Generally I find that translating these categories into point totals results in *lower* grades than a more holistic evaluation. Thus this rubric should not be seen as a precise breakdown of how your grade was calculated, so much as a guide to the areas you were strong in and areas you need work in. Generally, "Successful" is the A range, "Needs some work" is the B range, and "Needs significant work" is the C range. 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African American arts–New York (State)–New York–20th century. 4. African Americans in popular culture. 5. African Americans in literature. 6. Literature and society–United States–History–20th century. 7. Harlem (New York, N.Y.)–Intellectual life– 20th century. I. Sherrard-Johnson, Cherene, 1973– editor. PS153.N5C577 2015 810.9′896073–dc23 2015007882 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Cover image: The salon at Villa Lewaro, Irvington, New York. Photo © Elizabeth Dooley / VHT Studios Set in 11/13pt Garamond by SPi Global, Pondicherry, India 1 2015 17 Changing Optics: Harlem Renaissance Theater and Performance Soyica Diggs Colbert The cake‐walk, a dance best characterized as a strut that enslaved African Americans used to mock slaveowners, transforms into an “authentic” mode of Negro expression in the first Broadway musical to feature an all‐black cast—Clorindy: The Origin of the Cakewalk (1898)—and reemerges as a mode of intraracial critique in Zora Neale Hurston’s play Color Struck (first published in Opportunity magazine, 1925). The shifting meaning of the dance exemplifies the representational multiplicity of Harlem Renaissance theater and performance, which is always at once referencing acts of self‐definition and social inscription, insurgency and circumscription. The theater and performance of the Harlem Renaissance depicts paradoxes because it emerges in response to competing artistic, aesthetic, and market demands and desires. In this chapter, I consider how Harlem Renaissance theater and performance presents blackness as a paradoxical category in the themes and formal attributes of the work by engaging with and troubling the social and cultural practices that define blackness. Social practices such as lynching and the separation of public space due to Jim Crow defined blackness as an easily decipherable physical category. At the same time cultural practices including passing, the cake‐walk, and signifying demonstrated the slipperiness of blackness. Harlem Renaissance theater and performance changes the optics of blackness from a biological category able to be regulated in the social sphere to a contingent category that emerges in distinctive forms of embodiment. Several historical factors impact theater and performance of the Harlem Renaissance period including industrialization, the Great Migration, lynching, and Jim Crow segregation. For the purposes of the chapter, I categorize Harlem Renaissance theater and performance as work that negotiates the historical shifts (migration, urbanization, A Companion to the Harlem Renaissance, First Edition. Edited by Cherene Sherrard-Johnson. © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2015 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. 286 Soyica Diggs Colbert lynching, industrialization) that lead Alain Locke to differentiate between the Old and the New Negro in his classic collection The New Negro (1925). One of the central tropes of the Harlem Renaissance, the figure of the New Negro, represented the idea that a New Negro emerged in urban centers by way of northern migration, a transformed politics, and a separation from the bitter atrocities of the past. Locke explains: “A main change has been, of course, that shifting of the Negro population which has made the Negro problem no longer exclusively or even predominantly Southern … the trend of migration has not only been toward the North and the Central Midwest, but city‐ward and to the great centers of industry” (1992, 5). Therefore the production of most of the work considered in the chapter takes place within the classic phase of the Great Migration (1910–30), although the theater and performance of the Harlem Renaissance references the social and cultural forces that produces and historically precedes the emergence of the “New Negro.” Locke’s eponymous anthology spells out the characteristics of the New Negro detailing that “The day of ‘aunties,’ ‘uncles’ and ‘mammies’ is equally gone. Uncle Tom and Sambo have passed on … The popular melodrama has about played itself out, and it is time to scrap the fictions, garret the bogeys and settle down to a realistic facing of facts” (Locke 1992, 5). A social movement rather than a person, the New Negro differentiated the cultural and social practices of the growing population of urban migrants from those of their southern ancestors of slavery and Reconstruction. Such clear‐cut distinctions were harder to come by in theater and performance in particular because the medium relies on the same visual devices and embodied practices— gestures, body types, and clothing, for example—that produce the racial identities. Some of the central formal devices of theater and performance (props, settings, character types, melodrama) are also racial signifiers. The New Negro ideal marked a rupture but references to the ideal on stage demonstrated the category’s function as a continuum—linking the past to the present instead showing a break from the past. While Locke’s description argued for a different way of seeing, a different optics, it does not account for the transferal of gesture, style, dance, and song in the bodies of Old Negroes that become New Negroes in migration. Theater and performance, as artistic modes predicated on embodiment more than other forms such as the rarified poetics of the modernist period, had to negotiate what Harry J. Elam, Jr describes as the device of race. He explains: “at its inception, the American ‘race question’ is inherently theatrical” (2001, 4). Demonstrable in the drama that leads to the Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 US 537 (1896) Supreme Court decision, the theatricality of race produces Jim Crow and enables the manipulation of the color line in the theater and performance of the Harlem Renaissance. By briefly discussing Plessy’s act of racial passing, I would like to highlight the event that serves as the basis of the lawsuit, to establish a contested social landscape that performance, the performance of Homer Plessy in this case, emblematizes. After turning to the events that led to Plessy throughout the remainder of the chapter, I focus on other modes of scripted and choreographed performance, but I must emphasize that the later case studies exist along a continuum with Homer Plessy’s act Changing Optics 287 of racial appropriation; the same type of theft that occurs in Plessy informs the carriage of the first cake‐walkers. In 1890, the Louisiana State Legislature passed the Separate Car Act (Act 111) that required separate but equal accommodations for African American and Anglo‐ Americans on railroads. Fearing unequal treatment under the law, a group of concerned African American citizens formed an organization, the Citizens’ Committee, and devised a plan to test the constitutionality of the law. The Committee solicited the assistance of Homer Plessy, who was one‐eighth black, for the test and scripted for Plessy to purchase a first‐class rail ticket, to enter a segregated car, and announce his African American ancestry. The Committee hoped that Plessy’s violation of the law, prohibiting African Americans from riding in whites‐only cars, would serve as a basis to challenge Act 111 before the Supreme Court. The scripted performance aimed to call attention to the lack of clarity in defining race and therefore the arbitrariness of using race as a determining factor of law. The social drama questions, “Does the ‘fact of blackness,’ as Frantz Fanon terms Western racial obsessions, lie in the body and its epidermis or in the cultural training that quite literally teaches the eye not only how but what to see?” (Weigman 1995, 22). The Citizens’ Committee attempted to retrain the eye of the New Orleans judiciary and ultimately the Supreme Court but the court found that property rights emerge in relationship to the body even if the epidermis presents a false positive. Despite the limited social effects of Plessy’s act of passing on governance, theater and performance artists of the Harlem Renaissance developed aesthetic practices that addressed the pedagogical attributes of racial representation in visual media by crafting unique formal interventions. The arts function as one arena of cultural training. Recognizing the arts as such prompted W.E.B. Du Bois to charge in an essay that defines the uplift aims of the Renaissance, “Criteria of Negro Art,” “Thus all Art is propaganda and ever must be, despite the wailing of the purists. I stand in utter shamelessness and say that whatever art I have for writing has been used always for propaganda for gaining the right of black folk to love and enjoy” (1996, 328). Du Bois’s well‐known assertion serves as one side of what is often depicted as a two‐ sided debate of the Harlem Renaissance over the function of art to black modernity being either for the purposes of propaganda or the production of beauty. Instead of siding with either propaganda or the notion of art for art’s sake, most Harlem Renaissance dramatists and performers found themselves along a spectrum ranging from the didactic nature of lynching drama to the comedy of the play Mule Bone written by Hurston and Langston Hughes. Among performers a similar spectrum exists from Aida Overton Walker’s pedagogical purpose in her attempts to teach white women to cake‐walk in their parlors to the primitivist references that inform Josephine Baker’s role in the film Princess Tam Tam. I examine all of the aforementioned in more detail throughout the chapter to describe the ways Harlem Renaissance theater and performance changes the optics of racial purity that the Separate Car Act (Act 111) assumes. “The basis of scientific racism depended on a clear physical differentiation between white and black people. As a result, Plessy’s ability to … enjoy the privilege 288 Soyica Diggs Colbert of white passengers undercut the logic that one’s biology determined one’s actions and therefore subjects with certain biological factors needed to be more heavily policed than others” (Robinson 1996, 241). Although the Supreme Court ruled that Plessy had illegally appropriated a designation that did not belong to him, his act of passing demonstrated the difficulty in regulating such boundaries. While the Supreme Court ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson predates the Harlem Renaissance, the racial optics at the heart of Plessy’s performance establish ways of looking that fuel the inequality of Jim Crow, serving as one motivating factor for northern migration and the artistic production that follows. Alongside the dangers of appearing black in the South, black people migrated to the north for greater economic opportunities, which transformed urban centers into cultural meccas that gave artists access to publishers, theaters, libraries, salons, and cabarets. Between 1910 and 1930 over 1.5 million migrants moved from the southern to the northern United States. “The places they went were big, frightening, and already crowded—New York, Detroit, Chicago, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, and smaller, equally foreign cities— Syracuse, Oakland, Milwaukee, Newark, Gary” (Wilkerson 2010, 9). As Cheryl Wall further elucidates, “Harlem was, or would be, the race capital, drawing blacks from throughout the African diaspora … Not yet typical, Harlem was the augury of the future … For the first time since the advent of slavery had ruptured the ancestral community, people of African descent could through their group expression—and the art it generated—forge a new unity” (1995, 3). The desire for unity and collectivity fed the desire for a unified racial identity expressed through the ideal of the New Negro, creating intergenerational conflicts between the architects of the Harlem Renaissance, an older generation of scholar‐artists, including James Weldon Johnson, W.E.B. Du Bois, Jessie Redmon Fauset, Charles Johnson, Alain Locke, and Georgia Douglas Johnson, and the younger artists such as Hurston, Hughes, Baker, and Paul Robeson. Shane Vogel revises readings of the Harlem Renaissance that focus primarily on the politics of uplift as the goal of artists, explaining: The original architects of the Harlem Renaissance envisioned a movement that would counter images and representations of black inferiority with more “truthful” representations and evidence of serious black cultural accomplishment … Many therefore saw the Negro vogue, with its tendency toward black sensuousness, exhibitionism, primitivism, and sensationalism, as a distraction from or, worse, an impediment to their vision of the Renaissance. (Vogel 2009, 3) Much of Harlem Renaissance theater and performance engages with blackness as inherently sensuous or sensational. While some works, particularly lynching drama, directly counter such modes of representation others, such as the performance practices of Hughes, Hurston, and Baker, attempt to call into question the sensuous or sensational as the singular province of black bodies. Passing serves as a theme artists use to blur the lines of association between blackness and particular ways of being, sensational or otherwise. Changing Optics 289 Racial passing occurs by commission and omission. In most cases, either a black person allows others to assume he or she is white or a black person asserts that he or she is white. Questions concerning the ethics, cultural, political, and social implications of racial passing permeate the literature of the Harlem Renaissance. Nella Larsen’s Quicksand (1928) and Passing (1929), Wallace Thurman’s The Blacker the Berry (1929), Jessie Redmon Fauset’s Plum Bun (1929) and Comedy, American Style (1933), Zora Neale Hurston’s Color Struck (1925), Langston Hughes’s “Cross” (1925), “Mulatto” (1927), “Father and Son” (1934), and Mulatto (1935) feature mixed‐race characters or speakers. As Eve Allegra Raimon details, the “very phrase ‘tragic mulatto’ has a fraught history and status in literary studies, its genealogy dating back at least to Sterling Brown’s The Negro in American Fiction (1937). Because of the ‘single drop of midnight in her veins,’ Brown maintains, the mixed‐race figure must ‘go down to a tragic end’” (2004, 5). Raimon clarifies, along with Cherene Sherrard‐Johnson (2007) and Caroline A. Streeter (2012) that an intersectionalist approach that accounts for the workings of gender and sexuality offers a more robust understanding of how the tragic mulatto/a functions as a tragic and a subversive figure. Raimon contends, “Through both narrative strategy and characterization, writers in the tradition employ the device as an agent of social change as much as an emblem of victimization. For all their positional differences, they share a political sensibility and a literary vision that are forward looking … in their emphasis on contemplating the viability of an interracial republic” (2004, 7). Raimon offers a foundation upon which to consider the relationship between the mixed‐race figure and state formation that echoes through Plessy and the expressive traditions of the Harlem Renaissance. Presenting a threatening and brash mulatto figure, Hughes’s play, Mulatto, written in the summer of 1930 and performed on Broadway in 1935, depicts the strained relationships of Colonel Thomas Norwood, a plantation owner, his African American domestic partner and servant, Cora Lewis, and their children. The action of the play revolves around the disruptions one of the sons, Robert Lewis, known as Bert, causes to the household when he attempts to claim what he perceives as his rightful place in the household and community as the son of Colonel Tom. Being a mulatto, Bert calls attention to “a taboo and a synthesis” that produces blackness as a category of disinheritance (Sherrard‐Johnson 2007, 38). He also calls attention to how embodiment shifts registers of sympathy through his physical similarity to the Colonel. While the literature of the Harlem Renaissance often focuses on the cultural and social virtues and limitations of the mulatta to make the case for the tragic nature of her racial identity or social alienation, Mulatto draws attention to the social tragedy of regulating differently two visually akin bodies because of the disparate racial identity of their mothers. Though appearing before the audience as his father’s son, Jim Crow laws deny Bert his birthright and call into question the ethics of racial optics as modes of social regulation. At the rise of the play, Colonel Tom anticipates the return of his insubordinate son, Bert. Norwood angrily laments to his children’s mother: Yes, I know what you’re going to say. I don’t give a damn about him! There’s no nigger‐ child of mine, yours, ours—no darkie—going to disobey me … I’ll tell Talbot to use the 290 Soyica Diggs Colbert whip on him, too, if he needs it … Go on back upstairs and see about getting Sallie out of here. Another word from you and I won’t send your (Sarcastically) pretty little half‐ white daughter anywhere, either. (Hughes 2002, 20) The ambiguity that colors the Colonel’s categorization of his children “no nigger‐child of mine, yours, ours—no darkie—going to disobey me” reinforces the role of masquerade central to the genealogical backflips the Colonel must perform to render his children bastards. Hughes’s choice of language draws attention to the purposeful denial necessary to maintain racial hierarchies; a denial further magnified by the physical similarities between Bert and his father, resemblances a theater audience would readily notice. Colonel Tom must deny the self‐same reflection he sees when he looks in Bert’s eyes in order to solidify his house—his standing as a plantation owner in Georgia. Bert’s bravado and willingness to subvert authority, however, draws attention to the way that gender and race intersect in Hughes’s depiction of the son. Though annoyed with Bert’s acts of insubordination, Colonel Tom feels at ease taking the liberty to admire Sallie, his “pretty little half‐white daughter,” knowing that she does not pose the same threat to his house. Moreover, Sallie knows how to act in the presence of a white man, demonstrating the proper deference; she does not invoke the fear produced by her brother. Her comportment, dress, and choice of language all point to a willingness on her part to participate in the masquerade that enables Colonel Tom to financially support and render her a bastard at the same time. Consider the stage directions to Sallie’s entrance: “Sallie comes shyly down the stairs and approaches her father. She is dressed in a little country‐style coat‐suit ready for traveling. Her features are Negroid, although her skin is very light. Colonel Norwood gazes at her without saying a word as she comes meekly toward him” (Hughes 2002, 22). Sallie approaches her father with trepidation, “shyly and meekly.” Though well dressed, her “Negroid features” reveal what is in her blood. As Sallie leaves she says, “You been mighty nice to your—I mean to us colored children, letting my sister and me go off to school” (22). Hughes playfully inserts the slippage between “your—I mean to us colored children” to illuminate the room for negotiation not only on the part of Colonel Tom, but also on the black women he interacts with. The exchange between Sallie and Colonel Tom reveals her willingness to facilitate his denial, as well as the degree to which his identity hinges on her participation. Mulatto narrates a dangerous struggle for recognition waged primarily between a father and a son that hinges on a distinction between the way Bert sees himself and the ways others see him. Bert, a cocky and angry young man, returns to his hometown for the summer after going away to attend school. Once he returns, he begins to challenge his town’s most sensitive social conventions. For example, he sasses the Post Office worker, drives his father’s car without permission, enters the house through the front door, refuses to work in the fields, corrects white people, and dismisses the warnings of his neighbors, siblings, and mother. Bert’s actions qualify him as dangerous because his anatomical difference, the fact that he is, according to Colonel Tom’s neighbor Fred Higgins, “a yellow buck,” has already registered him as a threat. Interpretations of his Changing Optics 291 actions (gestures, carriage, mode of address), therefore, must contend with the preexisting history of racial strife in the South. Bert’s actions—entering the house through a front door—appear as dangerous not because they are inherently threatening but because a black body enacting them transforms them into cause for concern. Besides representing a personal threat Bert also embodies the general threat of blackness to whiteness through miscegenation. Higgins complains, “he’s sure got mighty aggravating ways for a buck his color to have” (Hughes 2002, 26). By aligning color, Bert’s yellowness, with demeanor Higgins participates in biological racism. He also suggests that one’s approximation to whiteness or blackness on the color spectrum should impact behavior. He also informs Norwood that Bert “said last week standing out on my store front that he wasn’t all nigger no how; said his name was Norwood— not Lewis, like the rest of his family—and part of your plantation here would be his when you passed” (26; emphasis original). Higgins seeks to anger Norwood into disciplining Bert for having the audacity to name what everyone knows to be true. What Bert says does not offend Higgins. Rather, Bert transgresses cultural hierarchies by having the nerve to say that he is of mixed race in public and then to attempt to appropriate white privileges. Genealogical customs of inheritance pinpoint the monetary risks associated with miscegenation, which Bert’s bold actions at the Post Office and claims that his last name is Norwood reinforce through the act of enunciation. When Bert asserts his name is Norwood he claims a status the town’s people are already aware he possesses. As a result, his enunciation enables him to lay claim to a social position the racial hierarchy of their town demands that he willingly forego. By claiming his social inheritance, Bert poses an immanent threat against which Higgins attempts to defend himself. The play foreshadows the final confrontation between the Colonel and Bert through Cora’s dream of “de moon all red with blood” (Hughes 2002, 15). The final argument escalates into a physical altercation that results in the Colonel’s death. Essentially signing his own death warrant, a lynch mob forms immediately to punish Bert for his father’s death. In Harlem Renaissance art, the paradoxical nature of black citizens as at once having made great sacrifices for the nation while persistently experiencing state authorized encroachments on their civil rights manifests itself in the imagery of nature’s physical properties. The moon all red with blood “is taken from the African‐ American religious tradition of sermons and spirituals where the image of the blood‐ colored moon serves as an omen for the crucifixion of Christ” (Griffin 1995, 25–26). Indeed, “Blood‐Burning Moon,” a short story in Jean Toomer’s Cane (1923), depicts African American history in terms of Messianic time. Although Bert may not seem to represent a Christ‐like figure, the lynching imagery at the end of the play fits into a familiar typology in the United States in the first decades of the twentieth century. The reference to lynching in Mulatto also points to the ways vigilante justice countered the process of changing optics in black cultural production with visual displays of violence. As if to coerce the black image back into subordination, lynching publically and profoundly demonstrated the costs of subverting racial hierarchies. The imagery of lynching in the United States is predominately black and male. Scholars 292 Soyica Diggs Colbert have given much thought to the function of representations of lynching. The familiar images of crowds of people surrounding a victim of lynching, some gathering to watch a lynching take place, others posing for the camera, suggest that not only the act itself but also its mimetic reiteration through photography and postcards act to make the spectator feel integrated into something bigger than him or herself. While in religious ritual that something is metaphysical, in this case it is the nation‐state or community. Just as the acts of passing in Mulatto threaten to dismantle the social illusion of racial purity of the Norwood house, the force of the lynch mob works to maintain the status quo and reinscribe the color line. The confrontation, that ends Act I, resumes in the first scene of Act II. Colonel Tom, offended and confused by Bert’s behavior, summons his son to decipher Bert’s motivations. The father begins by establishing some ground rules that Bert quickly challenges. Norwood Now, I’m just going to let you talk to me, but I want you to talk right. Robert (Still standing) What do you mean, “talk right?” Norwood I mean talk like a nigger should to a white man. Robert Oh! But I’m not a nigger, Colonel Tom. I’m your son. Norwood (Testily) You’re Cora’s boy. Robert Women don’t have children by themselves. Norwood Nigger women don’t know the fathers. You’re a bastard. (Hughes 2002, 23) The ground rules almost immediately diverge into a discussion of what Bert believes to be his rights as the Colonel’s son. The Colonel purposefully belittles Bert, calling him a nigger and a bastard. The Colonel attempts to shame Bert into accepting his place. Bert tries to reason with the Colonel by commenting on their physical approximation. The Colonel’s rhetorical questions—“How come your skin is yellow and your elbows rusty? How come they threw you out of the post office today for talking to a white woman? How come you’re the crazy young buck you are?” (Hughes 2002, 23)— serve as a reply that continues to assert that racial hierarchies trump any claim Bert may attempt to make on the social privilege of his paternity. As Bert becomes increasingly vulnerable, the son charges, They had no right to throw me out [of the Post Office]. I asked for my money back when I saw the broken tubes. Just as you had no right to raise that cane today when I was standing at the door of this house where you live, while I have to sleep in a shack down the road with the field hands. (Slowly) But my mother sleeps with you. (Hughes 2002, 23; emphasis original) For the first time Bert acknowledges that the relationship the Colonel has with Cora also informs his rage. He not only seeks acknowledgment for himself but also for his mother. Changing Optics 293 The conversation between the Colonel and Bert continues to dissolve until Bert strangles his father to death. After killing Colonel Tom, Bert “drops the body … at [Cora’s] feet in a path of flame from the setting sun.” The flaming sun reconfigures the imagery of a blood‐burning moon, suggesting a metaphysical shift that parallels the social one Bert pinpoints, saying, “He’s dead. The white man’s dead. My father’s dead. (Laughing) I’m living” (Hughes 2002, 41). In order to account for the disavowal the Colonel enacts and attempts to perpetuate, Bert must cause a physical death that ultimately costs his own life too. The forbidden nature of Bert’s action demands that he must die, that he must be ejected from the social order that he threatens. The play emphasizes, though, that the murder is not only a response to the brutal nature of plantation life and an early demand for civil rights, as Harry J. Elam Jr. and Michele Elam in “Blood Debt” (2009) theorize. It is also an intimate outcry for recognition of Bert’s place in the Norwood family. The commingling of civil disobedience with familial drama gets to the heart of the system of racial disavowal established through slavery and perpetuated in Jim Crow that functions within families but serves to build the nation‐state. The play ends with Bert taking his own life as a lynch mob approaches. In having Bert take his own life, Hughes offers a model for reworking anti‐lynching drama, which proliferated in the 1910s and 1920s. Bert’s last act of agency serves as his final challenge to the order and ordering of things. The best‐known lynching drama postbellum/pre‐Harlem, Angelina Weld Grimké’s Rachel (1916), emphasizes the communal effect of lynching by focusing on the family left behind after the mob enacts vigilante justice. Set in the North and featuring well‐ educated and law‐abiding characters, the play emphasizes the respectable attributes of black domesticity in counter‐distinction to the inherent theatricality of blackness. In addition, as an inaugurating text of the Harlem Renaissance and lynching drama, it shifts the optics of blackness from infamous scenes of brutalized black bodies to the black family. Rachel is not alone in its emphasis on the impact of lynching on the domestic sphere. Alice Dunbar‐Nelson, Mary Burrill, and Georgia Douglas Johnson also wrote plays that considered the effect of lynching on black families. Such focus not only demonstrates the structural force of the mob to destroy family units, it also highlights the humanity of black folk.1 Harlem Renaissance theater and performance not only drew from scientific notions of race, which influenced juridical categories, but also anthropological ones. As Daphne Lamothe argues (2008), anthropology influenced two of the era’s most influential performance artists, James Weldon Johnson and Zora Neale Hurston. Lamothe considers the impact of anthropology, highlighting “One aspect of New Negro modernity is the insistence on a way of seeing that dislocates ways of knowing” (2008, 3). Similar to Hughes, Johnson and Hurston imagined black characters that emerged along the continuum of Old and New Negro at once expressing the comportment, language, dress, and style of the Old Negro while demanding the social equality, recognition, and economic access of the New Negro. Presenting a multiplicity of perspectives that served to disrupt the singularity of ethnographic truth not only informed modes of narration, such as the protagonist’s southern migration in James Weldon Johnson’s 294 Soyica Diggs Colbert novel The Autobiography of an Ex‐Colored Man, which Lamothe discusses, but also Hurston’s use of southern cultural practices in her play Color Struck and her collaboration with Hughes on the drama Mule Bone. Taken together, the two plays (Color Struck and Mule Bone) deploy formal practices that insist “on a way of seeing” that shifts the optics of blackness and the optics of the New Negro. Zora Neale Hurston’s Color Struck (1925) depicts a love triangle among three characters on the way to a cake‐walking contest. Republished in the inaugural and only edition of the journal Fire!! (1926), Color Struck is set in 1906 for the first three scenes and in the 1920s for the final one. The gap in time serves to call attention to the cultural transitions that take place as a result of the Great Migration. While the cake‐walking contest, which is at the heart of Hurston’s play, preoccupied theater artists at the turn of the century, the dance’s popularity had waned by 1926. The first two scenes of Color Struck establish a rivalry between Emma, the dark‐ skinned protagonist, and Effie, “a mulatto girl,” over the affection of John, “a light brown‐skinned man.” While John professes his singular love for Emma throughout the first two scenes of the play, his choice to dance with Effie in scene III, after Emma refuses to dance with him, confirms for Emma a racial hierarchy expressed through colorism. Krasner (2002) questions Hurston’s use of a love triangle as a vehicle to critique colorism. In Colbert (2011) I too explore the theme of colorism in Hurston’s play and determine that Hurston offers a meaningful examination of intraracial hierarchies by focusing attention on the dark‐skinned protagonist and her suffering instead of the disenfranchisement of the mulatta. The distinctions in complexion called for in the character description, however, act as only one device to shift the optics of blackness in Color Struck. In addition, Hurston calls attention to the legacies of minstrelsy and vaudeville in the costuming (see Diamond 2001) of her characters and the staging of a cake‐walking contest to locate what she may call “Characteristics of Negro Expression.” In Hurston’s performance manifesto, “The Characteristics of Negro Expression,” she signifies on the practice of ethnography creating what Lamothe calls “narrative dissonance,” an “uneven or conflicted perspective” (2008, 143). Hurston illustrates the degradation of black speech by pointing to jargon in the rarified Western canon, while using the methodology of ethnography. She explains: “Now the people with highly developed languages have words for detached ideas. That is legal tender. ‘That‐which‐we‐squat‐on’ has become ‘chair.’ … Some individuals even conceive of the equivalent of check words, like ‘ideation’ and ‘pleonastic.’ Perhaps we might say that Paradise Lost and Sartor Resartus are written in check words” (Hurston 1994, 79). In the essay, Hurston positions herself as an objective observer as she highlights the valuation implicit in documentation of culture. Lamothe’s analysis of the influence of the ethnographic gaze on the Harlem Renaissance imagination draws attention to the important influence of anthropology on performance studies and to structures of looking (see Schechner 1985 and Conquergood 1989). In Harlem Renaissance writers’ work ethnography functions to defamiliarize the viewer instead of presenting a cultural contribution as authentic. Changing Optics 295 Such a defamiliarization takes place in Color Struck when Hurston introduces the dancers as “dressed in the gaudy, tawdry best of 1900 … Many ‘plug’ silk hats are in evidence, also sun‐flowers in button holes. The women are showily dressed in the manner of time” (1970, 7). The prototypical costuming establishes the familiar enactment of the cake‐walk as the finale to a variety show. Hurston’s play, however, positions the central character as a part of the background of the penultimate cake‐walking scene, and then refocuses attention on her in the final scene of the play. Rather than reinscribing the ethnographic gaze on the dancing black body, the play shifts the optics of blackness to a dark‐skinned black woman in the rural South that the New Negro movement has left behind. At the same time, the play calls into questions Emma’s investments in colorism. In the final scene of the play, which takes place 20 years after the cake‐walking contest, John returns from his migration to Philadelphia. While John has capitalized on the job opportunities in the North, Emma has remained in the South working as a domestic. Over the span of time, Emma also had a daughter, “a very white girl,” that appears to be mixed race and is deathly ill. When John arrives and learns the condition of Emma’s daughter, he sends Emma for help. Upon return, Emma accuses John of making advances toward her daughter and asks him to leave; shortly thereafter the girl dies. At the end of the play Emma is left alone, and she laments, “Couldn’t see” (Hurston 1970, 14). In the final line and shift of focus on characters from scene III to scene IV, the play calls attention to the social forces that produce ways of seeing, rendering dubious what appears before the eyes. Similar to Hurston’s Color Struck, the drama Hurston and Hughes collaborated on, Mule Bone, also features a love triangle: the play marries Hurston’s interests in folk culture “mastery of the vernacular and compelling sense of story” with Hughes’s expertise in dramatic structure (Gates 1991, 10). In the first act of the play an argument ensues between best friends Jim Weston and Dave Carter over Daisy Taylor. As tempers flare, Weston strikes Carter with the hock‐bone of a mule. Weston is arrested and stands trial in the second act of the play. The third act depicts a resolution between Jim and Dave “in a witty and sustained verbal dual, in which the two trade cleverly improvised hyperbolic claims of their love for Daisy, in an elaborate ritual of courtship” (19). The artful signifying that ends the play pulls on a thread of verbal performance Hurston and Hughes weave throughout Mule Bone. The verbal jousting highlights the intersection of performance and ethnography as Hurston scripts interactions based on quotidian exchanges she witnesses as an ethnographer and experiences growing up in Eatonville, Florida. Through humor and signifying, the play also disrupts the fixity of the southern rural Negro in the past through his or her association with what the New Negro has left behind and, instead, demonstrates the movement of culture through migration. Once again refocusing the visual landscape as a moving image rather than a static one, the play calls for the multiple geographies of the New Negro. The play had the potential to realize Hurston’s “plans for a culturally authentic African‐American theatre, one constructed upon a foundation of the black vernacular” (Gates 1991, 9). Unfortunately, a copyright dispute left the play unfinished and 296 Soyica Diggs Colbert severed the friendship between Hurston and Hughes. Hurston’s desire for authenticity demonstrates a questionable aspect of Harlem Renaissance cultural production that Lamothe ascribes to the disciplinary influences of ethnography. Although claims towards authenticity, as J. Martin Favor describes in Authentic Blackness: The Folk in the New Negro Renaissance (1999), undercut the diversity and complexity of black subjectivity, Hurston’s use of folk traditions within her art also make an original contribution to African American literature. As Henry Louis Gates describes: Hughes and Hurston … were drawing upon the black vernacular tradition both to “ground” their drama in that discourse but also to “extend” the vernacular itself. Mule Bone, then, was not a mere vehicle for black folklore, rather, black folklore served as the basis, the foundation, for what they hoped would be a truly new art form: an art form that would stand in relation to traditional American drama in the way that Hughes’s “blue poetry” stood to American poetry and Hurston’s vernacular fictions stood to the American novel. (1991, 20–21) While Mule Bone has its limitations as a play, including the gender politics and its use of “broad black comic types,” it demonstrates how the distinctive characteristics of Negro expression, to borrow from the title of Hurston’s essay, may serve as the basis for Negro art (Bass 1991, 3). In drawing directly from black culture to nurture African American drama, Hurston and Hughes have the potential to “reshape the public image of black people within American society and facilitate thereby their long struggle for civil rights, a struggle that commenced almost as soon as the last battle of the Civil War ended” (Gates 1991, 6). Hurston and Hughes used humor, folk cultural references, and signifying to demonstrate the humanity of black folk and highlight the unique contribution black arts make to American culture. While dangerous in its ability to be misread, Hurston and Hughes’s use of comedy as a force of optic reorientation resonates with the work of great performers of the era, including, most notably, the work of Josephine Baker. As Daphne Brooks illustrates (2007) and Jayna Brown details in Babylon Girls: Black Women Performers and the Shaping of the Modern (2008), black performer extraordinaire Josephine Baker manipulated her body in her comedic and dance performances from her early work appearing as a show girl, to opening in La Revue Nègre (1925) in Paris, to starring in Siren of the Tropics (1927), Zouzou (1934), and Princess Tam Tam (1935). Baker’s performances “reveal … innovative comedic strategies of gestures and corporeal eccentricities. Read from this perspective, we can consider the ways that Baker’s body perhaps re‐oriented the spectacular attention directed at black female bodies in public spaces and potentially disabled … exploitative spectatorship” (Brooks 2007). Similar to what I call the tightrope of identifications (Colbert 2011) that dancer Aida Overton Walker and others walk performing the cake‐walk for white patrons while sidestepping primitivism or authenticating blackness, Baker’s comedic performance signified on primitivism through acts of disidentification (see Muñoz 1999). The dancing, similar to Hurston’s and Hughes’s use of comedy, borrowed from stereotypical portrayals of blackness in order to undermine the stereotypes. Moreover as Cheryl Wall notes, Changing Optics 297 “In Paris [Baker] creates a persona that played to racist fantasies … yet she was not controlled by those fantasies. She retained her freedom and her integrity” (2001, 31, 35). Baker’s ability to evoke multiple corporeal traditions at once deflected the regulatory force of primitivism. Her deft comedic performance inspires new ways of understanding looking in the modernist period as demonstrated in Cheng (2011). Cheng uses the fascination with Baker as a performer to call attention to the viewer’s desire to ascribe meaning to Baker. In an incisive reading of how audiences project meaning onto Baker, Cheng demonstrates how theories of Baker as performer reveal as much about the viewer as they do about Baker’s actions. Cheng explains: “What interests me about revisiting the intimacy between Modernism and Primitivism is not what it can tell us about how we see racial difference, but about how racial difference teaches us to see” (2011, 6; emphasis original). The pedagogic aspect of Harlem Renaissance theater and performance returns, highlighting a generation of performers’ desire not only to appear differently but also for the audience to see differently. The interactive nature of dramatic arts has a communal function that works intraracially and interracially. Baker’s star quality particularizes audiences’ readings and misreadings of her and her contemporary performer Paul Robeson. Robeson emerges as a celebrity actor and singer during the Harlem Renaissance. On May 16, 1924, a revival of Eugene O’Neill’s hit play The Emperor Jones opened at the Provincetown Playhouse starring the relatively unknown actor Robeson. The play that launches O’Neill as the US playwright, depicts the deterioration of a ruler, Brutus Jones.2 The central character, an escaped convict and former Pullman porter, finds himself in exile on an island in the West Indies sometime between the end of the American Civil War and 1920. The setting of the play coincides with the growth of US empire, which, within the time span of the action of the play held Hawaii, Guam, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Haiti, and the Virgin Islands. Referencing US expansion, Jones takes control of the island, names himself emperor (as did Haitian leaders Jean Jacques Dessalines and Faustin Soulouque) and, by the time the play begins, falls from grace, marking the end of his despotic reign. The play details the emotional and psychological turmoil Jones experiences when he flees his palace, a palace unmistakably modeled off the Citadel that Haitian leader Henri Christophe built, and ventures into the forest to escape an impending coup (see Renda 2000, 203). Fleeing from attack into the dark woods, Jones finds haunting reminders of his past, a personal past that the play and the film adaptation intertwine with the history of US empire. Playing the role of Emperor Jones affirmed popular perceptions of black primitivism, an outgrowth of US imperialism, as it regularized notions of black leadership. As Stephanie Leigh Batiste explicates, imperialism includes “expansion, primitivism, exoticism, orientalism, ethnographic anthropology, and militarism” (2011, 2). Imperialism serves to create social values. Ideologically it not only promotes national identity it also inscribes individuals discursively and bodily. Robeson’s stature, standing 6 feet 3 inches (1.90 m) tall, made him an exemplar of what Jeffrey C. Stewart describes as the “cultural change in the interpretation of Black during the 1920s” (1998, 138). Stewart elaborates that the intersection of the Great Migration and the 298 Soyica Diggs Colbert corresponding emergence of the Harlem Renaissance alongside “the flowering of a white American modernist literary and artistic movement … transformed the image of the Negro from a post‐Civil War ward to a twentieth‐century American primitive, whose presumed freedom from civilization was positive in the anti‐Victorian bohemianism of Greenwich Village” (1998, 138–39). When Robeson played Jones, however, his body did not remain a static signifier; his gestures, comportment, and positioning may be understood as reinforcing or undermining the primitivism modern American culture scripts for his body. Robeson participates in a collective of theatrical arts that work together to produce the appearance of blackness. Harlem Renaissance theater and performance offers ways of seeing blackness that call into question juridical and anthropological notions of race in the early twentieth century. While some modes of performance reinforce the uplift politics of the architects of the Renaissance through respectable comportment, others call to mind sensuality and spectacle in order to attenuate the automatic association of blackness with primitivism. Using theatrical devices, the theater and performance of the Harlem Renaissance changes the optics of blackness from stillness to movement. Notes 1 See Mitchell 2011 and Krasner 2002, Chapter 5, 97–112. 2 The Emperor Jones introduced O’Neill to international theater audiences and, according to Travis Bogard, “Not only the literate American drama, but the American theatre came of age with this play” (1972, 343). Through O’Neill’s experimentation with expressionism, the play placed American theatrical modernism in conversation with its European counterparts and secured O’Neill’s position as a vanguard of American drama. Cross‐reference See also Chapter 3. Harlem Nights: Expressive Culture, Popular Performance, and the New Negro. References Bass, George Houston. 1991. “Another Bone of Contention: Reclaiming Our Gift of Laughter.” In Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes, Mule Bone: A Comedy of Negro Life, 1–4. New York: Harper Perennial. Batiste, Stephanie Leigh. 2011. Darkening Mirrors: Imperial Representation in Depression‐Era African American Performance. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Bogard, Travis. 1972. Contour in Time: The Plays of Eugene O’Neill. New York: Oxford University Press. Brooks, Daphne Ann. 2007. “The End of the Line: Josephine Baker and the Politics of Black Women’s Corporeal Comedy.” The Scholar and Feminist Changing Optics Online 6.1–6.2. http://sfonline.barnard.edu/baker/ brooks_01.htm. Accessed January 14, 2015. Brown, Jayna. 2008. Babylon Girls: Black Women Performers and the Shaping of the Modern. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Cheng, Anne Anlin. 2011. Second Skin: Josephine Baker and the Modern Surface. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Colbert, Soyica Diggs. 2011. The African American Theatrical Body: Reception Performance and the Stage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Conquergood, Dwight. 1989. I Am a Shaman: A Hmong Life Story with Ethnographic Commentary. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Diamond, Elin. 2001. “Modern Drama/Modernity’s Drama.” Modern Drama 41.1: 3–15. Du Bois, W.E.B. 1996. “The Criteria of Negro Art.” In The Oxford W.E.B. Du Bois Reader, ed. by Eric J. Sundquist, 324–28. New York: Oxford University Press. Elam, Harry J., Jr. 2001. “The Device of Race.” In African American Performance and Theater History: A Critical Reader, ed. by Harry J. Elam, Jr and David Krasner. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Elam, Harry J., Jr, and Michele Elam. 2009. “Blood Debt: Reparations in Langston Hughes’s Mulatto.” Theatre Journal 61: 85–103. Favor, J. Martin. 1999. Authentic Blackness: The Folk in the New Negro Renaissance. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. 1991. “A Tragedy of Negro Life.” In Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes, Mule Bone: A Comedy of Negro Life, 5– 24. New York: Harper Perennial. Griffin, Farah Jasmine. 1995. “Who Set You Flowin’?”: The African American Migration Narrative. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hughes, Langston. 2002. Mulatto. In The Collected Works of Langston Hughes, vol. V: The Plays to 1942: “Mulatto” to “The Sun Do Move”, ed. by Leslie Catherine Sanders and Nancy Johnston, 17–50. Columbia: University of Missouri Press. 299 Hurston, Zora Neale. 1970. Color Struck. In Fire!!, ed. by Wallace Thurman, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Gwendolyn Bennett, Aaron Douglas, Richard Bruce, and John Davis, 7–14. Westport, CT: Negro Universities Press. Orig. pub. 1926. Hurston, Zora Neale. 1994. “Characteristics of Negro Expression.” In Within the Circle: An Anthology of African American Literary Criticism, ed. by Angelyn Mitchell, 79–96. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Krasner, David. 2002. A Beautiful Pageant: African American Theatre, Drama, and Performance in the Harlem Renaissance 1910–1927. New York: Palgrave. Lamothe, Daphne. 2008. Inventing the New Negro: Narrative, Culture, and Ethnography. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Locke, Alain, ed. 1992. The New Negro. New York: Touchstone. Mitchell, Koritha. 2011. Living with Lynching: African American Lynching Plays, Performance, and Citizenship, 1890–1930. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Muñoz, José Esteban. 1999. Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Raimon, Eve Allegra. 2004. The “Tragic Mulatta” Revisited: Race and Nationalism in Nineteenth Century Antislavery Fiction. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Renda, Mary A. 2000. Taking Haiti: Military Occupation and the Culture of US Imperialism, 1915–1940. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Robinson, Amy. 1996. “Forms of Appearance of Value: Homer Plessy and the Politics of Privacy.” In Performance and Cultural Politics, ed. by Elin Diamond, 239–67. London: Routledge. Schechner, Richard. 1985. Between Theater and Anthropology. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Sherrard‐Johnson, Cherene. 2007. Portraits of the New Negro Woman: Visual and Literary Culture in 300 Soyica Diggs Colbert the Harlem Renaissance. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Stewart, Jeffrey C. 1998. Paul Robeson Artist and Citizen. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Streeter, Caroline A. 2012. Tragic No More: Mixed Race and the Nexus of Sex and Celebrity. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Vogel, Shane. 2009. The Scene of the Harlem Cabaret: Race, Sexuality, Performance. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Wall, Cheryl A. 1995. Women of the Harlem Renaissance. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Wall, Cheryl A. 2001. Qtd in Phyllis Rose, “Exactly What Is It about Josephine Baker?” New York Times (March 10): 2: 31, 35. Weigman, Robyn. 1995. American Anatomies: Theorizing Race and Gender. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Wilkerson, Isabel. 2010. The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration. New York: Vintage. ~------- RighteousPropag~!!~~s ANDTHEPOLITICSOF RACIALDESTINYAFTER RECONSTRUCTION BYMICHELE KITCHELL The Universityof North Carolina Press ChapelHill & ~ndcn i; m 11,I/111,·1•,, 1.~. 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