Performing Race and Torture on the Early Modern Stage (review)
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In Performing Race and Torture on the Early Modern Stage, Ayanna Thompson demonstrates that a semiotic analysis of tortured bodies on the early modern stage can illuminate our understanding of how race was constructed. Informed by performance theory and contemporary scholarship on race, Thompson's monograph focuses on the historical "coalescence" (5) of seventeenth-century dramatic depictions of torture and race, in order to argue that "race developed with contradictory significations in the early modern period: race became both essential and a construction" (3). Her thesis is thought-provoking, as is the scope of the book: while core chapters cover plays by Restoration dramatists (Elkanah Settle, Colley Cibber, Edward Ravenscroft, Thomas Southerne, William Davenant, John Dryden), a final chapter, on the photographically documented prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib in 2004, extends Thompson's analysis of racialized violence into a cultural moment that is, in her words, "deliberately anachronistic" (122) when placed alongside her other primary texts.
This diachronic frame of reference is intended to establish continuity between contemporary and early modern constructions of race; like the scenes of torture performed on the Restoration stage, the Abu Ghraib images manipulate bodies in order to suggest a particular interpretation of race. In the photographs, Iraqi detainees are portrayed as inherently animalistic, sexually deviant, and powerless. Although these stagings of race attempt to reflect the purported essential nature of "difference" (the racial difference between soldier and prisoner, torturer and victim), their carefully crafted portrayals suggest just the opposite: that race is malleable and performable.
In her readings of Restoration drama and the Abu Ghraib pictures (which she pairs with photographs of lynchings in the United States), Thompson aims to show that representations of race—in particular, those which are violently enacted—reveal an ever-present instability in the way "Otherness" is defined. While acknowledging the need to remain sensitive to "different performance modes from different historical eras" (122), Thompson argues that we also need to attend to the way that culture continues to "vacillate" (28) between essentialist and constructivist definitions of race, because this fluctuation works to create a disempowered racialized Other, especially when it is the subject of violent representation.
Imbricated within Thompson's link between early modern and contemporary conceptions of race is her refutation of the view that "race simply was not a factor on the Restoration stage" (25). The paucity of black characters in Restoration plays (excluding those that were revivals of earlier works) and the fact that performance conventions precluded white actresses from donning blackface do not, Thompson persuasively argues, diminish the importance of race in performances from the period. As she demonstrates in her close readings of Settle's The Empress of Morocco (ca.1673), its sequel The Heir of Morocco (ca.1682), and Cibber's Xerxes (ca.1698), non-English, nonwhite characters are sometimes represented in performance as exotic, villainous, or fundamentally Other without radical alteration of the physical appearance of the actor's body, but by means of context, dialogue, and action. It is precisely this immaterial mode of signification that leads Thompson to assert that, in these plays, race is a factor: it becomes "a matter that is no matter" (the title of chapter 2). In drawing attention to the [End Page 299] elusive constructions of race in noncanonical plays like these, Thompson hopes to inspire discussion of their performance possibilities and "heal historically restricted and restrictive fields of study" (145) by encouraging early modernists, theatre practitioners and historians, and performance theorists to more fully embrace Restoration plays dealing with race.
Throughout Performing Race and Torture, the combination of visible (corporeal) and immaterial (incorporeal) articulations of race most interests Thompson, because it "thwart[s] one clear, stable, and finite notion of race" (37). Engravings by William Dolle that accompanied the publication of The Empress of Morocco, for example, imply that Settle's Moroccan royalty were represented in performance as white-skinned characters in decidedly English apparel (including Restoration-style...
