Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Performances of Race and Freedom (review)

Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Performances of Race and Freedom explores the processes of self-claiming and self-creation developed by racialized subjects in the context of 19th-century performance cultures in Britain and the US. Brooks’s assertion is that bodies dissent the claims made upon them by exploiting a range of dramatic forms and genres: plays, exhibitions, lectures and demonstrations, panoramas, comedy and burlesque revues, and popular and concert dance. Most powerful and original in her study is her emphasis on Victorian spectacular culture: spiritualism, mesmerism and magic, and its influence on expressive and literary forms. Brooks’ wide-ranging choice of texts and subjects and her unexpected juxtapositions give her analysis a blessedly nonlinear rhythm.

Brooks considers the ways artists and activists manipulated the very terms of their spectacularization to re-present themselves. Race becomes the art of smoke and mirrors, from Henry Box Brown’s demonstrations of escapology and Ada Isaacs Menken’s bodily resignifications on the burlesque stage to black variety stage performers’ satirical verbal and bodily hyperbole. As Brooks argues, “Spectacular theatre exposed the hoax of ‘race’ itself, turning it once and for all into an optical, illusionistic, phantasmagoric stunt. Realness can only be expressed through spectacular and artificial means.” (52). Far from imprisoning, these artists’ talent for trickery and elusion offered them a kind of agency, the freedom to move between states of being and of being seen.

In her opening chapter Brooks situates these acts of dissent in the context of Anglo-American cultures’ “(white) ontological anxiety” (10). The stability of race and class hierarchies, by which people “knew” themselves, was shaken by the social, technological, and political upheavals of the 19th century. The central sites of contestation were physical bodies and their relationship to each other. As the emerging natural sciences challenged religion in defining the social order, models of the working body changed. Ideas of racial superiority were embattled by evolutionary science. Popular science, a performance in itself, was in the process of adapting concepts of class and racial pathology to restabilize the truth claims of whiteness and class dominance. As Brooks argues insightfully, “English Theatre absorbed and transposed onto the performing body” these fissures in ontological surety (23). Characters who existed on the threshold between worlds embodied and dramatized these anxieties. An ethos of phantasma shaped performance practices, from blackface minstrelsy, circus shows, and magic shows to scientific spectacles of racialized bodies. Brooks examines this ethos as it appears in the mid-century tale of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, both the work of literature and the dramatic play adapted from it. Looking specifically at the play and tale of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in the context of mid-century Britain, Brooks recognizes both as dramas of racial and class transmutation. She compares the British versions of the play to its reception and staging in mid-century America, where “social ideologies of the body remained sharply in flux,” haunted by the ghostly spectres of slavery, civil war, and class destabilization (22).

Brooks’s recognition of the abolitionist and “fervent anti-spiritualist” Hiram Mattison is important and original. Mattison represents a dominant class threatened by these processes that “render the body completely unreadable” (17) through the performance of in-between states of being that remain ambiguous and evade capture. Brooks astutely links his anxiety about the spirit world to his equally intense obsession with racially liminal female bodies, particularly those whose skin appears so white as to dangerously undermine racial categorization (18).

Within this frame Brooks juxtaposes two texts, Dion Boucicault’s The Octoroon (1859) and Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), both erupting from this same ontological conflict. Both plays dramatize “cultural obsessions with physical metamorphoses” (26). Boucicault’s near-white character Zoe defies detection; her physical presence troubles truth claims and shows they can be tricked. In death, Dr. Jekyll makes the ultimate sacrifice in order to contain and...