An Algerian in Paris: Habib Benglia's The Emperor Jones

In 1923 the Algerian actor Habib Benglia played an uncanny Emperor Jones for the nation that colonized his own.¹ On the stage of Paris's Odéon Theatre, one of France's most esteemed national performance venues, the French-speaking Benglia—a colonized subject—assumed the role of a colonizer (Brutus Jones) in a play that has been central in discussions of racial performativity, empire, and diaspora. This L'Empereur Jones enacted the ambivalence of colonial discourse, to borrow Homi Bhabha's formulation; it cited, distorted, and reconstructed the image of the Emperor.² Benglia performed the tensions between empire and colonial subject, embodying the spectacle of a failing Emperor, a despotic ruler who is destroyed by the indigenous people of the island. This North African actor's momentary assumption of imperial power onstage tellingly anticipated revolutionary struggles against colonial powers, like the Algerian fight for freedom from France, and the challenge to colonialist theatre-making advanced by the Negritude movement, in which Benglia would later take part.

Widely covered at the time by the international press, Benglia's performance of Brutus Jones on French soil has gone virtually unnoticed in theatre scholarship, critical race studies, and American studies. Equally forgotten is its performative afterlife nearly a decade later in which Benglia performed another character from O'Neill's Emperor Jones, the Congo Witch-Doctor, in his own Montparnasse nightclub, conjuring a counter-performance to the 1931 Colonial Exposition. And lost almost entirely is the revival of L'Empereur Jones twenty-seven years later with Benglia's all-black theatre company in Paris. In spite of this "racial amnesia," Benglia was known throughout Algeria and France for his classical stage repertoire;³ he was the first African actor to appear on a French national stage—tellingly while wearing the Emperor's coat. Throughout these pages I aim to show how this Franco-African performer deployed and subverted tropes of empire while performing characters from The Emperor Jones. I argue that these performative iterations of Jones mark not only a vital lost performance history of O'Neill's groundbreaking drama, but also the layered contexts and performative valences for performing bodies across the black Atlantic.

While the 1923 performance of L'Empereur Jones has been mostly ignored, scholarly work has been done tracing the importance of performing black bodies in relation to empire, diaspora, and what Stephanie Leigh Batiste calls the "darkening mirrors" of imperial representation.⁴ Benglia's overlooked performance in Paris occurred almost a decade before the Depression-era productions that anchor Batiste's important work and on different transnational coordinates (Algeria and France), and therefore can offer fresh insights on transnational black identities, racial performativity, and black (specifically Franco-African) performance. Like the African American artists whom Batiste examines in her study, I seek to clarify Benglia's "dizzying, recursive (and quite paradoxical) form of participation in history, modernity, and the promise and failures" of transnational identity.⁵ What is particularly instructive about Benglia's performances on French stages and in his Parisian club is how this actor was tracing, indeed constituting, alternate cartographies of black internationalism and artistic expression. In shifting my analysis away from texts and toward embodied practices—from the archive to the repertoire, as Diana Taylor has put it—I show how Benglia struggled with and at times subverted racialized projections and diasporic discourse.⁶ My analysis is underpinned by notions of citationality and cross-temporality. I am tracking neither a linear, positivist progression (from premiere to revival) nor a one-way cartographic flow (from colony to empire), but instead showing the force of imperial citation across diverse racial geometries and temporal framings. I am charting the performative trace, and the temporal tug, of the Emperor's remains.⁷

The Emperor Is Dead, Long Live the Emperor!

The Emperor Jones was one of O'Neill's modernist experiments—a play resembling a monologue more than a full-length drama, more expressionistic than realistic, more circum-Atlantic than American. O'Neill's play was one of the most widely performed and traveled cultural artifacts...