Whiting Up: Whiteface Minstrels and Stage Europeans in African American Performance by Marvin McAllister (review)

Marvin McAllister's Whiting Up: Whiteface Minstrels and Stage Europeans in African American Performance testifies to the transformative potential of whiteface in African American performance, arguing that "when we respectfully appropriate whiteness, blackness, yellowness, or brownness, we can transform our social deconstructions and reconstructions into new universals" (264). Investigating traditional whiteface performances by black actors "appropriating white dramatic characters" (or stage Europeans), McAllister also attends to the extra-theatrical employment of "white-identified gestures, vocabulary, dialects, dress, or social entitlements" by African Americans in social performances of whiteface minstrelsy. His analysis fills a lacuna in theatre scholarship about cross-racial performances, merging work by scholars of blackface minstrelsy with that on race, whiteness, and performativity in order to examine whiting up as a "coherent and sustained performance tradition" (1).

In his introduction, McAllister identifies four "cultural and political functions" of whiting up (12): to satirize or parody whiteness in order to undermine racial hierarchies; to imitate or emulate whiteness to build identification with "white aesthetic practices, artists, and histories" (13); to "expose systematic white terror in order to warn and potentially transform Afro-America" (14); and to identify with and against the majority culture by "disassociat[ing] and transfer[ring] presumably white traits and practices to black bodies" (16).

McAllister begins by discussing extra-theatrical performances like country dances, promenades, and cakewalks, among the earliest recorded instances of whiteface minstrelsy used to "construct and develop resistant commentaries on the dominant culture" (25). Master-sponsored cakewalks, for example, allowed African Americans to test the balance between acknowledging Euro-American power and separating symbols of privilege from whiteness (30-31). Promenaders took things further, publicly dressing in clothes traditionally associated with privileged white society, thereby "separat[ing] refinement from 'whiteness' and insert[ing] black bodies into the center of civic life" (44).

In chapter 2, McAllister demonstrates how nineteenth-century black actors inserted themselves into theatrical life by performing stage roles written for white European actors, thereby creating "a level of performative subversion and political resonance unmatched by the stage Africans or stage Indians created by white artists." He analyzes African American actor James Hewlett's performances of stage Europeans to explicate two varieties of cross-cultural identification that often resulted from these performances: professional, whereby African American actors gained artistic credibility by effectively emulating European stars; and political, whereby African American audiences and actors drew on well-known white theatrical and historical figures in order to "identify, articulate, and advance communal aspirations" (52).

In chapter 3, McAllister examines Bob Cole and Billy Johnson's A Trip to Coontown (1898), the first Broadway musical written, performed, and produced by black artists. Although the plot of Coon-town seemingly reinforces racial stereotypes, with a white main character who saves a black retiree from a black con artist, Cole's identity as a black man underneath a white character ultimately enabled the production to disrupt "blackface minstrelsy and middle-class morality" (109). Specifically, McAllister argues, Cole's whiteface "low-down stage European clown" (85) Willie Wayside "disconnected 'darky' stereotypes from African Americans," associating them instead "with multiple white identities across class lines" (98). At the same time, McAllister notes that the musical subverted "the notion of whiteness as the measure of culture and refinement" through its appropriation of "allegedly white forms, such as opera and ethnic impersonation" (75).

Chapter 4 addresses twentieth-century African American actors who performed stage European roles, focusing on the Ethiopian Art Theatre's 1923 production of Oscar Wilde's Salome, with Evelyn Preer in the title role, and the 1946 Broadway production of John Webster's The Duchess of Malfi, starring Canada Lee as a whiteface Bosola. McAllister examines the politics of "passing" to elucidate how racial boundaries can be both fluid and fixed, using the racial ambiguities of the two leads' performances to challenge rigid categorizations of race.

As McAllister notes in chapter 5, the 1960s saw a proliferation of plays written explicitly...