Enacting Others: Politics of Identity in Eleanor Antin, Nikki S. Lee, Adrian Piper, and Anna Deavere Smith by Cherise Smith (review)

Art historian and performance scholar Cherise Smith has written a smart, engaging study of the politics of what she calls “performances that trespass the limits of identity” (3). The book presents readers with an inspired quartet of “case studies” – dancer/choreographer Eleanor Antin, photographer/ethnographer Nikki S. Lee, performance/visual artist Adrian Piper, and documentary theatre actor Anna Deavere Smith – each of whom can be described as a postmodern feminist artist. Deploying the conceptual mantle of “enacting others,” Professor Smith analyses the difficult and fascinating topics of impersonation, masquerade, cross-dressing, and passing by giving close readings of a key performance by each of the aforementioned artists. Although one might be tempted to read the book in stand-alone chapters, one of its strengths is its ability to juxtapose the different aesthetic/political strategies of enactment performed by each of the subjects in question.

Early in the text, we learn of Smith’s personal investment (no pun intended) in the topic of enactment via her lyrical description of a photograph of her deceased mother (shades of Roland Barthes, here) in which the latter, according to many viewers, passes or poses as a black woman. The disjunction between so-called appearance and actuality or what we might term embodiment and bios, if not biography, serves as an injunction to delve further into the world of always-already distorted perception – what Nicole R. Fleetwood deems the “Troubling Vision[s] . . . of black visuality and performance” (2). Significantly, however, Smith’s re-enactors move in many directions and reproduce multiple racialized subjects.

The book joins the excellent work done in the last decades on subjectivity in the contiguous fields of visual culture and performance studies (here, I am thinking specifically of books by Anne Anlin Cheng, Amelia Jones, José Esteban Muñoz, Rebecca Schneider, John Bowles, E. Patrick Johnson, Peggy Phelan, and Elin Diamond, to name only a select few). The audience for the work could include scholars and students interested broadly in the performance of race, gender, and class (sexuality is less privileged here). If there is a through-line in the text, it would be carried by the word “ambivalence,” one deployed repeatedly in the book. It seems clear that Smith would agree with Ann Pellegrini that “the performativity of identity consists in the productive capacity of iterability. To reiterate is not, in any straightforward way, to mirror; it is to reflect back with a difference” (78). This really is a way of summarizing Smith’s fascination with enacting others and with how such movements reflect back on the artists’ senses of self. She sees the ways in which they, too, perform versions of themselves through their multiple movements. In other words, Smith’s underlying argument is that (1) the artists’ assumed alternate identities negotiate different aspects of their own identities, in order (2) to destabilize identity categories in general and (3) attempt to access a utopian position of liminality that is always elusive or, rather, never fixed.

Smith’s detailed explications of specific performances are valuable, and she explains the value of the work for audiences past and present. For example, the close reading Smith provides of an early performance by Piper, the Mythic Being project of the early 1970s, gives depth and meaning to the growing interest in Piper’s work, although here, and in the Deavere Smith section, more might have been said about gender enactment, especially when we think about Deavere Smith’s impersonation of Cornel West. Nevertheless, the book does a good job of historicizing the artists and thinking about the sociopolitical moments in which their work was and is consumed. Smith does ask what difference it makes that the work happened on the street, in the gallery, in the community, or on the stage. Throughout, she adequately addresses how Piper experiments, Antin politicizes, Deavere Smith ventriloquizes, and Lee impersonates...