Read an Excerpt
Black Performance Theory
By Thomas F. DeFrantz, Anita Gonzalez Duke University Press
Copyright © 2014 Duke University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-7701-6
CHAPTER 1
NAVIGATIONS
Diasporic Transports and Landings
Anita Gonzalez
An aerial grid of cultural migrations in 1840 might show a satellite hovering over the Atlantic Ocean, recording data as boatloads of Africans land on various shores of a circum-Atlantic landscape. Once grounded, African migrants would begin to enact performances of social disenfranchisement. Both historically and in contemporary contexts, these transatlantic voyages, and their corresponding landing points—New York, Jamestown, Hispaniola, Cuba, Rio de Janeiro, Amsterdam, Liverpool—have become sites for negotiating new identities with other ethnic and social groups. Historical maps depict transatlantic slave migrations as triangle voyages. Ships laden with textiles travel to Africa, where they buy and sell. Ships of enslaved workers travel to the Americas and empty their loads. Finally, ships of sugar and/or cotton travel back to Europe. Economy, transport, and territory are part and parcel of this international exchange of blackness. In the colonial worlds of the sixteenth through the twentieth centuries Africans were just one of many economies of goods and services that moved across the seas. Each destination was a new beginning—a new origin point—for a diaspora experience.
Now imagine the aerial grid realigned so that the destinations—points outside of mainland Africa—are origin points for negotiating new social and political experiences. As conversations about the African diaspora broaden, it is impossible to ignore the complex interactions and transformations that constitute the field. "Recognizing that diasporic connections are made and remade, undermined and transformed means that they are neither universally constituted nor static" (Clarke and Thomas, 19). Too often, African diaspora performance is read as a response to Euro-American or white frames of reference. This stance ignores the complex interplay of African descendants with other ethnic groups in the panorama of social identities. Jacqueline Nassy Brown simplifies this notion, asserting: "Diaspora is better understood as a relation rather than a condition" (38). The interplay of ethnic communities at each local site is what constitutes transnational experiences of diaspora (Fryer; Small; Nassy Brown). Concepts about blackness are developed within the subject "blacks" and also constructed by others in response to the presence of Africans and African descendants.
Performances of blackness were unnecessary before African encounters with other ethnicities and their social practices. In the absence of common languages, performance—physical, vocal, and emotional—captures the ongoing negotiation of social status. This means that points of origin, claims of authenticity, national or racial inclusion, are all relative. This chapter examines two case studies, one contemporary and one historical, in which black performance is part of an ongoing and evolving dialogue with other ethnicities for economic and social status. My project focuses on local mediated practices that are responses to African presence. At two distinct geographic sites—Liverpool, England, and Oaxaca, Mexico—non-black performers use African identities as cultural collateral for a social acceptance that approximates whiteness. I call this process of negotiating with blackness a social navigation. Performers of all ethnicities learn the social codes of power and subservience, and then use performance to jockey public opinion as they steer a path toward upward mobility. In Liverpool, transplanted Irishmen use minstrelsy to distance themselves from the rapidly growing African and Black Caribbean community. In Oaxaca, the Chontal Native Americans impersonate the rebellion of their Negrito neighbors. In both cases, "black performance" requires a masquerade in which layers of applied makeup, or the impermeable surface of the physical mask, substitute for inferior social status. Social whiteness or mainstream acceptance is the ultimate goal for each of these ethnic communities that seek to distance themselves from negritude.
Smoked Irish and Whiteness
Whiteness studies of Irish heritage generally focus on the mid- to late nineteenth century, a historical time period when Irish populations migrated en masse to mainland England and consequently to the United States. The potato famine that ravaged Ireland between 1845 and 1855 was a direct impetus for this relocation. Poor Irish migrants congregated in ghettos and slums—the North End in Liverpool and Little Five Points in New York, where the transplanted "white Negroes" and real Negroes rubbed shoulders and became nearly indistinguishable. Stereotypical representations of Irish, while fictional, circulated and perpetuated ideas about Irish lifestyles. The Irish, like the African Americans in the United States, were associated with rural practices and agricultural communities. Irish were commonly referred to as "niggers turned inside out," while blacks were called "smoked Irish." Noel Ignatiev, in his foundational text How the Irish Became White, describes how constructs of race were used by the Catholic Irish to move from their status as an oppressed "race" to an oppressing group within the Americas. Nineteenth-century racial notions fixed the Irish at the lowest rung of the Caucasian hierarchy so that "by the 1860s the 'representative Irishman' was to all appearances an anthropoid ape" (Curtis, 2). Stigmatized but not subjugated, the Irish, especially in Liverpool, were far from passive victims of such prejudice. TheEmerald, "the first Irish Magazine ever brought out in Liverpool," drew critical attention to "Irish misrepresentations, for the vulgar stage representation of them has contributed more than even their own worse conduct has done toward making our countrymen in England objects of contempt, or of a condescending patronage (like the humoring of a lunatic or wayward buffoon) which is far harder to bear than down right contempt" (Belchem, 14).
Irish presence within newly formed urban enclaves of the nineteenth century provided a site for the alchemy of racial transformation. Trapped within unsanitary ghettos without food or running water, the two ethnicities, Irish and African, competed for jobs requiring unskilled labor. They drank and caroused together, and gave birth to mixed-race children, who further confused the racial categories designed by British and American social codes. Liverpool's "Black People of Mixed Origins," like Americas's mulattos, were ostracized through social codes and purged from mainstream cultural lives of both England and the United States with national laws that chose not to distinguish between the "filth" of its lowest-class citizens (Small, 515). As poverty persisted, how were the Irish to socially advance and overcome their racial stigma? Penal codes prevented them from voting, holding public office, or living within the boundaries of incorporated towns (Ignatiev, 34). Progressive movement toward social acceptance was a fraught path for the new settlers.
Performance was a strategic, vernacular way of publicly demonstrating the differences between the two immigrant groups. Over a one-hundred-year period, Irish residents strove to assimilate into the white working class and to advance within the social cauldron of the United States and British politics. Performance tropes captured the evolving social realignments that characterized this collective shift. Pubs and street corners were cultural breeding grounds for ongoing exchanges of performance activities in which song and dance competitions, fiddling, brawls, and drunken sea shanties pitted performers against one another. The dance competition between John Diamond and William Henry Lane (also known as Master Juba) exemplifies this type of performance exchange. This widely publicized dance battle of rhythm and foot clogging traversed the Atlantic Ocean as the two dancers competed in both London and New York. Their competitive performances were but one of many types of ethnic tradeoffs. In 1841 Charles Dickens witnessed jig competitions at the black-owned Almack's club on Orange Street in the Little Five Points district of New York (Anbinder, 173). Five Points housed many dance clubs and drinking establishments. In both singing and dancing exchanges the stakes were high. Successful entertainers received monetary awards of as much as $500 and were given the chance to travel and perform in Liverpool, London, and other British cities. The dance traditions of the immigrants—Africans and Irish, like the ethnicities of its practitioners—were conflated and considered indistinguishable. However, competitive trade-offs could ensure that one ethnicity was the victor over the other. Later, more structured entertainments like touring acts and variety shows would popularize the vernacular dances. Local audiences began to attend public spectacles, and the spectacles became forums for distinguishing between blacks and whites.
Liverpool Trading
Liverpool, England, and New York City are potent points for discussion of Irish and African American / black British exchanges because both cities served as entry points to their respective countries. The itinerant nature of industry, coupled with the backbreaking labor and isolating lifestyles, created a kind of lawlessness within the dock communities. At the same time, for the ambitious worker, there was the possibility of using the sailing life as a way to learn about new places, acculturate, or perhaps settle in on either side of the "water." Men and women of the ports established camaraderie with one another. Social networking allowed workers to exchange knowledge of neighborhoods, opportunities, dangers, and alliances on both sides of the Atlantic. Performance was a mechanism for information exchange as well as a justification for moving from place to place. As workers became migrants, immigrants, and citizens, the lawlessness of the ports were muted by civic organizations that established moral codes and cultural policies.
Liverpool is a port city with a long history of multicultural encounters. In 1664, the small village was merely a shipping stop along the rugged western coast of Great Britain. One hundred years later, as the physical infrastructure of the port improved and more sailors migrated into the area, Liverpool was poised to become the major slave port of the English-speaking world. The docks evolved into a multilingual site of cultural meetings. Local merchants prospered through the exchange of human cargo for agricultural goods. The working class excelled at sailing, stocking, and building ships for cross-Atlantic transport that fueled local and colonial economies. The docks needed laborers, and the Irish—poor and living in close proximity to the port—were the preferred choice for workers. Once settled in Liverpool as in New York, the Irish lived side by side with enslaved and free African people. Even after the decline of the slave economy, black seamen and sailors continued to live within mixed-race communities. Indeed, Stephen Small describes Liverpool as an anomaly within England because of its unique racial and racialized "half-caste residents." However the passionate, insular social practices of Liverpudlian "Scousers" excluded black "Scousers" from employment opportunities (513, 517). Historically, free and partially skilled black workers were an economic threat to struggling Irish immigrants. As a result, African descendants, traveling between Liverpool and the United States, formed their own network of transatlantic alliances.
There are several examples of African diaspora theatrical exchanges that were spawned by the Liverpool trades. Perhaps the most well known is the case of Mr. William Brown, who founded the African Grove Theater, the first African theater company in the United States, in 1821. Mr. Brown came to know about the art of theater through his service on ships that sailed between the Caribbean, New York, and Liverpool. James Hewlett, the actor he hired for performances in his summer African Grove, was also a steward along this line. Hewlett's skills as a tailor, coupled with his firsthand knowledge of British Shakespeare performances, allowed him to introduce theatrical performances to the "free colored people" of New York (McAllister, 43–47). Another excellent example of a Liverpool exchange was the appearance in 1866 of Mr. Hague's Slave Troupe of Georgia Minstrels. Hoping to build upon the successes of the "real negro impersonator" companies in the United States, Mr. Hague decided to bring a troupe of emancipated African Americans to Liverpool. The results were disastrous. When they traveled to Liverpool in 1866, the black entertainers were not well received. The heavily Irish city of Liverpool preferred to see interpretations of blackness designed and performed by whites. The entrepreneur eventually fired his black actors, leaving several behind to become integrated into the black Liverpudlian community (Southern, "Origin and Development," 10).
Minstrelsy Archetypes
North American minstrelsy, or blackface performance, was introduced by the Virginia Minstrels in 1842 and expanded upon by dozens of other performance companies throughout the nineteenth century. Minstrel shows in the United States were variety revues that included comic skits, political stump speeches, sentimental songs glorifying life on the plantation, and dance numbers. The art form was a precursor to vaudevillian entertainment. When innovative white performers like the Virginia Minstrels developed blackface minstrelsy, the Irish working class in both England and the United States embraced the genre as a mechanism for distancing itself from popular imagery personifying the Irish as poor, uncouth, immigrant, outsiders to the civiliz(ing) nation. Minstrelsy was ideally suited for this transformation; its revue-style performance format could be utilized for political ends. Not only could the show's contents be adapted for local social commentary but the genre itself, by ridiculing southern African American lifestyles, served a political purpose. The ignorant and uncouth manners of the southern Negro provided strong contrast to the humanity and relative whiteness of the Irish immigrants.
Perhaps a word needs to be said about the efficacy of stereotypes and archetypes in promoting social standing. Africans in the Americas have long been subject to external exaggerations of racial qualities. Phenotypes—physical characteristics—have evolved into stereotypes, which in turn have evolved into archetypes. In the United States, I would identify the Uncle Tom figure as an example of this evolution. Under systems of slavery in the United States, African workers were infantilized and assumed to be less-than-human beings. African men in particular were expected to take on servile roles and to acknowledge the superiority of the white slaveholders. Often, fearing punishment, the African men would perform tasks with heads bowed, or take action without question in compliance with their master's wishes. Nineteenth-century texts like Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe popularized images of the southern servile Negro. With time, this stereotypical image of the compliant, servile black man became a cultural icon—an archetypal representation of black identity. Today, the remnants of this iconography are visible on commercial products like Uncle Ben's rice.
Minstrel shows cast African Americans as ignorant creatures content with the slow and lazy life of the American South. These portrayals complemented perceptions of the Irish that had long circulated in derogatory cartoons that depicted the Irish as animalistic creatures, "bog trotters," ogres, or pigs. The political efficacy of minstrelsy was manifest on both sides of the Atlantic. John Belchem writes that in Liverpool "blackface minstrelsy became an Americanizing ritual, offering socially insecure Irish migrants a sense of superiority over the blacks with whom they were once identified (labeled respectively as 'white negroes' and 'smoked Irish') and from whom they were able to distance themselves by parody" (148). Spectators in the United States viewed early minstrel acts as a way of presenting the manners of "real Negros." Northern audiences in particular, who were unfamiliar with the lifestyles and circumstances of southern agricultural plantations, turned to minstrel shows as a popular form of reality cultural exchange. Liverpudlians used the minstrel format differently. Black representations were not designed to demonstrate the reality of foreign cultural lifestyles; rather, they were utilized by Irish performers to demonstrate the superiority of Irish cultural practices over the backward manners and mannerisms of the black American / black British resident. Because the Liverpool Irish had long been exposed to Africans and African cultural practices, they were familiar with both the nobility of continental Africans and the misery of enslaved Africans. This new character—the partially civilized black clown—fulfilled a Liverpool Irish cultural need to redefine black identities in such a manner as to construct a cultural wall between black Brits and their Irish neighbors. Histories of Irish discrimination in Liverpool partially justify such practices.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Black Performance Theory by Thomas F. DeFrantz, Anita Gonzalez. Copyright © 2014 Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
