Blackface Cuba, 1840-1895 (review)

Jill Lane's Blackface Cuba lies at the nexus of scholarship on racial impersonation in the Americas and research on the processes by which national identity is constructed, embodied, deployed, and interrogated. Employing methodologies from performance studies, critical race studies, and Latin American cultural history, she argues that "blackface performance was a primary site for the development of mestizaje, Cuba's racialized national ideology, in which African and Cuban become simultaneously mutually exclusive and mutually formative" (book jacket). To do so, Lane concentrates primarily on the aural production of blackface nationalism, viewing the racist and racially coded texts alongside dance, music, and teatro bufo's black- and brownface performance techniques. In addition to reading teatro bufo scripts, she analyzes medical texts, newspaper columns, danzón practices, and purported ethnographic research conducted in pre-independence Cuba. Her work reveals that Cuban blackface performance is a multivalent set of racial impersonations which are not limited to the stage, even if they often emerged there.

Many of the plays in Blackface Cuba are unpublished and untranslated, available only in Cuban special collections, which is perhaps why teatro bufo rarely is studied outside of Latin America. This in itself makes the book an important addition to English-language scholarship on Americas performance. That aside, Lane makes three significant contributions to theatre studies: first, she insists that performance played an important role in the co-emergence of Cuban public cultures and nationalist sentiment; second, she carefully explores the often misunderstood relationship between performance practices and the development of ethnography in the late nineteenth century; and third, she interrogates privileging of visuality in studies of racial impersonation.

Lane's succinct introduction positions racial impersonation as the "embodied correlative to the split address of the nation" (10), which moves between Homi K. Bhabha's pedagogical and performative modes of address. Despite his terminology, Bhabha's theory does not derive from analysis of performance, but from literary texts. Benedict Anderson's oft-cited Imagined Communities, meanwhile, concentrates on the democratization of print culture in the early nineteenth century. Their omission of performance is startling given the role of theatre in many Latin American metropoles, and the interdependence between journalistic and performance practices in those sites. This intersection is the subject of Lane's first chapter, "Blackface Costumbrismo, 1840–1860," which analyzes Galician José Crespo y Borbón's development of "discursive blackface," by employing the figure of the bozal, the nonacculturated African in Cuba into plays, newspaper columns, and other texts. Lane carefully examines how his "colonial mimicry" defamiliarized Spanish through the aberrations of the so-called African, to "make audible a new Spanish that was later recuperated as Cuban" (59). She argues that this figure's racially marked speech became understood as descriptive, even ethnographic, rather than performative. In fact, when freed slave Juan Francisco Manzano began writing, his works were left unedited, his poor Spanish serving as proof of his authenticity, making his text "discursive blackface."

She views the subsequent development of the catedrático—the well-appointed urban black—similarly, tracing his role in bufo plays as an embodied anticolonial critique of peninsular pretension and colonial practice, without losing sight of how the figure registered intense racial panic at emancipation, suggesting that a sophisticated black man was acting in whiteface. Lane complicates conceptions of the public sphere as predominantly textualized in the next chapter, by showing how post-1878 bufo performances enacted a prenational Cubanness by displaying culturally specific musical and performance forms, inspiring "national longing" among spectators. The veladas, entertainment programs designed by black mutual aid societies, meanwhile, served as a space where black performers could model their proper speech and mastery of European forms, such as Italian songs.

Lane's analysis of the 1880–1881 danzón craze, on the other hand, addresses the anxiety around bodies, often women's bodies moving to African rhythms. The danzones, whose "variable tempo and close partnering" (150) made for a remarkably sensual dance, led to lengthy debates on their place in the public sphere. Critics focused on...