Staging Race in Nineteenth-Century America

In the early twenty-first century it has become a commonplace perhaps scarcely worth mentioning that the increasing move to a globalized, digitized culture in the United States and much of the developed or developing world has led not only to an expansion of zones that can be thought of as performative, but also a remarkable binding together of performance and social media. The acts of everyday people, as well as professional performers, jostle together, cheek by jowl. All the world’s a stage, and these days the performance is always being recorded. The histories of nineteenth-century theatre and performance to be reviewed in this essay remind the reader that this sense of spectacle and proximity are not new, and that in fact the elements of performance and sociopolitical issues that draw our attention now are firmly rooted in performances that are, in some cases, over two centuries old.

In the sensationalist tradition of stories “ripped from the headlines,” I offer one brief contemporary example. On 20 September 2015 Viola Davis, fresh off an Academy Award nomination for her portrayal of a servant in the segregation drama The Help (2014), became the first African American to win an Emmy for leading role in a television drama for her work in How to Get Away with Murder. In her acceptance speech Davis quoted Harriet Tubman and observed that performers cannot win awards for roles that do not exist, and praised a number of people who were helping to redefine the roles available to African American women, including producer and screenwriter Shonda Rhimes and actresses Taraji P. Henson and Kerry Washington, all African American women. This show-stopping moment did not sit well with daytime soap-opera veteran actress Nancy Lee Grahn, who immediately engaged in the sort of social-media monologue commonly referred to as a “Twitter meltdown.” Grahn, who is white, argued that as an “elite” actress paid millions of dollars, Davis inappropriately cited Tubman and should have spoken for all women on television. After generating a firestorm of backlash, Grahn apologized for her comments the following day, declaring herself a longstanding supporter of women’s rights and human rights and grousing about social media’s ability to bring out the “worst” in people. Presumably, Grahn meant not her assumption of the role of cultural critic so much as the emotional immediacy and the illusion of proximity created by social media like Twitter, whereby one lone spectator of a noxious rhetorical performance quickly and easily becomes a community of angry audience members. Fleeting though it might seem, this episode illustrates a variety of issues connecting numerous recent studies of the history of theatre and performance in the United States in the long nineteenth century. These new histories focus increasingly on the depiction and inclusion of women and people of color, and also the interconnection of entertainment and political activism and the role of entertainment in shaping public standards of demeanor and affect in a period, then as now, of rapidly proliferating opportunities for everyone to walk the boards of the theatrum mundi.

A vexed understanding of what the role of performer or spectator constitutes in a performative society, not to mention how certain oppressed segments of the population might fit into the larger social drama, has changed the study of the pre-twentieth-century American theatre in the past decade. In The American Play, 1787–2000, Marc Robinson begins with a study of Royall Tyler’s 1787 comedy of manners The Contrast, which displays a rapidly proliferating number of theatrical styles, as well as “fairground spectacle, Puritan preaching, and the effusive posturing of the body politic”—most notably in...