Paul Robeson and the Cold War Performance Complex: Race, Madness, Activism by Tony Perucci (review)

In this singular contribution to performance studies, the author borrows loosely from network theory and notions of the assemblage to theorize the idea of a Cold-War performance complex in the United States from the late 1940s through the 1950s. In this interlinked discursive formation, ideas of communism, blackness, and insanity were mobilized and deployed to tie political radicalism and race consciousness to each other. Even further, Perucci describes how the “semiotics of disloyalty” (2) that characterized the United States in the 1950s collapsed a host of behaviours and conditions into one, not just as deviant – madness, difference, homosexuality, communism, blackness, and theatricality – but also as treasonous. Insanity and irrationality became, by definition, everything that appeared to go against the ego norms of an American, mainstream, democratic, capitalist society.

The Cold-War performance complex was an “assemblage of techniques of power” (2) that conjoined the “stagecraft of statecraft,” as Eisenhower called it, with what is now commonly known as the military–industrial complex. Paul Robeson and the Cold War Performance Complex brings back an almost Marxist orientation to the study of media and performance and of the role of media and performance in broader disciplinary and governmental structures. Perucci reminds us of the merits of linking superstructures (entertainment industries, theatrical performances, mass culture, modes and technics of cultural production) to more updated visions of the capitalist mode of production or “base.” The “–industrial complex” is one such updated form, in which “racism and anticommunism [were] articulated [together as] an ideology and practice of imperial capitalism”– not as a “simplex,” as the overdetermined base/superstructure model would suggest, but rather as a “complex assemblage” (6). Perucci’s work recalls Althusser’s on ideological state apparatuses and Gramsci’s on the production of hegemony and common sense, but as per Stuart Hall, for Perucci, it is performance that functions as the site for articulating race to societies structured by dominance.

The Cold-War performance complex engages multiple types and modes of performance: theatricalizations of power performed in the HUAC hearings; acts of “informance” performed by, and producing, a restricted sense of citizenship; and a broader anti-theatrical discourse that linked treason, blackness, madness, homosexuality, and communism to a de-legitimated form of mimetic acting. Given scholarly discussions of the centrality of state performances and coercive acts in fascist and other tyrannical regimes, and in nationalisms more broadly, Perucci could have said a bit more about the forces that created this particular iteration of state power, with its focus on acting as in opposition to loyalty, in the 1950s United States. Engaging political scientist Corey Robin’s work on fear, for example, or his collaborations with historian of McCarthyism Ellen Shrecker (whose other work Perucci references) could better contextualize what is period-specific about the performances that Perucci considers. However, since the political production of fear is an old strategy, it is clear that what Perucci wants to focus our attention on is the way performance became an isomorphic site where what was being talked about – the performativity and inauthenticity of the Communist – was also being simultaneously enacted in the performativity of the state and its proceedings.

Perucci’s account is distinctive, less in its relationship to political theory and the history of McCarthyism, and more in the interdisciplinary nature of its method and claims. The work demonstrates decisively how and why politics must be seen as central to the study of performance. While there is some slippage at times between performativity and performance – is “acting” an everyday social practice or a performance practice? if both, how so? – Perucci makes up for this slipperiness with two ingenious historicizing moves. First, he interprets the attack on mimetic acting in the political realm – acting as lying – as having a corollary in the cultural realm in Strasberg’s Methodacting. The privileging of acting as a form of emotional expression close to the...