Ethnic Drag: Performing Race, Nation, Sexuality in West Germany by Katrin Sieg, and: Modern German Political Drama 1980-2000 by Birgit Haas (review)

550 REVIEWS KATRIN SIEG. Ethnic Drag: Pel/orming Race, Nation, Sexuality in West Germany. Social History, Popular Culture, and Politics in Germany. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002. Pp. 286, illustrated. $54.50 (Hb). BIRGIT HAAS, Modern German Political Drama 1980-2000. Rochester: Camden House, 2003. Pp. 239. $70, £50 (Hb). Reviewed by David Robb, Queen sUniversity Belfast Katrin Sieg's Ethnic Drag: Performing Race, Nation, Sexuality in West Germany is recommended for anyone interested in the performance side of cultural studies. In her examination of "ethnic drag" - the recent history of the "playing" of race in German drama, literature, and film - Sieg leaves no stones untumed in analysing the problematic. ambiguous relationship between referent and spectator. What emerges is a situation whereby the reading of "race" and racial identity is dependent not so much on the colour and gestus of the performing body, but - amid a minefield of cultural presumption - on the "spectatorial activity of decoding (and thereby producing) difference" (257). Sieg uses case studies from literature, theatre, and film that both suppon and challenge hegemonic portrayals of "the other," ranging from pre-war German anti-Semitic depictions of Jews to philosemitic depictions after 1945, and from Karl May's white European identification with North American Indians to present-day German Indian "hobbyist" practices and, in tum, American Indian parodies of these practices. Sicg argues that no politically correct identification or mimetic appropriation of an oppressed, racial, or sexual minority can automatically presume to be non-racist, non-sexist, or culturally non-hegemonic. She begins with the example of the French playwright Bernard-Marie Koltes, who, in 1988, attempted to stop a Hamburg produclion of his Le Retour au Desert - a play about ethnic tensions in postcolonial France - because he objected to the director's decision to use white Gennan actors to playa black African and an Arab. The German director, on the other hand, claimed thal mimetic portrayals reinforced the operations of racial ideology, whereas "cross-racial masquerade contests or even transfonns social relations organized around race" (5). The argument centred around the Brechtian naturalism-versus-estrangernent conflict which, ,Sieg contends, could not be resolved in this instance, since Brecht had not fully addressed the implications of racial masquerade in his theory of Verfremdung. Sieg's work will be beneficial to theatre scholars interested in the mechanics ofmasquerade in the post-Brechlian era. The chapter "The Violent White Gaze: Drag and the Critique of Fascism" notes the neglect oftace as an analytical category in the antifascist discourses of the New Left and the attempts to redress this in Max Frisch's Andorra, Rainer Werner Fassbinder's Katzelmacher. and Reviews 55 1 Kerstin Specht's Lila. While Frisch used aBrechtian dramaturgy, the antifascist drag of Fassbinder and Specht employed a dramatic hybrid combining the "Brechtian paradigm of estrangement with the critical Volksstack's paradigm of empathy" (156). Where Frisch, like Brecht, was concerned with the outsider 's behaviour and motivations, Fassbinder and Specht defamiliarize the social construction of race by leaving the foreigners' subjectivity blank, as "a bodily surface on which the German mobs project their racial fears and desires" (160). As a result, race is merely seen as a construction within the Gennans' minds. The problem that Sieg identifies, however, is that the analysis of racial otherness is seen from the perspective of white Germans; the way in which whiteness itself is constructed is ignored. The problematic assumption underlying many of the drag acts Sieg examines is, as she puts it, that of"the universal performability of the white body" (165). Sieg illustrates this further when analysing the anti-Semitic parodies of the usurper Jew "playing" the assimilated German, in the nineteenth-century Jew Farces, and the North American Indian parodies of German hobbyists "playing " indigenous peoples. In these. Sieg dissects the structure of the communication between actor and spectator by using Amy Robinson's theory of "passing." As Sieg demonstrates, the success of a parody depends on the comical portrayal of different codes of recognition. A triangular structure emerges, consisting of the actor/role who contends to be "other," called the "passer," and an "in-group witness" who sees through the masquerade. The parody, however, also...