Teaching A Day of Absence “at [your] own risk”

When I was an undergraduate during the early 1990s, I vividly remember absorbing the post-modern language of race and gender as social constructs. This vocabulary offered me the tools, as an African American woman, to respond to some of the “colored contradictions” of my own experience and my interpretation of the world around me by pinpointing the historically specific means through which identity categories are produced, articulated, and enforced at the social level. In conversations with friends, classmates, and acquaintances, a well-timed and -placed “but race/gender is a social construct” offered a refreshing reprieve from the politics of authenticity, and instead served as a call to deeper contemplation of the ways in which we felt compelled to fashion ourselves into a (or maintain the fiction of some a priori) community. However, sometime between my undergraduate education and the present, another word has crept into the middle of this valuable phrase when some students use it in academic and casual conversation: “just”—as in, race is just a social construct. And with the incursion of this word, the opportunities for critical contemplation that the contingencies of race seemed to suggest, even demand, have been replaced with a permission simply to disengage from conversations about race at all.

In this essay, I would like to share an example from my own teaching of how race as “just” a social construct has encroached upon my classrooms and departmental communities. When I teach a course on contemporary African American drama, which begins with Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun and ends with hip-hop theatre, I aim to generate conversations about how racial meaning is produced in and through performance, rather than simply by words on the page. One of my strategies is to try localizing the theatrical possibilities of the texts we read. Again and again, I ask my students (most of whom identify as performance practitioners of some sort) whether they could (or would want to) imagine a given text performed on campus within our Department of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies. What would it mean to go into one of our actual theatre spaces to rehearse and perform this play, or to watch one’s peers do so? Rather than asking them to think generally about what a production of a play we are studying might look like, I find that asking them to map a text onto the embodied spatial and cultural dynamics of our particular institution gets them to think more critically about what the meaning and cultural significance of the plays we read might be. For at least some of my students, this exercise is clarifying; for others, it produces the uncomfortable realization that the liberatory, utopic possibilities of performance do not find a home in every theatre with every play.

Douglas Turner Ward’s A Day of Absence is precisely the sort of play for which this question—Under what circumstances could we do this play here and now?—becomes essential: both the content of the play and the possibilities for its performance demand that audiences and production participants think about the absurdity of how race has been constructed throughout American history. First produced in 1965, the play is a reverse minstrel show that criticizes the simultaneous ubiquity and absence of blacks from the national imaginary. Even though America has long been framed (rhetorically and politically) as a white nation—a move that renders people of color discursively invisible—black people in particular are necessarily invoked as the “not-me” that lends coherence to this racially exclusive framework. In other words, the active disavowal of blackness and its value is a constitutive element of American whiteness and therefore of America. Ward scripts Absence as an ironic play on this racialization of our national identity.¹ It emerges from a simple, fantastical premise: the titular absence is that of a town’s entire black population for a day. The chaos that ensues belies the standard racist claim that America would be better off without its black citizens, and instead reveals their centrality to all notions of order...