University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

Troubling the boundaries: "blacknesses," performance, and the African American freedom struggle of the 1960s

(USC Thesis Other)

Troubling the boundaries: "blacknesses," performance, and the African American freedom struggle of the 1960s

PDF

Download a page range

Download transcript

Copy asset link

Request this asset

Transcript (if available)

Content TROUBLING THE BOUNDARIES: “BLACKNESSES,” PERFORMANCE AND
THE AFRICAN AMERICAN FREEDOM STRUGGLE OF THE 1960S
by
Carol Bunch Davis
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(ENGLISH)
August 2007
Copyright 2007 Carol Bunch Davis
ii
Dedication
To my parents, Jimmie and Bettie Bunch
and
My daughter, Kai Annabelle Davis
iii
Table of Contents
Dedication ii
Abstract iv
Chapter 1 1
Chapter 2 34
Chapter 3 68
Chapter 4 107
Epilogue 156
References 168
iv
Abstract
In its analysis of four plays staged between 1959 and 1969, Troubling the
Boundaries: ‘Blacknesses’ Performance and The African American Freedom
Struggle asks how the performance of visual and textual “blackness” in these works
mediate, rehearse, and constitute multiple black identities or “blacknesses” in
dialogue with the social and political upheaval of the African-American Freedom
Struggle and traces how they inform the discourse of race during this historical era.
The project demonstrates how the deployment of blackness as a performative
strategy in these four sites of performance produces multiple “blacknesses” and
resists the notion of a monolithic “blackness” circulating in both cultural and
sociopolitical milieus during this period.
Attentive to a “master narrative” of the 1960s that limits the Civil Rights
Movement to Dr. Martin Luther King’s work in Selma and Montgomery and casts
Malcolm X and the Black Power and Black Arts Movements as disloyal to calls for
integration and nonviolent protest, this project contends that the expressive culture of
the period troubles such a narrative. Instead, Troubling the Boundaries draws
attention to the ways in which “blacknesses” are constructed at multiples sites within
a matrix of social relations, as well as economic, political, and social issues that
foreground how race intersects with class, gender, sexuality, and region to
complicate black identity.
Considering works written, performed, and directed African-American
cultural producers and theatre critics’ responses to them in popular media outlets, the
project analyzes “cultural crisscrossings” and how they comment upon, revise, and
v
reinscribe notions of black identity through and between boundaries of race, class,
gender, sexuality, and region. Employing mixed methods including film, theatre and
performance theory alongside African-American literary and cultural theory the
project investigates the construction of blackness and black identity across genres.
In its analysis of texts that are not anthologized, revisiting those texts that are, and re-
examining those positioned as representative of the period, this dissertation
complicates notions of African-American identity in the 1960s and speculates on that
era’s currency in the present historical moment.
Chapter One: “Blackness” as Performance, Performance as “Blackness”
If a black somebody is in a history book, or printed on a pitcher, or drawed on a
paintin’, …or if they’re a statue,…dead and out of the way, and can’t talk back, then
you dig ‘em and full-a so much-a damn admiration and talk ‘bout “our” history. But
when you run into us livin’ and breathin’ ones, with the life’s blood still pumpin’
through us,…then you comin’ on about how we ain’ never together. You hate us,
that’s what! You hate Black me!
Tommy Fields to Bill, Oldtimer, Sonny and Cynthia in Alice Childress’ Wine in the
Wilderness
Tropes of “blackness” figuring African-American identity circulate in a range
of texts from W. E. B Dubois’ notion of double consciousness in The Souls of Black
Folk (1903) to Ralph Ellison’s casting of “blackness” as invisibility in Invisible Man
(1952) to Ossie Davis’ representation of “blackness” as “endless beginning” in
Purlie Victorious (1961), LeRoi Jones’ representation of “blackness” as “device” in
Dutchman (1964) and finally to the interrogation of an essentialized trope of
“blackness” in Alice Childress’ play Wine in the Wilderness (1969). At the climax of
that play, Tomorrow Marie Fields (Tommy) rejects the notions of black identity
imposed upon her by her peers and acknowledges a consciousness of cultural
attitudes, actions and behaviors linked to “blackness” and black identity. Next, she
discerns an audience that views these cultural codes and appraises her actions against
these codes. Her assertions about the representation of black identity and how she is
situated by them also points up the notion that black identity is not fixed, but
contingent upon his performance of the attitudes, actions, and behaviors for the
audience[s] that recognize[s] and/or validate[s] them. Finally, asserting her
evaluation as performative, linking it to the materiality of her performance at that
moment, and acknowledging the contingency of this particular performance of
“blackness” opens possibilities for the reconfiguring of black identity within and
1
against normative attitudes, actions, and behaviors. In effect, Tommy’s response to
Bill, Oldtimer, Sonny and Cynthia outlines a performative notion of black identity
central to this project. Her assertions make legible the ways in which the
performance of “blackness” is both “a doing”—an embodied act at a specific site,
potentially disrupting conventions of “blackness” and “a thing done—a pre-existing
oppressive category”.
1
It also reveals a concept of performance as “the site in which
concealed or dissimulated conventions might be investigated”.
2
While she clearly
critiques the notion of “blackness” as stable as well as its implicit gesture toward an
authentic black identity, her reply makes visible the cultural apparatus of
“blackness” that coerces certain social acts and excludes others and significantly,
mobilizes it as both identifying and disrupting those operations. Tommy Field’s glib
yet deft explication of “blackness” and black identity as performative drives the line
of inquiry Troubling the Boundaries: “Blacknesses”, Performance and the African-
American Freedom Struggle follows.
Foregrounding four plays from 1959 to 1969, this project asks 1) how does
the performance of textual “blackness” in selected plays of the 1960s mediate,
rehearse, and constitute multiple black identities or “blacknesses” in dialogue with
the social and political upheaval of the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements—
or African-American Freedom Struggle 2) what kinds of “blacknesses” do the
performances in these texts advance and how do they inform the discourse of
blackness 3) how do they resist, reflect, and inform nation-building efforts within the
11
Elin Diamond, ed. Performance and Cultural Politics. (London: Routledge, 1996).
2
Diamond. 5
2
context of the social and political changes taking place and 4) why is the expressive
culture of the period is as important as the political and social change in
understanding the significance of the period not only to African-American identity
and culture. To this end, the dissertation demonstrates that the deployment of
blackness as a performative strategy in drama of the period produces multiple
“blacknesses” and resists the notion of a monolithic “blackness” circulating in both
cultural and sociopolitical milieus during this period.
Attentive to a “master narrative”
3
of the 1960s that limits the Civil Rights
Movement to Dr. Martin Luther King’s work in Selma and Montgomery and casts
Malcolm X and the Black Power Movement as disloyal to this movement’s calls for
integration and nonviolent protest, this project contends that the expressive culture of
the period troubles such a narrative and that the period’s texts cannot be reduced to
symbolic stand-ins advocating either integration or revolution as both King and
Malcolm X are often cast. Instead, Troubling the Boundaries rejects such binaries
and draws attention to the ways in which “blacknesses” are constructed at multiples
sites within a matrix of social relations, as well as economic, political, and social
issues that foreground how race intersects with class, gender, sexuality, and region to
complicate black identity. Representations of blackness produced during the period,
particularly in the Black Power Movement and its cultural corollary, the Black Arts
Movement, often hinged on essentialized notions of “blackness” and masculinity and
3
Brian E. Ward ed., Media, Culture, and the Modern African American Freedom Struggle.
(Tallahassee: Florida University Press, 2001) 13. Ward argues that the post-war freedom struggle
itself provided context and content for developments in American media and culture and that
“conventional master narrative of the period has come to dominate social memory” (8).
3
these particular representations are often positioned as representative of the era.
4
This project challenges such mobilizations by taking into account works that utilize
performative concepts of racial identity to interrogate formations of “blackness” as
essence and that equate “blackness” with an essentialized masculine identity in order
to complicate the way we understand both the discourse of “blackness” and
representations of “blackness” during this period.
In its consideration of plays written, performed, and directed African-
American cultural producers that advance multiple modes of “blackness” the project
analyzes these “cultural crisscrossings”
5
and how they comment upon, revise, and
reinscribe notions of “blackness” and black identity through and between boundaries
4
One example is Phillip Brian Harper’s Are We Not Men? Masculine Anxiety and the Problem of
African-American Identity. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). Harper offers a critique of
masculinism and its anchoring of African-American identity in African-American culture arguing that
the Black Arts rhetoric in five frequently anthologized “exemplary” poems he considers hinges on an
intraracial division which contradicts the Black Arts project’s objective “to promote racial solidarity”
53. He correctly points out that this masculinist bias has continuing import and contends that “[I]t is
as crucial as ever to offer a cogent critique of black masculinism and the nationalist impulse” 53.
While this critique of the masculinist underpinnings of both Black Arts specifically and African-
American culture broadly is valid, it is also necessary to underscore that these impulses were critiqued
in the midst of the Black Arts project by some of cultural producers themselves and that while a
masculinist vision of black identity clearly exerted significant pressure on the movement, work by
Sonia Sanchez, Adrienne Kennedy, Ntozake Shange, Alice Childress, and Leslie Lee, among others
that challenge this vision have not received the level of scholarly attention that work viewed as
“exemplary” has enjoyed. Along these lines, Kimberly W. Benston suggests in Performing Blackness:
Enactments of African-American Modernism (London: Routledge, 2000) that the work of Shange and
Kennedy (and I would add Sanchez, Childress, and Lee who all produced work during this period)
should be positioned as “vital elements of, not antidotes or affronts to, the Black Arts Movement” 68.
Mike Sell concurs with Benston’s assertion in both “[Ed] Bullins as Editorial Performer: Textual
Power and the Limits of Performance in the Black Arts Movement” Theatre Journal 53 (2001) 411-
428 and “The Black Arts Movement: Performance, Neo-Orality, and the Destruction of the ‘White
Thing’” in African-American Performance and Theater History: A Critical Reader. Harry Elam, Jr.
and David Krasner eds.(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001) 56-80.
5
Michael Awkward, Negotiating Difference: Race, Gender, and the Politics of Positionality.
(Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1994) 15. Awkward argues that cultural crisscrossing functions
as an “image of translocational influence [that] acknowleg[es] and map[s] however imprecisely, the
presence of a multicultural synchronicity in a variety of subjects” 10.
4
of race, class, gender, sexuality, and region. Troubling the Boundaries situates the
ambiguities and nuances present in the representations of “blackness” during the
postwar freedom struggle at the center of the exploration, remaining mindful of the
historical context of the drama considered in the inquiry. Further, this project
foregrounds popular works—in particular those which gained accolades in mass
media assessments—alongside off-Broadway productions—in an effort to extend the
notion of “crisscrossings” to both generic and canonical boundaries. While Mark
Reid’s important Post Negritude Visual and Literary Culture conducts readings
across genres to explicate texts that follow his postNegritude paradigm in their
scrutiny of “monolithic forms of black subjectivity”; with the exception of Spike
Lee’s Malcolm X (1992), his inquiry focuses on independent cinema and
noncanonical fiction. In addition, his concern with interrogating heteronormative
and masculinist impulses overlooks how class status and class mobility might also
question static notions of black subjectivity, as well as how these factors might
inform heteronormative and masculinist conventions.
6
The project brings these
interests to bear on the discourse of blackness and representation during the 1960s.
Considering the dialectic between marginalized and popular works challenges
tendencies in film and literary criticism to analyze them in isolation and in particular,
6
Mark Reid, PostNegritude Visual and Literary Culture. (Albany: State University of New York
Press, 1997). While Reid allows that his focus on a “womanist” reading of the texts “should not be
viewed as ignoring the importance of other lived experiences such as class” he states that
“womanism” contests the destructive elements in certain masculinist and nationalist forms of
subjectivity” 83. However, class status and class mobility informs, and in some instances authorizes,
the masculinist and nationalist forms of subjectivity he cites as problematic, including the stand-up
comedy of Eddie Murphy and Andrew Dice Clay, as well as the lyrics of 2 Live Crew and Guns n
Roses. Seemingly, a critique of the function of class in these forms would be as useful as
“womanism” in contesting their destructive elements.
5
the notion that popular works are always a totalized and totalizing reinscription of
hegemonic power.
7
This project contends that reconsidering this period using
theories of performance and performativity to investigate the construction of
blackness and black identity in addition to focusing on texts that are not
anthologized, revisiting those texts that are, and re-examining those positioned as
representative of the period elicits a richly textured and multifaceted understanding
of the construction of racial identity in both the 1960s and that era’s impact on the
present historical moment.
Cultural production from the late 1980s to the late 1990s including Spike
Lee’s Do The Right Thing (1989), Malcolm X (1992), Get On The Bus (1996) and
Four Little Girls (1998), the 1999 NBC television miniseries “The 60s”, Alan
Parker’s Mississippi Burning (1988), Danzy Senna’s novel Caucasia (1998) to hip
hop duo Outkast’s 1998 resignifying of Civil Rights icon Rosa Parks in a song
bearing her name and rapper Eminem’s (Slim Shady) reworking of writer Robert
Beck’s (Iceberg Slim) penname among others, draw upon and revise notions of
“blackness” from this crucial historical era.
Even in Jasper, Texas, the site of the brutal June 1998 murder of James
Byrd, Jr., traces of the era were revised and recast. In the wake of Byrd’s death, a
Dallas-based group calling itself the New Black Panther Party staged an armed
7
Mark Reid’s Redefining Black Film (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993) makes a claim
for evaluating independent black cinema apart from commercial films. See also Jesse Rhines’ Black
Film/White Money, (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1996). In contrast, Ed Guerrero’s
Framing Blackness: The African-American Image in Film turns a critical eye toward popular “hit
vehicles” because they are most successful in shaping “narrative cinema languages and conventions”
and because of their power to “shape the audience’s conception of race. . . .and its mediation of the
audience’s racial and social attitudes” 45.
6
counter protest to a Ku Klux Klan demonstration in front of the Jasper County
Courthouse. A year before Byrd’s murder, original members of the Oakland-based
Black Panther Party for Self Defense were granted an injunction against the new
group’s use of the name. Original members claimed that the new group engaged in
“race baiting” and “misrepresenting” the Black Panther Party name because it was
more interested in headlines than in “serving the people”.
8
These examples link
“blackness” in the present moment to the earlier historical moment and raise an
important question about that linkage: what does deploying these performances of
“blacknesses” at these sites and at these times accomplish and what kinds of claims
are being made in the name of these particular performances? Thinking about and
tracing the operations of blackness as performance in the culture of the 1960s and its
linkage to the current moment can provide an entry into that question. Seemingly,
the performance of “blacknesses” in the past and present moments illustrate a desire
for the possibility of a liberating identity outside of social and cultural conventions
that might confine identity within narrow boundaries, even as they draw upon and
conceal those very conventions in order to figure that identity with a difference.
Further, these liberating identities might provide a means by which to confront and
8
Madeline Baro, “Black Panthers in Cat Fight/60’s Activists Defend Title Against ‘90’s Party They
Call Racist,” Houston Chronicle, 9 March 1997. 2 star ed.: State 4. This group’s membership includes
Quanell X and the late Khalid Mohammed, who gained national attention for his racist viewpoints in
the wake of the Million Man March in 1995. Both were expelled from the Nation of Islam in 1996.
The New Black Panther Party has been denounced by the Anti-Defamation League and is on the
Southern Poverty Law Center’s list of hate groups. Former Black Panther Party for Self-Defense
members Fahim Minkah (Fred Bell) and co-founder Bobby Seale have also condemned the new
organization as a “black racist hate group”. As problematic as its racial politics are, the group
successfully lobbied the Dallas Independent School District for changes in testing policies that
negatively impacted students of color. I am interested in how the new group mobilizes its notion of
the Black Panther’s performance of “blackness” to advance its own contradictory agenda and how
similar contradictions existed in deployments of “blackness” in the 1960s.
7
navigate “the delimiting cultural conventions of the geography within which they
move”
9
.
In outlining a performative concept of “blackness” within various
performance sites, this project allows for the possibility of envisioning and enacting
such identities and calls for a discussion of them. As Elin Diamond points out, “as
soon as performativity comes to rest on a performance, questions of embodiment, of
social relations, of ideological interpellations, of emotional and political effects all
become discussable”.
10
Troubling the Boundaries works toward advancing such a
discussion about the 1960s and to access the operations of its cultural affiliations and
conventions through the performance of “blacknesses” in the sites of performance it
studies, as well as, identify and discuss how they inform multiple black identities in
the midst of social change. Though they vary in scope and genre, these examples
demonstrate the continuing significance of representations from this period in
mediating, rehearsing, and constituting, African-American identities.
Troubling the Boundaries concerns itself with outlining the contours of
“blackness” during this specific period through the plays it considers and how the
political and social turmoil of the era influences the representations of “blackness”.
In order to enhance understanding of the representations it analyzes, it leans heavily
on key historical events of the period, linking them to the plays and the
representations of “blackness” considered, but it also turns to the historical archive of
9
Jill Dolan, “Geographies of Learning: Theatre Studies, Performance, and the Performative” Theatre
Journal 45 (1996) 417-444.
10
Diamond 5.
8
the plays’ reviews from both their premieres and subsequent productions. Turning to
the production history and review archives of the plays reveals several important
concepts that are central to interpreting the representations in them.
First, it highlights the response of critics to the wide scope of representations
of “blackness” during the period and can illuminate how the critics link
representations of “blackness” and its performance to history. Most significantly,
turning to the review archive reveals how both of those terms inform and shape their
interpretation. In “The Pot Calling the Kettle Black”, E. Patrick Johnson addresses
the interconnectedness of these terms and outlines how they create a multitude of
representational possibilities, arguing that “blackness” and “performance” are terms
that “signify differently within the specifics of [their] historicity”.
11
He continues:
“Blackness” and “performance” complement one another in a dialectic that
becomes an ontology of racialized cultural production. “Blackness,” for
instance, is a simulacrum until it is practiced—i.e. performed. The
epistemological moment of race manifests itself in and through performance
in that performance facilitates self-and cultural reflexivity—a knowing made
manifest by a “doing”. Far from undergirding an essentialist purview of
blackness, performance, as a mode of representation, emphasizes the ways in
which cultures struggle to define who they are and who they want to be.
12
Johnson’s insights regarding the manifestation of race through performative “doings”
and how they emphasize cultural agency are brought to bear on the review archive
that Troubling the Boundaries draws upon because the reviews provide a narrative of
11
E. Patrick Johnson, “The Pot Calling the Kettle Black” Theatre Journal 57 (2005) 605-608. In this
special issue devoted to Black Performance, Johnson’s essay was part of a forum on Black Theatre
that included the responses of sixteen critics and artists to the questions what is a black play and/or
what is playing black?
12
Johnson, 606.
9
the reactions to these efforts toward self-definition. In effect, they reveal how critics
responded to and interpreted “a knowing made manifest by a ‘doing’”.
13
Further, the
review archive details how the specifics of that particular historical moment shape
and inform the critical response to the representations. In other words, the review
archive provides a narrative, not only of a response to and interpretation of the plays
and their representations, but also of the themes and (then) current issues that the
representations directly or indirectly address. If the plays and their representations
catalogue multiple manifestations of “blackness”, then the review archive details a
parallel catalogue of the impact of pertinent historical events on the critical response
to representations of “blackness” and its performance.
Another reason for turning to the review archive is to make visible as David
Román contends in Performance in America: Contemporary U.S. Culture and the
Performing Arts the archive of previous performances that impinge upon subsequent
performances. In making the case for the significance of the performing arts in
shaping American culture, he offers an alternative perspective on the term
“contemporary” that refutes it as “presentist” or “as if the contemporary could only
be understood as antagonistic to the past, or in a mutually exclusive relationship to
it”.
14
In further disputing claims around “presentism”, he argues that:
Contemporary performance is itself already embedded in a historical archive
of past performances that help contextualize the work in history. In this way,
the contemporary participates in an ongoing dialogue with previously
13
Johnson 606.
14
David Román. Performance in America: Contemporary U.S. Culture and the Performing Arts.
Durham: Duke UP, 2005 (12).
10
contemporary works now relegated to literary history, the theatrical past, or
cultural memory.
15
While Roman’s insights speak specifically to tracing the contours of the
“contemporary”, he asserts that in so doing he is lead “to examine other historical
periods and practices” in order to fully understand the relationship between the
contemporary and the past.
16
In other words, the historical past cannot be erased
from the contemporary present in performance. Roman’s assertions about the
relationship between contemporary works and “previously contemporary” works
have two important implications for this project. First, the “previously
contemporary” works considered here have been consistently produced in venues
across the country and in Europe in the over forty years since their initial production.
Further, within the last three years, each play has been revived.
17
What this enduring
production history suggests is that though they have been relegated to “literary
history, the theatrical past or cultural memory”, these plays and their representations
still resonate with the cultural workers who stage them and potentially for the
audiences who view them. In a sense, they remain contemporary, in the here and
now, because they have been summoned from the past to speak to issues in the
15
Roman 12-13.
16
Roman 13.
17
On January 14, 2007, Dutchman opened as the third installment of The Cherry Lane Theater’s
Heritage Series comprised of works that had their debuts there. Alice Childress’ Wine in the
Wilderness was staged as the inaugural production at Seattle’s The Hansberry Project at ACT Theatre
in June and July of 2006. Ossie Davis’s Purlie Victorious was produced by the New Horizon Theater
at Kelly-Strayhorn Theater in Pittsburgh in February of 2006. Finally, A Raisin in the Sun was revived
in 2004 on Broadway at the Royale Theatre, earning Phylicia Rashad a Tony Award for her turn as
Lena Younger and making her the first African American woman to win the award for the best
performance by a leading actress. Audra McDonald also won her fourth Tony Award for her
portrayal of Ruth Younger and the production marked the stage debut of hip-hop artist and producer
Sean Combs.
11
present moment. Accessing the review archives can provide an entry into
discovering what resonates and why it does so in the current historical moment.
Second, and perhaps most importantly, the review archive throws into relief
the “ghosts” of previous performances of “blackness”. Even if the plays themselves
do not always resurrect or allude to previous representations of “blackness” on stage,
the critics reviewing the plays consistently draw upon preceding representations of
“blackness” in an effort to make sense of the current representation being staged.
Accessing the review archives enhances our understanding of how “previously
contemporary ‘blacknesses’” are put in the service of unraveling the representations
the critics interpret and helps to determine what tools they have at their disposal to
read them. Often, for the critics of the plays considered in Troubling the Boundaries,
these tools are the “ghosts” of previous performances and historical events occurring
in that current moment.
The final reason for drawing upon the review archive is to take note of the
pivotal role critics play in how the representations on stage are interpreted. Turning
again to Román’s study of contemporary performance and his analysis of a 2004
revival of William Saroyan’s 1939 play The Time of Your Life is instructive. Here he
emphasizes the growing importance of theatre critics to potential audiences for the
plays being produced and in particular the role they served in the reception to
Saroyan’s play:
Beginning in the mid-1920s, a new brand of critics who professed some
knowledge of theatre and drama had begun to write for daily and weekly
print media. Critics such as [Brooks] Atkinson, who began writing for the
New York Times in 1925, George Jean Nathan, and John Mason Brown
ranked among the most prominent of theatre critics whose reviews and
12
profiles were readily found in newspapers and magazines. They helped
educate an audience of readers on the merits of theatre.
18
While Román marks the start of the ascent of critics in the public sphere some
twenty years before the plays considered in this project, his observations have
significance because several of the critics he cites actually reviewed the plays under
discussion in Troubling the Boundaries. Further, by the late 1950s and early 1960s
when the plays considered here were produced, this upper echelon of theatre critics
had firmly established themselves as effective readers of theatre and drama. In short,
how they read and interpreted the works they considered mattered to their readership
and was taken seriously by them. Consequently, drawing upon the review archive
serves myriad purposes in this project. It provides parallel narratives to the analysis
of the plays considered and enriches how they are understood.
Troubling the Boundaries explores dramatic texts and engages scholarship in
American Studies, African-American Studies, Drama and Performance Studies,
Cultural Studies, and Literary Criticism. While histories of the period focus on
particular aspects of the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements and numerous
biographies detail significant figures in those movements, much of the existing
scholarship concentrates on the social and political events without a discussion of the
expressive culture. In developing an argument for a reconsideration of the period,
the project looks toward expanding the scope of histories of the 1960s such as Todd
Gitlin’s The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage that focus primarily on the New
Left, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), and anti-war Movements, situating
them at the center of the decade and recalling their pivotal moments, while figuring
18
Roman 297.
13
the African-American Freedom Struggle as a source of inspiration for these
movements.
19
Other histories of the period analyze organizations key to critical events of
the Civil Rights Movement such as Clayborne Carson’s narrative of the Student
Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) In Struggle: SNCC and the Black
Awakening of the 1960’s. While Carson provides an important narrative of this
central group of activists, he does not take the significance of culture and its
influence on and dialogue with Civil Rights Movement activity into serious
consideration.
20
In contrast, a history such as William Van Deburg’s A New Day in Babylon
foregrounds culture and argues that Malcolm X’s chief heirs in the Black Power
Movement utilized culture-based tools of persuasion to broaden the appeal of Black
Power tenets and have had a lasting impact on American culture. Although viewing
the Black Power Movement through the lens of culture remains at the center of his
work because as he asserts, culture “served to spread the militants’ philosophy much
farther than did mimeographed political broadsides” it does not take into account
cultural production prior to 1965 and therefore overlooks the dialectic between
19
Todd Gitlin, The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage. (New York: Bantam, 1989). See also James
Miller, “Democracy is in the Streets”: From Port Huron to the Siege of Chicago (New York: Simon
and Schuster, 1987). In contrast, Maurice Isserman & Michael Kazin’s America Divided: The Civil
War of the 1960’s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000) works to decenter the New Left “as the
pivot of the 1960’s around which other events inevitably evolve” (ix). Terry Anderson’s The
Movement and the Sixties (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995) shares this inclination.
20
See also Herbert Haines, Black Radicals and the Civil Rights Mainstream-1954-1970 (Knoxville:
University of Tennessee Press, 1988) and Juan Williams, Eyes on the Prize: America’s Civil Rights
Years, 1954-1965 New York: Viking Books, 1987). Vincent Harding’s Hope and History: Why We
Must Share the Story of the Movement (New York: Orbis Books, 1990) provides expressive culture a
more detailed treatment.
14
culture associated with both the Civil Rights Movement and the Black Power and
Black Arts Movements.
21
Much like Van Deburg, Sandra Hollin Flowers turns to culture in order to
understand broader social processes. She considers the literature of the Black Arts
Movement, but neglects works before 1963. Flowers’ important study attends to the
development and multiple manifestations of Black Nationalism in the literature
written between 1963 and 1972, but fails to see the continuities between the Black
Arts Movement and Civil Rights Movement expressive culture.
22
Though her study
does outline vital corollaries between the texts and their historical and political
contexts, reading across both movements elicits a richer understanding of the
dialectics between the works and provides better visibility of the operations of
“blackness”. While drawing upon these vital histories and analyses, this project
looks specifically at the significance of the expressive culture produced during both
the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements, tracing a dialogue between the
politics and the culture of the period and the texts themselves.
In its exploration of the drama during this important historical era, the project
turns on theories of performance and African-American culture to identify and
21
William Van Deburg, A New Day in Babylon: The Black Power Movement and American Culture,
1965-1975. (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1992) 25. Van Deburg’s Black Camelot: African-
American Culture Heroes in Their Times, 1960-1980 (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1997)
considers African American cultural heroes of this earlier period, arguing that black cultural heroes
were able to emerge because President John F. Kennedy, Jr. and the “Camelot” White House allowed
for the displacement of conservative heroes. Van Deburg contends that in the wake of President
Kennedy’s death, white Americans turned to black cultural heroes for relief. Claims about the
emergence and white embrace of black cultural heroes aside, Van Deburg makes no account for the
embrace of these heroes by African-Americans.
22
Sandra Hollin Flowers, Pens of Fire: African American Nationalist Literature of the 1960s. (New
York: Garland Books, 1996).
15
illuminate representations of “blackness” and black identity. In performance studies,
it follows Kimberly W. Benston’s analysis of performance in the theater, music,
poetry, preaching and literary criticism of the Black Arts Movement
23
Paying
particular attention his assertion that “‘blackness’ is not an inevitable object, but
rather a motivated, constructed, corrosive, and productive process”, the project links
this notion of “blackness” and its function in and relation to performance with
theories of race and representation from theatre and cultural studies.
24
Dovetailing with Benston’s concept of “blackness” is Harry Elam’s notion of
African-American performance as a means of reconfiguring black identity. He
argues that African-American theater and performance repeats and revises “dramatic
tropes, aesthetic and cultural images, artistic agendas, and political paradigms,”
creating works where “the past is continually made present, and the present is
constituted in the African American past”.
25
Like Benston, Elam asserts that the
performance of “blackness” is contextual and historically specific, but adds that it
has “functioned as [a] method of cultural and personal survival as well as
reaffirmation[s] and renegotiation[s] of cultural identity”
26
. Elam’s understanding
of the “American ‘race question’ [as] inherently theatrical” shares important
connections to both the performative concept of “blackness” in the various texts or
23
Kimberly W. Benston, Performing Blackness: Enactments of African-American Modernism
(London: Routledge, 2000) 6.
24
Benston 6.
25
Harry Elam, Jr. and David Krasner, eds. African-American Performance and Theater History: A
Critical Reader. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001) 3.
26
Elam 3.
16
“performance sites” considered in Troubling the Boundaries, but also to the social
upheaval of the era which functioned as another stage for performing “blackness”.
The African American Freedom Struggle of the 1960s and its subsequent
social upheaval readily lends itself to Elam’s notion of the inherent theatricality of
race in the United States.
27
The sit-in protests, marches, and other demonstrations
that undergirded much of the social change of that period are deeply embedded in
our cultural memory precisely because of the stages they provided for a wide variety
of performances of “blackness”. E. Patrick Johnson suggests in Appropriating
Blackness: Performance and the Politics of Authenticity that performance serves as
an effective means of clarifying the relationship between “blackness” and the
cultural implications of performance. He writes, “the performance paradigm
illuminates the mirroring that occurs in culture, the tension between stabilizing
cultural forces (tradition), and the shifting, ever-evolving aspects of culture that
provide sites for social reflection, transformation, and critique”.
28
The ongoing
protests during the period considered in Troubling the Boundaries illustrate both
Elam’s figuring of race as inherently theatrical and Johnson’s claims for the cultural
negotiations that performances of “blackness” help to make visible. Bearing both
27
Other critics have addressed the relationship between protest and performance during the
1960s.Both Susan Leigh Foster and Jane Rhodes have framed the social protests associated with the
African American Freedom Struggle as performance. In Foster’s “Choreographies of Protest” Theatre
Journal 55 (2003) 395-412, she reads the 1960 sit-ins at two Greensboro, N.C. lunch counters an
example of “a recalcitrant physicality that refuses to comply with the bodies of those in positions of
authority” that assists in advancing social change. Rhodes argues in “Fanning the Flames of Racial
Discord: The National Press and the Black Panther Party” The Harvard International Journal of Press
Politics 4.4. (1999) 95-118 that the Black Panther Party’s armed protest of a pending gun-control bill
at the California State Capitol Building in Sacramento in May of 1967 marked their entry to national
media coverage and the start of their symbolic use of guns that eventually elevated them to celebrity
status.
28
E. Patrick Johnson. Appropriating Blackness: Performance and the Politics of Authenticity.
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2003) 7.
17
Elam’s and Johnson’s claims in mind and turning now to a specific “staging” of
“blackness” during this era will aid in establishing the connections between their
claims and how they resonate in this project.
As the master narrative goes 42-year old seamstress and Montgomery
NAACP secretary Rosa Parks’ decision to keep her seat rather than surrender it to a
white passenger on a bus on December 1, 1955 initiated the Montgomery Bus
Boycott of the same year which consequently marked the start of the African
American Freedom Struggle. However, some nine months earlier in March of 1955,
15-year-old Claudette Colvin, a member of the NAACP’s Youth Council, refused to
give up her seat on a city bus to a white passenger.
29
She was arrested and charged
with assault and battery as well as violating city and state segregation statutes.
30
The
following year, Colvin, along with three other women, were the plaintiffs in the
Browder v. Gayle civil action lawsuit challenging both Montgomery and Alabama
statutes allowing for segregation in public transportation.
31
The U.S. District court
granted a permanent injunction restraining the enforcement of state and city statutes
in June of 1956, effectively ending segregation in the Montgomery Bus System.
Despite what might appear to be Colvin’s pivotal role in the desegregation of the
29
David Garrow. Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership
Conference, 1955-1968. (New York: Morrow, 1986) 15-16.
30
Taylor Branch. Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1954-1963. (New York: Simon and
Schuster, 1989) 120-121.
31
Mike Linn. “Law Day Marks Boycott Victory” The Montgomery Advertiser. May 5, 2006 C1.
Mary Louise Smith also refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus to a white passenger on
October 21, 1955, six months before Parks. However, her case was rejected as the test case because of
her father’s alcoholism and because of her lower-class background. Smith joined in the lawsuit along
with Aurelia Browder and Susie McDonald who had all been subject to mistreatment by the
Montgomery Bus System. Parks was not a plaintiff in the case.
18
Montgomery Bus System, her narrative has been eclipsed by Parks’ in cultural
memory.
32
Viewed through the lenses of both the inherent theatricality of race and the
significance of performance in cultural negotiations, Colvin’s story and the broader
narrative of the Montgomery Bus Boycott can be read as a performance of
“blackness” that was “staged” as a part of ongoing cultural negotiations during the
period. In this staging of “blackness”, E.D. Nixon, who headed the Montgomery
NAACP and two other attorneys, Fred Gray and Clifford Durr—a white attorney for
whom Parks sometimes worked as a housekeeper and seamstress, strategically
decided how the performance would be staged and who would be “cast” to represent
black Montgomery. Nixon, Gray and Durr made difficult choices in determining
who would most effectively represent their efforts to bring an end to segregation and
by extension, make an argument for the inherent humanity and equality of African
Americans.
By 1955, the NAACP had been waiting for a test case to challenge
segregation laws and thought they had found it in Colvin’s arrest. Though she found
support from the NAACP shortly after her father paid her bail, Nixon and the other
attorneys reconsidered using Colvin’s case, but opted against it for numerous
reasons, including that her father mowed lawns for a living and her mother worked
32
Though Parks is most frequently associated with the Boycott, Colvin’s role has not gone completely
unnoticed. Several writers including historian Taylor Branch and political scientist David Garrow
have routinely addressed Colvin’s story in their histories of Martin Luther King and his work with the
Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Historian Paula Giddings addresses the role of women
broadly in the Civil Rights Movement as well as Colvin’s role in Where and When I Enter: The
Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America (New York: Bantam, 1984). Also, writer and
actress Awele Makeba’s one-woman show “Rage Is Not a One-Day Thing!” which she wrote and
stars in tells the story of the Montgomery Bus Boycott through the eyes of Colvin after her arrest.
19
as a maid. Colvin also lived in the poorest part of Montgomery known as King Hill
and when she was arrested, police officers claimed that she hurled insults and
expletives at them. Perhaps most damaging to the prospects of using Colvin’s case
was that she became pregnant by an older married man shortly after her arrest. Nixon
and the other attorneys believed that this “moral transgression” would undercut their
arguments for the moral uprightness of their cause as well as alienate both
sympathetic whites and the religious black community that served as the backbone of
the Freedom Struggle in Montgomery.
33
After Rosa Parks’ death in October 2005,
even Colvin herself suggested that while her youth may have been a factor in why
her case wasn’t used as the test, there may have been other issues at work in the
decision saying, “the only difference between me and Rosa was that she was an adult
and she was of a lighter tone, a more fair skinned woman”.
34
Ultimately, Parks’
representation of respectability and morality, which served as key factors in the later
success of the African American Freedom Struggle, made her the choice of the
attorneys organizing the legal agenda in the lawsuit against the bus system.
The significance of notions of morality and respectability in the Civil Rights
Movement broadly and the Montgomery Bus Boycott in particular should not be
underestimated. These ideas and their embodiment were central to the rhetoric of the
movement and informed key decisions that were made by the architects of the
challenge to segregation laws in Alabama. As historian Kevin Gaines suggests,
emphasis on black civic and moral virtue as well close attention to and incorporation
33
Branch 159.
34
Jannell McGrew. “Living Link to Boycott Honors Parks”. Montgomery Advertiser, November 3,
2005. A 1.
20
of middle-class American values and ideals were central to creating a case for the
inclusion of African Americans in the American plurality.
35
In order to refute
segregationist claims that African American were not worthy of the privileges of full
citizenship and to placate and gain the sympathy of both the African American and
white middle class, stringent class status and behavioral or performance requirements
would have to be met by the plaintiff in the test case. Consequently, Rosa Parks’
status in the ranks of black working-class women in Montgomery as well as her
distance from white stereotypes of moral lassitude and behavioral insolence made
her case the choice of the Montgomery leaders.
Ironically, while these concerns about Colvin’s fitness as a potential
complainant who was beyond moral reproach ultimately led to Parks becoming the
representative face of the boycott; it was Colvin who took part in the lawsuit that
actually ended segregation in the Montgomery Bus System. Parks’ case was not the
basis for the federal lawsuit because as a criminal case it would have wound its way
through a long state appeals process before a federal appeal could be filed which
could have been delayed indefinitely left up to state officials. Additionally, Clifford
Durr feared that officials would vacate her conviction leaving the segregation laws
intact.
36
Claudette Colvin’s story underscores the high stakes involved in the
performance of “blackness” during this era as well as emphasizes the implications of
the inherent theatricality of race and the cultural negotiations that performances of
35
Kevin Gaines. Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership, Politics, and Culture in the Twentieth Century.
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996).
36
Branch 220.
21
“blackness” help to make visible. In their rhetorical maneuvers to link
representations of “blackness” to ideas in circulation about respectability and
morality that were the foundation of the burgeoning African American Freedom
Struggle and to make the connections between “blackness” and respectability
manifest, Nixon, Gray, and Durr opted to put Rosa Parks’ representation in the
service of the larger movement over Colvin’s. Further, their awareness of multiple
audiences—African American and white—assessing their “staging” of the legal
battle against segregation in Montgomery led them to choose Parks. The attorneys’
choices and the rationale behind them bring to the fore the theatricality of race and
also clearly illustrate the cultural negotiations that hinge upon various performances
of “blackness”. In other words, Colvin and Parks’ performances were central to how
the boycott would be supported and received by African Americans and whites.
Claims of Colvin’s insolence at the time of her arrest as well as her class status and
pregnancy undercut the connections leaders wanted to make between “blackness”
and respectability.
37
Conversely, Parks as a woman who “wore rimless spectacles,
spoke quietly [and] was a tireless churchgoer who was of working-class station and
middle class demeanor” was thought to be better suited for the role of the test case
complainant.
38
However, Colvin’s parallel narrative to the master narrative of the
Montgomery Bus Boycott points out the efficacy of performances of “blackness” as
well as their resilience. While Parks’ performance of “blackness” and its associated
37
McGrew A1. Colvin disputes that she was pregnant at the time of her arrest in McGrew’s story as
both Garrow and Branch have stated.
38
Branch 125.
22
images are constantly summoned to stand in for the African American Freedom
Struggle, which is suggestive of both the efficacy and resilience of her performance,
a similar argument can be made for Colvin’s performance of “blackness”.
Seemingly, it haunts Parks’ performance. Initially Colvin lurked behind the scenes as
a plaintiff in the lawsuit that eventually ended segregation on Montgomery buses.
Then she was revealed as a footnote to Parks’ story in Civil Rights histories and
alluded to in the numerous lectures given by Montgomery leaders such as E.D.
Nixon and others. Her story has now been developed into a one-woman show written
and performed by Awele Makeba and that relates the story of the Montgomery Bus
Boycott from Colvin’s perspective after her arrest and has been performed at
universities and other institutions around the country and Europe. Perhaps most
illustrative of the haunting of Parks’ performance of “blackness” by Colvin’s is the
controversy around a scene in the 2002 film Barbershop. In that film, a scene that
questions Parks’ role in the Boycott reveals the deep cultural investment in Parks
place within the boycott’s narrative as well as the resilience of Colvin’s parallel
performance along with some telling ironies. Barbershops and beauty shops have
long been central to African American culture in terms of establishing community
and providing a space to discuss pertinent social and political issues impacting the
African American community. In the film’s depiction of the social sphere of the
barbershop, its over-the-top elder statesman Eddie (Cedric The Entertainer) tells his
co-workers and patrons that there are three things that black people have to confess
to: 1) That Rodney King deserved a beating for driving drunk and being in a
Hyundai, 2) O.J. did it and that 3) Rosa Parks “ain’t do nothin’ but sit her black ass
23
down; there was a lotta other people that sat down on the bus, and they did it way
before Rosa did!”.
39
Immediately after Eddie’s round of the dozens on African
American Civil Rights history, another barber suggests that he “better not let Jesse
Jackson hear him talking like that” and Eddie replies, “Man, fuck Jesse Jackson”. As
if on cue, longtime activists and Civil Rights Movement figures Al Sharpton and
Jesse Jackson launched a boycott of the film, calling it disrespectful to Parks as well
as Martin Luther King, Jr., to whom Eddie refers as a “ho” in an allusion to his
widely documented extra-marital affairs. Ultimately, they called for the scene to be
deleted from its DVD release. Parks herself boycotted the 2003 NAACP Image
Awards which Cedric the Entertainer, who was nominated for his supporting role as
Eddie, hosted that year.
In this instance, while Eddie does not refer to Colvin or Mary Louise Smith
by name, the allusion to previous performances of “blackness” in terms of resistance
to segregation results in multiple ironies. First, the paradox of Parks’ boycott of an
awards show hosted by an organization that she had been associated with for the
better part of her life. Next, that she elected to boycott the program because the actor
who acknowledged previous performances of “blackness” in a film role he was
playing was hosting the show. Finally, that the parallel narrative of the Montgomery
Bus Boycott that the character Eddie alluded to is in fact true and while not always
widely discussed, had been acknowledged by Parks herself. The character’s
revelation then resulted in Sharpton and Jackson’s boycott and initiated a kind of
39
Barbershop. Dir. Tim Story Perfs. Ice Cube, Anthony Anderson, and Cedric The Entertainer. DVD.
Prod. Metro Goldwyn Mayer. Distr. MetroGoldwyn Mayer, 2003. The scene in question remains in
the DVD.
24
African American town hall meeting on the topic.
40
When a very public and heated
discussion of the history of the Montgomery Boycott and the role that Parks, Colvin
and others have played in it hinges on the summoning of historical representations
within filmic representations, the inherent theatricality of race is apparent. The
representational “ghosting” of Rosa Parks by Claudette Colvin confirms its
significance.
Clearly the inherent theatricality of race exists within literary and visual texts,
as well as within social spaces. Another facet of representation that demonstrates the
theatricality of race is the racial stereotype in its many forms which plays a pivotal
and contested role in both spheres. Resisting stereotypes has been central in the
discourse of “blackness” and black identity because the circulation of stereotypes in
mass culture has historically served to support white supremacy by denying the
humanity of African-Americans and other racial and ethnic minorities.
41
Henry
Louis Gates, Jr. asserts that eighteenth and nineteenth century racist allegations
claiming that African-Americans could not create literature deeply informs African-
American literary production stating that “it is fair to describe the history of black
40
Several newspapers including the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and the Chicago
Tribune, took to the streets and barbershops in African American communities, interviewing residents
about their reactions to the controversy. Lorenza Munoz and Greg Braxton “Black Leaders Angered
by Scene Say “Barbershop’ Needs a Trim” Los Angeles Times. September 25, 2002. A1. See also,
Steve Lopez, “Points West; Patrons at Real-Life Barbershop Have No Problem With Movie, Los
Angeles Times. September 27, 2002. B1.
41
Leonard Cassuto, The Inhuman Race: The Racial Grotesque in American Literature and Culture
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1997).
25
letters as this urge to refute the claim that because blacks had no written traditions,
they were bearers of an inferior culture.”
42
Herman Gray takes up this urge and its discourse, focusing on the cultural
politics of race and representation, specifically the use of stereotypes and the charges
of “cultural malpractice” artists of color face when deploying stereotypes.
43
He
asserts that the operation of stereotypes in black expressive culture depends upon
“irreverence and spectacle…[producing] a dangerous cultural politics, one that
teeters on the divide between the pleasures and fun of subversion and the real politics
of control, regulation, and reproduction”.
44
For Gray, the artist’s “self-reflexivity,
location, and level of engagement” within the work itself, in addition to an audience
that “must do the demanding and often frustrating work of confronting and grappling
with the role of race and representation in the national imaginary”
45
provides for
42
Henry Louis Gates, Jr. “Literary Theory and the Black Tradition” Reception Study: From Literary
Theory to Cultural Studies. James Machor and Philip Goldstein eds. (London: Routledge, 2001) 113-
125.
43
Herman Gray, “Cultural Politics as Outrage(ous)” Black Renaissance/Renaissance Noire 3 (2000)
92-102.
44
Ibid.
26
their disruptive possibilities. While making clear that not all deployments of
stereotypes do such work, he argues that the work of contemporary cultural
producers help to “produce a more complicated way of seeing our collective past and
imagining a different kind of future” by “confronting the beauty and ugliness, reality
and fantasy, the dangerous and the repressed in all of us”.
46
Gray’s assertions about
the cultural politics of race and representation are key to this project’s development
and use of a performative concept of “blackness” and black identity because his
emphasis on the significance of self-reflexivity in the deployment of stereotypes is
closely linked to performativity. Both rely upon the awareness of contextual
relations informed by historical and social contingencies and ambivalences and the
texts Troubling the Boundaries considers these relations in order to complicate
“blackness” and black identity. Consequently, Gray’s perspective on the subversive
possibilities in the strategic deployment of stereotypes serves as an important critical
pivot of the project’s analysis.
In the same vein as Gray’s assertions regarding stereotypes, Marlon Ross
argues for cultural identity and identification as a “temporal process that enables and
constrains subjectivity by offering up resources for affiliating with, while also
disaffiliating against, particular social groupings, which themselves are constantly
being revised over time by individual’s reconstitution of them”
47
His study of the
oevre of LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka asserts that while much Black Nationalist
45
Ibid.
46
Ibid.
47
Marlon Ross, “Camping the Dirty Dozens: The Queer Resources of Black Nationalist Invective”.
Callaloo 23.1 (2000) 290-312.
27
cultural production is fraught with heterosexist and sexist rhetoric and that those
tendencies should be exposed as such, that it also provides an opportunity to
understand the resources being put in the service of Black Nationalist invective and
in particular the influence of camp and the dozens on Baraka’s work. In effect, Ross
seeks to complicate our reading of Black Nationalist cultural production by
remaining attentive to the discourse of heterosexism and sexism within it, but by also
locating opportunities to identify formal and material practices “that mark sexual
identity as a resource for racial identification and racial identity as a resource for
sexual identification within and across historical moments within and across cultural
traditions”.
48
Following Ross’ lead, this study looks toward foregrounding such
cross identifications in the works it considers.
In developing an argument that the expressive culture of the 1960s provides a
crucial lens for viewing the era and its impact on “blackness” and black identity, as
well as foregrounding the significance of expressive culture in social movements
Michael Ryan and Douglas Kellner’s Camera Politica is instructive. Ryan and
Kellner account for the political and social shift in American culture from the New
Left of the 1960s to the New Right of the 1980s through a study of Hollywood film.
Outlining the matrix of historical, cultural, economic, and political factors that
inform this shift, they identify film as a site to access important linkages between
cultural production and social movements through its use of “discursive
transcoding”.
49
Ryan and Kellner argue that “films transcode the discourses (the
48
Ross 291.
49
Michael Ryan and Douglas Kellner, Camera Politica: The Politics and Ideology of Contemporary
Hollywood Film. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988) 10-13.
28
forms, figures, and representations) of social life into cinematic
narratives…executing a transfer from one discursive field to another. As a result, the
films themselves become a part of the broader cultural system of representations that
construct social reality”.
50
In effect, they detail a symbiotic relationship between
films and social reality; they rely upon one another for efficacy. Cultural discourses
construct social reality and social realities build cultural discourses, one mirroring
the other and gesturing toward the other as a source of authentication. Ryan and
Kellner’s notion of “discursive transcoding” informs the link Troubling the
Boundaries makes between the representations of “blackness” and the social
upheaval of the 1960s. While their study speaks specifically to cinematic narratives,
drama contributes to the discourses of “blackness” during this era and the
representations within these genres circulated within cultural discourse alongside
film.
It is worth noting here that both fictional and dramatic representations of
“blackness” and the narratives bearing them were frequently adapted for film.
51
This
trend of adaptation illustrates Ryan and Kellner’s notion that “films execute a
transfer from one discursive field to another” and demonstrates the currency of the
social issues these works address since these narratives warranted retelling. In light
50
Ryan and Kellner 13.
51
My own count of narratives first appearing in dramatic or fictional forms before becoming films
between 1959 and 1970 numbers nine texts and one near-miss. Plans were in place for a film
adaptation of The Confessions of Nat Turner before the controversy surrounding this novel ended that
effort. See Ward’s Media, Culture, and the Modern African American Freedom Struggle for a detailed
discussion.
29
of these links to the argument Troubling the Boundaries makes Ryan and Kellner’s
notion of “discursive transcoding” deeply informs the project.
The mixed methods employed in Troubling the Boundaries begin with an
iteration of David Román’s notion of “critical generosity”.
52
In his study of
performance, gay culture, and AIDS, he argues that this practice “sets out to
intervene in the limited perspectives we currently employ to understand and discuss
AIDS theatre and performance by looking beyond conventional forms of analysis”
and that further, his critical task has been “to attend to the context and ambition of
the performances under discussion”.
53
I utilize a parallel critical perspective in
Troubling the Boundaries. My project explicates strategies of black identity
formation during the 1960s that articulate the complexity of black identity
practices—or what I have called “blacknesses”. The works I consider speak to those
“blacknesses” that lie in the interstices of the representations that dominate cultural
memory. My critical methods assert that practicing “critical generosity” and
deploying theories of performativity can provide access to both the context and the
ambition of the performative “blacknesses” in the texts discussed. The project charts
a path across disciplines and its methods follow a similar course across genres,
linking the works thematically through their performative deployments of
“blacknesses”.
While drawing primarily on a performative notion of “blackness” to conduct
textual analyses throughout the project’s chapters, the conceptual framework
52
David Román, Acts of Intervention: Performance, Gay Culture, and AIDS. (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1998)
53
Román xxvi.
30
organizes the works chronologically from 1959 to 1969 in an effort to grapple with
the concerns leading into the sixties and into the end of that era in the mid-70s. The
first chapter turns back to consider some key issues within the culture of the 1950s
before proceeding to the 1960s. This strategy provides the foundations for the
sociopolitical changes taking place in the 1960s and helps to link those changes to
the culture, while extending the analysis assists in understanding the impact of the
sociopolitical changes during the 1960s, as well as making clear that in many ways,
many of the debates and concerns from the 1950s held through the next decade
where culture is concerned. Though clearly not an exhaustive study, the project does
look to foreground the cultural and sociopolitical continuities in selected texts during
the period.
Troubling the Boundaries begins its analysis with “A Raisin in the Sun,
Purlie Victorious, and Respectable Representations”. This chapter frames the
discussion of the drama of the 1960s by turning to the 1950s where many of the
seeds of the modern African-American Freedom Struggle were sown. It sets the
stage for what occurs in the 1960s in terms of both politics and culture, paying
particular attention to Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun (1959) that served as
a cultural touchstone in articulating modes of “blackness” and its representation after
World War II. While attentive to the historical and social significance of the Brown
v. Board of Education decision in 1954, Rosa Park’s rejection of Jim Crow and the
ensuing Montgomery Bus Strike, and the murder of Emmett Till in 1955, its analysis
of Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun (1959), focuses on the play’s thematic
concerns with class mobility, characterizations that gesture toward multiple modes of
31
black identity, and the legacy of “blackness” that Walter Lee Younger bequeaths to
his son Travis during his climactic exchange with Karl Lindner of the Clyborne Park
Neighborhood Association. The play’s thematic preoccupations speak to
performative concepts of “blackness” and echo notions of “blackness” and black
identity as a “doing” and the “thing done”. Ossie Davis’ farcical satire Purlie
Victorious (1961) takes a different thematic approach to representations of
“blackness” and how racial oppression informs those representations by drawing
heavily on racialized stereotypes to address questions of multiple modes of black
identity. In the end, the performance of multiple modes of “blackness” in both plays
suggest that African-American identity is fluid rather than fixed and further that it is
closely tied to the politics and culture of the period.
Turning toward the apparent ideological tension between so-called Civil
Rights era “integrationists” and Black Power era “revolutionaries” suggested in
chapter two, the third chapter, “(Mis)perception, Visibility and Authenticity in
Dutchman” considers LeRoi Jones’ 1964 play and its sketching of a performative
alternative to fixed class, gender, race, and sexual identities by defining Clay both
within and against those identities. Though the play is often charged with relying
“essentialized blackness” and a degradation of white femininity in order to prop up
the cultural identity of its protagonist Clay, this chapter argues for a reconsideration
of these claims based on the variety of cultural resources upon which he draws and
his own uncertainty about which cultural identifications he should be defined within
and against. Like the second chapter, it further considers the critical reception to the
32
play’s opening and suggests that the play’s reviews help to reveal the performance of
Clay and cultural identity as open and indeterminate.
Chapter four, “Banned in Alabama” examines the performative strategies
deployed in Alice Childress’ Wine in the Wilderness (1969). This text showcases a
preoccupation with a protagonist, Tommy Fields, who exists in, but is never fully a
member of her respective social spaces and the chapter works to elucidate the
performative maneuvers put into the service of maintaining her precarious
ideological and social position. Returning to Benston’s figuring of “blackness” as “a
motivated, constructed, corrosive, and productive process” the chapter details the
ways in which these protagonists performatively engage this process, highlighting its
stops and starts, its failures and successes. Teasing out the way in which the works
use critiques of class hierarchies, “cultural crisscrossings”, as well as tenets of both
Black Power Movement politics and Civil Rights Movement ideologies, illustrates
the complexities of “blackness” and black identity within representation during this
period.
54
Turning back to Harry Elam’s contention that the performance of
“blackness” has “functioned as [a] method of cultural and personal survival”, this
final chapter argues that these concepts of performative “blacknesses” outlined in
the interstices of Black Power and Civil Rights ideologies share corollaries in the
current historical moment and continue to resonate in an incomplete and ongoing
struggle for black identities that subvert oppressive conventions and provide
possibilities for both individual and collective liberation.
54
Awkward 15.
33
Chapter Two: A Raisin in the Sun, Purlie Victorious and Respectable
Representations
“This is a new kind of dignity….It is a dignity that is expressed in going back time
after time to register to vote….it is a dignity that would allow the darkest Negro in
New York to actually enjoy watermelon for dessert in the best dining room of the
Waldorf-Astoria. It is a dignity that comes when one is able to say, let the
stereotypes be damned! I am my own man!”--Ebony, November 1963 (my
emphasis)
While this observation of an anonymous author of a photo editorial in Ebony
Magazine compares two seemingly disparate and unrelated acts, ultimately the
writer’s yoking of these two events points up several important facets of the African
American Freedom struggle of the 1960s and the nature of resistance. First, it
questions the notion that the push for civil rights hinged solely on the struggle over
legislation such as the Civil Rights Act of 1965, which paved the way for equal
access to and equal treatment within the social, economic, and political realms of
American life. While the legal aspects of the Freedom Struggle were important ones,
the author suggests that the ontological impact of the outcome of the Freedom
Struggle on African Americans held an equally important status among them. In
other words, the political and legislative wrangling over Civil Rights for African
Americans served a significant purpose, but the influence the struggle had over how
African Americans envisioned their very being—their identities—rivaled the
consequence of legislation that ensured the right to vote and ended Jim Crow
segregation.
Second, the means by which African Americans viewed, shaped, and
envisioned their own identity in the midst of the Freedom Struggle became a
dynamic and shifting source of power both individually and collectively. The dignity
34
referenced is one that rejects the freight and burden of DuBois’ veil and double
consciousness which, in effect is an awareness of the gaze of whites upon African
Americans.
55
Instead, the weight of stereotypes about African American identity and
the consciousness of an ever present gaze of whites are cast off. What comes to the
fore is a kind of freedom found in the “new dignity” of the 1960s that had previously
been inaccessible and further that a historical and representational burden has been
unloaded in the writer’s simple disregard for a stereotype about African Americans
and eating watermelon. The power these stereotypes possess to dehumanize their
subjects is what is rejected in the Ebony editorial and it further applauds the implied
outcomes of the “new dignity” found within the burgeoning Freedom Struggle—a
sense of agency, empowerment, and humanization. In essence, the Ebony editorial
outlines a resistance in the rejection this particular stereotype that potentially
outweighs legal and political wrangling over civil rights for African Americans
during this period. Even more, these observations highlight an impulse toward an
African American identity unencumbered by the white dominant culture’s
expectations and this impulse as outlined in the editorial is present in other cultural
products of the period including expressive culture such as music, visual art, film and
theater.
Using expressive culture as a lens for an alternative view into the nature of
resistance during the African American Freedom Struggle, this dissertation shifts
focus away from the political and legal narratives of the period and even the cultural
55
DuBois, WEB. “Of Our Spiritual Strivings” The Souls of Black Folk. Eds. Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
and Terri Hume Oliver. New York: W.W. Norton, 1999.
35
histories and offers instead a study of select theatrical productions of the period and
how they actively participate in resisting racial oppression by enacting iterations of
the “new dignity” in representations of African American identity on stage.
However fleeting and capricious, these performative identities recur during this
period on stage and frequently these identities are frequently re-presented, appearing
in film, novels, and on the stage. They serve as indicators of a dynamic and
constantly expanding notion of African American identity that took shape both
within and against cultural norms of both African American and the dominant
culture, as well as the political and legal turmoil of the period. Specifically, the
analysis of the cultural products of the period and in particular the plays produced
during the period reveals how cultural producers struggled to present their iterations
of this sense of new dignity on stage and how cultural critics struggled to engage
with and in some instances, resist these representations of African American identity,
in the midst of enormous social and political change that begins some twelve years
before the production of the plays considered here.
Maurice Isserman and Michael Kazin contrast the politics and culture of the
1950s in America Divided: The Civil War of the 1960s, arguing “if mainstream
politics in the 1950s lacked fire and daring, the same cannot be said of popular
culture”.
56
Taking note of popular music, magazines, fiction, and sports, they point
out that for Americans during this period, “nearly every public conflict turned on a
56
Isserman, Maurice and Michael Kazin. America Divided: The Civil War of the 1960’s.
New York: Oxford, 2000 (18-19).
36
matter of cultural taste. . . .”
57
. In framing African-American culture as a “public
sphere” that includes entities such as, while not limited to, the black church, the
black press, black popular music and juke joints that existed within dominant
American culture, Isserman and Kazin’s observations also inhere in readings of
African-American cultural products
58
. Falling in line with these contentions, Mark
Anthony Neal asserts in What The Music Said: Black Popular Music and Black
Public Culture, that the changing political and social landscape for African-
Americans during the mid-to-late 1950s and 1960s informs black popular music of
the period and as a result, allows for the emergence of two styles of music that grew
from gospel, jazz, and rhythm and blues: hard-bop and soul
59
. The network of
African-American nightclubs collectively known as the “Chitlin’ Circuit” became
central to the entrenchment of these forms within African-American culture and
helped emphasize soul music as a pivotal element in the Civil Rights Movement, or
in Neal’s assessment, “[it] became the ideal artistic medium to foreground the
largest mass social movement to emerge from within the African-American
experience”
60
.
As hard-bop and soul took root in urban spaces during the mid-to late 1950s
and images of African Americans gained wider visibility both on stage and in film,
57
Ibid.
58
Neal, Mark Anthony. What The Music Said: Black Popular Music and Black Public Culture. New
York: Routledge, 1999 (9).
59
Ibid.
60
Neal, Mark Anthony. What The Music Said: Black Popular Music and Black Public Culture. New
York: Routledge, 1999 (29).
37
the Civil Rights Movement began to take shape in the American South. Substantial
gains made by African-Americans during World War II in terms of service in the
armed forces, as well as in manufacturing materials for warfare, set the stage for a
more aggressive and direct push for social, economic, and political equality
61
.
These achievements coupled with post-war political events and social protest such as
the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown vs. The Board of Education decision outlawing
segregated schools, the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955 and the murder of Emmitt
Till also in 1955, all gave rise to a concerted effort to bring about political
enfranchisement and social equality
62
. By 1960, the Student Nonviolent
Coordinating Committee or SNCC, began its sit-in protests of segregation in
Greensboro, North Carolina that might mark the start of the Civil Rights Movement
in earnest.
Though much of this organized effort to resist racial inequality occurred in
the American South in response to Jim Crow segregation, there was no corollary
effort in the North, though inequalities existed in housing opportunities and access to
jobs, particularly for African-Americans migrating to the North from the South
63
.
This was due in part to the influx of Black Southerners to the Northern industrial
cities, diluting the preexisting community networks there, and as Isserman and Kazin
suggest, “in the North, defining the foe was also more difficult than in segregationist
61
Franklin, John Hope. From Slavery To Freedom: A History of Negro Americans. New York:
Knopf, 1980 (409).
62
Isserman, Maurice and Michael Kazin. America Divided: The Civil War of the 1960’s.New York:
Oxford, 2000 (32-33)
63
Isserman & Kazin. 37-38
38
Dixie”
64
. In other words, the power structures in place that prohibited African-
American access to housing and jobs in the North functioned differently from those
structures in the Jim Crow South. Many Northern states outlawed separate public
facilities and hired African-Americans to fill some white-collar positions, but
housing and employment access remained obstacles in attaining social equality and
political and economic enfranchisement
65
. In essence, while the Civil Rights
Movement was centered primarily in the South, many of the concerns about social,
political, and economic equality central to the movement in that region resonated in
the North in a different register. These regional distinctions in the impact and scope
of the Civil Rights Movement resonate in the theatrical productions of the period.
Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun (1959) and Ossie Davis’ Purlie
Victorious (1961) foreground these two geographical trajectories in terms of African-
American cultural production. Hansberry’s drama is set in Chicago’s South Side,
while Davis’ satirical comedy is set in rural Southern Georgia. In addition, Isserman
and Kazin’s contentions about the “fire and daring” of popular culture during the
1950s and Neal’s observations that the changing political and social landscape
illuminates black popular music, might be extended to include African-American
cultural production of the late 1950s and early 1960s, specifically the traditional
theatrical performance of the period
66
. The political and social struggles of the
64
Isserman & Kazin. 18-19
65
Ibid.
66
Isserman, & Kazin. 18-19
39
period inform the representations of “blackness” in both plays in that they depict the
efforts of African-Americans to overcome race and class subordination, as well as to
resist political disenfranchisement and social inequality. Further, these divergent
performances and representations of “blackness” mark the beginning of multiple
modalities of black representation in theater that are taken up and explicated later in
the 1960s.
Comparing the final monologue of Clay in LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka’s play
Dutchman to “the blackness of blackness” sermon in the prologue of Ralph Ellison’s
novel Invisible Man, Kimberly Benston maintains in Performing Blackness:
Enactments of African-American Modernism that the interpretative modes of
“blackness” forwarded by both authors crystallize a central critical concern of the
representation of “blackness”. He argues:
Ellison’s view of blackness as endless beginning suggests that its
meaning does not inhere in any ultimate referent but is renewed in
the rhythmic process of multiplication and substitution generated from
performance to performance. . . . Baraka’s vision, by contrast, asks us
to negate the effects of such temporal displacements to materialize the
presence dissimulated in performance by moving through the text to the
truth of blackness beyond it (one might say, to literally per-form!).
67
Benston’s claims about the nature of performed “blackness” speak to the
representations of it in both A Raisin in the Sun and Purlie Victorious in terms of
their geographical settings and genres—Raisin is a domestic drama, Purlie
Victorious is a satirical comedy. Additionally, Hansberry’s work relies on social
67
Benston, Kimberly W. Performing Blackness: Enactments of African-American Modernism.
London: Routledge, 2000 (13).
40
realism to forward social critique, while Davis’ play follows in the tradition of satire,
as well as the trickster in African and African-American folklore to advance a
corollary critique. In short, Raisin in the Sun falls in line with a Barakan
performance of “blackness” that hinges on “moving through the text to the truth of
blackness beyond it. . . .”, while Purlie Victorious posits “blackness” as an “endless
beginning” in the Ellisonian tradition
68
.
These diverse representations become central to the critical reception of both
plays and it is in the critical reception to them that their representations of
“blackness” move beyond the “black public sphere” and into a broader American
cultural dialogue. Raymond Williams suggests in “The Future of Cultural Studies”
the relationship between an artistic or intellectual project and its formation must be
equally engaged or as he writes:
[W]hat we would now define as ‘project’ and ‘formation’—are
addressing not the relations between two separate entities, ‘art’
and ‘society’, but processes, which take these different material
forms in social formations of a creative or critical kind, or on
the other hand the actual forms of artistic and intellectual work.
69
Mindful of Williams’ assertions while considering the relations between the “art”—
A Raisin in the Sun and Purlie Victorious—and “society”—the critical reception of
these plays elucidates what Marvin Carlson calls the “primary function” of theatrical
performance: “cultural and social metacommentary, the exploration of the self and
68
Ibid.
69
Raymond Williams “The Future of Cultural Studies” John Storey Ed. What is Cultural Studies: A
Reader. London: Arnold, 1997.
41
other, of the world as experienced, and of alternative possibilities”
70
. In other
words, the critical reception of both plays function within American cultural
negotiations of the nascent Civil Rights Movement on equal footing with the
theatrical performances themselves. Both the plays and the critical reception of them
facilitate cultural negotiations with African-American identity politics and a rapidly
fracturing American communal identity in the late 1950s and early 1960s. In A
Raisin in the Sun and Purlie Victorious, the representational binaries of “blackness”
as “endless beginning” and as a finite “truth beyond the text” become a part of a
public conflict that is mediated through the critical assessments of the plays and
consequently, the representations and assessments echo a national dialogue about the
emerging Civil Rights Movement
71
.
In effect, the negotiation of a communal American identity between the
“black public sphere” and broader American culture and the function of African-
American representation in that communal identity becomes an issue of cultural taste
reflected in both the plays themselves and their critical assessments. A
reconsideration of the representations in A Raisin in the Sun and Purlie Victorious, as
well as a reconsideration of the theatre critics’ responses to them illuminate the
strategies they employed to make sense of the representations of “blackness” the
plays posited. Further, it reveals a representational genealogy of “blackness” in
70
Carlson, Marvin. Performance: A Critical Introduction. London: Routledge, 1996.
71
Benston, Kimberly W. Performing Blackness: Enactments of African-American Modernism.
London: Routledge, 2000 (13).
42
which critics position the representation of Walter Lee Younger as connected to the
representation of Purlie Victorious Judson. In effect, critics draw upon the previous
representation of “blackness” of Walter Lee Younger in order to provide insight
about the current representation of Purlie Victorious Judson. However, before
turning to the theatre critics’ reviews of the plays, tracing the details of A Raisin in
the Sun’s initial production as well as a rehearsal of the play’s plot will help to
establish both its historical significance and to situate the critical assessments in
relationship to the play’s plot and themes.
Hansberry’s play was initially produced in New Haven, Philadelphia, and
Chicago because its producer, Philip Rose, was denied access to Broadway’s
theaters.
72
After the play proved its commercial viability in these cities, it opened on
Broadway on March 11, 1959 at the Ethel Barrymore Theater and ran for 530
performances and eventually went on to win the New York Drama Critics’ Circle
Award in 1959, making Hansberry the youngest American, the first woman and first
African-American to win the award
73
.
The play traces several weeks in the life of the Younger Family, whose
matriarch Lena (Claudia McNeil) is the beneficiary of her late husband’s ten
thousand dollar life insurance policy. Living with her son (Sidney Poitier), daughter
(Diana Sands), daughter-in-law (Ruby Dee), and grandson (Glynn Turman) in a
72
Carter, Stephen R. Hansberry’s Drama: Commitment Amid Complexity. Urbana: Illinois UP,
1991(125).
73
Ibid.
43
cramped apartment on Chicago’s South Side, Lena invests a portion of the funds in a
down payment on a home in Clybourne Park, a white Chicago neighborhood and
gives the remainder to her son Walter Lee, asking him to put a portion of it aside for
her daughter Beneatha’s medical school tuition and the rest to use as he likes.
Frustrated by his inability to grasp his dreams of entrepreneurship and wealth, he
invests the all of the money in a plan to buy a liquor store with two acquaintances.
When one of the men leaves town with all of the money, Walter Lee calls the
Clybourne Park Neighborhood Association representative who had offered to buy
the home from the Youngers at a price beyond their initial investment so that the
neighborhood will not be integrated. He intends to accept the offer, but upon the
representative’s arrival and under his son’s gaze, he refuses it and restates the
family’s intention to move into the home despite the neighborhood’s misgivings
about the Youngers’ racial identity.
These themes of integration, family, class mobility, gender politics and racial
identity are foregrounded by the interactions between the family members, as well as
by interactions with the friends of both Beneatha and Walter Lee. Though not all of
these themes became hallmarks of the critical assessments of the play, the critics
consistently demonstrate a concern with the racial authenticity of the play’s
characters as they engage these themes. That is, they focus on its realism—or “the
portrayal of life with fidelity” and reiterate the universality of the play in their
assessments
74
. What becomes clear in retrieving the review archive of the initial
74
Cuddon, J.A. The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory. New York: Penguin,
1991.
44
production of A Raisin in the Sun is that it reveals how critics responded to and
interpreted the representation of “blackness” in the play or what E. Patrick Johnson
calls “a knowing made manifest by a ‘doing’”.
75
Further, it details how the specifics
of that particular historical moment shape and inform the critical response to the
representations. If the late 1950s and early 1960s are understood as transitional
years in terms of the African American Freedom Struggle and its quest for political
and social equality, then the review archive provides a narrative of this transition and
frames its discourse within what was euphemistically called the “Negro Question”.
Many of the critics draw parallels between the play and the “Negro Question”
in their critiques, but often stop short of engaging specific issues such as housing
access and integration and applaud Hansberry’s work because she has “no axe to
grind”
76
. Seemingly, as Stephen Carter observes, “Americans seemed to be
embracing the play without fully understanding it—or perhaps wanting to understand
it”
77
. Bearing in mind Williams’ reading of the relation between art and society,
these critical assessments might mark the opening salvo in an ongoing negotiation in
American culture of the nature and performance of “blackness” in how they situate
and interpret the Younger’s struggle to leave Chicago’s Southside.
75
Johnson 606.
76
Atkinson, Brooks. Rev. of Raisin in the Sun. New York. Ethel Barrymore Theater. New York
Times. 12 March 1959.
77
Carter, Stephen R. Hansberry’s Drama: Commitment Amid Complexity. Urbana: Illinois UP, 1991.
45
Of eleven reviews of the play from its opening night, nine were favorable,
one unfavorable, and one review was mixed. The reviews focus primarily on the
“honesty” of the play, its universal implications, in addition to the sentimental
emotions it stirs up in both the audiences and the critics. Several of the favorable
reviews also emphasize its integrationist effects—or the idea that the play breaks
down barriers between the audience and performers as well as between blacks and
whites.
Focusing on the play’s honesty and its universal implications in his favorable
review, Brooks Atkinson notes in the New York Times that the play is:
[A]bout human beings who want, on the one hand, to preserve their family
and pride and, on the other hand, to break out of the poverty that seems to be
their fate. Not having any axe to grind, Miss Hansberry has a wide variety of
topics to write about—some of them hilarious, some of them painful in the
extreme.
In another favorable review appearing in the New York World-Telegram, Frank
Aston adds that Raisin “. . . . has no axe to grind. It is honest drama, catching up real
people. It may rip you to shreds. It will make you proud of human beings”
78
(emphasis mine). These assessments point up two significant trajectories to consider
in terms of cultural mediation and negotiation. First, the universal implications both
critics ascribe to Hansberry’s work and second, the suggestion that there is “no axe
to grind” in her representation of “blackness” or in other words, cultural critique or
political agendas are absent from the play. Linked to both these trajectories is the
78
Aston, Frank. Rev. of Raisin in the Sun. New York: Ethel Barrymore Theater. New York World
Telegram. 12 March 1959.
46
play’s realism that the critics seem to suggest, forecloses a specific modality of
“blackness” in its representation and any critique of white American culture. In
other words, because the play portrays African-American life with fidelity that falls
in line with their own notions of “blackness”, the critics give the work universal
implications and erase its engagement with African-American identity politics and a
critique of the larger cultural sphere. For these critics then, Raisin transcends
“blackness” and the freight of cultural critique, but also marks both an emotional
catharsis about the plight of African-Americans and posits the universality of the
African-American experience.
This glossing over issues of racial identity in the critical evaluations of the
play became increasingly problematic for Hansberry who discusses how racial
oppression informs her work. Here, she also speaks to Benston’s notion of
“blackness” as “truth beyond the text”:
From the moment the first curtain goes up until the
Youngers make their decision at the end, the fact of
racial oppression, unspoken and unalluded to, other than
the fact of how they live, is through the play. It’s
inescapable. The reason these people are in a ghetto is
because they are Negroes. They are discriminated against
brutally and horribly. . . . so in that sense it is always
distinctly there.
79
Even as the author’s intention—a representation of “blackness” imbued by the lived
reality of racial oppression and a critique of that oppression—is recast by critics as
79
Carter, Stephen R. Hansberry’s Drama: Commitment Amid Complexity. Urbana: Illinois UP, 1991.
47
universal, it is also figured as an “honest” play with “vigor as well as veracity”
80
.
This erasure of “inescapable” racial oppression in the critical assessments suggests a
reticence to read Hansberry’s representation of “blackness” as a “truth beyond the
text”, but rather to impose a rubric of universality on the representations that skirts
the issue. In effect, the emerging cultural negotiations around representations of
“blackness” as reflected in the critical evaluations, fail to fully engage the issue at the
core of Hansberry’s representation—racial oppression and how it impacts concerns
of equal housing access, economic enfranchisement, and African-American identity
politics.
Additionally, sentimentality figures significantly in the critics’ reading of the
play. The New York Herald Tribune’s Walter Kerr admonishes the playwright for
“driv[ing] her desperation to too unrelenting a pitch in the second act. . .
.threaten[ing] [the audience] with a monotone of defeat. . . .”, but emphasizes the
value of sentiment suggesting that Walter Lee’s refusal to take the buyout offer
marks “a cumulative swell of emotion [that] reaches back over the evening to
surround, and bind up, an honest, intelligible, and moving experience”
81
. He goes on
to comment on Claudia McNeil’s performance as Lena Younger when her husband’s
life insurance check arrives at their home and she remarks that the money is more
than a check, it represents her husband’s life. In response to this scene, Kerr writes,
80
Atkinson, Brooks. Rev. of Raisin in the Sun. New York. Ethel Barrymore Theater. New York
Times. 12 March 1959
81
Kerr, Walter. Rev. of Raisin in the Sun. New York. Ethel Barrymore Theater. New York Herald-
Tribune. 12 March 1959.
48
“[a]s she moves away, a lifetime turns over—and so does something or other in your
throat”
82
. Frank Aston also locates the significance of the play in its appeal to
emotions, suggesting that “[t]he number of tears shed by presumably worldly first
nighters must have set a new record at the Ethel Barrymore last evening” and adding
that “[t]he major weeping comes in two waves” one at the end of the second act, the
other in Walter Lee’s offer refusal scene near the play’s end
83
.
This emotional catharsis for audiences and reviewers alike functions in much
the same way Karen Sánchez-Eppler describes the workings of antislavery protest
novels such as Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin in the mid-19
th
century.
In “Bodily Bonds: Intersecting Rhetorics of Feminism and Abolition” she argues that
often, antislavery fiction were tales in which the “tears of the reader” were “pledged
as a means of rescuing the bodies of slaves”
84
. Further, she asserts that antislavery
stories written by women abolitionists were marketable because “. . . . the horrific
events narrated in these tales attract precisely to the extent that the buyers of these
representations of slavery are fascinated by the abuses they ostensibly oppose”
85
.
Obviously at the time of A Raisin in the Sun’s initial production, the United States
was almost a century removed from the institution of slavery, however, Sánchez-
Eppler insights about the function of sentiment within the literature and how it
82
Ibid.
83
Aston, Frank. Rev. of Raisin in the Sun. New York: Ethel Barrymore Theater. New York World
Telegram. 12 March 1959.
84
Sánchez-Eppler, Karen. “Bodily Bonds: The Intersecting Rhetorics of Feminism and Abolition”
Representations 24 (1988): 28-59.
85
Ibid 32.
49
served its readers, proves to be a useful tool in considering the review archive of the
play because it shows an analogous impulse at work in the reviews of the play. In
effect, the reviewers pledge their emotional responses as a means of identifying with
the Younger’s experiences within this performance of black identity, but do so
without addressing the structural inequalities that shape their experiences.
Since the critical evaluations fail to engage how racial oppression in all its
manifestations informs the play, recognition of the emotions and sentiment attached
to viewing the play’s performance stands in for critical engagement of the truth
beyond the text of Hansberry’s performance of “blackness”. What becomes central
to critics’ assessments—and by extension—what then becomes central to their
readership is that the emotions and sentiment brought to the fore while viewing A
Raisin in the Sun allows the tears of the critics and audiences to be pledged as a
means of rescuing the bodies of the oppressed. That is, if reviewers and audiences
cannot critically engage the issue of racial oppression as it informs the play in their
assessments, they can offer emotion and sentiment—tears—as a gesture toward
recognizing the play’s commentary on racial oppression. Additionally, like readers
of antislavery fiction, the audiences and particularly critics, view the representation
of an African-American family negatively impacted by racial oppression—
presumably an institution that those audiences oppose. Interestingly, at least one
50
critic, Tom F. Driver in a favorable review in New Republic implies as much,
saying:
If A Raisin in the Sun had been written by a white instead of colored woman
and if it had been written about a white family it would have done well to
recover its investment. . . . As a piece of dramatic writing it is old fashioned.
As something near to the conscious of a nation troubled by injustice to
Negroes it is emotionally powerful. Much of its success is due to our
sentimentality over the “Negro Question”.
86
Suggesting that the nation is “troubled by injustice to Negroes”, Driver binds the
play’s thematics to what is, in essence, the burgeoning Civil Rights Movement vís a
vís the “Negro Question” . Contradicting earlier claims of universal implications by
some critics, Driver takes up Hansberry’s representations of “blackness”—albeit
reductive—and figures it as central to both the play’s success and the emotional
responses it elicits from its audiences. This recognition of both the sentimentality
and emotion the play’s performance underscores, as well as how it links to an
overriding cultural phenomena—the “Negro Question” or the nascent Civil Rights
Movement—once again speaks to an emerging cultural negotiation of “blackness”
and its representation that critics can only engage on a superficial level. While
Driver more closely approaches what Hansberry calls the “inescapable” evidence of
racial oppression represented in the play, his evaluation falls short of engaging the
issue. However, along with the other reviews, his assessment brings the issue under a
broader cultural lens and marks the start of cultural negotiations between
representations of “blackness” and a communal American identity further developed
86
Driver,Tom F. Rev. of A Raisin in the Sun. New York. Ethel Barrymore Theater. New Republic.
April 1959.
51
later in the sixties by drama critics and playwrights such as LeRoi Jones, Edward
Albee, Adrienne Kennedy and William Handley among others.
Advancing integration comprises another area of concern for critics. Along
with the play’s honesty and its emotional significance, the issue of integration and its
implications is not fully engaged in terms of how it intersects racial oppression, but
is drawn into a developing cultural dialogue about these issues and reflects the early
stages of that development. Returning to Driver’s evaluation, he suggests that in
spite of the function of sentimentality, the play “is a work of theatrical magic in
which the usual barriers between audience and stage disappears; the people up there
are living among us, and we down here are mixing with those up there of easy terms”
. Echoing Driver’s assertions, John McClain contends in Journal American:
A small hunk of history was made. . . .last night. A play by a
Negro about Negroes with an almost all Negro cast opened on
Broadway and was a stupendous unsegregated hit. It proved to
me at least, that when these people create and participate in
something for themselves, they can make the rest of us look silly.
87
Seemingly, these critics read the representations of “blackness” in A Raisin in the
Sun as a means of eliminating cultural barriers between African-Americans and
whites. In much the same way that the play’s “honesty” and “realism” removes the
representations from a specifically African-American cultural identity, these critics
read the integrationist subtext as allowing for “mixing” with African-Americans “of
easy terms” and along with African-American authorship and portrayals, this makes
the play an “unsegregated hit”. Erasing racial oppression from their readings of
87
McClain, John. Rev. of A Raisin in the Sun. New York. Ethel Barrymore Theater. Journal
American. 12 March 1959.
52
integration, lays bare the facile premises of the critics claims: first that integration
concerns itself solely with social interaction with whites, rather than access to
employment, housing, and educational opportunity, and second, that central to
integration is a notion of white cultural acceptance.
However, for African-Americans in both the South and the North, integration
hinged on questioning white supremacy as a rationale for limited African-American
access to opportunity. In the South, the 1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott protested the
segregation public transit, but more importantly the fact that African-Americans
were forced to give up their seats to whites—a custom grounded in assumptions of
white superiority, even as the majority of the transit system’s ridership was African-
American.
88
Rent strikes and N.A.A.C.P protests on behalf of African-American
housing tenants occurred in Chicago and other cities in the North in the mid-to-late
1950s.
89
As Isserman argues, “[i]ntegration had never been the sole aim of the
freedom movement; access to jobs, houses, and commodities mattered far more than
did the opportunity to mix with white folks”.
90
These critics, then, read integration
in the play reductively and posit those readings in mass cultural forums as part of a
developing cultural dialogue on representations of “blackness”. While those
reviewing the play overwhelmingly applaud it, these accolades come at the expense
of critical engagement of the central issue informing the work—racial oppression
88
Isserman, & Kazin. (42)
89
Franklin, John Hope. From Slavery To Freedom: A History of Negro Americans. New York:
Knopf, 1980 (409).
90
Isserman & Kazin (42).
53
and how it functions in Hansberry’s representation of “blackness” as “truth beyond
the text”.
Ossie Davis’ play takes a different approach to representations of “blackness”
and how racial oppression informs those representations. In the March 1962 issue of
Ebony magazine he suggests that comedy serves as tool to critique such oppression
saying, “[s]egregation is a ridiculous institution and it makes decent people do
ridiculous things. . . . if they can be made to laugh at it, they can see how absurd it
is”
91
. For Davis, the issue of integration is less concerned with social interaction
with whites and more concerned with access to opportunity—or what his play’s
protagonist calls “freedom”. His 1961 satirical comedy, Purlie Victorious, opened at
Broadway’s Cort Theater on September 28
th
of that year and ran for 261
performances.
Set in “the recent past” of rural Southern Georgia, it traces the efforts of self-
proclaimed preacher Purlie Victorious Judson (Ossie Davis) and other sharecroppers
to reclaim Big Bethel, a dilapidated church for the farmers from Ol’ Cap’n
Cotchipee, the Confederate landowner in order to “preach freedom in the cotton
patch”
92
. Described in the stage direction as “a man consumed with that divine
impatience, without which nothing truly good, or truly bad, or even truly ridiculous,
is ever accomplished in this world—with rhetoric and flourish to match”, Purlie left
91
“Purlie Victorious: Bright Broadway Hit Lampoons Dixie and Bestows Double Stardom
on Ossie Davis” Rev. of Purlie Victorious. New York. Cort Theater. Ebony. March 1962.
92
Davis, Ossie. Purlie Victorious. New York: Samuel French, 1961.
54
the cotton plantation in his youth after a severe beating from Cotchipee.
93
He returns
to hatch a plan to claim a 500-dollar inheritance that will allow him to buy the
building from Cotchipee and restore the church to the plantation’s farmers. After
recruiting Lutiebelle Gussiemae Jenkins (Ruby Dee) to stand in for the dead relative
who is entitled to the inheritance, Cotchipee thwarts Purlie’s plan upon discovery of
Lutiebelle’s true identity and he launches yet another plan to gain the inheritance
which fails. Finally, Cotchipee’s integrationist son and bookkeeper, Charlie, secretly
signs the church deed over to Purlie and becomes the first white member of the “Big
Bethel, Church of the New Freedom for all Mankind” and Ol’ Cap’n Copitchee, who
has died from the shock of his son’s betrayal, becomes the first person eulogized
there.
94
Stereotypes of Southern blacks and whites stand at the core of the play’s plot
and action but they also serve as a means of critique, advancing an interrogation of
stereotypes as they engage the issue of integration. The play’s characters including
Purlie’s brother, Gitlow Judson (Godfrey Cambridge), his sister-in-law Missy Judson
(Helen Martin), Charlie’s surrogate mother, Idella (Beah Richards), along with
Charlie (Alan Alda) and Cap’n Cotchipee (Sorrell Booke) all draw on widely
disseminated notions of the “Sambo”, the “Uncle Tom”, and the “Mammy” in
Southern culture. However, in its use of these stereotypes, Purlie also makes use of
93
Ibid (6).
94
Ibid (79).
55
black cultural self-affirmation rhetoric and race specific theology, even as it
advances an integrationist ideology.
In A New Day in Babylon: The Black Power Movement and American
Culture, 1965-1975, William Van Deburg suggests that the white supremacist
underpinnings of American Christianity helped spawn Black Power theology, “[b]y
refusing to allow whites to define their existence, black Christians could now claim
the biblical promise of freedom. . . .they no longer would be ashamed to accept
themselves as they were. They would be reborn into blackness”.
95
This notion of
self-affirmation through a Black Power Christianity plays a pivotal role in Purlie
Victorious. Using the reclamation of Big Bethel to drive his exploration of the
linkages between integration, black Christianity, and self-affirmation, Davis suggests
that these poles are not mutually exclusive and serve equally important functions in
resisting racial oppression. Essentially, Davis posits his representations of
“blackness” as an “endless beginning” that “is renewed in the rhythmic process of
multiplication and substitution generated from performance to performance”.
96
His
yoking of integrationist ideologies as access to freedom, black cultural self-
affirmation, and tenets of black power theology, complicates his representation of
“blackness” and disturbs the assumptions at the root of the stereotypes.
95
Van Deburg, William. A New Day In Babylon: The Black Power Movement and American
Culture,1965-1975. Chicago: Chicago UP, 1992.
96
Benston, Kimberly W. Performing Blackness: Enactments of African-American
Modernism.London:Routledge, 2000 (13).
56
For theatre critics reviewing Purlie Victorious, the use of these stereotypes to
drive the play’s humor and social critique becomes a central point of contention. Not
unlike the reviews of A Raisin in the Sun, the assessments of Davis’ work frequently
offer readers plot summary and present cursory engagement of the play’s thematics
of integration. Of thirteen reviews of the play from its opening night, seven were
favorable, four were unfavorable, and two were mixed. The reviews pay particular
attention to the genre, the use of stereotypes, in addition to the identification of as
well as the success of the play’s social message. In their participation in a developing
cultural dialogue about “blackness” and its representation vís a vís their reviews,
critics’ speculation on Davis’ authorial intentions inform their readings and mark a
visible split in the play’s reception. Similarly, as is the case with the review archive
of A Raisin in the Sun, the review archive of Davis’ play exposes the strategies
theatre critics employ in interpreting the representations of “blackness” in Purlie
Victorious.
It is important to consider the critics’ classification of the play in terms of
genre and how it might inform their readings of the comedy and stereotypes utilized
in the play. Though nearly all of the critics identify the play as a farce, the basic
elements of farce—“exaggerated physical action, exaggeration of character and
situation, absurd situations and improbable events” as well as a complex plot and the
succession of events with “bewildering rapidity” pushes the play closer to satire
which “is a kind of protest, a sublimation and refinement of anger and indignation”.
57
97
Jonathan Cuddon defines the satirist as one who “takes it upon himself to correct,
censure and ridicule the follies and vices of society and thus to bring contempt and
derision upon aberrations from a desirable and civilized norm”.
98
While there are
clearly elements of farce in the play, given Davis’ own evaluation of his work as
using comedy to point up the absurdity of segregation, in addition to the relative
simplicity of the play’s plot, “farcical satire” is a better fit as its genre. This
misreading of Purlie Victorious’s genre also informs the critics’ reading of the
comedy in that they fail to engage its satirical elements and ultimately accuse Davis
of “cultural malpractice” as Herman Gray would have it
99
. In other words, they
refuse to engage with “the pleasures and fun of subversion and the real politics of
control, regulation, and reproduction” or Davis’ “self-reflexivity, location, and level
of engagement” within the work itself.
100
Finally, the critics fail to do what Gray
calls “the demanding and often frustrating work of confronting and grappling with
the role of race and representation in the national imaginary”
101
which might provide
entry into the disruptive possibilities of the stereotypes Davis deploys.
Despite this misclassification, several critics do take note of Davis’ use of
comedy; one even links the play’s sense of playfulness to the Kennedy White House
97
Cuddon, J.A. The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory. New York: Penguin,
1991 (880).
98
Cuddon, 282.
99
Herman Gray, “Cultural Politics as Outrage(ous)” Black Renaissance/Renaissance Noire 3 (2000)
92-102.
100
Gray 100.
101
Ibid.
58
asserting that moving day there “did seem to coincide with a new spirit of mischief
in the land. . . .that may be seen in [Purlie Victorious]”.
102
Whatever its source,
generally critics applaud its use, particularly how it engages stereotypes. Walter
Kerr’s New York Herald Tribune review comments on Davis’ refusal to deflate
stereotypes, “[i]nstead he has blown them up like Macy parade balloons, made them
fatter and more preposterous than an old-fashioned cartoonist could ever have
conceived”.
103
He continues, “. . . .each dig in the ribs at contemporary America is
managed in a spirit as warm and as wide-open as the sunflowers that lean over the
crooked back fence”.
104
In the New York Times, Howard Taubman asserts that the
use of stereotypes carry cultural currency because of Davis’ own cultural location:
It is the Negro characters whom Mr. Davis has brought
to life with freshness and vitality as if for the first time
they were being presented from the inside. . . .he has
started, in their case, with stereotypes—the Bible-spouting
spellbinder, the Mammy, the slow-witted, drawling drudge
and the Uncle Tom. But these figures increasingly take on the warmth of
individuality, until you hate to leave their company.
105
Both of these favorable reviews illustrate that the critics allow for the possibility to
use stereotypes as a mode of critique that does not privilege the white supremacist
assumptions in which the stereotypes are rooted. Kerr notes that the satirical nature
102
“Purlie Victorious: Bright Broadway Hit Lampoons Dixie and Bestows Double Stardom
on Ossie Davis” Rev. of Purlie Victorious. New York. Cort Theater. Ebony. March 1962.
103
Kerr, Walter. Rev. of Purlie Victorious. New York. Cort Theater. New York Herald-Tribune. 29
September 1961.
104
Kerr, 34.
105
Taubman, Howard. Rev. of Purlie Victorious “Theatre: ‘Purlie Victorious’ Romps In”
New York. Cort Theater. New York Times. 29 September 1961
59
of the stereotypes permits Davis to forward cultural critique or a “dig in the ribs of
contemporary America” while Taubman suggests that Davis moves beyond the
stereotypes to foreground their possibilities for resistance. After he references
Purlie’s demand that African-Americans get “our cut of the Constitution. . . .not in a
teaspoon, but with a shovel”, Taubman implies as much in concluding his review
with, “‘Purlie Victorious’ will do as much to bring that about as a grim oration. . . .”
106
. While it is clear that humor makes Davis’ critique more palatable for critics, it is
also clear that these critics allow for his artistic agency in recognizing that his use of
stereotypes works to interrogate the nature of them in addition to advancing a
critique of Southern racial oppression.
However, some critics privilege the white supremacist genealogies of the
stereotypes and deride Davis for his usage of them. Further, these critics resist
Davis’ reading of representational “blackness” as “endless beginning” in their
rejection of his use of stereotypes even as he interrogates them. In an anonymous
review appearing in Time magazine, Davis is critiqued for “people[ing] a Broadway
stage with Negro characters that the N.A.A.C.P. has long claimed do not exist”.
107
The review continues, scorning both the characters and significantly, the play’s black
cultural self-affirmation:
Unacceptable as real Negroes, the play’s characters live a
fantasy life that Playwright Davis presents as gorged with
106
Taubman 21.
107
“Uncle Tom Exhumed” Rev. of Purlie Victorious. New York. Cort Theater. Time. October 6,
1961. (88-89).
60
self-pity and filled with a lust for revenge over past wrongs.
Under the surface laughter lies chauvinsism: “I find, in being
black, a thing of beauty. . . a native land in every Negro face!”
Substitute the word white and any playwright would be howled
down as a racist. (italics mine)
108
The review also draws on the Walter Lee Younger character in A Raisin in the Sun to
interpret Purlie Victorious Judson, suggesting that both Judson and Younger are
“frustrated” and “overambitious”, but that Younger has in effect learned from his
experience saying, “. . . .but Raisin’s hero grew to recognize that in race relations, as
in life, there are no shortcuts, and he courageously set his face toward self-discipline,
hard work and fair play”.
109
Following this same critical trajectory, Susan M. Black
argues in Theater Arts that the play “is based on the assumption that there is a
humorous side to the racial problem” and asserts that “maybe there is but Mr. Davis
hasn’t found it, possibly because he was looking in the wrong direction. . . .lines like.
. . . ‘being colored can be a lot of fun sometimes when ain’t nobody looking’ are
never going to set me rolling in the aisles”.
110
Finally, Robert Brustein asserts in The
New Republic that Davis has “set back inter-racial harmony. . . .by about fourteen
years. . . .the author has replaced white stereotypes of Negroes with Negro ones; but
I must say that the hate and violence seething under the shut-my-mouf benevolence
of the cardboard caricatures really gave me a start”.
111
108
Time, 89.
109
Ibid.
110
Black, Susan M. Rev. of Purlie Victorious. Theatre Arts 45:12 December 1961.
111
Brustein, Robert. Rev. of Purlie Victorious The New Republic 142:22 November 6, 1961.
61
Three significant and related critical trajectories surface in these assessments.
First, the resistance to multiple modalities of “blackness” in representation, second,
the resistance to black self-affirmation, and finally the linkage of Davis’
representation of “blackness” to Hansberry’s. In these critics’ estimation, what
makes Purlie Victorious problematic is its refusal to adhere to a singular mode of the
representation of “blackness”. That is, Davis binds integrationist ideologies, black
cultural self-affirmation, and tenets of Black Power theology within his
characterizations that trouble a notion of “blackness” as finite truth beyond the text.
The Time magazine review gestures toward such a finite notion in referencing the
N.A.A.C.P’s claims that such “characters do not exist”.
112
Collapsing fictional
representation and realist representation, the review foregrounds the organization’s
claims, using them as a kind of cultural yardstick to assess the accuracy of Davis’s
representations. In considering the late 1950s and the early 1960s as a period when
African-American culture and cultural products were beginning to reflect a multitude
of representational locations—bearing in mind the advent of Motown in Detroit in
1958 and the start of the Civil Rights Movement in the South—this reclaiming of the
N.A.A.C.P as arbiter of “truthful” representation suggests a resistance to new
modalities of representation and an attempt to contain those representations.
113
112
Time, 88.
113
Smith, Suzanne E. Dancing in the Street: Motown and the Cultural Politics of Detroit.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1999.
62
Linked to this question of multiple modalities of “blackness” in
representation is the “angry” undercurrent the critics note in the play’s language,
particularly its use of black cultural self-affirmation. If Davis’ language is
understood within the context of the psychological tenets of the Black Power
Movement or as William Van Deburg suggests, “to become conscious of one’s
blackness was a healthy psychosocial development. It was to make a positive
statement about one’s worth as a person,” it becomes clear that his language speaks
to this issue of “healthy psychosocial development” within the play’s setting of a
fairly hostile and segregated South.
114
In other words, what these critics read as
anger is actually a prefiguring of self-affirmative rhetoric that would become more
strident and visible as the Black Power and Black Arts Movements gained critical
mass later in the 1960s. Overlooking the significance of the use of the language and
how it bears particular currency and impact in the setting of Davis’ play, the
segregated South, these critics disregard its importance within that cultural sphere.
Further, these readings of “anger” in the play reiterate a resistance to multiple modes
of the representation of “blackness” in that the “shut-my-mouf” stereotypes and a
rejection of the white supremacist ideologies informing those stereotypes cannot
exist in the same theatrical or narrative space. Because Davis yokes multiple modes
of “blackness” to inform his representations, critics seemingly reject this “endless
beginning” in favor of a singular modality.
114
Van Deburg, William. A New Day In Babylon: The Black Power Movement and American
Culture,1965-1975. Chicago: Chicago UP, 1992 (52).
63
The comparison of Purlie Victorious Judson and Walter Lee Younger figures
significantly in the assessments. Several critics draw parallels between the two
plays, which were both produced by Philip Rose, but in the same way critics utilize
the N.A.A.C.P’s contentions as a cultural yardstick, Hansberry’s play stands for
them as the marker of the authentic representation of “blackness”. In another gesture
toward a singular mode of “blackness” in representation, the critics reject Purlie’s
connection to the figure of the trickster in African and African-American culture and
his use of dissemblance. The human trickster in African folklore is typically “an
underdog figure, smaller in stature and strength than his opponents. . . .but much
cleverer and always well in control of the situation”.
115
This rubric of the trickster
extends to Purlie who is a self-described “professor of Negro Philosophy”, preacher
of “freedom in the cotton patch”, and leader of the Negro people who hatches
multiple plans to reclaim Big Bethel and frequently conceals his intentions under the
pretense provided by the stereotypes at work in the play. Interestingly, the Time
review unknowingly acknowledges the tradition of the trickster, but recasts it as a
detriment to the work, arguing, “[h]ere is the unlicensed preacher hero, Purlie
Victorious Judson (Ossie Davis)—a liar, a braggart, a trickster, and the self-
appointed messiah of his race (‘Who else is they got?’)”.
116
In short, even as Davis
draws upon a black vernacular tradition of folklore, in addition to black self-
affirmation, and tenets of Black Power theology to advance the representation of
115
Merriam-Webster. Merriam-Webster’s Encyclopedia of Literature. Springfield:Merriam-Webster,
1995.
116
Time 88.
64
“blackness” as an “endless beginning” that gives rise to multiple modalities of
representation, critical resistance to his representations suggest that a singular
modality of “blackness” is a requisite for entry into the broader cultural dialogue.
The negotiation of “blackness” and a communal American identity, then, can only
occur with a singular mode of the representation of “blackness”.
In their assessments of both A Raisin in the Sun and Purlie Victorious, the
reticence of drama critics to fully engage the issues informing these representations
of “blackness”, as well as their resistance to multiple modes of representation
prefigures the political “white backlash” that followed the passage of the Civil
Rights Act of 1964.
117
That is, while white Americans demonstrated sympathy
toward the “Negro Problem”, that sympathy was in many ways undercut by a
resistance and resentment toward African-Americans. In the North, those
subscribing to this ideology helped George Wallace make a strong showing in the
1964 presidential primaries, and in the South, segregationists redoubled their efforts
to preserve the old social order.
118
Though many of the cultural products of African-Americans during this
period were seemingly embraced in broader American culture—Motown released its
first hit song “Money (That’s What I Want) in 1959, its first million seller “Shop
Around” in 1961 and marketed itself as “The Sound of Young America” in order to
117
Franklin, John Hope. From Slavery To Freedom: A History of Negro Americans. New York:
Knopf, 1980 (409).
118
Ibid.
65
reach across racial divides—but it also important to bear in mind that some of the
products of the period were viewed as subversive.
119
For example, though The Shirelles were not a part of Berry Gordy’s Motown
Machine, they were an extremely popular crossover group, making their mark with
the first number one hit by an African American “girl group” on the U.S. charts in
1960 with their song “Tonight’s The Night”. Their next hit, “Will You Still Love
Me Tomorrow?” was written by married songwriting team Gerry Goffin and Carole
King and details a young woman’s concerns that once she’s engaged in sex with her
boyfriend that he’ll still love her the next day. While this song also hit number one
that same year, it was banned in many schools across the country because the lyrics
were thought to advocate premarital sex. Ironically, The Shirelles’ lyrical innuendoes
coupled with the soft harmonies of their doo-wop tinged music earned them a spot as
the headline act in the first integrated concert in Alabama—the same state where
Governor George Wallace “tossed the gauntlet” in his 1963 Inaugural Speech and
declared “segregation today, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever” .
120
What
the example of The Shirelles illustrates is the peculiar mingling of rejection and
acceptance of African American cultural products in addition to the kind of
apprehension and anxiety that surrounded them.
This “vexed embrace” resonates in the reception of the representations of
“blackness” on stage. Echoing a nation that was only beginning to understand the
119
Smith, 6.
120
Sanchez, George. Lecture. “Politics and Culture of the 1960s”. University of Southern California.
February 11, 2001.
66
complexities of the euphemistic “Negro Problem” in the late 1950s and early 1960s,
the critics reviewing both plays gesture toward embracing the works and more
importantly, the issues of racial oppression informing them, but simultaneously deny
the breadth of those issues and the diverse approaches toward representing them.
Significantly, the critical resistance toward multiple modes of the representation of
“blackness” heightens with the production of plays such as LeRoi Jones’ Dutchman
(1964) and James Baldwin’s Blues For Mister Charlie (1964). In critically assessing
the reviews of these early representations of “blackness”, Raymond Williams’
notions of equally engaging both cultural products and their cultural formation as a
process illuminate the critics’ “vexed embrace” of Hansberry’s and Davis’
representations in that it underscores that a “gap between [America’s] recorded
aspirations and actual practices still remains” in terms of its engagement with
African-American political, social, and economic concerns. Bearing in mind that
neither the dramatic representations nor the critical assessments carry priority in
Williams’ figuring, it becomes clear that the dialogue or in Marvin Carlson’s
phrasing, the “metacommentary” elicited from both mark a stalemate in the
negotiations of a communal American identity. The critical assessments of A Raisin
in the Sun and Purlie Victorious indicate the beginning of an ongoing cultural
negotiation about the nature of representations of “blackness” that was in 1959 and
1960, and continues to be both contested and embraced.
67
Chapter Three: (Mis)perception, Visibility and Authenticity in Dutchman
The review archive of Purlie Victorious exposes the ways in which theatre
critics reject a representation of “blackness” in the play that deploys stereotypes in
order to advance tenets of black power theology and black cultural self-affirmation.
Additionally, it illustrates the investment critics have in the “ghost” of the
performance of Walter Younger in A Raisin in the Sun some two years before the
opening night of Davis’ play in terms of how Purlie Judson is perceived to be an
inauthentic representation of black identity when compared to the representation of
Younger.
Turning now to LeRoi Jones’ (now Amiri Baraka) play Dutchman (1964), the
ghost of Walter Younger does not come under discussion in the review archive as it
does in Purlie Victorious, however, the notion of authentic representations of
“blackness” becomes a fundamental element of theatre critics’ reading of the play
and reveals the thread of the authenticity of representations of “blackness” that links
all three plays. This thread begins in A Raisin in the Sun, which was applauded for its
realistic representation of “blackness”, moves through Purlie Victorious which is
figured as falling short of a representational standard of “blackness” set by A Raisin
in the Sun and now to Dutchman where critics bring both the play’s representation of
“blackness” in its protagonist Clay and the authenticity of Jones himself into
question. Although Dutchman’s critical archive does not directly reference the
representations of Walter Younger or Purlie Judson by name, it does lean heavily
upon notions of authentically black representations that are at issue in both of those
review archives. Further, as was apparent in the Purlie Victorious’ review archive,
68
the Dutchman archive also draws upon the ways in which anger and rage are put into
the service of the representation of “blackness” in the play. In effect, the
representations in both A Raisin in the Sun and Purlie Victorious haunt Dutchman.
But before turning to Dutchman’s review archive, a reconsideration of the
representation of “blackness” in the play is necessary.
Much of the critical attention of the mid-to-late 1990s given to Dutchman
focuses on three themes: first, the playwright’s role as an architect in the proscribed
aesthetics of the Black Arts Movement which substituted a neo-African essentialism
for Western essentialism and a fixed notion of black identity; second, the
abjectification of gay men in order to prop up black masculinity and finally the
abjectification of women in another effort to fortify black masculinity.
121
Drawing
attention to the attendant problems in putting representations of women and gay men
in the service of upholding black masculinity and replacing one narrow system of
representation for another, several critics reconsidering the play argue that the
representations in Dutchman underscore the instability of black masculinity and
further suggest that the play not only forecloses the possibility of multiple
representations of black identity in its characterization of Clay, but in fact, claim he
is “doomed” to “attempt to pierce the veil that DuBois made so famous” and to
“wander ceaselessly the psychological seas of self-loathing”.
122
121
Philip Brian Harper, Are We Not Men?: Masculine Anxiety and the Problem of African American
Identity. London: Oxford UP, 1998. E. Patrick Johnson, Matthew Rebhorn, Ron Simmons, Charles
Nero, Dwight McBride and others have written extensively about the problematic politics and
representations of the Black Power and Black Arts Movement.
122
Matthew Rebhorn, “Flaying Dutchman: Masochism, Minstrelsy, and the Gender Politics of Amiri
Baraka’s Dutchman” Callaloo 26.3 (2003) 796-812.
69
While acknowledging that the impulse to undergird black masculinity on the
figurative backs of homosexual men and heterosexual and most frequently white
women very clearly recurs in Baraka’s oeuvre and much of the artistic production of
the Black Arts Movement and even further that it informs Dutchman, this chapter
considers how the performance of identity—black heterosexual male and white
heterosexual female—refuses to be moored to fixed notions of any one identity
position and in so doing, creates possibilities for broadening the representation of
black identity. Further, considering the play within the broader context of theatrical
representations of African American identity during the period under study can
further illuminate how it broadens the scope of the representation of black identity.
Like Purlie Victorious, Dutchman is bound to A Raisin in the Sun both
ideologically and representationally and marks a second shift away from Hansberry’s
play in both representation and ideology in terms of the cultural resources from
which the representations derive. A Raisin in the Sun emphasizes domestic realism
to underscore the morality and respectability of the Younger family and ultimately,
the universality of their experiences in an urban setting. In a move away from
Hansberry’s realism and set in segregated Georgia, Davis’s comedy Purlie
Victorious couches a critique of white supremacy in its protagonist—a trickster
figure who draws upon black self-affirmation and tenets of Black Power theology to
preach “freedom in the cotton patch”.
123
Finally returning to an urban setting, but
123
Ossie Davis, Purlie Victorious. New York: Samuel French, 1961.
70
one that is “heaped in modern myth”
124
, Dutchman , revises A Raisin in the Sun’s
concerns with respectability and Purlie Victorious’ concerns with black self-
affirmation to relate its allegory of race relations in the U.S.
Marlon Ross’ notions about the nature of identity clarify the connections
between Dutchman and these earlier representations of black identity as well as the
matter of representations within the play itself. In his instructive essay, “Camping
the Dirty Dozens: The Queer Resources of Black Nationalist Invective,” Ross points
out that Black Nationalist writing has been singled out as invective discourse that
puts race, class, sexual and gender identities in contention. While he emphasizes the
importance of revealing homophobia, Ross proposes considering the potential
resources of such invective—its “cultural sources, traces, influences, alliances and
alternatives available to its users and thus changing its changing uses in specific
contexts over time”.
125
Ross further argues that identity positions are continually
shifting and reconstituted by individual subjects through “identifying with and also
against traditions based on the material and symbolic resources extant, absent, or
hidden within historically changing practices and forms moving within and across
particular environments”.
126
While asserting that cultural identification is concerned
with both “predefined racial, sexual, and class roles” that people take on and “how
they are motivated and constrained to act (or sometimes act out) unfamiliar
124
LeRoi Jones, Dutchman and The Slave. New York: Morrow, 1964.
125
Marlon Ross, Camping the Dirty Dozens: The Queer Resources of Black Nationalist Invective,”
Callaloo 23.1 (2000) 290-312.
126
Ross, 290.
71
experiences of identification depending on the range of cultural knowledge available
to them” he explores this notion in much of Baraka’s non-fiction writing and a
handful of his plays, though he does not consider Dutchman.
127
However,
bringing these insights to bear on Dutchman creates space to read the play and its
representations of white female and black male identity as drawing on a wide range
of cultural resources to sketch identity rather than purely predefined roles and it
positions cultural identification and identity as performance within the play. In its
attention to the seer and the seen, visibility and invisibility, acting and audience,
Dutchman expounds on both the possibilities and limits of its available cultural
resources in shaping identity and does so by staging performances within the play.
In addition to considering the limits and possibilities of available cultural
resources and their relationship to identity, drawing on the analysis of the play’s
review archive from its opening night reveals the links to previous iterations of black
identity on stage in terms of how it builds on the performances of black identity seen
in the farcical satire of Purlie Victorious and the domestic realism of A Raisin in the
Sun. The critical assessments of the play illustrate the significance of previous
representations of African American identity and an unwillingness to create space for
the “blackness” alluded to and gestured toward in Dutchman.
Unlike Purlie Victorious Judson, who defines himself by drawing on a
variety of cultural resources available to him and who relies on the (mis)perceptions
of others in order to escape a fixed, singular “blackness” and ultimately succeeds in
bringing Cap’n Cotchipee and the domination he represents to an end, Dutchman’s
127
Ross, 291.
72
Clay utilizes similar resources, but his efforts to reveal both the (mis)perceptions
about and the functions of the available resources results in his death. Still, at the
close of the play, the possibilities for multiple “blacknesses” remain available and
accessible.
If subjects and their identity positions hinge on both “predefined” racial
and/or gender roles and how they “act or act out” unfamiliar experiences, then how
do they play out in Dutchman? In order to respond to that question, a rehearsal of the
one-act play’s plot is in order. On a subway train “heaped in modern myth”, Clay, a
20-year old seemingly naïve black man, peers aimlessly from a window at a stop
and briefly catches the glance of Lula, a 30-year old, white woman.
128
Detailed as a
kind of “bohemian” figure complete with long red hair, sunglasses, sandals and a
minidress, she makes her way onto the train with her bag, which contains an
apparently endless supply of apples and sits next to Clay. From there, as the two of
them sit alone on the train, she initiates sexual banter and follows up with a sexual
proposition, then makes her way to a mostly one-sided discussion of his racial
identity and closes the first scene by accusing him of being a murderer. In scene
two, she relates an imagined scene of their first sexual encounter and then tells Clay
that their entire discussion has been about his manhood.
As other black and white passengers board the train and become an audience
for their exchanges, Lula’s sexual appeals become more exaggerated and physical as
she dances in front of Clay and insists that they “rub bellies”.
129
When he refuses,
128
LeRoi Jones, Dutchman and The Slave. New York: William Morrow and Company, 1964.
129
Jones, 31.
73
she calls him “Old-Thomas Woolly-Head”, he slaps her and begins a furious
monologue about the performance of black identity that ultimately causes Lula to
stab him twice in the chest, killing him. The other passengers assist her in removing
his body from the train and as the play ends, another 20-year old black man boards
the train and sits behind her, but while she tries to get his attention, the train’s older
black conductor steps into the coach doing a soft-shoe and singing a song. He
acknowledges the young man with a “hey brother” and tips his hat to Lula, who
stares at him, following his movements down the aisle as he exits the car.
130
For some critics, the play relies on simplistic binary categories of black and
white and resorts to essentialism in its characterization of both Lula and Clay.
However, the polarization of black and white in Dutchman can be seen as
problematizing those very categories and tracing their instability. While much of the
criticism of the play from the mid-to-late 1990s draws on both Clay’s final
monologue and Lula’s murder of Clay in the second scene to support their
arguments, the development of both Lula and Clay in the first scene receives scant
critical attention and the characterization of both in the first scene, particularly Lula,
are essential in understanding how the play attempts to extricate the received
opposition between various categories including black/white individual/community
and aesthetics/politics through the use of cultural resources that they both identify
within and against and through allusions to the performance of identity. Ultimately,
theirs is a struggle over the performance of identity and the perception of identity.
130
Jones, 38.
74
At the outset of the play, the significance of perception—insight, intuition of
knowledge gained from seeing is made clear. Much of the opening action in the first
scene is devoted to the realm of perception, looking, appearance and the
representation of self and others. Both Lula and Clay attempt to use perception to fix
identity for the other, even as both struggle against the other’s attempt to do so by
identifying with and against a variety of subject positions. In her essay “The Logic
of Retribution: Amiri Baraka’s Dutchman” Nita Kumar suggests that the play is “an
exploration of the various strategies of representation of black identity and the
possibility of unraveling these” and she further argues that the play “engages
dialectically with racial domination in terms of representation and attempts to invest
art and language with the power of immediacy and action”.
131
Considering Kumar’s
assertions about racial domination and its relationship to representation and linking
them to the function of performance within the play can further unravel the strategies
of representation she discusses and underscores the instability of both “blackness”
and “whiteness” as subject positions.
Much of the unmooring of “blackness” and “whiteness” occurs early on in
the play’s first scene before other passengers appear in the second scene. Even
before Lula boards the train, the stage direction advises that Clay looks away from
his magazine and “idly up until he sees [her] face staring at him through the
window” already suggesting Clay’s disengaged demeanor at the outset of their
131
Kumar, Nita N. “The Logic of Retribution: Amiri Baraka’s Dutchman”. African American
Review. 37:2-3: (2003) 271-279.
75
encounter.
132
After sitting down next to him, she asks if he was staring at her
through the window and begins their first exchange about perception and ultimately
its failures in determining identity. When Clay responds that he wasn’t staring at
her, but that she was staring at him, she readily admits that she was in fact staring at
him and further that she got on the train that wasn’t going her direction in order to
seek him out. At this point the stage direction reveals that he perceives her banter as
“pure sex talk” and he attempts to meet her invitation and engage her by telling her
he’s “prepared for anything”.
133
Lula disrupts and corrects his perception of her in
the stage direction and employs one of her many efforts to strategically dismantle
Clay’s perspectives on their encounter. First, she draws on the long history of
assumptions regarding black male hyper sexuality and asserts that Clay wants to
“take [her] somewhere and screw [her]” and when he asks if that’s “the way [he]
looks” she replies:
LULA. You look like you been trying to grow a beard. That’s exactly what
you look like. You look like you live in New Jersey with your parents and
are trying to grow a beard. That’s what. You look like you’ve been reading
Chinese poetry and drinking lukewarm sugarless tea.
[Laughs, uncrossing and recrossing her legs]
You look like death eating a soda cracker.
When he once again asks if this is “really” how he appears to her, she responds:
LULA. Not all of it.
[She feints a seriousness to cover an actual somber tone]
I lie a lot.
[Smiling]
It helps me control the world.
CLAY. [Relieved and laughing louder than the humor]
132
Jones, LeRoi. Dutchman and The Slave. New York: Morrow, 1964.
133
Jones 8.
76
Yeah, I bet.
134
Lula’s opening salvo in a continuous debate between the two regarding appearance
and perception marks a disjunction between visibility and authenticity. In other
words, Lula implies that what Clay looks like to her does not equate who she
perceives—or “knows” him to be. The signs of the beard, Chinese poetry, and
lukewarm sugarless tea might be suggestive of bohemian subculture of the period,
but Lula undermines Clay’s association with it by instead emphasizing her
perceptions about his sexual intentions toward her. Though she has not yet
mentioned race and how it impacts her perceptions of Clay and will not make
explicitly clear how it informs her observations until later in this scene, it serves as
the basic premise in her perceptions of Clay. In effect, he cannot be authentically
bohemian, but he can be preoccupied with the prospect of having sex with her.
Lula’s notion of visibility and its link to authenticity becomes an increasingly
entrenched position on knowledge of Clay’s “blackness” and identity that she refuses
to reconsider. Most significantly, this exchange exposes the motives behind Lula’s
perception of Clay and her attempts to fix identity for him. She allows that she
misrepresents what she sees in order to “control the world” or in other words, to gain
authority over the subjects she encounters. In short, this exchange between Lula and
Clay outlines the rules of engagement for their subway encounter—she asserts her
perceptions of Clay as knowledge and power, while he struggles to counter, engage
and refute her (mis)perceptions.
134
Jones 8-9.
77
Finally, the representation of Lula alludes to a phenomena that social
historian William Chafe calls the “progressive mystique”.
135
In his study of
Greensboro, North Carolina and its prominent role in the Civil Rights Movement,
Chafe argues that since white liberals didn’t have access to the local political
system’s rigid procedures the “progressive mystique” stands in for such a system and
functioned as a series of implicit assumptions, nuances, and modes of interacting
with and relating to African Americans that are powerful because they’re elusive—
they became a masterful weapon of social control. Under the “progressive
mystique,” progress is achieved only when direct conflict is avoided. The parties
involved must voluntarily agree on an appropriate course of action. In addition,
while it allows alternate views on controversial issues a fair hearing and discussion,
it also involves paternalism toward African Americans. Further, while Chafe
considers race relations in Greensboro over a period of thirty years, he contends that
his study “speaks to larger issues at work in our society and culture” and that while it
is the story of one city and how it addresses “the underlying issues of justice, self-
determination, and autonomy” it is also “the story of America”.
136
In Dutchman, this
notion of the “progressive mystique” informs the representation of Lula in that she is
figured as a white bohemian liberal, but most importantly that her interactions with
Clay follow precisely the dictates the “progressive mystique” outlines—aversion to
direct conflict, occasionally allowing alternate views, and paternalism. In particular,
135
Chafe, William. Civilities and Civil Rights. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1981.
136
Chafe 10.
78
her implicit assumptions about black male sexuality and violence, the aspirations of
the African American middle class, and the role of African Americans in U.S.
history significantly inform her interactions with Clay. Even more, the nuances in
her modes of relating to Clay clearly illustrate the position of power it creates for
her, not unlike what Chafe describes in the interactions between African Americans
and whites in Greensboro. One particularly powerful mode of relating to Clay
becomes apparent in her representation of herself.
If the “progressive mystique” concerns itself primarily with implicit
assumptions, nuances, and modes of interacting with and relating to African
Americans, then Lula’s iteration of it hinges on her continual (re)presentations of
herself to Clay. In the stage direction, she is described as a 30-year old tall, slender,
beautiful white woman with long red hair wearing sunglasses, summer clothes, and
sandals.
137
During the course of the play, she positions herself in a multitude of ways
to Clay: that they share a mutual friend—Warren Enright—so they’re potential
contemporaries, in a nod to the African American cultural tradition of “playing the
dozens” that she’s a former lover to his sister, that she’s older than she appears, that
she’s a poet, that she’s an actress, that she’s liar, that she’s politically astute, that
she’s sexually available to him, that she’s “nothing” and finally, that she knows Clay
“like the palm of her hand” and based on that knowledge that he is a “well-known
type”.
138
While Lula figures herself as indeterminate and continually changing, she
137
Jones 5.
138
Jones 17.
79
rebuffs Clay’s attempts to engage with her and gain insight about who she is as well
as about her perceptions and knowledge of him. Further, she questions Clay’s
perceptions and knowledge. After once again propositioning him and asking,
“would you like to get involved with me” and garnering his response of “I’d be a
fool not to” she replies:
LULA. And I bet you’re sure you know what you’re talking about.
[Taking him a little roughly by the wrist, so he cannot eat the apple, then
shaking the wrist]
I bet you’re sure of almost everything anybody ever asked you about…right?
[Shakes his wrist harder]
Right?
139
Here rather than continuing with the discussion of her initial sexual proposition, Lula
shifts gears and takes up the issue of an implied failure of Clay’s perceptions and
knowledge, a strategy she employs throughout both scenes in the play. As Lula raises
questions about the veracity of Clay’s perceptions and knowledge of the world
around him, she further outlines her efforts to control and define not only the nature
and tone of their conversation, but his role in it as well. This becomes clear in a
literal staging of both of their roles in this performance that Lula directs so to speak.
After (re)presenting herself to Clay as “Lena the Hyena, the famous woman poet”,
she once again broaches the issue of Warren Enright and the party he is having,
imploring Clay to invite her:
LULA.
[Starts laughing again]
Now you say to me, “Lula, Lula, why don’t you go to this party with me
tonight?” It’s your turn, and let those be your lines.
139
Jones 11.
80
CLAY. Lula, why don’t you go to this party with me tonight, Huh?
LULA. Say my name twice before you ask, and no huh’s.
CLAY. Lula, Lula, why don’t you go to this party with me tonight?
LULA. I’d like to go Clay, but how can you ask me to go when you barely
know me?
CLAY. That is strange, isn’t it?
LULA. What kind of reaction is that? You’re supposed to say, “Aw, come
on, we’ll get to know each other better at the party.”
140
Lula’s strategies of self-representation coupled with her staging of a play within the
play illustrate the roles she attempts to carve out for herself and for Clay. Her
indeterminate identity continually shifts and changes at her own accord, while Clay’s
identity is fixed, a known quantity and accessible to everyone but Clay. He doesn’t
know his “lines” and he doesn’t or potentially, can’t “know” who she is. In addition,
following the tenets of the “progressive mystique” she consistently avoids direct
confrontation with Clay while utilizing a series of implicit assumptions and nuances
about his identity as well as employing paternalism toward him that becomes a
means of social control. Ultimately, even as Lula implicitly critiques categorization
and fixed identities in her (re)presentations of herself, she invokes them in her
interactions with, reactions to and (mis)perceptions of Clay.
Another aspect of the “progressive mystique” involves the notion of civility
or as Chafe phrases it, “a way of dealing with people and problems that made good
manners more important than substantial action”.
141
For African Americans, the
etiquette of civility called for deference to whites in order to maintain economic
140
Jones 16.
141
Chafe 8.
81
stability and offered little room for self-assertion and independence. Further, it
suppressed honesty and protest when African Americans were in direct contact with
whites. Chafe suggests that while African Americans shuttled between two social
spheres, one public that involved contact with white and one private African
American social sphere, the need and desire to resist the social control of the
progressive mystique and the function of civility within it was ongoing. He
contends, “[w]hether the protests appeared as a desire for integration or simply for
better facilities for blacks, they reflected an incipient rebellion no less powerful for
not being able to find open expression”.
142
Parallel impulses to Chafe’s notion of
civility inhere in Clay’s relationship with and reactions to Lula throughout the play.
At the outset, Clay’s reactions to Lula and her many assertions about him
illustrate this notion of civility. He “idly” looks at her suggesting an indifference to
her, he “laughs louder than the humor” seemingly in an effort to smooth over a
potentially uncomfortable social moment, he “leans back hard against the back of the
seat…still trying to look amused” in an effort to maintain calm, he tries to “be as
flippant as Lula” in response to her sexual advances and after revealing that in
college, he thought he was Baudelaire
143
, she calls him a “black nigger”, and he
“quickly tries to appreciate the humor”.
144
Clearly, he tries to avoid confrontation
and he strategically maintains a stance of civility toward Lula and her assertions
142
Chafe 9.
143
Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867) 19
th
century French poet who was an opium and hashish addict
and died after contracting syphilis.
144
Jones 19.
82
about his identity. It is only after Clay begins to openly express his perceptions
about his “blackness” and how he identifies himself that they begin to turn down the
road toward confrontation. When Lula asserts for the second time in the play that
she knows Clay’s type, he provides more information about himself revealing that
his grandfather was a night watchman, that he went to a historically black college,
and that his mother was a Republican, while his father voted for the “man rather than
the party”.
145
After their exchange about Baudelaire, which is the first time he’s
made any assertions about his identity, she laughs at the notion of a “black
Baudelaire” and once again shifts the topic of the discussion, telling him, “[y]ou’re a
murderer Clay, and you know it”. The first scene ends shortly after with Lula
proclaiming:
LULA. And we’ll pretend the people cannot see you. That is, the citizens.
And that you are free of your own history. And I am free of my history.
We’ll pretend that we are both anonymous beauties smashing along through
the city’s entrails.
[She yells as loud as she can]
GROOVE! Black
146
By the end of the first scene, Clay’s first and only presentation of himself until his
infamous monologue in the second scene is that he likened himself to a 19
th
century
French poet as a college student. However, Lula patently rejects his representation
of himself and scoffs at it as an impossibility. Further, in the closing lines of the first
scene, she suggests that their collective histories will not allow for such a
145
Jones 20.
146
Jones 21.
83
representation of Clay or any representation of Clay that falls outside of the implicit
assumptions embedded in her figuring of his identity—that he is hypersexual,
potentially violent and strives to a part of the black middle class. Finally, the end of
the first scene marks the entry of an audience to Lula and Clay’s encounter which is
significant not only due to the passengers’ complicity with the end that Clay
ultimately meets, but also because it makes visible an audience to both Lula’s
performance and Clay’s monologue and reiterates the significance the performance
of “blackness” as both “a doing”—an embodied act at a specific site, potentially
disrupting conventions and “a thing done—a pre-existing oppressive category”.
147
At the start of the second scene, Lula recounts her imagined sexual
encounter with Clay as more passengers board the train and she becomes more
aggressive in both her sexual pursuit of Clay and in her figuring of Clay’s identity.
For his part, Clay refuses to become engaged, maintaining the stance of civility.
After she calls him “an escaped nigger” who “crawled through the wire and made
tracks to [her] side” he corrects her perception that plantations had wire around them
which seemingly raises the stakes for protecting her investment in her perceptions of
Clay.
148
She begins to perform a racial epithet laced song and dance, encouraging
Clay to “rub bellies” with her and referring to him as “Uncle Thomas Woolly
Head”.
149
Embarrassed, he tells her to sit down, as other passengers begin to join in
the singing and laugh at her impromptu performance. Clay grabs her arm and drags
147
Elin Diamond, ed. Performance and Cultural Politics. (London: Routledge, 1996).
148
Jones 29.
149
Jones 32.
84
her to the seat telling her to shut up and when she replies, “You’re afraid of white
people. And your father was. Uncle Tom Big Lip!” and in response he slaps her and
begins his monologue.
150
This rapid unraveling of their encounter hinges almost
entirely on Lula’s “blackface” performance of him. It initiates his break from a mode
of civility toward her and sets off precisely the kind of confrontation that the white
liberal “progressive mystique” seeks to avoid. In effect, the subtle social control the
“progressive mystique” provides Lula is lost when she insists upon his participation
in her “blackface” performance. Even further, this break paves the way for Clay’s
revelations about his struggles to shape identity and the modes through which he
attempts to do that.
In his monologue, Clay details the inner workings of his self-representation
and in so doing, reveals and corrects Lula’s (mis)perceptions of him, but it also
outlines a number of subject positions that Clay utilizes in his self-representation. At
the outset, Clay asserts that he could murder Lula and “all these weak-faced
ofays…even if they expected it…as skinny and middle class as [he is]”.
151
He
continues to Lula and the passenger car, “Let me be who I feel like being. Uncle
Tom. Thomas. Whoever. It’s none of your business. You don’t know anything
except what’s there for you to see. An act. Lies. Device”.
152
Here Clay’s rhetorical
maneuver responds to Lula’s previous contentions that he aspires to the black middle
class and that he’s a murderer, but underscores that these subject positions are also
150
Jones 33.
151
Jones 33.
152
Jones 34.
85
preexisting categories or expectations of him that he refuses to play out. While
allowing that the potential exists for either representation of himself, he opts not to
occupy either one, choosing instead to expose his own performance of “blackness”
and to uncover the artifice of civility to Lula and the other passengers. In effect, he
describes his “blackness” as a performance that hinges on what he makes visible and
available to the audience and the implicit assumptions the audience brings to bear on
that performance. As he proceeds, he draws upon the musical performances of blues
singer Bessie Smith and jazz saxophonist and composer Charlie Parker to illustrate
the use of art and the performance of “blackness” as a mode of both maintaining
civility while simultaneously transforming rage into a critique of the “progressive
mystique’s” implicit assumptions about African American identity. According to
Clay, while audiences “pop their fingers” they fail to understand that Smith is saying
“kiss my black unruly ass” and that Parker wouldn’t have written a note of music if
he had “walked up to East Sixty-seventh Street and killed the first ten white people
he saw”.
153
Aligning himself with these performers and positioning himself as a
poet, he declares:
And I’m the great would-be poet. Yes. That’s right! Poet. Some kind of
bastard literature…all it needs is a simple knife thrust…A whole people of
neurotics, struggling to keep from being sane. And the only thing that would
cure the neurosis would be your murder. Simple as that. I mean if I murdered
you, then other white people would begin to understand me. You
understand? No. I guess not.
154
153
Jones 35.
154
Jones 35.
86
Figuring honest and direct self-expression as “sanity” and by implication figuring
civility as “insanity” while simultaneously describing the efforts to avoid
confrontation and to transform rage as “neurosis”, Clay frames artistic expression as
a mode of not only performing “blackness”, but also as a means of critiquing the
“progressive mystique”. However, in uncovering the multiple functions and
possibilities of performing “blackness” he rejects the narrow modes of
(mis)representation that Lula utilizes in constructing his black identity and
unwittingly contributes to his own demise by bringing the artifice of civility to the
surface of their encounter and engaging in the confrontation with her.
After Clay opts for civility or insanity, he (re)presents himself again to Lula
and the passengers and rejects murder saying:
Ahhh. Shit. But who needs it? I’d rather be a fool. Insane. Safe with my
words, and no deaths, and clean, hard thoughts, urging me to new conquests.
My people’s madness. Hah! That’s a laugh. My people. They don’t need me
to claim them. They got legs and arms of their own. Personal insanities.
Mirrors. They don’t need all those words.
155
As Clay embraces civility and rejects confrontation, he offers an alternate figuring of
“blackness” that counters the kinds of implicit assumptions about African American
identity that Lula has made through the course of the play. In correcting his own
assertions about his “people’s madness” and contending that they have the ability to
articulate and perform their own subjectivity in their own “mirrors”, he effectively
argues against a collective African American identity and advocates for African
American agency in terms of self-representation. Although Lula has utilized
155
Jones 35-36.
87
generalizations in an effort to fix African American identity, Clay creates space to
read “blackness” from multiple vantage points and positions it as indeterminate.
Most significantly, the work that Clay does to open up constructions of “blackness”
and identity before his murder echoes in the representations of both the conductor
and the young black man at the close of the play.
As the play ends, Lula tells Clay that she’s “heard enough” and as he moves
to exit the train, she stabs him twice in the chest, enlisting the help of the other
passengers to remove his body from the train and instructing them to leave at the
next stop. However, when another 20-year old man with books under his arm enters
the coach and takes a seat, the train’s conductor enters as well, “doing a sort of
restrained soft shoe, and half mumbling the words of some song” and greets the
young man with “hey, brother!” and continues down the aisle where he tips his hat to
Lula and continues his soft shoe out of the car.
156
While Clay’s death at the hands of Lula might suggest an end to the troubling
of “blackness” and African American identity, the appearance of the conductor and
the young man only amplifies the possibilities for the performance of “blackness”
and African American identity, particularly since Clay revealed the artifice of civility
and the nature of the performance of “blackness”. The conductor’s “soft shoe” song
and dance and the tip of the hat to Lula, who “turns to stare at him and follows his
movements down the aisle” are suggestive of another potentially explosive encounter
over which Lula loses control.
157
Linking the conductor to performance through his
156
Jones 38.
157
Jones 38.
88
misleadingly deferential soft shoe dance and mumbled song is reminiscent of Clay’s
struggle between honest and direct self-expression as “sanity” and the maintenance
of a position of civility as “insanity”. In effect, because Clay revealed the artifice
involved in his interactions with Lula, parallel questions about the conductor and his
performance can be raised. Clay’s readings of the performance of “blackness” and
his uncovering of the artifice involved in maintaining civility positions both the
conductor and the young man as potential performers in the same vein as Clay,
Bessie Smith and Charlie Parker. Their appearance begs the question of where in
this spectrum of representational possibilities do the conductor and the young man
fall and how can Lula (and the audience) make a resolute determination? Ultimately,
she can’t nor can the audience.
Further, while simultaneously describing the efforts to avoid confrontation
and to transform rage as “neurosis”, Clay frames artistic expression as a mode of not
only performing “blackness”, but also as a means of critiquing the “progressive
mystique”. However, in uncovering the multiple functions and possibilities of
performing “blackness” he rejects the narrow modes of (mis)representation that Lula
utilizes in constructing his black identity and unwittingly contributes to his own
demise by bringing the artifice of civility to the surface of their encounter and
engaging in the confrontation with her. But even in his death, Clay creates space for
the representation of multiple “blacknesses” and allows for agency in self-
representation.
89
If Clay’s performance of “blackness” is understood as E. Patrick Johnson
argues as “a mode of representation [that] emphasizes the ways in which cultures
struggle to define who they are and who they want to be”, then looking to the review
archive of the play illuminates how theatre critics read and responded to this struggle
over self-definition.
158
As was the case with both A Raisin in the Sun and Purlie
Victorious, the review archive illustrates the anxiety around establishing an
“authentic” representation of “blackness”. It also reaffirms the ambivalence critics
held in their assessments of Purlie Judson’s performance of “blackness”. However,
the difference in the response to the performance of “blackness” in Dutchman is one
that seemingly parallels the advent of “white backlash” in American culture. The
phrase typically refers to disgruntled Southerners who were resistant to the growing
focus on civil rights in the domestic political agenda in the late 1950s to late 1960s,
as well as to African American agitation and protest during this same period.
Historian Jeremy Mayer suggests that this phenomenon reached a watershed in 1964,
the year that Dutchman opened. Mayer argues that because of the presidential
election of that same year, “race was the dominant issue in domestic politics, as it
had not been since Reconstruction”. He further suggests that:
the heightened prominence given to civil rights in 1964 was produced by
three key factors. First, the direct action tactics of the newly invigorated civil
rights movement…President Kennedy also helped put race at the center of
American politics. The favorite candidate of many segregationists in 1960
had gradually become the greatest presidential rhetorician on race since
158
E. Patrick Johnson. Appropriating Blackness: Performance and the Politics of Authenticity.
Durham: Duke University Press, 2003.
90
Lincoln…[and] the decisive role of Lyndon Johnson who made Kennedy’s
Civil Rights Act the centerpiece of the slain president’s legacy.
159
Mayer’s arguments about the factors that brought race and civil rights to the
political forefront in 1964 have important implications for Dutchman’s review
archive since the constantly changing political climate in the country informs how
critics read and respond to the play.
Just prior to the play’s production, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was making
its way through Congress, after being passed in the House in February of that year, it
was sent to the Senate in March and was ultimately signed into law in July of 1964.
Also, in the presidential primaries in the spring of 1964, Alabama Governor George
Wallace made a strong showing as a Democratic candidate in unlikely states such as
Wisconsin, where he gained 34% of the vote, in Indiana where he got 29.8% of the
vote, and finally in Maryland where he garnered 30% of the vote. What Wallace’s
support in these states demonstrates is that “white backlash” had gained traction in
the North as well as the South. Even his opponent in Wisconsin, Democratic
incumbent Governor John Reynolds allowed that Wallace’s showing demonstrated
that “Northern as well as Southern whites are unhappy about current civil rights
trends”.
160
Much of Wallace’s support came from white ethnic voters in the urban
Northeast and Midwest. He did particularly well in historically Democratic districts
that were heavily populated by lower-middle-class, second-generation immigrants,
159
Jeremy Mayer. “LBJ Fights the White Backlash: The Racial Politics of the 1964 Presidential
Campaign”. Prologue Magazine. 33:1 (Spring 2001)
160
“What Wisconsin Means” Time. April 17, 1964.
91
many of them Poles, Italians and Serbs, who historian Dan Carter argues, “felt
psychologically and culturally isolated from the dominant currents of American life
in the 1960s”.
161
Further, they felt the advances being proposed for African
Americans in civil rights legislation would harm their own economic interests. Most
significantly as Carter argues, this segment of working class white ethnics were
drawn to Wallace because they viewed him as a kindred spirit, “a man despised and
dismissed by distant social planners all too ready to sacrifice working-class families
on the altar of upper-middle-class convictions”.
162
According to Carter, the “upper-middle-class convictions” of “social
planners” who were committed to civil rights legislation and social equality for
African Americans disregarded the concerns and convictions of this segment of the
American populace who supported Wallace. If this same group of “social planners”
is extended to include the theatre critics who responded to and interpreted the
representations of “blackness” on stage, it can be argued that they similarly
disregarded efforts on behalf of African American cultural producers who, as E.
Patrick Johnson would have it, struggled “to define who they are and who they want
to be”.
163
Turning to Dutchman’s review archive makes this impulse clear and is
suggestive of a “white backlash” against the representation of “blackness” in the play
by the very “social planners” who were thought by white ethnics to provide
161
Dan T. Carter. From George Wallace to Newt Gingrich: Race in the Conservative
Counterrevolution, 1963-1994. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1996.
162
Carter 13.
163
Johnson 606.
92
unwavering support to civil rights legislation and social equality for African
Americans. While neither instance of “white backlash” is necessarily indicative of
racism, what both instances do illustrate is an investment in the status quo and the
resistance to change in the position of African Americans, whether it is in terms of
representations of “blackness” on stage or social and economic opportunities
available to them in lived experience.
Despite pending legislation and ongoing social protest that might suggest
public support for political and social advances for African-Americans, the 1964
presidential primaries suggest that there was an increasingly vocal and visible
segment of the American populace who resisted the political and social changes
afoot. Significantly, northern whites resisted direct action protests to eliminate
discrimination in their communities, while some Southerners actually transformed
their public establishments into private clubs in order to circumvent desegregation.
164
Even a February 1963 report by the United States Commission on Civil Rights
presented to President Kennedy asserted that “a gap between [America’s] recorded
aspirations and actual practices still remains”.
165
In its effort to evaluate its progress,
the Commission was forced to admit that disparity existed between the lip service
given to Civil Rights initiatives and what were lived social realities.
Barely a year after the Commission’s report, Dutchman premiered on a triple
bill at the Cherry Lane Theater on March 24, 1964 and ran until February 6, 1965.
164
Franklin 470.
165
Franklin 468.
93
The play has been described as “a modern parable of the encounter between black
and white America: an encounter in which the consequences for African-Americans
are dire”.
166
If Dutchman is a “modern parable” detailing the interaction between
white and black America, that parable might be extended to include both the
ambivalence toward the Civil Rights Movement shown by both U.S. domestic policy
and the nation’s citizens—according to the Commission on Civil Rights’ own
report—as well as by the critics who reviewed Dutchman. Through its thematic
concerns, the critical response to Jones’ “modern parable” reflects the ambivalence
held by the U.S. public and the U.S. government toward the African American
Freedom Struggle. While the play was awarded the Obie in 1965, the reviews of it
reflect a distinct anxiety about its themes and representations. Of seven reviews
from the play’s opening night, three were unfavorable, three were favorable, and one
was mixed. These reviews take issue with Dutchman for a number of reasons,
however three themes link the concerns of all the reviewers: first—the authenticity
of the play’s characters, second—the shocking nature of the play’s language and
plot, and finally the artistic merit of the play and the talent of Jones himself.
In an April 1964 review of Dutchman in The New Yorker, Edith Oliver
asserts that while Jones is an “original and talented young dramatist”, the “rage”
depicted in the play diminishes its significance and casts doubt on its artistic merit.
167
Such critical equivocation occurs in nearly all of the reviews. Further, nearly all the
166
Gates, Henry Louis Jr. and Nellie Y. McKay. Eds. The Norton Anthology of African American
Literature. New York: Norton, 1997.
167
Oliver, Edith. Rev. of Dutchman. “Off Broadway Over The Edge” Cherry Lane Theater. New
York. The New Yorker. 4 April 1964:23.
94
reviewers call the play’s rage into question. Though the rage is frequently described
as “justifiable”, it is also the cause of the play’s lack of artistic value—Oliver
describes it as “inartistic” and in a review of the recently published play, Philip Roth
claims that it is not of “literary value” and suggests that Jones may have drawn on
Edward Albee’s The Zoo Story for inspiration
168
While most of the reviews allowed
that Jones had the potential to make a contribution to American theater, the reviews
also suggest that Dutchman’s perceived efforts to retell a previously told story and to
allow Clay the “luxury” of “the exploited telling off his exploiters” seriously
weakened the play.
169
Further, many critics make note of what was frequently referred to as the
“Negro problem” a euphemism used to reference the political and social unrest
around race relations in the U.S. and its clear connection to the representations and
themes in Dutchman, but they object to Jones’ contribution to the discourse around
this issue because as Edith Oliver surmises in response to Clay’s monologue at the
play’s end, “much of what he says, however deeply felt it may be, has been said
before”.
170
Several critics allude to this kind of “fatigue” or boredom with the so-called
“Negro Problem” in their reviews that parallels the much discussed “white backlash”
which began circulating during the Democratic Presidential primaries concurrent
168
Roth, Philip. “Channel X: Two Plays on the Race Conflict” New York: Cherry Lane Theater. The
New York Times Review of Books. 28 May 1964: 10-12.
169
Oliver 23, Roth 11.
170
Oliver 23
95
with the production of Jones’ play. Seemingly, for the critics like Oliver reviewing
Dutchman, the play’s allusions to the “Negro problem” became a question of
redundancy for them. In effect, Clay’s performative struggle toward self-
representation and agency is positioned as superfluous by theatre critics interpreting
the play.
Letters to the editor in response to Time magazine’s coverage of the riots that
occurred in August of 1964 in Philadelphia and in July of the same year in Harlem
reflect the fatigue to which the critics allude. It also illustrates that the phenomenon
of “white backlash” was not one that was limited to a specific group of disgruntled
Southerners or white ethnics in Northern urban areas. For example, Howard J.
Williams of San Diego describes personal experiences with African Americans that
have weakened his previously unwavering support of the Civil Rights Movement ,
“Sir: So far I have been robbed twice by Negroes, kicked in the head and left in an
alley. So far, I am still a brother to the Negro, but offhand I would say that the
Negro is pushing too hard”.
171
Similarly, Charles L. Conus of Hollywood, California
writes, “Sir: I used to be in sympathy with those people, but now I believe I will say
yes to Goldwater in November”.
172
These letters illustrate the notion of “white backlash” as more than a singular
event, positioning it as sociologist Roger Hewitt explains as an “ongoing dispute”
continuing through the present day that demonstrates the “vacillations, the same
171
“Letter to the Editor” Time. Friday, August 14, 1964.
172
Ibid.
96
search for rationalizations the same lack of commitment that has always
characterized white America on the question of race”.
173
In short, though there was a
clear response to the Johnson Administration’s policy and the social agitation on
behalf of African Americans, this response differed little from those seen during the
Civil War and Reconstruction or any other period in U.S. history to African
American economic, social, and political advances. Deep seated ambivalence about
African American social and political advances shaped the discourse around the
Civil War and Reconstruction and the African American Freedom Struggle differed
little from its historical predecessors in that regard. Even more, the letters show that
the idea of “white backlash” wasn’t limited to a specific demographic in a specific
region of the country. The concerns around the social change embedded in civil
rights legislation and the increasingly fervent push on behalf of African Americans
for change through protests and civil unrest was present in numerous segments of the
American populace. The response of theatre critics to the representation of
“blackness” in Dutchman shares the historical ambivalence shown toward African
American agency in political and social contexts and brings it to bear on cultural
production.
Hewitt’s assertions regarding vacillation as an integral part of the “ongoing
dispute” of so-called “white backlash” echo in the reactions of critics to the
representation of “blackness” in Dutchman. As an example, Philip Roth questions
the plausibility of Clay as a representation of African American identity. He argues
173
Hewitt, Roger. White Backlash and the Politics of Multiculturalism. Cambridge: Cambridge UP,
2005.
97
that one of a multitude of problems with Dutchman is Clay’s implausibility as a
representation of African American identity, positing that “Clay is not really Negro
enough for us to be told that it is for his being a Negro he is murdered”
174
Suggesting that Clay’s notions of African American identity and its relationship to
the current discourse around the “Negro Problem” are simplistic and cannot be
distinguished from those held by anyone else, Roth contends, “[o]h, Clay can spout
about the predicament of the Negro in this country, but so can I, and so can Richard
Nixon, and probably however each of us says it, we will agree that it is awful”.
175
Roth asserts here that there is no difference in the representation of Clay and
his comments on African American identity to distinguish his reflections from
Roth’s or Richard Nixon’s.—that in effect, the representation of Clay offers no new
insights or revelations on this issue. Despite Clay’s ongoing effort to trace the
complexities of his own performance of “blackness” in his exchange with Lula, Roth
reduces Clay’s representation to one that can only confirm how “awful” the
“predicament of the Negro” is. Further, he suggests that instead of bringing a fresh
perspective on the “predicament of the Negro” in terms of its representation of
“blackness”, Dutchman only revisits widely held perspectives on African American
identity and how it signifies in the current historical moment. In other words,
Roth’s implication is if a collection of people with such politically and socially
disparate views as Richard Nixon, Jones’ character Clay, and Roth himself can arrive
174
Roth 11.
175
Roth 11.
98
at the same conclusion that the “Negro problem” is “awful” then Dutchman has
failed in providing both an authentic or meaningful representation of “blackness”.
What is of note here is less that Roth takes the play to task for what are in his view,
its artistic failures, but rather the notion that this particular representation of African
American identity is summarily dismissed as a creative impossibility, positioned as
irrelevant to “The Negro Problem” and most significantly that he reduces the
complexities of the “predicament of the Negro” to yesterday’s news.
This waffling between applauding and chastising the play and the playwright
has a parallel impulse in broader U.S. culture during this period. Not unlike the
Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party that sought to seat African-American
delegates at the convention, thus resulting in an inadequate compromise with the
party that failed to seat any of them, Jones “pushed too hard” to dramatize the
discrepancies he saw in American race relations. As a result, the play’s reviews
applaud Jones as a literary talent, but scold the playwright for the artistic lapses in
Dutchman.
The most frequent concern is the question of authenticity which is raised in
four of the seven early reviews. The questions range from whether or not Clay’s
rage is authentic, to whether or not he is “Negro” enough and consider whether Jones
is a “real” dramatist. In her mixed review published in The New Yorker, Edith
Oliver simultaneously disputes the authenticity of Clay’s rage and asserts that it is
legitimate. In her discussion of Clay’s final monologue she argues, “there is no
99
doubt that this anger is justified, but there is also no doubt, I think, that in this case it
is inartistic weakening of the character and the play”.
176
She continues:
Much of what [Clay] says, however deeply felt it may be, has been said
before. There are echoes of James Baldwin’s essays, and even of Adrienne
Kennedy’s Funnyhouse of a Negro. . . .somewhere in the middle of the
harangue the rage sounded hollow to me—cooked up rather than real—and I
stopped trusting the playwright.
While Oliver is critical of Clay’s monologue, she also maintains that Jones is a
“gifted and one-of-a-kind writer” who is “forcing himself” into a “familiar mold”.
177
For Philip Roth, who reviewed the play just prior to its publication, questions around
authenticity hinge upon what he describes as the “Negro who is missing” in the
play.
178
In his joint review of Dutchman and James Baldwin’s Blues For Mr.
Charlie, he suggests that Clay is not authentically Negro because the fury he exhibits
is a cover for the “depths in him. . . .of terror and dread”.
179
His unfavorable review
also takes issue with the play’s artistic value positing that the play is “finally a staged
newspaper headline”.
180
Yet another facet of the issue of authenticity is taken
up in Henry Popkin’s favorable review in Vogue. Popkin considers the playwright’s
authenticity as an artist, calling Jones “a real dramatist” who will be “uncomfortable
to live with”.
181
176
Oliver, Edith. Rev. of Dutchman. “Off Broadway Over The Edge” Cherry Lane Theater. New
York. The New Yorker. 4 April 1964:23.
177
Oliver 23.
178
Roth 12.
179
Roth 12.
180
Roth 12.
181
Popkin, Henry. Rev. of Dutchman. “Dutchman a Furious Account” New York. Cherry Lane
Theater. Vogue. July 1964:32.
100
These broadly differing perspectives on the authenticity of the play’s
protagonist and the legitimacy of Jones as a writer underscore the ambivalence of
reviewers toward what Roth calls play about “the races” and a desire to recognize
them as significant, or in Roth’s estimation, that they could have been significant had
they adequately addressed the issue of Negro authenticity. In effect, these reviews
police the representation of “blackness” in Dutchman, in an impulse that might be
seen as one parallel to “white backlash”. It is important to note that while most of
the critics took Jones to task about the authenticity of the rage and of the Negro
portrayed, they also praised Jones as an important dramatist. Even in Roth’s
unfavorable review, it was Jones’ misplaced rage that would prevent him from
“writing an important play”. In short, had he correctly represented the Negro—or
“blackness”, he would be within striking distance of writing an important play.
Popkin’s assertions in Vogue allow that Jones is a real dramatist, but also echo a
sentiment of discomfort and ambivalence bound to the backlash against the social
and political fallout around the African American Freedom Struggle.
This is not to suggest that critics were obligated unequivocally to support
Dutchman or that their criticism is an instance of racism, but rather to foreground
that their assumptions about the nature of authentic rage or an authentic Negro may
be grounded in an uneasiness with the play’s commentary on the “dire
consequences” that the encounter between white and black America involves. In
101
short, the reviews and their consistent questions of authenticity and its relationship to
“blackness” reflect what could be called the “Negro (Fatigue) Problem ”—the notion
that there is nothing else to be said about the issue that hasn’t already been said.
More specifically, concluding that Jones is an important dramatist, while questioning
the authenticity of his protagonist’s performance of “blackness” and the rage he
displays functions in two ways. First, it serves as a rejection of the play’s
representation of social critique. Second, critics’ inclusion of Jones in the American
theater tradition of “important playwrights” endorses the writer, while calling the
social critique of the work into question, positing it as a “near miss,” just outside the
parameters of an important play. In effect, Jones can make a contribution to
American theater, but hasn’t crafted Dutchman as intelligible or meaningful artistic
expression. This kind of equivocation about race, “blackness” and its representation
can be linked to the “white backlash” made evident in George Wallace’s presidential
primary showing in the North and the South.
Another concern in the reviews of Dutchman was the play’s “shocking”
dramatic nature and the rage depicted in both play’s language and plot. The critical
response to this aspect of the play can best be described as inconsistent. In his
March 25, 1964 review in the New York Times, Howard Taubman asserts,
“everything about Dutchman is designed to shock—its basic idea, its language, and
its murderous rage”. Taubman further notes that the play was a “mélange of
sardonic images and undisciplined filth”.
182
Edith Oliver describes the language and
182
Taubman, Howard. Rev. of Dutchman. “Drama Opens on Triple Bill at Cherry Lane” New York.
Cherry Lane Theater. The New York Times. 25 March 1964:46:2.
102
staging as “as rough as any I’ve ever been exposed to in theater”.
183
Philip Roth was
troubled by Jones being “hailed in the papers and on television for his anger; for it
[was] not an anger of literary value”.
184
Henry Popkin calls Clay’s final monologue
a “furious account of Negro art as substitute for murder”.
185
All of the reviews
consider the anger and rage in Dutchman and as is the case with the critic’s anxiety
about racial authenticity, there is equivocation about the function of the rage that is
reflected in their responses to it. However, an anonymous review appearing in
Newsweek on April 13, 1964 gave the rage universal implications, asserting that:
The interracial hatred and misunderstanding are only the most immediate and
dramatic expressions of what is perennial among men: the exploitation of one
another for the satisfaction of dreams and hungers. “Let me be what I want
to be” is a cry heard everywhere.
186
Still, most of the critics viewed the anger as a detriment to the work, but maintained
that the rage was justified. In addition, at least one critic, Taubman, saw the rage as
frightening as he suggests, “if this is the way even one Negro feels, there is ample
cause for guilt as well as alarm, and for a hastening of change”.
187
But he goes on to
say, “the impact of Jones’ ferocity would be stronger if did not work so hard and
persistently to be shocking”.
188
After scolding the playwright and in effect policing
183
Oliver 23.
184
Roth 12.
185
Popkin 32.
186
“Underground Fury” Rev. of Dutchman. New York. Cherry Lane Theater. Newsweek. 13 April
1964:60.
187
Taubman 46.
188
Ibid.
103
Jones’ representation, he critically cosigns Dutchman and ends his review of the
three plays at the Cherry Lane Theater with “Dutchman is the one that bespeaks a
promising, unsettling talent”.
189
These incongruencies in the assessment of the rage in the play suggest that
the reviewers reacted to the “staged headline” of Dutchman in much the same way
the country as a whole was responding to actual newspaper headlines about the
turmoil of the Civil Rights Movement and increasing civil unrest. While white
Americans were sympathetic to the struggle for Civil Rights—particularly after the
proliferation of television images associated with Bull Connor’s enforcement of
segregation and the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham
in 1963—they remained cautious about ongoing protests that sometimes culminated
in violence and that caution partially motivates the kinds of claims that Presidential
candidates Barry Goldwater and George Wallace made about civil rights protests
during this period calling them “crime in the streets”.
190
This reticence to accept the multiple representations of race and its role in the
Civil Rights Movement is echoed in the critical assessments of Dutchman. While
reviewers believe that the anger merits a “hastening of change” it does not lend to the
play’s artistic merit. However, this artistic lack does not prevent Jones from entering
the circle of “promising talent” in American theater.
189
Ibid.
190
Franklin 475.
104
In historicizing the reviews of Dutchman from its initial production, it
becomes clear that both theatrical performance and the critical responses to
performance serve as a “laboratory for cultural negotiations in the plurivocal
contemporary world”.
191
The politics and history of the 1960s informs the cultural
and social metacommentary of that period and the reviews participate in cultural
mediation of the Civil Rights Movement in the same way the performance itself
participates in the mediation. The critical assessments of Dutchman follow the same
trajectory as the African American Freedom Struggle in that it is viewed as a
difficult, but essential element in America’s political and social growth. The reviews
underscore the difficulties associated with the cultural negotiations taking place in
the midst of the Movement.
In terms of African-American theatrical production, Dutchman marked a
shift in ideology that parallels the shift of SNCC organizers following the
unsuccessful attempt to seat African-Americans at the 1964 Democratic Convention.
In frustration, many of those workers turned to more militant activism and Dutchman
certainly reflects this shift. Bearing in mind that Dutchman was preceded by
Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun in 1959, Ossie Davis’ Purlie Victorious in
1961, Adrienne Kennedy’s Funnyhouse of the Negro in 1962 and James Baldwin’s
Blues For Mr. Charlie in 1964, Dutchman’s “modern parable” reflected a sentiment
and a facet of black identity that had never before been depicted on stage. While in A
Raisin in the Sun and Purlie Victorious, the protagonists’ performance of
191
Carlson, Marvin. Performance: A Critical Introduction. New York: Routledge, 1996.
105
“blackness” hinge on fidelity to realism, Dutchman’s Clay reveals the function of
“blackness” as device that obscures questions of authenticity as well as exposes a
multitude of cultural resources upon which he draws to develop the device of
“blackness”. In short, the play reflects prescience about that historical moment and
its representations interrogate a monolithic notion of “blackness”.
Additionally, the critical response to Dutchman echoes the historical moment
for white Americans. The Civil Rights Movement and the protests and violence it
spawned was a source of anxiety and ambivalence. The play stands as a cultural
product of the turmoil of the period and as a result, was subject to “white backlash”
that left the Civil Rights Bill languishing in Congress in the fall of 1963. Today,
Dutchman is frequently anthologized in collections of both contemporary American
drama and African American drama and stands as a pivotal work in both genres and
has been consistently revived since it was initially produced in 1964 with a recent
revival at the Cherry Lane Theater in February of 2007. However, the play’s early
reviews highlight the tenuous nature of race relations in America offered in the
popular press for mass consumption.
106
Chapter Four: Banned in Alabama: Alice Childress’ Wine in the Wilderness
If the review archives of A Raisin in the Sun, Purlie Victorious and
Dutchman reveal how critics simultaneously resisted and applauded the
representations of “blackness” posited in those plays, then what does the absence of
a significant review archive suggest about the representations put forward in Alice
Childress’ Wine in the Wilderness? One answer to this question may be found in
reviewing the early production history of the play.
Wine in the Wilderness was initially written as a screenplay and produced for
Boston Public Television station WGBH-TV and was then published by Dramatists
Play Service later that year. Though it was broadcast across most of the country as
the first installment of a ten-week National Educational Television series written,
produced and acted by African Americans entitled “On Being Black”, the airing of
the series and Childress’ play was banned on Alabama Educational Television by the
Alabama Educational Television Commission due to the presence of “lewd, vulgar,
obscene, profane or repulsive material”.
192
One example of the “lewd, vulgar,
obscene, profane or repulsive material” included in the series was a production of the
Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater’s “The Black Belt” and “Revelations”. That
the representations of “blackness” put forward in these works elicited a blackout in
Alabama, a state often considered the so-called “cradle of the confederacy”, may not
be surprising. What is curious is the lack of theatre or television critics’ interest in
both the series and in Childress’ play in the cities where it did air. While this chapter
192
Robert Lewis Shayon, “Curiouser and Curiouser” Saturday Review 53:43. August 8,1970.
107
will work toward explaining that lack, it will also take into consideration how the
representations of “blackness” in Wine in the Wilderness engage with an ongoing
debate within the African American community about class status and how the
absence of a substantial review archive of the play exposes the reticence of theatre
and television critics to participate in or to even comment on this cultural dialogue.
Turning now to look at some of the differences in Wine in the Wilderness from A
Raisin in the Sun, Purlie Victorious, and Dutchman may aid in discovering why there
is no substantial review archive of the play.
One significant difference in Wine in the Wilderness from the other plays is
the position of the playwright herself in relationship to theatre and theatre
production. All three of the previously considered plays were the first plays written
and produced by each playwright. However, Wine in the Wilderness was the sixth of
eleven plays Alice Childress wrote before she died in 1994. She enjoyed a long
career as an actress and was one of the founders of the American Negro Theatre.
Because of the paucity of roles for African American women, she wrote her first play
Florence in 1949. In 1955, she wrote and directed Trouble in Mind which was
staged off-Broadway at the Greenwich Mews Theatre. The following year it won an
Obie award for the best original off-Broadway play.
193
Childress also published three
young adult novels including A Hero Ain’t Nothin’ But a Sandwich for which she
won a Lewis Carroll Shelf award and the American Library Association best young
193
Carol Bunch Davis. “Alice Childress” Encyclopedia of African American Women Writers.
Yolanda Williams Page, ed. Greenwood Press, 2007.
108
adult book award in 1973.
194
Just a year before her death, the Association for
Theatre in Higher Education recognized her career and contributions to theatre with
its Career Achievement Award
195
. In short, Childress was an established and
recognized playwright at the time of the initial production of Wine in the Wilderness
which only begs the question of why there is no significant review archive of the
play.
Perhaps the most important distinction that sets Wine in the Wilderness apart
from the three other plays considered in this project is that Childress’ play does not
include any white characters and the play’s themes and on-stage action only allude to
the “Negro Problem” that figures so prominently in A Raisin in the Sun, Purlie
Victorious and Dutchman. Instead, the play focuses on debates within the African
American community around the intersection of class and “blackness” and engages
the discourse around efforts within the African American community to fix African
American identity. In its figuring of class as “more than a strictly economic
concern”, it also addresses the social implications of class status which includes
personal style and behavior
196
. In effect, Wine in the Wilderness turns to the African
American community’s discussions about the impact of class concerns on the
performance of “blackness” and rejects putting class status in the service of
developing standards in shaping African American identity. Further, it moves away
194
Bunch Davis 83.
195
Bunch Davis 82.
196
Michael Eric Dyson. Is Bill Cosby Right? Or Has the Black Middle Class Lost Its Mind? New
York: Basic Civitas, 2005.
109
from what has heretofore been an interracial dialogue about “blackness” in terms of
representations and moves toward an intraracial discussion of it through the
representations put forward in the play. In other words, Wine in the Wilderness
focuses on discussions about class within the African American community rather
than engaging in these discussions with the general (white) public. But at the same
time, Childress stages in Wine in the Wilderness a “private” black public sphere
discussion about intraracial conflict and exposes it to the same general (white)
public. Consequently, the debate is one that takes place among members of the
African American community, but stages the play in a way that invites comment
from broader culture. Ultimately, it is this turn away from the interracial discussion
that accounts for the absence of a significant review archive of the play.
Given her long and successful career as an actress, novelist and playwright,
some feminist literary scholars have raised questions about the dearth of scholarship
on Childress and her oeuvre despite the fact that she wrote numerous plays and
novels over a span of 40 years. During the late 1980s to mid 1990s, Elizabeth
Brown-Guillory, Patricia Schroeder and other feminist critics advocated for more
scholarly engagement with Childress’ work.
197
In “Re-Reading Alice Childress”,
Schroeder suggests that too often the analyses of her work rely on pigeonholing
Childress as a “didactic black activist sometimes given to sermonizing” and that the
197
Elizabeth Brown-Guillory. Their Place on the Stage: Black Women Playwrights in America. New
York: Praeger, 1990. Patricia Schroeder, “Re-reading Alice Childress” in Staging Difference: Cultural
Pluralism in American Theatre and Drama. Ed. Marc Maufort. New York: Peter Lang, 1995. In her
essay “Alice Childress: Black Woman Playwright as Feminist Critic” The Southern Quarterly 25.3
(1987): 53-62. Gayle Austin makes an argument parallel to those of both Brown-Guillory and
Schroeder, as does Olga Dugan in “Telling the Truth: Alice Childress as Theorist and Playwright”
Journal of African American History 81 (1996) 123-136.
110
plays themselves are reduced to “sentimental melodrama” that have “undramatic
plots”.
198
She further suggests that while Childress’ plays rely on stage realism, a
mode of representation that feminist critics often view as “hopelessly complicit with
oppressive representational strategies”, that her work actually assists in underscoring
the “roles of class, race, and history in creating the oppression of women”.
199
While recognizing the importance of engaging with the ways in which Wine
in the Wilderness draws attention to the complex interaction of these identity
positions, this chapter will emphasize the play’s treatment of class and race. It is
through its representations of “blackness” and its commentary on the role of class in
figuring those representations that links Wine in the Wilderness to the other plays
considered in this study in that it makes explicit notions about African Americans
and class that have only been implied in the previous plays. Further, the play’s
discourse on the intersection of “blackness” and class exposes and indicts the ways
in which African Americans participate in policing representations of “blackness”
and the performance identity by drawing upon class status as an indicator of
“authentic” blackness. In order to make the case for Wine in the Wilderness’
commentary on the intersection of race and class, looking at the historical context of
the play’s setting and the representations of “blackness” present in the play itself
proves beneficial.
198
Schroeder 33.
199
Ibid.
111
June of 1964 marked the start of “Freedom Summer”—the collected effort of
the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO), Students for a Democratic Society
(SDS), and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) to register
African Americans to vote in Mississippi.
200
During the same month, on June 21
st
James Cheney, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman were beaten and
murdered in Philadelphia, Mississippi. The three men were taking part in the efforts
to register African Americans to vote which by the end of the summer had only
resulted in 1600 registrations.
201
However, “Freedom Summer” violence wasn’t
restricted to the segregated south. Racially motivated riots occurred in Harlem in
July after the fatal shooting of 15 year-old James Powell by white NYPD officers.
202
These riots specifically and the “Freedom Summer” broadly serve as the historical
backdrop for Childress’ 1969 play.
As the riot rages below, Bill Jameson, a 33-year-old painter takes refuge in
his Harlem studio which the stage direction describes as “obviously Black
dominated” and which reflects an interest in “darker peoples of the world” in its
iconography of multiculturalism—a Chinese incense burner, a Native American
feathered helmet, a Mexican serape, and a Japanese fan.
203
In spite of the riot,
Jameson is in the process of developing his own iconographic interpretation of
200
Terry H. Anderson. The Movement and The Sixties. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995.
(76)
201
Anderson 77.
202
Anderson 78.
203
Alice Childress. Wine in the Wilderness in Black Theatre U.S.A: Plays by African Americans.
James V. Hatch and Ted Shine, eds. New York: The Free Press, 1996. (344-362).
112
“black womanhood”—a triptych called “Wine in the Wilderness”. He shows his
painting, which has two completed canvases, to his friend, Oldtimer, “an old
roustabout character in his sixties”.
204
One canvas depicts “a charming little girl in
Sunday dress and hair ribbon” which he calls “black girlhood”, the other canvas
features a beautiful black woman, or as he tells Oldtimer, “Mother Africa, regal
black womanhood in her noblest form…perfect Black womanhood”. The blank third
and final panel will portray what Jameson describes as “the lost woman…she’s
ignorant, unfeminine, coarse, rude…vulgar…a backcountry chick right outta the
wilds of Mississippi,…but she ain’t ever been near there. Born in Harlem, but back
country”.
205
His goal is to display the triptych in a public place so that his “Black
queen will look down from the wall so the messed-up chicks in the neighborhood
can see what a woman ought to be…and the innocent child on one side of her and the
messed-up chick on the other side of her…MY STATEMENT.”
206
Ultimately,
Jameson looks toward using his art as a corrective for social problems he sees in the
community, but also to serve his own purposes of disseminating his views about
what values and qualities authentic “black womanhood” and consequently what one
facet of “blackness” reflects.
He is aided in his efforts to find “the lost woman” by his friends Cynthia, a
25-year-old social worker and her 27-year-old writer husband Sonny-Man. Cynthia
and Sonny-Man, who have been on the streets and in a bar during the rioting, call
204
Childress 345.
205
Childress 348.
206
Ibid.
113
Jameson to let him know that they may have located his “lost woman” in Tommy, a
30-year-old factory worker who has been burned out of her home due to the riot.
Cynthia and Sonny-Man are drawn to her by the fact that she wears a “mismatched
skirt and sweater, and wear[s] a wig that is not comical, but is wiggy
looking,…sneakers and bobby sox” and carries a brown paper bag that holds
everything she owns.
207
Unaware of their intentions, Tommy accompanies Cynthia
and Sonny-Man to Jameson’s studio.
In much the same way that perceptions about identity fail Lula and Clay in
Dutchman, Tommy and Jameson’s perceptions of themselves and others fail them in
Wine in the Wilderness. After a series of misinterpretations on Tommy’s part about
her role in the triptych, she finally comes to understand what purpose he intends for
her to serve and confronts all of them, delivering a scathing critique of their casting
of her as the “lost woman”. Most significantly, Tommy intervenes in their collective
efforts to both impose their notions of “blackness” that hinge almost entirely on class
status upon her and to discount her own performance of “blackness” as inauthentic.
Bearing in mind E. Patrick Johnson’s linking of “blackness” and performance as “a
knowing made manifest by a ‘doing’”, Tommy’s performance of “blackness”
emphasizes her knowledge of the implicit class divide within the African American
community and in her “doing” of “blackness” exposes it as well as makes manifest a
critique of it.
208
By the end of the one-act play, due largely to Tommy’s willingness
207
Childress 349.
208
E. Patrick Johnson. “The Pot Calling the Kettle Black” Theatre Journal 57 (2005) 605-608.
114
to confront Jameson, Cynthia, Oldtimer and Sonny-Man, all four characters have
gained a greater respect for one another and their particular experience and
performance of “blackness”.
While in Dutchman such a confrontation and violation of the unspoken rules
of the “progressive mystique” insured Clay’s murder, in Wine in the Wilderness,
confrontation provides as an essential element in advancing the discourse on
“blackness” and black identity as well as provides an avenue for meaningful
exchange. It is only after the heated confrontation that all four characters make
explicit assumptions and ideas about one another that had only been implied in their
interactions up to that point. Further, their ability to directly address the assumptions
results in their collective reconsideration of themselves and one another.
Perhaps most importantly, the role of the artistic process and the creation of
art in the confrontation that Tommy initiates enable them to access these
possibilities. As was the case in Dutchman, the significance of the artistic process
and artistic expression as a means of shaping African American identity is central to
this development. Bill Jameson’s efforts to construct the iconography of “black
womanhood” through artistic expression functions similarly to Lula’s efforts to fix
Clay’s identity in that Jameson, like Lula, initially resists any alternate perceptions of
his subject. However, in Wine in the Wilderness, Tommy’s confrontation and
critique of Jameson’s artistic intentions and the role that class plays in them
facilitates honest exchange between all four characters as well as provides them with
the opportunity to reconsider both their relationship to one another and their
relationship to “blackness”.
115
Finally, while Dutchman alludes to the African American class divide and its
role in the performance of “blackness”, it surfaces through Clay’s defense of himself
to Lula as “authentically” black. His insistence that he is no less black because he
aspires to the black middle class, an assertion whose premise is that the African
American middle class is somehow less authentically black than the African
American lower class, conceals the black public sphere discussion around the
relationship between class status and identity. In Wine in the Wilderness, this
concealed, black public sphere conversation is laid bare and staged for the general
public. Through the collective artistic process of creating the triptych in which Bill,
Tommy, Oldtimer, Sonny-Man and Cynthia are all participants, these characters
engage in this black public sphere debate around class. In addition, Tommy’s
initiation of a confrontation and its subsequent critique of their roles and her role in
their conversation serve to broaden their perceptions of themselves and others within
the black public sphere. In order to access and analyze Tommy’s critique of the class
division within the African American community, turning to a discussion of its
implications is instructive.
In Is Bill Cosby Right: Or Has the Black Middle Class Lost Its Mind? ,
cultural critic Michael Eric Dyson argues that a class divide has long existed within
the African American community and that it has been openly discussed, but only
within the black public sphere—at churches, social clubs, and other social gatherings
attended exclusively by African Americans. His arguments about the class divide
come in response to comedian Bill Cosby’s public critique of the personal values of
low-income African Americans that Dyson believes reflect the beliefs of middle-
116
class blacks in the United States.
209
While he asserts that this group has always
critiqued the values of low-income African Americans within the black public
sphere, Dyson contends that Cosby’s comments marked a new era in the African
American class divide since it made the debate available to the general public’s
scrutiny. In his argument that Cosby’s comments demonstrate that the “seething
class warfare” in the African American community has finally bubbled over to the
general public, he makes three significant points that shape the conflict and have
important implications for the performance of “blackness” in Wine in the Wilderness.
First, he states that African American class warfare pits what he calls the
“Afristocracy”—or the black middle class which is composed of intellectuals, artists
bankers, civil rights leaders, entertainers and athletes against the “Ghettocracy”—or
the black poor which is comprised by:
the desperately unemployed and underemployed, those trapped in
underground economies, and those working poor folk who slave in menial
jobs at the edge of the economy…[and] extends into the ranks of athletes and
entertainers…whose values and habits are alleged to be negatively influenced
by their poor origins.
210
209
At a May 17, 2004 fiftieth anniversary gala celebration of the Brown v. Board of Education
decision sponsored by the NAACP, the NAACP Legal Fund and Howard University, Cosby
contrasted the achievements of civil rights giants with today’s generation of African American parents
and bemoaned the lack of personal responsibility within a particular segment of the African American
community saying in part “lower economic people are not holding up their end in this deal. These
people are not parenting. They are buying things for kids--$500 sneakers for what? And won’t spend
$200 for ‘Hooked on Phonics’.” Colbert I. King “Fix It Brother” The Washington Post, May 22, 2004
A27. His comments generated an outpouring of both support and criticism from African Americans
and whites and initiated a tour to various cities around the country including Newark, Atlanta,
Baltimore and Milwaukee to expound on the points he made at the gala. However, the tour was cut
short after accusations of sexual misconduct were made against Cosby by a 31-year-old Canadian
woman who claimed he had drugged and fondled her. After an investigation, the Montgomery
County Pennsylvania District Attorney said that he found insufficient evidence on which to file
charges against Cosby. Kevin Merrida. “Cos and Effect: Bill Cosby Sparked a Debate. Will His Own
Troubles Snuff It Out?” The Washington Post. February 20, 2005 D1.
210
Michael Eric Dyson. Is Bill Cosby Right? Or Has the Black Middle Class Lost Its Mind? New
York: Basic Civitas, 2005.
117
In Wine in the Wilderness, Tommy, a dress factory worker who has had no education
beyond the eighth grade and Oldtimer, a sixty-something roustabout whom Jameson
chastises for picking up items looters in the riot have left behind including a suit and
some bottles of liquor, would seemingly be members of Dyson’s “Ghettocracy”. For
example, Tommy reveals to Cynthia that she “come from poor people” and that her
mother raised her and her siblings on very little money. Tired of her subsistence on
“on grits, or bread and coffee” she tells Cynthia that “I got me a job. Later for
school”.
211
In addition, Tommy has just lost her apartment in a fire that occurred
during the riots. She is homeless and has nothing but a brown paper bag that holds a
few belongings. Because of the riots, she can’t gain access to her apartment to
retrieve a mayonnaise jar that contains forty dollars she’s managed to save, so in
addition to being without a home, she is also penniless until she can return to work.
Clearly, Tommy exists at the edge of the economy and can be considered to be part
of the working black poor.
Second, he goes on to argue that the “Afristocracy” has never been
monolithic and posits that:
there are many black middle classes: the one barely a paycheck or two from
poverty; the one a notch above, with jobs in the service economy; the one
more solidly in the middle, with low-level professional jobs; and the one in
the upper stratum, with high-level professional employment and the esteem
such labor entails.
212
211
Childress 352.
212
Dyson xv.
118
Through both stage direction and dialogue, Jameson, Cynthia and Sonny-Man are
affiliated with the black middle class throughout the play. The stage direction
describes Cynthia as being dressed in clothing that is “tweedy and in good, quiet
taste”, while Sonny-Man wears a dashiki and slacks.
213
Both wear Afros. While the
details about their outward appearance are signifiers of what might be called middle
class tastes, what links them most closely to the black middle class are their jobs and
educational backgrounds. As a social worker, Cynthia’s work might be considered
“a low level professional job” by Dyson’s figuring. Both Sonny-Man and Jameson
are artists—writer and painter respectively, and as such are likely a part of the black
middle class that is “barely a paycheck or two from poverty”. Cynthia even
characterizes Jameson as a deficient potential partner to Tommy in her description of
him as “a poor artist”.
214
In addition to these economic concerns, for Cynthia, Sonny-Man and
Jameson, the successful pursuit of higher education puts them solidly in the black
middle class. Most often, their class status is signified through the dialogue between
these characters and Tommy. In particular, their emphasis on academic phrases and
other markers of what might be called cultural literacy that she doesn’t understand
illustrates this point. Tommy, whose eighth grade education heightens the class
differences between her and Cynthia, Sonny-Man, and Jameson, makes her
awareness of these differences clear in several instances.
213
Childress 348.
214
Childress 352.
119
After Sonny-Man and Jameson leave to get food for her to eat while she
poses for the triptych, she is left alone in the studio with Cynthia and they begin to
discuss Jameson. Tommy takes note of one marker of his class status in observing
that there are “[b]ooks, books, books everywhere” in his studio.
215
She further
acknowledges class differences between her and the others when she says to Cynthia,
“You a social worker, I know that mean college”.
216
Shortly after, Tommy reveals to
Cynthia that she was raised in a single-parent household headed by her mother and
Cynthia comments that their family structure marks an example of “the matriarchal
society”. She responds:
TOMMY: What’s that?
CYNTHIA: A matriarchal society is one in which the women rule…the
women have the power…the women head the house.
TOMMY: We didn’t have nothin’ to rule over, not a pot nor a window.
And my papa picked hisself up and run off with some finger-poppin’ woman
and we never hear another word ‘til ten twelve years later when a undertaker
call up and ask if Mama wanta come claim his body.
217
While Tommy allows Cynthia to provide her with the academic definition that is
suggestive of Cynthia’s class status, she also mediates her own relationship to the
phrase in terms of class status. She argues that if the logic of the matriarchal society
presupposes subjects who can be “ruled”, then by definition her family does not
follow that logic. In effect, she rejects both the phrase and its definition and instead
provides the social context that gave rise to their iteration of the so-called
215
Childress 352.
216
Ibid.
217
Ibid.
120
“matriarchal society”. It is this kind of resistance to markers and symbols of the
middle class on Tommy’s part that speaks to another aspect of class status that
Dyson addresses.
Finally, Dyson broadens the scope of the term class as it intersects the
African American community and comments on its implications for African
American identity by suggesting that “class in black America has never been viewed
in strictly literal economic terms; the black definition of class embraces style and
behavior as well”.
218
Tommy’s resistance to accepting the definitions of academic
phrases and markers of cultural literacy that Cynthia, Sonny-Man and Jameson use to
“educate” her, as well as her revision of those markers, speaks specifically to
Dyson’s notion of class status that includes style and behavior. Continuing with the
previous exchange between Cynthia and Tommy will help to make this assertion
clear.
As Tommy gains a clearer sense that the reason she’s been asked to
Jameson’s studio has nothing to do with a potential romance between the two, she
asserts that Cynthia doesn’t think he would “go for” her. Initially, Cynthia attempts
to remain diplomatic about Tommy as a partner for him, which also masks a refusal
to reveal Jameson’s true intentions, by placating Tommy with “perhaps you’re not
really his type”.
219
As she straightens up Jameson’s studio, she finally asks Cynthia
218
Ibid.
219
Childress 353.
121
“[w]hat’s wrong with me?”. Cynthia relents and replies with a laundry list of
behaviors and style concerns that she believes should be corrected:
CYNTHIA: Leave the room alone. What we need is a little more sex
appeal and a little less washing, cooking, and ironing. (TOMMY puts down
the room straightening) One more thing,…do you have to wear that wig?
TOMMY: (a little sensitive) I like how your hair looks. But some of the
naturals I don’t like. Can see all the lint caught up in the hair like it hasn’t
been combed since know not when. You a Muslim?
CYNTHIA: No.
TOMMY: I’m just sick-a hair, hair, hair. Do it this way, don’t do it,
leave it natural, straighten it, process, no process. I get sick-a hair and talkin’
‘bout it and foolin’ with it. That’s why I wear the wig.
CYNTHIA: I’m sure your own must be just as nice as or nicer than that.
TOMMY: It ought to be. I only paid nineteen ninety five for this.
CYNTHIA: You ought to go back to usin’ your own.
TOMMY: (tensely) I’ll be giving that some thought.
220
Let’s momentarily put aside Cynthia’s comments about sexuality and sex appeal to
focus on the discussion about Tommy’s hair and how they link to black middle class
sensibilities. It is important to take note here of the significance of the Afro during
this period in history and its importance as political and cultural symbol in the play.
Both Sonny-Man and Cynthia wear Afros, which were considered in many cases to
be indicative of radical political affiliations for African Americans.
But as Robin Kelley argues, the Afro reflected much more than political
affiliations. In “Looking for the ‘Real’ Nigga: Social Scientists Construct the
Ghetto”, he suggests that social scientists in the mid twentieth century often flattened
what would otherwise be dynamic cultural practices in the urban world in order to
construct particular narratives about the authenticity of African American identity. In
his critique of the use of the term “soul” by social scientists to signify authentic or
220
Childress 353.
122
“essential Negroness”, he instead positions it as “a discourse through which African
Americans, at a particular historical moment, claimed ownership of the symbols and
practices of their own imagined communities”.
221
Asserting that soul in the 1960s
and 1970s “was also about transformation,” Kelley names the Afro as the “most
visible signifier of soul” and confirms that the Afro was often viewed “through the
limited lens of Black Power politics, urban uprisings, and an overarching discourse
of authenticity”.
222
However, he goes on to point out that the origins of the Afro and
its meaning derive from a matrix of cultural affiliations and sensibilities. Contending
that market forces had much to do with the proliferation of the Afro in the 1960s and
1970s and that the availability of products to “make one’s natural more natural”
influenced its popularity, he also adds that its roots can be found in “the bourgeois
high fashion circles in the late 1950s”. He continues:
The Afro was seen by the black and white elite as a kind of new female
exotica. Even though its intention, among some circles at least, was to
achieve healthier hair and express solidarity with newly independent
African nations, the Afro entered public consciousness as a mod fashion
statement that was not only palatable to bourgeois whites, but in some
circles celebrated.
223
In effect, what Kelley describes is a transformation within the cultural genealogy of
the Afro. It began as a chic fashion statement among the female African American
elite, was then mass marketed through the hair product industry, and finally came to
be associated with Black Power politics, urban uprisings and black male masculinity.
221
Robin D.G. Kelley. Yo Mama’s Dysfunktional!: Fighting the Culture Wars in Urban America.
Boston: Beacon, 1997 (25).
222
Kelley 26.
223
Kelley 27.
123
It is at this point that Cynthia’s comments about sex appeal and sexuality come into
focus since much of the rhetoric of around the Black Power and Black Arts
Movement hinged on the idea that women could best serve the movement in support
roles—sexual and otherwise to the male leaders of the movement. Her suggestion to
Tommy that women need “more sex appeal” alludes to this prevalent notion.
Kelley’s genealogy then, has implications for Cynthia and Tommy’s discussion
about the Afro. Cynthia’s efforts to get Tommy to consider wearing an Afro draw
on both its origins as a signifier of the “bourgeois high fashion circles” as well as a
marker of “Black Power politics”. In short, Cynthia encourages Tommy to embrace
the Afro as a signifier of both class status and political affiliation.
However, Tommy rejects Cynthia’s usage of the Afro as both a marker of
class status and political affiliation. Instead, she argues for the insignificance of hair
as an indicator of either and suggests that in being “sick-a talkin’ about it and foolin’
with it” she’d prefer to ignore these potential meanings altogether by wearing a wig.
224
However, by the play’s end, the stage direction carefully points out that she
decides to stop wearing the wig, dictating that after it is removed, her natural hair
“must not be an accurate, well-cut Afro…but should be rather attractive natural
hair”.
225
While acknowledging the symbolic import and genealogy of the Afro, the
play insists on Tommy’s revision of it to suit her own needs. Though she does
eventually opt to begin wearing her hair in a natural style, Tommy continues to
224
Childress 353.
225
Childress 357.
124
refute Cynthia’s claims around the class and political significance of the Afro. She
rejects the meanings that Cynthia suggests inhere within that cultural marker, but
lays claim to its transformative possibilities. In other words, Tommy puts the cultural
marker in the service of her own representation of “blackness” that de-emphasizes
the class and political affiliations that are associated with the Afro in the play
through the representations of Cynthia and Sonny-Man.
As previously suggested, like Dutchman, Wine in the Wilderness’ climax
hinges on a confrontation between the characters. Oldtimer inadvertently reveals to
Tommy that Jameson intends for her provide the image of the “messed up chick” in
his triptych, she embarks on a critique of all of them. Jameson, who has now realized
that Tommy is much more complex than he imagined, apologizes to her. However,
in responding to Jameson’s admission that he made a mistake, she exposes her own
(mis)perceptions first, saying:
TOMMY: Yeah, and I’m Tomorrow, remember? Trouble is
I was Tommin’ to you, to all of you,…”Oh, maybe they gon’ like me.”…
I was your fool, thinkin’ writers and painters know moren’ me, that
maybe a little bit of you would rub off on me.
226
Figuring her own interaction with them as a performance of “blackness” that utilizes
“tomming” or obsequious behavior toward others to gain the favor of typically white
observers, she recasts the performance as one intended for an African American
audience. Further, Tommy takes responsibility for her complicity with their figuring
of her in terms of class status and underscores her knowledge of the class divide
226
Childress 360.
125
within the African American community. By admitting that she sought their
approval and making that explicit, she reveals her participation in using class status
as the singular marker of African American identity. This admission paves the way
for the confrontation to move into honest exchange and ultimately creates space a
reconsideration of the relationship between class status and “blackness”.
As the confrontation continues, she focuses her critique on Sonny-Man and
Jameson, outlining how they have put class status in the service of defining
“blackness”. As Tommy grows increasingly angry with the group and vocal about
her displeasure, Sonny-Man observes and announces to everyone that “the sister is
upset” and elicits a fiery response from her:
TOMMY: And you stop callin’ me “the” sister, …if you feelin’ so brotherly
why don’t you say “my” sister? Ain’t no we-ness in your talk. “The” Afro-
American, “the” black man, there’s no we-ness in you. Who you think you
are?
SONNY-MAN: I was talkin’ in general er…my sister, ‘bout the masses.
TOMMY: There he go again. “The” masses. Tryin’ to make out like we
pitiful and you got it made. You the masses your damn self and don’t even
know it.
(another angry look at BILL) Nigger.
227
Here Tommy directly the addresses and deconstructs the language used to depict the
class divide. While Sonny-Man employs language that might suggest a kind of
community or collective “blackness”, Tommy points out that it in fact works to set
him apart from the other African Americans living in the community or in Dyson’s
“underground economies”. In her rejection of his “community-minded” rhetoric, she
once again rereads the language to suit her own needs and exposes Sonny-Man’s
227
Childress 361.
126
vexed relationship to other iterations of “blackness”. Rather than accepting his
imposition of a class divide that figures the “blackness” of “the masses” as distinct
from his “blackness”, she argues that his version is really no different from any other
iteration of the “blackness” found within “the masses”. Even further, she aligns her
own “blackness” with his and “the masses” in terms of how their “blackness” is read
and interpreted both within the community and in broader culture. In other words,
instead of making a distinction along class lines, Tommy chooses to include any
iteration of “blackness” as authentic and gestures toward creating a collective of
“blacknesses” that accommodates them all.
One important aspect of Tommy’s critique of Sonny-Man includes a last-
minute affront—although she calls Sonny-Man “nigger,” the insult is directed to
Jameson. Throughout the play, the term has been the source of ideological struggle
between Tommy and Jameson and the conflict over it reaches its apex here. Earlier
in the play, when Tommy lamented the loss of her apartment to rioters saying
“[l]emmie tell you what the niggers done” he suggested that Tommy use the more
politically correct alternative of “Afro-Americans” because as he states, “we can talk
about each other a little better than that”.
228
When she directs the term to Sonny-
Man within Jameson’s earshot, he responds by turning to a dictionary in order to
educate Tommy on the meaning of the word and argues that his fifth grade teacher
said it meant any low, degraded person:
BILL: I’m telling you it’s a low degraded person. Listen. (reads from book)
Nigger, N-i-g-g-e-r, …A Negro…A member of any dark-skinned people…
228
Childress 350.
127
Damn. (amazed by dictionary description)
SONNY-MAN: Brother Malcolm said that’s what they meant,…nigger is
a Negro, Negro is a nigger.
BILL: (slowly finishing his reading) A vulgar offensive term of hostility and
contempt. Well, so much for the fifth grade teacher.
SONNY-MAN: No, they do not call low, degraded white folks niggers.
Come to think of it, did you ever hear whitey call Hitler a nigger? Now if
some whitey digs us,…the others might call him a nigger-lover, but they
don’t call him no nigger.
OLDTIMER: No, they don’t.
TOMMY: (near tears) When they say “nigger,” just dry-long-so, they mean
educated you and uneducated me. They hate you and call you “nigger,” I
called you “nigger” but I love you. (there is dead silence in the room for a
split second)
229
In another rhetorical maneuver, Tommy makes a distinction between her use of the
term “nigger” and when it is used in broader culture as well as emphasizes the
significance of the context in which it is deployed.
To help clarify Tommy’s usage, turning to a study of the history of the word
is useful. In Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word, Randall Kennedy
argues that the term still serves as a “harbinger of hatred, fear, contempt and
violence…but more than ever before, it also signals other meanings and generates
other reactions, depending on the circumstances.”
230
In other words, the meaning and
impact of the term depends on the context in which it is used. He continues that one
usage among African Americans is as a racial term “with undertones of warmth and
goodwill [but] that reflects a tragicomic sensibility that is aware of black history”.
231
229
Childress 361.
230
Randall Kennedy. Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word. New York: Vintage
Books, 2002.
231
Kennedy 29.
128
Tommy makes parallel use of the term and details the context in which she
deploys it. Her use of “nigger” has nothing to do with its meaning as a “harbinger of
hatred” but rather it expresses her frustration with the ideological paradoxes around
class status in her struggle with Cynthia, Sonny-Man and Jameson over the
representation of “blackness”. It speaks to the gap between the rhetoric all three use
in reference to her and their literal efforts to figure her as the representation of the
“messed up chick”. In other words, in the context of this intraracial struggle around
class status and how it informs “blackness”, her usage of “nigger” has several
purposes. First, in her distinction between her use and the “dry-long-so” or ordinary
use of the term in broader culture, she points out how she uses it to show her love, or
as Kennedy would have it, her “warmth and goodwill” toward Jameson rather than
as a means of limiting identity as signified in the ‘dry-long-so” usage of it often
found in broader culture. In this rhetorical turn, she also rejects Jameson’s figuring
of it as an entirely negative term that requires a more politically correct alternative.
Next, her explication of the use of the term in broader culture demonstrates
the futility of putting class status in the service of assessing “blackness”. She argues
that in spite of their figuring of her as the triptych’s “messed up chick”, their
education does not prevent them from being figured as “niggers” in broader culture.
In addition, she equates their efforts to limit her identity through the triptych to the
efforts of broader culture to limit their identities through the use of “nigger” despite
their education.
Finally, Tommy deploys the term to signify her love for them as well as to
show her desire for community that does not rely on class status as a marker of
129
authentic “blackness”. She deploys the “tragicomic sensibilities” attached to the
word that acknowledges the complicated history of African Americans in the U.S.
and the often troublesome intraracial relations between African Americans. Though
Tommy’s commentary on African American class warfare is significant, equally
important is her critique of class status in figuring authentic “blackness”. In so doing,
she exposes the many fissures in terms of representation within the African
American community. This exposure undercuts notions of monolithic African
American identity in its staging of the class divide and ultimately offers an
alternative means of bridging the class divide.
Like Clay in Dutchman, Tommy makes use of a monologue during the
confrontation with the group. Once again like Clay, in the monologue she reveals
her struggles to shape her identity and outlines the modes through which she
attempts to accomplish self-representation. As she prepares to depart Jameson’s
studio, she details part of her process of self-representation and provides her
response to their attempted imposition of “authentic” black identity:
Somewhere, in the middle of last night, I thought the old me was gone, …lost
forever and gladly. But today was flippin’ time, so back I flipped. Now it’s
turn the other cheek time. If I can go through life other-cheekin’ the white
folk,…I guess yall can be other cheeked too. But I’m goin’ back to the nitty-
gritty crowd, where the talk is we-ness and us-ness. I hate to do it but I have
to thank you ‘cause I’m walkin’ out with much more than I brought in.
232
Tommy figures her “blackness” as shifting and contingent upon the current
moment—it “flips” or shifts as she deems necessary. While she once again allows
for her own complicity with their fixed notions of “blackness”, in her admission that
232
Childress 361.
130
she thought the old Tommy was gone, she ultimately argues for a “blackness” that is
fluid, but that also draws upon a collective of “blacknesses” or a variety of modes of
representation of black identity. That is, she values what the “old” Tommy brought
to the representational table, but she also values and is grateful for what she has
learned about “blackness” and representation from Jameson, Cynthia and Sonny-
Man. What she discovers is that while she had initially hoped that their status as
writers and artists would “rub off” on her, that status and how they perform it does
not accommodate the multiple iterations of “blackness” and employs narrow markers
of class status in an effort to police those iterations. However, in emphasizing the
“we-ness” of the “nitty-gritty” crowd, she suggests that this collective rejects narrow
modes of representation that they seek to employ in their use of class status in
figuring authentic “blackness” and instead, broadens the scope of possibilities for the
representation of black identity. For Tommy, this collective embraces the multiple
meanings signified by cultural markers such as the Afro and rather than utilizing
them as indicators of “authentic blackness”, reads them simply as “accessories” in
shaping black identity.
While she identifies a collective of “blacknesses” through the “we-ness” of
the “nitty-gritty” crowd in her final monologue, Tommy also addresses Jameson’s
triptych and its narrow representation of black female identity. In her final
rejection of the (mis)perceptions about her and her performance of “blackness”,
Tommy deconstructs the iconography of Jameson’s painting and her intended role in
it:
131
Bill, I don’t have to wait for anybody’s by-your-leave to be a “Wine in the
Wilderness” woman. I can be it if I wanta,…and I am. I am. I am. I’m
not the one you made up and painted, the very pretty lady who can’t
talk back,…,but I’m “Wine in the Wilderness”…alive and kickin’ me…And
Cynthia, if my hair is straight, or if it’s natural, of if I wear a wig, or take
itoff, that’s all right because…They’re just what you
call…accesssories…[s]omethin’ you add or take off. The real thing is takin’
place on the inside…that’s where the action is.
233
In issuing one final corrective to Jameson and Cynthia about their narrow modes of
assessing “authentic blackness”, Tommy argues here for the primacy of living
representations of “blackness” that can “talk back” over the inanimate figures that
Jameson creates for the triptych. However, by aligning herself with Jameson’s icon
of “perfect Black womanhood” and arguing that it is one among many subject
positions that she occupies in her efforts toward self-representation, Tommy creates
space to read “blackness” from multiple vantage points and positions it as
indeterminate. Her performance of “blackness” depends entirely on how she
imagines herself and the social context in which she is embedded. In effect, she
suggests that if she can imagine herself occupying any subject position, then it is one
that consequently shapes her identity or her performance of “blackness”.
Further, in pointing out to Cynthia that the state of her hair fails to serve as
an indicator of “authentic” black identity, she argues for the representation of
“blackness” as performance and that her hair—straight, natural, or fake—serves only
as prop for her performance. It can signify a multitude of meanings. Additionally,
her assertion that “the real thing is takin’ place on the inside” parallels Johnson’s
233
Childress 361-362.
132
figuring of “blackness” as “a knowing made manifest by a ‘doing’”.
234
Her
performance of “blackness” and the performance of those whom she considers
members of the “nitty-gritty crowd” hinges on what takes place on the “inside” or
how they imagine themselves to be. Ultimately, Tommy’s and the “nitty-gritty”
crowd’s “knowing” of themselves—the “real thing takin’ place on the inside”—is
made manifest through both individual and collective “doings”.
In the end, Tommy’s advocacy for a more complicated means of knowing
and reading “blackness” persuades the group to reconsider their perspectives on how
they have assessed it earlier in the play. After Tommy’s monologue, Jameson tells
the group that his image of “perfect Black womanhood” was a dream he “drummed
up from the junk room of his mind” and that he will revise the triptych to include
Oldtimer, Cynthia and Sonny-Man. Continuing that his earlier version of the
triptych was painted “in the dark, all head and no heart”, he convinces Tommy to
pose for the center panel, so that when people see it they’ll say, “[h]ey, don’t she
look like somebody we know?”.
235
Creating a painting that reflects Jameson’s own collective of “blacknesses”
that derive from a variety of subject positions puts Tommy’s insights about the
performance of “blackness” into practice. Through confronting Jameson, Cynthia,
and Sonny-Man about the ways in which they employ cultural markers to identify
“authentic blackness”, Tommy prompts them to reconsider how they read the
234
E. Patrick Johnson. “The Pot Calling the Kettle Black” Theatre Journal 57 (2005) 605-608.
235
Childress 362.
133
markers as well as encourages them to recognize the impact of their assessments on
the people who are being read. Further, in advocating for a more complicated
reading of “blackness”, Tommy impacts the artistic process and artistic expression
and its relationship to representing African American identity. By persuading
Jameson to revise what he had at the outset of the play called his “statement”—or his
representation of the African American community, she recreates the artistic process
as a collective one. Cynthia, Sonny-Man, Oldtimer and Jameson all contributed to
their discussion and are all represented in the revised painting. In short, she brings
the group into the collective of “blacknesses” she dubbed the “nitty-gritty crowd”
through her confrontation with them. Although Tommy suggests that she could walk
away from her encounter with Cynthia, Sonny-Man, Jameson and Oldtimer with
“much more than [she] brought in”, the “nitty-gritty crowd” embodied in Jameson’s
revised triptych also walks away with much more than they brought in—a more
nuanced and complicated understanding of the performance of “blackness” and its
relationship to African American identity.
Perhaps for the Alabama Educational Television Commission (AETC), the
argument made in Wine in the Wilderness for a more complex reading and
representation of African American identity was not as persuasive. The AETC
successfully censored the broadcast because of what they viewed as problematic
content. But what specifically was objectionable? Indeed, it is difficult to locate
representations or dialogue in the play that might constitute “lewd, vulgar, obscene,
134
profane or repulsive material”.
236
Likewise, it is difficult to imagine how any of
those adjectives apply to a performance by the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre,
which was also a part of the series “On Being Black” deemed as inappropriate
material for broadcast. Presumably, the representations collected and developed in
the ten-week series which its producers argued “explores many of the situations
faced by black Americans” were not situations that needed to be broadcast by the
AETC’s estimation.
237
While it seems clear that the cancellation of the series in
Alabama was part of a larger institutional effort by AETC to regulate the
representations of “blackness” disseminated through its member stations, the
question remains of why in cities where it was actually broadcast, there was so little
critical interest in the production. Before taking the review archive itself into
consideration, providing a social and historical context for the play’s production may
offer valuable insight about the reasons for the critical disinterest.
Wine in the Wilderness’ initial broadcast was preceded by four days of
racially motivated riots in Detroit in the summer of 1967 that grew from a police raid
236
Robert Lewis Shayon, “Curiouser and Curiouser” Saturday Review 53:43. August 8,1970. Some
Alabama residents and the faculty senate of the University of Alabama lodged a complaint with the
Federal Communications Commission against the state’s educational television commission that
charged it had systematically censored black-oriented special programs and regular series distributed
nationally by National Educational Television. After the FCC gave the Alabama Educational
Television Commission the opportunity to respond and they denied the charges saying they had
canceled the programs due to lewd, vulgar, obscene, profane, or repulsive material. By 4-to-3
decision, the FCC sided with AETC saying licensees have “wide discretion in choosing the
programming to meet the needs of the community”. Their decision, however, ignored that the
network was not meeting the programming needs of the African American community which
comprised thirty percent of its audience. The AETC argued that a total of 217 hours of programming
during a relevant period “either were integrated or involved a Negro complement entirely”. However,
155 of those hours were devoted to morning and afternoon showings of “Sesame Street”.
237
Nora E. Taylor. “Public TV’s Big New Season: From ‘Forsyte' to Buckley to O’Horgan” Christian
Science Monitor. September 29, 1969 (6).
135
of an after-hours bar in a predominantly African American neighborhood. This civil
disturbance caused President Lyndon Johnson to form an eleven-member National
Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders in July of 1967 to explain the riots that had
occurred each summer in the U.S. since 1964 as well as to provide recommendations
on how to prevent them.
238
He had anticipated that the commission would find that
the civil disturbances grew from the political conspiracy of black militant groups.
However, the commission, commonly known as the Kerner Commission, released
findings to the public on February 29, 1968 that differed greatly from what President
Johnson had predicted. The report warned in a now frequently quoted phrase, that
“the nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white—separate and
unequal”.
239
Naming white institutional racism as the source for the riots, the report
offered reforms including educational programs such as Head Start, job programs, an
increase in the minimum wage and other programs of economic uplift.
240
The report also took the media to task for its passive escalation of racial
tensions. The commission found that “news organizations have failed to
communicate to both their black and white audiences a sense of the problems
America faces and the sources of potential solutions”.
241
Arguing that perspectives
238
Vernon M. Briggs, Jr. “A Postmortem Examination of the Kerner Commission Report:
Discussion” http://digitalcommons.ilr.cornell.edu/brigsI/13.(accessed April 25, 2007).
239
Ibid.
240
Ibid.
241
United States Kerner Commission, “The Communications Media, Ironically, Have Failed to
Communicate”: The Kerner Report Assess Media Coverage of Riots and Race Relations” Report of
the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders. http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/6553
(accessed April 25, 2007).
136
on the African American experience “are seldom conveyed” in “the white press,” the
commission went so far as to assert that the media “repeatedly, if unconsciously,
reflects the biases, the paternalism, the indifference of white America”.
242
The
commission concluded its findings about the media and race relations by suggesting
that while it is easy to understand how the media could maintain such passivity, they
were still accountable saying, “it is not excusable in an institution that has the
mission to inform and educate the whole of our society”.
243
In this cutting evaluation of the state of the media’s commentary on race
relations in the U.S., the Kerner Commission indicts the media as complicit with
other national institutions in its unconscious refusal to recognize and engage with
issues impacting African Americans in the late 1960s. Ironically, the report itself was
the subject of much media attention, and in a commercial press reprint, it made the
New York Times best-seller list.
244
Still, the commission’s findings about the
failures of the media in presenting to “black and white audiences a sense of the
problems America faces and the sources of potential solutions” have important
implications for Wine in the Wilderness and its review archive.
245
If the Kerner Commission’s report brought unexpected attention to concerns
around race and race relations, then the Presidential election of 1968 put those issues
squarely on center stage. Following the assassinations of both Martin Luther King,
242
Ibid.
243
Ibid.
244
Ibid.
245
Ibid.
137
Jr. in April in Memphis and Senator Robert F. Kennedy in June in Los Angeles,
clashes between protesters and police at the Democratic National Convention in
Chicago in August of that same year were widely publicized. The convention paved
the way for the 1968 Presidential election that only heightened many of the same
fears and concerns that surrounded the 1964 Presidential primaries. Though the
continued escalation of the Vietnam War came to the national stage through the anti-
war demonstrators who protested throughout the four days of the convention, race, as
Jeremy Mayer argues, remained a “dominant issue in domestic politics”.
246
This becomes clear in the lead-up to the Presidential election of 1968. After
sitting President Lyndon Johnson’s withdrawal from the race in March of 1968, the
Democratic nomination went to Vice President Hubert Humphrey. Humphrey
vowed to continue the work President Johnson had done with “The War on Poverty”
which provided federal funding for programs that helped to politically and
financially empower the African American poor in urban communities. Further,
amid doubts about its efficacy, he supported continued involvement in the war in
Vietnam and President Johnson’s failed policy there. Humphrey’s support of
unpopular domestic and foreign policies helped set the stage for Richard Nixon’s
victory in November 1968, but the strategies of both Republican Richard Nixon and
American Independent Party candidate George Wallace contributed to his defeat.
246
Jeremy Mayer. “LBJ Fights the White Backlash: The Racial Politics of the 1964 Presidential
Campaign”. Prologue Magazine. 33:1 (Spring 2001)
138
After losing the nomination in 1960 and 1962, Richard Nixon gained the
Republican nomination for the Presidency in 1968. He employed the much
discussed “Southern Strategy” which sought to appeal to moderates in Southern
border states and in the North. As part of the appeal, he chose Maryland and border
state governor Spiro Agnew as his running mate. As historian Dan Carter argues,
though Nixon would deny that race was a factor in his “Southern Strategy”, it was
clear that “almost every issue in the campaign was tightly interwoven with issues of
race”.
247
Nixon drew on and finessed the “hot button” issues of the period and was
advised by both Harry Dent, a former aide to South Carolina Senator Strom
Thurmond and John Erlichman, who would later become a key figure in the
Watergate Scandal.
248
Nixon’s campaign presented positions on crime, education,
and public housing in ways that by Erlichman’s estimation “a voter could avoid
admitting to himself that he was attracted by a racist appeal”.
249
For instance,
between 1965 and 1968, an economic downturn in what had been nearly 25 years of
sustained economic growth was thought to be linked to the antipoverty and social
welfare programs of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations that were perceived
as benefiting African Americans.
250
The decline in economic growth in the U.S. in
247
Dan T. Carter. From George Wallace to Newt Gingrich: Race in the Conservative
Counterrevolution, 1963-1994. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1996 (28).
248
Ibid.
249
Ibid.
250
Ibid.
139
the late 1960s made as Carter contends, “the poor—particularly the black poor—
increasingly appealing scapegoats”.
251
Also the social disorder of anti-war protests and civil rights uprisings or
“crime in the streets” as Barry Goldwater had called it in 1964 was still a concern in
1968 and Nixon capitalized on it. He promised to fight the “decline of law and
order” in his campaign stops and in what Carter calls an “unguarded moment” while
viewing a campaign commercial asserted that, “[i]t’s all about law and order and the
damn Negro-Puerto Rican groups out there”.
252
Even as Nixon’s public declarations
belie the significance of race in the campaign, his private comments make those
connections explicit.
Still, in order to secure the votes needed in the South to win, he had to
address the thorny issue of desegregation in public education and effectively ward
off attacks by Independent candidate George Wallace. Wallace, who made such a
strong showing in the 1964 primaries by drawing on the very same anxieties around
race as Nixon was during this campaign, could potentially cause Nixon to lose. He
was especially effective in painting both Humphrey and Nixon as divorced from the
lives of ordinary working people. In order to weaken Wallace’s strength in the
South, Nixon first gained the support of South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond.
253
In exchange for his support, Nixon would support states’ rights, freedom of choice in
251
Carter 29.
252
Carter 30.
253
Carter 33.
140
the school desegregation issue and appoint a strict constructionist to the Supreme
Court.
254
Second, he began an advertising campaign on country music stations across
the South and in the final weeks of the campaign, took to the airwaves himself.
While never mentioning Wallace by name, he suggested that a vote for Wallace
would put Hubert Humphrey in the White House.
255
Ultimately, Nixon narrowly
won the November election by the vote in three key states, Illinois, Ohio, and
California where his margin was only three percentage points.
256
Still, Wallace came
close to Nixon in both North Carolina and Tennessee; if he had succeeded in
carrying either of those two states, the election could have been decided in the House
of Representatives.
257
In addition, pollsters revealed that four out of five Wallace
voters would have cast their vote for Nixon had he not been in the race.
258
While
Nixon’s “Southern Strategy” may have been a key issue in his eventual election to
office, the less subtle “race baiting” that Wallace employed in the campaign did not
fall on deaf ears. His political ideologies had a significant impact on the U.S.
political landscape and in effect helped to shape Nixon’s “Southern Strategy”.
Consequently, what the campaign makes clear in both the strategies that
Nixon had to employ to win and in another strong showing by George Wallace is the
254
Carter 34.
255
Ibid.
256
Carter 36.
257
Ibid.
258
Ibid.
141
significance of the politics of race in the late 1960s. Both candidates successfully
used language and appeals that capitalized on anxieties and fears around race that
gained them votes. In other words, Nixon’s disavowal of the consequence of race in
the election, while simultaneously engineering a campaign that hinged entirely on a
“racist appeal” for its success, echoes the “white backlash” that figured so
prominently in the 1964 campaigns. If, as Roger Hewitt suggests, “white backlash”
is part of “a disparate set of responses to equalities discourses as they unfolded from
the 1960s to the present” then the 1968 Presidential election demonstrates yet
another set of responses to the “equality discourses” still in play in 1968, four years
after they initially surfaced.
259
Further, if Nixon’s election is framed as a referendum
on a liberal agenda that supported civil rights legislation and “The Great Society”
programs orchestrated by “the distant social planners all too ready to sacrifice
working-class families on the altar of upper-middle-class convictions”, then the
apparent national response was a tentative no to these equality discourses since
Nixon’s win was a narrow one.
260
It is within this political and social context that the initial broadcast of Wine
in the Wilderness aired—only four months after the 1968 election and not quite a
year since the Kerner Commission released its report. The cynicism around issues of
race and equality discourses in the 1968 Presidential campaign demonstrate the
entrenchment and continuing significance of “white backlash” some four years after
259
Hewitt, Roger. White Backlash and the Politics of Multiculturalism. Cambridge: Cambridge UP,
2005.
260
Carter 13.
142
the issue surfaced in the 1964 presidential election. Further, as the Kerner
Commission report indicates, “white backlash” had a parallel impulse in the media in
terms of its failure “to meet the Negro’s legitimate expectations in journalism”
through its “indifference” to the issues impacting African Americans.
261
It is worth
considering how the nation’s tentative reaction to these issues and what the Kerner
Commission identifies as “the indifference of white America” is reflected in Wine in
the Wilderness’ review archive.
There are only three reviews of the broadcast of Wine in the Wilderness—two
from its initial broadcast in 1969; the other from a rebroadcast in 1971. Nora E.
Taylor’s column in the Christian Science Monitor is nothing short of indifferent to
the play and reads more as an announcement of the broadcast rather than a review.
While she comments on the significance of the “On Being Black” series, calling it a
“series of one-hour dramas written, performed and produced by blacks which
explore many of the situations faced by black Americans,” she is silent on the play
itself, remarking only that actress Abbey Lincoln portrays Tommy in the
production.
262
Taylor’s column does, however, include the details of two new National
Educational Television programs for pre-school children—one called “Mr. Roger’s
Neighborhood” and the other called “Sesame Street”. She observes that the new
261
United States Kerner Commission, “The Communications Media, Ironically, Have Failed to
Communicate”: The Kerner Report Assesses Media Coverage of Riots and Race Relations” Report of
the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders. http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/6553
(accessed April 25, 2007).
262
Nora E. Taylor. “Public TV’s Big New Season: From ‘Forsyte to Buckley to O’Horgan” Christian
Science Monitor. September 29, 1969. (6)
143
“Sesame Street” program will include “live-actions films and guest stars against a
continuing background of a street that might be anyone’s our street in our town”.
263
Outlining the purpose of the program, she asserts that the new show is designed “to
equip little ones with knowledge that will be helpful to them when they start
school”.
264
Through the new show, Taylor explains, the N.E. T hopes to “deliver to
children the kind of program they have shown they like and understand and one from
which they are able to learn.
265
She goes on to discuss the premiere of “The Advocates” another new N.E.T
program that will use a courtroom format to raise such questions as “should the
principal of a high school report known marijuana-using students to the police?”.
266
Taylor closes her column with a review of the N.E.T’s “Theatre America” project
which will provide a “tour of six geographically separate and stylistically different
concepts of what theater in America is doing today” and pays particular attention to
Paul Foster’s installment in the series called “Heimskringla or the Stoned Angels,”
an experimental piece which “incorporates ‘videospace’ or almost all the surreal
effects television knows how to produce today”.
267
It is hard to escape the irony that in Taylor’s reading of “Sesame Street” as a
children’s show that emphasizes its location “in anyone’s our street in our town” in
263
Taylor 6.
264
Ibid.
265
Ibid.
266
Ibid.
267
Ibid.
144
the very same column, she essentially ignores and neglect to comment on a series
that attempts to accomplish the same goal in relation to the African American
experience. In addition, while she astutely observes that “Sesame Street” responds to
the needs and desires of children, Taylor falls short of identifying the needs of
audiences who might appreciate the broadcast of “On Being Black”. By her own
estimation, the “On Being Black” series explores “many of the situations faced by
black Americans,” but that exploration apparently did not merit a more engaged
discussion in her otherwise lengthy column. In electing to discuss at length a host of
other premiering N.E.T programs and effectively disregarding the broadcast of “On
Being Black”, Taylor seemingly participates in precisely the kind of media
indifference the Kerner Commission’s report outlined.
If Taylor’s column reflects indifference, then Jack Gould’s review of the play
can best be described as noncommittal. In his brief favorable review of the first
installments of two different National Educational Television series, Gould suggests
that the play partially met the requirements of N.E.T programming that is directed
“to social concerns rather than escapist matters”.
268
Summarizing the play as the
story of “a selfsatisfied artist and a bitter undereducated girl in search of identities by
which to live,” he asserts that Childress has “superimposed distinctions in black
society on a fitful romantic theme”.
269
He concludes that while the play’s structure
was “rather abrupt in raising its issue and convention in reaching a resolution,” that it
268
Jack Gould. “TV Review: Social Ills Are Focus of 2 N.E.T Premieres” The New York Times.
October 7, 1969. (96).
269
Ibid.
145
nonetheless offers “some insight into black tensions”.
270
By the end of the review,
the “identities” by which Bill and Tommy seek to live, as well as the “issue” that the
play has raised and its “insight into black tensions” that Gould claims it provides
remain unexplored questions. He fails to address or engage any of the seemingly
significant assertions he makes about the play and its themes. In short, while Gould’s
cursory review takes the play’s broadcast more seriously than Taylor’s
announcement does, it still fails to fully engage with the play’s representations and
themes. What is perhaps even more significant (and more disappointing) about
Gould’s assessment is that while he takes the time to identify at least three
potentially fruitful entries into a discussion of the play and its representations, he
instead gives it a superficial reading, devoting most of his column inches to the first
installment of “N.E.T Journal” on the increasing use of drugs among youth called
“Speak Out On Drugs”.
271
The program, which he asserts is a “worthwhile hour”
that underscores the need for “turning on the younger generation with fresh ideas,
fundamental changes in perspectives and especially things to do that are productive
and worthwhile”.
272
However, Alan Kriegsman’s review of a rebroadcast of “On Being Black” in
1971is the only one that comprehensively engages with the play’s representations
and themes.
273
Kriegsman immediately takes note of the complexity of the
270
Ibid.
271
Gould 96.
272
Ibid.
273
Alan M. Kriegsman. “On Being Black” The Washington Post-Times Herald. June 18, 1971: B13.
146
representations in the play, asserting in the first lines of the review that “[t]he ‘black
experience is not just a simple matter of black and white, a truism viewed from a
number of interesting perspectives in the teleplay ‘Wine in the Wilderness’”.
274
He
continues in this vein, emphasizing the gradations within the performances of
“blackness” and African American identity that the play seeks to showcase as he
identifies key questions that the play takes on:
What is blackness really all about—chic slogans, a kind of attire,
revolutionary lingo? What are the deeper sources: Where does
niggerhood end and Negritude begin? Such are the sticky questions
to which “Wine in the Wilderness” addresses itself, with no little
candor and insight.
275
Locating the significance of the play’s representations in the questions they raise
about the nature and sources of African American identity, Kriegsman points out that
Childress’ play does more than simply trade in the symbols and signifiers of African
American identity or “blackness”, but attempts to trace the cultural genealogies of
them as well as to dislodge them from essentialized notions of African American
identity through its representations. In noting that “niggerhood” and “Negritude” are
points on the same cultural continuum and, therefore, inform the performance of
“blackness” and notions of “authentic” black identity, Kriegsman offers insight about
the construction of identity that closely resemble Tommy’s assertions in the play. In
short, he crystallizes in his review the arguments that she has made throughout the
course of the play.
274
Ibid.
275
Ibid.
147
As he focuses specifically on the representations of Bill and Tommy in the
play, Kriegsman observes that Bill “looks upon her as an interesting specimen and
uses her admiration to draw out her attitudes, dreams and obsessions” while Tommy
views Bill as more than a man, but also as “an embodiment of uppercrust
sophistication which she both fears and covets”.
276
In this evaluation of the
simmering class conflict between the two that hinges on the assumptions they have
drawn about one another, he convincingly argues that their (mis)perceptions of one
another must be dispelled before the questions of what constitutes “blackness” and
how it shapes both of their identities can be answered. Describing the play’s final
confrontation as the point at which “Tommy explodes” and further detailing the class
divide between them, he outlines the transformative possibilities of their
confrontation:
She lashes out with all of her former bitterness, furious at her
own gullibility, angrier still at Bill’s hypocrisy. But with her rage
comes the spark of self-discovery, the realization that her own
identity is no less precious—and no less black than Bill’s despite
the differences in vocabulary, status, and life-style that divide them.
277
In his description of the final confrontation between Tommy and Bill, Kreigsman
acknowledges both the play’s critique of class status as a means of determining
“authentic” black identity, as well as, the necessity of the confrontation as a means of
“self-discovery” or transformation for Tommy.
276
Kriegsman B13.
277
Kriegsman B13.
148
While he suggests, as Gould did in his review, that the play’s resolution
“seems too easy and glib”, he argues that this shortcoming “really doesn’t matter
much, for the guts of the piece lie elsewhere”.
278
Evidently, Kriegsman locates them
in places other than in the craft of the play itself. Accordingly, he asserts that “most
new plays, especially the thematic ones, have an excess of style and a paucity of
substance…[t]he fact that the reverse is true for “Wine in the Wilderness” doesn’t
detract much from its impact”.
279
Although he describes the play’s use of setting,
characterization and dialogue as “strictly kitchen sink realism” and continues that in
terms of dramatic technique “breaks no ground”, he presumes that these minor
shortcomings are “more than redeemed by an authenticity of feeling” that the cast
captures with “unswerving intensity”.
280
Kriegsman applauds the performances of
all of the actors, but is especially impressed by the performance of Abbey Lincoln as
Tommy, describing it as one that “seems not to miss a single nuance of the
character’s turbulent transformation”.
281
In his emphasis on the significance of the
transformation of Tommy after the confrontation and the nuances of her performance
of “blackness” prior to it, Kriegsman points out that the play’s strength lies in how it
depicts the genuine feeling—the passion and the conviction—that lies within the
play’s themes and their continuing relevance in the (then) current historical moment.
278
Ibid.
279
Ibid.
280
Ibid.
281
Ibid.
149
In other words, its power or its “authenticity of feeling” resides in both the chemistry
between the actors’ performance with the play’s genuine conviction to its themes, as
well as the timeliness of its arguments.
Moreover, in concluding the review, Kriegsman reiterates those notions and
alludes to the ways in which drama and performance can uncover insights that other
modes of representation and genres might not as easily access, by asserting that
drama “can illuminate human experiences in ways that cannot be realized by
documentaries, by coverage of demonstrations or by the airing of grievances.”
282
In
recognizing the magnitude of the broad scope of drama as a representational genre
and casting it as one that elucidates the human experience in a particular way, he
effectively argues that the immediacy of performance provides its distinction from
other modes of representation. In other words, he contends that the immediacy of
performance underwrites both the “authenticity of feeling” present in Wine in the
Wilderness, as well as the genre’s particular ability to shed light on human
experiences in a way that other modes of representation cannot. For Kriegsman, the
source of the play’s strength also serves as the source of the genre’s strength.
Ultimately, what his review illustrates is that the Kerner Commission report
justly censured the national press for abdicating its duties to both white and black
citizens to provide “a sense of the problems America faces and the sources of
potential solutions”.
283
Apparently, the kind of engagement Kriegman demonstrated
282
Kriegsman B13.
283
United States Kerner Commission, “The Communications Media, Ironically, Have Failed to
Communicate”: The Kerner Report Assesses Media Coverage of Riots and Race Relations” Report of
150
with the play was an aberration, or a peculiarity, while the work that both Taylor and
Gould did with the play was standard fare for audiences who sought to be informed
and educated about the problems the country faced in regards to race relations.
Thirty years after the Kerner Commission report, a follow-up study conducted by the
Milton S. Eisenhower Foundation issued its report entitled “The Millenium Breach:
The American Dilemma, Richer and Poorer” in 1998 which found that the nation had
in fact cleaved into to “two societies, one black, one white—separate and
unequal”.
284
Although “The Millenium Breach” offered no parallel analysis of the
significance of the media in the widening of the socio-economic gap between
African Americans and whites, it is difficult to imagine that it did not play a crucial,
if not essential role in what has ultimately became a lived reality for many African
Americans.
As was the case for A Raisin in the Sun, Purlie Victorious, and Dutchman, the
Wine in the Wilderness review archive demonstrates that theatre critics routinely
failed to fully engage with the performances of “blackness” in the play, or they
simply ignored them. Bringing much of the country’s domestic political agenda to
bear on their interpretations of the plays, they essentially mirrored the same anxious
and sometimes, cynical reactions of the nation’s citizens, politicians and institutions
to questions about the representation of “blackness” and African American identity.
In mirroring these reactions, theatre critics responding to the plays produced during
the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders. http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/6553
(accessed April 25, 2007).
284
Fred Harris, et al. “The Millenium Breach: The American Dilemma, Richer and Poorer”
http://www.eisenhowerfoundation.org/frames/main_frameMB.html (accessed April 30, 2007).
151
this era participated in putting African American representations in a figurative
straight jacket. That is, they refused to acknowledge the complexities of the
performances—or to consider the web of cultural genealogies from which they
derived. Returning once more to E. Patrick Johnson’s contention that performance
as a mode of representation of for black identity emphasizes “the way in which
cultures struggle to define who they are and who they want to be”, it becomes clear
that in most cases, critics failed to recognize this effort.
285
All the more
disheartening is that, in the case of Childress’ play, the complex and compelling
representations of “blackness” addressing social questions that were in the Kerner
Commission’s estimation, pertinent to both African Americans and whites were
unceremoniously ignored. Even the fact that Childress was a playwright who was
well-established within the profession failed to create a sense of legitimacy or
significance about her representations with critics.
However, Kriegsman’s review provides some hope for the possibilities of
gainfully engaging in meaningful dialogue about the politics of race and
representation. In addition, his review makes clear that the representations are
accessible and available to those who elect to engage them. In other words, they are
not so obscure that they prevent critics from analyzing them. If, as the Kerner
Commission charged, the media consistently and unconsciously echoed the “biases,
the paternalism, [and] the indifference of white America” toward African American
culture, then Kriegsman’s review rejects those failures in its careful analysis of the
285
E. Patrick Johnson. “The Pot Calling the Kettle Black” Theatre Journal 57 (2005) 605-608.
152
representation of Tommy and consequently, exemplifies how to communicate to
both black and white audiences the problems the country faces and offers potential
solutions.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, his review advocates for multiple
means of accessing representations of “blackness” and points to ways of
acknowledging and engaging with the varying representations of it. In particular, he
emphasizes the primacy of performance as a means of accessing an “authenticity of
feeling” that other genres such as documentaries cannot capture because they lack
the immediacy that inheres in performance. Though Kriegsman’s “authenticity of
feeling” is not a call for the universality of “blackness” that might render it as a fixed
entity that is interchangeable with any other performance of identity, it does
emphasize points of continuity and recognizes intersecting vantage points between
multiple perspectives. It asks, where does the performance of “blackness” as
identity—or knowledge and understanding of the self intersect the notion of
“blackness” as performance—or a constructed self-reflexive process that continually
draws on vast cultural resources and shifting identity positions to gain the
aforementioned knowledge and understanding? Rather than figuring this
intersection as a tautology, he instead suggests that its temporality, its immersion in
the current moment, is what provides its power and links it to lived experience and
the performance viewed on stage. It is that same immediacy that accounts for and
strengthens the various performances of African American identity considered
throughout this study. The collection of “blacknesses” considered all rely on the
contingency of the current moment and a matrix of cultural genealogies for their
153
weight and heft. These “blacknesses” demonstrate how “a knowing is made
manifest by a doing”.
286
While the representations of “blackness” in the plays
considered consistently highlight the immediacy and the proximity of the current
moment, the theatre critics reviewing the plays do much of the same cultural work,
turning to current social and political debates to engage the representations, if they
take them up at all.
Still, whether or not theatre critics seriously consider the representations of
“blacknesses” in Troubling the Boundaries, both the performances of “blackness”
and the archives of those performances remain available and accessible for analysis.
In addition, these representations along with their critical archives outline an
important narrative about the struggles of African Americans to be who they want to
be. Even the absence of a significant review archive tells a story about the
performance of “blackness” in the 1960s. The palimpsest of performances and their
review archives provide the narrative. Figuring the dynamic between the
performances of “blackness” and the review archive as a palimpsest reveals the ways
in which each representation of African American identity is imbricated with the
previous, the current, and the subsequent representation of “blackness”. Likewise,
the previous, the current, and the subsequent review archives are bound together in
the same way. Though partially erased by the most recent iteration of “blackness”
and its archive, traces of previous representations and their archives remain visible
and significantly influence the following performance and archive. In other words,
286
E. Patrick Johnson. “The Pot Calling the Kettle Black” Theatre Journal 57 (2005) 605-608.
154
while the representations of “blackness” in Childress’ play were banned in Alabama,
they were not rendered invisible. Her representations of African American identity
are seen writ large in the play’s review archive by both what is present and absent in
the reviews. While it may appear that the representations of “blackness” were
partially erased by the network’s cancellation, they however, remain visible to those
wishing to look beyond the surface of the palimpsest of performance and to engage
with the traces that linger beneath.
155
Epilogue: “The ‘Past’ Pushing Us Into The ‘Present’”
Every play studied in Troubling the Boundaries: “Blacknesses”,
Performance and the African-American Freedom Struggle has been revived within
the last three years—A Raisin in the Sun in 2004, Purlie Victorious and Wine in the
Wilderness in 2006, and most recently, Dutchman at the Cherry Lane, where it
originally opened in 1964, in January of this year.
Theatre critics’ reactions to and reviews of the new productions of these
plays frequently situate them as important historical markers of a pivotal era in the
nation’s history. While the reviews turn back to consider the plays’ historical
significance, they additionally cast them as pertinent to current issues and audiences.
Paying particular attention to the historical and cultural legacy the plays bequeath to
a younger generation, the reviews most often position the plays as speaking to the
“truth” of the African American experience in the United States. But as they argue
for the historical significance of the plays as well as the currency of their themes,
nearly all of the critics elide the representations of “blackness” in them.
In the reviews of A Raisin in the Sun’s 2004 run on Broadway, hip-hop
impresario Sean Combs’ portrayal of Walter Lee Younger figures prominently.
Although his performance was routinely panned by critics, they point out the real
significance of Combs casting in the play lies in the audience he draws. The
Chicago Sun-Times’ Hedy Weiss suggests that Combs presence “promises to
introduce a whole new audience to a masterful piece of American theatre” and in the
156
process will “teach a younger audience something about a crucial moment in this
country’s development”.
287
Ed Siegel also takes note of Combs’ appeal to an atypical demographic for
Broadway, saying that he has made the play “a bona fide event in New York’s black
communities and thereby introduced both an American classic and the uniqueness of
live theatre to some people who might never have experienced either”. He attributes
the “mostly African American” audience present at the performance he attended to
Combs and asserts that it is the first time that has occurred at “any New York play
[he’s] attended”.
288
The New York Times’ Ben Brantley turns to the insight the play provides
into still current issues. While he scoffs at the performances of Combs and Sanaa
Lathan, who played Beneatha, saying neither “makes an argument for this generation
as one to pin your hopes on”, he maintains that its themes still resonate by asserting “
‘Raisin’ was remarkably prescient in identifying issues that would continue to shape
African American life”.
289
The one exception comes in the assessments of Ossie Davis’ play. But even
as the critics address the use of stereotypes in the play, they stop short of detailing
how they signify. In a review of the revival of Purlie Victorious, Christopher
287
Hedy Weiss. “Diddy on Broadway: It’s As If Something’s Holding Him Down” Chicago Sun-
Times. April 27, 2004; 41.
288
Ed Siegel. “”New York Stage Report: Bright But Not Sunny the Sentimental Is Out In A Crop of
Smart Plays” Boston Globe. May 30, 2004: N4.
289
Ben Brantley. “Theatre Review; A Breakthrough 50s Drama Revived in a Suspenseful Mood”
New York Times. April 27, 2004 9E.
157
Rawson argues that the stereotypes in the play “can be liberating, especially (or
maybe only) when they’re embraced willingly, when they can be both explored and
turned upside down and mocked”.
290
Also impressed by the play’s deployment of
stereotypes and commenting on their resonance in the current moment, Ted Hoover
says that “even after 40 years and with its somewhat broad conception and sweetly
non-ironic message, [it] still manages to entertain and inform”.
291
Celia McGee returns to Howard Taubman’s review of Dutchman’s 1964
premiere in a New York Times review of its 2007 revival. She summons history in a
number of ways in the review; in addition to quoting Taubman’s call for “a hastening
of change”, she also historicizes both Baraka’s career and the play itself saying:
“Dutchman” was a pivotal play not only at a particular juncture in 20
th
–
century American culture but also in Mr. Baraka’s increasingly polticized
career. The original run coincided with the escalation of the civil rights
movement. The play’s sudden emergence on the scene helped expose
ambiguities in American race relations that would shortly erupt in
angry upheavals in cities nationwide, while establishing Mr. Baraka,
to both good and occasionally harmful and intolerant effect in African-
American writing.
292
McGee argues here for the significance of the play as both a marker of an important
historical moment in the Civil Rights Movement, but also as cementing Baraka’s
writing career. However, the review goes on to focus primarily on his writing and
his role in the pantheon of African American literature.
290
Christopher Rawson. “Stage Review: New Horizon’s ‘Purlie Victorious’ Pushes Stereotypes to
Comic Effect” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. February 16, 2006. (6)
291
Ted Hoover. Rev. of Purlie Victorious. Pittsburgh City Paper. February 23, 2006. (23).
292
Celia McGee. “A Return to Rage, Played Out in Black and White” New York Times. January 14,
2007.
158
In another review of the “controversial 1964 race play” appearing in the New
York Times, Ginia Bellafante summons history, but to a different effect than McGee.
Asserting that it has “always seemed an unwieldy and ineffective boxing glove
jabbing at the malignancies of American capitalism”, she continues that the play
reflects the “artless art” that James Baldwin had in mind when he coined the phrase
“protest fiction” in response to Richard Wright’s Native Son in The Partisan Review
in 1949
293
. Bellafante concludes by contending that the play seeks to make “the
white person who goes to see [it leave] feeling like a viper sent off to repent; the
middle-class African-American is meant to go home regarding any embrace of
prosperity as weak, self-negating and lethal, both politically and spiritually”.
294
She
continues, “‘Dutchman’ possesses a single objective: to produce guilt. But 43 years
after it made its debut…it fails to do even that”.
295
While Bellafante explicates the
character of Lula in detail and takes Baraka to task for the representation saying,
“[t]he notion that a woman might embody all the power and evil of American empire
when she still could not make her way out of the broom closet must have had the
vague semblance of science fiction”.
296
On the contrary, Clay is mentioned just once
in the review—to introduce the actor who portrayed him.
293
Ginia Bellafante. “Theatre Review: ‘60s Prejudice and Capitalism as a Big Blond Metaphor” New
York Times. January 24, 2007.
294
Ginia Bellafante. “Theatre Review: ‘60s Prejudice and Capitalism as a Big Blond Metaphor” New
York Times. January 24, 2007.
295
Ibid.
296
Ibid.
159
Finally, critics reviewing Wine in the Wilderness’ most recent revival share
the same concerns about the continuing significance of the play’s themes in the
current moment. Addressing the play’s commentary on intraracial class warfare, Kat
Orland says that she initially felt hesitant in engaging with the play’s dialogue
because it felt as if she was “intruding on a private conversation…[b]ut the warmth
of the roles combined with their candid and uncompromising honesty opens the door
for exploration to even the most distant of viewers”.
297
Arguing that the play
“tackles tough questions about black culture with straight talk that’s as entertaining
as it is thought-provoking”, she observes that rather than offering didacticism, the
play instead “asks its audience, to listen, to remember and to form its own
opinions”.
298
She concludes that while the play, “with such strong political
overtones” could have resulted in a heavy-handed production, it stages in its head-to-
head character conflict “a very personal struggle to find solidarity within a sea of lost
identity”.
299
Conversely, Misha Berson argues that the play “play loads up its social
concerns with such didactic fervor, and resolves them so neatly, it feels quite dated
in form—though not in substance”.
300
Still, she allows for the play’s prescience
297
Kat Orland. “Black is Back at ACT: A Potent ‘60s Era Script Ushers in a New African-American
Theater Project” Seattle Weekly. June 21, 2006. (55).
298
Ibid.
299
Ibid.
300
Misha Berson. “Actress Drinks Deep of a Role; 1969 Play’s Questions Endure” The Seattle Times.
June 19, 2006: E3.
160
about current issues, saying “the play’s rhetorical streak is assuaged somewhat by the
stinging candor of the still-relevant questions it raises about male-female relations
and cultural tensions within the black community”.
301
While the reviews from the recent revivals of all of the plays situate them
within a larger historical context and emphasize their imbrication with African
American political and social history during the Civil Rights Movement, they fail to
engage the representations of African American identity in the plays. As critics
position the plays as historical objects that point to watershed moments in African
American history and culture, they subordinate the representations of “blackness”
put forward in them to the more pressing concerns of either marking historical
moments or providing a venue to air problems or complaints about interracial and
intraracial relations in the U.S. The meaning and impact of the actual representations
put forward is never addressed.
The reason why is because in the 38 years since the premieres, they have
become known quantities or foregone conclusions within cultural memory. Cultural
memory argues that we already know who Walter Younger is, who Purlie Judson is,
who Clay is, and who Tommy is. But do we really? How and what do those
representations signify in the current historical moment and the previously current
historical moment? As the reviews from the original premieres demonstrate, the
representations themselves were seldom engaged or explicated in any meaningful
way. However, the more recent revivals suggest that the comment or addition the
301
Ibid.
161
representations make to the discourse of “blackness” and African American identity
is a foregone conclusion. In effect, the critics draw upon a master narrative of the
representations in the plays that derives from a hazy cultural memory. Though no
clear indication of how they signify in either the current historical moment or the
previously current historical moment has been given, despite this absence, their
meanings endure as a certainty that need not be explicated or explored in any
meaningful way. And this comes even after the representations were critically
neglected in their original premieres during the 1960s.
Instead, the representations have been figured primarily as emblems or
mirror reflections of the political and social problems that involve race in the United
States. While the tendency to draw such conclusions about the representation of
“blackness” these plays produced during the African American Freedom Struggle
seems appropriate, it ultimately forecloses on a broad range of possibilities for the
representation of “blackness” and African American identity that might potentially
aid in sorting through the very problems and concerns that critics figure the plays
themselves to stand in for. Further, this tendency to turn to cultural memory alone
rather than engaging with the representations serves only to reinforce assumptions
about the cultural relevance and importance of African American artistic expression.
As Harry Elam argues in “Change Clothes and Go: A Postscript to Postblackness”,
“black art has never been understood as “high” or “serious” art”.
302
He continues
302
Harry J. Elam, Jr.. “Change Clothes and Go: A Postscript to Postblackness” in Black Cultural
Traffic: Crossroads in Global Performance and Popular Culture. eds. Harry J. Elam, Jr. and Kennell
Jackson. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005. (379-388).
162
that “[a]rtistic merit and achievement can be negatively colorized and black arts
diminished in the critical standards of the mainstream white art world”.
303
Seemingly, Elam’s assertions about African American artistic expression have
implications for the plays studied in Troubling the Boundaries. While critics do not
in every instance negatively color the representations in the play, it’s also clear that
the inclination to position the plays as a reflection of current issues rather than
engaging with how the representations in them signify, devalues their artistic merits
and significance. In other words, as Philip Roth would have it, the plays and their
representations become “staged headlines” and are rejected as legitimate artistic
expression.
What Troubling the Boundaries has attempted to do is to complicate the
relationship between the figuring of the plays and their representations as either a
“low” art “staged” headline or inaccessible “high” art and to seriously consider the
role that theatre critics play in creating cultural memory in how the plays are
understood. Further it has endeavored to understand how the historical context
shapes both the critical reception and the representations in the plays themselves.
Finally, it calls for a reappraisal of the representations of “blackness” in the plays
considered.
When the representations are taken seriously and their cultural genealogies
are engaged, they reveal an early iteration of what Elam calls a “postblack”
moment.
304
Arguing that the “postblack paradoxically invokes the power of race and
303
Elam 382.
304
Elam 381.
163
racism and, at the same time, refutes their authority” he continues that the
“postblack” also “explores new racial meanings” and allows “[b]lackness to travel
outside of existent boundaries”.
305
Elam concludes that the “postblack” moment
“responds to the changing political climate but rejects the programmatic ties of black
art to politics as in the 1970s Black Arts Movement”.
306
But what becomes apparent
in Troubling the Boundaries is that these “programmatic ties of black art to politics”
are not always as rigid as they might seem. While they draw upon political currents,
the representations of “blackness” in the plays also reveal that they deploy symbols
and meanings that cannot always be irreducibly linked to monolithic notions of the
African American Freedom Struggle and the symbols of “blackness,” such as the
Afro, that it is thought to have spawned. Indeed, the representations discussed in
Troubling the Boundaries travel beyond existent racial, historical, and political
boundaries.
One final turn to the recent review archive of the play that began the study—
A Raisin in the Sun—can help illustrate this point. Further, it is suggestive of the
possibilities that this study has worked toward exposing. Performance artist Anna
Deveare Smith’s review of Hansberry’s play and Tony Kushner’s Caroline, or
Change, begins with a reference to George C. Wolfe’s 1986 play The Colored
Museum, which takes on and sends up stereotypical images of African Americans
produced on stage and takes a pointed shot at the Lena Younger character with its
305
Elam 381.
306
Ibid.
164
sketch of “The Last Mama on the Couch Play”. Suggesting that the staging of the
plays within close proximity of one another and that Wolfe’s direction of Kushner’s
musical marks “a moment when political and theatrical interests mesh”, she argues
that both plays “offer a new and refreshing lens on our history and on the theater’s
potential”.
307
She further suggests that the revival of the play comes “with a sense of
urgency” and is “infused with hope”, and suggests that Phylicia Rashad, who
portrayed Lena Younger, echoes this sentiment when she contends that the play is
about “continuity…seeing this dream through”.
308
Smith then turns to Sean Combs’
turn as Walter Lee Younger and positions it as suggestive of this continuity saying,
“having [him] play the striving son, is unexpectedly fitting…he has seen the dream
through; he is the entrepreneur that Walter Lee could not have imagined.”
309
Finally,
Smith closes her review with a suggestion for audiences, “first see “Raisin” and then
“Caroline”. [i]t’s the past pushing us into the present”.
310
Smith’s review of A Raisin in the Sun takes into serious consideration how its
representations signify in the current moment. Demonstrating an awareness of how
the representations of “blackness” in the play can potentially function as a kind of
straight jacket, forever binding them to images of a “mama on the couch”, she turns
to the current moment to find new interpretative possibilities. Locating them in Sean
307
Anna Deveare Smith. “Two Visions of Love, Family and Race Across the Generations” The New
York Times. May 29, 2004: B9.
308
Smith B9.
309
Ibid.
310
Ibid.
165
Combs, she then points to how he infuses the foregone conclusion of Walter
Younger with new meaning, but also emphasizes how the play by its nature “reached
out to its public” in his casting. In other words, she allows that its representations can
speak to anyone who seeks them out. Finally, in linking A Raisin in the Sun to
Caroline, or Change, Smith succeeds in establishing and foregrounding continuity in
and across representations of “blackness”. In linking Kushner’s musical that traces
the resistance of Louisiana maid Caroline Thibodeaux resistance to political and
social change and her daughter Emmie’s embrace of it to A Raisin in the Sun, a play
that tries to advance social change she effectively allows “blackness” to travel
outside of existent boundaries.
Allowing the past to push us into the present as Smith puts it, creates space to
reflect on how representations of “blackness signify within the specifics of their
historicity”.
311
In other words, looking to the past to discover how it connects to and
shapes the current moment provides a way of accessing alternate and intersecting
meanings of representations from both the past and the present. It provides for a full
consideration of the ways in which the representations have served as a method of
cultural survival for African Americans in and through history. Ultimately, the
strategies employed in Troubling the Boundaries: “Blacknesses”, Performance and
the African-American Freedom Struggle seek to encourage the interpretation
representations of “blackness” and by extension, African American identity,that
311
E. Patrick Johnson, “The Pot Calling the Kettle Black” Theatre Journal 57 (2005) 605-608.
166
subvert oppressive conventions and provide possibilities for both individual and
collective liberation.
167
References
Anderson, Terry H. The Movement and the Sixties (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1995)
Atkinson, Brooks. Rev. of Raisin in the Sun. New York. Ethel Barrymore Theater.
New York Times. 12 March 1959.
Austin, Gayle. “Alice Childress: Black Woman Playwright as Feminist Critic” The
Southern Quarterly 25.3 (1987): 53-62.
Aston, Frank. Rev. of Raisin in the Sun. New York: Ethel Barrymore Theater. New
York World Telegram. 12 March 1959.
Awkward, Michael. Negotiating Difference: Race, Gender, and the Politics of
Positionality. (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1994).
Barbershop. Dir. Tim Story Perfs. Ice Cube, Anthony Anderson, and Cedric The
Entertainer. DVD. Prod. Metro Goldwyn Mayer. Distr. Metro Goldwyn Mayer,
2003.
Baro, Madeline. “Black Panthers in Cat Fight/60’s Activists Defend Title Against
‘90’s Party They Call Racist,” Houston Chronicle, 9 March 1997. 2 star ed.: State 4.
Bellafante, Ginia. “Theatre Review: ‘60s Prejudice and Capitalism as a Big Blond
Metaphor” New York Times. January 24, 2007.
Benston, Kimberly W. Performing Blackness: Enactments of African-American
Modernism (London: Routledge, 2000) 6.
Berson, Misha. “Actress Drinks Deep of a Role; 1969 Play’s Questions Endure” The
Seattle Times. June 19, 2006: E3.
Black, Susan M. Rev. of Purlie Victorious. New York. Cort Theater. Theatre Arts
45:12 December 1961.
Branch, Taylor. Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1954-1963. (New
York: Simon and Schuster, 1989) 120-121.
Brantley, Ben. “Theatre Review; A Breakthrough 50s Drama Revived in a
Suspenseful Mood” New York Times. April 27, 2004 9E.
168
Briggs, Jr. Vernon M. “A Postmortem Examination of the Kerner Commission
Report: Discussion” http://digitalcommons.ilr.cornell.edu/brigsI/13.(accessed April
25, 2007).
Brown-Guillory Elizabeth. Their Place on the Stage: Black Women Playwrights in
America. New York: Praeger, 1990
Brustein, Robert. Rev. of Purlie Victorious. New York. Cort Theater. The New
Republic 142:22 November 6, 1961.
Bunch Davis, Carol . “Alice Childress” Encyclopedia of African American Women
Writers. Yolanda Williams Page, ed. Greenwood Press, 2007.
Carlson, Marvin. Performance: A Critical Introduction. London: Routledge, 1996.
Carter, Dan T. From George Wallace to Newt Gingrich: Race in the Conservative
Counterrevolution, 1963-1994. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press,
1996.
Carter, Stephen R. Hansberry’s Drama: Commitment Amid Complexity. Urbana:
Illinois UP, 1991(125).
Cassuto, Leonard. The Inhuman Race: The Racial Grotesque in American Literature
and Culture. New York: Columbia UP, 1997.
Chafe, William. Civilities and Civil Rights. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1981.
Childress, Alice. Wine in the Wilderness in Black Theatre U.S.A: Plays by African
Americans. James V. Hatch and Ted Shine, eds. New York: The Free Press, 1996.
(344-362).
Cuddon, J.A. The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory. New
York: Penguin, 1991.
Davis, Ossie. Purlie Victorious. New York: Samuel French, 1961.
Deveare Smith, Anna. “Two Visions of Love, Family and Race Across the
Generations” The New York Times. May 29, 2004: B9.
Diamond, Elin. ed. Performance and Cultural Politics. (London: Routledge, 1996).
Dolan, Jill. “Geographies of Learning: Theatre Studies, Performance, and the
Performative” Theatre Journal 45 (1996) 417-444.
169
Driver, Tom F. Rev. of A Raisin in the Sun. New York. Ethel Barrymore Theater.
New Republic. April 1959.
DuBois, W.E.B. “Of Our Spiritual Strivings” The Souls of Black Folk. Eds. Henry
Louis Gates, Jr. and Terri Hume Oliver. New York: W.W. Norton, 1999.
Dugan, Olga. “Telling the Truth: Alice Childress as Theorist and Playwright”
Journal of African American History 81 (1996) 123-136.
Dyson, Michael Eric. Is Bill Cosby Right? Or Has the Black Middle Class Lost Its
Mind? New York: Basic Civitas, 2005.
Elam, Jr., Harry J. “Change Clothes and Go: A Postscript to Postblackness” in Black
Cultural Traffic: Crossroads in Global Performance and Popular Culture. eds. Harry
J. Elam, Jr. and Kennell Jackson. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005.
(379-388).
Elam, Jr., Harry J. and David Krasner, eds. African-American Performance and
Theater History: A Critical Reader. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).
Flowers, Sandra Hollin. Pens of Fire: African American Nationalist Literature of the
1960s. (New York: Garland Books, 1996).
Foster, Susan Leigh. “Choreographies of Protest” Theatre Journal 55 (2003) 395-
412.
Franklin, John Hope. From Slavery To Freedom: A History of Negro Americans.
New York: Knopf, 1980 (409).
Gaines, Kevin . Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership, Politics, and Culture in the
Twentieth Century. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996).
Garrow, David. Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Southern
Christian Leadership Conference, 1955-1968. (New York: Morrow, 1986).
Gates, Jr. Henry Louis. “Literary Theory and the Black Tradition” Reception Study:
From Literary Theory to Cultural Studies. James Machor and Philip Goldstein eds.
(London: Routledge, 2001) 113-125.
Gates, Henry Louis Jr. and Nellie Y. McKay. Eds. The Norton Anthology of African
American Literature. New York: Norton, 1997.
Giddings, Paula. Where and When I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race
and Sex in America (New York: Bantam, 1984)
Gitlin, Todd. The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage. (New York: Bantam, 1989).
170
Gould, Jack. “TV Review: Social Ills Are Focus of 2 N.E.T Premieres” The New
York Times. October 7, 1969. (96).
Gray, Herman. “Cultural Politics as Outrage(ous)” Black Renaissance/Renaissance
Noire 3 (2000) 92-102.
Hansberry, Lorraine. A Raisin in the Sun. New York: Random House, 1959.
Haines, Herbert. Black Radicals and the Civil Rights Mainstream-1954-1970
(Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1988)
Harding, Vincent. Hope and History: Why We Must Share the Story of the
Movement (New York: Orbis Books, 1990)
Harper, Phillip Brian. Are We Not Men? Masculine Anxiety and the Problem of
African-American Identity. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996).
Harris, Fred, et al. “The Millenium Breach: The American Dilemma, Richer and
Poorer” http://www.eisenhowerfoundation.org/frames/main_frameMB.html
(accessed April 30, 2007).
Hewitt, Roger. White Backlash and the Politics of Multiculturalism. Cambridge:
Cambridge UP, 2005.
Hoover, Ted. Rev. of Purlie Victorious. Pittsburgh City Paper. February 23, 2006.
(23).
E. Patrick Johnson. Appropriating Blackness: Performance and the Politics of
Authenticity. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003) 7.
--- “The Pot Calling the Kettle Black” Theatre Journal 57 (2005) 605-608.
Jones, LeRoi. Dutchman and The Slave. New York: Morrow, 1964.
Kelley, Robin D.G. Yo Mama’s Dysfunktional!: Fighting the Culture Wars in Urban
America. Boston: Beacon, 1997.
Kennedy, Randall. Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word. New York:
Vintage Books, 2002.
Kerr, Walter. Rev of A Raisin in the Sun. New York. Ethel Barrymore Theater. New
York Herald-Tribune. 12 March 1959.
---- Rev. of Purlie Victorious. New York. Cort Theater. New York Herald-Tribune.
29 September 1961.
171
Kriegsman, Alan M. “On Being Black” The Washington Post-Times Herald. June
18, 1971: B13.
Kumar, Nita N. “The Logic of Retribution: Amiri Baraka’s Dutchman”. African
American Review. 37:2-3: (2003) 271-279.
Levy, Peter B. America in the Sixties: Right, Left, and Center A Documentary
History.Westport, CT: Praeger, 1998.
“Letter to the Editor” Time. Friday, August 14, 1964.
Mayer, Jeremy. “LBJ Fights the White Backlash: The Racial Politics of the 1964
Presidential Campaign”. Prologue Magazine. 33:1 (Spring 2001)
Linn, Mike. “Law Day Marks Boycott Victory” The Montgomery Advertiser. May
5, 2006 C1.
McClain, John. Rev. of A Raisin in the Sun. New York. Ethel Barrymore Theater.
Journal American. 12 March 1959.
McGee, Celia. “A Return to Rage, Played Out in Black and White” New York
Times. January 14, 2007.
McGrew, Jannell. “Living Link to Boycott Honors Parks”. Montgomery Advertiser,
November 3, 2005. A 1.
Miller, James. “Democracy is in the Streets”: From Port Huron to the Siege of
Chicago (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987)
Merriam-Webster. Merriam-Webster’s Encyclopedia of Literature.
Springfield:Merriam-Webster, 1995.
Munoz, Lorenza and Greg Braxton. “Black Leaders Angered by Scene Say
“Barbershop’ Needs a Trim” Los Angeles Times. September 25, 2002. A1
Neal, Mark Anthony. What The Music Said: Black Popular Music and Black Public
Culture. New York: Routledge, 1999 (9).
Oliver, Edith. Rev. of Dutchman. “Off Broadway Over The Edge” Cherry Lane
Theater. New York. The New Yorker. 4 April 1964:23.
Orland, Kat. “Black is Back at ACT: A Potent ‘60s Era Script Ushers in a New
African-American Theater Project” Seattle Weekly. June 21, 2006. (55).
172
Popkin, Henry. Rev. of Dutchman. “Dutchman a Furious Account” New York.
Cherry Lane Theater. Vogue. July 1964:32.
“Purlie Victorious: Bright Broadway Hit Lampoons Dixie and Bestows Double
Stardom on Ossie Davis” Rev. of Purlie Victorious. New York. Cort Theater. Ebony.
March 1962.
Rawson, Christopher. “Stage Review: New Horizon’s ‘Purlie Victorious’ Pushes
Stereotypes to Comic Effect” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. February 16, 2006. (6)
Rebhorn, Matthew. “Flaying Dutchman: Masochism, Minstrelsy, and the Gender
Politics of Amiri Baraka’s Dutchman” Callaloo 26.3 (2003) 796-812.
Reid, Mark. PostNegritude Visual and Literary Culture. (Albany: State University of
New York Press, 1997).
---. Redefining Black Film (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993)
Rhines Jesse. Black Film/White Money, (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press,
1996).
Rhodes, Jane. “Fanning the Flames of Racial Discord: The National Press and the
Black Panther Party” The Harvard International Journal of Press Politics 4.4. (1999)
95-118
Román, David. Acts of Intervention: Performance, Gay Culture, and AIDS.
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998)
--- Performance in America: Contemporary U.S. Culture and the Performing Arts.
Durham: Duke UP, 2005
Ross, Marlon. “Camping the Dirty Dozens: The Queer Resources of Black
Nationalist Invective”. Callaloo 23.1 (2000) 290-312.
Roth, Philip. “Channel X: Two Plays on the Race Conflict” New York: Cherry Lane
Theater. The New York Times Review of Books. 28 May 1964: 10-12.
Ryan, Michael and Douglas Kellner, Camera Politica: The Politics and Ideology of
Contemporary Hollywood Film. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988) 10-
13.
Sanchez, George. Lecture. “Politics and Culture of the 1960s”. University of
Southern California. February 11, 2001.
173
Sánchez-Eppler, Karen. “Bodily Bonds: The Intersecting Rhetorics of Feminism and
Abolition” Representations 24 (1988): 28-59.
Schechner, Richard. Between Theater and Anthropology. Philadelphia: Pennsylvania
UP, 1985.
Schroeder, Patricia. “Re-reading Alice Childress” in Staging Difference: Cultural
Pluralism in American Theatre and Drama. Ed. Marc Maufort. New York: Peter
Lang, 1995.
Shayon, Robert Lewis. “Curiouser and Curiouser” Saturday Review 53:43. August
8,1970.
Siegel Ed. “”New York Stage Report: Bright But Not Sunny the Sentimental Is Out
In A Crop of Smart Plays” Boston Globe. May 30, 2004: N4.
Smith, Suzanne E. Dancing in the Street: Motown and the Cultural Politics of
Detroit. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1999.
Taubman, Howard. Rev. of Purlie Victorious “Theatre: ‘Purlie Victorious’ Romps
In” New York. Cort Theater. New York Times. 29 September 1961.
--- Rev. of Dutchman. “Drama Opens on Triple Bill at Cherry Lane” New York.
Cherry Lane Theater. The New York Times. 25 March 1964:46:2.
Taylor, Nora E. “Public TV’s Big New Season: From ‘Forsyte' to Buckley to
O’Horgan” Christian Science Monitor. September 29, 1969 (6).
Turner, Victor. From Ritual to Theatre. New York: Performing Arts Publications,
1982.
“Underground Fury” Rev. of Dutchman. New York. Cherry Lane Theater.
Newsweek. 13 April 1964:60
“Uncle Tom Exhumed” Rev. of Purlie Victorious. New York. Cort Theater. Time.
October 6, 1961.
United States Commission on Civil Rights. A Time to Listen. . . . A Time to Act:
Voices From the Ghettos of the Nation’s Cities. Washington: GPO, 1967.
- - - Freedom to the Free: A Century of Emancipation 1863-1963. Washington:
GPO, 1963.
United States Kerner Commission, “The Communications Media, Ironically, Have
Failed to Communicate”: The Kerner Report Assess Media Coverage of Riots and
174
Race Relations” Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders.
http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/6553 (accessed April 25, 2007).
Van Deburg, William. A New Day In Babylon: The Black Power Movement and
American Culture, 1965-1975. Chicago: Chicago UP, 1992.
--- Black Camelot: African-American Culture Heroes in Their Times, 1960-1980
(Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1997)
Ward, Brian E. ed., Media, Culture, and the Modern African American Freedom
Struggle. (Tallahassee: Florida University Press, 2001).
Watts, Richard. Rev. of A Raisin in the Sun. New York. Ethel Barrymore Theater.
New York Post. 12 March 1959.
Weiss, Hedy. “Diddy on Broadway: It’s As If Something’s Holding Him Down”
Chicago Sun-Times. April 27, 2004; 41.
“What Wisconsin Means” Time. April 17, 1964.
Wilkinson, Doris Y. ed. Black Revolt: Strategies of Protest. Berkeley: McCutchan,
1969.
Williams, Juan. Eyes on the Prize: America’s Civil Rights Years, 1954-1965 New
York: Viking Books, 1987).
Williams, Raymond. “The Future of Cultural Studies” John Storey Ed. What is
Cultural Studies: A Reader. London: Arnold, 1997.

Abstract (if available)

Linked assets

University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

Conceptually similar

PDF

Sampling blackness: performing African Americanness in hip-hop theater and performance

PDF

"What is black, white and yellow all over?" an analysis of the racial experiences of people of Asian/white and Asian/black heritage

PDF

Splitting Aztlán: American resistance and Chicana visions of a radical utopia

PDF

"As shelters against the cold": women writers of the Black Arts and Chicano movements, 1965-1978

PDF

Carrying the fire home: performing nation, identity, indigenous diaspora and home in the poems, songs, and performances of Arigon Starr, Joy Harjo and Gayle Ross

PDF

Wonder boys: tales of the extraordinarily queer adolescent

PDF

The mythology of Nat Turner: black theology and black revolt in the shaping of American myth and symbol

PDF

Describing and mapping the sources of college impact on the identity development of African American college students attending a predominantly white institution

PDF

Representational conquest: tourism, display, and public memory in “America’s finest city”

PDF

Imagining alliance: queer anti-imperialism and race in California, 1966-1990

PDF

On speaking terms: spirituality and sensuality in the tradition of modern black female intellectualism

PDF

Labor, performance, and theatre: Strike culture and the emergence of organized labor in the 1930's

PDF

Creating cities and citizens: municipal boundaries, place entrepreneurs, and the production of race in Los Angeles county, 1926-1978

PDF

Lake Elsinore: a southern California African American resort area during the Jim Crow era, 1920s-1960s, and the challenges of historic preservation commemoration

PDF

The successful African American Parenting (SAAP) Program: an evaluation of a culturally sensitive parenting intervention

PDF

A place in the sun: Mexican Americans, race, and the suburbanization of Los Angeles, 1940-1980

PDF

Nature, nurture, nation: race and childhood in transatlantic American discourses of slavery

PDF

"Home is Little Tokyo": race, community, and memory in twentieth-century Los Angeles

PDF

The fabled fourth estate: media freedom, democracy and human rights

PDF

The implementation of strategies to minimize the achievement gap for African-American, Latino, English learners, and socio-economically disadvantaged students

Asset Metadata

Creator Davis, Carol Bunch (author)

Core Title Troubling the boundaries: "blacknesses," performance, and the African American freedom struggle of the 1960s

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program English

Publication Date 06/28/2009

Defense Date 06/11/2007

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag African American studies,American Literature,American studies,OAI-PMH Harvest

Language English

Advisor Roman, David (committee chair), Kincaid, James R. (committee member), Sanchez, George J. (committee member)

Creator Email davisc@tamug.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-m564

Unique identifier UC1203161

Identifier etd-Davis-20070628 (filename),usctheses-m40 (legacy collection record id),usctheses-c127-510952 (legacy record id),usctheses-m564 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-Davis-20070628.pdf

Dmrecord 510952

Document Type Dissertation

Rights Davis, Carol Bunch

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Repository Name Libraries, University of Southern California

Repository Location Los Angeles, California