African American Performance and Theater History: A Critical Reader

0195127250.pdfHarry J. Elam, Jr. David Krasner,
Editors
‘ ‘
Edited by
David Krasner
1 2001
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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, ProfessorErrolHill—brillianthistorian,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 . elam , jr .
part i : social protest and the politics of representation 17
1 Uncle Tom’s Women 19 judith williams
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 telia u . anderson
7 The Chitlin Circuit 132 henry louis gates , jr .
viii Contents
8 Audience and Africanisms in August Wilson’s Dramaturgy: A Case Study 149 sandra g . shannon
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 kimberly 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 diana r . paulin
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 . elam , jr .
16 The Costs of Re-Membering: What’s at Stake in Gayl Jones’s Corregidora 306 christina e . sharpe
part v : roundtable discussion with senior scholars 329
17 African American Theater: The State of the Profession, Past, Present, and Future 331
Contents ix
Roundtable discussion edited by harry j . elam , jr . , and david krasner
Afterword: Change Is Coming 345 David Krasner
Selected Bibliography 351
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 TheatreResearch foroutstandingscholarshipinAfrican 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 inTheatre Journal,TextandPerformanceQuarterly,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
xii Contributors
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 LiteraryCriticism (1988),LooseCanons:Notes on theCultureWars (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 workingonhisnextbook,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 PLUMis 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.ROACHis the Charles C. and DorotheaS.DilleyProfessorofTheater at Yale University. He is author of The Players’ Passion: Studies in the Science of
Contributors xiii
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 DramaticVision ofAugustWilson (1995) traces Wilson’s evolution from his boyhood interest inblackliterature 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 theDramaofAugustWilson (1994),andchapters inAugustWilson: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 Cherrie 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
xiv Contributors
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.
African American Performance and TheaterHistory
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Asourtitle,AfricanAmericanPerformanceandTheaterHistory: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, thisexaminationofAfricanAmer- 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-
4 AfricanAmerican Performance and TheaterHistory
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,whileofferingfreshinsightsintofamiliartopics.Itjuxtaposes the work of established historians and critics with those of emergingscholars. 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 theaterand 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, biologicallybasedracial 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 playLesBlancs (1969), by Lorraine Hansberry,3 offersoneof 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
Introduction 5
aseriesofpolemicaldebatesonrace.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, thispassage 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. InLesBlancs, 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…