In her article “Performance as Place Preservation: The Role of Storytelling in the Formation of Shankleville Community’s Black Counterpublics,” Andrea R. Roberts defines performance as “a form of a dialogue between place, political issue or grievance, memory, and audience” that allows Black communities to maintain their personal and geographical identities (Roberts 8, 6). For example, Roberts explains, the Black residents of Shankleville, Texas hold a biennial celebration to perform their town’s origin story (11). This performance acts as a “dialogue” by connecting current residents to their collective “memory” of their town’s founders (1-2, 13). Residents’ relationship with this origin story helps them resist predominant white understandings of geography, which characterize recognize Black spaces as “frontier” rather than recognizing their importance (1, 6-7). Instead, performance of Shankleville’s place-based origin story allows residents to maintain a sense of place-based identity and assert their home’s rich history and value. They thus strengthen their community’s bonds and ensure its continued unity (3).
I read Zora Neale Hurston’s book Barracoon as another example of performance as dialogue.1 Within the text, Kossola “performs” the story of his life through conversation with Hurston (Hurston). His performance thus literally occurs through dialogue, demonstrating performance’s interlocutory nature. Beyond the pages recounting Kossola’s performance, Zora Neale Hurston re-performs Kossola’s story by editing it, however minimally, in order to publish it. Hurston’s performance is not explicitly dialogical. However, I find that her difficulty producing Barracoon—she struggled to find a media form that could convey the story and ultimately failed to publish the book during her lifetime—demonstrates tension between the version of the story that Kossola recounted and the version of the story she could present (Womack). I interpret that tension as dialogue: Hurston’s process of revising Barracoon from film to story collection to its current manuscript form demonstrates an ongoing, shifting connection between Kossola’s performance and hers. Hurston’s publishing process process thus creates a dialogue between Kossola’s performed story and its transcription, reinforcing Roberts’ definition of performance as inherently dialogical.
Jacqueline Shea Murphy, in her article “Unrest and Uncle Tom: Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company’s Last Supper at Uncle Tom’s Cabin/The Promised Land,” explores a more literal iteration of performance than Roberts and Hurston. Shea Murphy situates her work at the intersection of “performance, violence and African Americans,” pointing out that enslavers and oppressors historically employed performance—especially dance—to subjugate and ridicule Black people (Shea Murphy 82, 83). Instead of continuing that tradition, Bill T. Jones’ performance piece Last Supper at Uncle Tom’s Cabin/The Promised Land performs violence to push back against violent oppression. For example, Jones’ work demonstrates that performance can “respon[d]” to violence rather than perpetuating it through its stylized presentation of Uncle Tom’s whipping and through actor R. Justice Allen’s rap (98-99). Through performances like these, Shea Murphy argues, Black Americans can demonstrate and comment on violent systems without perpetuating the violence those systems employ against them. Performance thus becomes a “political tool” for Black Americans confronted with violent oppression (99).
Shea Murphy also explores performance as closely linked to identity. For example, she explains that performances like Harry’s dance in the book Uncle Tom’s Cabin “serve as a sign of the position of Africans in America” during enslavement (85). White enslavers interpreted their own control over supposedly African-American performances as evidence that enslaved individuals were separate from and subordinate to white people.2 Stereotypically African-American performances thus reinforced oppressors’ personal, racialized sense of superiority (85). Yet enslaved Black people also retained agency over their performances and, through them, the identities they presented to their enslavers. In Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Topsy depicts this dynamic by “playing the part of the heathen, dancing Negro” to manipulate her enslavers (85). Her performed identity demonstrates that, as Shea Murphy argues and Last Supper demonstrates, performance allows its performer to present an identity “constructed in and by and for the viewing, laughing public” (96).
Poet and scholar Clint Smith, in his article “Monuments to the Unthinkable,” explores performance within the context of remembering atrocity. More specifically, Smith questions whether Germany’s Monument to the Murdered Jews of Europe helps Germans “collectively remember” the Holocaust or represents “a performance of contrition” to the outside world (Smith 30-31). Smith thus juxtaposes performance with a genuine desire to understand atrocity, contrasting with Shea Murphy’s understanding of performance as a meaningful study of violence. Instead, Smith’s discussion of performance as a dialogue through which Germany apologizes to the rest of the world aligns with Roberts’ and Hurston’s exploration of performance as interlocutory. Germany’s dialogical performance, however, remains distinct from Hurston and Roberts’ justice-oriented and identity-preserving focus. Instead, Germany’s performed apology may replace more concrete efforts to respond to its historical wrongs.
- The claim that I explain here was not originally my own; I encountered it during a Plenary discussion of Roberts and Hurston’s work, guided by Dr. Bowles. My extrapolation reflects my consideration of and expansion upon that conversation. ↩︎
- I say “supposedly” because, as Shea Murphy explains, the dances that Stowe references derived more from minstrel shows than actual African tradition. In the scene in question here, Harry, “a light-skinned slave, while ostensibly mimicking another, darker slave, is actually copying the minstrel performance techniques of whites in blackface” (Shea Murphy 84). ↩︎
