The Problem of the Color[blind]: Racial Transgression and the Politics of Black Performance: Racial Transgressions and the Politics of Black Performance (Theater: Theory/Text/Performance) - Softcover

Catanese, Brandi Wilkins

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0472051261 ISBN 13: 9780472051267

Verlag: University of Michigan Press, 2011

Inhaltsangabe

"Catanese's beautifully written and cogently argued book addresses one of the most persistent sociopolitical questions in contemporary culture. She suggests that it is performance and the difference it makes that complicates the terms by which we can even understand 'multicultural' and 'colorblind' concepts. A tremendously illuminating study that promises to break new ground in the fields of theatre and performance studies, African American studies, feminist theory, cultural studies, and film and television studies."
---Daphne Brooks, Princeton University

"Adds immeasurably to the ways in which we can understand the contradictory aspects of racial discourse and performance as they have emerged during the last two decades.  An ambitious, smart, and fascinating book."
---Jennifer DeVere Brody, Duke University

Are we a multicultural nation, or a colorblind one? The Problem of the Color[blind] examines this vexed question in American culture by focusing on black performance in theater, film, and television. The practice of colorblind casting---choosing actors without regard to race---assumes a performing body that is somehow race neutral. But where, exactly, is race neutrality located---in the eyes of the spectator, in the body of the performer, in the medium of the performance? In analyzing and theorizing such questions, Brandi Wilkins Catanese explores a range of engaging and provocative subjects, including the infamous debate between playwright August Wilson and drama critic Robert Brustein, the film career of Denzel Washington, Suzan-Lori Parks's play Venus, the phenomenon of postblackness (as represented in the Studio Museum in Harlem's "Freestyle" exhibition), the performer Ice Cube's transformation from icon of gangsta rap to family movie star, and the controversial reality television series Black. White. Concluding that ideologies of transcendence are ahistorical and therefore unenforceable, Catanese advances the concept of racial transgression---a process of acknowledging rather than ignoring the racialized histories of performance---as her chapters move between readings of dramatic texts, films, popular culture, and debates in critical race theory and the culture wars.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Brandi Wilkins Catanese is Associate Professor of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies and African American Studies at the University of California, Berkeley.

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The Problem of the Color[blind]

Racial Transgression and the Politics of Black PerformanceBy BRANDI WILKINS CATANESE

The University of Michigan Press

Copyright © 2011University of Michigan
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-472-05126-7

Contents

CHAPTER 1. Bad Manners: Talking about Race......................................................................................1CHAPTER 2. The End of Race or the End of Blackness? August Wilson, Robert Brustein, and Color-Blind Casting.....................32CHAPTER 3. The Limits of Color Blindness: Interracial Sexuality, Denzel Washington, and Hollywood Film..........................72CHAPTER 4. Transgressing Tradition: Suzan-Lori Parks and Black Performance (as) Theory..........................................112CHAPTER 5. Are We There Yet? Race, Redemption, and Black. White.................................................................143Notes...........................................................................................................................173Bibliography....................................................................................................................201Index...........................................................................................................................209

Chapter One

Bad Manners: Talking about Race

Let me begin by burnishing what has become, in fairly short critical order, an old chestnut: within the United States, blackness and performance are ineluctably linked. Some of the nodes of this linkage are already quite obvious within black cultural and performance studies: from the ignoble tradition of blackface minstrelsy to contemporary NAACP boycotts of television networks that underutilize black talent on- and offscreen, to Barack Obama's recent history-making presidential campaign, we are by now keenly aware of the politics and burdens of representation within the United States. Critical and political attention to the quantity and quality of black cultural performances is certainly warranted, given the ever-increasing power of cultural representations to shape public attitudes in matters of race, and the global commodity that hip-hop culture-often collapsed into a complicated synonymity with black culture—has become.

What I want to add to this truism, though, is the suggestion that we couple our attention to the power of expressive culture with an understanding that other modes of performance—related to institutional and capitalist imperatives of surveillance, productivity, and efficacy—play equally significant roles in constructing the lived experience and political possibilities of black Americans. As Jon McKenzie illustrated in Perform or Else, the isolated valorization of cultural performances as liberatory, transgressive practices risks ignoring the other, more normative registers of power within which notions of performance have always also functioned. He writes: "Our attentiveness to liminal performance has kept us out of the loop with respect to the performativity of power, and in doing so, has limited our liminality," and this is nowhere more true than where black subjects must contemplate which thresholds we may or may not cross during the presentation of self in everyday life and elsewhere. This, too, guides Herman Gray's critique of an outdated mode of black cultural politics that "continues to privilege representation itself as the primary site of hope and critique." Representations in the realm of cultural performance—just like bodies (Butler) and race (West)—continue to matter, of course, but should be analyzed relationally rather than hierarchically in order to understand how the multiple formulations of performance cohere to regulate, to provide pleasure, to enact possibility. For example, if we accept the central role of slavery in the production of the African American subject, we must address not only the performative affect of certain twice-behaved behaviors in stylizing black bodies to occupy a certain social role, but also the economic imperatives that performance opens up in relation to these black bodies at different moments in history. Surveillance of black bodies through the system of slavery, for example, was designed not just to quell any assertions of subjectivity that would threaten white supremacy, but also to ensure that these working black bodies performed their labor tasks as efficiently as possible. Indeed, as Saidiya Hartman's Scenes of Subjection demonstrates, the relationship between performance as aesthetic practice and performance as evaluative rubric of labor is not just one of complementarity but of mutual constitution. Observing black bodies engaged in what was acknowledged as physical labor had entertainment value for white spectators, just as "the transubstantiation of abjection into contentment" required a great deal of faith and work, given the abject circumstances into which enslaved blacks were forced.

This supervisory dimension of the national investment in black performance manifests in other areas as well: as a mundane example, library searches for work on "black performance" reveal an extensive bibliography of research not just on expressive cultural forms but also on black academic and athletic performance, and the external factors contributing thereto. This quantitative analysis resonates both in California, where I live and work, and across the country, as efforts to dismantle affirmative action in higher education routinely rely upon disparaging arguments about undeserving, underqualified minority applicants. The argument in favor of California's 1996 Proposition 209, which ended affirmative action programs in the public sector, used inflammatory language to explain why affirmative action was wrong: "set-aside" policies "hijacked the civil rights movement," creating "terrible programs which are ... tearing us apart," an outcome that "naturally [causes] resentment when the less qualified are preferred." Such rhetoric makes clear that one of the most urgent current discussions of blackness and performance in their many meanings revolves around national anxieties over the racial crossroads at which we have arrived (or stalled): are we a consciously pluralistic nation, or a color-blind one?

This book is an attempt to understand the function of these complementary, even overlapping, modes of performance—aesthetic and efficacious—in settling this question. The Problem of the Color[blind] argues that an examination of black performance practices from the last decade of the twentieth century, after the abatement of the 1980s culture wars, exposes color blindness and a strictly quantitative multiculturalism as far more ideologically linked than they are oppositional responses to the politics of racialized representation, and clarifies the need for a new vocabulary and evaluative framework through which to understand how performance in particular might intervene against the limitations that stereotypes impose upon black expression. On both institutional and cultural levels, performance has become the medium through which American anxieties about race (and in particular, blackness) are pondered, articulated, managed, and challenged. Whether we talk about artists who subvert our habits of looking at black bodies or we discuss conservative politicians' attempts to measure and yet detach performed productivity from the racialized bodies that execute various types of work, looking at what black bodies do through the conceptual parameters of performance and its attention to...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: University of Michigan Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2011
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0472051261
• ISBN 13: 9780472051267
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 224
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar