New Genealogies of Performance

Since the 1990s scholars have produced numerous accounts of Uncle Tom’s Cabin as presented on the nineteenth-century stage, emphasizing that more Americans saw Uncle Tom’s Cabin performed than ever read Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel. Treatments by Eric Lott, Linda Williams, Sarah Meer, David S. Reynolds, and John W. Frick, among others, consider the political importance and ambiguities of period theatrical adaptations, their entanglement with blackface minstrelsy, their transatlantic reach, and their persistence in twentieth-century film. The website Uncle Tom’s Cabin & American Culture, directed by Stephen Railton, contains indispensable primary and secondary materials related to theatrical and filmic adaptations.¹ The best of such accounts of Uncle Tom’s Cabin onstage and on-screen offer what Joseph Roach calls “genealogies of performance” that “document—and suspect—the historical transmission and dissemination of cultural practices through collective representations.” Such genealogies of performance “draw on the idea of expressive movements as mnemonic reserves”—how a repertoire of movements that is embodied, recorded “in images or words (or in silences between them),” or imagined anew carries along and transforms key elements of a culture.² Anyone who has spent time with the images, sounds, and words of the staged Uncle Tom’s Cabin steps away with the conviction that the popular drama did not simply manipulate or express audience sentiment. Rather, the wildly variant performances of Uncle Tom’s Cabin were part of the culture’s rumination (conscious and otherwise) on slavery, African American personhood, and the individual’s moral culpability for the suffering of others.

The four books reviewed here present new genealogies of performance practices other than Uncle Tom’s Cabin stagings (with one exception) that are no less rooted in nineteenth-century culture and politics and resonate with all that comes after. Marvin McAllister’s Whiting Up: Whiteface Minstrels and Stage Europeans in African American Performance documents the practice of African American performers putting on markers of whiteness in highly conscious performances of racial privilege from 1820s South Carolina through our “post-soul” present. Amy E. Hughes’s Spectacles of Reform: Theater and Activism in Nineteenth-Century America analyzes mid-nineteenth-century melodrama’s “sensation scene”—a spectacular dramatic moment appealing directly to audience emotion—as a phenomenon with terrific physical impact and a range of political valences. Matthew Rebhorn’s Pioneer Performances: Staging the Frontier spins a genealogy of the nineteenth-century frontier drama intended to challenge our understanding of the frontier not only as theatrical symbol of ascendant white individualism but also as historical fact. Finally, Karl Kippola’s Acts of Manhood: The Performance of Masculinity on the American Stage, 1828–1865 reflects on the opposing forms of white masculinity that vied for dominance of the mid-nineteenth-century stage. Taken together, these books show that (to quote Rebhorn on minstrelsy) “the theater did not so much stage racial construction as it actually theatricalized the construction of race” (73)—and the same holds for gender. As these authors demonstrate, to explore the lineage of whiting up, the sensation scene, the frontier drama, and dramaturgical manhood is to find that theatrical performance does more than represent and participate in existing social practices; it is itself a social practice with far-reaching yet often obscured impact.

McAllister’s Whiting Up is a painstakingly researched and revelatory book that recounts a previously neglected history of African Americans’ performance of whiteness—not in the sense of “passing” or “acting white” but in acts that depend on audience knowledge of the...