Coloring Whiteness: Acts of Critique in Black Performance by Faedra Chatard Carpenter (review)

Faedra Chatard Carpenter’s illuminating book is a timely call for a discursive specificity to describe the nation’s ongoing racial traumas in the twenty-first century. Examining performances by African American artists from 1964 to 2008 that use whiteface to resist “the presentation of whiteness as normative and, in the process, expose the fallacies associated with racial designations” (3), the book’s thesis addresses how “self-identified African American artists and individuals express the intricacies of their own racial and cultural identities through (in relation to, and often because of) the social scripts and common tropes associated with whiteness” (8). Carpenter deftly builds on critical race theory scholar Cheryl Harris’s concept of whiteness as a property of privilege and power to argue that African American performers have utilized whiteness, both its invisibility and visibility, to fight against racism.

The introduction opens with the author’s discovery of a series of civil rights photographs, one in particular of a young black man in whiteface at a suffrage march in Selma in 1965 with the word “Vote” drawn on his forehead, his brown skin peeking through opaque white paint. Carpenter connects the sociopolitical intentions of the protestor’s usage of whiteface to set up the premise of her book, which seeks to understand how African American artists, in various sonic, embodied, and visual manifestations from the end of segregation to the post-racial era, have utilized whiteface performance to critique US racism not simply as “cultural critique of blackface minstrelsy,” but also in acts that reveal the “constructed nature of all racial identities” (12). Rich descriptions in the introduction define new terms of whiteface to be discussed in each chapter, along with a dramaturgical case study of strategic whiteface usage in Adrienne Kennedy’s Funnyhouse of a Negro (1964). The five chapters and coda focus on “instances in which embodied presentations of whiteness work to counter, rather than affirm, essentializing racial narratives” (11).

Chapter 1 focuses on Douglas Turner Ward’s haunting Day of Absence (1967), a work performed in whiteface by an all-black cast. The play takes place in a southern town that awakes one morning to find that all of the black people have vanished. Carpenter discusses the significance of tinted whiteface (whiteface that is not quite white) and optic whiteface (the deliberate opaque usage of white paint) in descriptions of Ward’s artistic process. Commentary on the play’s failed translation to television and theatre critics’ reading of Day as a knockoff of Jean Genet’s The Blacks are high points that contribute greatly to US theatre history.

Carpenter’s next chapter demonstrates how affective themes can be captured using nonconforming whiteface, a move that the author argues is achieved in director Lydia Diamond’s stage adaptation of Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye by abstracting focus to indicate whiteness through props, clothing, and so on, and not necessarily using only whiteface makeup on the body (24). Carpenter excavates moving context for the production, foregrounding Diamond’s intention to adapt this play for black girls who are told, like Morrison’s Pecola, “You’re not beautiful; you’re not relevant; you’re invisible; you don’t even count” (107).

Chapter 3 draws our attention to Harlem-based performance artist Daniel Tisdale and the physical transformation of late pop icon Michael Jackson to unpack “Whiteness as ‘Becoming.’” Tisdale’s alter ego, “Tracy E. Goodman,” owns a fictional company, Transitions, Inc., that peddles skin-lightening crèmes, hair relaxers, and related items on the streets of Harlem to help black people “transition” to whiteness. Carpenter connects Tisdale to Jackson’s changing of his hair texture, phenotype, and skin tone over his career, reading these performances as forms of naturalized whiteface, or “‘whitening up’ through artistic intervention, elaborate makeup, plastic surgery, or medical technology” (24). Here, the author addresses the ways in which African American artists engage in and/or subversively challenge the conflation of “becoming white” with the American Dream...