Skin Acts: Race, Psychoanalysis, and the Black Male Performer by Michelle Ann Stephens (review)

In Skin Acts, Michelle Stephens explores the labor and function of the corporeal, specifically the epidermis, and how it is imbricated in the black masculine performances of Bert Williams, Paul Robeson, Harry Belafonte, and Bob Marley. Stephens centers Paul Gilroy’s and Franz Fanon’s earlier exploration of the “epidermalization” of blackness in order to theorize the intersections at which black skin informs the reception, performance, and meaning of black masculine performance throughout the twentieth century. In a theoretically heavy introduction, titled “Fleshing Out the Act,” Stephens cogently articulates a theoretical terrain that better understands the relationship of black subjects’ minds and bodies and their proximity to a world that mediates its understanding through skin, complexion, and facial expressions by highlighting historical theories of the skin and body with the psychoanalytical theories of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan.

In the first chapter, “Seeing Face, Hearing Sings,” Stephens analyzes the importance of facialization in black face minstrelsy by critically engaging the performance, portraiture, and fictionalized biography of Bert Williams. Stephens highlights the falsity of blacks donning blackface to portray a perception of blackness put forth by white minstrel actors and rounds out her conversation by pulling from other historical and literary engagements of Bert Williams—specifically Caryl Phillips’s Dancing in the Dark (2005). Here, Stephens troubles Ralph Ellison’s repudiation of the black minstrel performer to demonstrate an “ironic performing consciousness in the songs and lyrics created by the musicians and composers who produced black minstrel acts” (53). In addition to convincing readings of In Dahomey (1903) and Dancing in the Dark, Stephens includes portraiture and song sheets to demonstrate moments of resistance in Williams’s minstrel performances. Stephens asserts that within the parodic work on the minstrel stage Williams attempts to reclaim the black male body at the expense of his voice and body.

“Bodylines, Borderlines, Color Lines,” Stephens’s second chapter, “mark[s] an important shift in the visual culture of modernism” by deconstructing the centrality of skin in Paul Robeson’s artistic works (72). Stephens cogently argues that this shift from the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries’ emphasis on the face within a black minstrel tradition, as typified by Bert Williams, was broadened to the entire body by early modernism. Thus, it is Robeson’s body—his physique—and not simply his face that American popular culture was interested in during this early modernist moment. To underscore this point, Stephens analyzes Antonio Salemme’s full-length nude statue of Robeson, Negro Spiritual, and then interrogates the modernist gaze of Salemme’s statue of Robeson with H. D.’s Red Roses for Bronze (1931) to elucidate how a modernist gaze of Robeson was invested in “a more intimate form of recognition” (77). After discussing the white gaze of Robeson’s body, Stephens analyzes Robeson’s films Borderline (1930) and Song of Freedom (1936) to engage the title of the chapter and work through the formal aspects of framing in film, and theorize the boundaries of bodies and complexions on the screen. Stephens ends the chapter discussing the importance and intention behind Robeson’s blurry body in Song of Freedom and the distance it creates between him and his audience.

The author’s third chapter, “The Problem of Color,” explores the shift in technologies in film production—specifically Technicolor—and how the 1950s and film technologies ushered in a new white gaze “reifying and phallicizing blackness as ‘color’ in a new social and political ideal” (120). Stephens begins the chapter by retelling a story of Baldwin and the racial dynamic of what he refers to as a schizophrenic gaze at a civil rights march in Montgomery, Alabama, and how the audience’s—specifically white women’s—contempt shifted to adulation at the sight of Harry Belafonte. Indeed, Stephens’s reliance on the writings of James Baldwin function as a sort of through line for the chapter, making her contributions to the iconicity of Harry Belafonte a project that extends...