Poor "Black" Theatre: Mid-America Theatre Conference Keynote Address, March 7, 2009

{ 1 } \ Poor “Black” Theatre Mid-­ America Theatre Conference Keynote Address, March 7, 2009 —E. Patrick Johnson When I thought about the theme of this year’s conference, “Poor Theatre,” I thought I might have been left out of a bad joke, for I didn’t know there was any other kind. But then it struck me that there are indeed some theatres that have more resources than others, indeed, that some of our most important smaller theatre companies around the country are closing their doors—­ victims of the economic downturn and the Republican Party’s failure to understand that the arts are integral to the economic, social, and cultural well-­ being of this country. I also considered “poor” not only in economic terms but also in semantic terms—as in, “deserving of pity or compassion.” I know this signification of the term all too well, for in southern culture the term is often used to soften the blow of a devastating insult—as in when my grandmother said of someone, “She can’t help that she’s ugly—poor thing.” Somehow, the “poor thing” made the insult perfectly acceptable, especially if it was followed by a “bless her heart.” The various ways in which“poor”signifies made me consider the history of black theatre and performance studies in the field and its practice outside academia . For as rich as this history is, the diminution of black theatre and performance studies as “subpar,” “reactionary,” or “anti-­ intellectual” positions it in that category worthy of my grandmother’s condescending, “Poor black theatre . It can’t help that it’s ugly, bless its heart.” Indeed, while black theatre and performance has been a sustaining and galvanizing force of black culture and a contributor to world culture at large, it hasn’t always been recognized as a site { 2 } E. Patrick Johnson of theorization in the academy. On the flip side, black theatre and performance has been cultivated on the concrete of urban sidewalks as well as on the front porches of shotgun houses. For many black folk,“making a way out of no way” meant creating theatre from life, which often meant speaking through a subjugated position in society. As Stuart Hall argues, black theatre and performance emphasizes that “it is only through the way in which we represent and imagine ourselves that we come to know how we are constituted and who we are.”1 I want to focus on these two ways that “poor” signifies as they relate to black theatre and performance studies: “poor black theatre” in the sense of its designation as “other” in the field, and “poor black theatre” in the sense of making theatre out of the material resources of life. In the former, I will redress the designation as “other” by demonstrating how black theatre and performance has always already played an important role in the maintenance of theatre and performance studies in the academy; and in the latter, I will provide examples of how black theatre and performance functions as epistemology and a site of resistance. Poor Black Theatre Take 1: The Erasure of Black Theatre and Performance Studies There has always been a black performative “presence” within theatre and performance studies, whether it has been acknowledged as such or not. I am thinking here of Toni Morrison’s intervention in the construction of the literary canon. Morrison deploys the term “Africanism” to suggest the process through which black folk are interpellated in the white imaginary and how that interpellation gets represented in literature. “As a trope,” she writes, “little restraint has been attached to its uses. As a disabling virus within literary discourse, Africanism has become, in the Eurocentric tradition that Ameri­ can education favors, both a way of talking about and a way of policing matters of class, sexual license, and repression, formations and exercises of power, and meditations on ethics and accountability.” She continues: “Through the simple expedient of demonizing and reifying the range of color on a palette, Ameri­ can Africanism makes it possible to say and not say, to inscribe and erase, to escape and engage, to act out and act on, to historicize and render timeless. It provides a...