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  • Racial Authenticity:The Tension between Production & Reception in the Shakespeare Archive
  • Ayanna Thompson

It is not often that one gets to read an essay that completely challenges a common critical narrative in our field, but that is precisely what Benjamin Hilb’s essay does. Carefully delineating the way Orson Welles’s 1936 FTP production of Macbeth employed Vodou practices (specific ritualized clothing, objects, staging, music, and movement) and the seemingly ubiquitous interest in, and engagement with, West Indian politics and culture in 1920s and 1930s Harlem, Hilb warns us that our current approaches have significant blindspots and asks us to revisit the archive with fresh eyes.

The common critical narrative about Welles’s so-called “Voodoo” Macbeth production is one of racist primitivism. On the one hand, scholars are quick to point out that the production employed lots of actors of colour during the height of the Depression (and was therefore very progressive). On the other hand, scholars argue that Welles’s production essentialized those actors in disturbing ways (and was therefore very regressive). Hilb effectively challenges this narrative by employing a different archive (Haitian history, religious history, and Harlem’s sociocultural history) and different theoretical frames (critical race studies, Haitian studies, and cultural studies). He implicitly asks what we can uncover and/or recover if we approach the archive through different critical and theoretical lenses. This is an important intervention that we should heed with some urgency and immediacy, especially those of us interested in early modern race studies and race in/as performance.

Yet, I cannot say that I am completely convinced, because Hilb plays it a little too fast and loose with production and reception with regards to what he is calling “authenticity.” While Hilb is very convincing about the [End Page 683] fact that the black actors employed in the 1936 Macbeth production took ownership of the Vodou aspects included, he hedges about the place or significance of Welles’s role in the “Haitian dimension.” For instance, Hilb never entertains the notion that Welles’s role could have been anything but “ancillary” because he is so invested in an essentialist argument about racial sociocultural uplift. In other words, it is vital to Hilb’s argument that the Vodou is constructed and performed by blacks (West Indian, African, and initiated African Americans). But it is important to gauge and theorize if the religious authenticity of the production would be performed differently (or assessed to be essentially different) if Welles were central instead of ancillary to the Vodou. Can Hilb’s argument hold if the essentialist claims are dropped? If so, what needs to change in the argument and what does this tell us about our current constructions of authenticity?

Even if one assumes that the intentions behind production are easy to identify and distinguish (and even if the essentialist claims are themselves deemed to be vital), it is still important to ask what role reception plays in claims about authenticity. Hilb astutely critiques scholars for reproducing the racist assumptions included in the early performance reviews of the production. As Hilb points out, even when scholars acknowledge the problematic nature of the published performance reviews for Welles’s production, it has proven difficult for us not to employ some of their frames. This is a fantastic point that deserves attention, but there is a larger question that Hilb leaves unasked: what is the relationship between an authentic Vodou production and that production’s reception?

Furthermore, does an authentic experience require an audience—both/either viewers and/or critics—to recognize that authenticity? Hilb acknowledges that the production’s “significance, indeed its very Vodou essence, was missed by members of the audience” (667). Of course, it seems entirely feasible that one could argue that the intention is all that matters; for Hilb, this might mean that the most important factor for an authentic production is the black actors whom he claims imagined and realized the Vodou elements. But many artists of colour have struggled with the fact that their visions for, and intentions behind, any given racialized production have not been able to control racist reactions to them. The list of black artists who have attempted to create authentic...

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