Paul Robeson and the Cold War Performance Complex: Race, Madness, Activism

Introduction: The Red Mask of Sanity

Introduction: The Red Mask of Sanity WHEN PAUL ROBESON ALLEGEDLY STATED at the 1949 Paris Peace Conference that it would be “unthinkable” for blacks to fight in a potential war against the Soviet Union, he was vilified in the United States as a mentally unstable traitor. While the U.S. press in general dubbed Robeson as un-American, the New York Times claimed he suffered from “twisted thinking,” and columnist Earl Brown called him “just plain screwy.”1 The House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) held special hearings to give “members of his race” the “privilege” of “the expression of contrary views” to the “disloyal and unpatriotic statements” that Robeson had uttered, indicating both that blacks now bore the responsibility of denying that his views were representative and that the American government feared that they were.2 Paul Robeson, the former stage and screen star, had once been the best-known African American in the nation, having garnered adulation for his stage and screen performances in the title role in Eugene O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones (1933) and as Joe in Show Boat (1936), as well as for his acclaimed stage performance in the title role of Othello (1943), the longest-running Shakespeare production in the history of Broadway.3 Yet, the former all-American football player, attorney, and son of an escaped slave had gone from singing in support of war bonds and appearing with the vice president in the 1940s to being the “most persecuted man in America.”4 Although Robeson had been monitored by the FBI since the early 1940s, the response to his 1949 comments initiated what would be, for him, over a decade of continuous FBI surveillance, mob violence, and blacklisting. This decade of supervision and turbulence culminated in the seizure of Robeson’s U.S. passport from 1951 to 1958, leaving him at one point “the only living American against whom an order has been issued directing immigration authorities not to permit him to leave the continental confines of the United States.”5 Robeson’s vocal activism against U.S. repression of African American freedom at home and against American imperialist and colonial actions abroad brought him the ire of the 1 federal government. Taken as part of a broad-based African American struggle against American imperialism and capitalism, the political critiques of the United States in Robeson’s speeches and at his concerts in Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Soviet Union led the State Department to determine that such performances were “contrary to the best interests of the United States.”6 In this context, Paul Robeson’s performances emerged as a central domestic site for the waging of the Cold War. Moreover, discourses of performance and its relationship to American citizenship regulated such symbolic and material battles. This book reads Cold War culture through two signal performances by Robeson that were shaped by his infamous Paris remarks as well as the political “psychoanalysis” that followed: his appearance before the House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1956 and his concerts in Peekskill, New York, in 1949. These events exemplified a performance culture that configured Cold War America, where a politicized discourse of psychopathology operated as a part of a constellation of “performance complexes” that regulated American life. Within Cold War culture, discourses of difference were articulated with those of treason. Madness, Communism, homosexuality, theatricality, and blackness and their articulation together became key elements in a semiotics of disloyalty. Paul Robeson and his performances became the foremost sites where these elements were seen to coalesce. His detractors pathologized him by linking his alleged madness and status as an actor with his Communist sympathies and activism for civil rights and anticolonial movements. And yet Robeson used his performances to mobilize performance, itself, to challenge the produced crisis culture that underwrote the postwar racial capitalist practices of the United States at home and internationally. Tracing the antitheatrical language that connected race, madness, and Communism with performance reveals the state’s own performance “complex” as well as how these discourses crystallized in the controversies surrounding Paul Robeson. At his HUAC hearing and concerts, Robeson disrupted these formulations by enacting performances that destabilized the constitutive conventions, rhetoric, and policies of what I call the Cold War performance complex. Paul Robeson and the Cold War Performance Complex understands the discourses that collapsed black activism, alleged Communism and madness , as being part of an assemblage of techniques of power that is the Cold War “performance complex.” Understood as...