The Problem of the Color[blind]: Racial Transgression and the Politics of Black Performance by Brandi Wilkins Catanese (review)

“Color-blind.” This term—residue of 1990s multiculturalism—has been repeatedly deployed as of late, such as in the recent Supreme Court decision on affirmative action. Meanwhile, Governor Rick Perry in Texas, when asked his opinion on the Trayvon Martin verdict, declared: “the justice system is color-blind.” This term is not innocuous. On the contrary, as Brandi Wilkins Catanese declares, the DuBoisian “problem” of the 21st century is not race, but rather the “color-blind: those who wish to disavow the continued material manifestations of race in our society” (6). In her carefully argued The Problem of the Color[blind]: Racial Transgression and the Politics of Black Performance, Catanese probes the ineluctable link between blackness and performance in the United States (3). Runner-up for the Errol Hill Award from the American Society for Theatre Research, Catanese’s study importantly argues that, in order to understand this link, we must pay equal attention to two different, but interrelated, types of behavior: performance in the realm of expressive culture and the more commonplace forms of labor (economic, or otherwise) that are also forms of “doing.”

The stakes are made clear at the outset: if the “racial etiquette” of the United States has made the discussion of race “bad manners”—as the first chapter is titled—performance is often the medium through which “anxieties about race (and in particular, blackness) are pondered, articulated, managed, and challenged” (5, 3). In this first chapter, Catanese briefly considers color blindness and multiculturalism as two distinct, albeit linked, narratives through which we understand American-ness. She persuasively details the persistence of these narratives, from their appearances in court cases to their recurrence in the realm of aesthetic practice. The latter is picked up in a discussion about nontraditional casting, in which Catanese argues that cross-racial casting often traffics in an erroneous notion of color blindness coupled with transcendence; this trope of “color blindness-as-transcendence” resurfaces in Catanese’s discussion of the racial rhetoric surrounding President Barack Obama as well (22). In its inattention to “racial reality,” she offers “racial transgression” as an alternative, one that exposes and studiously avoids the faulty frame of transcendence by violating “limits placed upon racial discourse” and “foregrounding the possibility of black performance as a transformative practice within American culture” (18, 21, 31).

Chapter 2 takes an extensive look at the 1996/1997 print war and later live debate between the late playwright August Wilson and drama critic Robert Brustein about the racial politics of American theatre. Catanese skillfully frames this debate as a reckoning over cross-racial casting. For Wilson, black art and a color-blind theatre are antithetical; color-blind casting not only “produces inauthentic blackness” but also threatens the financial livelihood of black theatre (42, 39). Brustein’s appeals, on the other hand, for a “race-blind aesthetic meritocracy” appeals to a racial transcendence model; invested in getting over race, his view, as Catanese makes salient, ignores structural inequalities and the “complex intersections of race, art, and commerce” (55, 57). Color-blind casting practices, she argues, are never “innocuous aesthetic choice[s]”: if they draw attention to the “racial manners” seeking to ignore the material concerns of black theatres, they also strikingly “illuminate the racial ideologies that they [are meant to] defy” (60, 63, 68).

Catanese, meanwhile, effectively positions the third and fourth chapters as a Janus-faced pair: the former focuses on the failures of racial transcendence, while the latter centers on racial transgression. Chapter 3 centers on Denzel Washington in the 1990s films The Pelican Brief and Devil in a Blue Dress and the occlusions of interracial sexuality that haunt them. Catanese argues that, despite Washington’s “color-blind success” as a black actor, both films reveal “the impossibility of the color-blind space” they seek to create, ultimately suggesting...