During this Module we explored texts that challenged the black-white binary that shapes the American racial imaginary.
How are scholars and artists interrogating shifting definitions of blackness and whiteness over time? What do we make of the multivalent and conflicting language used to describe race, its ascription to particular groups and its regulation by the state? How might cross-racial performance and transnational comparisons of racial formations foster social, cultural and political connections between and within communities that can enable new ways of thinking about race and ethnicity?
Monday, March 2, 2015
Module 3- Disrupting the Black-White Binary
During this Module we explored texts that challenged the black-white binary that shapes the American racial imaginary.
How are scholars and artists interrogating shifting definitions of blackness and whiteness over time? What do we make of the multivalent and conflicting language used to describe race, its ascription to particular groups and its regulation by the state? How might cross-racial performance and transnational comparisons of racial formations foster social, cultural and political connections between and within communities that can enable new ways of thinking about race and ethnicity?
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David Roman defines performance as “a cultural practice that does more than illustrate the social and historical context in which it is embedded. At its best, it shapes and transform the way we understand and experience our lives.” Performance, by lifting a specific moment or event to the audiences’ view, creates an alternative space/mean capable of exploring the subjective lives of others in an objective manner. This looking at other’s life objectively was at the heart of the performance done by the 84Theatre Company in a café in Tehran, Iran, in 2014.
ReplyDeleteBefore the performance begins, the director explains that Endless Monologue is a verbatim show based on the interviews that he has done with ordinary people. This ordinary people, he explains, had different stories to tell, stories that the cultural hegemony in Iran has no words or tendency to articulate them. In Endless Monologue the performers are supposed to listen to the pre-recorded voices of the interviewees through their headsets and retell to the audience what exactly they have heard. However, the director mentions that the interviewees are among the audiences, anonymously, and are listening to their own stories, too. It is at this moment that the search for identifying these misfit individuals begins. While the stories are being told, audiences constantly look around and through their gazes they ask from one another that “is this you?” The performers, by embodying these misfit individuals from the outside instead of approaching them through the methods of “self-absorption and interiorized motivation,” provide a gap for audiences to perform and to practice their identities through their gazes. It is this gaze, this looking at each other that makes the event a performance and as Roman believes it is through these types of performances that audiences can experience and understand their lives.
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ReplyDeleteStuart Hall begins his piece “Race, Articulation and Societies Structured in Dominance,” by exploring two lines of theory which have dominated theoretical discourse surrounding race. One is economic, the other, sociological. An economic line of inquiry takes the point of view that race cannot be understood outside of specific sets of economic structures. The sociological line of inquiry attempts to understand broad social categories, wherein race is treated as its own category, intertwined with politics and ethnicity.
ReplyDeleteIn the other performances and readings we’ve explored, we can see the ways in which both the economic and sociologic play a role in how a body’s race is constructed. Performers such as Margaret Cho, John Leguizamo, and “Jane the Virgin” (played by Gina Rodriguez) all challenge us to disrupt the “black-white binary” – a reductive address of race which over-simplifies discussions of race. Hall’s right: neither category is sufficient to capture the complexities of understanding race as a whole; they are tethered to one another in complex ways. If we isolate economics for instance, the body of a Latina woman such as Jennifer Lopez – a commercially successful actress and presumably wealthy – is raced differently in media discourse than a Latina woman who occupies a lower economic strata, and is therefore classed differently. While untethering economics from sociology or vice versa might reveal specific truths, the greater picture of race is never complete without grasping the intersection of where the two meet. Or take it from Culture Clash in AmeriCCa, who in performance exclaim, “If they’re going to build a wall to keep out the Mexicans, guess who’s going to build the wall?” Dominant, hegemonic discourse has created unequal relationships among bodies, and in this discourse, some are more valued than others. It is up to us to break down those artificial distinctions and restore equal value to all bodies: but color is just a starting point.
It is the world that insists on engaging in a black-white binary that Dorinne Kondo responds to when she writes about the need to create “new kinds of formations to combat hegemonic forces.” She argues that it is in theatre where we can find visions of possibility for those new formations. It is through the work of Anna Deavere Smith where notions of identity are problematized through the theatre. It is not Smith’s intent to pass for every gendered and raced body that she portrays on stage, but to distance herself from her characters in hopes that the audience will recognize and “experience the gap.” This is her way of interrogating the definitions of blackness and whiteness through historically specific bodies. In doing so she de-essentializes race, while also arguing that it has something to say. Stuart Hall argues that in order to understand the historical ‘work’ which racism accomplishes, one must understand historical conditions — economic, political, and ideological practices — that are directly linked to hegemony.
ReplyDeleteAs David Román writes about the idea of the present, he describes a similar objective as he wants the audience to imagine itself within a “fluid and nearly suspended temporal condition, living in a moment not yet in the past and not yet in the future, yet a period we imagine as having some power to shape our relation to both history and futurity.” It is not just the popular imaginary that Román is concerned with, but the vernacular one. Performance offers the vernacular imaginary “the means to embody [the tension of the gap] and [to] critically assess it as a community.” It is the conditions of the raced and gendered bodies that David Román confronts as he prioritizes the need to challenge racial normativity so that we might allow ourselves to imagine race and power differently.
While attempting to understand the macro implications of race, class, gender, etc… more often than not academics attempt to shotgun answers across the a ubiquitous society. Originally, Hall and Rex left me with a bad taste in my mouth, seemingly attempting to provide macro-level theorems to complex societal issues that present themselves on varying and intersecting levels.
ReplyDeleteMacro-level engagements offer few answers, and house fewer applications. Hall admits that the South African model is ‘peculiar,’ (312) not just geographically but through temporal understandings of these intersections. This ultimately leaves me doubting the Rex model as it lacks the specificity of the geographical and temporal understandings. Furthermore, even in the same national geographical space, regionalism offers issues that the Rex model will continue to lack.
While an intriguing starting point, I feel that the applications of Roman from last week offer far more substantive applications. Rather than offer a starting point or a model and perhaps the benefit of a book over an article, Roman analyzes various performances and spotlights different intersectionalities be it sexuality, race etc… but understands the various dynamics interplaying into a piece and never completely leaving other topics out of the conversation.
This, I hope, is how my own work functions. Its perfectly acceptable to put the spotlight on a particular aspect of the “Gramscian superstructure” or systems of power, but never leave these other intersections out of the spotlight. Race might be performing in an interesting manner in one’s work, but that does not mean that class or gender is also not functioning in the object of study I suppose, I ultimately find that micro level understandings of an issue or topic will always be more helpful to think about my own work, rather than a macro-level discussion of how race, gender, sexuality, etc… intersect, because ultimately the competing forces will always be in fluxuation and intersecting at different angles in different studies.
Jenna Lyons
ReplyDeleteThe black-white binary in the United States needs to be interrogated before one can evens tart to speak about race in America. However, with any binary, society has created a duality, a dichotomy, a system of two. When only two racial identities are examined in the discussion of race in America, others are ignored, overlooked, and illegible. As a result, it becomes important and necessary that people (scholars and performers, as is the focus of our course) confront and challenge the black-white binary in order to claim a racial identity. David Román’s Performance in America, Margaret Cho’s stand-up comedy, and the television series Jane the Virgin all seek to claim a racial identity by disrupting the black-white binary and challenge assumptions of citizenship and immigration.
In chapter two, Román works from the intersection of immigration and racial identity. Román confronts the myth that immigration is a Latino/a concern, and that in being so, citizenship is based on questions of illegality in immigration. Román makes legible Asian-American racial and ethnic identities in the face of the black-white binary by investigating the Asian-American immigration experience and its unique history of national policy and discrimination. In the realm of popular culture, the comedy of Margaret Cho dismantles immigration as an essentialized Latino/a experience and a national mythology of European citizenship. As a first generation American with Korean parents, Cho challenges dominant conversations on race and immigration. Jane the Virgin is a cultural import from Venezuela and focuses on Jane and her story, as opposed to her legality. It forges Latino/a legibility by separating Latino/a characters from immigration narratives. Ugly Betty worked toward a similar goal, but emphasized the illegality and lack of citizenship of her father, a plotline that further embedded Latino/a citizenship and racial and ethnic legibility in legal discourse.
Hall’s “articulation” focuses on the linkages between parts of a complex structure, “a structure in which things are related, as much through their differences as through their similarities” (325). Race is “structured in dominance,” a dominance that has social and material results (325). Hall would have us ask, “What are the different forms and relations in which these racial fractions were combined under capital?” (339-40). The question I address here is: how is race articulated in Lin Manuel Miranda’s Tony acceptance speech?
ReplyDeleteOn Broadway and in the Tony Awards ceremony, Miranda’s performances are marked by his body, always already racialized as other, and by his chosen mode of performance. Broadway’s financial power structure, those with the capital to invest in others’ labor, is predominantly white and overwhelmingly privileges stories focused on whiteness and couched in universal terms. Taking space on the stage as a Latino man Miranda’s body counters normative expectations of who will win the Tony. As Roman says of Leguizamo’s performance, Miranda “reimagines the commercial as a contested site that Latinos should not cede to others” (136).
Rather than fitting into the hegemonic narrative that degrades Latino/a communities, Miranda embraces a counter narrative that foregrounds pride in his Puerto Rican heritage and uses rap as cultural expression. Miranda waves the Puerto Rican flag in his Tony Award acceptance speech in opposition to the dominant US centric perspective of Broadway. In rapping his speech Miranda claims authority for a form of expression historically connected to speaking truth against power and to marginalized groups. The in-the-room audience’s split response – a few cheers punctuating a large silence– shows the discomfort of people used to operating where the capital and cultural product are dominated by whiteness, and the excitement of those ready for it to change.