “The White Slave,” St. Louis Republican (29 Oct. 1882): 3.
46. Many historians assert that the fear of black male–white female relations
became more critical after the Civil War and that efforts to control blacks in the
South were supported by racist claims that free black men were predators who needed
to be controlled. Also, actual relationships between white women and black men
threatened the social-economic structure of the white patriarchy because it enabled
children of these unions to make property claims after the war (see Hodes 4–6, 19–
28).
47. Hortense Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar
Book,” Diacritics (Summer 1987): 65–82. In this article, which describes the impact
of slavery on black families and bodies, Spillers cites the law partus sequitir ventrum,
which states that the condition of the child follows the condition of the mother. This
law enabled white slave owners to claim any children of female slaves as property,
even if the father were free.
48. Hodes documents the destabilizing impact of mixed-race individuals, inter-
racial marriages, and the contradictory and conflicting responses to these liaisons.
Her historical examples demonstrate how black-white liaisons challenged and com-
plicated the racial, class, and gender hierarchies at the time these liaisons occurred
and, later, when the descendants of these relationships challenged laws that denied
them property and other rights. See also Gatewood 177–78 and Gaines 58–59, 121–
25 for descriptions of how skin color and the color line complicated intra- and
interracial relations in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

270 Performativity and the Performance of Race

 14

Birmingham’s Federal
Theater Project Negro Unit
The Administration of Race

‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘
tina redd

In a social order that is deeply racialized, any policy that invokes

race as a sign, a mark of, rather than as grounds for preferential
treatment, even where justified, is likely to be used to exacerbate
racial tensions and divides, to magnify whatever racially
characterized tensions and ambivalences there are.
David Theo Goldberg,
Racist Culture1

The speed and enthusiasm with which the Federal Theater Project was
conceived, organized, and instituted during the late summer and early fall
of 1935 is a model of bureaucratic maneuvering. Between August and No-
vember 1935, the improbable idea of a federally funded national theater
program became a reality. On 14 November 1935, the Works Program
Administration (WPA) allocated $6,784,036 to support theater projects in
nineteen states for a period of six months.2 Hallie Flanagan, the Federal
Theater Project (FTP) national director, initially envisioned a relief program
for unemployed professional actors, which would limit its activities to cities
where the majority of those actors resided. New York City, for example,
would receive $1.8 million to cover four months’ operating expenses while
most states received less than half of that to cover the same period. With her
program’s initial funding secured, Flanagan and her administrative staff
began formulating and implementing FTP “units,” and in a matter of
months, various FTP theater troupes across the country prepared to open
their doors to the public.
In October 1935, with a variety of theater projects across the country
already underway, Flanagan established an advisory board, which included

271
leaders of the largest theatrical organizations in New York, theaterproducers,
critics, playwrights, and actors. Included in Flanagan’s initial mailing to her
board was an outline of her goals for the FTP:
Although the immediate necessity of the project is to put back to work
some ten thousand theatre people now on relief rolls, the more far-reaching
purpose is to establish them in theatrical enterprises which, we hope, will
achieve a degree of excellence, fulfill a need in their communities, and thus
become self-supporting.3
Flanagan intended to use the opportunity of federal sponsorship to create a
nationwide theater network.
Her optimism surrounding the FTP’s potential to become a self-sustaining
and integral part of community life indicates Flanagan’s belief that theater
should function as a social institution. Flanagan eagerly courted diversity—
racial, regional, and ideological. Her goal was to mirror the complexities of
American life while creating a program specific to the needs of individual
communities. For Flanagan, an “American” theater would demonstrate di-
versity as one of the United States’s greatest strengths. Her national plan,
however, ignored the fact that localpoliciesmightinhibittheproject’scentral
goals. Representing diversity meant enacting problematic intersections of
racial and regional thinking. As a result, Flanagan’s nationwide policies
became entangled in regional politics, which, in the South, were also the
politics of race—although by no means were the project’s intentions to
overtly challenge existing social mores.
During the early planning stages, black actress Rose McClendonsuggested
to Flanagan the concept of “Negro” units. Flanagan’s background in exper-
imental theater as head of the Theatre Department at Vassar, her exposure
to European theater practices and social politics in the 1920s through Gug-
genheim grants, and, especially, her commitment to socially relevant theater
made her a receptive audience to McClendon’s suggestion. She agreed that a
truly American theater project would need to include African American
representation. As a result of their discussion, the Harlem Negro Unitopened
on 5 February 1936, with cosponsorship from the National Association for
the Advancement of Colored People and the Urban League. The Harlem
unit, included in the overall plan for New York City, served as the Negro
units’ model for a national design. Negro units would specifically address
the needs of African American theater workers, while the supposed racially
“unmarked” federal theaters would provide an outlet for white artists. Fol-
lowing the Harlem unit’s opening in February 1936, Negro units were
created in Los Angeles, Chicago, Boston, Newark, Seattle, and Birmingham,
Alabama.4
Rose McClendon’s ideas about the political potential of a Negro theater
differed significantly from Flanagan’s. In June 1935, just a month before
their first meeting, McClendon spoke publicly about the prospects for any
successful Negro theater. In a letter to the New York Times Drama editor, she
remarked:

272 Performativity and the Performance of Race

 Now what makes a Negro theater is not so much the use of Negroes as the
selection of plays that deal with Negroes, with Negro problems, with
phases of Negro life, faithfully presented and accurately delineated. Any
other approach is doomed to failure.5

The distinction between McClendon’s goals for the Negro units and what
eventually became institutionalized through FTP practices can best be un-
derstood through an examination of the racialized nature of the FTP’s ad-
ministrative framework. While in design FTP implemented Negro units
with admirable intentions, in practice the lack of racial discourse—except
as an identifying marker for the recruitment of personnel—in the context of
the racially stratified United States made the Negro units, in McClendon’s
phrase, “doomed to failure.”
To varying degrees, any of the sixteen Negro units could serve as a model
for the process of how a white-centered framework affected the choices for,
the criticism and the stereotyping of, and the artistic restrictions placed upon
African Americans working in the FTP. The Birmingham Negro Unit,
however, is an exceptional study in administrative practices. The very idea
of a Negro theater unit in Birmingham, Alabama, met with resistance, even
from its sponsors. Segregation and inequality had been the rule in Birming-
ham since its founding by iron and steel developers in the late 1870s. While
the iron and steel industry attracted both black and white workers from the
northern mills, it relegated blacks to common labor and promised whites
higher grades of employment reserved only for them.6 Although Birming-
ham’s Negro community supported a small business section within the
downtown sector and two small newspapers, Jim Crow statutes governed
every aspect of black life in the 1930s. The racial climate in Alabama made
every FTP and WPA administrative decision regarding the Negro unit,
racially unmarked and marked, suspect. While all Negro units—in the
Northaswell as theSouth—adheredtoracialhierarchiesandweresegregated,
the Birmingham Negro Unit illustrates the ways in which interacting levels
of power and bureaucracy discouraged development of Negro theater as a
whole.
In Birmingham—a city whose population was nearly half black; where the
steel industry, the major employer in the region, had collapsed during the
depression, creating significant need for relief; and where local universities
and theaters responded enthusiastically with offers of sponsorship—the Ne-
gro unit sputtered into existence and stammered out in less than a year. Given
the Federal Theater Project’s dual goal of providing relief and developing
community-based theater, one might expect the Birmingham Negro Unit
to be an anomaly. Instead, this Negro unit’s history can be extrapolated to
more broadly question the effectiveness as well as the effects of a liberal
framework in ensuring artistic integrity in a context of ensconced racial
biases.
Initially, interest in forming a Negro unit in Alabama was substantial. By
the first week of October 1935, Flanagan had sent acknowledgment letters

The Administration of Race 273

to the heads of the theater departments at Tuskegee Institute and Alabama
College. The Birmingham, Montgomery, and Anniston Little Theaters had
also expressed interest in sponsorship.7 News of the FTP’s funding spread
even beyond academic and theater circles. A woman in Fairhope, Alabama,
sent in an extensive proposal, which included “colored people” who would
“have their chance through their dance, their songandtheater.”8 Allproposals
adhered to the separation of Negro and white theater stipulated within the
larger Federal Theater Project. Whether this separation was a pragmatic
resolution to prevailing circumstances or a rationalized response to serving
what were perceived as two inherentlydifferent communitiesremainsunclear
despite the various historical studies written about the project.
The formation of Negro units depended on evidence that professional
performers already existed on a proposed location’s relief rolls. Evidence of
professional activity was nearly impossible to provide in smaller communi-
ties, regardless of the communities’ interest or need for a unit. Even African
American performers in New York were unemployed most of the time. In
addition, Negro units required sponsorship by an individual or group already
in possession of performance space and production equipment. Categorized
as artistic criteria, this restriction required capital before aid. The struggle
for decision-making power within the Harlem Negro Unit included black
participants because the Negro community in New York City was itself a
sponsor for the project. This was not the case in Birmingham.
From the time the initial proposals arrived on Hallie Flanagan’s desk in
October 1935 to the unit’s closing in December 1936, the Birmingham
Negro Unit was at the center of a struggle for power among three levels of
government-sponsored bureaucracy. At the civic level, Laura Sharp, repre-
senting the Birmingham Parks and Recreation Board, wanted a supervisory
position within the FTP and funds to build a Negro recreation center where
Negro “dramatics” would be included in the activities. Birmingham Parks
and Recreation provided access to recreational facilities and educational
programs for Negroes, and its board hoped to sponsor the Negro unit. At the
state level, in Montgomery, Alabama, Mary Weber, WPA administrator for
Women’s and Professional Services, assumed the FTP to be yet another works
project under her supervision. Weber’s office already had a working relation-
ship with the Parks and Recreation Department, and it was her office that
informed Sharp of the FTP and its Negro theater program.
John McGee, FTP director for the southern states and one of Flanagan’s
first administrative appointees, represented the FTP regionally. With an
understanding of the FTP’s national directives, McGee assumed that setting
up a project involved verifying sponsorship and establishing the need for
relief among the theater professionals. Alabama was one of six states under
his jurisdiction, and he expected the process to movealong quickly.Although
all three of these individuals, McGee, Weber, and Sharp, sought to procure
benefits for Negroes who met the criteria for unemployed theater workers, it
became obvious, as their interactions progressed, that they had little else in
common. A history of cosponsorship did connect the WPA to the Parks and

274 Performativity and the Performance of Race

Recreation Department; McGee and the FTP, however, held control over a
substantial amount of newly directed funding, and thisgavehimconsiderable
leverage in any negotiations. Although the historically black Tuskegee In-
stitute, with its active drama group, had applied to sponsor the Negro unit,
nothing in the records indicates that they were even considered by McGee.
Negroes, therefore, were silenced, totally outside of the discussionsregarding
the unit that was to represent their community.
Of the various letters and proposals that came to Flanagan’s Washington,
D.C., office in the fall of 1935, none was as ardent as that from Sharp. The
Fine Arts Committee of the Birmingham Parks and Recreation Board, of
which Sharp was chair, was “prepared to take twenty white and twenty negro
[sic] actors [and they] need[ed] to begin with them at once.”9 Weber con-
tacted Sharp once it became official that funding was available for a theater
project. In addition to its schedule of activities for white residents, the
Birmingham Parks and Recreation Board already actively sponsored recrea-
tional activities for Birmingham’s Negro community. Weber, in fact, shared
Sharp’s hope that federal funds could be used to build a Negro recreation
center, but establishing a Negro theater was not their ultimate goal. Since
Birmingham’s white facilities barred Negroes, Sharp and Weber wanted to
build black residents a recreation facility of their own.
Flanagan referred Sharp directly to McGee, who had only been on the job
one month in October 1935; still, he was already familiar with Birmingham
and its racial tensions. After graduating from Grinnell College in Iowa
(Flanagan’s alma mater), McGee had directed plays at Purdue University
before relocating to Birmingham, where he directed the Birmingham Little
Theatre. While McGee focused on the artistic and educational goals of the
Negro unit, WPA administrators in Montgomery—Weber, in particular—
concerned themselves with the more pragmatic problems of providing relief.
Issues of authority were in question from the beginning of the FTP. Federal
Theater Project administrators planned an autonomous management struc-
ture, ranging from the national to the regional and, finally, to state and local
levels. This clashed withWPAauthorityprimarilybecausetheFTPimagined
itself independent, while the WPA considered the FTP, like all of the arts
projects, directly under its supervision. In September 1935, Flanagan doc-
umented her frustration with this arrangement:
[New projects] are now subject to so many checks in states and districts
that the whole affair is assuming the proportions of a colossal joke. Any
assistant administrator in any State or locality can now negate or hold up
indefinitely any project even if such a project has the approval of the Federal
Theatre Director and his Regional representative.10
John McGee experienced this negative power of local bureaucracies in Bir-
mingham.
The problems McGee had in establishing a Negro unit in Birmingham
resulted in part from the confusing circumstances surrounding the formation
and funding of the FTP. In June 1935, less than two months before Flanagan

The Administration of Race 275

assumed the FTP directorship, WPA director Bruce McClure elaborated on
his program’s Section for Professional and Service Projects’ intention “to
concentrate its energies upon an arts program” at the WPA’s national con-
ference.11 These programs—in art, drama, and music—were to be locally
sponsored by existing public organizations. A drama program proposed
under the sponsorship of the Birmingham Parks and Recreation Board would
thus fit the criteria that Mary Weber, as a WPA administrator, found appro-
priate. Complications in establishing both white and Negro units in Bir-
mingham resulted from McGee and Weber’s differing perspectives on how
to carry out evolving government policies.
Since Negroes had no input at this stage of the planning process, their
concerns and experiences did not receive consideration. In the segregated
South, where intolerance of racial interaction had a long and volatile history,
racial antagonisms were deeply embedded in all social and political arenas.
Despite their acceptance of a “separate but equal” artistic system, white FTP
administrators maintained that the project’s aesthetic values, artistic crea-
tivity, and administrative policies were racially neutral and racially un-
marked. Yet, administration of these units, as well as the material that would
ultimately be acceptable for Negro units to produce, was always racially
marked. Race dictated who could be employed and in what capacity by these
units. Racial politics may have been an impetus for creating Negro units,
but white administration ensured that neither the productions nor the units’
artistic strategies engaged meaningful issues of racial identity or politics.
White administrators had the power to approve or deny production material,
including the representation of race, and, in so doing, invoked white privi-
lege. Negroes constantly experienced injustice as a result of the enforcement
of white privilege. The structure of the FTP, however, made it difficult if not
impossible to express or challenge such experiences of oppression. For all
intents and purposes, the Birmingham Negro Unit was a white endeavor
carried out by black participants.12 This situation was the antithesis of Rose
McClendon’s vision for a Negro theater.
By the end of October 1935, despite the FTP’s hope to begin a Negro
project immediately, the Birmingham unit was clearly stalled. McGee
wanted to give up on Alabama. The relatively simple plan that FTP admin-
istrators had envisioned for a nationwide theater had become tangled in the
already established networks of the WPA. McGee faced two levels of WPA
resistance. At the first and foremost level was a general disinclination to
accept theater as a legitimate relief activity: as recreation, yes, but not as an
undertaking that would benefit a community in the same way as a bridge, a
building, or any other functional structure. Second, since the city’s founding,
Negroes in Birmingham had been relegated to the most physically demand-
ing labor for wages consistently lower than white workers. Black “players”
earning relief wages was an affront to accepted divisions of labor, and the
WPA did not intend to override regional and local racialpoliciesandcustoms.
In a report titled the “Alabama Situation,” McGee remarked that the
project stalled, first, because Sharp demanded that she be placed in charge of

276 Performativity and the Performance of Race

the Negro unit, a position for which she was “neither technically qualified
nor ethically eligible.”13 As chair of the Parks and Recreation Board, Sharp
believed she should also have administrative control over the unit. Aware of
the existing relationship between Sharp and Weber, McGee rightly con-
cluded that district WPA officials under Weber would not approve the
project without the Parks and Recreation Board’s sponsorship. McGee
pointed out that “six other prospective sponsors, including the University of
Alabama, Alabama College for Women, Alabama Polytechnic Institute,”
and three little theaters were willing to work with the Federal Theater
Project.14 He, however, understood that the WPA worked through existing
civic organizations and that WPA officials had already made up their minds,
so alternative sponsorship was not feasible.
McGee did, however, have the full backing of his FTP boss in Washington.
Dismayed by the bureaucracy and determined to setthings straight,Flanagan
wrote to her superiors:

At the present time, the Federal Directors are not directors but areadvisors.
It is not in such a capacity they were hired, nor is it their intention to
continue to function in a position which is at present all responsibility and
no power.15

The frustrations McGee and Flanagan experienced were only partly due to
WPA policy. They were also caught unaware by the local bureaucratic con-
straints and by racial politics in Birmingham, and, since McGee had spent
some time in the South before taking the regional directorship, this is some-
what surprising. Little documentation exists to shed light on what Flanagan
thought about the racial tensions already prevalent in the United States or
on the heightened state of racial agitation during the depression. Her com-
ments tended to come in the form of questions: Could Negroes in Seattle
perform convincingly in the nationwide opening of It Can’t Happen Here?
Could audiences be integrated in the South?16 Flanagan’s plans for establish-
ing Negro units throughout the United States did not account for the social,
economic, and political realities of America’s black communities. What the
Federal Theater Project encountered and helped maintain in Birmingham
was institutionalized racism. Her approach—to provide structure at the
national level in hopes of allowing for regional, state, and local diversity to
meet community needs—seems, in the South, to have backfired.
Of the many letters Sharp wrote to Flanagan in October 1935, one re-
marked, “The Negro Theatre Project with fifty names and case numbers is
ready to be submitted.”17 In January 1936, however, after being told by
McGee that the “professional qualifications” of the persons listed were “ques-
tionable,” Sharp responded by writing directly to the WPA director in
Washington, Jacob Baker:

We realized that we had not a Theatre Project and in making out the
Negro Recreational Project we, in no way, stressedthetheatricalexperience

The Administration of Race 277

 of the negroes [sic] because we had no desire for a negro [sic] Theatre
Project.18

Here, Sharp points to the underlying miscommunication among Weber,

McGee, and her. The Negro theater unit, in her mind, was merely a general
funding category. McGee, however, assumed that the Negro unit would
produce theater with professional standards. Although Sharp’s tenacity de-
layed the project, her actions aimed at procuring funding for several Negro
recreational activities. She worked within existing social frameworks as she
understood them. McGee, using Harlem as his guide, had certainprofessional
standards in mind, but he had no tangible strategies for instituting profes-
sionalism in a community so far removed, in every way, from Harlem.
In November 1935, Weber reevaluated McGee’s list of qualified theater
personnel for the Negro unit and narrowed his list of twenty-two down to
twelve. Her list included only one actor, no singers, a scene shifter, a radio
violinist, and a guitar player. According to Weber, she had “attempted to
contact several people who were familiar with the situation and all expressed
. . . the idea that there are not professional actors and actresses available.”19
At every turn, the very concept of Negro performer, professional or not, came
under scrutiny and was subjected to prevailing prejudices, racist perceptions,
and biases.
On 26 March 1936, after the Negro unit was finally initiated, McGee
wrote, wearied by the experience, to Flanagan’s assistant, William Farns-
worth, suggesting that “in the light of our various experiences with the
Alabama situation, we cancel the project for white workers and withdraw
the funds provided there for. The negro [sic] project which is in operation
should, I think, be continued.”20 The suggestion was ignored. Four days
later, a WPA memorandum from Jacob Baker arrived in D.C. It notified
Alabama WPA state administrator, Ray Crowe, that Ivan Paul would ar-
rive within the week “to set up the long delayed theatre project for white
workers in Birmingham.”21 On 9 April 1936, just over a week after his
arrival from New York, Paul received approval for a 25 percent exemp-
tion (25 percent of his personnel need not qualify for relief), an exemption
common within the FTP.22 In this instance, however, the FTP granted
approval on the grounds that the delay in setting up both the white and
Negro units necessitated immediate recruitment of qualified theater per-
sonnel. The following day, Paul signed a lease on the Jefferson Theatre,
the largest performance space in Birmingham, with special approval
wired from Washington, D.C. While the WPA and FTP delayed the Ne-
gro unit’s opening for more than four months, they pushed the white unit
through in two weeks. The telegrams, memoranda, and letters surround-
ing this administrative action do not indicate specific racial concerns. And
yet, WPA and FTP officials not only disregarded McGee’s suggestion to
cancel plans for the white unit, they managed to cut through months of
paperwork. Their haste indicates a perception of racial imbalance and po-
tential unrest if they canceled the white unit and funded the black one. In

278 Performativity and the Performance of Race

racially stratified Alabama, a Negro theater without a bigger and better
white counterpart was unimaginable.
The speed with which the white project was set up, however, created
problems for both units down the line. The Jefferson Theatre’s size was a
problem. A WPA field agent, after seeing the white unit’s third production,
The Spider, complained that it was less than half full on a good night. In May
1936, more serious problems arose. By the end of the month, delinquent
lease payments had accumulated to $600, which Alabama treasury officials
refused to pay because the procurement had not been cleared through their
offices. In addition to recommendations that the lease be canceled by the end
of June and that the white unit be moved to the Birmingham Little Theatre,
personnel problems, including the agent cashier’s WPA eligibility and the
pageant director’s “habitual intoxication,” prompted WPA officials to sug-
gest that McGee, the regional director, return to Birmingham “as soon as
possible.”23 McGee, who was in Little Rock, Arkansas, working on regional
business, wrote to Flanagan on 24 May 1936, explaining the situation.24
Since his original advice to cancel the white unit was ignored, McGee felt
that those who had created the mess should resolve it. In his letter, he notified
Flanagan that he had “telephoned Mr. Farnsworth,” Flanagan’s assistant,who
approved funding in the first place, and requested Farnsworth “persuade the
Alabama treasury officials topaytheamountwhichisinarrears.”Theeventual
loss of the Jefferson Theatre also affected the Negro unit, which had been
given a small space to rehearse there.
While the accomplishments and administrative concerns of the white unit
dominate correspondence between the Birmingham FTP and the central
office in Washington, D.C., Clyde Limbaugh, a white director and local
playwright, who McGee had appointed to run the Negro unit, did attempt
to draw the national administration’s attention to the work of his Negro
ensemble. Limbaugh wrote the Negro unit’s first production, Home in Glory.
He described his play as a “symphonic drama” and told Flanagan that the
production garnered notices in both Harper’s and Vogue.25 Although the
production only received three performances, it did draw a reasonable audi-
ence. The Municipal Auditorium, where the play was presented, had a fixed
seating capacity of 6,000. The stage was 100 feet wide and 55 feet deep.
According to Limbaugh, 2,500 people attended the production. Signifi-
cantly, the play catered to white audiences, the seating was segregated, and
the representation tended heavily toward stereotypical depictions of Ne-
groes.26 While Limbaugh had the best of intentions for the Negro unit, a
lack of quality scripts for black actors coupled with his own limited knowl-
edge of Negro experience and a privileged white subject position hampered
his efforts on behalf of his black employees.
In early July 1936, Limbaugh wrote to Hallie Flanagan, enthusiastically
outlining his plans for the future:

We are just beginning on a small scale and are doing the simpler things
first with the idea of “Stevedore,” “Porgy” and the bigger things later on.

The Administration of Race 279

 Through the cooperation of our local Park and Recreation Board and by
giving the services of our negro [sic] Director we have been able to assemble
a choir of 200 voices to assist in the productions here.27

Once the Birmingham Negro Unit began, despite Weber’s claim that no
qualified theater personnel existed, a black choir and director were imme-
diately procured from a community church.
The FTP provided Harold White McCoo, an accomplished Negro choir
director, with as much support as the Negro unit director, Limbaugh. The
choir performed a weekly half-hour show on a local radio station as well as in
every Negro unit production. This practice was not exclusivetoBirmingham;
in Seattle, a gospel choir was added to the production of Stevedore and even
the Harlem unit regularly imposed musical interludesuponstraightdrama.28
By the 1930s, Birmingham had become a national “center for the develop-
ment and diffusion of jubilee gospel quartet music.” Given the prominence
of the steel and iron industry and the experiences of the mines in the black
populace of Birmingham, gospel songs and singers began to feature labor
themes in their lyrics.29 Gospel recording artist George Korson toured coal
regions between 1928 and 1941 under the sponsorship of the United Mine
Workers. He included in his repertoire a union-commissioned ballad that
celebrated passage of the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA) in 1933.
The passion and religious spirit of the gospel music made it a palatable and
nonthreatening vehicle for the dissemination of labor messages and political
platforms.
Similarly, the fusion of an accepted spiritual endeavor, gospel, with labor
concerns proved a successful tactic for the Birmingham Negro Unit. The
unit’s first production, Home in Glory, included eleven spirituals, which were
one of the few acceptable ways to express political discontent. Not surpris-
ingly, nearly every Negro unit production employed a choir. Gospel music
also ensured white attendance at a production. By the time negotiations for
the Birmingham Negro Unit were underway, Marc Connelly’s Pulitzer
Prize–winning The Green Pastures with its gospel music and stereotypical
black “heaven” had toured the United States for nearly four years and was
about to be released in a film version, with the Harlem Negro Unit’s Rex
Ingram in the starring role of De Lawd.
Unfortunately, instead of deepening support for the Negro unit in Bir-
mingham, the choir represented the only successful aspect of its work in the
eyes of the local WPA. In October 1936, as southern WPA officials began
circulating memoranda outlining their concerns about the FTP in their
region, one official recommended “that the Negro Unit, set up at insistence
of Parks and Recreation Board, be reviewed withtheviewofshiftingemphasis
from dramatic to musical productions.”30 Ironically, this WPA official saw
the Harlem unit’s touring production of the “voodoo” Macbeth in Dallas and
suggested that Birmingham model itself after that unit’s success. When the
WPA withdrew funding from the Birmingham Negro Unit at the end of

280 Performativity and the Performance of Race

November 1936, funding for the choir under the auspices of the WPA’s
recreation program continued.
The Negro unit’s second production, Harold Courlander’s Swamp Mud,
opened on 11 July 1936 at the Industrial High School. Swamp Mud’s subject
matter, chain gangs in Georgia, held significance for Birmingham’s Negro
community. Chain gangs, the continued presence of forced labor maintained
by a corrupt legal system in Birmingham, provided for blacks a visceral
connection to the experiences of their parents and grandparents in slavery.
Shortly after the city’s founding, Birmingham had incorporated a convict-
lease system, followed by a scrip system for exchange in company stores.
Although both black and white workers revolted against these systems, it
was black workers and their families who were systematically deprived of the
power to negotiate a fair return for their labor. The institution of the chain
gang further enforced free black labor.31
The Industrial High School, the venue for Swamp Mud, also had histor-
ical import. Founded in 1900 as the city’s first and only Negro high
school, this stone and stucco building covered an entire city block. The
high school was the realization of a dream of A. H. Parker, the son of
freed slaves, who taught school in Birmingham. Even more significant
was the school’s location. Situated on 8th Avenue between 5th and 6th
streets, it bordered a proposed housing project, Smithfield Court, which
was, in 1936, under construction. Included in that proposed project,
which would eventually provide shelter for 544 families, was the planned
Community Center building. Although the Negro unit was canceled,
that building would be completed with WPA funds in 1937. It would
contain an auditorium “with a seating capacity of 700 and a stage large
enough for concerts and plays” and would be managed “under the super-
vision of the Birmingham Parks and Recreation Board.”32
Still, the representation of Negro characters by Courlander in Swamp Mud
and by Limbaugh in the Negro unit plays that he wrote by no means radically
departed from the stereotypical black musicals and primitivistic dramas of
the era.33 In the context of Birmingham’s racial history and segregated social
structure, any realistic representation of black experience courted contro-
versy. As implied by the title Swamp Mud, prior to the Civil War, the territory
where Birmingham would eventually be located was known only as Jones
Valley, a largely uninhabited area with swamps, cornfields, pines, and dirt
used as a source of red dye by local farmers. One social historian, writing in
the mid-1930s, pointed out, “Birmingham is a Southern city and now one
of the most populous. The word ‘Southern’ implies a past, a past going back
to Calhoun and slavery wealth. Birmingham has no such past.”34 During the
1850s, once the industrial potential of the area was discovered through
surveys, which revealed extensive iron and coal deposits, organized efforts to
extend rail transport into the area began. Postponed by the war, however,
industrial development in Birmingham did not gain momentum until the
late 1870s. The aid of northern capital accelerated the process, and as the

The Administration of Race 281

turn of the century approached, iron and steel created the town of Birming-
ham.
The rapid increase in both black and white populations at the turn of the
century, as Birmingham developed into a major steel town, created a need
for company involvement in all aspects of Birmingham’s early development,
including segregated company housing. As blacks throughout Alabama and
some from surrounding states left the restrictive sharecropping system for
positions as common laborers, various legislative acts reduced the threat of
losing the cheap labor supply. Industrial concerns reacted by stepping up
their recruitment campaigns aimed at blacks, and by the turn of the century
blacks made up more than 40 percent of Birmingham’s population.
The tensions such practices produced were magnified significantly follow-
ing the First World War, and in the years between the war and the depression,
relations between blacks and whites were mediated by a third concern: class.
The International Labor Defense’s intense campaign on behalf of the Scotts-
boro Boys, young black teens accused of raping two white women, who later
recanted, brought worldwide attention to Birmingham; it also created the
misleading public perception that there was a widespread connection be-
tween blacks and the Communist party. In 1933, Robert L. Vann’s Pittsburgh
Courier claimed, “Experienced ‘agitators’ stayed clear of Dixie but . . . inex-
perienced, idealistic youths were being sent there to suffer.”35 One of those
“agitators,” Angelo Herndon, was first arrested in Birmingham before mov-
ing on to Atlanta, where his subsequent arrest would attract international
attention. A suspected connection between Communism and the FTP by the
anti–New Dealers in the House and Senate eventually led to congressional
hearings and the FTP’s loss of funding.
By the 1930s, Birmingham strictly adhered to Jim Crow laws. Not
only were neighborhoods segregated, but every aspect of the community
was divided along racial lines. Of the city’s ten movie houses, two served
Negroes; there were no Negro hotels; and in a population that was almost
50 percent Negro, six high schools educated white children, and one high
school accepted Negro children.36 In every way imaginable, the Birming-
ham to which Federal Theater Project and WPA officials brought relief
was racialized, and at every level of the racializing process, white privilege
was instituted. The mere inclusion of Negroes within the FTP was prob-
lematic in Birmingham, and to bring concepts formulated in postrenais-
sance Harlem to the deep South was shortsighted on the part of white ad-
ministrators. Were one to view Negro units solely in terms of
productions, longevity, and innovations, much of the information regard-
ing administrative practices that contradicted the FTP’s overarching ide-
alistic goals would be missed. In the case of the Birmingham Negro Unit,
administrative maneuvering is its history; a history from the black per-
spective, which can only be reconstructed from silence.
As autumn 1936 approached, both the Negro and white units developed
plans for the upcoming year. Verner Haldene, who had replaced Ivan Paul as
director of the white unit, planned for the first Regional Federal Theatre

282 Performativity and the Performance of Race

Conference to be held 6–8 October 1936. Clyde Limbaugh rehearsed what
Haldene described as “by far the most ambitious production attempted by
the negro [sic] group.”37 That production, Great Day, written by a local
playwright, M. Wood Morrison, traced the history of the Negro race from
4500 b.c. to the present. According to Limbaugh, the play was “written as
it might be seen through the eyes of the Negro himself. His trials and
tribulations are brought down to the present day in dramatic fashion.”38
Limbaugh felt the choreography especially notable because it included both
“ancient” and “modern” dance. Significantly, it was the first play produced
in Birmingham written by a Negro. Haldene described it as “a large produc-
tion by our colored unit written by a young negro [sic] man assigned to our
coordinating Project.”39 In October, conference attendees from throughout
the southern region watched a dress rehearsal of this Negro unit play, in
addition to a white unit rehearsal of Sophie Treadwell’s Machinal.
The October conference concluded with a reading of Altars of Steel by
southerner Thomas Hall-Rogers. The action of the play, set in a Birmingham
mill recently bought by United States Steel, centered on thestrugglebetween
management and labor. The reading alone was said to have made “a profound
impression on the assembly” and likely inspired the Atlanta staff to mount
a production that spring.40 After the Birmingham units were closed, the
Atlanta white unit would produce Altars of Steel, featuring stark and angular
scenery by Josef Lenz, twenty-one staged deaths, a workers’ riot, and an
explosion in the mill.
Written and directed by Clyde Limbaugh, Mining Town, the Negro unit’s
last production, took up similar concerns. The play’s theme—racial tensions
that test the limits of organized labor—indicates that Limbaugh was sincere
in his desire to have the Negro unit work toward producing relevantmaterial,
such as Peters and Sklar’s Stevedore. In mid-October 1936, Hallie Flanagan
wrote to Verner Haldene to thank him for hosting the southern conference.
Haldene, meanwhile, concerned himself with rehearsals for Birmingham’s
part in the simultaneous national opening of It Can’t Happen Here. At the
same time, Clyde Limbaugh began rehearsing Mining Town. The Birming-
ham FTP personnel assumed that all was developing smoothly. As far as the
WPA was concerned, however, the FTP in Alabama was a fiasco.
At the local level, the Parks and Recreation Board remained involved in
sponsoring the Negro unit even though Sharp was not given control over the
unit’s administration. At the state level, however, Weber continued to cam-
paign against the project in favor of returning to the original idea of a Negro
recreational center. In September 1936, Weber wrote toherregionaldirector,
renouncing any responsibility for the theater Project:

We did not approve of the operation of the Theatre project in Alabama,

due to the fact that there were very few certified persons who had profes-
sional qualifications for the project. As you know, after considerable pres-
sure from Mrs. Flanagan and Mr. McGee, the project was put into opera-
tion.41

The Administration of Race 283

After outlining the scope of the project in Birmingham, paying special
attention to the 25 percent relief exemption, Weber concluded, “My rec-
ommendation would be a serious investigation of the project as to its justi-
fication.”42
In the following weeks, Malcolm Miller, a WPA field representative,
received memoranda from both Frank Bentley and Blanche Ralston, the
regional WPA section directors, recommending that the FTP in Alabama
be closed. Miller had already made his stand on the relationship between
regional WPA concerns and national FTP dictates over the issue of touring
theatricals. According to Miller, “No one [could] come into the South with-
out an invitation.”43 He was even willing to carry out Bentley and Ralston’s
recommendations personally. Bentley substantiated Weber’s remarks by
claiming that, in addition to unreasonable rental fees for the JeffersonTheatre
and a larger nonrelief than relief payroll in some instances, Weber did not
receive an invitation to attend the regional conference for the FTP in Bir-
mingham. According to Bentley, Weber had informed him of the upcoming
conference, but “she [had] not been notified of this meeting officially.”44
For the WPA, this “clearly indicate[d] the lack of proper coordination be-
tween the Federal Director at Washington and the state administration.”45
While the FTP officials now finally believed that the “Birminghamsituation”
would work within the national FTP framework, WPA officials had no
interest in allowing their power to be usurped any longer.
Early in October 1936, the WPA would have its way. Although no ma-
terials exist that speak to the experiences of the Negro performers in the
Birmingham unit, Clyde Limbaugh’s frustration with the unit’s sudden close
illustrates the vulnerability of the Negro units in the face of white bureau-
cratic disputes. Limbaugh had already expressed concern for his position as
a white director of a Negro unit only four months into the job, when a young
black apprentice was sent in to work with him. McGee responded to his
concern by reminding Limbaugh of the policy, as it had been formulated in
Harlem. “As you know, I am very anxious to place in charge of negro units
competent persons of their own race, if and when those peoplearediscovered.”
He continued, however, by reassuring Limbaugh that “the young man we
have asked in there is strictly on trial, and will, for the present, work under
your general supervision.”46 On 14 August 1936, administration of the
Harlem unit transferred from its white director, John Houseman, to the joint
Negro directorship of Harry Edwards, Carlton Moss, and Gus Smith. Lim-
baugh, no doubt, knew of these changes.47 That McGee truly intended to
follow through with the model for Negro theater established in Harlem
illustrates the optimism both he and Hallie Flanagan felt for the Negro units.
The fact that few Negro units outside of Harlem were ever turned over to a
black director—and none were administrated by blacks—illustrates that
optimism is not enough.
Five productions and eight months after it finally opened, the Birmingham
Negro Unit closed. Some of the white personnel transferred to Atlanta, where
they had the opportunity to work on Altars of Steel. Unlike many Negro units,

284 Performativity and the Performance of Race

whose black actors and audiences managed to leave traces of their struggles
and remnants of their small victories, the Birmingham Negro Unit’s history
is a study in silence. In arguments to withdraw FTP funding, Congress
critiqued the Birmingham Negro Unit and other Negro units as if they were
autonomous black artistic endeavors. Yet, interacting levels of white admin-
istrative hierarchy dictated personnel, financialworkings,performancespace,
and choices in theatrical subject matter in Birmingham. White administra-
tive hegemony functioned as a form of censorship, silencing black voices.
In her study of the FTP’s Negro units, Blueprints for a Black Federal Theatre,
Rena Fraden asks: “What is the relationship between a national culture and
a racial subculture?”48 The history of the Birmingham Negro Unit suggests
that mechanisms operating to maintain racialized subcultures are not nec-
essarily identifiable as racist practices. Significant obstacles in the realization
of artistic autonomy for any racially marked group receivinginstitutionalized
patronage are the very mechanisms that outline and sustain racial identity in
the first place. The formulations of racial difference and racial identity are,
in fact, the problem; the structures enabling these categories necessarily
maintain divisions and inequities. The unusual organizational arrangement
between the FTP and the WPA created a variety of conflicts, which played
out on terrain ranging from censorship to the closing of units, but, in all
cases, racial tensions—as the quote that began this article asserts—were
magnified. This resulted from using race as a label to identify who should
receive funding instead of deeply examining the grounds for funding and
from not questioning the validity of racial categorization in the first place.
A history of contention above—and silence below—the story of Birming-
ham’s short-lived Negro unit attests to the problematic nature of artistic
patronage in a system of preestablished values that permeate and direct the
distribution of resources. Government support for the arts continues to be
controversial. If the underlying ideological foundations delineating theracial
categorization and artistic expectations of recipients are not examined, we
will continue to foster the very divisiveness in the arts that public policies
are aimed at diminishing.

notes

1. David Theo Goldberg, Racist Culture (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1993): 234.

2. Hallie Flanagan, Jacob Baker, and Bruce McClure, 15 Nov. 1935, National
Archives and Record Administration (NARA), Record Group (RG) 211.2 AAAA.
3. Flanagan and Arthur Hopkins, 9 Oct. 1935, NARA, RG 211.2 AAAA.
4. In addition, vaudeville units were located in Oakland, Chicago, Boston, and
Camden, New Jersey; marionette units were in the District of Columbia and Buffalo;
musical revues were performed by the Peoria Negro Unit; and a teaching unit was
located in Raleigh, North Carolina. George Mason University Archives, Theatre of
the Thirties Collection, Fairfax, Va.
5. Rose McClendon, “As to a New Negro Stage,” New York Times (30 June 1935):
10:1.

The Administration of Race 285

 6. See Henry M. McKiven, Iron and Steel (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 1995).
7. Hallie Flanagan, General Correspondence, Oct. 1935, NARA, RG 69.
8. Letter dated 15 Aug. 1935. NARA, RG 69.
9. Laura Sharp to Flanagan, 1 Oct. 1935, NARA, RG 69.
10. Hallie Flanagan (Davis), Arena (New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearle, 1940),
288.
11. William F. MacDonald, Federal Relief Administration and the Arts (Columbus:
Ohio State University Press, 1969), 512.
12. For a more detailed discussion of white attitudes and control over the Negro
units in the South, see John Russell Poole, “The Federal Theatre Project in Georgia
and Alabama: An Historical Analysis of Government Theatre in the Deep South,”
Ph.D. diss., University of Georgia, 1995.
13. John McGee to Lester E. Lang, 7 Feb. 1936, NARA, RG 69.
14. Ibid.
15. MacDonald 512.
16. Flanagan, Arena, 120.
17. Sharp to Flanagan, 31 Oct. 1935, NARA, RG 69.
18. Sharp to Baker, 9 Jan. 1936, NARA, RG 69.
19. Weber to Baker, 1 Nov. 1935, NARA, RG 69.
20. NARA, RG 69. William Farnsworth became assistant national director of
the Federal Theater Project in Feb. 1936; he took over much of the administrative
work from Hallie Flanagan. Formerly, he had served as executive head of the Legit-
imate Theatre Code Authority.
21. Baker to Crow, 30 Mar. 1936, NARA, RG 69.
22. Ivan Paul to William Farnsworth, 10 Apr. 1936, NARA, RG 69.
23. Frank Bentley to Bruce McClure, 12 June 1936, NARA, RG 69.
24. McGee to Flanagan, 24 May 1936, NARA, RG 69.
25. Limbaugh to Flanagan, 9 Dec. 1936, NARA, RG 69.
26. Poole 146, n. 10.
27. Limbaugh to Flanagan, 8 July 1936.
28. For a detailed history of this production, see Tina Redd, “Stage Race: The
Seattle Negro Unit Production of Stevedore,” Journal of American Drama and Theatre
7, no. 2 (Spring 1995): 66–85.
29. Brenda McCallum, “Songs of Work and Songs of Worship: Sanctifying Black
Unionism in the Southern City of Steel,” New York Folklore 14 (1988): 15.
30. Blanche M. Ralston to Malcolm Miller, 12 Oct. 1936, NARA, RG 69, Series
651.312, Alabama.
31. See McKiven 47–52.
32. Alabama: A Guide to the Deep South, comp. Writers’ Program of the Works
Projects Administration (New York: R. R. Smith, 1941), 174.
33. For a more complete discussion of details and the reception to the plays that
the unit produced, see Poole 143–168.
34. George R. Leighton, Five Cities (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1939), 100.
35. Quoted in Charles Martin, The Angelo Herndon Case and Southern Justice (Baton
Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1976), 52.
36. Alabama: A Guide, 174.
37. “Narrative Report of Federal Theatre Project Ending, 15 Sep. 1936,” signed
by Verner Haldene, NARA, RG 69.

286 Performativity and the Performance of Race

 38. Federal Theatre in the South, I, Oct. 1936, George Mason University Ar-
chives, Theatre of the Thirties Collection, Fairfax, Va.
39. Verner Haldene to Flanagan, 24 Aug. 1936, NARA, RG 69, Alabama.
40. Ibid.
41. Weber to Blanche M. Ralston, 12 Oct. 1936, NARA, RG 69. (This letter is
dated September, with no specific date, it is stamped as received 12 Oct.)
42. Ibid.
43. MacDonald 516.
44. Blanche M. Ralston to Malcolm Miller, 12 Oct. 1936, NARA, RG 69, Series
651.312, Alabama.
45. Ibid.
46. McGee to Limbaugh, 15 Aug. 1936, NARA, RG 69.
47. Philip Barber, New York City FTP Director to All Project Supervisors and
Heads of Departments, NARA, RG 69, Philip Barber File.
48. Rena Fraden, Blueprints for a Black Federal Theatre (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1996), 204.

The Administration of Race 287

 15

The Black Performer and the

Performance of Blackness
The Escape; or, A Leap to Freedom
by William Wells Brown and
No Place To Be Somebody by Charles Gordone

‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘
harry j. elam, jr.

Throughout African American theater history, African American play-

wrights, actors, and artists have manipulated the “productive ambiva-
lence” of the black performer to transgress, transcend, and even subvert
established racial categories. Performers and performances have effectively
challenged racial definitions and provoked audiences to reconsider the so-
ciocultural justifications for racial identifications. Repeatedly, perform-
ances have interrogated and exploited the slippage between the meanings
of race and its visible signifiers. In this essay, I will explore the subversive
potential of the black performer by analyzing two important works from
the canon of black theater history: the first play ever published by a black
author in the United States, The Escape; or, A Leap to Freedom (1858) by
William Wells Brown and the 1969 Pulitzer Prize–winning play by
Charles Gordone, No Place To Be Somebody. Implicitly and explicitly, these
works foreground the power of the black performer to renegotiate the
meanings of blackness. Significantly, in these plays, the playwrights’ use
of language functions both to construct and to confront racial categories.
Despite obvious differences in time period, in intended audience, and in
perceptions of blackness, each of these texts relies on the “productive am-
bivalence” of the black performer to deconstruct existing racial defini-
tions. In the process, the authors comment on how blackness is conceived
and performed both on stage and in life.
By my use of the term productive ambivalence, I am appropriating a concept
developed by Homi Bhabha in his important article “Of Mimicry and Man:
The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse.” Bhabha writes, “The discourse of

288
mimicry is constructed around an ambivalence; in order to be effective, mim-
icry must continually produce its slippage, its excess, its difference.”1 Trans-
lated to the theatrical performance, the performer succeeds because of the
ambivalence, the excess, the slippage between him or herself, his or her role,
and the social implications of that performer and of that role. The audience
applauds a performance because it recognizes the performer’s productive ne-
gotiation of this ambivalence.
The solo performer, the singular live body before an audience, height-
ens this productive ambivalence. The solo performer is always mediating
among differing levels of subjectivity, reality, and meaning. She must ne-
gotiate among the self as creation, as performing subject, as art object, as
real self, and as performed character(s). It is the excess, the slippage be-
tween these negotiations that constitute successful performances. Bhabha
argues that the ambivalence inherent in the colonial project of mimicry—
an attempt by the colonizer to remake the colonial subject as “almost the
same, but not quite”—produces “an uncertainty which fixes the colonial
subject as a ‘partial’ presence. By ‘partial’ I [Bhabha] mean ‘incomplete’
and ‘virtual.’ ”2 Expanding Bhabha’s critique of the partiality of colonial
mimicry, the partiality that results from the ambivalence of performance
is productive. For the productive ambivalence of the solo performer ren-
ders not only the performing subject “virtual” but his gender and race as
well. This “incomplete,” or virtual, status is critical to the performer’s
ability to transcend and even subvert the socially patrolled boundaries of
race and gender.
What makes black performers and black solo performance affective and
effective arenas for the consideration of racial identity is that definitions of
race also depend on ambivalences. Race as a signifier is inherentlyambivalent.
A slippage occurs between the sociohistorical constructions and cultural uses
of race and the real, material conditions of oppression and subjugation, which
people must endure merely as a result of their racial classification. As Ralph
Ellison so eloquently noted in Invisible Man, “Now black is . . . an’ black
ain’t.”3 The black performer, visibly marked and read by the audience as
“black,” enters the stage and negotiates not only the spaces between the stage
representation and the social reality butalso racialdefinitionsandstereotypes,
racial misconceptions, and ambivalences of race.4 My contention is that,
through the productive ambivalence of the black performer, these racialized
meanings can be destabilized and possibly even erased. The black performer
can purposefully acknowledge and utilize her ambiguous status—as real
person, as theatrical representation, as sociocultural construction—to ex-
plore, expose, and even explode definitions of blackness. Crucial to these
processes is language and how language in performance produces, exceeds,
and controls racial representation. In both The Escape and No Place, the
performative interactions of the theatrical language and text with the text of
the black performer’s own body accentuate the situational significance of race
and provoke the audience to reconsider the social, cultural, and historical
meanings of blackness.

The Black Performer and the Performance of Blackness 289

 William Wells Brown, Nineteenth-Century
“Performance Artist”

Prior to writing The Escape and an earlier, unpublished play, The Experience;
or, How to Give a Northern Man a Backbone (1856),5 Wells Brown, an escaped
slave, appeared frequently as an orator at abolitionist meetings. As was the
common practice of ex-slave lecturers, Wells Brown would begin his address
with an apology, which constituted a strategic, racialized, and theatrical
device. It served as a disclaimer, freeing Wells Brown from any responsibility
for clumsiness in his writing or delivery. Even more important, it allowed
the audience to marvel at and to sympathize with his ability to overcome in
the face of insurmountable odds. He had escaped slavery and taught himself
to read and write, and he now stood before them able to demonstrate a high
level of proficiency as an orator. Consequently, the apology positioned the
black orator in relation to the institution of slavery as well as in respect to his
white abolitionist audience.
The ex-slave oratory itself functioned as a racialized performance in which
the former slave performed his blackness. Here, in order to understand the
performance of race or race as performative, I am adapting an idea from the
theories on gender performativity developed by Judith Butler.6 In a chapter
in Bodies that Matter on Nella Larsen’s Passing, Butler discusses, in a footnote,
how the character Bellew could be construed as performing whiteness:
Thissuggestsonesensein which“race”mightbeconstruedasperformative.
Bellew produces his whiteness through a ritualized production of itssexual
barriers. This anxious repetition accumulates the force of the material
effect of a circumscribed whiteness, but its boundary conceded its tenuous
status precisely because it requires the “blackness” that it excludes. In a
sense a dominant race is constructed (in the sense of materialized) through
reiteration and exclusion.7
Butler contends that Bellew’s performance of whiteness includes blackness
by excluding it. Transferring this performative equation to the situation of
the black ex-slave orator, she performed blackness in relation to the whiteness
of the audience. She performed blackness with an awareness of how it was
excluded and included in whiteness. The black orator performing before a
sea of white spectators was extremely conscious of himself as theatricalized
“spectacle.” Frantz Fanon observes:
For not only must the black man be black; he must be black in relation to
the white man. . . . In the white world, the man of color encounters diffi-
culties in the development of his bodily schema. Consciousness of the body
is a negating activity. It is a third-person consciousness.8
The third-person consciousness of the black body, of being black in relation
to the white world as Fanon describes, was exacerbated by the artificiality
and theatricality of the ex-slave oratorical performance. For, although the

290 Performativity and the Performance of Race

audience for the ex-slave oratorical performance was generally an audience of
the converted, faithful abolitionists, this audience was still susceptible to
nineteenth-century attitudes and theories on black inferiority. Antislavery
sentiment at this time often exhibited what George Fredrickson terms a
“romantic racialism.”9 Romantic racialists, despite a commitment to aboli-
tion, continued to exoticize and patronize blacks and to maintain that innate
differences existed between the Anglo-Saxon and African races.10
Wells Brown wrote The Escape not to be staged by a troupe of actors, but
to be read by him, in lieu of an oratorical address, at northern abolitionist
meetings. The Escape depicts a series of events on the fictitious Muddy Creek
Plantation owned by Dr. Gaines, which led three of his slaves, Glen, Melinda,
and Cato, to escape. By performing a play within the context of the already
performative ex-slave oratory, Wells Brown both intensified and reified the
theatricality of the event. For Wells Brown, performing a play within the
structure of the ex-slave oratorical performance represented an empowering
act, an act through which he asserted control over the representational ap-
paratus. Through his theatrical performance, Wells Brown reached beyond
the constraints imposed on the genre of ex-slave oratory. Rather than being
simply objectified before the abolitionist gaze, Wells Brown placed himself
in the subject position as artist, playwright, and performer. Wells Brown’s
performance of The Escape exploited his own exoticization by white aboli-
tionists as well as his own degradation under the horrors of slavery.11
When he performed The Escape, Wells Brown’s body as well as his words
represented performative texts. The interaction of the body as text with the
traditional mimesis of the text-performance structure is, in a contemporary
context, commonly associated with performance art.12 Examining or contex-
tualizing Wells Brown’s performance through a contemporary critical gaze
could locate him as an early black “performance artist,” a precursor to the
work of Anna Deavere Smith.13 Such a reading of this early modern work is
potentially problematic because postmodern circumstances and conditions
not only surround contemporary performance art but are elements in its
definition. Nonetheless, Wells Brown’s solo body in performance, much like
Deavere Smith’s 1990s solo projects, pushes the boundaries between perfor-
mance and reality. His public reading of all the characters in the play chal-
lenges not only the dynamics and structure of ex-slave oratory but that of
traditional theatrical productionaswell.Inanarticleonfeministperformance
art, Jeanie Forte observes, “Arguably all performance art, particularly in the
early years, evidenced a deconstructive intent.”14 Implicitly recognizing the
productive ambivalence of the genre, Forte maintains that performance art
foregrounds the problematic relationship between life and art, “between a
Renaissance conception of the self and a postmodern subject constructed by
cultural practices.”15 Through this process, performance art, she argues,
questions, attacks, and deconstructs accepted practices of representation,
“knowledge acquisition and accumulation.”16 Clearly, Wells Brown’s intent
with his live solo performance of The Escape was equally deconstructive. In
The Escape, he articulated the inherent contradictions, hypocrisy, and inhu-

The Black Performer and the Performance of Blackness 291

manity present in the practices of the white slave owners. Through his
representation of the slaves, he critiqued the images of blackness promoted
by the dominant culture.
The solo performance of Wells Brown, similar to Deavere Smith’s critically
acclaimed Fires in the Mirror (1993) and Twilight: Los Angeles 1992 (1994),
was polyphonic; it represented many voices, both black and white. John
Ernest writes, “As the author and the single voice performing all the parts,
Brown became a nexus of the various characters he portrayed—white and
black, northern and southern, antislavery and proslavery—and of the ideo-
logical and social forces that shaped them.”17 Wells Brown’s performance
was not so much interested in the individual characters as subjects but rather
in their statements, their discourse, and how this discourse reflected on the
injustices, the inequities, the economics of slavery. Using the concepts of
subjects and discourse theorized by Michel Foucault in The Archaeology of Knowl-
edge (French 1969, English 1972), Charles and James Lyons conclude that,
in Anna Deavere Smith’s theater, the statement or discourse is “not the
expression of the subject; the subject is she or he whose position is predicated
by the statement.”18 Wells Brown’s performance could be similarly inter-
preted. In his reading performance, Wells Brown did not identify with nor
attempt to embody the different characters but, rather, the discourse revealed
their subjectivity.
The language that Wells Brown uses to represent the slaves Glen and his
wife, Melinda, works againstexistingstereotypicalimagesofblackness.Their
language is free of any association with black or slave vernacular. As Melinda
awaits Glen’s arrival, she muses:

It is often said that the darkest hour of night precedes the dawn. It is ever
thus with the vicissitudes of human suffering. After the soul has reached
the lowest depths of despair, and can no deeper plunge amid its rolling
foetid shades, then the reactionary force of man’s nature begin[s]tooperate,
resolution takes the place of despondency, energy succeeds instead of
apathy, and an upward tendency is felt and exhibited.19

Certainly, this language was not traditionally associated with black speech,
with white speech, or with any common speech patterns. Significantly, Glen
and Melinda are the only characters in the play who use this language. Their
speech patterns distance them from the white characters as well as from the
other slaves. Consequently, their linguistic separation from the other char-
acters highlights their difference and invites the audience to focus on their
particular plight and exploitation. Yet, Glen and Melinda’s dialogue not
only places them in isolation, it also connects them with the elevated prose
found in European and American romantic melodramas of this period. By
constructing Glen and Melinda as subjects through this dialogue, Wells
Brown not only destabilizes conventional expectations of “Negro speech
patterns,” he demonstrates the poetic capabilities of these black figures.
Paradoxically, Glen and Melinda perform their blackness through Wells

292 Performativity and the Performance of Race

Brown’s appropriation of the flourishes and romanticism associated with
white, Victorian aestheticism.
Another level of performing blackness was also at play in Wells Brown’s
delineation of Glen and Melinda: the performance of Wells Brown himself.
By creating this dialogue for Glen and Melinda, Wells Brown was also
consciously constructing and performing his own blackness. Wells Brown,
aware of his blackness in relation to his white audience, did not want to
project his Otherness, but his worthiness of equal stature, freedom, and equal
rights. His productive ambivalence as a performer rendered the spectators’
readings of him as black ex-slave incomplete. Ernest argues:
Brown could play his role differently and he could in such a way challenge
the terms of the multiply contingent performances of identity on the
United States cultural stage. Brown’s effort to revise the script of his own
cultural performance largely involved redefining himself as a professional
lecturer and man of letters rather than a fugitive slave.20
Through his performance of The Escape and of blackness, Wells Brown in-
tended to displace nineteenth-century perceptions of black intelligence and
literary ability.
The language and representation that Wells Brown assigns to the slave
Cato stand in stark contrast to those of Glen and Melinda and produce a
different image of blackness. While Glen and Melinda speak in elevated
prose, Cato speaks in the dialect traditionally and pejoratively associated
with the image of the blackfaceminstrel, whichdominatedAmericanpopular
culture at that time. When Dr. Gaines leaves Cato alone in the clinic to tend
to the slave patients, Cato responds, “I allers knowed I was a doctor, an’ now
de ole boss has put me at it, I muss change my coat. Ef any niggers come in,
I wants to look suspectable” (TE I:2: 38). With his malapropisms and false
sense of self-importance, Cato is the embodiment of the comic “darky.” This
stereotypical icon has been a constant in American representations and con-
ceptions of blackness. Mel Watkins points out in Onthe Real Side,“InAmerica,
blackness was associated with humor from the outset.”21 The blackface ar-
chetypes presented in this theatrical genre would have been well known to
northern abolitionist audiences. In fact, historian Ronald L. Davis argues,
“Blackface archetypes fundamentally issued from the imagination of north-
ern whites.”22 In addition, Wells Brown’s construction of Cato was consistent
with the sentimentalized notions of the childlike, self-sacrificing slave pre-
sented in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which had been pub-
lished six years earlier. The happy and docile Cato appears to fulfill all of his
master’s requests. When the mistress, Mrs. Gaines, compels him to marry
Hannah, a slave woman in love with another man, he willingly complies,
despite Hannah’s protests. Later in the play, after Glen and Melinda have
escaped, Cato goes to their master, Dr. Gaines, and informs him of their
flight. Thus, at first, the image of Cato met the expectations of an audience
steeped in nineteenth-centuryliteraryandtheatricalrepresentationsofblack-
ness.

The Black Performer and the Performance of Blackness 293

 And yet, with Cato, Wells Brown subverts the comic slave/house slave
stereotype and the romantic racial expectations of this role by demonstrating
that even the most seemingly accommodating and docile of slaves still desires
to be free. When Dr. Gaines takes Cato north with the slave-catching expe-
dition to assist in the recapture of Glen and Melinda, Cato seizes the oppor-
tunity to leap for his own freedom. Consequently, Cato’s prior performance
of the “happy darky” must be recognized as just that: a performance. He
adopts a strategic blackness as a subterfuge or coping mechanism in order to
survive on the plantation. Such tactical performances were common inslavery
times and after. The mask, the device of a differentiated performance of
blackness solely for the white gaze, helped blacks to negotiate the dangers of
racism and oppression. In the words of the old slave adage, “Got one mind
for white folk to see, ’nother for what I know is me.”23
Still, because of the purposes of his own black performance, Wells Brown
was aware that he could not totally subvert the scopic image, or expectations,
of the audience, or he would risk alienating them from the abolitionist cause.
Consequently, even after Cato’s escape to freedom, Wells Brown has him
retain elements of the happy darky performance. Once free, Cato looks to
change his name, just as Wells Brown had changed his own name from
Sanford, the slave, to William Wells Brown, the free man, after he had
escaped. Cato relates his decision to undergo a name change to the audience:

Well now it is me, an’ I em a free man. But, stop! I muss change my name,
kase ole massa might foller me, and somebody might tell him dat dey seed
Cato; so I’ll change my name, and den he wont know me ef he sees me.
Now, what shall I call myself? I’m now in a suspectable part of de country,
an’ I muss have a suspectable name. Ah! I’ll call myself Alexander Wash-
ington Napoleon Pompey Caesar. Dar, now dat’s a good long, suspectable
name, and every body will suspect me. (TE V:3: 55).

While fulfilling comic expectations, this performance of Cato still exhibits

a productive ambivalence and excess. For ex-slaves, who had previously been
named by their master, the process of naming carried added importance.
Since southern masters often gave their slaves ancient Greek and Roman
names, such as Pompey and Caesar, these names were generally rejected by
the newly freed blacks as slave designations.24 Cato, however, joins these
slave names with Washington, a name commonly chosen by freed blacks
because of its association with the father of the country, George Washington,
and connotations of American liberty. Cato calls attention to the process of
naming by choosing a name that is both excessive and literally “suspectable,”
for its excess would draw suspicious attention to him. His comic naming
ceremony emphasizes the significance of names and labels to the construction
of racial, social, and cultural identity. By representing Cato in conjunction
with Glen and Melinda, Wells Brown implies that a commonality of their
blackness lies in the desire to be free.

294 Performativity and the Performance of Race

Certainly, between the time of Wells Brown’s performances of The Escape and
the off-Broadway debut of Charles Gordone’s No Place To Be Somebody in 1969,
public conceptions and definitions of blackness had changed significantly
(see figure 15.1). And while the previous discussion of The Escape noted how
playwright Wells Brown actually functioned as a solo performer, the exam-
ination of No Place focuses on how the playwright, Charles Gordone, con-
structs a character, Gabe Gabriel, who operates as a solo black performer
within the context of the play. Through Gabe, Gordone disrupts the conven-
tions of stage realism and the expectations of black drama of the period, just

Figure 15.1 No Place To Be Somebody by Charles Gordone, Public Theatre, New

York, 1969, directed by Ted Cornel. Ron O’Neal as Gabe Gabriel, Nathan George
as Johnny, Paul Benjamin as Machine Dog. Courtesy Billy Rose Theatre
Collection, New York Public Library at Lincoln Center.

The Black Performer and the Performance of Blackness 295

as Wells Brown’s reading challenged the norms of ex-slaveoratoryandtheater
production. No Place, like The Escape, foregrounds the performance of black-
ness as meanings of blackness are displaced, replaced, and critiqued. In the
decade of the 1960s and into the early 1970s, black artists and activists
practiced a different sort of romanticized racialism, which idealized the
African roots of African American culture. Black Nationalist paradigms of
the period perceived race not as socially constructed but as ontological in its
foundations. They imagined an essentialized, organicized blackness. No Place
is both a critique and a celebration of those romanticized and essentialized
ideals. The plot of No Place acts as a metaphor for the imagined racial revo-
lution. Johnny Williams, a black bar owner and Harlem hustler, plans to
usurp the power of the white crime bosses in Harlem. He exclaims to his
friend and alter ego, Gabe Gabriel, “We at war, Gabe! Black ag’int white.”25
Gabe kills Johnny for his exuberance, for his insistence on perpetuating this
racial divisiveness.26
As the doubling repetition in his name suggests, Gabe Gabriel isacharacter
constructed on excess and ambivalence. Significantly, Gabe is an actor and
playwright. As an actor, Gabe is unemployed and perhaps unemployable
because of the dominant culture’s definitions of blackness. He is repeatedly
not cast as an actor because he is too light for black roles and too dark for
white ones. Early in the first act, he informs Johnny that, at a recent audition
for a musical on slavery, “Stage Manager calls me over. Whispers they’re
auditionin’ the white actors tomorrow” (NP I:1: 645). Gabe’s casting diffi-
culties, the ambivalence of his visibility, make evident the inherent problems
with reading skin color as race.27 The reductivism of interpreting skin color
as race not only limits the castability of Gabe, but in a much broader context,
it severely restricts the possible representations of race and racial identity.
When the representations of race are reduced to the visible, the invisible
determinants of racial identity are ignored. Such essentialism labels all black
people solely by their phenotype and does not allow for heterogeneity. One
of Gordone’s projects in No Place is to assail such essentialism through the
performance of Gabe.
Throughout the play, Gabe directly addresses the audience and breaks the
fourth wall. Gabe proclaims that he is not only a character in the play but
the writer of the play. In his opening monologue, Gabe informs the audience:
Right now I’m working on a play. They say if you wanna be a writer you
gotta go out and live. I don’t believe that no more. Take my play for
instance. Might not believe it but I’m gonna make it all up in my head as
I go along. Before I prove it to you, wanna warn you not to be thinkin’ I’m
tellin’ you a bunch’a barefaced lies. An’ no matter how far out I git, don’t
want you goin’ out’a here with the idea what you see happen’ is all a figment
of my grassy imagination. ’Cause it aint. (NP I:1: 637)
Gabe claims an intriguing duality: he is creating the play in his head as he
goes along and yet the events are real, they are not “barefaced lies” nor
“figments of [his] grassy imagination.” And, in fact, Gabe’s words andactions

296 Performativity and the Performance of Race

are not products of his imagination but the result of playwright Gordone’s
creativity. Through the ambivalent representation that is Gabe, Gordone,
the real playwright, purposefully reveals his art and artifice to the audience.
By foregrounding the stage character Gabe—who maintains that he is con-
structing the play as he performs within it and is his own construction—
Gordone simultaneously blurs and extends the space between the theatrical
illusion and reality.
At key moments in No Place, Gabe steps out of the immediate context
and action of the play and performs his own “original” poetry for the au-
dience. In these poetic moments, Gabe, the character, functions as a solo
black performer. When he acts as solo performer, Gabe situates himself as
“speaking subject.” He delivers introspective and revealing performances
directly to the audience. The conceit of such direct and “personal” per-
formances is that the audience now interacts in a more tangible way with
the “real” as the performer engages in a self-articulating, self-reflexive
performance. At the same time, a distance between audience and the per-
former remains. For both audience and performers are still aware that the
events within the performance transpire in the realm of the performative
and therefore are not real. Moreover, in contrast to the performance of the
very real Wells Brown, the audience is aware not only of the performative
nature of this encounter but that Gabe himself is performed. Still, the
flexibility of Gordone’s construction of Gabe—as both character within
the story and solo performer outside the plot directly before the audi-
ence—enables him to reflect and comment on the action and on race in
ways that a position of merely being inside the representation could not
afford him. Gordone’s creation of this unique, reflective vantage point
parallels effects achieved by Wells Brown’s eschewing of a conventional
abolitionist speech to instead perform The Escape. Correspondingly, Wells
Brown’s polyphonic performance allowed him to express perspectives, to
present viewpoints, to address issues of race and slavery in a manner not
available to more conventional oratory. In both cases, the playwrights
used the productive ambivalence of performance to their advantage.
At the opening of act 2, an “obviously drunk” Gabe appears before the
audience and performs a poem. His inebriation is itself a device, a classic and
often-repeated theatrical device. When drunk, theatrical figures, their minds
and bodies oblivious to their surroundings and the ramifications of their
actions, their tongues and inhibitions liberated, reveal their innermost feel-
ings and the truth of their emotions. The device of drunkenness provides
Gabe with a particularly ambiguous position of agency. For his acerbic
comments on the construction and performance of blackness can beconstrued
and consequently dismissed as the mere rantings and ravings of a drunk. Or,
is he lucid? After all, Gabe’s drunkenness, like Gabe, is performed. Gabe’s
poem begins with an old Protestant hymn:

Whiter than snow, yes!

Whiter than snow!

The Black Performer and the Performance of Blackness 297

 Now wash me, and I shall be
Whiter than snow! (NP II:1: 663)
Gabe’s intonation of this hymn has immediate and significant social and
cultural connotations; it conjures traditional Western associations of white-
ness with purity and goodness. By having the ambiguously black Gabe
perform this hymn, Gordone immediately problematizes the conventional
Western binary, which constructs white as good and black as bad with no
ambiguity. Gabe/Gordone’s project in the body of the poem is to subvert the
Manichaean opposition of whiteness and blackness by negotiating the space
in between the two, to find a space for his own identity by problematizing
essential definitions and thereby questioning and exploding the absolute.
Gabe’s poem details how his family attempted to “wash away” the negative
stigma of blackness. They:
moved out of the dirty-black slum!
Away from those dirty-black people!
Who live in those dirty-black hovels,
Amidst all of that garbage and filth!
Away from those dirty-black people,
Who in every way,
Prove daily
They are what they are!
Just dirty-black people! (NP II:2: 662)
Note that, within the construction of the poem, dirty and black are hyphen-
ated, so that the two are elided in their vocal presentation. This semantic
arrangement eliminates the difference between these two adjectives. They
become inseparable, part of one identity. Black is dirty. The relationship
between black and dirty in Gabe’s poem reflects the ways in which poverty
and crime have been and continue to be racialized in this country. Terms
such as “the poor and underprivileged,” “the urban underclass,” “the welfare
dependents” have become code words that consciously, if covertly, denote
blackness or people of color in our New World order. In addition, through
this linguistic construction, the attributes dirty and black are made substan-
tive. Thus, through the pattern of words in Gabe’s poem, “dirty-black”
becomes inculcated into patterns of behavior, internalized into social atti-
tudes, and manifested in social performances of inferiority. Gabe relates that
these “dirty-black people” prove daily “They are what they are! Just dirty-
black people!” The theatrical device of linguistic conflation foregrounds the
damaging effects of such absolute racial signifiers.
Gabe and his family tried to escape dirty-blackness by moving to a “clean-
white neighborhood” that had “clean-white sidewalks” and “clean-white
people.” In addition:
We went to schools that had clean-white
Rooms with clean-white teachers
Who taught us and all the clean-white

298 Performativity and the Performance of Race

 Children how to be clean and white!
(NP II:2: 662)
Gabe and his family wanted to perform the privileges of whiteness. However,
the poem argues, the social advantages, the performance of whiteness, could
not be separated from the “being” of whiteness. Social mobility depended on
one being clean and white. Thus, the attempt at “clean-white” access by Gabe
and his family was a project doomed to failure. Despite their attempts to
wash away their associations with dirty-blackness, they could not remove the
racialized meanings that “colored” their bodies.
In the concluding section of the poem, Gabe differentiates himself and his
blackness from the dirty urban masses by linguistically Othering and pur-
posefully dehumanizing them. No longer does he denote them as “dirty-
black people,” but, rather, he refers to them as “dirty-black Niggers.” Gabe
informs the audience:
Most of all! We were safe!
Assured at last!
We could never more be
Like those dirty-black Niggers!
Those filthy, dirty-black Niggers!
(NP II:1: 665)
Gabe’s invocation of the term nigger is a deliberate tactic of denigration,
distancing, displacement, and denial. It can even be perceived as evidence of
an internalized racism, which is as pernicious and as damaging as the external
variety. Gabe internalizes his rejection by the clean-white world and denies
any connection to these “niggers” and his own “niggerness.” His inclusive
We—“We were safe!”—explicitly excludes other blacks and demonstrates
his continued victimization by the device of race.
Act 3 of No Place again opens with a solo performance by Gabe in which
he builds on his earlier considerations of the nature of blackness. In this poem,
he repeats the refrain “They’s mo to bein’ black than meets the Eye!” (NP III:
3: 683). This repeated coda again reinforces the notion that blackness cannot
be equated with skin color, that there is more to being black than the visible.
Here, as in The Escape, the language used is critical to the production and
meanings of blackness. In black vernacular practices, the verb to be denotes a
constant state or reiterative behavior: “I be going to church on Sundays.”
Accordingly, Gabe’s use of the phrase bein’ black emphasizes the permanence
of this condition. And yet, the actions, gestures, and behaviors that Gabe
describes as “bein’ black” are historically, culturally, and socially constructed
practices:
Bein’ black is like a way ya walk an’ Talk!
It’s a way’a lookin’ at life!
Bein’ black is like sayin’, “What’s happenin’, Babeee!”
An’ bein’ understood!
Bein’ black has a way’a making ya call some-

The Black Performer and the Performance of Blackness 299

 Body a mu-tha-fuc-kah an’ really meanin’ it!
An namin’ eva’body broh-thah, even if you don’t!
Bein’ black, is eatin’ chit’lins an wah-tah
Melon, an’ to hell with anybody, if they don’t
Like it! (NP III:1:683)
Gabe’s definitions of blackness satirize black stereotypes and reimagine the
connotations of and contexts for performing blackness. Again, Gabe/Gor-
done’s linguistic construction is important. In addition to saying, “bein’
black is,” Gabe uses the phrases “bein’ black has a way” or “is like a way.”
The implication is that bein black compels or propels the performance of
certain behaviors. This behavior, similar to Cato’s adoption of the happy
darky performance mask in The Escape, acts as a cultural, coping mechanism,
a necessary response to the conditions of black existence:
It’s all the stuff that nobody wants but
Cain’t live without!
It’s the body that keeps us standin! The
Soul that keeps us goin! An’ the spirit
That’ll take us thoooo! (NP III:1: 684)
Gabe’s discourse on bein’ black is also a product of its specific historic
moment. By the late 1960s, a momentous movement of black pride and
consciousness had emerged. Representations of blackness and black visibility
proliferated within American culture. This burgeoning spirit of black con-
sciousness would have contextualized and contributed to the audience ex-
perience with and response to Gabe’s pronouncements of bein’ black back in
1969.28
Despite its historical and social context, Gabe’s declarations on the collec-
tive, essentialized nature of bein’ black are purposefully restrictive and re-
ductive. Gordone problematizes the meanings of Gabe’s essentialpronounce-
ments on bein’ black through the symbolic implications of the setting that
he constructs for Gabe’s performance. As Gabe enters onto the stage from an
offstage bathroom, Gordone’s stage directions note:
The Table at center has a folded newspaper leaning against a large Molotovcocktail.
Its headline reads: “Negroes Riot!” A banner resembling the American flag dangles
from a flagstand. Next to the Molotov cocktail is a plate on which rests a black
automatic pistol. Beside the plate is a knife and fork. (NP III:1: 663)
The newspaper headline on the table is extremely dramatic: “Negroes Riot!”
Within the immediate theatrical context, the headline calls attention to the
recurring motif of Gabe’s poem, “They’s mo to bein’ black than meets the
Eye.” The media’s sensationalized representation of blacks solely as rioters
denies the complexities of blackness as well as the causes of racial frustration,
which lie below the surface “eye,” or cursory reading of the newspaper. In
addition, the setting, with its black gun and Molotov cocktail, implies
another dimension, a profoundly political dimension, to blackness. The gun

300 Performativity and the Performance of Race

and Molotov cocktail together with the newspaper headline infer that the
exigencies of the current racial climate have prompted a violent response, a
different sort of black performance: “Negroes Riot!”ThegunandtheMolotov
cocktail visually signify black revolutionary rage.
Gordone juxtaposes the political constructions and violent manifestations
of blackness with the humorous social and cultural constructions of blackness
presented in the text. This juxtapositioning implies that there is more to
bein’ black than rage and rioting. In addition, after Gabe has concluded his
poem, he sits at the center stage table and “Cuts into gun with knife and fork.
Finally [he] picks up gun. Bites into it. Chews and swallows. Takes a drink from
Molotov cocktail. Wipes mouth” (NP III:1:684). Then, Gabe turns to the black
audience members and invites them to participate in this meal. “Bruthas an’
sistahs! Will ya jine me!” (NP III:1:684) Through this new “call to arms,”
the “I” that is Gabe deceives the “eye” of the audience and enacts an explicitly
ambivalent, black performance. By eating the gun and drinking the Molotov
cocktail, Gabe literally internalizes black rage into the black body. This
action could be interpreted to mean that violence, the revolutionary imper-
ative, is a critical element of black construction and an internalized essence
of bein’ black. However, this reading is not supported by the cultural con-
structions of blackness presented in the text. I would argue that, by swallow-
ing the representations of violence, Gabe demystifies and deactivates their
power and authority. The images of revolt are not only consumed by Gabe’s
black body, they are confuted by the body of Gabe’s text and rendered partial
or incomplete by his ambivalent performance.
Perhaps conservative, antirevolutionary readings of Gabe’s actions and
the messages of No Place contributed to the play’s popularity with white
audiences. Unlike more incendiary black plays of the period, such as
Amiri Baraka’s Slave Ship (1967),29 No Place did not advocate the murder
of whites nor militant action to overturn the current social system. Sig-
nificantly, rather than the violent events of Slave Ship, No Place, much like
Brown’s The Escape, relies on humor and satire. Similar to Brown’s fore-
thought in performing The Escape at abolitionist meetings, Gordone in No
Place anticipated white audiences. His play neither attacks nor threatens
white spectators as he challenges their perceptions of race. White audi-
ences, in fact, made up the majority of those who originally attended No
Place. Joseph Papp first produced the play at the Public Theatre in New
York in June 1969. It then moved uptown to Broadway, where it won the
Pulitzer Prize in 1970. This award and the support of white spectators
stand in sharp contrast to Baraka’s cultural nationalism and the tenets of
the Black Arts Movement of that period. The Black Arts Movement
viewed such success in the white commercial mainstream as antithetical
to the objectives of revolutionary black theater. The Black Arts Move-
ment proclaimed the black community to be its sole audience and critic.
Despite their federal funding, Baraka and the Black Arts Repertory The-
ater School (BART/s) in Harlem, during the mid-1960s, barred whites,
including government officials, from attending their productions.

The Black Performer and the Performance of Blackness 301

 In his final solo performance, Gabe continues to deconstruct anddestabilize
racial meanings through his employment of the ambivalence of the black
performer. After killing the enraged black hustler, Johnny, Gabe returns for
the play’s epilogue. He now addresses the audience dressed in drag, as The
Black Lady in Mourning. The costume change emphasizes the constructed
nature of both gender and race. Certainly, Gabe’s drag performance has
profound implications for feminist readings. Recent feminist criticism has
interpreted male cross-dressing as a misogynistic act that reinforces male
privilege. “A man imitates a woman in order to confirm that she belongs to
him.”30 Gabe’s drag portrayal is encoded with misogyny and male-centrism.
For Gabe must become feminized in drag in order to mourn.
Certainly, Gabe’s transvestism provides him with even more ambiguity
and ambivalence as a performer. Peggy Phelan argues that, for the male drag
performer, “Performing the image of what he is not allows him to dramatize
himself as ‘all.’ ”31 Accordingly, Gabe in drag determines that he will“change
[his] part over and over again” (NP 705) in order to provoke his audience.
His final performance is constituted by its historical significations: Gabe
argues that black identity is constructed in and through history, that black
people are “a people whose identity could only be measured by the struggle,
the dehumanization, the degradation they suffered. Or allowed themselves
to suffer perhaps” (NP 705). Dressed in black with a shroud draped over his
head, he references the famous historical images of Betty Shabazz and Coretta
Scott King bravely mourning the deaths of their assassinated husbands,
Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. Yet, Gabe in his drag performance
also transcends history. He is a harbinger of destiny, who predicts his future
as well as that of the audience and the entire black race.
Gabe purposefully conflates endings and beginnings. He mourns “the
passing of a people dying into a new life.” He proclaims that the “new life”
of black people will be a death because it will entail a loss of or disconnection
from history. He believes that the revolutionary paradigms of Black Nation-
alism are not built upon an understanding of the history of black struggle.
Instead, they are conceived in and solely concerned with the present and
predicated on the disruption of the historic continuum. For Gabe, Black
Nationalistic fervor marks a drastic change from the past, and he will “mourn
the ending of those years.” Through this final performance, Gabe wants to
provoke in his audience a consciousness of this passing of history. Signifi-
cantly, Gordone advances this argument on and through the productive
ambivalence of the black performing artist, Gabe.

Conclusions
As is evident in No Place as well as in The Escape, the productive ambivalence
of the black performer informs our understanding of the situationalmeanings
and social constructions of blackness. Both No Place and The Escapeforeground
the power of the black performer through his bodyand languagetodestabilize

302 Performativity and the Performance of Race

the visible. They argue that there is, indeed, “mo to bein’ black than meets
the Eye.” In fact, the invocation of black performers and solo performances
works to deconstruct the social or aesthetic structures within which these
performances are supposedly situated. Wells Brown’s solo performance sub-
verts the conventional format of ex-slave oratory. Gordone’s injection of
Gabe’s poetry and prose disrupts any attempt to read or categorize No Place
as conventional realism or, even more significantly, as a prototypical black
revolutionary drama of the late 1960s. Juxtaposing Gordone’s manipulation
of the character Gabe with Wells Brown’s polyphonic performance of The
Escape reveals how the power of performance, the dynamic interactions of a
singular live body with an audience, can confront and effectively challenge
established social and cultural constructions of race.
The transcendent and transformative power, the productive ambivalence
of the black performer, has been operative since the earliest black perform-
ances in America. Eric Lott in his significant study on blackface minstrelsy,
Love and Theft (1993), argues that a recognition of the potential subversive
agency of the black performer was one important reason for white appropri-
ation of blackface minstrelsy.32 In the 1980s and 1990s, black playwrights
like George C. Wolfe and Suzan-Lori Parks in works such as The Colored
Museum (1984) and The America Play (1990–1993) have employed the pro-
ductive ambivalence of the black performer by featuring solo black perform-
ances that implicitly and explicitly comment on the meanings of race as they
explore and explode racial categories. The Colored Museum by Wolfe riffs on
the ambivalence between the constructedness of blackness and the real socio-
cultural pressures associated with black existence in America. After symbol-
ically strangling his black rage, The Man in The Colored Museum exhibit
entitled “Symbiosis” announces that he will engage in a new situational
performance of blackness: “Being black is too emotionally taxing. Therefore,
I will be black only on weekends and holidays.”33
Through the language of The Man, Wolfe humorously disrupts theconcept
that blackness is biologically fixed. The Man intends to both construct and
deconstruct his own blackness. There has been and continues to be a historic
continuum of black destabilizing performances, which must be recognized.
For, as bell hooks argues:
African-American performance artists have always played a role in the
process of collective black political self-recovery, in both the process of
decolonization and the imagining and construction ofliberatoryidentities.
It has been a space where communities of resistance are forged to sustain
us, a place where we know we are not alone.34

notes

1. Homi Bhabha, “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Dis-
course,” in his The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 86.

The Black Performer and the Performance of Blackness 303

 2. Bhabha 86.
3. Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (New York: Modern Library, 1994), 9.
4. This racialized inscription of the black performer can have a profound effect on
so-called nontraditional performances, such as the appearances of Joe Morton as
Coriolanus in William Shakespeare’s Coriolanus or James Earl Jones as Big Daddy in
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof by Tennessee Williams.
5. The play The Experience is listed in some sources as Doughface, in others as Doe
Face. At that time, the term doughface was slang for northern preachers, such as those
characterized in the play.
6. Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter (New York: Routledge, 1993), 12.
7. Butler, 275, n.4.
8. Frantz Fanon, “The Fact of Blackness,” in Black Skins White Masks (New York:
Grove, 1967), 110.
9. George Fredrickson, The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-
American Character and Destiny, 1817–1914 (New York: Harper and Row, 1971),
102.
10. Eric Lott, Love and Theft (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 34.
11. The theatrical performance that Wells Brown created displaced and yet re-
inforced the real of his life as a slave on a plantation. Wells Brown based the characters
in both The Escape and The Experience on his own life and modeled the plantation
owner, Dr. Gaines of The Escape, on his own original owner, Dr. Young. And yet, by
theatricalizing real figures and actual life incidents, Wells Brown was able to manip-
ulate their emotional impact. He could shape the representations of both slave and
slave masters to meet the didactic purposes of his drama, while he simultaneously
remained cognizant of the drama as an artistic medium and the need to “delight” as
well as “instruct” his audience. On 28 Apr. 1857, after a reading of The Experience in
Boston, a reviewer in the Auburn Daily Advertiser wrote:
The play is itself a masterly refutation of all apologies for slavery and abounds
with wit and satire, philosophy, argument, and facts, all ingeniously inter-
woven into one of the most interesting dramatic compositions of modern
times.
Unfortunately, given the unpublished status of The Experience, we can never verify
whether it was “one of the most interesting dramatic compositions of moderntimes.”
12. Elin Diamond, “Mimesis, Mimicry, and the ‘True-Real,’ ” in Acting Out, ed.
Lynda Hart and Peggy Phelan (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993),
377.
13. Anna Deavere Smith is one of the most important and renowned performance
artists of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. She uses interviews with
actual persons and real accounts of significant incidents to form the texts of her
performances. Her most noted works are Fires in the Mirror (1992), an examination
of the racial and religious conflagration that arose in Crown Heights, New York
(1990) and Twilight: Los Angeles 1992 (1992), an explorationoftheriotsandaftermath
of the Rodney King decision in Los Angeles (1992).
14. Jeanie Forte, “Women’s Performance Art: Feminism and Postmodernism,”
in Performing Feminisms, ed. Sue-Ellen Case (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1990), 251.
15. Forte 251.
16. Ibid.

304 Performativity and the Performance of Race

 17. John Ernest, “The Reconstruction of Whiteness: William Wells Brown’s The
Escape; or, A Leap to Freedom,” PMLA 113, no. 5 (Oct. 1998): 1109.
18. Charles R. Lyons and James C. Lyons, “Anna Deavere Smith: Perspectives on
Her Performance within the Context of Critical Theory,” Journal of Dramatic Theory
and Criticsm 9, no. 1 (Fall 1994): 49.
19. William Wells Brown, “The Escape; or, A Leap to Freedom,” in Black Theater
USA, ed. James Hatch and Ted Shine (New York: Free Press, 1974), I:3:39. All
subsequent references to this play will be noted in the text.
20. Ernest 1116.
21. Mel Watkins, On the Real Side: Laughing, Lying, andSignifying:TheUnderground
Tradition of African-American Humor that Transformed American Culture from Slavery to
Richard Pryor (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994), 83.
22. Ronald L. Davis, A History of Music in American Life, Vol. 1, The Formative
Years, 1620–1865 (Malabar, Fla.: Robert Krieger, 1982), 209.
23. Watkins 52.
24. See Herbert G. Gutman, The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750–1925
(New York: Pantheon, 1976), 185, 186.
25. Charles Gordone, “No Place To Be Somebody,” in Black Theater, ed. Lindsay
Patterson (New York: New American Library, 1971), III:3:703. All subsequent
references to this play will be noted in the text.
26. The repetition evident in the nameGabeGabrielalsodemonstratesaconscious
excess, like the new name of the former slave Cato in The Escape, and Gabe’s name
also connects him to the Archangel Gabriel from The Bible. He acts, in a manner
similar to his namesake, as a beacon, a harbinger of things to come, warning black
people and directing their future.
27. See Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: the politics of performance (New York: Routledge,
1993), 8.
28. Lisa Kennedy, “The Body in Question,” in Black Popular Culture, ed. Gina
Dent (Seattle, Wash.: Bay Press, 1992), 108.
29. For a discussion of Amiri Baraka’s Slave Ship, see Harry J. Elam, Jr., Taking It
to the Streets (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 86–100.
30. Phelan 17.
31. Ibid.
32. Lott 6.
33. George C. Wolfe, “Symbiosis,” The Colored Museum(London:Metheun,1987),
43. For further discussion of this play, see: Harry J. Elam, Jr., “Signifyin(g)onAfrican
American Theatre: The Colored Museum by George C. Wolfe,” Theatre Journal 44:3
(1992): 291–303.
34. bell hooks, “Performance Practice as a Site of Opposition,” in Let’s Get It On:
The Politics of Black Performance, ed. Catherine Ugwu (Seattle, Wash.: Bay Press,
1995), 220.

The Black Performer and the Performance of Blackness 305

 16

The Costs of Re-Membering

What’s at Stake in Gayl Jones’s Corregidora

‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘
christina e. sharpe

Everything said in the beginning must be said better than in the

beginning.1

Re-Membering Enslavement
On Sunday, 2 April 1995, the front page of the New York Times featured an
article entitled “Bringing Slavery’s Long Shadow to the Light.” The sub-
heading continued, “Blacks Seek Catharsis by Bringing Slavery’s Long
Shadow to the Light.” This article focused on the work of some African
Americans to remember the Middle Passage with ceremonies, rebirthings,
and other performances in order to transform our individual and community
relationships to the living memory of slavery:
Within thelastdecade[the] . . . evolutionofemotionhasbeenexperienced
by a growing number of African-Americans,whohavebeguntore-examine
slavery—reflecting upon it in film and music, remembering it through
ritual and ceremony, assessing its legacy from universitiestoneighborhood
study groups.2
While the article focuses on the fact of the legacy, the ceremonies actually
focus on the performance of the legacy of enslavement through specific
ritualistic rememberings. bell hooks locates this repetition of oppressive
structures with a difference as part of a “strategy of re-enactment [that] has
been at the core of African American performance practice.”3 I contend that
performativity as a strategy of reenactment is crucial to understanding Gayl
Jones’s blues novel Corregidora as a text concerned with performing the
legacies of enslavement. For, as Angela Davis notes, “The blues . . . marked

306
the advent of a popular culture of performance, with the borders of performer
and audience becoming increasingly differentiated.”4
More specifically, Corregidora engages concerns of “race,” AfricanAmerican
collective trauma, and remembrance largely as problems of visuality, repro-
duction, and memory, which are compelled to be performed. Jones’s Corre-
gidora works at the tension between a desire for the disappearing nonrepro-
ductive performance and the monumental. The problematic of visuality is
not a desire for increased visibility: I am not concerned with the multipli-
cation of representations of black people in mainstream visual or textual
economies. Rather, Jones and a text like Corregidora realize that only in the
performance of the ways in which the descendants of enslaved people are
constituted can particular traumas be realized and resisted. Jones isconcerned
with a life in which there is a decision to block the production of new
generations in ways that are destructive for the descendants of slaves.
Corregidora is concerned with four generations of women, who struggle to
make sense of the violence and traumatic effects of Brazilian enslavement. As
we begin Corregidora, we are taken into the life and memory of Ursa Corre-
gidora, a blues singer and the third generation of women descended from the
Portuguese “slaveowner/whoremonger” Corregidora. Through Ursa’s sing-
ing the blues within Jones’s text, (non) reproductive possibilities are made
possible. As Peggy Phelan argues in Unmarked, “Performance is the art form
which most fully understands the generative possibilities of disappearance.
Poised forever at the threshold of the present, performance enacts the pro-
ductive appeal of the nonreproductive.”5 Part of the power and beauty of the
blues performance is that it is transient and not monumental. It lives on in
the memories of those who have witnessed it. When Ursa performs, she at
first singles out a malememberoftheaudiencetosingto;shelaterreconfigures
this and sings to and for a community of men and women, and this change
is one way that nonreproductive witnessing is made possible by her blues
performances.
The blues articulate the possibilities of nonreproductive remembering; a
noncommodifiable working out of historical memory. Largely through re-
memory, Ursa Corregidora relates her experiences with her ex-husband,Mutt
Thomas, her mother and grandmothers, and her (long dead) slave-owning
ancestor, old man Corregidora. Through Ursa’s life, we also enter into the
lives of the previous generations of Corregidora women. From an early age,
Ursa is immersed in the process of reproduction; she is told repeatedly that
the Brazilian government destroyed the records of enslavement and that she
must “make generations” to keep visible the horrors of slavery. In Corregidora
and in the world, the absence of markers that corroborate memory, in com-
bination with a corresponding emphasis on the visible, often makes women’s
reproductive bodies the site for reconstituting and reenacting racialized and
gendered social and cultural histories. In the absence of Brazilian records of
enslavement, the grandmothers insist on inscribing that history on and in
their bodies. In their control, bearing witness ceases to be a dynamic activity:

The Costs of Re-Membering 307

the generations of daughters are supposed to tell thesame storiesuninf(l)ected
by their lived lives. For Ursa, this unchanging same has been particularly
devastating: she undergoes a hysterectomy, which makes it impossible for
her to leave evidence in the ways that the ancestors demand.6
Ursa’s performances of her familial histories offer up a space of possibility
for re-membering relationships among the descendants of the formerly en-
slaved. Singing the blues bears witness in a way that disappears, that does
not presume the stasis required by Gram’s, Great Gram’s, and Mama’s defi-
nitions of “bearing witness.” For Ursa and Jones, the blues offer a possible
space of intervention: a performance that recedes as it appears. The blues
become a guerrilla tactic—Ursa’s sometimes oppositional, ever-changing
performance against those transmitted oppressions.

Reproducing Poisoned Relationships

Corregidora insists on the necessity of rethinking our emphasis on particular

kinds of embodied social memory as a visual marker of or way to witness
historical events. It begins a revision of mononarratives of the flesh by at-
tempting to locate remembering in song, rather than by further stigmatizing
the body through the reproduction of particular historical moments, like
enslavement. Corregidora is about overcoming remembering so well that one
is consumed by the past.7 Ursa Corregidora struggles to locate remembering
outside of her body because, for the enslaved and the formerly enslaved, such
memories have historically and insistently been located within and on the
body—the “hieroglyphics of the flesh” during enslavement.8 As Hortense
Spillers writes, “We might well ask if [the] phenomenon of marking and
branding actually ‘transfers’ from one generation to another, finding its
various symbolic substitutions in an efficacy of meanings that repeat the
initiating moments” (Spillers 67). For the image of branding used by Spillers,
one may substitute rape or any other sort of trauma or rupture of the flesh
and/or psyche, the intention of which is to produce prolonged and systemic
effects. Jones examines the ways that traumas and oppressive structures are
enacted upon and later internalized by the enslaved and their descendants
and then enacted intraracially.
In Corregidora, the generations of women’s insistence upon the photograph
of Corregidora as the image of “whom to hate” and the process of keeping an
unspecified it visible function in much the same ways that Spillers’s branding
describes. They are an insistence both on the possibility of making historical
memory visible and on an unchanging notion of what that visible historical
memory might look like. The picture of Corregidora that the women possess
tells them “what evil look like” (C 12), and it does not look like them. For
Ursa, initially, anger at being unable to reproduce is directed not at a partic-
ular black man or at the unchanging ubiquity of the mothers’ stories but at
the image of the distant Corregidora. Following Ursa’s hysterectomy, Tad-
pole McCormick (owner of Happy’s Bar, where Ursa sings, and her second

308 Performativity and the Performance of Race

husband) asks her if she hates “him.” Ursa replies: “What my mama always
told me is Ursa, you got to make generations. Something I’ve always grown
up with.” Tadpole initially says nothing and then insists, “I guess you hate
him then, don’t you?” (C 10; emphasis mine). Ursa intentionally (mis)reads
the “him” as Corregidora and not Mutt and answers, “I don’t even know the
bastard” (C 10). She continues, stating that all that she has of “him” is a
picture and the stories of Mama, Gram, and Great Gram. Their continued
insistence upon the ubiquity of this image, the “picture” of whom to hate, is
an insistence upon the misrecognition of what has previously been unspoken
(intraracial hate and desire) by deferring to a monolithic idea of historical
memory. It is also a cloaking of their problems, which functions as a means
of keeping them in perpetual recurrence. Ursa says, “I don’t even know the
bastard” rather than “I didn’t even know him,” and her attempt to push this
moment into the past is betrayed by the grammar of the sentence.9 Moreover,
Ursa does know old man Corregidora; she converses with him, visits with
him in her dreams and nightmares; he is reconstituted within her and within
all of her relationships. The interaction between Tadpole and Ursa displaces
sexual violence onto a powerfully resonant image from the past and refuses
fully to examine contemporary violence and silences between black women
and black men. It is a refusal fully to examine the complications at stake in
any discussion of power and desire. A possible intervention in and explication
of inter- and intraracialviolence,love,hate,anddesireisdeflectedbydeferring
to the monolithic, albeit in a particular moment oppositional, historical
imperative of hatred that was passed on to Ursa.
Thus, the women-headed households in Corregidora reproduce the mothers’
stories in ways that anticipate a male gaze and the need to externalize trauma
and render it accountable in the ways that counted for old man Corregidora
and, therefore, for the women under his control. The generations of Corre-
gidora women are called upon and call upon each other to redefine themselves
as “womb-en.”10 A similar form of accounting occurs in some contemporary
discussions about black male–black femalerelations.Oftenthetextorsubtext
for intraracial conversations about race, conflicts about “black gender rela-
tions” (which usually means relations between heterosexual black men and
black women) are frequently staged in the media whether the discussion is
about the O. J. Simpson case or Waiting to Exhale.11 The popularity of books
like How to Marry a Black Man: The Real Deal, which includes commentary
by black men who refer to black women as “womb-en” (and with younger
generations of black women self-identifying as womb-en), makes the ideo-
logical and performative power of the reproductive increasingly visible.12
Consider Orlando Patterson’s “Blacklash: The Crisis of Gender Relations
among African Americans,”13 an article that appeared in Transition twenty
years after Corregidora’s publication. Patterson and Jones would agree that
black people are performing relationships that began in enslavement. How-
ever, while Corregidora is a text that is about maternal/material reproduction
of generations and mimetic reproduction of attitudes, it is also about sex and
brutality and their many manifestations and possible alternatives; about

The Costs of Re-Membering 309

translation (what is possible in the space between recollection and reenact-
ment), transformation, and performance. In Corregidora, Jones addresses the
cultural aphasia within black communities around sexuality and attempts a
writing of it, its inter- and intraracial manifestations and reproductions.
Patterson, too, is concerned with intraracial problems that are a legacy of
enslavement—what he terms the “poisoned relationship”betweenblackmen
and women (Patterson 26). Attempting to work through and work out this
poison, or “contagion,” as Jones’s text does, is Ursa Corregidora. Patterson,
however, specifically blames black feminists for obscuring “the problems of
gender—which concerns both males and females in their relations with each
other . . . to privilege the standpoint of women, on the assumption that they
are always the victims of the interaction” (Patterson 7). Patterson contends
that the “double burden” suffered by black women is, if not a myth, then a
burden that has worked to their advantage: “Whereas the burdens of poor
African-American men have always been oppressive, dispiriting, demoral-
izing, and soul-killing, those of women have always been, at least partly,
generative, empowering, and humanizing” (Patterson 11). For Patterson,
“lower-class” black men’s performances of race are, among other factors,
enacted in opposition to black women.
Locating the Anita Hill–Clarence Thomas hearings as a watershed forblack
Americans, Patterson asserts that the hearings showed that black Americans
were “integral” both because they framed “the most intimate problems of
white men and women” in terms of “people who happen to be African
American” and that they have initiated a “full recognition of this problem
[the problematic relationship between black women and men]—and
promot[ed] [it] to the top of the agenda of issues for dispassionate study,
public discourse, and change” (Patterson 4, 26). After laying out the differ-
ential effects of oppression on black women and men andlocatingthehearings
in this fashion, Patterson reinscribes a patriarchal imperative in the need for
marriage. Although he would not align himself with the Nation of Islam, he
arrives at a point that converges with the rhetoric of the 1995 Million Man
March and Day of Atonement: black men need to regain their rightful place.
What these cultural articulations share is that they are contemporary per-
formances of race, which attempt to control black women’s representational
and actual bodies and to reinstate patriarchy. These are performances that
long for re-productive stasis (reproduction of patriarchy in the form of the
dominant culture) in ways similar to the stories of Gram and Great Gram in
Corregidora.14

What’s at Stake?
In Corregidora, the absence (named in the text as the destruction of written
records of slavery: “they burned all the slavery papers so it would be like they
never had it” [C 9]) of visual evidence to inform Brazilian postemancipation
social memory once again leaves only the formerly enslaved to bear witness.

310 Performativity and the Performance of Race

What’s at stake is the compulsion to repeat oppressive histories in order to
keep them visible. Corregidora takes up the unspoken, often unknown,trauma
or desire that complicates and structures our lives, that increases and redu-
plicates with every denial and with every repetition. Both the women and
the men in Jones’s text struggle under “particular historical and contempo-
rary nightmares,” which are legacies of slavery, while it is the Corregidora
women who bear the ambiguous twin injunctions to “make generations to
bear witness to the horrors of slavery” and to “keep it as visible as [the] blood”
(C 22, 72; emphasis mine). We look for the written record to document
enslavement and to reckon with the past. The slavery papers would function
as a way to hold up irrefutable evidence; they are simultaneously a legal
document and one that, for the formerly enslaved, acts as both iconic and
textual proof that enslavement actually occurred. Lacking that public record,
the mothers reproduce and Ursa sings in an attempt to remember without
reproducing.
Particularly relevant to the repetition of spoken and unspoken trauma
emphasized in Corregidora is the Tawana Brawley case. In 1987, Brawley, a
fifteen-year-old African American girl, alleged that six white men—all of
whom were public servants—sexually assaulted her, covered her in excre-
ment, wrote obscenities on her, cut her hair, and abandoned her, covered in
plastic garbage bags, in a vacant lot.15 Sequestered and effectively silenced
for “her own protection,” Brawley’s story was disseminated without the
benefit of her body and voice. When Brawley’s mother spoke about the effects
on her daughter’s body—the excremental writing, hair pulled out in clumps,
and cigarette burns—she was discredited, and the trauma of Brawley’s flesh
became “alleged” trauma (Williams 171–172). Brawley, unlike Anita Hill
four years later, did not break the silence; she did not speak publicly about
inter- or intraracial silencing and sexual violence.
Under the “protection” of black men, who disclosed her story for her (and
perhaps embellished it), Brawley became further entrenched in her silence.16
What was at stake in hearing Brawley’s story? What if her rearticulation of
the events revealed that she was abused both by the white men (whom she
accused) and by her black mother and stepfather (whom she did not accuse)?17
What is at stake in admitting that black women often experience abuse in
both interracial and intraracial contexts and that this abuse can and does
occur concurrently and with equally devastating effects and repetitions? In
Corregidora, under Mutt’s “protection” in the form of financial support, Ursa
would no longer sing the blues even though she sings them “because she has
to.” She would no longer be allowed the space of audience-performer partic-
ipation and possible transformation, for which the performance and the
performative allow. Analogously, the 1995 Million Man March asked for the
silence of black women and their removal to the domestic as black men
organized in order to regain their rightful place as patriarchs.18 In each of
these examples, the maintenance of hegemonic patriarchal structures took
precedence over the possibility of working out the complications of sexual
and racial violence.19

The Costs of Re-Membering 311

 In order to get at these complications, Jones’s text takes up intraracial
violence in ways contrary to the Black Arts Movement’s call for “positive
images.” Committed to the idea that things happen in process, Jones writes
of specific situations that may or may not be antithetical to the experiences
of “most” black people. For Jones:
Sometimes politics . . . can also tell you what you cannot do, tell you what
you must avoid, tell you that there’s a certain territory politics won’t allow
you to enter, certain questions politics won’t allow you to ask—in order
to be “politically correct.” I think sometimes you just have to be “wrong”;
there’s a lot of imaginative territory that you have to be “wrong” in order
to enter.20
In this way, Corregidora is explicit about its repetitions, and it is often
dismissed because what these repetitions perform is not what is generally
expected or accepted in black communities. Jones is interested in complex
characters and situations; she is concerned with the necessity of creating an
environment within which things happen in process.
Despite her attention to complexity, Jones’s nuanced depictions of sexual
violence have been read and simplified by critics both as accommodating
white audiences with more images of problematically sexual(ized) black
women and as statements of how she thinks about black men and black
heterosexual relationships.21 Such readings accord Jones’s fiction the status
of nonfiction ethnography or autobiography and obscure her importance as
a different voice in black women’s writing. Asked to discuss positive race
images, Jones asserts that such characterizations:
are fine as long as they’re very complex and interesting personalities.Right
now I’m not sure how to reconcile the various things that interest me with
“positive race images.” It’s important to me to be able to work with a range
of personalities, as well as with a range within one personality.22
Jones is committed to foregrounding the obscured and unaccounted for. She
most often writes about socially resistant characters who exist peripherally,
if at all, in the works of many other African American women writers.23
The paucity of critical attention to Jones’s work, particularly toCorregidora,
attests to the fact that we continue to lack access to or have not invented
concepts capable of conveying the historical and cultural complexities of
sexual violence and the very vexedness of sex(uality) itself within and outside
of African American communities. The blues encode pleasure and pain and
exist as a marker of the possibility of what Jones calls tenderness. For Jones,
“What comes out in my work, in those particular novels, is an emphasis on
brutality. Something else is also suggested in them . . . namely the alterna-
tive to brutality, which is tenderness” (Tate 98). Many readers of Corregidora
overlook this tenderness, which is so important to Jones. It is largely her
complexly layered explorations of intraracial sexual violence and desire that
have kept her writing at the margins of African American women’sliterature.
Jones speaks to this when she says that English is inadequate because it uses:

312 Performativity and the Performance of Race

 one dimensional words to try to express multi-dimensional things. . . .
There are a lot of things that this language won’t account for, that are
outside its perspective, you could say, that it doesn’t have either the words
or the forms for. That’s what we are all looking for—the words and the
forms to account for certain things we feel need to be accounted for.24
In Corregidora, although Ursa struggles for the language to speak what is
repressed, speech is ultimately unable to carry the weight that she wants it
to carry. Irene tells Ursa, “She ain’t never known no Corregidora to behave
with just telling” (C 146–147). Ursa’s speech is unable to enact repetitions
with a difference. Ursa discovers that telling alone is not a way through or
outside of the problems; indeed, often speech generates new problems. What
is ultimately at stake in the performance of these particular black female
bodies is the possibility for the exorcism of trauma to prevent further repe-
titions.

Working It Out

Corregidora begins with a narrative silence around the confrontation between

Ursa and her husband, Mutt. Initially recounting the encounter, Ursa says
simply, “That was when I fell” (C 4). Ursa’s narrative silence around Mutt’s
violent act is also her silence about her own desires, silence around her
participation in her current impasse of biological nonreproduction. What
the narrative does reveal is that an increasingly angry, jealous, and suspicious
Mutt plots to interrupt Ursa’s blues performance and remove her from the
stage at Happy’s Bar. Not only does Mutt threaten physically to remove Ursa
from the stage while she is singing, but he threatens to enact a part of their
collective past by holding a contemporary slave auction in order to “sell me
a piece a ass” (C 159).
A possibility for the exorcism of trauma through another traumatic en-
counter occurs in Corregidora in the interstices of the narrative around Mutt’s
violent act (the scuffle between Mutt and Ursa at the top of the stairs).
Contrary to Patterson’s reading of the ways in which women⫽victim inblack
women’s texts, Jones does not exempt her women characters from partici-
pation in oppressive desires. Ursa knows that, without this fall, she will
reproduce Corregidora. Indeed, it is Ursa’s never-to-be-born child and the
space of her womb that are the loci of crisis and of possibility. The novel
maintains and relies on ambiguity around the violent incident that renders
Ursa unable to bear children. The result, however, is not ambiguous: Ursa
will produce no new descendants; through the fall, nonreproductive possi-
bility is inscribed on her body. Without this inscription, she will become, as
Bruce Simon points out in an excellent reading of Corregidora, her foremoth-
ers, like Mama does, as she begins to divulge to Ursa the “terrible” private
memories of her relationship with Martin.25 The unrealized, unborn child
who Ursa necessarily gives up in Corregidora is an absence in reproduction,

The Costs of Re-Membering 313

which makes possible the changes in the present generation. What is ensured
is that the particular traumas connected to Corregidora will not be passed on
to another generation. Ursa will, however, still be compelled to repeat these
structures in her own relationships.
Discussing his plans for a slave auction with Ursa, Mutt and his family
history collapse into the story of Corregidora, the slave-owningwhoremonger
(who fathered Ursa’s grandmother and her mother), to create a Corregidora-
like Mutt, who threatens to sell Ursa. The narrative space around Mutt’s
actions, however, allows the reader to complicate both his actions and Ursa’s
unspoken desires. Might they not be enacting the connections between their
marriage and Corregidora’s relationships with Ursa’s female forebears, con-
nections that Ursa and Mutt have beenmakingconsciouslyandunconsciously
since they first began exchanging and re-membering family histories? One
can only speculate what might have happened, what demons might have
been exorcised and created, had Mutt performed this ritual of ownership.
Perhaps he would not have thrown/pushed/otherwise caused Ursa to fall
down that flight of stairs after she finished singing. His own staged perfor-
mance might have offered them an alternative for working out the relations
of power between them; nonetheless, Mutt would have had the patriarchal
upper hand, which Ursa resists. Instead of relinquishing herself to Mutt’s
desire for control over her body and her relationship to the gaze of other men,
Ursa increases the volume of the song she is singing, drowning out Mutt’s
shouts as he approaches the stage threateningly. Mutt contends that the men
in the audience “mess with [Ursa with] they eyes.” Ursa’s insistent sexual-
ity—“If it wasn’t for your fucking I” (C 46)—and the triangulation of desire
(Mutt watches the men watch Ursa sing; Ursa watches him and watches him
watch the men watching her) become the context of her fall (C 4). After his
outburst, Mutt is escorted from the bar; he hides, waits for Ursa, grabs her
around the waist from behind, she struggles and . . . falls(?) down the stairs.
Because of the great cost to the (possible) generations, Ursa insists on the
power of the loss of her womb and her singing to work out difference; she
attempts to establish an “I” (at least for the duration of the blues performance)
to exert control over the productions of her body.
Prior to this, Ursa has begun to see the necessity of marking memory in
ways that differ from her foremothers’. The hysterectomy necessitates a
renegotiation of her relationship to her own and her female ancestors’ pasts,
and it is the product of a renegotiation that was already occurring. Prior to
the hysterectomy, Ursa has begun to question whether her child would be
like “her” or like “them.” She transforms the necessity for bodilyreproduction
into another type of visual and aural production, saying, “Then let me give
witness the only way I can. I’ll make a fetus out of grounds of coffee to rub
inside my eyes. When it’s time to give witness I’ll make a fetus out of grounds
of coffee. I’ll stain their hands” (C 54). The blues function as testimonials of
sexual abuse, abusive relationships, a possible extrabodily site of transfor-
mation (of the body, but not on the body): “The blues . . . articulated a new
valuation of individual emotional needs and desires” (Davis 5). In Ursa’s

314 Performativity and the Performance of Race

dream, the grinds from the coffee produced on Corregidora’s plantation (and
the fertility of Great Gram, the “coffee bean woman”) become a means of
changing trauma into performance. As Elizabeth Alexander notes, witness-
ing is both aural and ocular.26 The future of a black woman is performed: the
possibility of a liberatory difference arises out of the repetition of some
repressive force.

Keeping It Visible

Ursa maintains that her singing is life-affirming, something that she has to
do in order to create a place for her eyes/Is. She says, the blues “helps me to
explain what I can’t explain” (C 56), and part of what she cannot explain are
the changing roles and relationships between black women and men.
Through singing, Ursa begins to move from her Gram’s and Great Gram’s
juridically legislated truth of “no desire”—nonownership of their bodies and
the labor (prostitution, childbirth) of their bodies—to her “truth” of an in-
process, yet-to-be-articulated subjectivity. Her songs articulatetherelatively
new ability of black people to choose freely their sexual partners.27 As other
critics have noted, Ursa Corregidora signifies “bearing judgment,” and she
is called upon alternately to bear daughters to hold up evidence, to be a
witness, and to give a verdict.28 Her value inheres in biological reproduction
while Gram and Great Gram were valued for turning their labor (fucking)
and their desire (sexual) into gold. Great Gram was old man Corregidora’s
favorite enslaved woman, his “good little piece. Little gold piece” (C 10).
Mutt becomes simultaneously the black male partner, absent black son, and
a Corregidora stand-in. When Ursa asks her mother, Irene, if her grand-
mothers had other children, Mama replies, “I think there was some boys, but
Corregidora sold the boys off” (C 61). Mutt is the strand that connects him
and Corregidora, the thread between Ursa and her female ancestors, between
Ursa and Corregidora, between Ursa and her father. Echoing all of the
relationships, Mutt says to Ursa, “Your pussy’s a little gold piece, ain’t it
Urs? My little gold piece” (C 60).
After the hysterectomy, she contends: “I can still feel your [Mutt’s? old
man Corregidora’s? the mothers’?] fucking inside me. If it wasn’t for your
fucking I” (C 46). Through this articulation, Ursa seeks a space that is outside
“the cycle of violence that gets passed on . . . as the grammar of love.”29 Jones
creates the words and forms with an in-process language, which carries with
it an internal conflict to contest objectification. Ursa insists on claiming her
subjectivity as she moves within the latter sentence from sexual object to
nascent subject.30 The “fucking I” also plays on the visual: as the fucking I
(subject) and the fucking eye (vision), Mutt’s gaze appropriates Ursa’s body
and her sexuality for his pleasure, an appropriation that also occurs when
Mutt sees Ursa looking at a photograph of the two of them. He asks, “Don’t
we look good?” (C 60; emphasis mine). Ursa remembers looking at the image
of Mutt and herself, being seen by Mutt looking at it, and being embarrassed

The Costs of Re-Membering 315

“because it was me I was looking at, not us” (C 60). While looking at herself,
she is once again subjected to the male gaze—Mutt interrupts her contem-
plation of her own image and shifts the gaze with his query “Don’t we look
good?” Ursa later says that she would look at the picture when Mutt was not
there, “I’d never look when Mutt was home” (C 60).
Mutt continually refers to Ursa’s eyes saying that she looks tired and wears
too much mascara. When Tadpole also talks about Ursa’s eyes and expresses
a desire to fall to the bottom of them, Ursa thinks, “Fall to the bottom of my
eyes. What will you do there?” (C 56). Ursa’s desires continually conflict
with those of the people around her. Mutt says, “Ain’t even took my name. You
ain’t my woman” (C 61). Mutt attempts to support Ursa, to control her body
and, through it, the gazes of the men who comprise her audience, while she
maintains that she is able to take care of herself. Mutt’s attempts to control
Ursa increase to the point that he does not even want the men who come into
Happy’s to look at her. Ursa says, “Last night you didn’t wont nobody to say
nothing to me, and tonight they can’t even look at me” (C 155), an exchange
that is echoed by Ursa after her hysterectomy, when Mutt is banned from
Happy’s. Ursa tells Tadpole half-jokingly, “Tell him that ‘can’t come in’
means ‘can’t look in’ either” (C 18). Mutt’s desire to control Ursa and Ursa’s
desire also to exert control converge with Corregidora’s beating and selling
off black men for looking at “his” women and with her female forebears’
exercising of their limited power.
Confronting herself in the mirror, Ursa discovers “for the first time” that
she is as much a product of Mutt, Mutt’s own history, her ancestors’ history,
and Corregidora as her mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother are
products of Corregidora and their own unexplored (by the text) histories. It
is through further examination of the picture on the mirror (which is also her
looking at herself in the mirror) that Ursa recognizes herself as one of “them.”
She collapses herself, Mutt Thomas, Tadpole McCormick (her second hus-
band), and her female ancestors into Corregidora in the ritualistic conversa-
tions that she stages with an imaginary old man Corregidora. No longer able
to maintain that she knows what evil looks like, Ursa realizes that the “evil,”
which is in all of the women except Great Gram, is made visible through
their “mixed blood”; Corregidora is literally running through their veins.
Ursa says, “My veins are centuries meeting” (C 46). “Since race is thought to
be ‘carried’ by blood . . . the history of slavery for African American women
is also the history of rape” (Phelan 7). Running in Ursa’s blood are the traces
of interracial violence and the very present threat and enactment of intraracial
violence. Tadpole’s, Ursa’s, and Mutt’s immediate families and their larger
diasporic (African, North American, and Brazilian) families are all infected
with stories of incest and rape.
In Corregidora, the effects of that interracial trauma get worked out through
the generations as intraracial sex/gender trauma. As the second generation
born in North America (Irene was born in Louisiana), the first daughter whose
father is not Corregidora, and the second daughter of a blackman(presumably

316 Performativity and the Performance of Race

Great Gram is the first), Ursa is marked as different from birth. Ursa, like
Irene, is doubly Corregidora (her mother is daughter and granddaughter of
Corregidora), and it is he of whom the grandmothers are so possessive. They
also have internalized Corregidora’s own anxiety about (the visibility of) race.
When Ursa was born, she did not look like them. Irene tells her: “You come
out bald-headed. . . . I knew they hated me then. Cause you come out all
baldheaded. White skin before you got the little pigment you got now, and
baldheaded. . . . I used to put a little ribbon on your head so people would
know you was a girl” (C 117). Bald and white-skinned, Ursa signifies male to
the mothers—Irene’s union with a black man has reproduced the power
structure (they think) that they sought to subvert.31 And, like the photograph
they keep of Corregidora to let them know “what evil look like” (C 12) and
whom to hate, it is important for the women to be able to see with whom to
align themselves. Ursa may make evident the horror of fulfilling their role of
reproducing to bear witness outside of Brazil. Tadpole tells Ursa that she’s
“mixed up every which way” (nationally, racially, sexually). To which Ursa
replies, angrily, that what is in her “she didn’t put it there” (C 80).
The working out of the traces of enslavement in Corregidora takes place
partially through the necessity and the vehemence of Ursa’s racial explana-
tions to Tadpole and others. They indicate a post-Brazilian enslavement shift
in the significance of racial physiognomy and the meanings that attach to
skin color and class position once the South American mulatto is transplanted
to North America. They also indicate the repressed significance of these
meanings in the North American context.32 Ursa’s hybridity contributes to
the North American inability to solidly locate her in one race or ethnicity.
(Consider the older black man in Detroit who wants to know Ursa’s nation-
ality, and Sal, the bartender at Happy’s, who tells her that she can pass for
Spanish.) In Brazil, there is a continuum of racial identification not an
opposition of black-white. Corregidora is filled with confusions about the
meanings of race in Brazil and in North America and confusions about what
counts as strategies of resistance in each context. Infanticide is particularly
powerful within the United States, while producing new generations reso-
nates for descendants of Brazilian slavery. This shift, in turn, contributes to
the collapsing of the boundaries between Ursa’s reflections, her dreams of
what she has been told about Corregidora, and what she experiences in her
marriages to Mutt and Tadpole. Her two marriages are replete with the traces
of her female ancestors’ material and emotional relationships with Corregi-
dora and with her husbands’ relationships to and with their ancestors. The
trace is not always visible (one cannot always see whom to hate), and it is not
only Corregidora who is infected. Because of this, Ursa is often unable to
differentiate which memories are “hers” and which are “theirs,” where “she”
begins and where “they” end. She says, “Stained with another’s past as well
as our own. Their past in my blood. I’m a blood. Are you mine, Ursa, or theirs?”
(C 45). Mutt also recognizes Ursa’s desire and ties to Corregidora when he
says:

The Costs of Re-Membering 317

 “You one of them,” he said. . . .
“If you wasn’t one of them you wouldn’t like them mens watching after
you.”
“They don’t watch after me, Mutt.” (C 154)
Ursa’s desire and Mutt’s escalating violence enable a dialectic that otherwise
might not have happened. It is Mutt and Ursa who successfully enact on
Ursa’s body the kind of violence that Corregidora only threatens to carry out
on Gram and Great Gram. Paul Gilroy writes:
In the context of a discussion of racial authenticity . . . some of the most
powerful components of what we experience as racial identity are regularly
and frequently drawn from deeply held gender identities, particular ideas
about sexuality and a dogged belief that experiencing the conflict between
men and women at a special pitch is itself expressive of racial difference. 33
And while the events that surround her fall exceed representation, Ursa
returns again and again to the moment of rupture, the tone of the “accident,”
the way that she feels about it; she names the sexual possessiveness, the abuse,
and the desire—the desire that persists after and despite the rupture. Ursa
thinks:
I always get back to that. The tobacco fields or coffee ones. Hard because
you have to be, but still those tender-eyed women and hands tender behind
tobacco calluses with their men. Hurt you into tenderness finally. Is it
more his fault than mine? (C 41)

The generations of women before Ursa want not only to reproduce a surplus
of memory but also a lack. The move to keep visible the horror of enslavement
entails an equal move to conceal the libidinal investments of the generations
of women: insisting upon the visibility of certain memories also means
insisting upon the invisibility of other memories.34 If they produce genera-
tions that include males, memories cannot be transmitted in the same ways.
Irene says that, once she was married, her mother and grandmother stopped
telling her stories but continued to relate them to each other. “With him
there they figured they didn’t have to tell me no more, but what they didn’t
realize was they was telling Martin too” (C 128–129). What the women do
not really seem to account for is the effect that their stories have on the men
who are present and, in turn, on the women with whom they make relation-
ships. Great Gram learned to speak and act like Corregidora, Ursa like Mutt
(and her neighbor Cat). They no longer need Corregidora; the codes of the
dominant culture are exercised by the family on itself in the absence of
the representative of the oppressor. The absent presence of Corregidora and
the evidence of the horrors of slavery, which are supposed to be reproduced
through making generations, are already internalized and reproduced
through the interactions of the women. They dedicate their lives to remem-
bering bodies and power relations preserved from the Corregidora days as

318 Performativity and the Performance of Race

much as to remembering particular atrocities (and desires) attached to the
experience of being enslaved by Corregidora.
The mothers tell Ursa:
“They burned all the documents, Ursa, but they didn’t burn what they
put in their minds. We got to burn out what they put in our minds, like
you burn out a wound. Except we got to keep what we need to bear witness.
That scar that’s left to bear witness. We got to keep it as visible as our
blood.” (C 72)
After her hysterectomy, Ursa is able to discern a difference between herself
and her female ancestors. Her productions will not mark memory in the
prescribed ways. She will never produce generations that bear witness for
men. She has her singing and a visual marker of nonreproductive possibility.
The loss of her womb has produced a void in which Ursa transforms the
memories that she was unable to manage before. With the exception of her
brief, disastrous marriage to Tadpole, Ursa does initiate movement toward
new definitions of making family and witnessing. She says that she feels as if
“part of [her] life’s already marked out for [her]—the barren part” (C 6). “In
the analysis of the means of production the unmarked signals the
un(re)productive” (Phelan 27). Following the hysterectomy, Ursa comes to
consciousness, repeating the words “never her own to me,” hungering for the
memories that her female ancestors, her mother in particular, have denied
her (C 102). She begins to conceive of her life in ways that will, among other
things, allow her to ask and answer questions that her female ancestors were
not allowed.
Ursa thinks, “But I am different now. . . . I have everything they had,
except the generations. I can’t make generations. And even if I still had my
womb, even if that first baby had come—what would I have done then?
Would I have kept it up? Would I have been like her, or them?” (C 60). In an
effort to differentiate herself from “them,” Ursa transforms the words forced
into her by Gram and Great Gram into song and “sang it as they hummed
it”; the possibility of biological reproduction forced out of her is produced
in blues songs instead, a music that reflects the experiences of pain, pleasure,
and possibility.
After her hysterectomy, Ursa does not sing until she acknowledges to Cat
that she is worried about the tone of her voice. “They didn’t say anything
about my throat. They didn’t say it did anything to my throat” (C 44). When
Ursa sings, Cat tells her:
“Your voice sounds a little strained, that’s all. But if I hadn’t heard you
before, I wouldn’t notice anything. I’d still be moved. Maybe even more,
because it sounds like you been through something. Before it was beautiful
too, but you sound like you been through more now.” (C 44)
Ursa’s need for witnessing is different after the hysterectomy, and her singing
must register that difference. Tellingly, Ursa has not sung for herself, yet

The Costs of Re-Membering 319

even after her sexual encounter with Jeffy, the fourteen-year-old girl who Cat
looks after, she sings for Cat. That she does is even more significant for, until
this point, performance in Corregidora is constructed for a male gaze and
functions almost solely within a heterosexual reproductive economy. Ursa
sings for Cat after Jeffy has fondled Ursa and after Ursa suspects that Cat
(who is sixty) and Jeffy (whois fourteen) areinvolvedinasexualrelationship.35
The songs that Ursa sings enact the distance between herself and her
ancestors and displace the desires (the desire of Corregidora and the desire to
judge) that she recognizes in the photograph of Mutt and her. She sings, “O
Mister who come to my house You do not come to visit You do not come to see me to visit
You come to hear me sing with my thighs You come to see me open my door and sing
with my thighs” (C 66–67). Mister and master are interchangeable as Ursa
experiences the effects of masculine desire in ways similar to her enslaved
forebears. Song is both something that is forced into Ursa and something
that is forced out of her—she sings because she must. “They squeezed Cor-
regidora into me, and I sung back in return” (C 145). In the aftermath of the
hysterectomy, Ursa restages her own initial articulate birth, “I came into the
world complaining . . . full of teeth and memories” (C 102). She is reborn
out of the place where her womb used to be. She also reconfigures her
conception of audience and moves from the performance of singular desire to
the possibility of a communal grappling with what is passed on. “It was as if
I wanted them to see what he’d done, hear it. All those blues feelings. . . . I
felt as if they could see my feelings somewhere in the bottom of my eyes” (C
50–51).

Working It Out (Again)

The text maintains a necessary ambiguity around whether Ursa was pushed,
and despite this textual ambiguity and the shifting declarations around her
“accident,” readers often collapse the contradictions and maintain silences
around them.36 In other words, the complexity of agency in the decisive
moment in Ursa’s life (the “decision” not to reproduce) is signified by an
omission. Ursa forgoes (willingly and unwillingly) the making of generations
in order to create a rupture. Because she sees Corregidora in herself as well as
in Mutt, she is enacting on her body and psyche the experiences that her
grandmothers relate to her. She is forcing another possibility on herself
outside of the necessity to make generations, which the Corregidora women
impose on her life, exercising and exorcising a kind of power on and from
herself through Mutt that males, particularly Corregidora (for whom Mutt
is a proxy in Ursa’s fantasy apprehension), and her grandmothers have
wielded. Ursa makes it impossible for herself to fill the female role of repro-
ducer of generations. Now that there is a rupture in the visible transmission
of embodied historical memory, Ursa is able to transform her life, the past,
and the family memory through performance. She does not want to own those

320 Performativity and the Performance of Race

things that have oppressed her.37 She says, “Let no one pollute my music. I
will dig out their temples. I will pluck out their eyes” (C 77).
Jones is primarily concerned with what Ursa is unable to ask her ancestors.
She wants to ask Cat (and her ancestors): “What are you doing to the girl?
[What did you do to me?] Two swollen plums for eyes. . . . What about
when it comes to her time? Do you know what I mean?” (C 65). Ursa wants
to question the insistent reproduction of generational desire and memory,
which occludes any other subjectivity. Speculation leads Ursa to the memory
of a time when:
“Great Gram sat in the rocker. I was on her lap. She told the same story
over and over again . . . and sometimes I’d see the sweat in her palms. . . .
Once when she was talking, she started rubbing my thighs with her hands,
and I could feel the sweat on my legs. Then she caught herself, and stopped,
and held my waist again.” (C 11)

It seems that Great Gram’s desire is, at least in some ways, in her hands.
This scene converges with a story that Great Gram relates to a five-year-old
Ursa:
“[Corregidora’s] wife was a skinny stuck-up little woman he got from over in
Lisbon and he had her brought over here. He wouldn’t sleep with her, so for five
years I was sleeping with her and him. That was when I was from about thirteen
to about eighteen. . . . But they had me sleeping with both of them.” (C 13)

After hearing this story, Ursa asks her great-grandmother if she is telling the
truth. Great Gram “slapped me. ‘When I’m telling you something don’t you ever ask
if I’m lying. Because they didn’t want to leave no evidence of what they done’ ” (C 14).
This fear that aspects of their enslavement will not be believed is part of the
reason that the grandmothers insist on leaving visual evidence. Through her
repetition of the “fact” of the story, Great Gram continues to repress her own
motives and desires, and sex with the master and the mistress becomes only
something that was done to her, not something that she participated in (as
much as an enslaved person can be said to participate in nonconsensual sexual
acts).38
What is transmitted to Ursa is more than the text of the story. Great Gram
also transmits desire in an instance where she bests Corregidora’s wife, a
white woman who “couldn’t do a damn thing” (C 23). “She didn’t give him
nothing but a little sick rabbit that didn’t live but to be a day old. So then
he just stopped doing it” (C 23). Great Gram takes some pride in the fact
that she is, before Corregidora’s wife, the primary erotic object:
“[The wife] had some hot prongs she come after me with. . . . cause she knew he was
getting his from me too. . . . He [Corregidora] grabbed her and knocked the prongs
out of her hands and then he started beating her. That woman was black for days
to come. After that he just kept her locked up in that bedroom.” (C 172)

The Costs of Re-Membering 321

Corregidora beating his wife black renders her a sexual object; similarly,
Martin, who is denied sexual access to Irene, repeatedly slaps her face until
it is blackened: “he just kept slapping me all over my face, twisting me and
slapping me all over my face. . . . I know I was going to be black and blue all
over, it hurt so bad” (C 117). Thus, Corregidora locking his wife “up in that
bedroom” means both locking her away (the fetishized) and locking her in
for his sexual pleasure (the pornographic). We have read already that Corre-
gidora prefers his women black. As the “coffee bean woman,” Great Gram in
particular has a libidinal investment in a kind of class-race stasis.
As stated earlier, Gram’s and Great Gram’s behaviors and the desires that
inform them are passed on: Corregidora teaches Great Gram and Gram; they
teach Irene and Martin; Great Gram, Gram, and Irene teach Ursa; and Ursa
teaches Mutt and Tadpole and vice versa. They all are taught the importance
of learning the codes of patriarchy and reproduction, which are, ultimately,
important for their survival. (After all, Corregidora’s wife dies because she
isn’t “good for anything.”) As Ursa says, “I was made to touch my past at an
early age. I found it on my mother’s tiddies. In her milk” (C 77). Irene also
speaks about the stories and their effect on Martin and her:
“After he come they didn’t talk to me about making generations anymore
or about anything that happened with Corregidora, but Martin and me
could hear them in there talking between theyselves. We’d be in the front
room and they’d be back there in the bedroom, Great Gram telling Mama
how Corregidora wouldn’t let her see some man because he was too black.”
(C 123–124)
Martin is a “kind of satin-black” man (C 112), and while Irene’s mothers
are not primarily concerned with his “complexion” (Corregidora was dark-
skinned himself and worried by the fact that he was confused for Creek
Indian), they are concerned with “race” and his occupation as a counterman.
Great Gram and Gram were taught that looking at black men can be dan-
gerous, for the man and for them. Not only were the enslaved women on
Corregidora’s plantation punished for making love with and for conversing
with enslaved black men, the men (husbands, fathers, lovers) and boys (sons,
brothers, lovers) were sold off or killed. Taking on her mothers’ voices, Irene
relates a story of an enslaved man and woman who defend their right to make
a family. The black woman castrates the slave master, and both she and her
husband are caught. The enslaved man is castrated, and the woman is hung
after being forced to watch her husband bleed to death. For the older Corre-
gidora women, in the move from Brazil to Louisiana to Kentucky, there has
been little room and, perhaps, little desire to reconfigure what they have
come to know and experience as the always tenuous and dangerous relation-
ships between black men and black women.
While black women’s blues are often about sex and the production of
desire, they are a performance of desire.39 Ursa is paid for singing about desire,
she is not producing a profit for her owner by another bodily performance of
desire. The mothers and Mutt, however, fail to see a difference; Ursa’s re-

322 Performativity and the Performance of Race

muneration for singingthebluescollapsesthedistinctionofbeing“cultivated
women,” which the Corregidora women fight to maintain.40 Her work also
throws into abeyance Mutt’s question: “what’s a husband for?” if not to
support his wife. It is for these reasons that Mutt and Ursa’s female ancestors
oppose Ursa’s public performances. Tadpole is the exception because it is in
his best interests for Ursa to sing—as the proprietor of Happy’s, he profits
from her performances. Indeed, the marriage between Ursa and Tadpole is
her continued performance of the same problems on her body instead of
through her songs. She has replaced Corregidora with Mutt and then with
Tadpole, other men whose connections to Corregidora she will be compelled
to overcome while she engages in a continuing ritualistic dialogue with old
man Corregidora.
For Ursa, the process of reconfiguring her relationship to and with Mutt
occurs after the hysterectomy. Coming to terms with the persistence ofdesire,
longing, and trauma, she dreams that she births old man Corregidora:
“My belly was swollen and restless, and I lay without moving, gave birth with-
out struggle. . . . I never saw what squatted between my knees. . . . Who are you?
Who have I born? His hair was like white wings and we were united at birth.”
(C 77)
A struggle against the previously oppositional stance of her mothers must
take place. The hysterectomy is necessary; successful biological reproduction
would have initiated another generation united at birth to Corregidora. By
the end of the text, Ursa is able to admit and begin to perform (in a sado-
masochistic sense) the complications of her relationship with Mutt: desire is
mixed in with hate, and they have similar family histories. Staged through
the act of fellatio, “A moment of pleasure and excruciating pain at the same
time, a moment of broken skin but not sexlessness, a moment that stops just
before sexlessness, a moment that stops before it breaks the skin” (C 184),
Ursa and Mutt perform the sexual ambiguity that the blues articulate, the
crossing and the riding of the lines between pleasure and pain.
Corregidora begins and ends with nonreproductive, (potentially) violent
acts encased in nonreproductive performances of a kind of sadomasochistic
desire; the circumstances surrounding Ursa’s hysterectomy and her perform-
ing fellatio.41 For Michele Wallace:
The relationship of the problems of visuality (who produces and reproduces
vision) to popular culture and material culture and, ultimately, history is
vital. We are in danger of getting wasted by ghosts . . . by effusions and
visual traces that haunt us because we refuse to study them, to look them
in the eye. (Wallace 344)
Corregidora is a text that takes up the profoundly discomfiting task of filling
out and complicating the facts of enslavement by looking at the ghosts that
haunt our stories and by enacting ritualistic rememberings which reanimate
some of the conditions of enslavement.

The Costs of Re-Membering 323

 notes

1. Gayl Jones, Corregidora (1975; reprint, London: Camden, 1988), 54. All sub-
sequent references to this text will be made parenthetically.
2. This article appeared on the front page of the New York Times with a photo
caption that read, “African-Americans paying tribute to their ancestors who died on
board the slave ships taking them to the Americas. The fifth annual ceremony of
acknowledgment and healing was held last June at Coney Island.” Charisse Jones,
New York Times (2 Apr. 1995): 1, 43.
3. bell hooks, “Performance Practice as a Site of Opposition,” in Let’s Get It On:
The Politics of Black Performance, ed. Catherine Ugwu (Seattle, Wash.: Bay Press,
1995), 214.
4. Angela Davis, Blues Legacies and Black Feminism (New York: Pantheon, 1998),
5. All subsequent references to this text will be made parenthetically.
5. Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (New York: Routledge,
1993), 27. All subsequent references to this article will be made parenthetically.
6. Ursa acknowledges that included among the ancestors are old man Corregidora
and her father Martin—the mothers make and leave evidence that they can see.
7. This is the struggle that Toni Morrison articulates in Beloved (1987) with the
repetition of the phrase “this is not a story to pass on.” Beloved and Corregidora are
engaged in an intertextual conversation about the dangers of remembering so well
that one is consumed by the past. As Jones’s former editor and editor of Corregidora,
Morrison is intimately acquainted with the text and the problems of memory and
possession that it undertakes. That Morrison does not name Jones as her literary
predecessor stems in part from the problem of mother-daughter relationships and
inheritance, which both Beloved and Corregidora attempt to work through. For Mor-
rison and Jones, the (literary) daughter makes the work of the (literary) mother
possible but, as in Corregidora, that is not the trajectory of inheritance.
8. For a discussion of what Spillers calls “hieroglyphics of the flesh,” see Hortense
Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” Diacritics
(Summer 1987): 64–81.
9. This is a reference to Spillers.
10. See Amy L. Gottfried, “Angry Arts: Silence, Speech, and Song in Gayl Jones’s
Corregidora,” African American Review 28, no. 4 (Winter 1994): 559–570.
11. Terry McMillan, Waiting to Exhale (New York: Washington Square Press,
1994).
12. Mrs. Monique Jellerette de Jongh and Mrs. Cassandra Marshall Cato-Lewis,
How to Marry a Black Man: The Real Deal (New York: Doubleday, 1996).
13. Orlando Patterson, “Blacklash: The Crisis of Gender RelationsamongAfrican
Americans,” Transition 62 (1995): 4–26. All subsequent references to this article
will be made parenthetically.
14. They also seek to become monumental rather than performative.
15. Patricia Williams notes, “The white men she implicated included the dis-
trict attorney of Wappinger Falls, a highway patrolman, and a local police offi-
cer.” She also says that the Reverend Al Sharpton took Brawley into hiding “soon
after the police officer she had implicated in her rape committed suicide” (The Al-
chemy of Race and Rights [Cambridge Mass.: Harvard.: University Press, 1991],
171–172).
16. After being silenced by Sharpton and Attorney Alton Maddox, Brawley later
joined the Nation of Islam and was further silenced.

324 Performativity and the Performance of Race

 17. In fact, Brawley’s mother and stepfather were suspects. My point, however,
is that these accusations were to the exclusion of the six white men whom Brawley
did accuse.
18. “I pledge from this day forward I will never abuse my wife by striking her,
disrespecting her, for she is the mother of my children and the producer of my future.”
Excerpted from the Million Man March Pledge, last revised 7 May 1997. See
www.igc.apc.org/africanam/hot; shpledge.html.
19. For further discussion of this, see Michele Wallace, “ ‘Why Are There No
Great Black Artists?’ The Problem of Visuality in African American Culture,” in
Black Popular Culture, ed. Gina Dent (Seattle, Wash.: Bay Press, 1992), 333–346.
All subsequent references to this text will be made parenthetically.
20. Gayl Jones, “About My Work,” in Black Women Writers, ed. Mari Evans
(London: Pluto, 1985), 233–235. All subsequent references to this text will be made
parenthetically.
21. Jerry Ward, Jr. “Escape from Trublem: The Fiction of Gayl Jones,” in Evans
249–258, is an example of this sort of criticism. He writes, “Ursa Corregidorabegins
with the end of her first marriage, and she ends with a description of the vindictive
sexual act that makes reconciliation with her first husband possible” (253). And
Ursa is imbued with this primitive belief in the duty of a Black woman,
connected as it is to a circumscribed vision of women’s possible development.
Ursa never rebels, never seeks alternatives, never breaks free of the constrictive
role ordained by others. (253)
The act that reconciles Mutt and Ursa is fellatio—perhaps an unsatisfactory ending
but not vindictive. Ursa does seek alternatives through singing and through her
participation in the end of her ability to reproduce biologically.
22. Claudia Tate, “Gayl Jones,” in Black Women Writers at Work, ed. Claudia Tate
(New York: Continuum, 1984), 89–99. All subsequent references to this text will
be made parenthetically. In relation to the things that she now allows herself to write,
Jones says:
I find myself wanting to back away from some questions. I don’t know why.
Maybe there’s still that feeling that I don’t want to analyze things too closely.
I should mention that the male characters in those early novels areunfortunate,
like the sexual theme—in this society that looks for things to support stereo-
types. I’d like to be free of that. I used to think one could be.
Actually, when I wrote those stories I didn’t do much thinking about the
stories. I just wrote them. Now I do more thinking about the stories and make
extensive notes so I can talk about them better. I mean I can talk about them
better because they were thought out in a way the others weren’t. But it also
means that I could write many kinds of stories that I can’t write now, and I
guess it works the other way too.
Charles Rowell, “An Interview with Gayl Jones,” Callaloo 16 (Oct. 1982): 32–53.
23. Dorothy West’s The Living Is Easy (1948), Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes
Were WatchingGod(1937), Ann Petry’sTheStreet(1946),ToniMorrison’sSula(1973),
and Terry McMillan’s Mama (1987) are examples of texts concerned with the lives
of “marginal” black women.
24. Michael Harper, “Interview with Gayl Jones,” in Chant of Saints: A Gathering
of Afro-American Literature, Art and Scholarship, ed. Michael S. Harper and Robert
Stepto (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1979), 366.

The Costs of Re-Membering 325

 25. Bruce Simon, “Traumatic Repetition: Gayl Jones’s Corregidora,” in Race Con-
sciousness: African-American Studies for the New Century, ed. Judith Jackson Fossett and
Jeffrey A. Tucker (New York: New York University Press, 1997), 93–112. See also
Gottfried 559–570.
26. Elizabeth Alexander, “ ‘Can You Be Black and Look at This?’: Reading the
Rodney King Video,” in Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary
American Art, ed. Thelma Golden (New York: Whitney Museum of Art, 1994), 91–
111.
27. As Angela Davis writes, “Blues registered sexuality as a tangible expression
of freedom” (8).
28. Ursa is the constellation of the bear and corregidor means “to judge” in Por-
tuguese. Bear judgment can mean “to give birth to it, produce it.” It can also mean “to
be marked by judgment or to carry a judgment.” See Melvin Dixon, “Singing a Deep
Song: Language as Evidence in the Novels of Gayl Jones,” in Evans 236–248.
29. Gina Dent, “Black Pleasure, Black Joy: An Introduction,” in her BlackPopular
Culture, 1–19.
30. In the grammar of this sentence, me is the object, and I also occupies the object
position, although it uses the subject pronoun. Ursa is attempting to shift the
particular “grammar of love” that she has learned.
31. This is a zeugma. They think that Irene has reproduced the power structure,
and they think that they have tried to subvert the power structure.
32. Tadpole tells Ursa about his white grandmother, who was raised by his black
grandfather until she was old enough for him to marry her. Tadpole says:
“My grandmother was white. . . . She was an orphan and they had her working
out in the fields along with the blacks and treated her like she was one. She
was a little girl about nine, ten, ’leven. My granddaddy took her in and raised
her and when she got old enough he married her. She called him Papa. And
when they were married she still called him Papa.”
Ursa replies, “Maybe I should ask you how you were taught to feel” (13).
33. Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cam-
bridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993), 201–202. All subsequent references
to this text will be made parenthetically.
34. Ursa (in relation to both Jeffy and Vivian, the young woman with whom
Tadpole takes up) is in the role of experiencing, in regard to her family history, the
role that is emptied of power. She occupies the place of Corregidora’s white wife over
whom her great-grandmother enjoyed some semblance of power. The very sites from
which her grandmothers were able to exercise a limited amount of power, because
their sex(uality) was productive for Corregidora, are now used against Ursa. This may
be part of the reason the mothers are adamant about making generations: it not only
empowers them through some sort of future claim to justice, but it empowered them
in their relation to Corregidora’s wife and her inability to produce children, desire,
or a profit for Corregidora. Concentrating on making visible generations involves a
move to repress whatever power the women exercised from a placeseeminglyemptied
of power.
35. Another example of what is discomfiting about Corregidora: no one escapes
the compulsion to repeat. Lesbianism is not an idyllic state (nor is Jones expressly
homophobic); the relationship between Cat and Jeffy echoes therelationshipbetween
Cat and her white employers and between Corregidora and Gram and Great Gram.

326 Performativity and the Performance of Race

 36. See Ann DuCille, “Phallus(ies) of Interpretation: Toward Engendering the
Black Critical ‘I’,” Callaloo 16, no. 3 (1993): 559–573. See also Gottfried 559–570;
Keith Byerman, “Beyond Realism: The Fictions of Gayl Jones and Toni Morrison,”
in Fingering the Jagged Grain, ed. Keith Byerman (Athens: University of Georgia,
1985): 171–216; and Dixon 236–248. Dixon, however, does note that Mutt breaks
the connection with the womb through this act.
37. Similarly, Ursa has no desire to occupy the house that she lived in with her
mothers. Nor does she want the china cabinet that she believes must have come from
Brazil. The cabinet contained things that she never saw used: “The only time it was
opened was to be dusted or polished.” Like Great Gram herself, “it was an expensive
dark mahogany thing, the best thing we had in the house” (C 123).
38. Within an untenable situation, there are still a range of options open to Great
Gram, and she chooses to exploit her sexual power in the ways that are available to
her.
39. Madhu Dubey writes that the blues was one of the first places that black
women could speak of themselves as sexual subjects. Dubey, “Gayl Jones and the
Matrilineal Metaphor of Tradition,” Signs 20 (Winter 1995): 245–267.
40. Of her “class,” Great Gram says, Corregidora “called hisself cultivating us,
and then didn’t send nothing but cultivated mens into us” (C 124). However, as
Bruce Simon points out, this is actually Irene speaking as if possessed by Gram and
Great Gram.
41. Mae G. Henderson has a provocative article, “The Stories of O(Dessa): Stories
of Complicity and Resistance,” in Female Subjects in Black and White: Race, Psychoa-
nalysis, Feminism, ed. Elizabeth Abel, Barbara Christian, and Helene Moglen (Los
Angeles: UniversityofCaliforniaPress,1997),285–304.However,Hendersonwants
to settle the question of chattel slavery and sadomasochistic desire by reading Sherley
Anne Williams’s Dessa Rose (1986) against Pauline Réage’s Story of O (1954 France,
1965 U.S.) and other accounts of sexual slavery. What Henderson does not allow for
is the condition, like in Corregidora, where (chattel) sexual slavery constitutes the
enslaved’s social rank and social/sexual desire. Outside of that system, sadomaso-
chistic desire might be a place from which to exercise power and to exorciseitthrough
the repetition of particular power relations.

The Costs of Re-Membering 327

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Part V

Roundtable Discussion with

Senior Scholars
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 17

African American Theater

The State of the Profession, Past, Present, and Future

‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘

Roundtable discussion edited by

harry j. elam, jr., & david krasner

Panelists:

H. E. Harry J. Elam
D. K. David Krasner
J. H. James V. Hatch
S. R. Sandra L. Richards
M. W. Margaret B. Wilkerson

Panel presented at the Association for Theater in Higher Education Confer-

ence, 7 August 1997, Chicago.

D. K.: Welcome to African American Theater: The State of the Profession,

Past, Present, and Future. Two years ago, Professor Harry Elam and I met in
San Francisco at the ATHE conference with the possibility of forming this
panel. We had been attending many performance and theater conventions,
and there were many state-of-the-profession panels. While these panels were
interesting, they were white: they were about white theater and white issues,
although they passed themselves off as “universal.” We have asked several
scholars to be on this panel because they are ground-breaking teachers and
researchers; they have made it possible for research and scholarshiptoflourish.
H. E.: The first question: “In the 1920s, black theater critics, such as
Theophilus Lewis and J. A. Jackson, felt it was part of their mission as critics
to further and support the development of black theater. In the 1960s, critics
such as Larry Neal not only commented on the Black Arts Movement, they
were part of the movement themselves. Consider and discuss the role of the
critic and scholar of black theater. How has his or her role in relationship to
the practice of black theater evolved? Consider the position of the scholar/

331
critic today: Does the scholar/critic today still have a duty to serve black
theater? Why or why not?”
S. R.: It seems to me that unstated in this series of questions is the fact
that the location of the black theater critic has shifted to a certain extent.
That is, whereas Theophilus Lewis or J. A. Jackson were writing for news-
papers in the ’20s, today we have a cadre, a small cadre, perhaps, of critic/
scholars, like ourselves, who spend a good deal of time attending to the
demands of institutions that place relatively little value on black theatri-
cal production.
I’m not quite sure that I know what you mean by “serve black theater,”
but I suppose on one level I would say that, if I see black theater as my primary
research interest, then out of sheer self-interest, I want to see that theater
flourish and so need to be active in trying to help that happen. That’s perhaps
the easy part of the question.
Also related to this question is the issue of audience: to whom should the
black theater critic be speaking? The answer to that varies: some of us,
perhaps, are better equipped to write, to speak, to a more general public of
readers of newspapers and popular magazines like, perhaps, Emerge, Essence,
or Black Masks, and certainly some of us need to be writing in academic
venues like Theatre Journal, TDR, or Transition in order to contribute to,
disrupt, or intervene in dominant discourses, particularly now that the acad-
emy is devoting some attention to race, some attention to the constitution
of whiteness or to issues of postcoloniality.
Whether directed to a general or a specialized public, both critics and types
of critical writing are important, first of all, because they document produc-
tion, so that current and future generations know that we have been here and
we’ve produced. They have some record of what has happened. Also, it seems
to me that the critics in both places offer readers and spectators a vocabulary
with which to begin to evaluate those productions.
Finally, I would offer at least one other way in which we can “serve black
theater” and that’s by dramaturgy. After all, we’re trained as scholars, so
presumably we have research skills that theater companies often do not
possess, because they’re busy just simply trying to get the production
mounted. So we may be able to bring more historical depth and conceptual
rigor to a given production.
M. W.: Sandra has spoken well about the scholar as critic, and I just wanted
to focus on the role of the newspaper critic, because I’ve often been troubled
by the role that critic plays. I worry that if we do not address the issues of the
critic—that is, the newspaper critic and reviewer—then we stand in danger
of losing the importance of much of our black theater production that is done,
because the failure to cover and to review certain works certainly has a
detrimental effect on the production of black theater.
The critic of black theater in particular needs to be very much aware of the
contents and the purpose of theater, of what that theater attempts to do, the
arguments that it attempts to address. That has to be taken into consideration
regardless of the racial background or experience of the critic.

332 Roundtable Discussion

 Too often, black theater is reviewed on premises that it does not set for
itself, and that’s a very unfair way and a very abusive way to look at the work.
The critics’ role is a role of illuminating the work rather than determining
whether it’s good, bad, or indifferent. You seek to get inside the work and to
understand and to explore it. If you can’t get inside of the work and can’t
illuminate it, then there’s no sense in doing it. Thecritichas theresponsibility
to reflect and to understand an audience’s response.
When I was writing my dissertation, I was reading a review by a critic of
a production in Los Angeles—it was about Angela Davis—and the news-
paper critic really panned it, and then made a little statement at the end that
he seemed to be at odds with the audience, which treated it as if it were a
football game. I realized that that critic had missed an opportunity to really
try to understand what it was that the audience found so exciting about this
work.
We need to examine the role of the critic, particularly the reviewer of live
productions, so that we can be in a position to “serve” and to encourage and
support the development of black theater.
J. H.: A word about African American critics and their newspaper criti-
cism. The critics for any oppressed group rarely air the group’s dirty laundry.
If they do, as Stanley Crouch has done in the Village Voice, they are roundly
abused. All too often, no matter what a critic might not like in a production,
he’ll praise what he saw, and he does it for the reasons that Margaret spoke
about.
In the 1920s, Tony Langston of the Chicago Defender and RomeoDougherty
of the Amsterdam News gossiped; they knew all the performers on a first-name
basis. They knew who was out of town and where they were. Their columns
were chatty rather than what we call criticism because theater was a very
small world.
Sylvester Russell, James A. Jackson, and Theophilus Lewis are the great
exceptions: Lewis had the language, the skills, the vision to set forth what he
thought a theater should be, and periodically he would put it down and then
say, “Well, this group has made a beginning” and “That group is a start, but
we have to do these things.” In other words, his chastisement would be
general, but his praise, when it came, would be specific. If he criticizedEulalie
Spence, he would say something nice about her sister. Lewis tore into white
playwrights; he had no problems with it, and he had the wit to do it. Lewis
promoted not only art theaters like Krigwa, but he also praised the girlie
shows and the low comedians at the Lincoln Theatre because he knew very
well the tastes of the “common people”; he knew where the folk roots grew.
To bring criticism into the more modern time, Joe Papp formed his black
repertory and Hispanic company in the early ’70s; it was roundly criticized
by the white critics, partly because of diction and accent: “In Julius Caesar,
how can we believe that these are citizens of Rome when they’re speaking in
all these different accents?” Puerto Rican, Dominican, urban black, and
southern? The white critics, Walter Kerr and others, were so vicious that,
after two shows, Julius Caesar and Coriolanus, the company closed.

African American Theater 333

 The black critics saw the Shakespeare experiment in different perspective.
When Errol Hill placed the company’s Shakespearean performances into the
context of a movement toward equality, the accent issue became much less
of a problem. Loften Mitchell, who wrote regularly for the Amsterdam News,
found much to praise in the actors, but finally, at the end, he said the diction
was horrendous. Now, that is a pioneer remark of a kind.
We don’t get helpful criticism from black newspaper critics because the
theater is a small world full of vendettas. If you say a bad word publicly about
someone, it’s never forgotten. The white critics will seize upon it. Therefore,
we have to turn to Larry Neal and Theophilus Lewis to find a theoretical and
critical view of theater.
D. K.: Next question: “Contemporary African American literary criticism
has been much concerned with ideas of essentialism versus constructionism.
Essentialists argue that there are certain essential truths of black identity;
constructivists suggest that blackness is culturally, politically, and histori-
cally constructed with each context of its use. Consider how concerns over
essentialism and constructivism affect your work and analysis of black theater
history and performance. How does the changing concept of race influence
our understanding of the evolution of black theater? Should we dismiss
certain periods of black theater practice or certain plays for their essential-
ism?”
J. H.: I’d like to reinterpret and rephrase the question: “Is there a black
aesthetic?” This was a big item in the ’60s, particularly among African
American artists. Vivian Browne, a black painter, said, “Black art is anything
painted by a black painter,” and that was a very easy way to deal with it, but
it satisfied almost no one. What lies behind the question is more important,
and that is racism. If there were no racism, the question wouldn’t be discussed
to any great extent. There would be questions of form and content, roman-
ticism versus classicism, and a raising of all the questions that you recognize
as traditional inquiries into art and theater.
But those questions are often dismissed in favor of the large one, often
asked by the culture cops: “Is there a black aesthetic, and does this play
conform to it?” And most critical: “How is it different from European?” In
the American Negro Theatre’s preamble to its constitution, Abram Hill
wrote that the Negro had some special contributions to give to America, and
he lists one: “rhythm.” Now, you know that the word rhythm is a word that
can trip a white critic; if it’s the right day and the right person, yes, “We got
rhythm, we’ve got more than whitey’s got,” and if it’s the wrong person on
the wrong day, “You think all black people can do is dance and play basket-
ball?” Or, “You calling me a jungle bunny?” Many of the answers one might
bring to the question “Is there a black aesthetic?” are double binds.
The Colored Museum. Remember the scene where the middle-class man is
trying to trash the Temptations’ recording of “My Girl,” and the song climbs
back out of the trash to him? That’s a wonderful illustration of class discrim-
ination. And this question revolves around class distinction. During the ’60s,

334 Roundtable Discussion

“street” was the blackest black. Language and attitude to be black had to be
street black. It was a revenge of the young artists against their teachers and
parents, who they accused of wanting to be white.
Do these attitudes affect me when I write? Yes, they do. When I write, I
look over my shoulder all the time to see “who am I likely to offend?” I don’t
like to do that, and I shouldn’t do it, but I do it almost unconsciously.
M. W.: I had more difficulty with this question than any other, because if
I examine my own approach to understanding black theater, I’ve always been
aware of the ways in which race is a social construction. You can see it reflected
in the ways in which black theater artists have responded down through the
years, initially, in response to the stereotyping of African Americans. African
American playwrights, in depicting any particular character on stage,
brought with them the historical and racial baggage that an audience might
bring, regardless of whether the audience was black or white or any other
color. When Hansberry puts Lena Younger, for example, on the stage, she’s
aware that she will be seen, for example, within the context of the black
mammy, of being very domineering, and being the head of the household,
despite the fact that that family has had a male head of the household until
very recently in the family history. Thus, the black writer writes with an
understanding, an awareness, of the fact that that audience is going to see
the mammy specter in the midst of their play. Therefore, part of the challenge
of the writer is somehow to reveal the humanity, the truth, the energy, and
the complexity that emerges from a stereotype.
One could argue that almost any writer thinks of that, but the African
American writer thinks of it particularly because of the tremendous demon-
ization of African Americans through history. You’re dealing with different
demonizations now. In the early part of the twentieth century, it was the
assumption that African American men were cowardly, and if you look at the
early materials on some of the black boxers, the earliest ones coming along
even before “The Great White Hope,” the newspaper critics wrote and
questioned whether or not the black male boxer would have the courage to
stay in the ring, whether he would be termed “yellow.” Jack London actually
wrote an article like that in the early part of the twentieth century. We aren’t
dealing with that particular stereotyping now, but it’s something even more
insidious, so that it seems clear to me that race is a socialconstruction.Though
it changes as we go through history, it doesn’t make it any less dangerous. It
could be, in fact, more dangerous, perhaps.
S. R.: Just a little comment: Black Nationalists, like Amiri Baraka, Ron
Karenga, and Ed Bullins, can be accused of being essentialists in terms of the
’60s, but what’s interesting is that “black” was used in two ways. One was
an ontological category, the second, a performative category, so that Baraka
spends a good deal of time castigating certain black people for not being
black—i.e., for not performing or acting in certain ways. “Black” encom-
passes a presumption of a certain inherent quality, an essentialism, but even
more so, a performative quality, that in order to be black, you had to do x, y,

African American Theater 335

and z. We could say that there was certainly an authoritarian dimension to
the definition of blackness and black art, but nonetheless some of our critics
have given the ’60s a bad rap in ways that are undeserved.
H. E.: Your comments have made me think of the movie Cotton Comes to
Harlem. We saw it way back then, and the guy stands up, and he asks the
audience full of black people, “Am I black enough for you?”
D. K.: Along these lines, there was the battle in the 1920s between Charles
Gilpin and Eugene O’Neill for the construction of the character of Brutus
Jones. Gilpin felt that “O’Neill, he just wrote the role. I understand it, I
know it, and I therefore can change the text.” Gilpin changed the words to
be appropriate to particular audiences, depending upon whether theaudience
was largely black or largely white. He would adapt and improvise, which
eventually led to his firing.
H. E.: Moving to question three, “As evidenced at NCAAT—which is the
National Conference of African American Theater—in April of this year, the
subject of a black theater canon became a heated topic. So, for the panel,
should there be a black theater canon? How would it be determined? Who
would choose the works? Would it include works from all over the African
diaspora? What purpose would a canon serve?”
M. W.: I am absolutely against [canon formation]. I am against the reasons
that were given to me for doing that—that, in developing white institutions,
canons are very important, and one of the reasons why black theater is not
acceptable is that we have not put forth a canon of our greatest works and so
forth, and that in order really to be accepted, we need to do this.
It doesn’t really serve the purposes that we should seek to serve, and that
is to encourage and develop the best of black theater. The minute you form
a canon, you immediately define out of the canon certain works and certain
people and certain things. I really feel that a canon does not serve a good
purpose for us.
S. R.: Margaret, I would want to ask, what do you teach when you teach a
course in African American theater? Do you, in effect, teach a canon? Are
there certain plays that just simply have to be there?
M. W.: It depends on what you are trying to get your students to under-
stand about theater, and it’s not necessarily that there are certain plays that
must be there. There may be plays that you like particularly or that you feel
an affinity for, and you should confess that.
S. R.: And what would you include?
M. W.: It’s difficult for me to do that, because I’d have to sit down and
really think through, “What is it that I’m trying to accomplish in this course,
and which plays would allow me to do that?” I did do a course, the most
recent course I developed, whichwasoneforanAmericanculturerequirement
at Berkeley, and you’re required to include works by particular cultural
groups or underrepresented groups, and I chose four of the following: Euro-
Americans, African Americans, Latinos, and Asian Americans. These are
freshmen and sophomores.

336 Roundtable Discussion

 I titled the course Theater and Cultural Identity. The pieces that I chose
were based around those issues. I also chose those that I found to be most
accessible in this initial course. I taught it once, and it was a very exciting
course for me to teach. From what I gather from the students, it was exciting
for them, too.
H. E: Sandra, are you suggesting that a black canon is implicit?
S. R.: Yes. Particularly in choosing to offer an introductory course in
African American theater. I guess I would hesitate if I never mentioned, for
example, Lorraine Hansberry, because I would be embarrassed and feel that
I had done the student a disservice if a student took my course and had no
idea who she was. But I certainly do agree with Margaret, I mean, that very
often what we don’t admit about canons, or haven’t up until recently, was
that canons are ways supposedly of preserving the past. But we preserve the
past in relationship to some sense of where we are in the present and where
we want to be in future, so in effect I would be operating within a version of
Margaret’s comments about context.
I have certain ideas that I would want to offer, certain narratives that I
would want to offer, about black cultural production seen through theater;
thus, in a certain sense, I construct a canon in teaching a course. But I would
hope to transmit ideas in such a way that there’s a variety in the course, so
that the texts are in dialogue with each other and perhaps at times quarreling
with each other.
What I’ve done in some of my classes is to ask students, “Okay, well, we’ve
got this narrative, how is this narrative produced, and what questions doesn’t
it allow us to ask? What might be missing?” as a way to try to get them to
think, “Well, for every story I’ve been told, there are certain facts or elements
that have been suppressed; I need to look at what’s being omitted.” I try to
challenge them in this way so that they begin to think how ideology operates,
thatis, by defining parameters andnaturalizingthemsothatcertainquestions
become virtually unthinkable or completely disallowed.
H. E.: Jim, you’ve created a book that I’ve used and added to Margaret’s
class, which could be called, in effect, a black canon. Where do you weigh in
on this?
J. H.: The book, Black Theater USA, is twenty years old, and in 1974 there
was noother comprehensiveanthology.So,bycircumstance,ourbookbecame
the standard. As regards the canon, let me speak about our experience at
NCAAT in Baltimore this year [1997], where we meet annually to discuss
black theater issues. This year, three members were charged with coming up
with the black theater canon. But, instead, we circumvented it; we kind of
cheated. What we did was declare there would not be a canon but there would
be a list of thirty plays (no musicals) that anyone who claimed to be familiar
with African American theater should have read. Then we said, “The list
should be historical from the beginning to the end. It should represent all
kinds of views and styles.”
Very quickly, we ended up with thirty; there was some horse trading: “If
you’ll take this, I’ll take that out.” But the whole thing happened in an hour,

African American Theater 337

and everyone went away relatively content because we didn’t say, “This is it.”
Instead, we said, here are thirty plays that will make you knowledgeable.
And the reason that we did it was exactly what Sandra was saying: school-
teachers keep asking, “Which plays should I teach?” Well, here are thirty.
Pick some.
D. K.: The next question, the issue of binary structuring, emerged from
Samuel Hay’s book, African AmericanTheatreHistory:AnHistoricalandCritical
Analysis (1994). “While some have argued that the fundamental attributes
of African American theater are produced either from the Du Bois tradition
of art as propaganda or the Locke tradition of folk art, others say that this
binary structuring narrows the frame of African American theater. Is the
Locke/Du Bois binary broad enough to accommodate an array of styles,
genres, and theatrical functions? Is there room for an alternative position
outside this binary?”
J. H.: Art versus propaganda. Humphrey Bogart said, “If you want to send
a message, send a telegram.” It’s an old argument. Ron Karenga said, “All
art is propaganda,” and, in a very real sense, it is. Take a Camille Billops
sculpture, for example. If she manages to get it in the Museum of Modern
Art, it is moved up in class and is propaganda for that class; if she gets it in
the Met, her sculpture then says, “This is no longer a craft. This is fine art.”
That is propaganda, too. So I think that’s what Karenga must have meant.
S. R.: It seems to me that the historical record does not support this
binarism. I think of plays like Georgia Douglas Johnson’s Sunday Morning in
the South or Blue Eyed Black Boy. Are they folk plays? Propaganda plays? We
know that Locke wrote that he supported Angelina Grimke’s Rachel, and
then later on when it was done before the NAACP, it caused a big controversy,
a controversy over art versus propaganda, so that Locke’s position evolved
over time.
So the question that I would want to ask Sam Hay is, “Why do we want to
reify one point in Locke’s thinking?” If you also look at, I think, some of the
women who were playwrights in the 1920s who were considered to have
written “folk plays,” they studied with Locke and they were produced by Du
Bois, so what does that say about this supposed binarism? We certainly can
note that the debate occurred, that these two important figures had different
points of view on it, but that those points of view were not all so far apart.
H. E.: The subject of pedagogy: “The issues of race, class, and gender are
not mutually exclusive. How are we to understand and teach black theater
in such a way that students understand the linkages and interactions among
race, class, and gender? What strategies have you found useful?”
J. H.: I would not start with A Raisin in the Sun because, if you’re going to
deal with race, class, and gender, Lorraine Hansberry has dealt with all three
of them simultaneously, and you want to start with something that is easier
for beginning students to see. Start with some 1920s one-acts by women,
where they have the very simple point of view “Lynching is bad” or whatever
it is, and it’s very clear and it’s very direct and it’s very short.

338 Roundtable Discussion

 Ralph Ellison said, “Change the joke and slip the yoke.” That concept
applied to a play could be “change the gender and slip the play.” Substitute
a woman for a male, or a wife for a husband, and so on. Or you can reverse the
race, if you like, but gender is the key. Pretty soon, it becomes quite clear
what the author intended and how absurd it is if you change the gender of it
and then how absurd it is if you leave the gender as it is. It’s a way of distancing
students from the material so one may have a discussion of gender or race
that is truly helpful.
The only way that I’ve found to teach performance history that has no
literary text and where the performance cannot be reenacted is to send the
students to the newspapers of the 1920s, the Amsterdam News, Chicago De-
fender, Pittsburgh Courier, and tell them to read three months of ads and cabaret
reviews. You give them a report form to turn in [group laughter]. They come
back with a whole different understanding of what the 1920s theaterbusiness
was about, and it wasn’t the literary plays of Krigwa.
D. K.: “Henry Louis Gates’s essay on the Chitlin Circuit [see chap. 7] has
increased awareness of black theater that is neither mainstreamnorhighbrow,
but appealing to the masses; it is a theater attentive to issues attached to local
concerns and not necessarily to traditional Western aesthetic values of drama.
Do you teach in your courses about the Chitlin Circuit, and should black
theater courses discuss this theater that is truly—or perhaps—‘by, for, and
about black people’? Why or why not?”
M. W.: I would applaud it. I’ve taught a little bit about it, because I’m
intrigued with the fact that they are so popular. Whenever something is that
popular with a developing black audience, we who are in black theater and
are attentive to it need not look down our noses at it but try to understand
their standpoint. How is it done? There are particular techniques that they
use: they go in and organize the churches, they do networking. They really
know how to do it. They do not spend two cents on flyers and posters and
amusement grants. It’s by grapevine; it’s the drum; it’s by radio.
It’s popular theater. I’m not sure that I agree that it’s—and I’m glad you
said “perhaps”—truly “by, for, and about black people.” I’m not too sure
about that. I like to believe that if some of our other theater companies were
able to market and had some of the financial backing that they have, then
other plays might also be very popular with the new audience.
S. R.: I think The Beauty Shop also fits into this genre too. Shelly Garrett,
the originator of The Beauty Shop in 1987, talked about how he wanted to
appeal to black women who have a certain amount of disposable income and
weren’t seeing representations of themselves on stage, and so he went for a
particular market. They have produced it rather well.
But, The Beauty Shop plays remind me of what I imagine church plays of
the 1930s were like, plays like The Old Ship of Zion that Winona Fletcher
writes about. It seems to me that some of those same dynamics are offered on
this Chitlin Circuit. I know, at least in Chicago, whenever such a play comes
to town, the producers involve local DJs, so that if you want to see what so-

African American Theater 339

and-so radio personality looks like, if you want to interact with him or her,
you see The Beauty Shop. That is, known personalities in a local community
are dropped into the show, which means that a certain amount of improvi-
sation occurs during the performance, because these personalities are not
learning lines and attending rehearsals.
I think this type of play also raises the question, “Where isthe performance?
Is the performance on stage, or is it someplace between on stage and in the
audience?” because of the kind of dynamic: the laughter, the jokes, and
everything that’s going on back and forth. Those were some of the things
that were also happening in the church plays of the 1930s and on.
Those may be some of the good things that we need to investigate in terms
of the Chitlin Circuit. But, at least in terms of The Beauty Shop plays, there’s
a way in which they are very deeply homophobic, and that’s troubling. But
then, we need to see to what extent we can use some of those marketing skills,
because it’s not as though people are paying five or ten dollars for a ticket,
they’re also putting out a good sum of money for a ticket, so the fact that
these shows do well financially says that there’s more disposable income in
black communities than we had previously assumed.
M. W.: I agree. I think we need to help our students develop their own
critical framework in dealing with plays and performances that they’ve seen.
However, I want to go back to that question about race, class, and gender,
because I agree with what Jim has said, but I do start with A Raisin in the
Sun, and I want to just give an example of why I do that. I agree with you
that Hansberry deals with these areas quite masterfully.
I’m particularly fond of the scene that is often left out in some of the
presentations, and that is Walter’s moment alone with his son Travis. It is
the only time in that play when we see Walter by himself, without the chorus
of women surrounding him and constantly educating him. Here, he dreams
about moving up in class, about what he will be as a big corporate executive,
and implicit in that dream is a sexist view of female workers.
I like to use that with my students because, at first, they buy it. At first
they say, “Yeah, that’s great. I have a secretary, I’ve got a Lincoln in the
driveway, I’ve got a gardener, I’ve got all of this, but [it’s] the secretaries who
don’t get things right, who’re always missing, etc.” It’s so much a part of the
language and the culture that it passes them at first. I like to have them read
that and then force them to come back and reexamine Walter’s assumptions
that are built into his American materialistic dream, and it makes them
uncomfortable initially.
H. E.: Turning to the debate—a subject that comes up in other areas of
this conference—between Wilson and Brustein.
S. R.: I still can’t quite figure out, even though I’ve read some views and
articles on it, what all the excitement was about, what the event actually was.
I can’t figure out what people thought they were going to see happen there
at Town Hall and then why they were so disappointed at what did happen.
So, for me, the event is analogous to Genet’s play The Blacks, where there’s
this wonderful spectacle happening on stage. People actually referred to the

340 Roundtable Discussion

Town Hall debate as a boxing match. There’s a spectacle going on on stage,
while something, it seems to me, far more important is happening off stage.
Both Wilson and Brustein are compromised in various ways by their rhetoric,
their discourse, and their actual practice. But I’ll just leave that alone, so that
we can get to the more interesting questions of what is happening off stage.
People express shock that Wilson should call for funding for specifically
black theater. But the kinds of questions I would love to see and deal with
include “What has been the track record of funding multicultural theaters,
whatever they are? How many dollars did organizations like the Lila Wallace
Fund give to historically white theaters to diversify their repertoires? How
many playwrights of color did the theaters produce, and how many designers
of color did they employ? How many administrators? How many are there
after the one or two ethnic plays are done? And then, at the same time, how
many dollars did these same philanthropic organizations give, let’s say, to
Asian American theater companies, Latino companies, African American
theater companies?”
On the topic of color-blind casting: given Brustein’s wagging, moralizing
finger at Wilson about self-segregation, I would want to ask Brustein: “Well,
how many nonwhite actors have you employed?” Is there a “self-segregation”
that is also occurring in Brustein’s practice as well as a whole lot of other
theaters, and why isn’t it called “self-segregation”?
If white theaters see color-blind casting as desirable and fruitful, then why
don’t they simply get on with it and stop making all this noise? Hire minority
actors rather than making a lot of noise about “Oh, how horrible, August
Wilson doesn’t think I should do color-blind casting?” Good nonwhiteactors
who are employed have already had a history of doing color-blind work. How
did they get through B.F.A. programs, M.F.A. programs, if they didn’t do
color-blind work? [group laughter] And they’re good. In order to be good, you
have to work, right? So black performers have already had a history. I’m sure
that those actors would be happy for that decision to be able to work.
The other reality that everybody is dancing around and not admitting is
that, for the foreseeable future, even if everybody agreed, “Oh, yes, we’re
going to do color-blind casting,” it’s not as though there’s going to be a huge
influx of Asian American or Latino or African American actors into all these
regional companies. That’s not going to happen. The sort of notion that “Oh,
if they are employed in color-blind casting, they won’t get an opportunity
to do plays that are consistent with their own ethnic and racial background”
simply isn’t the case.
I would wonder if these theaters were indeed going to get on with the job
of doing color-blind casting, then hopefully they would behave intelligently
and begin to ask questions like “Well, what happens to Death of a Salesman
when I put in people who are not white? If I create a family that is multiracial,
how does this text fall apart, or how does it work? How does it help me as a
white person, or my audience, see more about whiteness? Or, Am I inviting
actors of color in simply to do a kind of whiteface?” These are some of the
important questions.

African American Theater 341

 J. H.: I’ll add one thing. The word is “access.” It is a meaty word for all the
issues we’re talking about. White people have access to black culture and
history, but black people do not have equal access to white culture. There are
very few black scholars who write on white subjects. Esther Jackson wrote
on Tennessee Williams in approximately 1958 for her dissertation at Wis-
consin, and I don’t know if there are any other blacks who have written
dissertations on white theater subjects.
This inequity is what our conversation is all about. It’s a dialogue where
Brustein says to Wilson, “Are you going to give up being black?” and Wilson
replies, “No, not yet.” “Well, why not?” “Because, Mr. Brustein, you keep
me black.”
M. W.: People often forget when they talk about color-blind casting that
the African American men who began that whole effort out of Actors’ Equity
initiated that national movement around nontraditional casting as their last
effort before filing suit for the failure to employ African American actors. It
was all about access, as Jim says; it’s all about hiring; it’s all about the
opportunity to do your work. The discussion gets off on another level that
may or may not be really appropriate.
S. R.: I would imagine that that debate must have been very funny in terms
of a person who hasn’t liked a whole lot of American theater since the1960s—
Brustein, you know [group laughter]—and a person who’s talking about the
need for black theaters, and yet a major portion of his work has been done in
white theaters. So, that’s a compromised position.
J. H.: I’d like to discuss black scholarship in the theater. Our scholarship
is the best it’s ever been. There are more people writing; there’sbetterwriting;
there’s more intelligence, more background; more people understand world
theater history, American theater history, African theater history, and race,
class, and gender concepts. There are a dozen young new scholars, both black
and white, who are changing the face of this history. I’m old enough to
remember when there were very few books, not many plays, and little dis-
cussion of any of these issues.
S. R.: I certainly would retain the Du Bois pronouncement that a black
play is written by us, understanding “black people” as those people who self-
identify as being of African descent and then those people whom the society
identifies as such. Under such a definition, a black play can have a Mama on
the couch [Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun and George C. Wolfe’s The Colored
Museum] or a purple mountain [Marita Bonner’s The Purple Flower]; it can
have the rind of a watermelon [Suzan-Lori Parks’s The Death of the Last Black
Man in the Whole Entire World]; it can have virtually anything else that the
mind can conceive, and it can also have on stage a whole cast of characters,
none of whom are black, none of whom are discussing things that are partic-
ularly black issues.
We’re still at a point where we don’t want to weed anybody out, because
that’s what it becomes: weeding people out of the family. The ghost of the
’60s is that “You haven’t written a play that’s black enough; therefore your
own blackness is in question.” I don’t think that we can afford that.

342 Roundtable Discussion

 Also, the question of a white writer. I would want to ask some of the same
kinds of questions that I would ask of anybody, namely, “How does your play
work? What’s its relationship to a material world?” But then, I would also
want to conduct a comparison to answer such questions as “Is the whiteauthor
being received in a way that a black author is not? Is racism operative in this
specific instance, and if so, how so?” I would ask these questions because I
would fear that we might have a situation analogous to what’s happening on
our campuses now, where certain black texts are in the syllabus so everybody
reads them. The joke’s that students, particularly women, read Their Eyes Are
Watching God at least four times during their careers as undergraduates.
Well, great. So Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison, and a few other people
have made it; Lorraine Hansberry made it into the curriculum. But where
are those black students sitting in those classrooms? Our society’s moving to
ensure in whole numbers of different arenas, like education, health, employ-
ment, etc., that black and other poor people of color are marginalized and
thus unprepared to sit in those college classrooms and read those texts.
I’m reminded of Frantz Fanon’s comment, despite the sort of violence of
colonialism—the violence that strips the colonized of his or her humanity,
that renders him or her black—that despite that black people don’t vote in
a politician because they want black culture; they vote in the person who
they think is going to enhance their life prospects in terms of education, in
terms of food, in terms of dignity.
So, while we focus our attention on whether the play is authored by a black
or nonblack person, the more important question demanding our attention
is this: “Does this play contribute to a larger project of dismantling the
present hierarchies, or does it support the status quo?” That may be more
important than “Is the author black? Is the author not black?” Rather, “what
does this black play do?”
M. W.: I would absolutelyagree,intermsofwhatSandrasaidsoeloquently,
as I struggled with this question, What would I do with a play written by
Ward Connelly? There’s someone I can drum out of the family. But I think
where you ended up, Sandra, really is where I would end up on that same
question: that it really has to do with the vision of the work itself and the
degree to which it takes into account the life and example in the cauldron of
racism and sexism and classism and everything else that black people deal
with and that other people deal with as well.
In the final analysis, this has to be the real measure for it, because I’m not
sure I could accept a work by Connelly if he were writing on paper what he
is acting out in his life in the ways in which he is affecting all of us. But I’d
also just like to give a last statement that will affirm the topic of this agenda:
I’m very excited, as Jim is, about the virtual explosion of writing about black
theater by all kinds of people. It’s really very, very exciting and veryaffirming.
I worry, though, about the response to that writing from some quarters. I
worry about the extent to which the whole effort that has been made since
the Civil Rights Movement has resulted in what we have now. Many people
have said that the Civil Rights Movement didn’t accomplish what itintended

African American Theater 343

to accomplish, but it seems to me that many of you who are younger in this
room, and even older, are beneficiaries of the early efforts to integrate the
academy—that is, to bring in the life stories and narratives and experience
and history of so many people who had been written out.
I don’t fool myself: I believe that there is a real effort to turn the clock back,
and it’s terribly important that we as scholars be activists as well in whatever
arenas we can be in, because you know that if those students are not present
in those classrooms, those teachers are not going to be there, and the material
that we’ve all written and talked about and researched, and the marvelous,
challenging questions that you raised also will not be there.
It’s a real, clear, and present danger that we, as scholars, need to address
ourselves to in whatever way we can, whatever ways we can. I’m not going to
prescribe what people should do, but as a person who came into an African
American studies department, I’m very much aware of the tremendous strug-
gle that went into bringing this kind of material into the academy. Our gains
can be so ephemeral if we don’t keep an eye toward the fact that there were
many people outside the academy who made it possible for this to happen. I
really think it’s important that we remain connected, not only in terms of
what we say, but the ways in which we function in our roles as faculty, as
staff, and as students when we raise these issues.

344 Roundtable Discussion

 Afterword
Change Is Coming

‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘
david krasner

Commenting on the study of African American theater history, James V.

Hatch identified five obstacles to its development: the loss of primary sources,
a “severely circumscribed” definition of theater, a “paucity of scholarly
publications” in black theater history, a “disgraceful absence of theater schol-
ars who know both black and white theater history,” and an “abundance of
institutionalized racism.” According to Hatch, these problems are exacer-
bated by the fact that black theater history “has not yet been assimilated into
our mainstream bibliographies, directories, biographies, scholarly journals,
and history texts.”1 As this is being written, ten years following Hatch’s
lament, there is evidence that a welcome change is coming. Although lost
primary sources can never be replaced, scholars are finding new ways to study
available sources; the circumscribed view of theater is opening up to new
ideas about performance studies and oral traditions; and scholarly
publications are on the increase. During the 1990s the number of essays,
books, and Ph.D. dissertations on African American performance and theater
history has grown significantly, attesting to the rising interest in the subject.
In addition, institutional racism is being chipped away incrementally.
The broad scope of this collection has emphasized the wide impact that
African American theater has had on American theater and culture, as well
as the wide impact that theater has had on black life and culture. Accessing
the various threads of African American theater and its influence on culture
is a multilayered task. Wahneema Lubiano contends that the “single greatest
difficulty facing Afro-American scholars is the need to figure out, in the space
of an article or a book, how to convey the full complexity of periods or genres
or intertextual relationships.”2 Instead of one voice defining the subject, our
objective has been to include multiple voices; and instead of a single outlook,
we have incorporated several, allowing ideas to dialogue and debate in order
to comprehend the polyphony of viewpoints in African American perfor-
mance and theater history.

345
 Notwithstanding several important predecessors, Errol Hill’s landmark
work, The Theatre of Black Americans (1980), initiated a turning point in black
theater history. Hill’s collection of essays illuminated African American
theater history in greater detail than had most earlier works. He claimed that
“theatre as an institution can have a significant impact on the relentless
struggle of a deprived racial minority for full equality” and that it promoted
the “spiritual well-being” for a people “divorced from their ancestral heritage
through centuries of degrading slavery.”3 The Theatre of Black Americans
investigated rituals, playwrights, audiences, actors, and theater companies
contributing to black theater history. Hill was among the first African
American theater historians who, by rewriting the history of theater from a
black perspective, called attention to its multiple formations.
In many ways, our study purports to take up where Hill’s book leaves off.
Like The Theatre of Black Americans, this book has attempted to shed light on
African American theater and ways in which black theater counteracted the
negative images fostered by minstrel stereotypes. In minstrelsy, whiteAmer-
ican performers simultaneously emulated and mocked black American cul-
ture, style, gesture, and language. White American minstrelsy fashioned
what Houston A. Baker, Jr., dubs a “device” that only mattered in its rela-
tionship to, and mockery of, “the Afro-American systems of sense from which
it is appropriated.” By appropriating, imitating, and distorting the behavior
of black culture, white minstrel performers enshrined the blackface mask,
creating an enduring cultural icon of black effacement and a “device” that,
as Baker maintains, “is designed to remind white consciousness that black
men and women are mis-speakers bereft of humanity.”4 Yet, as Harry J. Elam,
Jr., notes in the introduction to this book, race is also a “device” usable in
oppositional ways: for promoting social protest and political representation;
for shaping cultural traditions and memory; for influencing gender and racial
representations; and for informing “performance” in itself, defining the
meaning of race at the moment when the performer and the audience interact.
Since the advent of blackface minstrelsy nearly two centuries ago, black
people have had to come to terms with minstrelsy’s insidious representations.
There is no denying the fact that black people reacted actively to cultural
stereotyping. This work seeks to define the inspiring and ingenious ways
black performers have negotiated, subverted, incorporated, resisted, chal-
lenged, and ultimately “signified”—the black rhetorical strategy of inver-
sion, parody, and innuendo—on the pervasive minstrel image.
There are, however, other issues besides minstrelsy taken up in this work.
Essays here have explored vexing questions that face black artists living in
the double worlds of dominant white society and the black community,
issues of gender relationships, the oft-neglected history of women in theater,
and the way in which distinctions of class in the black community relate to
black drama and performance. Judith Williams, for instance, observes how
the black female archetype—the Mammy, the tragic mulatto, and the Topsy
figure—represent “blackness” that is fraught with controversy and conflict.

346 African American Performance and Theater History

Margaret B. Wilkerson takes a fresh look at Lorraine Hansberry, arguing
that her work belongs in the pantheon of black revolutionary literature rather
than the tepid accommodationism associated with more conventional writ-
ers. Wilkerson illuminates the radical elements in Hansberry’s work by
accentuating the playwright’s Marxist and deconstructive view of property
rights and neighborhood ownership. Along similar lines, Mike Sell carefully
dissects the Black Arts Movement, tracing the subtle nuances of its revolu-
tionary agenda. Implicit in Sell’s analysis is the fact that the very success of
the Black Arts Movement was the cause of its own erasure. William Sonnega
investigates the notion of a “liberal audience”; his unflinching study clarifies
the relationship between black performers and white patrons that has com-
plicated this dynamic. By offering personal accounts and observations, Son-
nega sheds light on this conflictual relationship from a contemporary per-
spective.
Three important areas of concern have come to light in the past decade,
which have added to this work: the emergence of performance studies as a
discipline, the importance of gender and class in the discussion of African
American theater history, and the breaking up of hegemony in the analysis
of black culture. This work, unlike many others, has sought to move the
emphasis of African American theater from playwrights to relations among
authors, performers, and audiences. This collection testifies to this new
emphasis on performativity; withoutdenyingthesignificanceofplaywrights,
over half the essays focus on performance. Performance can dictate fashion,
style, and even identity. Identity is formed in the public sphere, wherespeech,
acts, gestures, fashion, and codes of behavior establish who a person is, what
she represents. Performance is also a public art foregrounding expressive
powers of cultural memory and traditions; performers often act out cultural
codes that are constitutive of the social lexicon. Cultural memory serves as a
critical device in Joseph Roach’s study of “deep skin.” Roach observes that
in New Orleans, Congo Square’s “mythic status” provides an intersection of
trans–Atlantic behaviors, a hybrid connection of gestures and acts inculcated
through slave performances and jazz funerals. Telia U. Anderson’s discussion
of women’s performativity in black churches asserts that such performances
empower self–assertion. Building on the study of black audience receptivity
to August Wilson’s plays, Sandra Shannon claims that the Afrocentricity
embedded in Wilson’s dramaturgy comes to life in performance. In contrast,
Henry Louis Gates, Jr., bears witness to black audiences in the working–class
theaters of the “Chitlin Circuit.” He develops the idea of an alternative
Afrocentric theater different from what August Wilson proposes. Yet, im-
plicit in both Shannon and Gates’s argument is W. E. B. Du Bois’s 1926
notion of a theater that is about, by, for, and near African Americans.5 The
juxtaposition of Shannon and Gates’s investigations brings into focus class
distinctions and varying perspectives that add to our understanding of the
diverse vibrancy and multifaceted intentions of black culture and black
theatrical traditions.

Afterword 347
 Performance is analyzable to the degree to which a performer embodies
cultural expression. Sandra L. Richards, commenting on such expressivity,
remarks:
The critical tradition within African American literature locates “authen-
tic” cultural expression on the terrain of the folk, but the folk have artic-
ulated their presence most brilliantly in those realms with which literature
is uncomfortable, namely in arenas centered in performance.6
In the case of the blues, for example, black performativity creates a world
perspective that holds together everything that racism would tear apart; the
blues acts as a healing process in the face of oppression. Performance also
provides definition and, therefore, meaning; it is part of the way black culture
has communicated. Edouard Glissant wrote that it is
nothing new to declare that for us music, gesture, dance are forms of
communication, just as important as the gift of speech. This is how we
first managed to emerge from the plantation: esthetic form in our cultures
must be shaped from these oral traditions.7
Similarly, Manthia Diawara contends that performance “records the way in
which black people, through communicative action, engender themselves
within the American experience. Black agency here involves the redefinition
of the tools of Americanness.” Diawara adds that “performance presumes an
existing tradition and an individual or group of people who interpret that
tradition in front of an audience in such a way that the individual or group
of people invent themselves for that audience.”8 In this way, social action
came to be linked with expressivity. The result was the formation of a
communicative infrastructure within the black community, with black per-
formers playing a significant role in structuring black identity.9
This study has also investigated how gender is contextualized in African
American theater. To this end, Annemarie Bean looks closely at how the
concept of black female cross–dressing can destabilize the negative stereo-
typing of black women. She makes clear that during the nineteenth century
the idea of “double inversion”—racial and sexual—cut against the grain of
stable representations of identity. Along similar lines, the notion of “primi-
tivism” gained currency by the early twentieth century. Exaggerated percep-
tions of black sexuality affected the way women were viewed, especially
in the realm of dance. In my essay, I call attention to the Salome dance craze
of the early twentieth century, considering how black female dancers nego-
tiated the minefield of racial and gender representations in their perform-
ances. Performance is also a political tool; Kimberly D. Dixon reminds us
that contemporary black female playwrights, particularly Suzan–Lori Parks,
use the idea of “creative nomadism” to mark a fluid sense of cultural identity.
Building on his observations of Pomo Afro Homo’s Dark Fruit, Jay Plum
traces contemporary issues surrounding African American gay and lesbian
politics, calling into question conventional notions of black sexuality.

348 African American Performance and Theater History

 Finally, these essays have born witness to the broad scope of African Amer-
ican culture. They have revealed that the black experience is neither mono-
lithic nor unified. Anthony Appiah, reflecting on the meaning of African
American culture, remarks:
If this means shared beliefs, values, practices, [it] does not exist: what exists
are African-American cultures, and though these are created and sustained
in largemeasurebyAfrican-Americans,theycannotbeunderstoodwithout
reference to the bearers of other American racial identities.10
Building diverse cultural and critical perspectives, the essays collected here
are a commentary on how varying representations of blackness contribute to
the formation of racial identity. Diana R. Paulin, for example, asserts that in
the nineteenth century miscegenation was a definitive tool used in the per-
formance of race. According to Paulin, interracial desires upset standards and
conventions that were designed to restrict racial differences; the performance
of miscegenation and desire challenged racial identity and blurred its dis-
tinctions. Analyzing the mechanisms of black–white relations in the con-
struction of theater companies, Tina Redd looks closely at a specific instance,
the 1930s Birmingham Alabama’s Negro Unit of theFederalTheaterProject.
Her study ramifies the struggle between white administrators and black
creative artists for control of the Negro Unit. Redd’s analysis has relevancy
for today, given similar repercussions in many current Hollywood projects
where white executives and producers dictate control over black directors
and actors. Harry J. Elam, Jr., draws a parallel between two seemingly
disparate plays. Despite the fact that William Wells Brown’s The Escape, or
Leap to Freedom (1858) and Charles Gordone’s No Place to Be Somebody (1969)
are a century apart, Elam convincingly demonstrates how the performance
of race in both dramas acts as a destabilizing force. Both plays, Elam asserts,
are rife with conflicting signals and contradictory meanings of race. Christina
E. Sharp develops the theme of performance in Gayl Jones’s novel, Corregidora
(1975), calling attention to the unstable notion of reading and performance.
Performance functions in the novel as a reenactmentofslavery’spast,enabling
the characters, and by extension the readers, to “reenact” past events.
According to Brenda Dixon Gottschild, American culture “is a panoply of
quotations from a wide spectrum of past and present conditioning forces,”
and, as a result, “we desperately need to cut through the convoluted web of
racism that denies acknowledgment of the Africanist part of the whole.”11
This study has examined how the representation of blackness contributes to
the American “panoply.” The final chapter brings together James V. Hatch,
Margaret B. Wilkerson, and Sandra L. Richards, three distinguished scholars
of African American performance and theater history, in a roundtable dis-
cussion. In her closing remarks, Wilkerson warns us that, despite progress,
the goals of the Civil Rights Movement remain unfinished. She laments
efforts by many to return to a time when discrimination was tolerated. As a
pioneering scholar of African American theater history, Wilkerson has strug-

Afterword 349
gled to bring to our attention the works of black playwrights and performers
during times when African American scholarship was deemed unfashionable
and marginalized. Wilkerson, like many others, fought to make African
American theater history part of the curriculum. If change is to come, it will
come because of the perseverance and work of scholars who have paved the
way. We must now build on their efforts.

notes

1. James V. Hatch, “Here Comes Everybody: Scholarship and Black Theatre

History,” in Interpreting the Theatrical Past: Essays in the Historiography of Performance,
ed. Thomas Postlewait and Bruce A. McConachie (Iowa City: University of Iowa
Press, 1989), 148.
2. Wahneema Lubiano, “Constructing and Reconstructing Afro-American Lit-
erary Texts: The Critic as Ambassador and Referee,” American Literary History 1, no.
2 (Summer 1989): 433.
3. Errol Hill, ed., The Theatre of Black Americans: A Collection of Critical Essays
(1980, reprint, New York: Applause, 1987), 1.
4. Houston A. Baker, Jr., Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance (Chicago: Univer-
sity of Chicago Press, 1987), 21.
5. W. E. B. Du Bois, “Krigwa Players Little Negro Theatre,” Crisis 32 (July
1926): 134. Du Bois writes that the “plays of a real Negro theatre must be . . . About
us, By us, For us, and Near us.” Only then, he says, “can a real folk–play movement
of American Negroes be built up.”
6. Sandra L. Richards, “Writing the Absent Potential: Drama, Performance, and
the Canon of African-American Literature,” in Performativity and Performance, ed.
Andrew Parker and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (London: Routledge, 1995), 65.
7. Edouard Glissant, Caribbean Discourse, trans. J. Michael Dash (Charlottesville:
University of Virginia Press, 1989), 248–249.
8. Manthia Diawara, “Cultural Studies/Black Studies,” in Borders, Boundaries,and
Frames: Cultural Criticism and Cultural Studies, ed. Mae Henderson (New York:
Routledge, 1995), 209.
9. Language is one form of expression, but performativity explores another “lan-
guage” of the body, which asserts expressive communication. Hence, performativity
becomes another important way in which black people communicate desires, frus-
trations, and the irony of living in a discriminating world.
10. K. Anthony Appiah, Color Conscious: The Political Morality of Race (Princeton,
N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996), 95–96.
11. Brenda Dixon Gottschild, Digging the Africanist Presence in American Perfor-
mance: Dance and Other Contexts (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1996), 3.

350 African American Performance and Theater History

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351
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Book Specialists, 1970.
———. Sorrow Is the Only Faithful One: The Life of Owen Dodson. Urbana: University
of Illinois Press, 1993.
Hatch, James V., and Leo Hamalian, eds. Lost Plays of the Harlem Renaissance, 1920–
1940. Detroit, Mich.: Wayne State University Press, 1996.
Hatch, James V., and Ted Shine, eds. Black Theatre USA: Plays by African Americans,
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———. Ed Bullins: A Literary Biography. Detroit, Mich.: Wayne State University
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Hill, Anthony D. Pages from the Harlem Renaissance. New York: Peter Lang, 1996.
Hill, Errol. Shakespeare in Sable. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1984.
———, ed. The Theatre of Black Americans: A Collection of Critical Essays. New York:
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Hudson, Theodore R. From LeRoi Jones to Amiri Baraka. Durham, N.C.: Duke Uni-
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Hughes, Langston, and Milton Meltzer. Black Magic: A Pictorial History of theAfrican-
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Isaacs, Edith J. R. The Negro in the American Theatre. New York: Theatre Arts, 1947.
Jennis, La Vina Delois. Alice Childress. New York: Twayne, 1995.
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356 Selected Bibliography

 Index

Abbey, Edward, 97 Dutchman, 61, 82–83, 147, 161, 240–

abolitionism, 290–291 241
Abyssinia, 199 as advocate of armed resistance, 42–43
Africa audience reception of, 82–83, 241
and African American writers, 47–48, on Hansberry, 41, 42–43
149–150, 296 Home, 240
and colonialism, 49 political views of, 60
independence of, 47, 50–51 on revolutionary theater, 6–7, 60–61, 64,
African American theater, critics’ and 76n.20, 136–137
scholars’ contributions to, 331– The Slave, 161
334 Slave Ship, 62, 70–71, 72, 79n.57, 301
African Grove Institute, 16n.11 The Toilet, 241
Aiken, George, 21 violent rhetoric of, 61
Alabama College, 274 Barber, Duncan, Jr., 61
Aldridge, Ira, 15n.1 Barnum, P. T., 21
Alexander, Elizabeth, 315 Beacon Theatre, 140
Allen, Maud, 192 Becker-Leckrone, Megan, 200
Allen, Richard, 118 Bed-Sty Street Academy Workshop, 62
Ambush, Benny Sato, 150 Bellamy, Lou, 85
American Negro Theatre, 334 Bentley, Frank, 284
Andrews, Dwight, 162 Berry, Jason, 103
Anzaldúa, Gloria, 216 Bhabha, Homi, 20, 22, 172, 238, 240, 288–
Armstrong, Louis, 103 289
Armstrong Park, 103, 105 Big Minstrel Festival, 185
Artaud, Antonin, 60, 76n.20 Billops, Camille, 338
audience binary structuring, 338
African American, 178 Birdoff, Harry, 22, 34
white, 81–85, 88–97, 156–157, 160, Birmingham, Alabama
301 Community Center building, 281
Ayler, Albert, 61 gospel music in, 280–281
industrial development of, 281–282
Baker, Houston A., Jr., 194, 346 Jefferson Theatre, 278–279
Baker, Jacob, 277–278 Little Theatre, 279
Baker, Josephine, 127, 187, 193, 198 Municipal Auditorium, 279
Baldwin, James, 212, 226 Negro theater project in, 273
Blues for Mr. Charlie, 42 administration of, 276–277, 279, 282,
Bandanna Land, 186, 199, 200 285
Baptist Women’s State Convention (1890), closing of, 284
117 formation of, 273–278
Baraka, Amiri, 132, 335 productions of, 279–281, 283
and BART/S, 60–61 sponsorship of, 277, 283
on the Chitlin Circuit, 140 Parks and Recreation Board, 274–277,
on color-blind casting, 133 280, 281, 283

357
Birmingham, Alabama (continued ) Brown, James, 63
racism in, 277, 278–279 Brown, William Wells
segregation in, 273, 275, 282 Escape; or, A Leap to Freedom, 178, 288,
white theater project in, 278–279, 282– 304n.11
283 characters in, 292
black aesthetic, 334 language of, 292–293
Black Arts Movement, 132, 331 as oratory, 291
aesthetics of, 57, 61, 62, 63–65, 67, 73, polyphonic qualities of, 292
75n.6, 79n.53, 301 stereotypes in, 293–294
and Black Power Movement, 56–57 The Experience, 290
critical metaphysics of, 57–61 as orator, 290
criticism of, 58 as performance artist, 291
cultural revolution of, 63 Browne, Vivian, 334
feminist artists in, 71–72 Brustein, Robert, 83, 88, 134–35, 149,
funding for, 137 157, 166n.2, 340–342
Hansberry, criticism of, 40, 42 Bullins, Ed, 61–62, 73, 132, 335
legacy of, 73–74 on avant-garde drama, 68–69
manifesto, 6 on the Chitlin Circuit, 148
and new orality, 65 In the Wine Time, 62
origins of, 59 on New Lafayette Theatre, 137
political views of, 59, 221 The Theme Is Blackness, 67–70, 72
preeminence of performance in, 65–66, We Righteous Bombers, 72
137 Butler, Judith, 252, 290
and property ownership, 65, 77n.27
and rejection of art object, 57–58, 65, 67– Cable, George Washington, The
68, 76n.7 Grandissimes, 104, 106–107, 108–
Black Arts Repertory Theater/School, 59– 109, 111–112
61, 62, 76n.18, 301 cakewalk, 185, 186, 199
Black Arts/West, 61, 62, 68 call and response, 120
Black Crook, The, 174 Callender’s Consolidated Colored Minstrels,
Black Gay Men United, 235 177
Black House (Oakland), 59, 61–62, 77n.37 calling the spirit
Black House (Philadelphia), 62 as challenge to patriarchy, 115, 118–
Black Nationalism, 215–216, 221, 240, 120, 123, 125, 128
242, 296, 302, 335 description of, 114–115, 120, 128
Black Panther Party, 56–57, 61, 77n.37 as performance, 115, 120–121, 122,
Black Patti and her Troubadours, 185 123
Black Power Movement, 132, 240 in secular space, 127
black theater canon, 336–338 Calloway, Terryl, 140
Black Theatre (journal), 62 Campbell, Bartley, The White Slave
Black Vernacular English, 227 conciliatory ending of, 262
blackface, 23–24, 172 language in, 256
Blanchard, Jayne, 94 minstrel elements in, 261
blues performance, 306–308 miscegenation in, 251–252, 254, 263
Boissiere, Carl, 61 neutrality of, 255–256
Bondi, Liz, 216 performance of race in, 251–252, 256–
Bonehill, Bessie, 187 261
Boucicault, Dion, The Octoroon, 255 racism in, 257–258
Braidotti, Rosi, 214–215, 222, 227 reviews of, 261, 262–263
Branch, William, In Splendid Error, 9 stereotypes in, 261
Branner, Djola Bernard, 235, 238, 241–242 summary of, 254–255
Brawley, Tawana, 311 tragic octoroon tropes in, 255–256,
British Blondes, 174 259, 260, 263–264
Broadus, Hillery X, 61 Carby, Hazel, 197, 198
Brooks, Gwendolyn, 71, 79n.60 Carter, Mandy, 243

358 Index
Castro, Fidel, 59 reconstruction of, 104, 106, 108, 112
Chapmyn, James, 142–144 slave dances in, 103, 106–110
Our Young Black Men Are Dying . . . , 143 Connelly, Marc, The Green Pastures, 280
Chaudhuri, Una, 216 Connelly, Ward, 343
Chebo Evans Third World Three Black Conquergood, Dwight, 120
Trio, 66 Conteh-Morgan, John, 152
Chelsea Theatre, 70 Conway, H. J., 21
Childress, Alice, 221 Cook, Will Marion, 177, 184, 186
Chitlin Circuit, 339–340 The Southerners, 185
funding of, by drug dealers, 143–44 Copeland, Roger, 192
origins of, 139 Corbett, Elizabeth, 24
as popular black theater, 138, 139–140, Corthron, Kia, 233n.42
141, 146–147 Courlander, Harold, Swamp Mud, 281
promotion of, 143, 146 crack funerals, 104, 110–111
success of, 140, 142–143, 146 Creamer, Tom, 159
Christy, George, 179 Crenshaw, Kimberlé, 124
church, African American, 114–115 Creole Company, 180, 186
African influences on, 116, 125, Creole Show, The, 180–181, 185
129 nn.5–6 Croly, David, 253
African Methodist Episcopal, 118 Crossroads Theatre, 133, 135, 146
Baptist, 117–118, 130n.34 Crouch, Stanley, 333
the Bible in, 119, 120, 123 Crowe, Ray, 278
dance in, 116, 119 Cruse, Harold, 60, 62, 65, 66, 77n.25,
fluidity of, 115 78n.38, 78n.43
glossolalia in, 122–125
patriarchal structure of, 117–119 Dabney, Virginius, 86
Pentecostal, 122, 130n.26 Daly, Ann, 202, 204
as performance site, 115, 119, 120–121, dance
123, 126 and African American women
in secular space, 126–127, barriers to, 194, 197
sexual dynamics in, 121–122, 129n.25, and eroticism, 198
130 nn.27–30 choreographers,185–186,192–193,198–
during slavery, 116–117, 125–126 208
women in, 115, 117–128, 129n.21 in church, 116, 119
Women’s Day services, 117 modern, 192, 193–194
Cleage, Pearl, 233n.42 African American women’s
Cleaver, Eldridge, 61–62 contribution to, 193–208
Clinton, Catherine, 31–32 “founding mothers” of, 192–193
Clum, John M., 236 and primitivism, 198, 205–206
Cohen, Cathy, 243 Salome, 199–206
Cole, Bob, 177 sexuality in, 194, 199–201
works (with J. Rosamond Johnson and of slaves, 103, 106–110
James Weldon Johnson) Danzette Sisters, 184
Red Moon, 180, 205 Dara, Olu, 162
The Shoo-Fly Regiment, 179–180 Dark Fruit, 235
Coleman, Ornette, 61 “Aunties in America,” 236–239
Coles, Robert, 195 “Black and Gay: A Psycho-Sex Study,”
color-blind casting, 90–91, 133, 341–342 243–245
Coltrane, John, 61 characters in, 236–237, 239, 243–244
Concept East, 62, 70 “Chocolate City, U.S.A.,” 236, 243
Cone, James, 125 “Doin’ Alright,” 240
Congo Circus, 107 “Sweet Sadie,” 241–242
Congo Square “Tasty,” 239
documentary film about, 103–104 themes of, 235–236
history of, 107–108, 109 Darkest America, 180

Index 359
Darling Nelly Gray, 178 Farrakhan, Louis, 135
Dashiki Project Theatre, 62 Federal Theater Project
Davis, Angela, 306–308, 333 advisory board, 271–272
Davis, Ronald L., 293 aims of, 271–273
Davy, Kate, 237 allegations of Communist connections,
de Beauvoir, Simone, 51 282
de Certeau, Michel, 65 authority of, 275, 284
Dean, Dora, 193 Negro units of, 272–73
DeFrantz, Thomas, 193 administration of, 273, 276, 285
Dempster, Elizabeth, 192 aims of, 273
Dent, Tom, 59 in Birmingham, 273–285
Desmond, Jane, 192 in Harlem, 272, 274, 278, 280, 284
Diamond, Elin, 9 in Seattle, 280
Dijkstra, Bram, 200 origins of, 271
Dougherty, Romeo, 333 racialized nature of, 273
Douglas, Ann, 193 and regional politics, 272, 274–277,
Dove, Rita, The Darker Faces of the Earth, 279, 282, 283–285
255 feminist theater, 215–216, 219
Drama Review, The, 62 Fierce Love: Stories from Black Gay Life,
Dreamland, 185 235
D’Souza, Dinesh, 87–88 Fiofori, Tam, 58–59
Du Bois, W. E. B., 45 Fisk Jubilee Singers, 177
on black theater, 6, 136, 338, 342 Flanagan, Hallie, 271–275, 277, 279, 283,
on the color-line, 172 284
and double-consciousness, 217 Fletcher, Tom, 179
Duckworth, Sarah, 33 Fletcher, Winona, 339
Dumont, Frank Flint, Timothy, 109
The Boys of New York End Men’s Joke Book, Ford Foundation, 137
171 Forsyne, Ida, 182, 185, 187
The Witmark Amateur Minstrel Guide . . . , Forte, Jeanie, 291
171 Fox, Caroline, 22
Dunbar, Paul Laurence, 177 Fox-Genovese, Elizabeth, 207
Duncan, Isadora, 192, 202, 204, 205–206 Fox Theatre, 140
Dunham, Katherine, 193 Fraden, Rena, 285
Dutton, Charles, 155 Franko, Mark, 192
Dyer, Richard, 23, 237 Frazier, E. Franklin, 217–218
Dyson, Michael, 121 Fredrickson, George, 20, 291
Freedom (newspaper), 45
Ebony (magazine), 57 Freeman, Brian, 235–237, 240, 242, 243,
Ebony Showcase Theatre, 144 245
Edwards, B. E., 182 Fuller, Charles, 59, 63, 65, 67
Edwards, Harry, 284 A Soldier’s Play, 63
Elam, Harry, 71 Fuller, Loı̈e, 192
Ellis, Trey, 218 funerals
Ellison, Ralph, 339 crack, 104, 110–111
Invisible Man, 289 jazz, 104, 110
Epps, Sheldon, 88, 90–93 Furman, Roger, 60
Erenberg, Lewis, 193–194
Ernest, John, 292, 293 Gaetano, Signore, 107
Erstein, Hap, 160 Gaines, Kevin, 197
Evrie, John H. Van, 253 Garrett, Shelly, 144–146, 339
expatriates, 212 Barber Shop, 144
Beauty Shop, 142, 144–146, 339–340
Fanon, Frantz, 290 Beauty Shop Part 2, 144
Farnsworth, William, 278, 279 Laundromat, 144

360 Index
Garrett, Shelly (continued ) characters in, 42, 43, 46, 335
Living Room, 144 emendations to, directorial, 44
Snuff and Miniskirts, 144 revival of, 42
Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., 58, 85, 240 summary of, 40
Gay Rights, Special Rights, 243 themes of, 40, 43–44, 46–47, 127,
gender 338, 340
and nomadism, 219–221 religious views, 50
performance of, 173–176, 178–187 Robeson, Paul, association with, 45
Gilman, Sander, 196 Happy Girls, 186
Gilpin, Charles, 179, 336 Harlem Youth Project, 60
Gilroy, Paul, 227, 318 Harrison, Paul Carter, 164, 165
Giroux, Henry, 86–87 Hart, Tony, 174
Goldberg, David Theo, 271 Hatch, James, 345
Goldberg, Whoopi, 243 Haverly’s Colored Minstrels, 177
Goldberger, Paul, 134 Hawkins, Thomas, 182
Gomez, Jewelle, 243 Haynes, Albert, 60
Goode, Gloria Davis, 118 Hazzard-Gordon, Katrina, 193
Goodman Theater, 159 Henderson, Mae Gwendolyn, 123–123,
Gordone, Charles. See OyamO 125, 207
Gottschalk, Louis Moreau, 108 Herndon, Angelo, 282
Gottschild, Brenda Dixon, 150, 155, 163– Higgenson, Vy, Mama I Want to Sing,
164, 165, 193 142
Graham, Martha, 192 Higginbotham, Evelyn Brooks, 117, 118,
Gramsci, Antonio, 116 128, 197
Granville, Gertie, 174 Hill, Abram, 334
Grimke, Angelina, 338 Hill, Anita, 124, 310
Gubar, Susan, 176 Hill, Errol, 334, 346
Guevara, Ernesto “Che,” 59 Hill, J. Leubrie, 177, 180
Gunther, John, Inside Africa, 49 Himes, Chester, 212
Gupton, Eric, 235 Hindle, Annie, 187
Guthrie Theatre, 88–93 Hine, Darlene Clark, 219
Hines, Florence, 182, 185, 186, 187
Haldene, Verner, 282–283 Hogan, 179
Haley, Alex, Autobiography of Malcolm X, 73 Hogan, Robert, 9
Hall, Stuart, 6, 13 home, as metaphor, 216, 218
Hall-Rogers, Thomas, Altars of Steel, 283 homosexuality
Hamlin, Larry Leon, 138, 140, 144, 242 between African Americans, 239–240
Hammerstein, Oscar, 206 artists, 235
Hampton Singers, 177 cultural movement of, 237
Hansberry, Lorraine, 221, 337, 343 and gay plays, 236–238, 242
and Africa, 46–50 and homophobia, 239, 240, 243
on audience, 43 and identity, 241–242, 244–245
biographical details of, 44–45 masculine violence against, 240–241
on her craft, 43 politics of, 238–239, 243
critics of, 40, 41–42 and race, 236–238, 239
FBI surveillance of, 45–46 hooks, bell, 124, 228, 229, 306
feminism of, 51 Houseman, John, 284
Les Blancs, 4–5, 16n.3 Howard, Cordelia, 22
characters in, 48–49, 50, 51–54 Howard, George, 22
summary of, 48 Hughes, Langston, Mulatto, 255
themes of, 46, 48, 49–51, 53–54 Humphrey, Doris, 192
marriage of, 45 Hunter, Eddie, 180
political views of, 44–46, 48 Huntington Theatre Company, 138
Raisin in the Sun Hurston, Zora Neale, Their Eyes Were
actors in, 42 Watching God, 123, 343

Index 361
Hutchins, Jeannie, 93 Kenyatta, Jomo, 47
Hyers Sisters, 178, 180–181 Kerr, Walter, 333
Kersands, Billy, 179, 182
In Dahomey, 199 Kersands, Louise, 182
Ingram, Rex, 280 Khan, Ricardo, 133, 146–147
International Labor Defense, 282 Korson, George, 280
Ira Aldridge Theater, 156 King, Coretta Scott, 302
Irigaray, Luce, 198 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 59, 84, 302
Isaacs, Diane, 195 King, Woodie, Jr., 146
Isaacs, Harold, 195–196 Kisch, Richard, 52
Isaacs, Howard, 47 Kneebone, John, 86
Kuryluk, Ewa, 200
Jack, Sam T., 180 Kushner, Tony, 236, 237, 238
Jackson, Esther, 342 Angels in America, 236–237, 246n.9
Jackson, J. A., 331, 332, 333 Millennium Approaches, 236, 237
Jackson, Janet, 127 Perestroika, 237
Jackson, Shannon, 87
Jamison, Judith, 127, 193 La Cage aux Folles, 236, 238
jazz La Passionara, 51–52
funerals, 104, 110 Langston, Tony, 333
links to Congo Square, 103 Larsen, Nella, Passing, 255, 290
Jefferson, Margo, 138 Latrobe, Benjamin Henry, 107, 110–111
Jefferson, Thomas, 95 Laurie, Joe, Jr., 175
Jewell, K. Sue, 194 Lee, Jarena, 118
Johnson, Georgia Douglas, 338 Lee, Spike, 81
Johnson, J. Rosamond, 177 Lewis, Theophilus, 331–334
Johnson, James Weldon, 101, 177, 178 liberal attitudes
Johnson, Jerah, 108 critique of, 84, 85–88, 96
Jolly Joe’s Lady Minstrels, 171, 172, 174, 187 definition of, 81–82
Jones, Gayl of guilt, 96
Corregidora negative connotations of, 83–84
blues in, 314–315, 319–320, 322 and social change, 82, 83, 84, 86–87
cultural aphasia in, 310 in the South, 86
historical memory, 308–309, 311, Liberator (magazine), 59, 60
314, 318–319, 320–321 Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Fund, 135,
legacy of slavery performed in, 306– 341
308, 310–311, 314, 316–319, 321– Limbaugh, Clyde, 279–280, 283, 284
322 Home in Glory, 279, 280
racial identity in, 317 Mining Town, 283
reproduction in, 307–309, 311, 313, Lindo, Delroy, 155
315, 319, 320, 323 Locke, Alain, 338
sexual violence in, 312, 313, 318 Loften, William, 182
summary of, 307–308 Lott, Eric, 23, 174, 303
on English language, 313 Lubiano, Wahneema, 62–63, 77n.27, 345
on positive race images, 312 Lucas, Sam, 19, 178
Jones, James Earl, 133 Lumumba, Patrice, 59
Jones, LeRoi. See Baraka, Amiri Lyles, Aubrey, 179
Jones, Sissieretta, 185 Lyons, Charles and James, 292
Josie’s Cabaret and Juice Joint, 235
Jung, Carl, 196 Macbeth, Robert, 62, 137
Mahone, Sydné, 219–220, 221
Karenga, Maulana Ron, 67, 133, 335, 338 Malcolm X, 59, 72–73, 153, 302
Keith and Proctor, 184 Autobiography, 73
Kennedy, Adrienne, 221, 233n.42 mammy characters
Funnyhouse of a Negro, 255 asexuality of, 32, 236–237

362 Index
mammy characters (continued ) impersonators,
servitude of, 35 female, 173–174, 176, 178–180, 181–
as white collaborators, 31–32 187
maroons, 109 male, 174–176, 180–182, 184
Martin, Wendy, 198 performance of color in, 172–174, 176,
Marvin X, 62 179, 180, 187
masculinity, 239–240 performance of gender in, 173–176, 178–
of Black Nationalism, 240–241 187
McCarter Theatre, 132 performers in, 174, 179
McCauley, Robbie, 94–96 African American, 176–187
Sally’s Rape, Penumbra production of, 88, women, 174–176, 178, 180–187
93–96 “plantation” scenes, 177–178, 181, 184,
McClendon, Rose, 272–273, 276 187
McClure, Bruce, 276 songs for, 173–174, 176, 178, 181
McConachie, Bruce, 21–22, 25, 31, 24 stereotypes in, 173, 177, 181, 184
McCoo, Harold White, 280 and Uncle Tom’s Cabin stage adaptations,
McDougald, Elise Johnson, 194 20, 172, 174, 178
McGee, John, 274–279, 283, 284 miscegenation
McIntosh, Tom, 179 historical responses to, 253–254
McNeil, Claudia, 42 in nineteenth-century literature, 251–
Meltzer, François, 200 252
memory and racial subjectivity, 252, 265
cultural, 101, 112, 150, 154, 213, 308 as transgressive relationship, 251, 252–
environments of, 101, 103, 108, 112 253, 261, 263–265
of the flesh, 308 “Miss Lucy Long,” 173–174
nonreproductive, 307 Mitchell, Loften, 334
in reconstructing history, 104, 107, 109 Morrison, M. Wood, Great Day, 283
Mercer, Kobena, 238–239 Morrison, Toni, 324n.7, 343
Micheaux, Oscar, The Underworld, 185 Beloved, 114, 128
middle class, African American, 196, 199, on enablers of whiteness, 32, 36
217–218, 231n.24, 334 Sula, 123
Middle Passage, commemorative work, 306 Moses, Gilbert, 70
migration Moss, Carlton, 284
of African Americans, 212–213, 214, Motts, Robert, 179
219, 226, 228–229, 231n.21 Moving beyond the Margins: A Festival of
and creative expression, 213–217, 219, New Voices, 235
223 Moyers, Bill, 151
in cultural memory, 213, 229 Muhammad, Elijah, 153
Mill, John Stuart, 81–82 Munto reading group, 57, 58, 59, 68
Miller, Arthur, Death of a Salesman, 133 musical revues, 178, 180–181, 186
Guthrie Theatre production of, 88–93
Miller, Flournoy, 179 National Association for the Advancement
Miller, Malcolm, 284 of Colored People, 272
Miller, May, Harriet Tubman, 9 National Baptist Convention (1895), 117–
Miller and Slater Company, 180 118
Mills, Florence, 193 National Black Theatre Festival, 138, 242
mimicry, colonial, 288–289 National Conference of African American
Minneapolis/St. Paul, theater community Theater, 336
of, 88 Neal, Larry, 59, 60, 62, 65, 73, 78n.43,
minstrel show 331, 334
audience for, 162, 177, 178 on Baraka, 240
characters in, 172, 174, 179, 180, 181– on the Black Arts Movement, 6, 57–58,
182 60
dandy, 182, 184, 185 on poetry, 63
guides for, 171, 172, 187 on theatre, 65–66

Index 363
Negro Ensemble Company, 137, 138 Pekin Theatre, 179
Nemiroff, Robert, 45, 47–48, 51 Penumbra Theatre, 82, 85, 88, 93–96
Nesmith, Eugene, 85 Phelan, Peggy, 21, 26, 302, 307
New Federal Theatre, 146 Pitcher, Oliver, The One, 72
New Lafayette Theatre, 62, 137 Poitier, Sidney, 42, 242
New Orleans Poli and Fox, 184
antinoise legislation, 105–106 Pollard, Percival, 199
Congo Square, 103–112 Pomo Afro Homos, 235–245
French Quarter, 105–106 Porto Rico Girls, 186
as site of performance postmodernism, 216
for funerals, 104, 110–111 Powell, Richard, 194
intercultural, 101, 107, 108–109 primitivism, 195–198, 205–206
of slave dances, 103, 106–110 Primus, Pearl, 193
of street performers, 105 productive ambivalence, 288–289, 293,
Treme, 105–106 297, 302–303
Nketia, J. H. Kwabena, 104 Public Theater, 235, 301
nomadism, creative, 213–229, 233n.42 Put and Take, 180
Nora, Pierre, 101, 103, 150
Raboteau, Albert J., 116, 119
O’Casey, Sean, 133 race
octoroon/mulatto conventions, 255, 256, as ambivalent signifier, 289
260 analyses of
Olaniyan, Tejumola, 154, 165 biological, 4, 15n.1, 173, 194–195,
O’Neill, Eugene, 336 259
oratory, as racialized performance, 290–291 constructivist, 4, 5, 302, 334–336
OyamO (Charles Gordone), 134, 137 essentialist, 334–336
on avant-garde theater, 138 ontological, 296
on black theater, 148 binary construction of, 298
on the Chitlin Circuit, 144–145 destabilization of, 251, 302
No Place To Be Somebody, 288 and the development of black culture,
characters in 295–297 194, 197
language of, 298, 299–300 displacement of, 261–262
summary of, 296–298 in Great Britain, 25
themes of, 296–297, 299, 301 and multicultural politics, 81–83, 86,
88, 96, 239
Papp, Joseph, 301, 333 in New Orleans performancehistory,102–
Parker, A. H., 281 103
Parks, Suzan-Lori, 134, 147, 303 performance of, 290, 292–294, 297,
The America Play, 220, 227–228, 299, 300, 307, 335–336
233n.46, 303 representation of, 88, 218–219, 251–
Betting on the Dust Commander, 220 252, 256–260, 296, 300
characters of, 220, 222, 224–227 segregation of, 253–254
and creative nomadism, 213–214, 215, as “skin,” 102, 106, 108, 110, 296
217, 221–229 subjectivity of, 252, 256, 261, 264
dramatic strategy of, 223–224 uplift of, 197
Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third racial identity
Kingdom, 9, 220, 222–226 African American
language of, 227–228 African roots of, 296
Last Black Man, 220–221, 223–225, and importance of naming, 294
227, 232n.38 and meanings of blackness, 296, 297,
Venus, 220–221 299–301
Patterson, Charles, 60 in relation to white world, 290, 298–
Patterson, Orlando, 309–310 299
Patterson, William, 60, 61 performance of, 289, 290, 292–294, 297–
Paul, Ivan, 278, 282 300

364 Index
Ralston, Blanche, 284 Simon, Bruce, 313
Reed, Linda, 85–86 Singh, Amrijit, 9
Reid, Mark, 194 Six Degrees of Separation, 236, 238
religion, African American. See church, Skerrett, Joseph, Jr., 9
African American slavery
Rhodes, Colin, 195 in Great Britain, 25
Rice, Rebecca, Everlasting Arms, 94 in New Orleans, 103, 106–109
Rice, William Henry, 179 and performance of subservience, 13
Rich, Frank, 142 and religious worship, 116–117, 125–
Richards, Lloyd, 133, 135, 154, 155, 158, 126, 129nn.5–6, 129n.10
165, 167n.23 in Sally’s Rape, 93–96
Richardson, L. Kenneth, 160 in Slave Ship (Baraka), 70–71
Riggs, Marlon, 235, 239 Smart Set, The, 180, 185
Riis, Thomas, 177, 178 Smith, Anna Deavere, 127, 134, 219, 220,
ring shout, 126, 131nn.45–46 291, 304n.13
Robbins, Jerome, 185 Fires in the Mirror, 233n.42, 292
Roberson, Susan, 29 On the Road, 233n.42
Robeson, Paul, 45 Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992, 233n.42, 292
Robinson, Willie, 182, 184 Smith, Bessie, 185
Rogers, Alex, 186 Smith, Gus, 284
Román, David, 236 Smith, Walter, 182
romantic racialism, 20, 291 Snellings, Rolland, 60, 77n.27
“Room 222,” 244 social class and nomadism, 217–218
Rose, Phyllis, 187 Sollers, Werner, 137
Russell, Sylvester, 333 Southern Conference Movement, 85–86
Southern, Eileen, 178
sacred/profane dialectic, 115 Soyinka, Wole, 133, 150, 165
Salome, 200 Spanish Civil War, 51–52
Sampson, Henry T., 178, 185 Spear, Robert, 206
Sanchez, Sonia Spence, Eulalie, 333
The Bronx Is Next, 71–72 Spillers, Hortense, 308
Malcolm/Man Don’t Live Here No Mo, 71– Spirit Tides from Congo Square, 103–104, 110
73 Spitz, David, 81–82
Sister Son/Ji, 71–72 Squire (maroon leader), 109
Sarah Vaughan Concert Hall, 139 St-Denis, Ruth, 192
Schechner, Richard, 9, 13, 253 Starr, S. Frederick, 108
Schultz, Alfred P., 253 Steele, Shelby, 84, 96
Schweitzer, Albert, 48–49 stereotypes
Scott-Heron, Gil, 73 of black homosexuals, 236
Scottsboro Boys, 282 in the Chitlin Circuit, 142
Seale, Bobby, 56 in Death of a Salesman, Guthrie
Seidman, Steven, 244–245 production, 91–92
Selwyn, Blanche, 187 in Escape, 294
Shabazz, Betty, 302 fixity of, 20–21, 177, 335
Shange, Ntozake, 216–217, 227, 233n.42 in minstrel shows, 173, 177, 181
for colored girls . . . , 128 in nineteenth-century representation, 20,
Sharp, Laura, 274–278, 283 23–24, 25
Sharpeville Massacre, 50 resistance to, 194, 237
Shepp, Archie, 70 in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 20, 22
Shipp, Jesse, 177, 186 Stevedore, 280
Shorenstein, Carol, 165 Stewart, James, 58, 59, 65, 67
Showalter, Elain, 200 Stewart, Susan, 242
Shuffle Along, 180 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 19, 20, 26, 33–34,
Sidran, Ben, 65 293
Silverman, Kaja, 239 Strand Theatre, 140

Index 365
Studio Watts Workshop, 62 minstrel show elements in, 20, 22, 23,
Suggs, Donald, 243 38n.10
Sun Ra, 58–59, 61 motherhood in, 27, 33, 36
stereotypes in, 20, 22, 23, 32, 37
Theatre Communications Group, 132 versions of,
Theatre Owners Booking Association, 139, by Aiken, 21–23, 25, 27, 29–30, 31,
184 34
Thomas, Clarence, 310 by Barnum, 21
Thomas, Helen, 192 by Conway, 21–22, 25, 27, 29–30, 34
Thompson, Lydia, 174 in Great Britain, 24–25, 30
Thorne, Erika, 94 by Lemon and Taylor, 30–31
Tilley, Vesta, 185, 187 by Stowe (The Christian Slave), 33–34,
Toll, Robert C., 178 36
Tom Show. See Uncle Tom’s Cabin Umbra Poets Workshop, 59, 60
Tongues Untied, 235, 239 Urban League, 272
Torgovnick, Marianna, 195
Touré, Askia M. See Snellings, Rolland Vann, Robert L., 282
Townes, Emilie, 126 vaudeville, 178, 180, 182, 184–187
Treadwell, Sophie, Machinal, 283 Vega, Marta Morena, 127
Tribble, Andrew, 179–180 Vorlicky, Robert, 241
Tucker, Sophie, 185
Tuskegee Institute, 274, 275 Wagner, Ann, 194
Wakeman, George, 253
Uncle Tom’s Cabin, stage adaptations of, 178 Walker, Aida Overton, 182, 184, 185–186,
actors in 187
Bates, Marie, 25 choreography of, 185–186, 193, 198–
Chippendale, Miss, 25 208
Fox, Caroline (Mrs. G. C. Howard), Salome, 193, 199–206
22, 24 reviews of, 201, 206
Hampie, Addie, 38n.10 Walker, George, 177, 184, 185–186, 199,
Howard, Cordelia, 22 205
Howard, George, 22 Wallace, Michele, 323
Lucas, Sam, 19, 38n.10 Walton, Lester A., 201
Martin, Bella, 38n.10 Ward, Douglas Turner, 133, 137
Payton, Lew, 38n.10 Washington, Booker T., 194
characters in Watkins, Mel, 178, 293
Cassy, 26–31 Weber, Mary, 274–278, 283–284
Chloe, 32–35 Weeks, Jeffrey, 196
comic, 26, 34 Wellstone, Paul, 84
Eliza, 26, 27, 30, 31, 33 Wesley, Richard, Black Terror, 72
Emmeline, 26, 27, 30, 31 Wesner, Ella, 187
George Harris, 27, 29, 30 West, Cornel, 116, 117
George Shelby, 27, 34, 36–37 West, Dorothy, The Wedding, 255
Haley, 33 White, Charles A., 178
Harry, 27, 33 White, Edgar, Underground, 72
Little Eva, 22–23, 24, 35, 37, 174 White, Hayden, 195
Mammy, 35–36 White, Marvin K., 235, 238, 239
mammy (type), 32, 35 Whitman, Pops, 184
Marie St. Clare, 35–36 Whitman Sisters, 182–184, 187
mulatto, 26–27, 30, 31 Alberta, 182–185, 187
Ophelia, 36 Alice, 182, 184
Simon Legree, 27, 29, 30–31, 37, 258 Essie, 182, 184
St. Clare, 25–26 Mabel, 182, 184
Tom, 24, 29, 30, 33, 34–35, 36–37 Mattie, 182
Topsy, 22–26, 30, 172, 185 Whitney, Salem Tutt, 206–208

366 Index
Williams, Bert, 177, 184, 186, 199, 200, African presence in, 153, 158–160
205 characters, 153, 158, 159
Williams, Fannie Barrier, 197 reception of, 158–160
Williamson, Adrian, My Grandmother Two Trains Running, 136, 158
Prayed for Me, 139, 140–142 African presence in, 153, 162–164
Wilson, August characters in, 159, 162–163
and Africanist agenda, 151–165 on white theaters, 138
background of, 152–153 Wilson, Flip, 180
on black theater, 6, 7, 83, 88, 132, 133– Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 64
134, 135, 139, 340–342 Wolfe, George, 135, 147, 235, 237, 303
on color-blind casting, 133 The Colored Museum, 303, 334
Fences, 136, 144, 158 Wolford, Lisa, 122
African presence in, 153, 164–65 women, African American
characters in, 159, 164 in church, 115, 117–128, 129n.21
Jitney!, 153 complexity of, 207
Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, 136, 158, feminists, 124, 231n.22
167n.23 mobility of, 219
actors in, 155 and patriarchal structures, 311
African presence in, 153, 154–157 stereotyping of, 194, 196
characters in, 153, 155, 156 sexual, 196, 197
reception of, 154–156 subjective plurality of, 124, 125
themes of, 149 theatricality of, 115, 127
and keynote address to TCG, 132–133 Works Program Administration, 271
Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, 135, 149, 158 arts programs, 276, 281
African presence in, 153, 160–162 authority of, 275, 284
characters in, 161–162 Section for Professional and Service
music in, 162 Projects, 276
reception of, 154, 160–161 Women’s and Professional Services, 274
and National Black Theatre Summit, W.O.W. Cafe, 237
16n.11 Wright, Elizabeth, 245
The Piano Lesson, 136, 144 Wright, Richard, 212
African presence in, 153, 157–158
characters in , 158 Yale Rep, 138
reception of, 157, 158 Yarborough, Richard, 27, 28
separatist views of, 135, 147 Yard Theatre, 62
Seven Guitars, 153 Yiddish Theater, 142

Index 367