Skin Acts: Race, Psychoanalysis, and the Black Male Performer
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Skin Acts: Race, Psychoanalysis, and the Black Male Performer
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780822376651 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Duke University Press |
| Publication date: | 08/24/2014 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 296 |
| File size: | 9 MB |
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Skin Acts
Race, Psychoanalysis, and the Black Male Performer
By Michelle Ann Stephens
Duke University Press
Copyright © 2014 Duke University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-7665-1
CHAPTER 1
Seeing Faces, Hearing Signs
I ain't never done nothin' to nobody,
I ain't never got nothin' from nobody, no time!
And until I get somethin' from somebody, sometime,
I don't intend to do nothin' for nobody, no time!
—BERT WILLIAMS, lyrics, "Nobody"
The obverse of the voice that gives body to what we can never see, to what eludes our gaze, is an image that renders present the failure of the voice [as] a sound that doesn't yet resonate but remains stuck in the throat.
—SLAVOJ ZIZEK, "I Hear You with My Eyes; or, The Invisible Master"
In 1906 Bert Williams's partner, George Walker, wrote an essay for the Theatre Magazine entitled "The Real 'Coon' on the American Stage." In this piece he expressed his hope that "the black man on the American stage [could] rise above being a mere minstrel man," and yet, he knew that the black entertainer in turn-of-the-century America still had to focus on the expectations of a white audience "always interested in what they call 'darky' singing and dancing." Walker was confident that he "could entertain in that way as no white boy could," especially after he observed white performers acting in blackface: "Bert and I watched the white 'coons,' and were often much amused at seeing white men with black cork on their faces trying to imitate black folks. Nothing about these white men's actions was natural, and therefore nothing was as interesting as if black performers had been dancing and singing their own songs in their own way." The very real distinction between caricatures of black performance and the actual movements and songs of black subjects of this period may have influenced Walker's idea of what constituted an authentic black performance. However, by billing themselves as "Two Real Coons," Williams and Walker's "darky act" made literal the idea that black actors are coons rather than actors playing coons, inviting audiences to observe them doing what seemingly came naturally.
The play on authenticity that the notion of the "real coon" captures—where is the distinction between the self and what the self performs—mirrors the ways in which the blackface mask functioned as an epidermal sign at the turn of the twentieth century. In Williams and Walker's performances, the blackface mask literally extended its racialized meanings over their skin. The body of the minstrel became "facialized," that is, ruled by that aspect of the symbolic grid in which the most obvious sign of the intersection between signification and subjectification is the human face, a "white wall/black hole system." Unlike Deleuze and Guattari's face on the symbolic grid, however, which is that of the "White Man himself, with his broad white cheeks and the black hole of his eyes," the hole is now the black facial surface and the white wall the unseen gaze of the cultural grid or screen. In the interaction between the two, "the mask is now the face itself," that is, blackness becomes, signifies as, a reified image or thing. Physiognomy and skin color were not only parodied in the blackface mask; they became the primary frame through which white audiences understood the black minstrel's body, speech, and song.
Blackface minstrelsy, then, as both the emblematization and the embodiment of faciality—the process by which the self becomes a subject in the signifying order through surface signifiers such as the face—reflects the popularization of blackness according to a deeper physiognomic logic undergirding colonial modernity. As an aesthetic strategy for black artists seeking recognition at the beginning of the twentieth century, the visual logic of faciality was the primary playing field they had to operate within to assert a sense of self recognizable to American audiences at that time. The first stirrings of the New Negro movement in the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s could be seen in the earlier visual politics of African Americans from the 1890s onward. The turn of the century saw an African American preoccupation with presenting a newly emancipated race to the nation by literally presenting a new face of the race, that is, reconstructing the black image. For all of their ideological differences, two of the leading black male figures of the period, Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois, took advantage of the new medium of photography and the genre of the portrait to engage in a very similar visual project. In 1900 Booker T. Washington edited the book A New Negro for A New Century, which included sixty portraits of idealized black subjects representing members of the race's "progressive class." For the International Exposition in Paris in 1900, Du Bois prepared an exhibit on the lives of African Americans that included hundreds of photographs and individual and family portraits depicting the industry and intelligence of African Americans following slavery and Reconstruction.
The portrait photograph, far from an authentic representation of the black ex-slave at the dawn of the new century, is the very medium through which the modern black subject was turned into a sign that could be recognized, seen: "The head, even the human head, is not necessarily a face. The face is produced only when the head ceases to be a part of the body, when it ceases to be coded by the body, when it ceases to have a multidimensional, polyvocal corporeal code—when the body, head included, has been decoded and has to be overcoded by something we shall call The Face. This amounts to saying that the head, all the volume-cavity elements of the head, have to be facialized." In the portrait photograph, the body of the black subject was as facialized as the body of the blackface minstrel, but here the makeup and props were also gendered codes, producing respectable New Negro men and women as powerful visual signifiers of the race's potential for a fuller form of American citizenship. As Deleuze and Guattari also describe: "The difference between our uniforms and clothes and primitive paintings and garb is that the former effect a facialization of the body, with buttons for black holes against the white wall of the material." In the portrait photographs of the New Negro neither the head nor the body was present; rather, the face and the respectably dressed body of the New Negro were the phallic signifiers and gendered signs through which a newly interpellated black subject addressed a broader American culture.
Black performers like Walker and Williams, working and creating together in the entertainment industries during the early decades of the twentieth century, saw themselves as part of this new effort to present a new face of the Negro to the world. In his fictional biography of Williams in the years surrounding his first show with Walker, In Dahomey, the British Caribbean author Caryl Phillips reconstructs turn-of-the-century Harlem as "a respectable colored world peopled by those who had yet to learn how to grin and bend over for the white man." In this space, Bert Williams the celebrity entertainer "was king, and his subjects were happy to bask in his long, ambling shadow." A "tall, light-skinned man," Williams the elegant performer with his upright public bearing epitomized the idealized New Negro male: "Back then he dressed well, he walked tall, and the bright glare from his shoes could pick a man's eyes clean out of his knobby head. Women watched him pass by, his hardback carriage upright, and they whispered half sentences about him from behind perfumed handkerchiefs.... Men watched him too, with their collars turned high, pulling on ash-heavy cigarettes, their broad feet helplessly anchored to the earth.... Children followed him at a respectable distance ... but the neighborhood man continued on his way, stepping purposefully." In this depiction, repeated in a photograph of the dashing Williams in his three-piece suit with phallic cigarette dangling, Williams wears the joint persona of the New Negro and the West Indian gentleman, Anglophone and Victorian in his sensibilities and carriage (see figure 1.2). In Phillips's reconstruction, Harlem was the perfect setting for Williams and Walker's early ambitions on the American stage because both Williams and the black metropolis shared a turn-of-the-century ideal image of blackness, one based on "that old-fashioned dignity and civic pride," which allowed black "men [to] appear where previously only shades lived." Offstage as New Negroes, the gentleman and the dandy arm in arm, Williams and Walker suited up in an attempt to remove the mantle of the Negro as phobogenic object that they donned onstage as the "Two Real Coons" (see figures 1.3 and 1.4).
The visual politics of the New Negro make sense when one remembers what they were up against, prolific racist caricatures of black people distributed at the turn of the century on postcards that anyone could purchase. While Washington and Du Bois hoped to use portraiture to move the black subject beyond caricature, for the blackface minstrel the two worked as synonyms for each other rather than opposing visual mediums. Although the photograph and the illustration are two distinct mediums with different visual vocabularies, in representing the blackface minstrel they worked together to reinforce blackness in the social field as a speck of difference, evident to the sight.
Song sheets from the period illustrate well the chiasmic relationship between portraiture and caricature in representing the blackface minstrel as the phobogenic object, that is, as the signifier for a form of racial difference substituted for, standing in the place of, white audiences' experiences of the like subjectivity of black performers. At the turn of the century, since a performer's celebrity depended on the popularity of his songs, sheet music provided a way for the performer to advertise himself with his songs. In so doing, they also tended to bind the voice, as an alternative register for experiencing the performer, to certain images. On one song sheet advertising Williams and Walker's song "Good Morning, Carrie!," the performers' portraits are bound to the field of racist cartoons that surround them, the latter effectively undercutting the photographs' efforts to differentiate them from those caricatures. Just as their voices are the absent register behind the words advertising their song, their embodied selves, already represented at one remove in their portraits, are further enfolded and subsumed within the cartoon images and words, and the comedic effect they produce on the page. On song sheets more generally, often the placement of black performers' portraits alongside derogatory images of blackness reinforced the drawings' ability to modify the picture of reality the photographs tried to present. Sitting squarely between image and text, the illustration becomes the key form of visual inscription on the song sheets, "drawing" blackness farther from the framed body and fixing it, like a dye, in the realm of the signifier.
In another popular song sheet, caricature ultimately works to assign the portrait a subordinate signifying status. The insert photo of minstrel performer Lew Dockstader in blackface literalizes blackness as a face that can be drawn onto the head of the performer himself (see figure 1.5). A clever visual pun, the animated word-image of the COON, dominates and overshadows the portrait of the performer on the top right corner of the page. The stereotypical image of ears, eyes, and lips cohere into the three repeated faces of a black person. When the word "COON" is literally animated into a visual caricature of a black face, with the white letters and words standing in for the eyes and ears of a human, the facial caricature naturalizes in the words "COON COON COON" the idea that the signifier of the coon stands in for something real in the world, blackness as the site of difference. "COON COON COON" provides both a literal instance of and a perfect metaphor for the process by which a word becomes a thing. The COON, a discursive construction, becomes Real, material and visible, in a chain of metonymic associations that lead us from a sound-image (the written letters of the word) to a physiognomic illustration (the drawing of a face) to the visual logic that links blackness and whiteness to skin color—"the white wall/black hole system" of racialization through facialization.
As the image of the word "COON" bores through the black subject from one ear to another he becomes nothing more than that word and image, a violent, univocal instance of racist interpellation. He is what he hears, that interpellating call, and what he hears is imposed upon the skin as seen. The cartoon image of the black face as a "real coon" represents the ways in which blackness as a sign exceeds even the boundaries of the photograph in early twentieth-century American culture. The photograph is not creating stereotypical images of blackness; rather, it is recording symbolic understandings and codings of blackness as, primarily, a visual sign of the difference of the racial other. Exceeding the frame of the portrait, blackness is already an ideogram, an image that is always already a word—race, difference, coon—before the emerging technology of photography offers a new medium for reinforcing racial codes inherited from colonial discourse. A comparison of the "COON COON COON" image with the photograph of Williams in blackface as Shylock Homestead at the beginning of this chapter (see figure 1.1) offers a graphic representation of the blackface mask as merely a drawing or caricature of blackness pasted on to the face itself. Bert Williams's photo-graphed, blackfaced depiction blurs the lines between portrait photography and caricature, revealing the ways in which both functioned as visual interpellations of the black subject into the symbolic order as his stereotypical image, the black imago, the facialized form of the anxiety-producing body of the black performer.
At the time of Bert Williams's first blackface performance, the early twentieth-century photograph recorded the activity of a gaze, an act of sight, which was already shaped by the racial discourses of modernity, its social languages and its political unconscious. By the turn of the century, white American audiences were already trained to see black corporeality reductively, as meaningful only in terms of its epidermal surface. As a synecdoche for the body, the skin was both an index of and a container for biological racial difference. The term "physiognomy" refers both to the features of the face and to the surface features of the body. By first facializing the head and then racializing the face of the black subject, "a concerted effort is made to do away with the body and corporeal coordinates through which the multidimensional or polyvocal semiotics operated. Bodies are disciplined, corporeality dismantled." The blackface mask doubled the effect of "the thickening into visibility of the skin" of the raced subject. The blackface mask extracted the face and its meanings one step further away from the corporeality, the bodiliness, of the (black) body.
What the mask also thickens is the idea that one's likeness, one's face, is a perfect index to subjectivity, to the truth of the person. The reliance on the visual is tied up in the ideal that one's likeness represents the "selfsame body," that is, it is like the self. While this idea of the face as a sign of the person shapes Bert Williams's portrayal in the two visual mediums, portraiture and caricature, popular at the turn of the century, Williams the performer did find ways to play with his own facialization on the early twentieth-century grid. An elaborate photo spread in Vanity Fair, which depicted the performers engaged in "a series of specially posed facial stunts," provides a powerful example of a main argument of Skin Acts. Reading the bodily performance retrospectively back into an image can break up some of the equivalences between the performer's likeness and the racist imago that portraits and caricatures of blackness work to link and underscore in different periods.
As much as the Vanity Fair series placed the two black performers on the social grid much like "a chemical solution is fixed by a dye," the title caption of the series also points to the performative gap between the natural man—Williams and Walker as Nature's Black-Face Comedians —and the man performing nature, with his series of Specially Posed Facial Stunts (see figures 1.6 and 1.7).
The sixteen photographs are arranged as a grid with six poses on the top row of George Walker, six on the bottom row of Bert Williams, and four in the middle, two of each performer, sharing space with two boxes of text. In George Walker's images, the actor is not in blackface and in five shots in the top row he performs an exaggerated array of facial poses, clearly indicating that he is acting. The performer's posed aspect carries over into the two more "natural" shots of Walker, one in which he is sitting before the camera in his street clothes as if posing for a studio portrait. The other, an idiosyncratic portrayal of the actor shirtless, with his bare back to the camera as he throws us a grin from over his shoulder, fits within the field of images precisely because the photograph literally presents the skin (of the back) as the face of the actor's bodiliness, black flesh bared as skin dressed up for the gaze.
The first line of accompanying text commends Williams and Walker for being unlike other "colored actors" who "frequently failed because they aimed higher than the white theatre-going public wanted to look." Since "every image embodies a way of seeing" and the photograph is "a sight which has been recreated or reproduced," in the Vanity Fair pictures, reproduced as posters and publicity sheets for In Dahomey, the gaze of Williams's blackface coon situates his audience historically. Walker's unwillingness to meet the "eyes" of the camera places less pressure on the viewer to change the terms of his or her relationship to the image by acknowledging the black subject as a like subjectivity. Bert Williams's gaze in his headshots communicates with the viewer differently, producing the effect of an irrepressible force pushing in from the space of real racial interaction and social conflict. Bert Williams's facial stunts represent subtle attempts to draw the aim of the gaze to the gap between the performer and his skin.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Skin Acts by Michelle Ann Stephens. Copyright © 2014 Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press.
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Table of Contents
Preface viiAcknowledgments xiii
Introduction. Fleshing Out the Act 1
1. Seeing Faces, Hearing Signs 31
2. Bodylines, Borderlines, Color Lines 71
3. The Problem of Color 111
4. In the Flesh, Living Sound 153
Conclusion. Defacing Race, Rethinking the Skin 191
Notes 205
Bibliography 259
Index 273
What People are Saying About This
"Michelle Ann Stephens has written a book that anyone interested in race and psychoanalysis will want to pay attention to, and one that even those who do not consider themselves interested in the topic will have to pay attention to. She has taken the most immediate and seemingly obvious site of racialization, the skin, and given it a revelatory new genealogy. She sets the standard for all future engagements with what Frantz Fanon termed 'epidermalization.' Through arresting readings of modern and contemporary art and performance, Stephens unfolds the racializing and engendering of skin within modernity, and makes a powerful argument for reading it through the lens of feminist, antiracist, and haptic visuality."
"Michele Ann Stephens adds an important layer to our understanding of black masculinity in the U.S. and the Caribbean during the twentieth century. This is a compelling, thorough, and cohesive treatment of the complex intersections of black masculinity, performance, and psychoanalysis. Well-written and clearly argued, Skin Acts will make an indispensable contribution."