The Problem of the Color[blind] by Brandi Wilkins Catanese (review)

Brandi Wilkins Catanese’s The Problem of the Color[blind]: Racial Transgression and the Politics of Black Performance examines how the intersection of multiculturalism and colour blindness in the last decade of the twentieth century informs racial representation. Locating the juridical as a site that produces colour consciousness – for example, the Supreme Court ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson – The Problem of the Color[blind] demonstrates the tension between racial identification and identity, how someone characterizes herself and how others view her. Using the methodologies of performance studies to examine some of the most pressing questions in African American studies, The Problem of the Color[blind] explains how “transgressive” performances challenge the social bind of aspiring toward racial representation that takes the form either of “strictly quantitative multiculturalism” or of “color blindness” (3). Two sides of the same coin, multiculturalism assumes an alignment between under-represented people and political points of view that advocate for the advancement of under-represented people, whereas colour blindness requires an almost mesmeric social forgetting that attenuates the hold, for better or for worse, of the colour line. Through its critique of colour blindness as a transcendent category, the book critically questions the cultural sacrifice such forgetting requires. While Catanese artfully quips that “this is not a book about non-traditional casting,” the debates over the politics and practice of alternative casting crystallize the stakes of placing unfamiliar actors in well-established social roles, from the stage to the museum to the television screen to the movie theatre (9).

Using four case studies, the book analyses racial representation in theatre, film, and television. Chapter two examines the debates between August Wilson and Robert Brustein, in the aftermath of Wilson’s “The Ground on Which I Stand” speech, which critiques the politics of colour-blind casting for reinforcing the presumption that black actors are inferior. Yet, at the same time that Wilson challenges the assumptions at the heart of colour-blind casting, his worldview depends on essentialized notions of race. The chapter concludes, “The end of race will indeed come to mean the end of blackness, and the vivid histories out of which Wilson’s work emerges will be denied in favor of a racially transcendent American theater that refuses to acknowledge the full context and significance of black artists’ accomplishments” (71).

Moving from the still highly segregated theatre world to that of film, which makes space for an exceptional few black actors, chapter three explores Denzel Washington as a black Hollywood cross-over artist. The limits of his ability to fully integrate into white Hollywood emerges in his role as both black man and heterosexual leading man. While Washington figures as an exceptional individual who transcends race in terms of Hollywood casting and therefore obviates the pull of race as a social contract, “white women become the sexual barrier that Washington can neither transgress nor transcend” (74). Tracing the imbrication of race and sexuality in U.S. film from D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915) to Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967), The Problem of the Color[blind] figures Washington’s positioning in the late twentieth century as a variation on an intersectionist theme. The book examines closely two of Washington’s films, The Pelican Brief and Devil in a Blue Dress, and concludes that heterosexual coupling acts as the limit point of colour blindness and “sustain[s] the relevance of racial difference” (111).

Placing Washington’s work within a particular historical frame prepares the book to consider the role of history in the production of racial representation. Taking on Suzan-Lori Parks’s most controversial play Venus, chapter four considers the relationship between Parks’s penchant for imagining lives for historical figures in her drama and clearing space for black female subjectivity. In Venus, Parks merges myth and history to create the life, voice, and desires of Saartjie Baartman (the Hottentot Venus). Through a consideration of Parks’s play...