Darkening Mirrors: Imperial Representation in Depression-Era African American Performance by Stephanie Batiste (review)

Consider The Swing Mikado. Featuring flower-laden, black, female dancers, wielding feather fans in a South Seas-esque setting, its raucous, sped-up numbers in swing simultaneously swung to a very American tempo. In this 1938 spectacle, dancing to “the tune of dusky skins, white teeth, and a fringe of jungle décor,” what or who was mirrored on stage (155)? What was at stake in this imperial performance? These questions are the main thrust of Stephanie Batiste’s tightly packed and cogently argued Darkening Mirrors: Imperial Representations of Depression-Era African American Performance. Batiste’s book reveals how black filmmakers, directors, and performers, in the late 1930s, “used, made and reproduced imperial identity even as they contested, changed, and undermined it” (25). Batiste skilfully excavates black historical actors’ complex representational work in the theatrical narratives selected. Implicit in the recurring desire for power, Darkening Mirrors asserts, was a dual struggle – sculpting an American identity that was also black, while at the same time affirming black diasporas beyond America – that was submerged, its meanings “in motion and invisible, like deep currents in dark water” (xiv).

Batiste commences Darkening Mirrors by tracing black imaginings of an American West, and the freedom implicit in it, in three select films: a 1927, silent promotional film for an African-American resort, Oscar Micheaux’s 1931 drama The Exile, and the 1939 black Western Two-Gun Man from Harlem. Despite the heterogeneity of these works, Batiste’s analysis illustrates how all three made visual claims to the western frontier as a space through which to assert desires of inclusion in the nation, while also re-orienting geographies of black life away from south-to-north or rural-to-urban to an interplay, instead, between the urban and the West, or “the city . . . [and] frontier”(48). Yet, even in these assimilationist narratives, Batiste subtly perceives strains of imperialist ideologies, in that the “performance of westward settlement and land acquisition” these films celebrated cleared representational space for black citizens through “their own imperialist erasure of Native Americans” (41, 42). This strategy – complicity with imperial discourses in the service of domestic belonging – perniciously recurs in the works analysed in the next two chapters, albeit in more primitive and exotic ways.

Chapters two and three form a pair, focusing on the production of three plays staged by Negro Units of the Federal Theatre that employed various imperialist gestures of othering. Darkening Mirror’s second chapter focuses on the plots and extreme aesthetics of two plays, Haiti (1938) and the “voodoo MacBeth” (1936), both linked by larger national tensions apropos the American occupation of Haiti from 1915 to 1934. Both “consent[ed] to the terms of imperial projects of representation,” Batiste suggests, by positioning African American performers – substitutes for a civilized modern and western (read: American) identity – against a wild and primitive Haiti(74). Yet, as she subtly argues, these performers were caught in a double bind: desiring, on the one hand, to claim participation in the “nation in and through the deployment of available imperial structures,” while, on the other hand, desiring the ability to assert diasporic kinship and “disidentify with U.S. imperialism” (95). Chapter three, meanwhile, executes similarly complex work with the 1938 swing performance of the British operetta The Mikado, illustrating how the play appropriated and reproduced British imperialism, despite its mostly black cast. Simultaneously, The Swing Mikado “extend[ed] the imperial gaze across the Atlantic and into the Pacific,” through its orientalist representations of an abstract and unspecific tropical other (116). In their detailed complexity and robust prose, these two chapters are the strongest in Darkening Mirrors.

Chapters four and five form the other pair of the book as Darkening Mirrors shifts to ethnographic dance and filmic forms, where strains of exoticism and primitivism persist. The confluence of such exoticism or primitivism with unexpected forms of affirmation and identification is particularly evident in Batiste’s exegesis, in chapter...