Performing blackness in Caryl Phillips’s Dancing in the Dark

Abstract

This paper investigates the theatrical stage both as a walled-in space where ethnic difference can be safely experienced and consumed, and as a gateway for black performers to achieve public visibility and recognition as appears in Caryl Phillips’s novel Dancing in the Dark (2005). Phillips’s main character puts blackface on his own black skin to handle what Edward Said would name the “anxious power” of performance; this power becomes, in Phillips’s own postcolonial rereading, a device to expose the performativity of racial borders and gateways. Here, the theatrical curtain works as a gateway to acceptance and, in some cases, integration; yet it also becomes a wall enclosing the performer in her/his own performance of “the Other”.

Keywords:

• Caryl Phillips
• black minstrelsy
• performance
• Harlem Renaissance
• mirror stage

Notes

1. Bert’s stage persona, “The Jonah Man” is a version of the minstrel “plantation darky” or Jim Crow, and as such is mentioned in the eponymous song from Williams and Walker’s Broadway show In Dahomey (1903) reported in the novel: “My hard luck started when I was born, leas’ so the old folks say. / [ … ] For I’m a Jonah, / I’m an unlucky man” (Phillips 2005, 81).

2. The audience at the Follies was rigorously white-only; during his career, however, Williams regularly played for both black and white audiences, although generally in segregated venues where black spectators were relegated to the upper rows, nicknamed “nigger heaven” (Phillips 2005, 83). The question of black spectatorship will be addressed later in this article.

3. I here borrow Michelle Ann Stephens’s notion that “[the] authenticity [of Bert’s performances] rests on the degree to which they characterize the shifts and breaks marking off one cultural moment from another, each with their respective contradictions” (2008, 132): hence Phillips applies it quite freely to such apparently opposite performances as blackface minstrelsy on the one hand, and the blues and jazz of the Harlem Renaissance on the other, as will emerge later in my discussion of the novel’s opening lines.

4. Fanon explicitly references Lacan’s theory here, remarking the difference between the white child’s and the black child’s experience of the mirror stage. On the one hand, “the imago of his fellow built up in the young white at the usual age would undergo an imaginary aggression with the appearance of the Negro”, marking the black man as Other for the white man; for the black child, on the other hand, the social construction of blackness as Otherness leads to a rejection of the subject’s social identification as black (see Fanon 1967, 161–162).

5. I wish to thank Bénédicte Ledent for this suggestion.

6. The Zip Coon, first played by George Washington Dixon in 1834, impersonated the “city Negro”, whose clothes and manners parodied the desire of urban blacks for upward class mobility: “Constructed as a trickster, the citified dandy Zip Coon represented freedom without the self-control needed for republican virtue [ … ] to emphasize that, however ‘free’, the African American could only masquerade as a citizen” (Lee 1999, 35).

7. The “black buck” stereotype also derives from the minstrel imagery, but it has been rejected with far less vehemence than the shuffling and dumb plantation darky: as Linda Williams argues, “the ‘anti-Tom’ reinvention of this figure in the reconstruction era [ … ] put a new spin on the stereotype by presenting the comic minstrel as a melodramatic villain in perpetual lust after white women” (2008, 101). George appears to be a veritable incarnation of this stereotype as he is a notorious womanizer and takes a white lover, while Bert appears to be completely uninterested in sexual relationships even with his own wife, and the reader is left with the doubt whether this may be due to a psychologically driven impotence or to a repressed homosexuality.

8. This analysis of the role of women in the novel is by necessity sketchy; in particular, I am unable here to expand either on the binary between Ada and her husband’s Irish lover, Eva Tanguay, or on Ada’s travesty role as substitute for George right after his stroke, which points to another level of (gendered) performativity.

9. Nowatzki actually attributes the attempt at passing for white to “light-skinned persons of exclusive European ancestry” (2007, 116). Yet Phillips’s careful exploration of Bert’s racial identity as markedly not African American but indeed West African, and of the role of his light complexion in his blackface performance, blurs the black-white divide which Nowatzki correctly locates in the US context.