Scripts of Blackness: Early Modern Performance Culture and the Making of Race (RaceB4Race: Critical Race Studies of the Premodern) - Softcover

Ndiaye, Noémie

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1512826073 ISBN 13: 9781512826074

Verlag: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2024

Inhaltsangabe

Scripts of Blackness shows how the early modern mass media of theatre and performance culture at-large helped turn blackness into a racial category, that is, into a type of difference justifying emerging social hierarchies and power relations in a new world order driven by colonialism and capitalism.
In this book, Noémie Ndiaye explores the techniques of impersonation used by white performers to represent Afro-diasporic people in England, France, and Spain in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, using a comparative and transnational framework. She reconstructs three specific performance techniques-black-up (cosmetic blackness), blackspeak (acoustic blackness), and black dances (kinetic blackness)-in order to map out the poetics of those techniques, and track a number of metaphorical strains that early modern playtexts regularly associated with them. Those metaphorical strains, the titular scripts of blackness of this book, operated across national borders and constituted resources, as they provided spectators and participants with new ways of thinking about the Afro-diasporic people who lived or could/would ultimately live in their midst.
Those scripts were often gendered and hinged on notions of demonization, exclusion, exploitation, animalization, commodification, sexualization, consensual enslavement, misogynoir, infantilization, and evocative association with other racialized minorities. Scripts of Blackness attempts to grasp the stories that Western Europeans told themselves through performative blackness, and the effects of those fictions on early modern Afro-diasporic subjects.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Noémie Ndiaye is Associate Professor of English at the University of Chicago.

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Introduction
Performative Blackness in Early Modern Europe


Scene 1
January 4, 2016. Seville, Spain. Following a tradition that originated, we are told, in the mid-nineteenth century, thousands of spectators gather in the streets to attend the annual Parade of the Magi, la cabalgata de reyes. At dusk, some thirty pageant wagons start moving, laden with music equipment, multicolored neon lights, and costumed children who shower spectators with fistfuls of candies. The kings’ wagons arrive last: this year, King Balthazar is performed by the president of the Sevilla FC soccer club, in blackface, as always. He is attended by local volunteers, most on foot, some on white horses, all in dazzling North African white garb, with white cheches on their heads sharply contrasting with the black gloves on their hands, black makeup on their faces, and bright red lipstick applied within the natural contour of their lips. They laugh, dance to the tambourines, strike a pose for the cameras, and throw candies at spectators. The ground is sticky with crushed candies. You look around; you are the only visibly Black person in this crowd.

Scene 2
March 2019. Paris, France. An upcoming performance of Aeschylus’s The Suppliants is advertised on the website of your alma mater, Paris-Sorbonne University, with photographs from a rehearsal featuring white actresses playing the Libyan Danaids in blackface. Students and antiracist organizations protest and get the performance canceled. Outrage over the cancellation ensues from academic, cultural, and governmental institutions denouncing censorship, attacks on creative freedom, and the misguided importation of American cultural sensibilities and performance history into French society. You read the press: antiracist protesters are accused of misunderstanding the director’s intentions, Aeschylus’s intentions, and the universalist values of a color-blind republic. The production will be performed two months later, with actresses sporting golden masks this time, in the presence of the minister of culture, the minister of higher education, diplomats, congressmen, and the Parisian academic establishment.

Scene 3
Spring 2008. Paris, France. In her office, your formidable acting teacher (a senior white woman) gives you (a young Black woman) feedback on your performance in Salina, an unremarkable African fantasy play by a popular contemporary playwright that she added to your portfolio. She is trying to steer you in the right direction the best way she can—the way her own training, culture, and experience have taught her to. She is trying to help. “This scene is not working, Noémie. It’s not working because you are not being African enough for the part. You need to find it. I don’t know. Maybe we could—” (she gestures toward her own face while looking at you. The gesture is vague but unmistakably evocative). She will not complete her sentence, perhaps because she caught the expression on your face, or because she can hear herself now. You look at the shelves of classic European drama covering the walls around the two of you.

Those three scenes of formation constitute the affective substrate of Scripts of Blackness: Early Modern Performance Culture and the Making of Race and offer a unique experiential shortcut to some of the core ideas of this book.

Performative blackness—a type of racial impersonation that brings into being and fashions what it claims to mimic—haunts the memory of the Western theatre industry far beyond the confines of the Anglo-American world to which its study has so often been limited.

Performative blackness is tied to the use of prosthetic techniques of embodiment that include but are not limited to masks and makeup.

Performative blackness rubs up against lived Blackness historically and politically in ways that have informed the lives of Black professional performers to this day.

Many European countries suffer from forms of cultural amnesia that either erase performative blackness from their history altogether (like France), or erase the early modern roots of performative blackness, making it appear more recent than it is (like Spain).

Performative blackness holds bodies politic together: it is a conduit for communities to tell the fictions they need to hear about themselves, in conflict and in celebration alike.

Those three scenes drive my commitment to understand the appeal that participation in the economy of performative blackness has held across space and time since its inception. In this book, I ask: what did performative blackness do for early modern Europeans? I explore the invention of performative blackness in Renaissance Europe with the hope that uncovering the ideological operations of that racial technology in early modernity might yield insights for the present—a hope that the broken, recursive, and lacunar history separating our moment and early modernity but also linking them might generate theoretical traction.
In this book, I consider the material practices of racial impersonation in use in early modern Western Europe. I reconstruct three specific techniques—black-up (cosmetic blackness), blackspeak (acoustic blackness), and black dances (kinetic blackness)—in order to map out the poetics of those techniques by tracking metaphorical strains regularly associated with them in performance. Those metaphorical strains, the titular scripts of blackness of this book, were not simply ornamental: operating across national borders, they constituted resources, as they provided spectators and participants with new ways of thinking about the Afro-diasporic people who lived or could live in their midst, and conceptually brought blackness into being as a racial category organizing power relations. All early modern European nations whose colonial aspirations involved Afro-diasporic populations found in performative blackness a most useful instrument. By putting into conversation expansive early modern English, French, and Spanish archives that are seldom discussed and never discussed in relation to one another, in this book, I attempt to grasp the stories Europeans told themselves through performative blackness, and the effect of those fictions on early modern Afro-diasporic subjects. This attempt proceeds from first-person knowledge that the history of early modern performative blackness is ongoing (as Sylvie Chalaye puts it, “it is as if racialized actors and actresses today had to become the perennial African ambassador, that comedic figure of French baroque theatre inherited from court masquerades”), and from a hope that historical consciousness might foster a greater awareness of the scripts permeating the multimedia terrain of performative blackness in our own moment.
To provide a synthetic introduction to Scripts of Blackness, in this opening chapter, I first define some the project’s key words: I explain what the word race meant in early modernity, and I provide an account of the early modern racial matrix that is simultaneously historicized and informed by Critical Race Theory. With those indispensable conceptual premises in place, I proceed to set up the geographical bounds of this project and show that the emergence of blackness as a racial category was a glocal phenomenon that took place in an intercolonial space following the development of de facto color-based slavery in the Atlantic world starting in the mid-fifteenth century. I then unfold the central argument of this book: I explain what early modern scripts of blackness were, where they can be located for historiographic purposes, what the phrase “performative blackness” means in the context of early modern performance culture, and how the scene of...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2024
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1512826073
• ISBN 13: 9781512826074
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 376
• Herausgeber: Heng Geraldine, Thompson Ayanna
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Mare Nostrum Group B.V.; gpsr@mare-nostrum.co.uk; ; Doelen 72; Breda; 4831 GR; Niederlande