This dissertation theorizes the relation between blackface minstrelsy and contemporary Black performance. The project analyzes the use of nineteenth-century blackface minstrel conventions in Black theatrical performances during later eras where its usage seems counter-intuitive: during the Black freedom struggles of the 1960s; within Black feminist and queer performance of the 1990s; as a tool to critique “post-race” ideologies in the new millennium; and in the cultural production of ongoing anti-racist movements. Each chapter develops the theoretical concept of “strategic re-deployment” to describe and analyze a historical process whereby Black artists transform blackface minstrel conventions into tools for advancing politics and practices of anti-racism and decolonization. I track this strategic phenomenon through an exploration of radical resistance politics at the community level (Chapter One), through tropes of cultural memory and historical erasure (Chapter Two), and the racialization of theatrical form (Chapter Three). The first chapter develops the concept of “strategic re-deployment” by reconstructing a production of Amiri Baraka’s JELLO that took place during the Newark Uprising of July 1967. The chapter shows how strategic engagement with blackface minstrelsy was already a tool in the arsenal of Black Power, and how Baraka takes up the practice to direct political action at the community level during a particularly violent period of anti-blackness in Newark. Chapter two analyzes the embodied, discursive, and spectatorial strategies that Lydia Diamond and Suzan-Lori Parks (along with directors of their plays) use to interrogate the figure of the “Hottentot Venus” as a hegemonic frame established and maintained by traditional historical inquiry and circulation through cultural memory. Their plays mine the gendered, racial, and sexual discourses that render Sara Baartman simultaneously hyper-visible and invisible across history and cultural memory. The third and final chapter engages plays by Dave Harris, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, and Young Jean Lee to demonstrate how, at strategic moments of change in recent understandings of racial politics, theatrical form itself is racialized and indebted to the practice of blackface minstrelsy. This study situates its theatre historical cases within the contexts of their composition, live performance, and reception to demonstrate how artists and spectators access an insurgent potential within the form of blackface minstrelsy that helps them articulate the social, material, and institutional dimensions of anti-blackness and challenge white supremacy at the level of culture.

Creator

• Watts, Steven Keary

DOI

• https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-s6w8-7h21

Subject

• Performing arts
• Black studies
• Theater history

Language

• en

Alternate Identifier

• http://dissertations.umi.com/northwestern:16781
• etdadmin_upload_1014341

Date created

• 2023-01-01

Resource type

• Dissertation

Rights statement

• In Copyright