Lives in Play: Autobiography and Biography on the Feminist Stage

6. Performing Race and the Object of Biography

chapter 6 : Performing Race and the Object of Biography The corpus of staged feminist autobiography and biography admittedly has been, like the body of feminist drama in general over the last decades of the twentieth century, a largely white affair. Typically, the texts and performances that comprise this corpus, like many of the plays examined in the previous two chapters, have consistently taken a protective, nonconfrontational approach to its audiences, often formulated in the name of fostering a supportive community of women who can, in solidarity, confront and critique the circumscribing discourses of gender that are often written onto male characters, many of whom are themselves only ever imagined offstage. For white performers and playwrights, however, the active critique and reframing of gender constructions often elide the equally important work of critiquing and reframing racialized constructions , particularly when race and gender interact discursively to generate mutually supporting lines of subjugation. For performers of color, autobiographical performance has yielded a small but significant number of staged interrogations of the performativity of both gender and race; individual performance artists like Robbie McCauley, Carmelita Tropicana, and Laurie Carlos have compellingly introduced race into the discourse of feminist lives, while playwrights such as Adrienne Kennedy have brought autobiographical material that directly engages discourses of race to scripted drama. These texts and performances frequently turn out to be challenging theatrical events and just as often create an almost Artaudian sense of discomfort in engaging their audiences. Yet biography plays have proven far less popular, and perhaps less fruitful, for interrogating race and ethnicity as historical constructions. Even when they are staged, they can come off either as dangerously naive to the operations of 173 racial discourse or as so deeply suspicious of their own working mechanisms that their rhetorical success is always in question. While the notion of the performative nature of gender, primarily as articulated by Judith Butler, has gained enough traction that it has been usefully applied to other nodes of identity construction, discourses of race have not seen those concepts imported so easily. Certainly we can imagine ways in which cultural performances of race could be considered a stylization of the body, although the compulsory nature of the repeated and repeatable codes of race is more complexly arranged, if for no other reason than the variety of racial categories historically deployed to make meaning of biological and genetic distinctions. Given the often arbitrary ways in which racial distinctions have been drawn, the many vectors along which racial hierarchies are deployed between cultures and groups, and the inconsistencies between various exercises of racinated power, it becomes clear that racial performativity can only be conceived under very specific historical and cultural contexts, without which the codes of a performance of race dissipate into meaninglessness. Accordingly, while racial logic (especially in imperialist contexts) deploys a kind of binary logic not unlike the binary logic of sex, racial binaries themselves are articulated on both biological and cultural lines that do not succumb quite so easily to simple charges of essentialist stereotyping, making specific stylized acts simultaneously reifications of and challenges to the logic of racialized power. So while we might say that racial identities can be imagined as performative , the mechanisms and theories used to unpack gender, sex, and sexuality cannot be used in precisely the same way in exploring power dynamics exercised across racial categories. Instead, I turn briefly to Saidiya V. Hartman, whose theorization of the performative of African American identity offers one template for imagining the constitutive nature of the stylized body through cultural articulation. For Hartman, performing blackness, particularly in the antebellum period, “is defined here in terms of a social relationality rather than identity; thus blackness incorporates subjects normatively defined as black, the relations among blacks, whites, and others, and the practices that produce racial differences.”1 That is, instead of coming to rest specifically on the definition of an individual body through specific performances that stylize that individual body, “blackness ” for Hartman is produced spectacularly through social relations that specify and orient difference along specific lines of power, and in normative terms, implicate the black body as abjected and the white body as 174 : lives in play dominant. This dominance is typically rendered invisible by what Charles W. Mills has called “The Racial Contract,” noting that “in a racially structured polity, the only people who can find it psychologically possible to deny the centrality of race are those...