Africans on Stage: Studies in Ethnological Show Business ed. by Bernth Lindfors (review)

REVIEWS intervention vis-a-vis the exclusionist histories he cntIques. Much work remains to be done, but the materials assembled by Fusco provide an indispensable resource for students and scholars of contemporary performance. BERNTH LINDFORS, ed. Africans on Stage: Studies in Ethnological Show Business. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999. Pp. 302, illustrated. $I 6.95 (Pb). Reviewed by Nadine George-Graves, Yale University Africans on Stage: Studies in Ethnological Show Business is a collection of essays focusing on the nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century practice of displaying Africans in world's fairs, museums, circuses, and pseudo-scientific road shows. Most of the articles focus on the exhibitors and spectators (i.e., the Europeans and Americans) from this particularly shameful era in the histories of Western performance and science. The text puts names and faces to shrewd businessmen who capitalized on curiosity regarding the freak/other and who exploited Africans in the name of a science (ethnography) that was mostly about sensationalism. Descriptions of the Africans are given mainly from the viewpoint of the exhibitors and spectators. Though primary documents illustrating the attitudes of the Africans are probably scarce, more speculation as to how the Africans might have felt would have given a more balanced representation of the significance of this practice. As it stands, the reader has a difficult time knowing what to take as accurate representation and what to recognize as the product of a less enlightened time. Scholars cannot always take the primary written documents at their word, as only Jeffrey P. Green frankly acknowledges when he writes, "The study of theatrical entertainers must avoid uncritical acceptance of contemporary comments" (162). The truth of exhibitors' claims that their Africans were on display voluntarily and were satisfied with their lives, as well as of the few accounts of spectators translating the Africans' speeches as desirous of murdering the audience, is suspect. In general, the essays are more concerned with historical exegesis than with philosophical and psychological theorizing on the systems that created this performance genre: in other words, the text speaks to how this happened , but not much to why it happened. Very few theories of colonialism or analyses from a postcolonial perspective are invoked. Also, from a theatre/ drama perspective, not much is given by way of performance analysis. The text is arranged chronologically, but the articles do not build on one another. The same points are often repeated, and some later articles, such as Robert W. Rydell's "Darkest Africa," offer very few original insights, mostly because of their place in the order of the text. Recurring motifs include perceptions of Africans as subhuman savages (only occasionally as people), the process of "civilizing" the Africans, the rhetoric of justification, Charles Dick- Reviews ens's devastating views, and the "science" of social Darwinism. One valuable result of reading the articles together is that readers get a good sense of the evolution of performance expectations. [t was enough simply to display the Venus Hottentot (Sarah Baartman) as a curiosity and proof of some theories of human development. Later, Africans had to give entertaining and, most importantly, convincing shows. Z.S. Strother's article "Display of the Body Hottentot" is the strongest contribution. [n it, she provides an in-depth analysis of the history and context needed to understand the Venus Hottentot, the systems that created the desire to gaze at the other as well as the manifestation of that desire. She delves into the Hottentot mythos, focusing on the belief that language separates humans from beasts, the creation of wild and savage imagery , cooking as a mark of civilization, the Hottentot physical type, the use of the pipe, and sexual violence. Unfortunately, she does not tell us how much of the mythos to believe and how much to attribute to the colonial imagination. Perhaps it was all a fabrication. Perhaps it does not matter. Perhaps we are simply still too caught up in a desire for proof of authenticity, But a scholarly interest in colonial psychology as well as African identity.would validate this sort of critical inquiry. Granted, this is dangerous territory, as our voyeurism meets our scholarly desire to know the truth. Though Strother fills in much...