: RACIAL SPECTACLES AND AMBIVALENT BLACK PERFORMERS IN SUZAN-LORI PARKS  By  Yeoniee Cho                                            A DISSERTATION  Submitted to  Michigan State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of       English  Doctor of Philosophy    2016  ABSTRACT   RACIAL SPECTACLES AND AMBIVALENT BLACK PERFORMER IN SUZAN-LORI PARKS  By  Yeoniee Cho  This dissertation rethinks a relationship between blackness and performance through black performers who compulsively summon themselves to the historical stages of black suffering and subjugation as featured in Suzan-th lynching and minstrelsy, two exemplary racist spectacles from American/African-drama foregrounds and problematizes the persistence of blackness as spectacle and reveals how theatre has been exploited as a form for negotiating race relations and facilitating the discursive control of the black body. To debunk the construction of blackness and unyoke themselves from its essentialized notions from the past, a group of postmodern black artists of the late 1980s and the 1990s designated as post-soul or post-black were beginning to deliberately reify blackness through various formal strategies and conceptual critiques. This thesis aims to show how Suzan-Lori Parks reflects, complicates, and revises this post-soul/post-black sensibility an tity and art particularly in terms of ambivalent ways in which her black performers do their bodies. Aligning herself with post-soul/post-black artists, Parks features black performers who deliberately assume the trope of blackness and appropriate the white appropriation of blackness for alienating the audience from what is performed by them. Rather than just inviting the audience for a distanced, analytical approach to their performances, I epistemological as reified in historical racist spectacles by exposing blackness as a contestation   between authenticity and appropriation, theatrical illusions projected onto the black body and material living experiences of black people, through jarring moments in her plays blackness explodes performance and the performative. Turning racist spectacles into the occasions for discursive resistance and affective investment black bodies on redeems theatre as a venue for enabling and complicating doing history. A suggested reading of The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World as a postmodern lynching drama in the first chapter reveals how Black Man with Watermelon envisions his body as collective and intimate, alienated and pressing, representational and presentational to challenge lynching as a form that imposes a closure on African American bodies, experiences, and identities in terms of temporality and symbolic working. The second chapter analyzes two black Lincoln impersonators in The America Play and Topdog/Underdog as end to the ways in which this thwarted endeavor paradoxically accuses a genocidal white psychology behind blackface as it serves to destabilize the border between theatre and reality. The third chapter examines how In the Blood nfanticide featured in early-twentieth-century lynching drama by reading Hester La the role of the mater dolorosa as an allegorical act of resistance to the politics of representation involved in spectacularization. As a reflecti-Venus, as discussed in the last chapter, resurrects the Venus, a Khoisan woman who turned into a circus freak in early nineteenth century Europe, to discursively debunk the spectator and affectively challenge their fetishistic desire, altogether pushing them to   Copyright by    YEONIEE CHO 2016v  TABLE OF CONTENTS    INTRODUCTION.1 Suzan-Lori Parks-  Performing Blackness/ Black Performing Body Chapter Summary CHAPTER 1:The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World (1989) as Lynching 31 Anti-Lynching (or Lynching) Drama in the Early Twentieth Century Collision of Rituals and Performative Mediumship..............................40 Bodily Transmission of Collective Experiences .50     CHAPTER 2: Theatricalizing History/ Historicizing Theatre: Blackface Lynchings in The America (1994) and Topdog/Underdog  Whiteface as Symbolic Inversion  The Foundling Father as a Black Minstrel  Two Modern Dandies  Blackface Lynching 90  Transferring the Affects  When Theatre Meets Reality   CHAPTER 3: Thwarted Motherhood and Reclaimed Body of Son in In the Blood (1999104 Black Mothers and the Christian Ideal of Motherhood  The Private Made Public, or Spectacularization of Hester La Negrita    In -Lettered A   CHAPTER 4: Black Body as Remains/ Black Body Remains: Venus (1996) as a Racial  Spectacle139   The Venus as a Racist Spectacle and Venus as a Racial Spectacle ..141  Thwarted Presence of the Black Female Body  Kiss me Kiss me Kiss me Kiss      BI    1  INTRODUCTION  In 2001, a black artist Keith Obadike posted his blackness on sale via online auction site for twenty-its portability. Shedding a light on the possibilities for re-interpreting a racist spectacle from the past as a liberating performance, his cyber performance evoking the auction block from slavery past reminds us that what is at stake in subversive performance especially in terms of identity politics is a sense of distance. By separating blackness from his body and again separating himself from his blackness transacted, willing to determine the worth of his blackness on the open market, unyoked by previous  As a playwright doing history, Suzan-figures, figments, ghosts, [. . .] shadowsplayers maybe, maybe They impersonate the figures from the past, re-enact the scenes from the most emphasize what is theatrical about what is performed by them. However, Parks, who is often classified -block rather than  to accentuate the ways in which their black bodies 2  are operformers highly discursive yet stubbornly flesh sometimes renders it difficult and even impossible for the audience to take a distance from what is on stage the suffering black body. By performing blackness and simultaneously opening up a space for empathic engagement with the audience  black performers interrogate historical uses of blackness/the black body as a trope, a means, a metaphor, or a signifier, complicate a relationship between blackness and performance, and finally redeem the black body as a site for redressing the loss of history for black people.   Suzan-Lori Parks-)Constru  Suzan-Suzan-Lori Parks 1) figure in contemporary American drama. From the beginning of her career, Parks was hailed by the mainstream media and leading theatre critics. Having won an Obie for her first full-length play, Imperceptible Mutabilities of the Third Kingdom (originally produced at the 1989 BACA for the next 3New York Times ߬ by Time Magazine in 1999. Having received another Obie and the Tony Award, she finally won the Pulitzer Prize in Drama for Topdog/Underdog in 2002. Imperceptible Mutabilities, with its sense characterization, brought her immediate fame even in the world of experimental theatre while deed, the language and form of familiar settings of home and work, and its predominantly linear forms of narrative and inition of the term (536). Blackwell edition of A 3  Companion to Twentieth-Century American Drama -  Experimental theatre practitioners were even m-American experimental thea--30). Most Parks critics -posand a penchant for ethnic writing is not an urgent issue only to an African-American writer who sees her task in showing her command of postmodern theatrics not caught and inflected by her ethnic identity but to the critics who adhere to postmodern aesthetics yet cannot be unheedful of a political agenda: When Kerstin Schmidt d Parks maintains a dialogue  . A play is a blueprint of an event: a way of creating and rewriting history through the medium of -American history and the conventional historical representation of African Americans in the spatial imagination of 4  postmodern historiography1The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World With the repeated deaths of Black Man with Watermelon through beating, hanging, drowning, and electrocution dispersed, Last Black Man meanings of space, the spatial co-presences and temporal displacement of characters, and her concept of monumental time in lieu of linearity also reveals that the experience of the --Radunovi -   that is, Repetition and Revision  that most contributes to the multi-this method employs its musical refrains played over and over with revision each time: ß«In such plays we are not moving from A to B but rather, for example, from A è! A è! A è! B è! A. Through such movement we refigure A. And if we continue to call this movement FORWARD                                                  1 In the second half of twentieth century, the concept of history has been dramatically revised in terms of the postmodern dissatisfaction with linear models of time and progression. If for the experience of lead to the spatial/cartographic methodologies in the field of historiography as represented by Les Lieux de Memoire. Tracing public objects, sites, and foreshadowed/exemplified the horizontal, synchronic, and pluralistic approach of postmodern historiography revolving around the notion of history as intersections between the present, the past, and the future.   5  PROGRESSION, which I think it is, then we refigure the idea of forward pro9). The repetition observed in the movement from the first A through the third A to the final A speaks to the repetitive nature of history as embodied from Parks's first play,   drama change, revision, is the thing. Characters refigure their words and through a refiguring of languainteractive, thus problematizing and denaturalizing the progress from A to B.  -imagining of narrative time and inevitable progress envisions ins are primarily meant for allegory for American history, The America Play deconstruction of dominant historical na-racial re-enactment of history into collision with the absence of African-great hole. IThe America Play 158) on the stage visually embodies (The America Play 158) in the narrative dimension: If the Lesser Known who introduces himself his re- 6    admiratio-o a question from an audience member unhappy with the characterization of Mrs. Imperceptible Mutabilities, Why does everyone think that white artists make art and black artists make statements? Why formplaywright who would not define blackness only in terms of oppressive race relations and consider black experiences mere as those of the oppressed. Can a Black person be onstage and be other than oppressed? For the Black writer, are there Dramas other than race dramas? Does Black life consist of issues other than race issues? And   refusal to have her artistic works read as agitprop and her commitment to formal strategy which is largely marked by its performativity repetition with difference reflect what - Neal regards as post-soul a series of ideas, movements, and ideological strategies to make sense of societal flux and ruptures on the part of the black community since the end of the civil rights and Black Power movements (3). Referring  of Reaganomics and experienced the change from urban industrialism to deindustrialism, from segregation to desegregation, from -soul sensibility in their irreverent attitudes toward the legacies, traditional tropes, and iconicities 7  of the past: For Neal, the post-African American experience, attempting to liberate contemporary interpretations of that experience from sensibilities that were formalized and institutionalized during earlier social ness confined and limited by the essentialized notions and programmatic racist understandings, post-soul arts and practices open up a space for articulating and expressing multifaceted and specified dimensions of blackness and black experiences that are never to be subsumed by the wholesale  This liberating moment is also -show of twenty-eight black artists, to refer to this new generation of black artists with their oArts Movement of the 1970s, the theory-driven multiculturalism of the 1980s, and the late globalist expansion of the late 90s). Non-committal to any political ideologies or coherent artists, though their work [is] steeped, in fact deeply interested, in redefining complex notions of ).  Post-soul/post-black artists externalize and reify blackness to expose its hegemonic and essentializ and discourses of the racist past without any veneration for the traumas and seriousness this painful history and tabooed history as the sale of the black body can only be an object of satire, humour, and playful mimicry. Stylized images from plantation stereotypes and minstrel caricatures in Kara 8  -on-white paper-figures exist for artistic license and conceptual reworking, not to encumber the artist by their racist dictates: One of the post-soul/ post-      In this process for diverse artistic expressions and representations of blackness, however, these performances of racialized styles and gestures might disconnect blackness from the black body and dematerialize both, just reducing them to an idea or a concept. While acclaiming blackness ever travel light  free from the baggage of the past or is black cultural travel always accompan E. Patrick Johnson seems to answer these ambivalent questions with his understanding of more than just visual imagery, theatrical inexpressible yet undeniable racial experience of b and debunks the  is penetratingrather than just updating the post-black dynamic in its -American art and ultimately to ongoing redefinitions of blacknes5).    juncture with which the post-soul/post-black art is confronted9  always have to be outside the door for Black people to have lives the plays: CHONA, MONA, VERONA, MRS. SAXON. . .THE FOUNDLING FATHER AS -4). , in my view, lies in propelling an understanding of a more complicated and multifaceted connection between form 381), Park nevertheless asserts that form is not indifferent to racial identity: American woman-this is the form I take, my content predicates this form, and this form is inseparabl The dialectic tension between an aesthetic freedom and a political agenda Parks should handle as post-black artist can be also located in her engagement with postmodern historiography. Approaching American/African-American history through Rep & Rev, Parks -sensibilities evoke the historiographic metafiction of the postmodern era that recasts historiography and rethinks the project of history.2 While ß«the domination of spatial logic in contemporary culture has -Radunovi 465) and postmodern culture has been often accused of rejecting history (Gitlin 347), spatial imagination in postmodern historiography does not deny a sense of history per se but rather urges historical consciousness by awakening an awareness of the simultaneous existence of heterogeneous histories, not just revising the notion of history as simultaneous existence of heterogeneous temporalities. Through Rep & Rev                                                  2 A Poetics of Postmodernism 105-123. 10  technique, Parks is also American history that has been deployed around the false myth of white supremacy  that of  American history. Deeply i-American history, which is yet to be fully Against the pessimistic  (Peterson 17) and along with Parks -)constructive.  Imperceptible Mutabilities in which the five actors take turns playing all twenty roles in the play throughout the four sections, they do not represent figures, figments, ghosts, rolesindivAfrican Religion and Philosophyt continues to live: he is a living-dead. . . They belong to the time period of the Zanami [past] and by entering 11  Watermelon in The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World is a representative -past, the present, even the future, throughout the play, this figure brings together the historical time of African A-American literature may be seen as one vast genealogical poem that attempts to restore continuity to the ruptures or discontinuities imposed by the history of the black presence in  as an alternative and metaphoric space to dramatize the resurrection of black subjectivity and the restoration of black issues with history becauIn her theatre as an incubator, the histories not quite fully born from the past are nurtured into existence through the metonymic materiality of black presence. Parksdeconstructive engagement with History and (re)constructive engagement with African-American history challenges and parodies the demeaning poweracting in specific socio-cultural theaters whether on and off stage that has been wielded over the black body and break into reality 12  in its abstract, artistic, and aesthetic theatres in the past historicized and even traumatized  by having its characters cite them through their performances.  five plays chosen here feature black performers. Black Man with Watermelon (Last Black Man), The Foundling Father and his son Brazil (The America Play), Lincoln and Booth (Topdog/Underdog), Hester La Negrita (In the Blood), and the Venus (Venus) act out historical spectacles of black subjugation and stereotyped images associated with African Americans. If Black Man with Watermelon and two black Lincolns, compulsively or strategically, mount the spectacle of the  the Venus offer their bodies only to be made into voyeuristic and fetishistic spectacles. On the other hand, the stereotyped characterization and stylized antics of Black Man with Watermelon, the cross-racial performances of the Foundling Father and Lincoln, and the prosthetic costume of the Venus constantly evoke the minstrel form. Parkslynching and minstrelsy. If blackface minstrelsy is a chief cross-racial theatrical performance wherein the black character is appropriated and parodied by white actors, lynching is extra-theatrical socio-political theatre in which the utmost forms of corporeal violence was perpetrated on the black body. If minstrelsy, as a foremost entertainment in the antebellum era, was sustained by the spectacle of blackness, and thereby contributes to the dissemination of racist derogatory images, spectacularization of black outlaws and their executions became a politically deliberate and disciplinarily effective strategy when it comes to the practice of lynching in the segregation era. The historical contextualization of lynching and minstrelsy would help privilege theatre as a site for engaging with the ways in which the physical and discursive violence has been afflicted on 13  predicated on and simultaneously serves for the ideological production of blackness; and the e genocidal motivation to obliterate the black body behind the mask.      judge  Charles Lynch  in light of his penchant for hasty extralegal hangings at the expense of whipping, tar-and- the so- mostly directed at whites like criminals and Tories (Markowitz xxiii; Goldsby 16-17), it extended to abolitionist, Mormons, Catholics and blacks during the antebellum period. With more and more executions of slaves in large numbers during the Civil African Americans, especially corporal punishment (Wiegman 93). Between the 1880s and the 1940s, more than three thousand African Americans fell victims to extralegal executions by was always intended as a meJonathan Markovitz argues in Legacies of Lynching (xvi).  The racialization of lynching played a critical role in affirming white supremacy during the great social changes at the turn of the century. As Harvey Young writes, lynching campaigns -14  punishment mainly targeted at black males  Expanding and deepening the socio-political understanding of lynching as manifestation of Elizabeth Hale interprets lynching as an integral part of segregation in the South, which served to reaffirm and (re)produce the color line the white southerners had drawn between themselves and the blacks. Desired by the segregationist South, a white collectivity across regional and social the regime of lynching in the contexts of economic and cultural changes, Hale presents an sibility, the act of looking, and the  Lynching became modernized as a form of ß«spectacle lynching,߬ settling itself as ß«a new and yet grisly form of southern amusement߬ for white spectators (Hale, Making Whiteness 203). As spectacle, lynching came to approximate contemporary cultural performance: Lynching was - to 15  3 Streetcar and railroads brought the crowd to the scenes of lynching spectacles and the telegraph, newspaper, and postcards transmitted the stories of execution events and images of lynched bodies. - Amy Wood also stresses the cultural force of spectacle within the regime of lynching: by its very nature, public and visually sensationalmutilated, hanged and burnlence 4                                                   3 As Markowitz aptly summarizes, the spectacle lynchings are composed of fore-lynching for the accused, the identifications of the captured African American by the alleged white victim f the upcoming lynching, selection of the site, and the lynching itself, which involved torture and mutilation, often including castration, also discusses such -23). 4 While public executions legally banned by the end of nineteenth century, albeit for fear of potential disorder among crowd rather 27, 29). 16  Witnessing lynching practices, black people experienced alienation from their own bodies. Lynching victims had their bodies physically forfeited, mutilated, annihilated, and dismembered. Ptransformation of the living body into a set of lifeless parts. . . . the spectacle becomes theatre, the bodies displayed and staged while being lynched remain at the realm of representation as they become vulnerable to symbolic and metaphoric violence. Lynching 5  the black dead body hanging from a branch after lynching  the lynched body was chiefly the object of white voyeuristic gaze but it also of aberration, transgression, and disloyalty.                                                     5 a famous song about lynchings, performed by Billie Holiday. It was originated from a poem written by teacher Abel Meeropol and published in 1937. The lyrics runs as the followings:   Blood on the leaves and blood at the root,  Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze,  Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.  Pastoral scene of the gallant south,  The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth,  Scent of magnolias, sweet and fresh,  Then the sudden smell of burning flesh.  Here is fruit for the crows to pluck,  For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck,  For the sun to rot, for the trees to drop,     17  The bodies displayed during and after lynching sessions were charged with its semiological and ideological values mostly stemming from the myth of the black rapist. Lynching was believed to be the inevitable and most appropriate punishment for the (alleged) black rapist who transgressed the sexual and racial line prescribed and stipulated by white society. The charge of rape was a remarkably effective strategy for lynching apologists since white womanhood was at stablack men ijustified and perpetrated racial violence by associating black men with excessive, unbridled d further to they created to contain blacks socially really boils down to one between white men and black men and the mythic conception the the utmost physical violencedismembered, tortured, burned, and hanged this actual physical body being lynched mysteriously becomes invisible and misrecognized as the idea of black criminality, obscenity, abjectness, and hyper-sexuality collapses onto it.  The slippage of abstraction into materiality even becomes stark and defamiliarized through another historical racist spectacle from the nineteenth century on blackface minstrelsy. Performing in corked-black-face (what is perceived as) African American speech, behavior, lyrics, and songs, blackface minstrelsy exemplifies the ways in which the whites negotiate their repressed desires and psychic instabilities by replacing actual black bodies with the imagined 18  minstrelsy in the antebellum era in Love and Theft illuminates that it primarily originated from white envy of blmixed erotic economy between white and black men, shedding a light on what Lott means by Tthe clownish, childish, and bawdy images of minstrbehind it, the antebellum white working class men projected their imagined blackness onto imagined black bodies. By displacing conflicts with their masters into racial conflicts, they could defuse their social and sexual insecurities. With its racist blackface stereotypes, the minstrel show constitutes a crucial phase of racial violence. If white mobs in spectacle lynching witnessed utmost physical violence committed against black body, mimetic and symbolic kinds of violence were inflicted on black skin/body/identity through such conventional stage figures as Jim Crow, (Norman 14) on the other.  Eric Lothe regime of minstrelsy. While the minstrel show constantly violated the color line ambivalent emotional valences white spectators harbored toward blackness  envy and repulsion, 19  sympathy and fear paradoxically provided whiteness with a collectivity, thus contributing to formation of a white working class in the antebellum society (Love and Theft 8). In blackface whiteness facilitated by attraction and/or antipathy to blackness was ultimately predicated upon minstrelsy are deeply engaged in the process of embodiment in which the black body, apparently extra-social matter, is paraphrased as a social process  particularly the process what Judith  as it becomes subordinated to power (Psychic Life 4). Within the wide contexts of the civil rights agenda and in the wake of emancipation,6 lynching and (Hartman 22), which leads to the forfeit of the black sentience or figurative possession of blackness.      By clashing these -theatrical project serves symbolic struggles for self-fashioning. As spectacles, lynching and minstrelsy separated blackness from African-American bodies and circulated the representations of blackness as                                                  6 While blackface minstrelsy arose during the latter days of slavery and gained mass popularity through post-Reconstruction era, its caricatured and stereotypical depictions of blackness still exerted compelling influences in Hollywood films in the early twentieth century. 20  lynching practices in varying extents over and over, reenacting racial violence and social death on stage on the one hand and revealing how blackness itself has become spectacularized throughout American history on the other.  To engage with the construction of blackness and the politics of representation in such racist spectacles, Parks makes her stage theatricalized space by presenting her characters as self-conscious performers who deliberately assume stereotyped blackness. Evoking the legacy of minstrelsy, such characters as Black Man with Watermelon, two black Lincolns The Lesser Known and Lincoln  and the Venus tend to exaggerate the physical features, gestures, and dialect of African Americans, often incongruent with realistic characterization. By exaggerating  seem to prove as false the racial differences the blackface or any prosthetic device to it embody. The fact that black performers, not white minstrels, assume the caricatured images of blackness and sell their images and bodies subverts the structures of historical exploitation and revises past trafficking in blackness and black body. These black performers who are all paid workers  except for Black Man with Watermelon become their agents, free men/women unyoked by the rigid hierarchical relationship of the African-American past. As her plays feature these performers that no longer feel pressured by earlier racist paradigms, Parks get to liberate her art from the exigency of relating to and addressing the racial politics. r still remain ambivalent: Their stereotypical antics provoke laughter, yet form an uncanny harmony with the threat of violence pervading the plays, foregrounding and defamiliarizing the physical and material violence on the black body.   21  Performing Blackness/ Black Performing Body  The subversive or resistant gestures of Parkss performers are notably detected on the level of form. Parkss idea of Rep & Rev does not just refer to linguistic or aesthetic experiment but constitutes a chief discursive and performative strategy for her deconstructive historiography. For example, Steven Drukman explains Parkss use of Rep & Rev in light of her refusal of narrative closure which enriches and vibrates spectatorial/reading experiences: The rep and rev strategy keeps the spectator/reader ever vigilant, looking for something missed in the last repetition while scrutinizing the upcoming revision. Closure seems just on the horizon. . . where it remains (57). However, repeating Black Man with Watermelons death and resurrection, The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World suggests haunting as a form to shatter a closure that lynching, as a secularized ritual, imposes on African American bodies, experiences, and identities in terms of temporality and symbolic working.  Parkss performers also signify on historical instances of racist spectacularization by repeating them with a signal difference or echoing the dominant discourse implied in them.7 Two black performers impersonating Lincoln assassination insert black presence in the white history or invert the symbolic hierarchy of blackface, riffing on the historical and cultural stages that have been dominated by the white presence and myths. Rehearsing historical commodification and objectification of the black female body,                                                  7 As Henry Louis Gates Jr. defines, Signifyin means repetition and revision, or repetition with a signal difference (xxiv). Tracing it back to early African culture, the black vernacular culture, and jazz, Gates theorizes Signifyin as a chief discursive strategy of African American literature. By capitalizing S and omitting or bracketing the final g, Gates accentuates its free play differentiated from the order and coherence of its normative usages (46, 49).      22  appearing as a spectacle before Having their citational capacities pushed to the utmost by employing their own bodies for revelation of various discourses on the black body and blackness, these the ways in which the black body has been appropriated as a receptacle for myths, beliefs, and constructed ideas about blackness.  The critical distance these performers have toward what is staged by their performances is revealing, yet this conceptual approach remains a problematic or limited strategy when considering the medium of these performances is the black body. While reviving and resurrecting black bodies as signs of oppression, racist exploitation, and dehumanization for the purposes of critique and resistance, the reenactment of stereotypes might conversely inscribe its racist ideology by circulating its damaging images. The racially marked body on stage locates both the difficulties and potentials involved in making anti-racist performances out of historical racist spectacles. Shannon Jackson cautiously suggests a possibility that racialized performance might when the tolerance for ambiguous address is low and the quest for literal representation high it is in instances of explicitly racialized performance. In anti-racist performance, audience members often forgot pectacles whether ontological or transhistorical featuring black ancestors as spectators or commercial spectators set in a theme park, an arcade, a private house (for private lesbian show), or historical freak show stage  vulnerable to their possible reproduction of historical racial oppression and abjection, replicating in the present theatrical experiences the power relationship between the blacks on historical stages and those who made them into  do not just 23  debunk the portability of whiteness but inversely re-spectacularize black bodies as objects of abuse, resonant with the images of lynch victims. Indeed, black performers might be doubly consumed: by spectators within and without.   On the other hand, however, representations of blackness, these citational racialized performances might render black bodies mere critical signs and reduce them to their dephysicalized readability, unwittingly  the theatrical darky type endorses. For instance, the customers o who [Lincolns suffering and dying black body] Topdog/Underdog 52) rehearse the self-deception of white slaver masters. By having their slaves performing singing, dancing, and instrumental recreations on the Middle Passage ships, on the auction block, and on plantation, white masters worked out a strategy of containment on the black sentience and relieved their guilt by erasing black suffering, pain, and discontent (Hartman 23; Harris 4). Problematizing and foreand reality as cherished by the white masters (22).   Parkss black performers reveal that the transformative power of subversive black performances also can be operative only in a sanitized version of theatre. All of these performances end up with deaths. If the deaths of Black Man with Watermelon and The Foundling Father connote a sense of resolution with the established version of history marked by the absent presence of blacks, the deaths of Lincoln, Hester La Negrita, and the Venus reveal that their performances fall short of escaping from their social, historical, and commercial 24  Topdog/Underdog leads to a final outcome namely, death only leaving Lincoln to replicate the violent history in reality.  My analysis of Parkss history drama aims to show how Parkss black performers critically engage with the limitations and complexities involved in their formalistic approach to African-American history and experience. Picking up on such a dilemma in which the subversive performances in terms of identity politics are inherently implicated, cited and signifying bodies paradoxically resurrect and re-member black embodied subjects by mobilizing liberating possibilities of the performing bodies on stage on the one hand and triggering affective spectatorship on the other. The utopian possibilities attributed to material presence of bodies on stage began to be envisioned with the experimental theatre in 1960s. Stressing movement and sound, the avant-garde artists in 1960s and early 1970s tried to liberate the body on stage from traditional communicative functions imposed on it: They envisioned the -  audience.8                                                   8 Seeking for a cure for what is pathological about drama in his era and Western culture in drama. Indebted to Antonin Artaud and his Theatre of Cruelty, the experimental theatre in 1960s considered the actors presence before the audience as the medium for politically activating the relationship between actor and audience. Such avant-garde artists in the 1960s and early 1970s as Peter Brook, Jerzy Grotowski, and Joseph Chaikin tried to radicalize and politicize theater: As 25  If avant-garde theatre practitioners tried to materialize and corporealize their performance theatres, phenomenological theatre critics in 1980s located corporeal presence at the heart of dramatic theatre as well as performance theatre. While focusing on the plays themselves, either creating plays as performances, such phenomenologists as Bruce Wilshire, Bert O. States, Stanton Garner, and Alice Rayner succeeded to the avant-garde problematic with the bodily -up this dialogical and complementary relationship between phenomenological investigations and ing body in its dephysicalized readability with what we might Bodied Spaces 50).   Attending to this dialogic and dialectic relationship between semiotic and phenomenological capacities of a performing body, this project investigates how black performers self-conscious re-enactments of racist stereotypes problematize the black body as a site charged with the tension between its bodily and material presence and its semiotic fungibility. While inviting the audience for a distanced, analytical approach to their performances position of the spectators alienated from the stage spectacle by affectively implicating them in the performance and simultaneously reminding them of their contingency as a viewer. By                                                  homage to Artaud the   26  locating their performing bodies between their semiotic capacities and phenomenological manifestations and mobilizing a dialectic relationship between each, these ambivalent black performers expose blackness as a contestation between appropriation and authenticity, theatrical illusion projected onto the black body and material living experiences of black people. Turning racist spectacles into the occasions for discursive resistance and affective investment and thereby historical valences of performance and redeems theatre as a venue for enabling and complicating doing history.   Chapter Summary Chapter One reads The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World against the practices of lynching and the tradition of lynching drama in the early twentieth century when lynching was at its height. Lynching is both the past preserved through black testimony and the form through which Black Man with Watermelon, as black collective self, negotiates the collective experiences of black suffering. Inflicted with various forms of violence evoking lynching  hung, chased by dogs, drowning and electrocuted  Black Man with Watermelon has -lynching drama in the early twentieth century stuck to realistic images of African Americans in defiance of the pe of folk -)characterization employs Black 27   experiences of violence and suffering in dissipate the aesthetics of closure and cathartic resolution lynching promoted as a secular ritual for white spectatoperforms the alternative temporality of African culture circular, conflated, and collapsed against the teleology of History. The latter part of my discussion demonstrates how the clashing between the forms lynching and minstrelsy  serves to destabilize passive spectatorship. paradoxically heightens the visceral effect on the part of the audience, thus debunking and interrogating the politics of pleasure that served for the institution of slavery.  Chapter Two contextualizes/problematizes The America Play and Topdog/Underdog problematic image of Abraham Lincoln in American/African-American history, vacillating cultural iconography surrounding blackface minstrelsy. Considering the history of the white including the provocative and problematic tradition of black blackface. If blackface minstrelsy -American-economic gains of the white working class in the years leading up to the Civil War, the inverted crossracial dynamics of whiteface performance in both plays serves the economic profits of 28  black impersonators, revealing how they buy into the system that buys them. The Foundling unavoidable means to make a living when it comes to Topdog/Underdog. The black male subjectivity depicted by Lincoln and Booth is fragmented and feminized within the symbolic system of blackface minstrelsy and lynching, leaving their appropriated form of theatricality the liberating potential of their performative reenactment  as a problematic possibility. Evoking the cultural tradition of blackface minstrelsy and simultaneously bringing in its historical contexts, inst the stereotypical renditions of African American masculinity worked out by blackface portrayals. The virtual death each black Lincoln, The Foundling Father and Lincoln, faces in a theme park or in an arcade, with whiteface on, does not only reference symbolic violence inherent in blackface minstrelsy but also stands for the social deaths of these characters, culminating in their literal deaths at the end of each play. The Foundling Father and Lincoln are confronted with death every night, embodying the metaphor of lynching penetrating the African American past and present.  Chapter Three analyzes In the Blood the black female body through its heroine, Hester La Negrita, a problematic black mother who ends up killing her own child. In the Blood black female body in the modern welfare state, uncannily evoking the antebellum America. If this play has been often read against murderous mothers such as Medea and Sethe, my reading of In the Blood adds the ambivalent mothers nurturing and murdering of early lynching drama. If early lynching drama negotiates black citizenship through Christian ideal motherhood to anchor 29  black belonging, this idea/ ideology becomes thwarted when it comes to Hester, a black mother who is not allowed any claim to her private sphere her abode and body. Parks demystifies the ideology of black belonging by featuring the ways in which Hester is constantly being made a spectacle by each representative of the society. The latter part of this chapter is invested in revealing how human relations of this allegorical society are articulated and negotiated through the form of spectacle power relations between spectator/consumer and the spectacle/commodity  hinting at a possible linkage between the epistemic violence of racism and the postmodern end of the play registers as a resistant and defiant act on the symbolic level, redressing the alienated relations between the black body and the words/ideas/symbols inscribed on it. By returning his son to the blood, thus disrupting the collapse of the symbolic into the literal in the her own in defiance of the role of the mater dolorosa, finally aligning herself in the lineage of black defiant mothers who kill their children.    Chapter Four discusses Venus, a play on a Khoisan woman named Saartjie Baartman who turned into the Venus Hottentot, a circus freak in early nineteenth century Europe. I read this play as -ubious and ambivalent characterization of The Negro Resurrectionist parallels the part Parks plays in both re-exposure and restitution of Baartman. Reading Venus as a part of racial spectacle surrounding this diasporic black female body, this chapter refers to Without Sanctuary exhibition and anti-lynching crusade its forerunner for their strategic employment of racist spectacle as a site for critical contests and political awareness. Venus does not just resurrect the Venusbut the racist mythologies revolving around black female body for the audience to confront, 30  Venus thwarts, disrupts, and refracts the white gaze on the black female body by constantly calling up the Venusto foreground its absent presence. However, my reading also shows that the performative use of the prosthetic costume  featured in the play many productions  paradoxically implicates the audience in the play, rendering difficult their distance-taking from her body on stage. As the audience begins to perceive their spectatorship contingent and vulnerable, they are finally ushered to the resurrection of the Venus as a feeling subject and palpable embodied being, who invites them for affective communion with her. 31    CHAPTER 1 The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World (1989) as Lynching Drama   While Suzan-Lori Parks provocatively 19), an imperative to preserve black testimony lies at the core of her dramatic world, constituting The Death of the s main concern as well. Parodying Last Black Man  yet 9 and Black Woman with Fried Drumstick who embraces these ghostly visits and always gets herself ready to feed him while being perplexed by them. Black Man must shuttle between his wife and other dead ancestors, the being and the un-being, until he has successfully carried out his mission, assigned by African American spirits from various historical, literary, and mythic it under a rock [. . . ] because if you And Greens Black-Eyed Peas Cornbread notes (102, 104).  yner explain, is not just inherited from their mystic ancestors but from literary and dramatic predecessors who contributed to the genesis of lynching drama during the heyday of lynching. In the first full-length black-authored lynching play, Rachel (1916), Angelina Weld Grimké features the                                                  9 Suzan-Lori Parks, The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World, in The America Play and Other Works (New York: TCG, 1995), 102, 105.   32  children, whom she fears will become lynching victims. It is her mother stories about the deaths of her father and brother that turn this would-be affectionate mother who feels sorry for grow up and are badblack mother committed to protecting her adopted and future children from mob violence. Not until brother Tom that their father and brother were lynched. While acknowledging that she was one of that perhaps the reason I I talk about them [. . .] was because I was ashamed who fumble for an answer, and for Mrs. Lovingever, attests to how black mothers took part in the generation, shaping, and transmission of the collective memory of this traumatic history of African Americans. By imparting her lived knowledge of this painful family history to her surviving children, she fulfills her obligation to articulate and stand as a witness to racial violence and the collective past of the disclosure (40).   Critics may find historical reLast Black Man repeats a concrete history of black persecution and racist violence. The play repeatedly revisits a period of American history  from the 1890s through the 1930s  mottled with savage violence, as is visually and aurally intimated in its references to execution. Repeatedly emitting a  33  choking sounds if welcoming --collar worker (118). Through ntional scene from an ordinary modern family is revealed as a historicized and racialized scene of persecution and oppression: -lace let me loosen up thuh noose that stringed a compelling historic relic, the noose evokes the horrific meaning. Although he desperately wants to break from the choking grip around his neck and take a whole breath, Black Man asks his wife not to take the noose off from his neck but to just loosen it. He even wants the tree branch he brings home along with the noose left as it is around e body hanging from the tree, the noose and the tree branch from which it hangs serve to remind Black Man of his y flew open and thuh light went ZAP. Tree bowed over till thuh branch said BROKE. Uhround my necklace my neck uhround my neck my tree branch. In full bloom. [. . . ] Feet hit thuh ground in I started runnin. [. . .] Draggin on my tree branch on back tuh hohroughout Black Man, the noose visually and discursively serves as a leitmotif interlacing his seemingly ahistorical and nonsequential narratives with a phase of post-Reconstruction racial violence. As Adrienne C. Macki explains, the noose was more than just a stage prop in early-twentieth-century black- 34  accompanied the actual act that  With its significance as an iconic stage preminder of vulnerability to racial violence in Last Black ManDowntown Cultural Center in 1990 directed by Beth A. Schachter, Black Man appeared most of the time with a noose around his neck and a piece of wood attached to it, pointing to the role lynching has played in shaping the collective consciousness of violent history10 and rendering d from her echoes the poignancy of the scenes from early lynching dramas in which lynch victims from you and tooked you. That was yesterday. Today you sit your chair where you sat yesterday 11 The presence of Making 203).                                                    10 The Death of the Last Black Man: Recollections of the BACA production (197-199).    11 In earlier lynching dramas that usually unfold against the domestic setting of black homes with and are symbolized in the physical intrusion of white mob or executioners into black broke down the front door and made their way to our bedroom. . . . They broke down the door. . . . Four masked men fell they did not move any more after a little. (pauses) Rachel 41, emphasis added). Georgia A Sunday Morning in the South illustrates how a peaceful mundane life of black home is broken by the abrupt entrance of the two officers and a white girl who are sent for Tom, a grandson of this house, as a victim of their lynching ritual.   35  Despite the overwhelming presence of the noose onstage and other slyly inserted scraps of the lynching narrative, few studies have read this play against the legacy of lynching drama. This black literature. Parks is an African-American writer who resists the idea that African American   does not repudiate the notion of historical reference altogether; she only warns that too much focus on oppression might people, but are Black peoHer misgivings firstly come from a concern that the diversities and multiplicities in which black people and experiences can be artistically rendered might be forfeited.   Partially taking up the form of an (anti-)lynching drama, Last Black Man is confronted with the reality of oppression at hand and the no less imminent task of decentralizing the defining position of racial identity for black art. As a representative African-American post-soul playwright, Parks faces up to the potential dead end of negotiating the relations between the text and the social, literature and context, art and politics. Parks gropes for a breakthrough through the ways in which Last Black Man reflects and refracts the collective experiences of black suffering by clashing aesthetic and social forms, without privileging either. While succeeding to the imperative to preserve black testimony, Last Black Man collective experience of lynching, distancing itself from early-twentieth-century lynching  36  family and community.  Anti-Lynching (or Lynching) Drama in the Early Twentieth Century  In Strange Fruit, a seminal anthology of the genre of lynching plays, Judith L. StephensLimited to early-twentieth-century dramas by women, the anthoinitiative in the anti-lynching movement and their contribution to the tradition of lynching drama. Such African American women playwrights as Angelina Grimké, Georgia Douglas Johnson, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, and Mary Powell Burrill were dedicated to The Anti-Lynching Crusade, and set out to ost of works written by black women in this early phase are set in the domestic spaces. Rather than presenting the actual violence onstage, these playwrights depict how the black family or community copes up with the lynching event that happened, is happening, or will happen offstage. However, the clashing between such domestic and communal environment of everyday routine as home, church, school, or workplace and the brutal reality of lynching is so dramatic as to accentuate the ruthlessness and inhumanness of this racial violence.  For these jarring moments of contrast, particularly in terms of the structure lynching is featured offstage, the role of verbally recreating and relaying the incident of lynching becomes vital in these plays. It is more so when considering the importance of lynching drama as an archival testimony. Aligning themselves with other artistic forms of protests against lynching by African-American women Oakland Tribune in 1915,  37  Mary Turner (named after a real woman lynched as  these African American women United States and a continuously evolving dramatic form that preserves the knowledge of this particular form of racial violence the detailed and painful confession of Mrs. Loving in Rachel, these African-American women pioneers in theatre mainly feature black women as the messengers of lynching incidents in the past or in session,  featuring a black male messenger. In A Sunday Morning in the South, Matilda tersely yet appallingly breaks -lynching dramas Safe (1925) and Blue-Eyed Black Boy (1930), a trio chorus of female characters Liza, Mandy, and Hannah, and Pauline, Rebecca, and Hester  relays and comments on lynchings happening outside. And it is the sister Millie who imparts the tragAftermath (1919).    However, these dramatistits material and emotional aftermath in black families and communities. Lynching does not just point to physical, extralegal mob violence against blacks but it is a battle waged over symbol, image, and representation. The myth of the black rapist who violates a white woman was always at the center of pro-lynching rhetoric although less than a third of those lynched were reported to lynching was not sparked by black crime but rather served as a theatre that perform black barbarity and white righteousness by creating public displays of bestial black men in visible contrast to strong and -authored lynching plays were one  38  of the cultural means available for full  - theater of alleged crime and punishment that robbed its victim of that right. In this context, Koritha Mitchell prefers to call these - lynching plays written by black authors the height of mob -7). According to Mitchell, the ideological strife surrounding black citizenship was waged over black domesticity. Inasmuch as domesticity provides the rights and responsibilities of citizenship, lynch mobs tried to deny domesticity by relegating black men to brute rapists and potential threats to white families, and, as a result, in turn, destroyed black homes by lynching black men. Black-authored lynching dramas, conversely, strived to emphasize that lynched victims were capable of successful homes by using domestic settings and featuring black characters who -14).       However, the mainstream stage at this era was propagating the distorted, caricatured, and mocked representation of African Americans. On top of the unfavorable legacy of the stage n-authored dramas since the eighteenth centuryassociated with malapropisms, cowardice, and lack of common sense (P. Young 17-9),  first formal public acknowledgLove and Theft 4) which arose during the latter days of slavery and gained mass popularity though post-Reconstruction era, played a critical role in defining and consummating the black theatrical type, the so-called  251). Grinning with large lips, rolling and bulging white eyes, jerking in motion, and shuffling in gait, the black minstrels with burnt cork masks performed the  39  version of music, speech, dance, and behavior that whites perceived as black identity. While in which whites chose to perceive African Americans, and those distorted and appropriated images were further disseminated in American literature, theater, the arts, and popular culture. Nathan Huggins offers a detailed description of this stereotyped image on stage:  The theatrical darky was childlike; he could be duped into the most idiotic and foolish schemes; but like a child, too, innocence would protect him and turn the tables on the schemers. His songs were vulgar and his stories the most gross and broad; his jokes were often on himself, his wife or woman. Lazy, he was slow of movement, or when he displayed a quickness of wit it was generally in flight from work or ghosts. Nevertheless, he was unrestrained in enthusiasm for music for athletic and rhythmical dance. . . he was insatiable in his bodily appetites; his songs and tales about food would make one think him all mouth, gullet and stomach. . . .The stage Negro went into ecstasy over succulent foods pork, chicken, watermelon  This kind of characterization rid blacks of the qualities required of citizens an ability to think for themselves, solemnity, integrity, moral dignity, and self-sufficiency; thus, dismantling these stereotypes became an imminent task for such black dramatists as Grimké, Johnson, Burrill, and Dunbar-Nelson. Disrupting the legacy of e, slow in intelligence and movement, only guided by instincts and appetites, which is deep-rooted in the American stage tradition and the realistic images of blacks as they manage their lives gracefully in well-organized homes, engage in activities in schools and workplaces, cultivate their familial, religious bond in homes and  40  churches, not different from whites. For instance, Grimké confesses that she chose her characters well educated, cultivated and cultured; they are well-mannered and in many instances, more moral than the whites; they love beauty; they have ideals and ambitions, and they do not talk this educated type in the Negr Grimké presents Rachel as an example of this sophistication: -26).    Collision of Rituals and Performative Mediumship  Like these black women characters who preserve collective memory through black stories, past (102). nnocent black man who were aware of his innocence and tried to publish it through his own newspaper before he was dragged and to complete linguistic inscription, whether spoken or written. If Rachel portrays the ways in which family members surviving lynching come to terms with the tragic death of their father that has remained unclaimed for their consciousness, Last Black Man has been also read through the lens of trauma theory work[s] through the trauma of loss by remembering, repeating and re-experiencing  Last Black Man is invested in redressing The America Play (175): Heading toward th 41  historical and mythic ancestor figures as Lots of Grease and Lots of Pork, Yes and Greens Black-Eyed Peas Cornbread, Queen-Then-Pharaoh Hatshepsut, Before Columbus, Old Man River Jordan, And Bigger and Bigger and Bigger, Prunes and Prisms, Voice on Thuh Tee V. have gathered together to re-member, resurrect, and re-enact the history of Black Man, finally to lay him to rest. The structure orchestrated by an overture, five scenes, and a final chorus, gives the play a ritualized rhythm, paralleling that of Greek tragedy whose narrative episodes are separated by choral stasima, enclosed by opening padados and closing exodos (Malkin 168). Parks also heavily resorts to religious rituals for structuring Last Black Man: As she mentions in an interview, the five scenes titled aCross, a series of fourteen tableaus depicting the passion of Christ (Jacobus 1372). Parks confesses that she  (Ong 47-50).   The structure and rhythm adopted from Greek traes of violence and suffering. While the association with the Stations of Cross accords his repetitive deaths a mock-heroic and mock-religious quality, the movement toward each death tends to become fatalistic as well with this association. Paralleling d dying on the cross, Black Man charges toward his destined death every time with a large watermelon that is, his cross marked by racial stigma. s by diverse means revisit the death of each black man in the past,  42  -American man, as Deborah E. Geis suggests (Suzan-Lori Parks 62). The compulsive rhythm of repetition white American society, whether on the socio-political, economic, or cultural dimension (Wiegman 12).       This recurring, circular, routinized cadence of death is brought to an end by a final, proper death Black Man seeks for in the end. This concluding death enables Black Man to break free from the cycle of killings and mutilations from which he has suffered, thus yielding among critics a tendency to accentuate a sense of resolution. Parsing s ritualistic elements against voodoo rituals devoted to the Petro loa, Glenda R. Carpio detects a cathartic movement from  is, first, toward the release of anger and pathos  In a similar vein, Louise Bernard interprets the Final etelling the past, writing it down, and securing it under a rock, as commanded by mythic, historical black ancestors, Black Man can Chorus, Black Woman once again today next summer tomorrow just uh moment uhgoh in 1317 dieded thuh last black man in thuh whole entire worshe confirms the death of her husband for herself and for the chorus figures for the last time by adding, flavor of finality to his death and the structure of the play as well. Elam and Rayner even elicit a  43  exchange the last words12 with each other,  It is indeed the finality of death that affords/serves for such a cathartic ending, enabling laying the dead and the past of racial violence to rest. However, the finality of death deserves special consideration against the backdrop of lynching as a rite of exorcism. In terms of the punitive system of lynching, death is obviously the ultimate punishment afflicted on the body of a victim. In terms of the representational politics of the regime of lynching, physical violence inversely serves symbolic and metaphoric endsshows, lynching constitutes a ritual specific to American society, consummating its racial relations through its ceremony and performance (1-19). As ceremony, lynching performs white supremacy and black inferiority as vital to the society. While the representational politics serves to endorse and offer a rationale for the physical violence of lynching as instanced by the myth of the black rapist, death, in turn, evil and restore the topsy-As a backlash against the and fix the African body in a particular place, where it could be  and was looked upon as a dangerous                                                  12 BLACK MAN WITH WATERMELON: Miss me. BLACK WOMAN WITH FRIED DRUMSTICK: Miss me.  BLACK MAN WITH WATERMELON: Re-member me.  BLACK WOMAN WITH FRIED DRUMSTICK: Re-member me. Call one me sometime. Call on me sometime. Hear? Hear? (131)   44   Lynching is a form of closure imposed on blackness in two transformation from chattel to citizenry. As black individual bodies were physically dismembered with lynching practices, they were also collectively dis-membered from the body politic of America.  The aesthetics of closure lynching harbors as a physical and symbolic form of violence is t black man toward/through (recurring) death(s), the title presents the play as equivocal: Does the death of the last black man imply the termination of black people or does it set them free from the circular history of violence? The catharsis or the celebration his final death might endorse is undermined by the repetitive appearances of Black Man with the noose around his neck. Voice on thuh Tee  dlining tonight: the news: is Gamble Major, the absolutely last living Negro man in the whole entire known world is dead. Major Gamble, born a slave, taught himself the rudiments of education to become a spearhead in the Civil Rights Movement. He was 38 years old. News of Major death sparked controlled displays of jubilation in all corners of the world. (110) ormation about Black Man including his name. The revelation is quite new and even abrupt against the ways in which the play negates its protagonist any features of a realist character. This biography, however, is far from a  45  conventional characterization: Born a slave, spearheading the Civil Rights movement, and dying in the present at the age of 38, this figure has lived across an impossible time span, more than a century, contracting and transpiring through African-American time and history, straddling the personal and the political. The furtive allusion to phenomenal black figures from the actual history of Civil Rights movement, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcom X, both of whom died at the age of 39  works to further connect the personal history of Black Man to the Civil Rights Americans who were not any more their property, to forestall their movement toward full citizenship, and to maintain white collectivity by annihilating those it perceives as not entitled to s evokes and parallels the catharsis lynching might provoke as a secularized exorcising ritual: The conduct of the whites who participated in murdering and lynching blacks suggests that these grisly events served as a catharsis by purging the evil the whi as James P. Comer comments on the perverted scapegoating of lynching (134).        As such, the ritualized structure of Last Black Man is encroached upon by the temporality of a pagan ritual of lynching as the presence of the noose on the stage constantly evokes. In on the part of the white participants this secularized ritual is  plural deaths also can be reconfigured in terms of linearity: perpetual dying of Black Man, almost like clockwork, creates a sequential order predicated on demise, his repetitive deaths represent the rhythm of actual practices of lynching as repeated,  46  counterpart resurrecting momentum, as emblematized by the peculiar mode of haunting. If r progress towards annihilation of the specific race,  When Black Manformances of the past are only meant for his reconciliation with its traumatic loss in the end, haunting might be disregarded. Signifying his existential quandary per se, haunting operates as an ambivalent mechanism for Black Man, who is a victim, thus already deceased, and yet at the same time a witness to his own deaths. He can bring an end to his haunting and thereby successfully cross over to the land of the dead only by fulfilling his testimonial acts. Haunting becomes the only form to which Black Man can resort for sharing the circumstances of his deaths with the living. committed against him and his race. By retelling, re-enacting, and re-experiencing the scenes from his executions, Black Man calls up and lays bare all the violence afflicted on his body so that it can be perceived not just as past but present. The choral refrain reminds once again the temporal ubiquity of t in the final funeral rite of the play:  . . .  died thuh last black man in thuh whole entire , resounds as chorus throughout the play, this leitmotif paradoxically reveals there can be no death of the last black man in this world.  Not just a thematic and structural leitmotif of this particular play, haunting holds a special Parks depicts playwriting less as an authorial or  47  compositional activity than as a state of being hauntedfrom, say, P13 The return of these ghost figures to the present enables the expansive temporality in which conventional historical temporalities are shattered. Parks depicts these mystic, diachronic moments of her figures as possession, quoting John S.  son lies and yet continues to live: he is a livin-dead, and no other term can describe him better than that. . . . [The living dead] belong to the time period of the Zamani [past] and by entering individuals in the Sasa [present] period, they become our co. In the bodies of such figures, multiple spirits are intermingled with each other, ancestral, spiritual force,through this orphic transgenerational fusion, renders possible what is called the African Continuum, which envisions, as Michael S. Harper explains, Jones 54). predicated upon an alternative temporality of African culture as conceived by Mbiti, denying any sense of linear or teleological resolution.   nter-force against the teleology of History as conceived by white oppressors and the impulse of Othering embedded                                                  13 Parks also explains the moments she got inspired to write Last Black Man as dreaming or possession. One day she woke up after napping, she got suddenly caught by the words written  in the whole entire While rethe source of her artistic inspiration not as individual but communal.   48  in lynching. Along immemorial, from. . . PastLand, from somewhere back there by them and channels them through writing-him to commune with the living in the contemporary world. Black man is not just haunting the livingBlack Woman-- but is haunted by other living-dead. The chorus figures, these mythic, literary, religious black ancestors, have not just gathered to re-but to tell their own stories distorted by or erased from the dominant history. The anxiety of erasure Queen-Then-Pharaoh Hapshepsut and Before Columbus. One of the few female pharaohs to rule in Ancient Egypt during the eighteenth dynasty, Queen-Then-Paraoh Hapshepsut built (116). On the other hand, the name irst time I saw it. It was huge. Thuh green sea becomes uh hillside. Uh hillside populated with some peoples I will name. Thuh first time I saw it was uh was-Land he first discovered getting smaller connects to a critique of division and differentiation  QUEEN-THEN-PHARAOH HATSHEPSUT: Before Columbus thuh worl usta be roun they put uh /d/ on thuh end of roun makin round. Thusly they set in  49  motion thuh end. Without that /d/ we couda gone on spinnin forever. Thuh /d/ thing ended things ended. (102) -Then-Pharaoh Hatshepsut uncovers the violence of to the discursive and political and its change after the Western conquest, as witnessed by Before Columbus encapsulate the imperialist intent latent in the desire for enlightenment and closure:  BEFORE COLUMBUS: The popular thinking of the day back in them was that the world was flat. They thought the world was flat. Back then when they thought the world was flat they were afeared and stayed at home. They wanted to go out back then when they thought the world was flat but the water had in it dragons of which meaning these dragons they were afeared back then when they thought the world was flat. They stayed at home. Them thinking the world was flat kept it roun. Them thinking the sun revolved around the earth kept them satellite-like. They figured out the truth and scurried out. Figuring out the truth put them in their place and they scurried out to put us in ours. (103) Putting /d/ at the end of roun is a symbolic act that stands for the Western realization that the world is round, not flat, and this knowledge triggered their colonial voyage. This process contesting any fixa 50  knowledge and colonial epistemology, intimating how both operate by grouping, classifying, and differentiating. Queen, Before Columbus, and even Black Man got their stories omitted and   knowledge and power. As the play proceeds, the chorus figures come back to a question over and   Bodily Transmission of Collective Experiences   Early lynching -reliant black figures was not just meant for belying, thwarting, and reconfiguring the false images of blacks the  darky provided the brilliant African- needed to prove the race is virtuous, dignified, and autonomous, altogether so equal to citizenship. Such virtuous, smart, and upright individuals as exemplified by black soldiers, lawyers, and mothers/wives could serve as a counterpart  darky as type. To avoid, shatter, and debunk wholesale derogation, early anti-lynching dramatists tried to establish each character as an individual impervious to such a stereotypical rendering.   Marking its discontinuity from the realistic characterization of modernist lynching drama, Last Black Man lends the figure of Black Man little room for personal representations, rather Bearing the names that mark themselves as type, Black Man  51  with Watermelon and Black Woman with Fried Drumstick stereotypes, archetypalrepresenting the simplified lives of African Americans on plantations and the devotion of the married black couple (Fuchs 48). Yet, the play does not provide any familial or social background for figuring out why Black Man has to die repeatedly. The characters are not psychologically grounded and realistically rounded, amounting to nothing beyond what they signify or embody. Less as an individual than as a collective self, Black Man takes over the role of revealing and recording what is generic and prototypical about African American experiences. Rather than featuring a single death of a black man, Last Black Man depicts how African American history is saturated with death and the memory thereof.  Embodying a plausible shift from the personal to the communal or the political, Black Man serves as a signifier for the collectivity of African American experiences, as he in 170). Particularly, the death of the last black man reenacts and represents the death of each black man transpiring through American history: He has fallen from space tu in thuh middle of thuh City.  to be hanged me uh space 6 feet by 6 feet by 6. Make it big and mark it . . . uh mass grave-site. Theres company is not just limited to the locale of their burial. Black Man also imparts his body to those  -site in which the physical maltreatments of those countless black men have been registered and engraved. Through his body, personal memory, cultural memory, and history are intermingled and crisscrossed with each other.   52  The advent of the concept of collective memory and the performative turn went hand in hand in the 1980s, when Last Black Man debuted. he performance of memory serves as a mnemonic deviceThrough performance, we move from the individual to the group to the individual, ascertaining the social framework of remembrance. Especially because lynching is concerned with the embodied history of African Americans, theatre can be an optimized venue for dealing with such a kind of collective memory in which the experiences of the ancestor bodies are transmitted to the body in the present. It is the circular, conflated, and collapsed temporality of the play that contributes to collective experiences:  BLACK MAN WITH WATERMELON:  There is uh Now and there is uh Then. Ssal there is. I being in uh Now; uh Now being in uh Then; I bein, in Now in Then; in I will be. I was be too but uh me-has-been. Thuh Then that was be is uh has-been-Then too. Thuh me-has-been sits in thuh be-me; we sit on this porch. Same porch. Same me. Thuh Then thats been somehow sits in thuh Then that will be: same Thens. I swing from uh tree. You cut me down and bring me back. Home. Here. I fly over thuh yard. I fly over thuh yard in all over. Them thens stayed fixed. Fixed Thens. Thuh Thems stays fixed too. Thuh Thems that come and take me and thuh Thems that greet me and then them Thems that send me back here. Home. Stays fixed, them do.) BLACK WOMAN WITH FRIED DRUMSTICK:  Your feets. (126)  53  --has-and even his me-will-be co-exist, conflated with each other. He exists simultaneously The ways in which the present, the past, and the future interfere with and intrude upon each other through this locale also point to a spatial imagination at the height of postmodernism. Jeanette R. Malkin reads porch as the one they have sat on throughout time compounding all the memories into a single note in this monologue the ways in which his musings on his simultaneous, transhistorical being s corporeal sensations as well as intuitive feelings that compound all the disparate times into a performative continuum in perience of lynching as present: He uses the present tense for describing how he  over  It is not just in the porch Black Man sits on but through his body that n is actualized, in which African American experiences of the present, the past, and the future intersecting with each other. The temporal elision in which the past, the e sense of his bodily presence in the present Last Black Man is ultimately abParks herself opines:    54  In Last Black Man, heroism is being there and seeing it through. I guess I have a greater understanding of the small gesture, or the great act that is also very small gesture, or the great act that is also very small like being present. He [the Black Man with Watermelon] is present and spirit people come       When we approach lynching as collective memory that is transmitted through body, the following passage from Richard Black Boy is particularly illuminating:  I had never in my life been abused by whites, but I had already become conditioned to their existence as though I had been the victim of a thousand lynchings. The penalty of death awaits me if I made a false move and I wondered if it was worth-while to make any move at all. The things that influenced my conduct as a Negro did not have to happen to me directly; I needed but to hear of them to feel their full effects in the deepest layers of my consciousness. The actual experience would have let me see the realistic outlines of what was really happening, but as long it remained something terrible and yet remote, something whose horror and blood might descend upon me at any moment, I was compelled to give my entire imagination over to it, an  55  act which blocked the springs of thought and feeling in me, creating a sense of distance between me and the world in which I lived. (203)   fied by the threat of death looming over them at every move they take. For African Americans, lynching is an experience which has exerted a visceral effect, even if it is remote. They can feel this terror paradoxically inasmuch as it remains in the realm of representation whether as narratives or images. While being a bodily sensation and horror experienced by them personally, lynching strengthens its damaging power in proportion to its representational praxis. The imaginative    The ught relationship with his own body also reflects the ways in which the body has been experienced as collective and intimate, alienated and pressing, representational and presentational as African Americans have gone through thousands of lynchings whether individually experienced or culturally traumatized. Early-twentieth-century lynching dramatists tended to leave the aspect of lynching as the experience of flesh unattended, leaving it offstage: Lynching was rather familial and communal matter that their members had to handle and cope with by their mutual affection, intelligence, and human dignity, not inferior to those of whites. Last Black Man does not present the actual lynching scene on stage, either. Black Man seems detached from his own body and his bodily experiences: As an African American collective self always perceives his body as seen by others electrocution] wit 56  lynching (119). Last Black Man suggests this traumatized relationship with the body is due to the discursive and symbolic violence Black Man, as a collective and transhistorical self, has gone through. Focalizing the complicated and contradictory ways in which African American experiences of lynching got inscribed in the flesh, this play shows how Black Man finally reconstitutes himself as an embodied subject by affectively engaging the audience in the process through which he is tortured and dying. Last Black Man recounts and revives lynching as a flesh event, even from the beginning.      Last Black Manbacks something Hen). take you. . . They told and told and told: proper instructions for thuh burial proper attire for thuh mourninneighbors uh  (105, 106) Strutted down on up thuh road with my axe. By-my-self-with-my-axe. Got tuh thuh street top 93 dyin hen din hand. Dropped thuh axe. Tooked tuh strangling. 93 dyin hen din hand with no heads let em loose thu run down tuh towards home infront of me. Flipped thuh necks of thuh next 23 more odd. Slinged um over my shoulders. Hens of thuh neighbors now in my pots. (106)  While inheriting and parodying black mothers in early lynching dramas who engross themselves in such family chores as sewing, ironing, cleaning, and food preparation with the belief that the  57  black home is an important pdescription of how she carried her axe by herself, strangled and flipped the necks of so many hens, and finally fried them in her pots, evokes the ways in which the lynch mob slaughtered black men ruthlessly and brutally for nothing. Addressing the exact number of the hens she killed to no purpose, Black Woman once again obliquely refers to the institution of lynching grisly reflecting the ways in which it is often remembered by the large number of the victims  approximately more than 3200 black men between 1890 and 1930. The resonance between hen and lynch victims is reinforced by the remarks she makes nonchalantly at the end of this panel: . They eat their own yuh know. . . Hen do. Saw it on thhens points to cannibalism.  Horrifyingly yet seamlessly, the image of hens slaughtered and fried is transferred onto right here uh middle of thuh Cityo onessgot rocuted.   While beginning the depiction o Black Man deflates the gravity and acerbity of the subject he touches upon  58  As if excited about setting up his own persecution, Black Man continues to enumerate the length. Closer tuh thuh power I never been. Flip up on thuh go switch. Huh! Juice begins its ssipated to the trivial and mundane technical problems  county tuh synecdoche for the hands who controls the power, not just the physical one but the power of policing the body.  Such a detached posture toward his own persecution scene can be aligned with his alienation from his body witnessed throughout the play. From the very beginning of the play, this description of his own action does not bring about any tangible changes in his movement, between language and body is also attested to by his words that begin to fall apart. As he attempts to move his hands in the third time, declaring in vain ack man move. His hands  Queen-Then-move). Associating Black Man with his stepson, Thutmose III, for whom she served as a regent, Queen connects his alienation from his body with the stereotype of blacks as children who cannot see, rule, and write for themselves14: Black Man refers back to the                                                  14 e are too young to see. Let them see it for you. We are too young to rule. Let them rule it for you. We are too young to have. Let them have it for you. You are too young to write. Let them e uses for the subject that is characterized by these immature traits has changed form you to we. By  59  tradition of the stage darky who 251).      Parks attributes have been assigned to black people. In this play, the stereotype that has been assigned to the black self is embodied and materialized by a watermelon that Black Man with Watermelon holds onto physically. Black Man opens his first reunion with his wife with a negation of his possession of this foreign object105). the juxtaposition of two entities might be taken for a possessive relationship with the preposition, ecomes articulated and defamiliarized by the physical juxtaposition of Black Man and watermelon. On the stage, he carries this plant, but does not have any organic relationship with itplanted on me. On me in my handis denied between them either in terms of stripedly whfigurative addendum to Black Man with the literal watermelon, and thereby making the best of the medium of theatre in which the literary, the textual, and the figurative can be actualized, physicalized, and materialized. The enthrallment Black Man feels about the stereotype of watermelon lovers  often associated with gluttony, simple-mindedness, and childishness is literalized and externalized by the weight of the watermelon he holds.                                                   of surrogation from ancient Egyptian history to modern American racial history.     60  Among the chorus characters, And Bigger And Bigger And Bigger also points to this revealing analogy between the figurative and the literal of being stigmatized. As his name evokes, he is drawn from Bigger Thomas. As the image of Bigger Thomas has and Elam, UnfinishedAnd Bigger And Bigger  As an igure suffocation and alienation from his own body, tossing it around with him throughout the play. As if he would be a mouthpiece for Black Man who can express his pain just with an intermittent  Bigger vicariously feels and articulates the pain and the anger he might feel If Black Man is the obedient, docile, and pastoral type, And Bigger/Bigger Thomas represents an angry young black man from an urban area. This contrasting pair of stereotypes, Black Man and And Bigger, illuminates the ambivalence with which the Other is conceived, imagined, and signified in colonial discourse.  is recognizably true that the chain of stereotypical signification is curiously mixed and split, polymorphous and perverse, and articulation of multiple belief. The black is both savage (cannibal) and yet the most obedient and dignified of servants (the bearer of food); he is the embodiment of rampant sexuality and yet innocent as a child; he is mystical, primitive, simple-minded and yet the most epistemological violence that envisions the black as a collective yet split, schizophrenic self, Black Man, an obedient, dignified, simple-minded servant, can be associated with Bigger  61  Thomas, savage, rampant embodiment of sexuality. This intertextuality with Native Son once again contextualizes Last Black Man adversity begins with his accidental killing of a white woman; the combination of the black male criminal and white female victim triggers a lynching scenario when Bigger is falsely accused of Native Son 327). Definitely, it is the mythology of the black rapist and the dissemination of the images associated with it that play a deadly part, making And -up story in grown Bigger and Bigger. Too big for my own -laden and smellin badly As a stand-in for any sencompasses the fated life of Bigger Thomas, an alleged black rapist. Malkin also might consider rmelonduring the play hi168). The stereotype of the black rapist works to reduce the African American subject to the corporeal by investing the black male with hypermasculinity and excess sexual prowess. While serving as a practical ground for propelling mob action, the accusation of black men of uncontrollable sexuality and extreme corporeality sustains the regime of lynching at a more fundamental level: marking of the African American body as property, lynching emerges to reclaim and reassert the centrality of black corporeality, deterring the now theoretically possible move toward citizenry   62  suspicion of and resistance to what is imposed on and assigned to his self/body result in a by whats gots my looks. Ssmymethod. Try it by testin it and it turns out true. Look down at my o his other bodily tooth. Melon mines?  foreignness to him, he also seems to be distanced from his own body by engaging himself in its dismemberment  cataloging, dissecting, and scrutinizing each part.        This oscillation between self-identity and self-negation continues even in the moment they strap him all over the body for electrocution. In the course of his almost failing and eerily humorous attempt to claim his body parts through querying them, he comes to affirm the possession of his body in an abrupt and unexpected way,  Thuh straps they have on me are leathern. See thuh cord waggin full with uh jump-juice try me tuh wiggle from thuh waggin but belt leathern straps: width thickly. One round each forearm. Forearm mines? 2 cross thuh chest. Chest is mines: and it explodin. One for my left hand fingers left strapted too. Right was done thuh same. Jump-juice meets me-mine juices I do uh slow softshoe like on water. Town crier cries uh moan. Felt my nappy head go frizzly. Town follows thuh crier in uh sorta sing-uglong-song. (108)  Black Man ascertains that the chest belongs to him even before casting the existential question,  63  -juice meets me-seems so detached from his body that he even treats himself as an inanimate object such as fruit  this time he becomes melon himself  his mock-biochemical treatment of the moment of electrocution paradoxically lets the audience imagine and feel the visceral effect  electrhowever, at a surface level, Black Man keeps trying to cut off himself from his bodily sensations by bringing up the specter of minstrelsy. The utmost physical pain inflicted on his body to an extent that would make him shuffle and scorch his hair to tight crisp curls is mediated by and minstrel elements in this scene, Carpio contends that minstrelsy foregrounds theatre as an innately violent space compared to the spectacle of electrocution (220). However, reading of the connection between the blackface minstrel and lynching victim reveals that the clownish expressions and motions of minstrels also point to the physical violence the punitive society inflicted on the black body, not just a mimetic one on blackness or the black character: The blackface grinning cannot be distinguished from the grimace of pain; Expressions of pidity, fear, and pleasure,such as bulging eyes, can be associated with for rigor mortis, the frantic, yet spasmodic motion which r       This alienating disparity between the denotation and the connotation of these gestures and facial expressions of blackface reveals the politics of pleasure that served for the institution of slavery. W psychological economy, the blacks should be or, at least, look, -- always happy, contented, and jolly. The stereotype of the contented darky served as a self- 64  defensive delusion for the white masters. Although the slave owner  locates the political containment of black sentiment in the slave dancing in the Middle Passage ships, performance on the auction block, and instrumental recreations on plantations. These y. . . to dissimulate -sequivocally pointing to both the racist imand indifferent to sufferingemphasis added) and the involuntary movements of the frenzied body in actual pain. By featuring himself in the images invented by the white masters and clashing them with the sheer violence attested to by his shuffling feet and frizzled hair,  which are also accompanied by town-resounding moaning  -59). Exposed to diverged affective loads of pleasure and pain, the audience cannot maintain their passive spectatorship any longer, let alone being given to indulgence in this degenerate tradition or complacently sentimentalizing the body in pain. This jarring combination of hilarity and cruelty prompts the audience to speculate and feel for re- seemingly insensate, indifferent, callous tone switches into an affective, visceral awakening as indicated by the verb he chooses for the first time in his testimonyFelt my nappy head go   65       The most engaging moment in terms of atrocity and affective rapport with the audience in  Swingin from front tuh back uhgain. Back tuh back tuh that was how I be wentin. Chin on my chest hangin down in restin eyes each on eyein my 2 feets. Left on thuh right one righ one on thuh left. Crossed eyein. It was difficult tuh breathe. Toes uncrossin then crossin for luck. With my eyes. Gaw. It had begun tuh rain. Oh. Gaw. Ever so lightly. Blood came on up. You know: tough. Like riggamartins-stifly only isolated. They some of em pointed they summoned uh laughed they some looked quick in an then they looked uhway. It had begun tuh rain. I hung on out tuh dray. They putting uhway their picnic baskets. Ever so lightly gaw gaw it had begun tuh rain. They pullin out their umbrellas in hidedid up their eyes. Oh. (119) vulnerable than ever. In the theatre he verbally set up, however, Black Man becomes his own agent by modulating the distance between himself and his body, his body and his audience. Black Man does not see himself through the eyes of others any more, but looks down from his through the chest to tperspective. Around when his left and right eyes visit his right and left feet, the audience might even feel nauseated by having their imaginative eyes also crossed. The visual nausea syhe feeling of being strangulated is evoked with t and this onomatopoeic association finally explodes into a  66  visceral imagination. Through this empathetic identification, the audience can exempt themselves from those who summoned uh laughed they some looked quievoke a perplexing complexity of feelings, grief, sorrow, horror, and pity, rather than giving rise to a reflexive  or, unreflective  laughter.        Along with the presence of his body with the noose around neck aaudience. Verbally re-enacting his past persecution, Black Man debunks and disrupts the closure of sentiment whites impose on the black bodyYou will writ-of re(-)membering, his oral and bodily transmission of the past plight. As she reveals in   something that  Involves yr whole bod.  Write with yr. whole body.  Read with yr. whole bod.    67  Primarily, on (17-8). At a more fundamental level, language as a physical act enables the intersubjective bodily transmissions of affects and emotions. Given that language is integral to retrieving the past and turning it into history, this language is not just to be located in the rational and intellectual faculty of man, but language, more associative, more flexible, more spontaneous, is hinted at by the metaphor of spittle Charged with the vital, regenerative, and connective images, the spittle casts his words as a as he says himself (116). While Queen-Then -Pharaoh Hatshepsut warns him against its ephemeral, unstable, non-feeling subjects by its associative and adhesive power, disrupting the constraints on blackness, black body, and the black sentient being. 68  CHAPTER 2 Theatricalizing History/ Historicizing Theatre: Blackface Lynchings in The America Play (1994) and Topdog/Underdog (2001)    The America Play realizes Suzan-Lori Parks a way of creating and Featuring the Lesser Known who acts out the assassination of Lincoln in a theme park every night, The America Play summons, revisits, and recasts one of the important moments of American history. Playing such a white history in blackface, this play suggests that the kind of history Parks wants to create through her theatre might lie elsewhere than simply in the figure of Lincoln. The Lesser Known who calls himself the Foundling Father virtually creates and re-possesses his place in history by including his black presence in the performance rather than just revolving around the white iconography of Lincoln. While the contribution of the theatrical -level, especially in -enactment, its cross-racial structure suggests its engagement with a specific historical performance genre: blackface minstrelsy. The whiteface makeup of Lincoln another Lincoln impersonator in Topdog/Underdog with the proper name  renders more pronounced these two black perforeference to blackface minstrelsy and the inversion hinted at in their performances.  What is often addressed but curiously left unattended in the Lincoln plays is their adoption of this highly historicized and racially conscious form of American theatre. And scattered critical comments on plays tend to locate the kind of subversion Parks envisions in an inversed cross-racial performance of the black minstrel  its disruption of the symbolic structure of white dominion  69  embedded in blackface donned by the white minstrel.15 This chapter reads blackface minstrelsy as a form for mediating and negotiating formal structures of racialized experiences and history of African Americans. Two black  this cross-racial performance form bring up racial and racist contexts to this play, the milieu in which minstrelsy has been nationally located as a socio-cultural institution. With a prospect of subversive agency epitomized in the joke of a black Lincoln on the one hand, The America Play and Topdog/Underdog remind us that these two black minstrels are not free to escape from the cultural, symbolic, and economic system epitomized by blackface minstrelsy, which they try to destabilize, appropriate, or subvert. Ea confinement leads from his compulsive replication of the suicidal and genocidal structure embedded in minstrelsy as a historical and racialized form: The Foundling Father and Lincoln are exposed to virtual deaths over and over by the customers, each finally contained by the  evocative of both the symbolic and allegorical death and the literal and physical violence to which African Americans have been historically vulnerable behind blackface.   Whiteface as Symbolic Inversion  When contextualized against minstrelsy, the black Lincoln-racial performance registers as a form of inversion from the outset. Reversing the racial/racist dynamics of the                                                  15 In the first essay published on this play, Harry Elam and Alice Rayner read The America Play  premier at the New York Public Theatre: The actor Reggie Montgomery as the Foundling Father performed certain behaviors traditionally associated with the minstrel tradition. Montgomerys repetition of those behaviors and his tails, the costume of the minstrel players, stands as a consciously racialized performance. (183).  Mo behaviors and costume performance within the legacy of the minstrel show.   70  minstrel show, the black performing the white can serve to debunk and rebuke the exploitative intentions inherent in blackface masking. To locate a ground to discuss the possibilities beyond the colonial and subjugating structure of cross-racial appropriations such as blackface minstrelsy, E. Patrick Johnson asks-racial performance appropriates the colonize in its transformation of a representative postmodern drama centre and hierar(Malkin 19), critics have located The America Play unchained from any dominant discourse or the imperative of closure  through the ways in which tRep&Rev variations of .16 Along with continuous simulation, echoing, and iteration throughout the play, the performativity of the black Lincoln opens up a variety of perspectives on the . By passassination of Lincoln this play radically invites the audiences to rewrite, renegotiate, and reimagine the white myth of Lincoln as a founding father and America as a nation embracing the ideal of equality and freedom. While focusing on  -ness of meaning, Haike Frank points out that --idea of the world is conducted around                                                  16 Reenacting the historical shooting scene time and again with the customers, the Foundling Father riffs on the historical incident with slight variations each time, such as when the customer as Booth cries ords of Secretary of War Edwin performance primarily puts into question the received truths about the history of Lincoln.    71  Abraham Lincoln look-alike who disturbs and challenges the white- (4-6). By staging a black Lincoln impersonator, Parks plays with the presence and absence of American  Hole of HistoryAP 159): Aostends . . . the absence of , 32)[s] attention to and correct[s] the elisi(Dawkins,  83),  182). Within the wider historical context of slavery, war, and emancipationdecentering whiteness as a privileged racial identity. Ithen the assumed whiteface this black Lincoln might don reversely posits the existence of the black body behind it. By having the black  the performance over and over, the Foundling -racial impersonation realizes his desire to insert his own narrative within the governing narratives of the nation ( 194). The Fountheatre is envisioned as a performative A. Baker calls in project is to discover a particularly black wholeness w(184).  While whiteface is not directly mentioned or visualized in The America Play, Parks renders more unambiguous and even conscious the allusion to blackface minstrelsy in Topdog/Underdog coln should wear for his job: Lincoln confesses to his brother, the ironically named Booth, They offered me thuh job, saying of course TD 29). If blackface caricatures, mocks, and lampoons  72  blackness, the whiteface donned by the Foundling Father and Lincoln might suggest that whiteness can also be the object of mockery and spoof. While evoking the tradition of Pierrot, an age-old familiar image of whiteface, whiteface becomes defamiliarized in the historical context of the American stage which was overwhelmed by blackface. Such an uncanny doubling of blackface might work to de-privilege and re-negotiate whiteness, especially whiteness revolving around one of the venerable and righteous founding fathers of America, Abraham Lincoln.  The critical discussion of the liberatory potential of the inversions crafted by the Foundling Father and Lincoln is reinforced with a recent surge of studies on embodied whiteness performances. In her contribution to The Cambridge Companion to African American Theatre, Faedra Carpenter reads Parks against the cultural and literary tradition of using whiteface, a long-lived theatrical practice which has yet just begun to constitute a critical subject. Aligning The America Play and Topdog/Underdog with the spectacular uses of whiteness in such contemporary African American dramas Funnyhouse of a Negro, Day of AbsenceThe Bluest Eye, Carpenter shows how Parks foregrounds and renegotiates whiteness, the relationship between whiteness and blackness, and the notion of racial difference (175). Considering various live performances such as antebellum cakewalks, weekly promenades, and stand-up comedy and solo performance in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Marvin McAllister also examines  -de- (16). In the last chapter of his Whiting Up, McAllister discusses how hion their identities against it, tapping into the possibilities and limitations of performed whiteness in the twenty-first century (249-51).   73  These whiteness studies critics have mapped out the kind of subversion Parks envisions around and against the black Lincolns disruption of blackface. I find this approach problematic in two ways. First, even whiteface is  since whiting up still means entering into a tabooed tradition. Given the playful and satiric energy and spirit of postmodern pastiche whiteface performance harbors, these two black Lincolns show rreverent postmodern irony is ,said of Ted ars Club roast of Whoopi Goldberg in 1993 (82). The  might re-traumatize the painful history of African Americans by reproducing the black body as spectacle. Second, the prospect of subversive agency in the black man impersonation of the white in the pursuit of symbolic emancipation is implausible in the the day-to-day reality of Topdog/Underdog. While Lincolnms to inherit and even reinforce the satirical and subversive elements of the Foundling Father-racial mimicry, the imaginative and symbolic flight sanctioned by the Founpresentation of whiteness seems irrelevant in the realistic/naturalistic world of Topdog/Underdog. This play depicts a grim and disturbing reality in which the characters have lost access to any social uplift and performativity as a symbolic force to redress their social oppression. They are alienated from a positive outlook The America Play nourishes as a historical meta-drama.  As an attempt to fill in the gap between Parks, this chapter approaches blackface minstrelsy not just as a theatrical but a socio-cultural apparatus that has regulated black male subjectivities since the antebellum era. An exploration of the historical contradictions and social conflicts held within Lott, Love and Theft 18) can help explain the dilemma the Foundling Father faces as a black minstrel and the world inhabited by Lincoln and Booth, two black minstrels here and now. If the Foundling  74  Father seems to purge the culpable legacy of minstrelsy through the symbolic power of his assumed whiteface and his voluntarily integration into its industry, Lincoln and Booth have their subversive potentials complicated and undermined not just by being subsumed into the industry as underclass workers, but by becoming the con artist and into the social roles prescribed and reinforced by minstrelsy as a socio-cultural system.   The Foundling Father as a Black Minstrel   rises from p,launched by musical pioneer Bob Cole and becoming tradition by the time of the hip hop innovator Busta Rhymes, particularly in  While being real LincMalkin 176, emphasis added), the Foundling Father does not aim for verisimilitude in his impersonation some inaccuraca stove pipe hat indoors  as would not be the case with the historical Lincoln  and a yellow beard just for his fancy. Presenting a caricature of Lincoln assassination, the Foundling Fathersideshow deemphasizes and deflates the gravity of the figure and the event:   at the left side of the Foundling Father, as Abraham Lincoln, pointing the gun    A Man: Ready.  The Foundling Father: Haw Haw Haw (Rest) HAW HAW HAW HAW    (Rest)  75  Hhhh. (Exits) what  Sometimes they yell that.   (A Man, the same man as before, enters again, again as John Wilkes Booth. . . . ). (164-65)    Setting aside the stage directiondemanding the histrionic tone from A Man, an unnatural staccato flow of actions  is based on a skeletal history. The strange and crude atmosphere pervading the scene gives an impression that the Foundling Father purportedly theatricalizes the scene for pleasure of himself, the customer, or the spectator of The America Play. The visitor-as-the assassin should choose a pistol and wait for guffaw as a cue for putting his shooting exercise to practice.17 He/she is given , which Booth proclaimed in Latin in the Washington, D.C. on 14 April 1865.18 Such patterned and mannered actions forfeit the intensity and precipitancy of the original assassination, presenting a defining scene of American history as penny-theatr                                                 17  into the actor of this show. With the momentum of his laughing, the Foundling Father becomes Lincoln and A Man becomes  18  The context the words were shouted in the actual historical moment is explained in the Malkin, and Schmidt.  76  but only to holes  However, The America Play also problematizes what is not to be encompassed by the The Foundling Father, as a black minstrel, is confronted with the complexities and contradictories within the wider social, cultural, and economic contexts of minstrelsy as a system, not just a color-specific racial performance. Despite  e Foundhe makes money from it 189). Although he voluntarily enters into his impersonating job, he is economically integrated into the industry. livelihood but fakin was his callin, repeats Brazil about his father (AP 179), offering an ontological  in which he pretends to be the other man  but far much  As the play goes on, however, it turns out that faking is not just his calling but his livelihood as well. In a way, the Lesser Known was Lucy kept secrets for the dead. And they figured what with his digging and her Confidence work they could build a mourning business. The son would be a weeper. Such  (AP 162). Lucy is gifted with hearing and holding the secrets of others The Lesser Known planned out a family business of mourning long before his son was born and carried it out. th anniversary of the founding of our n taught him the first technique of the ear after then, on the same anniversary, he taught his son and   77  Brazil practices until his father finally teaches him the final fatal skill, (AP in 178), Brazil succeeds in faking, performing the legacy of his father. As his father replicates the  his son is engaged in simulating grief with of wailing, weeping, sobbing, and gnashing. faking to black cultural traditions, Elam and Rayner suggest that this strategic disingenuousness clears out a space for African American subversion in the American theatre tradition: The showmanship in acting out mourning parodies rituals from the performative black church tradition as well as from the minstrel tradition of stereotype, exaggeration, and exploitation. . . . in imitating kept  (189-190). Brazilappropriates the ways in which African Americans are stereotyped, exaggerated, and exploited by the dominant culture. A more fundamental meaning of faking becomes discernible here: Through the performance of mourning, this black professional mourner willfully misrepresents his people to profit from the cultural system in which they are misread, misconstrued, and mistaken. -parody, still reduces an African American capacity for empathetic identification to some marketable gestures: ,as Brazil quotes his father (AP 162).             As a professional mourner, Brazil parallels his father who was a black minstrel, buying into the system through which AP 182). Such a questionable positioning toward the white supremacist culture illuminates the predicament of blackfaced black minstrels in the second half of the nineteenth century. At the turn of the century, such black actors as Bert Williams and George Walker presented themselves as g the white minstrels who mimic African American dialect, music, and  78  dance (Alkire 36-37). And the twenties witnessed even more black actors on stage with the popularity of such Broadway musicals as Shuffle Along (1921), Dixie to Broadway (1924), The Chocolate Dandies (1924), and Africana (1927). Visually and economically consumed on a large scale, this first generation of Black Broadway stars could not help tapping. . . minstrel and vaudwith their blackened black faces (Gubar 114). Blacks impersonating whites impersonating blacks might replicate the white appropriation of African American cultural forms, reproducing themselves as a -gla116).  As a black minstrel, the Foundling Father straddles two variants of blackface minstrelsy: black whiteface and black blackface. When aligned not only with the tradition of black whiteface performance but with the provocative and problematic tradition of black blackface, the ratory potential re-negotiated and complicated. An interesting adaptation of true stories about the origin of Jumping Jim Crow,  Darktown Strutters (2000) offers a relevant portrayal of a blackfaced black minstrel against the historical evolution of blackface minstrelsy from slavery through just after Reconstruction. This novel features a famous traveling minstrel, Jim Crow, and his adopted son, Jim Too, who straddle the fictional and the real. It is of the ownership of the form. The protagonists are alienated from the form originating from their cultural tradition in its evolution as a white form. The story of the father who tries to hand down his moves to his son and the son who finds moves have become a part of white culture and divorced from their  brings out this irony. By performing unmasked, unlike all the other blacked-up minstrels whether black or white, Jim Crow tries to perform as truth a self that is not a perfo  79  (177). Scoffing at his mistaken belief in his autonomy, however, his lover tells him: ß«matter that you never blacked up. You made a name for yourself from it, same as those who used 184). What matters, as she aptly reminds him, is whether he is bound to economic systems of minstrelsy, not his refusal to black up. Jim Crowimself from the industry leads only to failure. Although he does not consciously agree with its racist thrust, but rather defies it, he is making a living and a name by participating in the institution of minstrelsy. Whether blackened up or not, his performance registers itself as an entertainment for the audience mostly by evoking inferior, naïve, and bawdy images associated with African Americans.  A-documentary suggests, the legitimate reclamation of this black cultural tradition is possible only when black blackface minstrelsy is (re)defined less as accommodation of white projections to contain blackness by uncritically acting them out than as black agency to construct and negotiate black identity through consciously performing it. Indeed, the Lesser Known and Brazil are also implicated with the dilemma of Darktown Struttersand son. Although Brazil is not ignorant of the ways in which his own black qualities are consumed within the cultural economy of minstrelsy and consciously participates in its economic system, he is still complicit with it, circulating the cultural images projected onto blackness. the suspicion about the attempts at destabilizing, overthrowing, or subverting the system by someone who is already vulnerable to its symbolic structure. In her sequel, Topdog/Underdog, Parks delineates a less favorable, even somewhat deterministic reality for two African American men to negotiate their self-determination and autonomy. Although the tragic, fatal confrontation between Lincoln and Booth at the end of the play seems to be historically ordained by their ridiculous historical names, it is  80  rather the beliefs and ideologies circulated by the minstrel regime that regulate and doom the subjectivities of Lincoln and Booth, two modern black minstrels.   Two Modern Dandies   Making his first appearance on stage [ing] a top hat and fTD 8) and whiteface, Lincoln seems to succeed to tperformative gesture to defamiliarize the (in)visibility of whiteness in the construction of American history. In terms of critical whiteness studies, Carpenter particularly pays attention to Lincolntaking off whiteface makeup: Featuring ak[ing] off TD11) on stage, Parks suggests that the racial boundary can be melted and finally removed along wit If The America Play signifiers of race, s blatant use of whiteface carries this scheme a step further, emphasizing the deconstruction of racial identity (Carpenter 190).  Carpenterve outlook on the trajectory from a latent/assumed whiteface to a blatant one leaves room for reexamination. Wdeconstructive potential tends to be undercut, if not closed off in Topdo naturalistic world. Rather than serving as a symbolic exit from the devastating conditions of life, whiteface is associated with debasement and humiliation throughout the play. Lincoln even feels disgraced about whiteface:  Lincoln: They said thuh fella before me he took off the getup one day, hung it up real nice, and never came back. And as they offered thuh job, saying of course I would have to wear a little makeup and accept less than what they would offer a another guy    81  Booth: Go on, s(TD 29)  Whereas it is clear that Lincoln should wear a makeup and be paid less than his predecessor because efore Conversely, Booth has the nerve to articulate such a clear yet stern reality since TD 52). In Scene 3, Lincoln explicates the desperate circumstances under which he and I looked good in the getup and TD 53). With the access to any means for social, economic, and emotional maintenances precluded, literally in the situation s to undertake the first job available at the moment. While TD 53), he is mortified to have to  The modicum of the liberating vision that is granted to the Foundling Father-racial play is missing from LincolnMuch like the black minstrels who were often encouraged and even coerced to don blackface to mock themselves in late nineteenth century, Lincoln has to don whiteface only to mock himself as a commodity.  Practically and sy whiteface features as a masking ritual to be it. Abandoned by their own parents and left only with the inheritance of 500 bucks for each, Lincoln and Booth stick to the utilitarian view of the world. While Booth, a younger brother who is more emotional and spontaneous, still takes issue with the historical and racial disgrace his infamous white  82  the more practical, financial concerns, as shown in his obsessed interest in employment prospect:  You gonna call yrself something African? That be cool. Only pick something names, I mean, ok, Im down with the power to the people thing, but no ones gonna hire you if they cant say yr name. And some of them fellas who got they african names, no one can say they names and they cant say they names neither. I mean, you dont want yr new handle to obstruct yr employment possibilities. (TD 14) TD 94), Lincoln may well know that African names say yr means an admission to white society for these black brothers. Evoking the process of interpellation as defined by Louis Althusser, Lincoln suggests that African Americans can only be employed in white society, and, only summoned as subjects when white society can discern and articulate their names.   Lincoln suggests to Booth as an easily spelled and pronounced onenot just in terms of its pronunciation but in that both serve as a compromise between African American lineage and its commodification in a white racist system.19 The industry that can be                                                  19 Shango is a God of thunder and lightning in Yoruba religion. In Black Folk, W. E. B. DuBois introduced Shango as exemplifying the preponderance of African gods over European and Semitic deities. When it comes to the capitalist and consumerist society Lincoln and Booth belong to as underdogs, this indigenous African deity has its mythic power deflated only to be reduced to a cultural commodity.    83  instrelsy is still effective in contemporary American society. ust a coincidence that justified their hiring Lincoln at TD 53, 29). While the Lesser Known gets self-employed by his desire to follow the Great Man, Lincoln becomes commodified as a lucrative property and cheap replacement of his white predecessor, who himself was a cheap replacement of Abraham Lincoln. By agreeing to whiteface, Lincoln anachronically sanctions the basic tenets of minstrelsy in which black body is . As a major trope for white appropriation of blackness in the antebellum era, minstrelsy marks its fundamental exploitation by selling the black body and blackness as financial goods. Bthroughout U.S. history that sells blackness as property, as Eric Lott points out (39).   Saidiya Hartman regards both minstrelsy and slavery as forms of possession of the black body, drawing an analogy between their figurative and literal ways of possessionpunitive pleasures yielded through the figurative possession of blackness cannot be disentangled W-inscribes Lincoln in the racial economy of minstrelsy, in which the black body is still being commodified as property and returned to its chattel status before emancipation. (TD capacity as property is paradoxically proved by his empl threat that TD 44): such  as Hartman remarks (21).   84  Eric Lott contends, however, that t only be partly apprehended pocketbooks of (Love and Theft 39). In this bodily traffic called the minstrel show, the ß« the commodity makes the captive body an abstract and empty vessel vulnerable to the projection -the-president as a signifier, the whitefaced Lincoln serves for his customers, their undigested feelings, repressed rages, and hidden desires. Lincoln carries out his duty faithfully as a customized school TD 48-which once again evokes the exaggerated expressions and behaviors of the blackface actors that have appeared on minstrel stages (TD 50-51).  While urging Lincoln to practice his impersonation on the one hand, Booth charges him for his assimilation into his impersonating job on the otheralienated from deal of masculinity as he becomes set in his arcade performance. Defending his masturbating to cheap pornography, Booth inversely turns on Lincoln, accusing him of a passive and lethargic manhood: got a woman you sit there. Letting your shit fester. Yr dick, if it aint falled off yet, is hanging there between yr legs, little whiteface shriveled-up blank-  85  (Rest)   You a limp dick jealous whiteface motherfucker whose wife dumped him cause he couldnt get it up and she told me so (TD 45).  As Booth intimates to the breakup between Lincoln and his wife, which again leads g for the penis and that of the limping gait for impotence that work in above passage resonate with the antebellum period20. Within the racial economy of minstrelsy, the limping gait served as a compelling metaphor for deprived masculinity, or castration. Conflating racial difference onto sexual one, such an emasculating narrative worked to affirm white supremacy against a potent threat posed by black masculinityof black males they envied and at the same time they feared.21                                                   20 witness a black youth named Cuff perform a jump dance. So impressed with his performance, Rice trie(Nevin 609). Onstage his grotesque imitation made a great success and as it became popular, he sed as interchangeable   21 In his monumental discussion of blackface minstrelsy in Love & Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class, Eric Lott discusses blackface minstrel show in the decades (38) rather than blackness only, showing how white working class audiences of blackface minstrelsy projected the conflicts with their masters into racial conflicts. He tries to complicate the widely-received assumption that fascination wthe black male bodies engendered mixed erotic economy between white and black men, shedding ions of blackface  86       The antagonism between whiteface and the ideal of masculinity becomes stark through ring that bullshit, that shit that bull that disguise that getup that motherdisfuckinguise anywhere in the daddy-(TD 9). This bifurcated according to his misogynistic view of the world. If the masculinity emblematized by secures poses a threat to an ideal of masculinity. Quite superstitiously, Booth abhor (TD 29) them and threw them away that he left his hustling career and in its stead undertook the impersonating job:  He had some nice stuff. What he didnt spend on booze he spent on women. would look at his stuff and calculate thuh how long it would take till I was big enough to fit it. Then you went and burned it all up. (TD 29) see if they are  (TD 29). Fideals attached to them partly as a memory. Quitting hustling and getting into the white industry                                                  minstrelsy successfully locate this form in such a broader context of antebellum American -racial at mobilizes the socio-political structures and movement of this era at the bottom.  87  as an underdog, Lincoln becomes distanced from this ideal of masculinity as implied by his  as a hustler demeaning yet legitimate job points to his disillusionment from the ideal of black masculinity as exemplified by their s holding down a steady job. Cause its bullshit and I know it. I seen how it cracked [Mom and Pop] up and I aint going thereTD 68). The picture of masculinity and the sentimentalized image of family and childhood ed memory. Herein, the question at issue is less why their father bequeathed such a distorted masculinity to his sons than why black males cannot but envision their masculinities as such.       While not being employed in reality, Booth engages himself in re-incarnating his father in his own way. What he contrives as an alternative for the legitimate form of employment is shoplifting. At the beginning of Scene 2, Booth enters with two suits he has stolen from a department store that day. Bragging about stealing these two suits, two shirts, two ties, and two pairs of shoes, he imagines (TD 28). In Scene 3, Booth pompously enters again after spending a night with Grace: He -as the stage direction says (TD 38).  Among the dandy figures, Booth can be classified specifically the masculine urge for gratification but sheltered the moral doubts associated with the exercise of such behaviors by exaggerating the qualities pe defines (201).   88  According to ssification of types of minstrelsy, the figure of the northern dandy namely, the roarer type constitutes the most representative subjects of the male display and boasting songs (195-228). The chief dandy figures omarked by sexual prowess. Lincoln and Booth brothers are also marked by their fraud and pretense: Lincoln was a con-artist and Booth aspires to Lincoln by pretending to be a good one himself; The portrait of Booth [s] ting well - These qualities were applied to urban dandies regardless of race between 1840 and 1870, when they were most popular on stage. In opposition to Jim Crow who represents the comedic, the rural, the common, and the black, Dandy Jim is regarded as the dramatic, the urban, the elite, and the white. The defining character of the type was less race or class than its social aspirations: To be more attractive to females, they needed to excel themselves; Yet with any means for social uplift precluded, they could not but pretend to be what they are not. Whether -class American desire to set himself or herself apart from the daspiration to the middle class, these transgressive desires are and derision (Mahar 227).       Although the urban dandy was a racially stereotyped figure, often associated with the white rather than the black, its repetitive presentations by the actors in blackface on minstrel stages served to attribute these pretentions and duplicities to blacks. Discussing not only dandy types but characters like Sambo Johnson, Doctor Quash, or Merky  89  the characters are invariably punished and containedfather until she regained her senses. . . . Doctor Quash, the sham physician and mangler, is beaten, murdered, revive While Mahar says that the dandy stereotype has been criticized because it mismen who, condemned by racism to work in menial jobs, attempted to support their families in 210), the type can fit well with African American laborers who reflect in their striving for self-promotion in a society that has a very low tolerance for any social and racial transgression. Within the racial dynamics of blackface minstrelsy, their ambitions are regarded as a threat posed to white terrain, and thus registered as an impossible aspiration.  More than just presenting the despicable traits of these black male types and characters for amusement  or, attributing those to them,  the minstrel narrative reflects or mediates the conservative and punitive structure of their society. braggadocio are lampooned and finally lead to the final fatal confrontation in Topdog/Underdog, suggesting that the world of Lincoln and Booth is still affected and regulated by such a punitive narrative. Representing the uncertain positions of African American men in America, Lincoln and Booth negotiate the variegated social uncertainties through their masculinities. The bifurcation of masculinity into emasculated and nonsexualized impotence on the one hand and fully sexualized promiscuity on the other is expressed by the binary of Booth and Lincoln, or is past and present, his new job and former one. Masculinity  90  functions in two ways: While the black males ought to be feminized within the racial dynamics of the minstrel show, masculinity is the only way to make up for their lacks as a social being with any other opportunities for social-uplift precluded.   Blackface Lynching   In The Melancholy of Race, Anne Cheng scathingly questions about the possibility of political agency granted to underdogs someone operating in a symbolic, cultural economy that has already pre-assigned them as a  Guarded against the easy narrative of progress, Cheng identifies a tendency to  In his review of The America Play DeRose asks a revealing question about the psychic impacts of dominationWhat sort of culturally induced masochism compels a man, particularly a black man, to take upon himself the person of Abraham Lincoln in order to be shot again and again? And what cathartic function does he fulfill for the many shooters who enter the mock--10). The suicidal structure of daily rituals of self-annihilation, exposing themselves to being shot by their customers, does not just  punitive narrative but informs the feeling of deficiency. Behind these undecipherable psychological impulses on both sides, whether masochistic or cathartic, lies the collective memory of historical practices of lynching. The traumatic scar of the collective experiences of being hanged, shot, and mutilated over and over by racial violence engraved on African American minds ought to drive him to reenact this self-destructive execution over and over.   91  While being the ultimate form of physical and corporeal retribution, lynching operated on the symbolic and perfw). Robyn about the law. . . . In the circuit of relations that governs lynching in the United States, the law as legal discourse and disciplinary practice subtends the symbolic arena, marking out a topos of bodies and identities that gives order to generation, defines and circumscribes social and political behavio). The Focross-racial theatrics control racial representation, and thereby he gets persecuted by these mock-assassins. His signifyin(g) on the signifiers surrounding the white iconography of Lincoln is marked by its transgression within the symbolic system of minstrelsy  he enters n-symbolic economy.  In Racechanges: White Skin, Black Face in American Culture, Susan Gubar suggests a parallel relationship between blackface minstrelsy and lynching. If violence is afflicted on the black body on the physical, material, and literal dimensions in lynching practices, it works on the symbolic, mimetic, and figurative dimensions within the cultural regime of minstrelsy. If minstrelsy is a chief cultural form disseminating spectacle of blackness, lynching also staged spectacle of blackness to terrorize and discipline the black audience. If lynching is capital punishment, blackface metaphorically sacrificed the black body. Gubar locates the kind of the white psychology intervening in such cross-racial practices as blackface movie star, minstrel show, and vaudeville acts in  92  (107)22. Behind blackface lies the white men--of-black-bo  s a rite of death every day. Grounded on the fact that the customers could see the real skin color of the fake Lincoln behind his whiteface especially in Topdog/Underdog, Jennifer Larson aptly suspects that they might dissimulate their desire to kill a black man by pretending to participate in the re-creation of history. Rather than just re-writing the mythos pertaining to Lincoln-the-President, the mock-entially becoming members of a lynch mob, lining up to -assassinations, the customers are engaged in physicalizing and materializing the symbolic, representational, and emblematic violence that has been afflicted on the black body, identity, and blackness itself within the wide symbolic system of black man assassinated every night serves as an eerie yet revelatory site for intersections between two American racist institutions.  Such an ating intentions, however, runs the risk of reproducing the spectacle of the black body lynched, persecuted, and tyrannized, tapping on the collective memory of an African American traumatic past. Despite its reversed                                                  22 While encompassing two ki white performances of blackness and black performances of whiteness, w by racechange, a term coined by herself,   93   (Lewis 97). the spectacular abuse of the black bodycontributes to discursive constructions of blackness by fomenting and thereby forging an easy connection between blackness and suffering (Embodying Alexander says (82). Singling out the Rodney King beating by Los Angeles police officers as a representative instance, Alexander traces such instances of violence from physical abuse on plantations through lynching spectacles through televised beatings of African Americans. Tackling these images of pain, Alexander foregrounds and problematizes the ways in which black bodies are publicly consumed, as surrogate sites for dramatizing other national traumas such conflas such a surrogate. While accusing lynching and minstrelsy of their racist corporal containment, his repetitive performance not just spectacularize the whiteness surrounding this historical figure and event but feature his body as an object of abuse. at allows the Foundling Father to cross racial lines, the framed theatre allows him to be doubly consumed once by his customers and then by the s audience, whether for thrill or sadistic desire.  The spectacle of suffering becomes more problematic considering the demographic that would consume these traumatic scenes. Around the 1840s, so to speak, in its own times, blackface minstrelsy was a chief entertainment form for a northern white male working-class at  94  first, and then extended its target to a broader population of white middle- and working-class but in one way or another, black people also have been looking, forging a traumatized collective historical memory which is reinvoked at contemporary sites of people have been violated, impinged upon through bodily display, the black audience of The America Play is further exposed to the violent, repetitive consumption of the black body visually and even aurally as gunshots echo. At the end of The America Play, the Foundling Father returns from his grave and performs his actual deathEven if the assassination seems a theatrical repetition, the spectators are potentially traumatized by the repeated witness, exposed to the . in which The America Play is set with a scenes drive the act into mise-en-abime in which the protagonist eventually must perish (105). In a similar vein, Kurt assassifind the assassination simulation emptyUna Chauduri suggests that such a spiral movement of the acts does not just head toward the tions, the ludicrous script they follow is gradually transformed through repetition into a ritual, in which what is being Staging 264). While this violence might be waged against thsuggests, it is yet undeniable that the black man who impersonates this white leader or father  95   leading finally to his self-destruction. The Foundlin sanitized presentation of violence, as it is played over and over, paradoxically accuses American history and society of its violence, which is emblematized in the Foundling Fathergreat heaat the end of the play (AP 199). The Foucelebration of violence parallels and reverses the ways in which the lynching, as a ritualistic behavior, reinforces whiteideology go hand in hand, and ideology   Transferring the Affects  While both Lincoln plays feature a black Lincoln impersonator, the way each -enactment diverges from each other. Whereas The America Play features the assassination scene several times directly on stage, Topdog/Underdog resorts to description of the arcade gig at second hand. This difference chiefly comes from the extent that each impersonator identifies with Lincoln. For the Foundling Father, impersonation is more that AP 163, 162): his speech (AP 160). In contrast, Lincoln asserts his own identity as distinct from his impersonating job and the historical figure represented by his performance.23 Whereas the                                                  23 Lincoln regards his historical namesake just as a signifier he can signify on, which is divulged in the episode of his encounter with a kid in the bus. Seeing Lincoln in his arcade costume  Theyd just done Lincoln in history class and to the arcade but, I dunno, for some reason he was tripping cause there was Honest Abe right beside him on the bus. I wanted to tell him to go fuck hisself. But then I got a look at him. A little rich kid. Born on easy street, you know the type. So I waited until I could tell he really wanted it, the autograph, and I told him he could have it for 10 bucks. (TD 11)  96  Foundling Father seems so enthusiastic about his impersonation that he showcases and plays the assassination scene over and over, it is only when Lincoln rehearses it with Booth, practicing with exaggerated gestures, that the audience witnesses the assassination scene on stage in Topdog/Underdog. While the repetitive execution scenes might lend themselves to an empathetic identification with the executed, The America Play is curiously reticent about how the Foundling Father perceives the moment he gets shot. The other way around, Topdog/Underdog presents Lincolnmoments when he sits waiting for his customer-assassins:  All around the whole and arcade is buzzing and popping. Thuh Whirring of thuh duckshoot, baseballs smacking the back wall when someone misses the track of cans, some woman getting happy the barker talking up the fake freaks. The smell of the ocean and cotton candy and rat shit. And in thuh middle of all that, I can sit and let my head go quiet. Make up songs, make plans. Forget. (TD 33)  TD 33),   Lincoln is vulnerabwhich sea smell, sweetness, and stench are mixed. He is so transparent that everything around goes through him. Having all his senses thrown into outer stimulations, he paradoxically gets                                                  TD 11), Lincoln exploithis representation of it. This kid is rather the type of the audience the Lesser Known should aim at in The America Playts and touch their hearts and look up into the heavens and say something about the freeing of the slaves. That is, he AP 166). Taking advantage of such a great impression as Lincoln-the-President might have left on this kid AP 175), Lincoln extorts his money and buys drinks at Luckys with this money. Lincoln seems engaged in his role-playing more playfully than ever without any remorse, ascertaining his    97  displaced and alienated from them and even from himself. Against the whirlwind of emotions and feelings around himself, he seems numb and deadened. It is almost as if he is dreaming.       The physical environment of his working place also works ta little electric box made of silver metal on the opposite wall. Its reflection makes everything e I [Lincoln]  Not behind me yet but I can hear him coming. Coming in with his gun in hand, thuh gun he already picked out up from when he paid his fare. Coming on in. But not behind me yet. His dress shoes making too much noise on the carpet, the carpets too thin, Boss should get a new one but hes cheap. Not behind me yet. Not behind me yet. Cheap lightbulb just above my head. And there he is. Standing behind me. Standing in position. Standing upside down. . . . Thu gun is always cold. Winter or summer thuh gun is always cold. And when the gun touches me he can feel that Im warm and he knows Im alive. And if Im alive then he can shoot me dead. And for a minute, with him hanging back there behind me, its real. (TD 49-50, emphasis added) Through Lincolnised diction surfaces the fear he felt when he witnesses his own assassin coming over behind him. while waiting leads to the nauseating images reflected on the dent in the metal box, everything upside down, which altogether demonstrate his inability to assert control over the external situation. It is teasing question that precipitates and gives shape to Lincoln: na come in there with a real gun? A real gun with real slugs? TD 48). Shattering the absolute boundary  98   which Lincoln labors to disreBooththe terror Lincoln feels in each mock-assassination session could be indeed mortal, deeply grounded in material and affective reality. H-shoes, the thin carpet, and the noise they collaborate on; the light of cheap lightbulb; the coldness of the gun, most of all.  It penny arcade show, a doubly mediated theatrical form, both historical re-enactment and commodified artifact. as ofter AP 162; 163), the historical relevance seems to have faded away in its transition from the first to the second black Lincoln. Lincoln sees TD 52). Denied his access to the historical past, he enters into a relationship with his ancestors in an unexpected way. The tactile sensations evoked by the contrast of the cold gun and his warm body foreground what is bracketed and s theatricalized presentation of the persecution. Through these affective sensations, African American collective memory of racial violence can be awakened and summoned. Synthetic images conveying bodily sensations at the threat of death render possible the empathetic transfer to his audience, including the murderously responding Booth: The audience imbibes his experience by mobilizing their capacity for empathetic identification and with the nerves and senses whether Linc on edge, the play builds up to the final death of Lincoln, which is a physical and material reality.  99   When Theatre Meets Reality   While Lincoln is not committed to grand history, history still coln. Sharing metatheatrical structures, The America Play and Topdog/Underdog indeed resort to different theatrical forms. ,a scene from Our American Cousin, the Foundling Father suddenly begins to relay the very moment of Lincoln assassination, quitting his metatheatrical cross-racial role-playing as Mrs. Mount in Our American Cousin:  And now, the centerpiece of the evening!! (Rest)  Uh Hehm. The Death of Lincoln!: --. The watching of the play, the laughter, the smiles of Lincoln and Mary Todd, the slipping of Booth into the presidential box unseen, the freeing of the slaves, the pulling of the trigger, the bullets piercing above the left ear, the bullets entrance into the great head, the bullets lodging behind the great right eye, the slumping of Lincoln, the leaping onto the stage of Booth, the screaming of Todd, the screaming of Keene, the shouting of Booth And the silence of the nation. (AP 188) Reminding of the broadcasting tone of Voice On Thuh Tee V announcing the death of Black Man with Watermelon in The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World, the Foundling  almost hyperrealistic  description of how the bullets were discharged the listener from the assassination scene rather than precipitating a thrilling suspense. Presenting  100  the summary of the assassination without so much as acting it out this time, the Foundling Father hints at his own displacement from the Great Man whose steps he would follow. His mock-broadcast captures the standard AP 188-189) in a detached and even playful manner. It turns out that the Foundling Father is capable of separating the Lesser Man from the Great Man, not falling short of AP 175).  When the Lesser Known familiarizes himself with the existence of the Great Man in his youth, [w]hat interested the Lesser Known most was the murder and what was most captivating about the murder was the 20 feet where the Great Blonde (AP 166, 168). The twenty-foot distance between the stage upon which My American Cousin residential box stands for the line between reality and stage, history and theatre, and the real thing and its echo, that the Foundling Father and The America Play tries to maintain and sometimes playfully erodes. AP 168) was he stage, that fine line was lost, leading to the fatal outcome. The theatre of a black man enacting the Great Man of American history originates from a black sire to be included in the history. After watching the historical parade at the Big Hole on his honeymoon, the Lesser Known (AP 162). As with a fairy tale, folklore, or legend in which magical events and imaginary figures become real, this play resorts to a meta-theatrical/theatricalist magic whereby theatre effects, changes, or turns into a medium for  101  history with  Mimicking the Foundling Father who (Foster2), Parks pretends to mistake his The America Playinsert it into real li (Sellar 52).  misleading theme park in the world of the play. Shattering the boundary between theatre and real life,  seeming ingenuousness locates destructive/deconstructive power to break into real life. A play named The America Play turns into playing eatured by a frames American history which has left out the black in its privileging of the white, realizing performativity as a reenactment that transforms what it cites.  If The America Play resorts to theatrical power to insert itself into reality, Topdog/Underdog suggests another w. When theatre draws near reality and the copy envisions its consummate correspondence to the original, they inevitably head towards death. AP 164) to the Lesser Known who was launching his recitation business, it was not just a revelation about his future career but about the ontological status of the Foundling Father as an impersonator or a simulation. And as a sequel, Topdog/Underdog encapsulates the confrontation between theatre and reality, the original and the copy by its fatal ending.   102  TD 109) just as he did over and over in the arcade show as Lincoln-the-president. Playing out the historical scenario when Booth killed Lincoln, mount to historical representation. As his theatre . When the copy has its distance from the original minimized, it cannot but be put to death. Conversely speaking, it is only when Lincoln reaches his death that he can approximate the identity with the original. With his own death at the end, Lincoln also put into actuality the  triggered by his joke of naming his sons as Lincoln and Booth. Unwittingly rehearsing his own death, Lincoln practices the arcade gig over and over with his brother to make it look more realrolling and wriggling and screaming in accordance TD -the-president is not at all a success since the TD 52). Accusing Booth of getting him fired, Lincoln certain way. They like it to unfold the way they folded it up. Neatly like a book. Not raggedy and TD 50).  Unlike the Foundling Father Lincolnontological dimension. The fine line between theatre and reality, history and its representation, the original and its simulation the first black Lincoln has maintained by theatricalizing/sanitizing history begins to fall apart with the bodily affects awakened by the real threat of death the second black Lincoln experiences. His theatricalized and commodified assassinations are indeed overlaid with the possibility that real gun and  103  Presenting a Topdog/Underdog scene is once again revealing the ontological glitch or the symbolic clumsiness, but registers as a stark reality that the audience havTopdog/Underdog lays bare the homicidal and genocidal desire the audience could dissimulate by theatricalizing it, frustrating e minstrelsy is located in the fatal clash between theatre and reality which leads to the messiness of death as a reality. By representing two black minstrels who are lynched every night de-familiarize and problematize  these historical racist spectacles.      104  CHAPTER 3     Thwarted Motherhood and Reclaimed Body of Son in In the Blood (1999)  While not featuring any lynching scenes or any performers acting out being lynched, In the Blood engages with the legacies of lynching and lynching literature. Hester La Negrita, a nurturing and cherishing mother who ends up killing her own child, simultaneously evokes two types of black mothers from early-twentieth century lynching drama, one that aggressively embraces Christian motherhood and one that rejects it. Tracing the ways in which Hester departs from and aligns herself with each type, this chapter reveals how In the Blood intervenes in the discourses of lynching on a more fundamental waythrough its meditation on the nature of spectacle, particularly spectacle of the black female body. Read against the ways in which early-twentieth-century lynching drama negotiate the relationship between the private and the public through the domestic ideology of ideal motherhood, In the Blood demonstrates that the myth of ideal motherhood can only be thwarted when it comes to this contemporary or transhistorical  black mother who has no right to her private area:  and privacy than that of exposure, vulnerability, and publicity, often invaded by policemen, welfare officials and vandals. Having what is private about her made public, she is constantly made a spectacle by the representatives of the society: The public exposure of the private culminates in the ways in which her female body is exploited as a sexual commodity by the Doctor, Welfare, Amiga Gringa, and Reverend D, as revealed in  racialized and gendered otherness, the discourses performed by these exploiters feature Hester alienated from her own body as she is used as a vessel for their desires and pleasures.   105  Hester turns her body from a racist spectacle into an occasion of discursive resistance by employing it in the spectacular performance and presenting it in the images the audience is ready to consume. While revealing her sense serving the c Brechtian performance in the lesbian pornographic show which is tive, very scientific, very lucrative24 mimics the ways in which her lived body and experiences are abstracted and displaced as exploitable and lucrative images. While she seems to be conscious of a gap between the symbolic and the literal, capable of being manipulative for economic ends, she might also replicate the white supremacist scenario of lynching by physically obliterating her son, Jabber, to shut off what is meant  Ultimately, however, I locate her killing of her reinvest and counterinvest in the black body as a locus of decommodification. As a mother who rejects the role of the mater dolorosa in the lineage of black mothers who kill their children, she reclaims his body as her own, redressing the alienation between her body and the word representing it and nullifying the inscription of language/ideas/symbols on the black body.   Black Mothers and the Christian Ideal of Motherhood       The first scene of In the Blood begins with a question penetrating the world of the play. a Negrita                                                  24 Suzan-Lori Parks, In the Blood, in The Red Letter Plays (New York: Theatre Communications Groups, 2001), 72. Subsequent references to this volume in this chapter will be given parenthetically in the text.    106  from the word. Addressed to Jabber, her alphabet teacher, this question reveals that Hester o the word. Also addressing the sign system as regulated by the dominant class/gender/race and moral platitude and absolutism entailed by it. Prefiguring many hesitating moments of the play, Jabber cannot answer this the charhaving a sense of the violence of the symbolic, the power of language which demarcates and differentiates.         The difficulty of telling the good from the bad is foregrounded and even exacerbated by In the Blood. Hester La Negrita is a caring, sacrificial, and responsible mother who kills her childHester Prynne, often recapitulated and symbolized by the letter A, whether worn on her dress Negrita)25, is not just located in her ostracization by society but her living up to ideal motherhood                                                  25 In an interview with Dinitia Smith, Parks neither admits to nor negates the relevance of Red-Letter Plays to The Scarlet Letterimportance, no cudoes not just intimate that In the Blood and Fucking A the canonical text, but attest to how Parks vigorouslto open up possibilities for figuring out a mysterious text named Hester for which the letter A serves as a symbol.    107  despite all the economic hardships and socio-cultural denials with which she is confronted. As a homeless, black, illiterate mom, Hester La Negrita tries to nurture their fatherless, illegitimate children physically, emotionally, and morally. She starves herself to feed her children, whom she this economic distress, she even cares about their clothes and shoes, shining their shoes and pressing their clothes. While trying to fill their empty stomach with imaginary foods, pumpkin and cherry pies, steak, mashed potatoes, and milk, she even imbibes her made-up stories into their impoverished souls. And she also takes care of their moral and ethical behaviors, teaching them not to say or do bad things.       r ends up as a murderous, criminal one by the end of the play: In stop repeating it, Hester batters her own son dead and bloody with her club. Two archetypal models of motherhood have been invoked to make sense of this abrupt, tragic, and unnatural pattern from nurturing to murdering, from devoted to defiant motherhood: Medea in Greek myth Beloved (1987). If Medea prefigures the rages and revengeful fury of Hester, that she tries to protect children from a hostile society.  While Sethe is an archetypal, memorable black slave mother who kills her own child, it goes often unheeded that Beloved is preceded by black mother in early-twentieth-century lynching dramas. With lynchings happening/having happened in the familial past or in the present right outside their homes, African American mothers get scared of delivering their children in this inimical society, and thus assert their motherhood paradoxically by repudiating it. As she discovers the tragic secret of her family that her father and brother were lynched, the heroine of GrimkéRachel (1916) withdraws from her  108  proposal, bewailing her cursed destiny as a would-it would be more merciful children on the symbolic level by tearing apart the rosebuds Strong sent her and grinding them Safe practice. This short one-bor in her home onstage with a lynching of a young black man in session offstage. Liza faces the tragic end of this victim just before she goes into labor, and she finally strangles her new-safe       These murdering mothers accuse and challenge the racist society that would regard their children as potential victims for lynching by transgressing the Christian ideals of motherhood (112). Along with her friend who also recommends LChristian model of motherhood. Rachel also was once fascinated by the idea of being a mother and the motherhoodreamed, and a voice said to me oh! It was so real rd her suitor  109  and a beautiful piano. . .and lovely pictures of Madonnas, emphasis added).   nas depicted in these dramas, however, does not necessarily lead from the uncritical accommodation of Christian ideology of feminine reticence and submissiveness. The figures of black mothers/wives devoted to home maintenance and child-care were employed to challenge and thwart such antebellum plantation stereotypes as mammies and promiscuous wenches. If whites deny black women domesticity, purity, and piety by imposing such stereotypes as Jezebel or Sapphire, anti-lynching dramas showcase ideal Christian black mothers as a corrective to these stereotypical ideas and negative interpretations of black femininity implied in them. Mainly set in domestic intimate spaces, anti-lynching dramas fervently attempted to prove that African Americans are husbands, wives, sisters, and brothers, no different from the white, and at the core of this ideological strife surrounding black domesticity lies the feminine virtues of black women as successful home-builders. Juliet Mitchell explicates the ideological implication of the portrayal of black belonging in terms of the citizenship within the nation often hinged on insisting that blacks were homeless brutes, whores, mammies, and uncles, the first task became affirming themselves that they were citizens of their own smaller communities; then, blacks could certify for each other that they belonged in the -possession in the private sphere leads to an upstanding citizenship in the public: the black women writers in the early ed out (7). Without so much confining  110  black women or mothers to limited domesticity, the ideal motherhood urged them to find a public voice through their maternal roles.  In the Blood shows how the self-possession of the private is not possible for a black, single mother as Hester La Negrita, interrogating both the ideology of black belonging and the cult of true womanhood that only applied to white, middle class women. Hester is alienated from her private space, her body, and her agency. While idealized black mothers in early lynching dramas are the theatrical characters and literary devices to make sure that successful black homes exist and that blacks belong, Hester, a black mother who tries to emulate the ideal motherhood cannot belong by having her claim to the private realm denied.   The Private Made Public, or Spectacularization of Hester La Negrita              In s prologue, the reader/audience encounters Hester La Negrita, the heroine of the play, even before she makes an appearance on the stage. The chorus of the characters verbally makes her a spectacle by vantage point of moral righteousness and social superiority, the chorus use social clichés to judge Hester is an unmarried mother of five children, all of whom had different, unknown fathers. She has no access to means to provpurportedly legitimate, moral, and civilized are engaged in drawing a line between themselves and this morally depraved and intellectually disabled woman with five illegitimate children. Indeed, Hester seems the more illegitimate, immoral, and uncivilized because she is a  111  STOP THIS SORT L BE DEAMNED IF SHE GONNA LIVE OFF his/her positioning betraying their role as the chorus in Greek tragedy and situating himself/herself as an interested, biased member of the imagined community in the play  Along with other structural affinities to classical Greek tragedy in this play, the chorus in In the Blood is much indebted to the Greek chorus as such critics as Harvey Young and Carol Schafer point out. While straddling the role of the character and that of the narrator within the play, the Greek chorus performed the citizenry and were actually constituted by citizens. For the audience, theatre was a place for participation and intervention, albeit vicariously, since the chorus members on stage were also citizens just like themselves. Evoking the role of the Greek chorus that mediates and negotiates between the world in the play and that outside of it as such, Harvey Young discusses how each choral member in In the Blood tries to work out an -39). However, I argue that the chorus of in In the Blood is designed to reflect biases, interested relationships, and implied hierarchies latent in the concept of citizenship, as well as providing a ground for the communal bond between the chorus and the audience.  While featuring eleven charactesix actors. The five actors except for Hester play dual roles, each playing one adult character and bers. Amiga Gringa who comprise the chorus are not just individual characters who assert their prestigious standings within the society  even Amiga, a woman in lower class just like Hester, is  112   but the allegorical figures that stand for the institutions and systems of the society: applying the principles of the systems to which they belong, that is, the social welfare institution and the medical service; Reverend D exemplifies and personifies the hypocrisy of the religious institution, blinding hims out. Parodying the representative citizenry for which the Greek chorus serves as a stand-in, In the s chorus, as a caricatured microcosm of the society, reveals its violent tendentiousness and Rena Fraden in her Rather than serving as a physical, psychological fence for protection, safety, and defense, the chorus circling around Hester makes her an object for their specular desire and punitive gaze.       The image of a disclosing enclosure the play but hints at how this pivotal center, spatially and psychologically, becomes decentered reflect the poverty of the world of the plahome, which cannot provide the family members with a proper shelter and the necessities of life, this void and unoccupied space paradoxically contextualizes the world of the play as the existential arena in which the symbolic workings of alienation, marginalization, and  113  stigmatization is manifested and foregrounded through spatial perception and imagination. Hthe society. She is marked off from other community members who are impersonally represented by the chorus figures in the Prologue. The bridge serves as a horizontal borderline between Hester below and the others above. An analogy between spatial configuration and social relationship is indebted to Nathaniel  La Negrita town, within the verge of peninsula, but not in close vicinity to any other habitation, there was a segregated from or, rather outside of  ly built by an  Secluded, abandoned, and marginalized, Hester does not give in to the containing A clump of scrubby trees, such as alone grew on the peninsula did not so much conceal the cottage from the view, as seem to (65). The scrubby trees shadowing the cottage does not reinforce a sense of seclusion and challenges its objecthood by deciding to conceal itself by its own will. Hester makes this deserted, sequestered space a pr-work (65).  114       If Hester Prynne voluntarily re-possession and self-sufficiency, Hester La Negrita iher home, which is allegedly private, yet invaded by vandals, as visualized by their scrawling on the wall. Inscribing her Otherness, the La Negrita to social prejudice and contains her within social stigma. Still having no idea of what the word exactly means, Hester intuits being violated she calls this sp We know who writ it up there. It was them bad boys writing on my home. And in my practice place. Do they write on they own homes? I dont think so. They come under the bridge and write things they dont write nowhere else. A mean ugly live with it. 5 children I got. 5 treasures. 5 joys. But we aint got our leg up, just yet. So we gotta live with mean words and hurt feelings. (12)  Hester Prynne makes the children who off outside intrusions, however, ite  on the wall trespasses Hest the scrawling occupies actual space Hester might use for her own use, this literally and metaphorically in this space of private possessionwhat we call home. While she argues for what  115  unfavorable residential environment.   her within, the representatives of society also engage themselves in uncovering what is intimate about Hester. The society violates and intrudes upon her private sphere while seeming to provide her with the protection and care to which she is entitled as a citizen and a welfare target of this society as epitomized by the check-up episode. In his first entrance in the play, the Doctor reminds Hester and the audience this check-up is performed in the next scene, beginning  the nature of the check-up. The patient about her dietary habits and bowel patterns. He His inquisition into her sex life and private area turns out to be a part of his duty as mandahis and theyre on the likes of me like white on  set up to audience is e-the broad daylight:  Hester: Sometimes. My gut   Doctor: In a minute. Gimmie the Spread & Squat right quick. Lets have a look under the hood.   116  Standing, Hester spreads her legs and squats. Like an otter, he slides between her legs on a dolly and looks up into her privates with a flashlight. (39)    The readiness and willingness of the doctor and the patient to engage in this intimatis quite striking. With its hilarity and a sense of familiarity evoked by its cartoonish image, the scene uncannily delivers a stark image of violence inflicteparadoxically heightening its visceral effect. The -up epitomizes the ways in which the system of society places the black female body in its place by unveiling it.  Indeed, this pattern of drawing a boundary between self and the other by intruding upon and inquiring into what is private about the other is repeated throughout the play. Every character eye exam but urges her to be cautious about the line between them she needs to observe. However, it is the Doctor crosses (44). Although their sexua for his emotional and sexual gratification, he deceives himself into believing that the act is an extension of his medical service and attributes it to lf to / and more and m). He deliberately misreads her needs to project his sexual desire onto her. He is not disturbed at all by his crossing the line, since the border, as he thinks, is voluntarily crossed by Hester, or never crossed at all. Since Hester, as he premises,  that was not hers . . . , their hierarchical relationship  in terms of gender and class difference  still remains intact. Indeed,  117  even the sexual intercourse never makes any difference to their relationship as he still perceives and communes with her body in an abstracted and mediated way. While he confesses that this about Hester, this does not mean any change a mutuality or reciprocity in their relationship but Like I needed to./ What could I  unconscious of the sense of boundary, either. As a pompous representative of the institution who understands that the system is sustained by and maintained through differentiations and demarcations in a hierarchical chain:   I walk the line  Between us and them Between our kind and their kind The balance of the system depends on a well-drawn boundary line  And all parties respecting that boundary. (61) The -(61). On top of her orderly life, healthy diet, economic stability, and decent offspring, of which Hester is in lack, her marriage guarantees a dominant position over Hester in terms of moral and sexual integrity. Paradoxically, however, it is the Welfare  118  menage-a-trois with her husband and her. For the Welfare lady, the boundary is still firmly in its ly blinds herself to the patriarchal one. Her husband is associated with the phallic image whose authority to which she and Hester must succumb:  He told us what he wanted and we did it./ that this sexual adventure is her husband husband. However, she reaches a point when her performance is not possible any more. The fine cbrings home to the Welfare lady the sadistic power and pleasure she has over Hester. With its he admits. Like the Doctor, she commodifies and exploits Hester, while opening up a possibility of disturbing the system by that it is threatening to the system in its transgressing of the boundary, this opening faces the destiny of soon closing. Winform the audience of a transition within the drama and at the same time to distance her with its abrupt and theatrical turn), the Welfare lady swiftly redeems her status as a venerable citizen, relegating the menage-a-trois heveled and disturbed for a moment of corporeal communion is re-asserted and restored much more strongly than ever: The  119  should emphasize/ that she[Hester] is a low-, emphasis added).      The allowed any privacy or intimacy. What is private about her sexual organs and stories gets laid bare before the Doctor and the she sucforces the audience to unwittingly join in their fetishizing and objTheir confessions verbally and theatrically replay or reenact the black female body as an object of desire, paradoxically foregrounding the position of the audience eavesdropper. The society these characters represent employs spectacle as a form of surveillance and discipline, not just as a stimulant for prurient curiosity. While the Doctor and the Welfare are eally engaged in is forfeiting her command of the private sphere to offer her up to public eye, which is disciplinary and regulative. The Doctor and the Welfare need to check out and look into the private territory about Hester to secure her person and body within their grasp. The words on the the anxiety about the unruly body and being of Hester, they eliminate what is the most private er stops being a parasite that lives off the ter  120  any sense of privacy or intimacy and outcasts her in terms of race, gender, and sexuality by [ing] safety nets, rub[bing]  subjectivity as she has her private      The sense of distance remains integral and really problematic in defining these relations sions, and these illusions, in turn, enable and facilitate the appropriation, objectification, and commodification of the object. That is, through the form of spectacle, one can distance oneself from the object of spectacle and simultaneously violate it. A(be recovered. The characters justify their sexual exploitation of Hester by replacing their experience with her with the representation (the Doctor) and consciously and deliberately regaining the sense of distance from her, which has been minimized through their corporeal the symbolic, the Doctor is not just engaged in sublimating the vulgar and profane pleasures he got from it but justifying his turning away from her pained body that invites his empathetic  121  preconceived idea of Hester, who is an unmarried and poor, saves her from any hesitation in -nd it. Such relationships as the Doctor and the Welfare have with Hester sum up what Guy Debord calls Thesis 1).  ary consumerist culture in The Society of the Spectacle, the spectacle reifies the inversed relation between direct experience and mediated representations. In a society in which the spectacle constitutes the dominant mode of human perceptions and social rterms, the spectacle is affirmation of appearance and affirmation of all human life, namely social ges spectators. the image in contemporary society. However, the spectacle is not reduced to images, but rather engages with : collection of images but a social relation among people mediamen among themselves and vis-à-vis the-7).  In the Blood depicts a world in which human relations are articulated, mediated, and negotiated through the form of spectacle. This play grapples with a power relation between the  122  spectator/consumer and the spectacle/commodity through the relationships between Hester and each character,26 that are profitable and lucrative. While Debord accentuates how images overwhelm the spectator, leaving them well as relegated to passive individuals as shown in characters eager for consuming images of Hester for gratification of their sexual urges and economic ends. Revolving around the form of spectacle, their oppressive relationships with Hester are located at the conjunction between antebellum slavery and postmodern anxiety. t is  In the Blood features shows how Hester is vulnerable to the fetishized desires and exploitative intentions of the characters, not unlike the antebellum black female slaves while foregrounding the contested and inversed relations between reality and appearance, being and seeming, and the real and the symbolic. The spectacle is a manifestation of the ss as well as the postmodern ontological crisis.  While the Doctor and the Welfare lady resort to the form of spectacle for rationalizing their sexual mistreatment of Hester somewhat unwittingly, Reverend D and Amiga Gringa, the heroes of the third and fourth confessions, are the characters who consciously profit from the images of                                                  26 The play solely consists of each encounter (or liaison) between Hester and each character. The five adult characters who visit Hester or Hester visits throughout the play never meet with each other, much less building any momentous relationships between them (only the Welfare and the  of Hester, but they neither meet with each other) except for when they form the chorus collectively and anonymously at the beginning and the end of the play. While somewhat schematically foregrounding the subjugated status of Hester each time, these repeaimbalanced power distribution of this society.   123  Hester or deliberately abuse them. They know how to make the most of the images they want to contain her within. Awith Hester and abruptly asking her for a blow job, the Reverend confesses:  Suffering is an enormous turn on. . .  She had that look in her eye that invites liaisons Eyes that say red spandex. (78)  Rather than eliciting compassion or vocational/ethical responsibility from the Reverend D.,  Reminding him of his  paradoxically reaffirms his rehabilitated life in the present. His exultation at and strong will to Hester to  only nourishes his sexual fantasy, and he never sees Hester apart from this fetishized imagery for sexually arousing him. For this mountebank preacher, everything is all about the image. While  is having his own church built  for its figurative operation in this world. He tells Hester to come around to the back next time she comes to meet him and tries to deliver money to Hester through a lawyer. He is afraid of being seen though he explains to Hester   at all  the meaning of a backer watch you real close, to make sure yr as good as they think  124  vigilant about the possibility that they might be betrayed by what the Reverend D. seems. Yet he oor and himself on tv:       want local poor. Local poor dont look good. Gimmie foreign poor. Poverty exotica. Gimmie brown and yellow skins against a non-Western landscape, some savanna, some rain forest some rice paddy. Gimmie big sad eyes with the English they know, right into the camera. And put me up there with them, holding them, comforting them, telling them everythings gonna be alright, we gonna raise you up, we gonna get you on the bandwagon of our ways, put a smile in yr heart and a hamburger in yr belly, baby. (Rest) (73) Displacing the ethical into the aesthetic, the Reverend D. is obsessed about the exotic images of with his own image as a benevolent missionary who reaches out to those impoverished bellies and hearts on the dark continent. As the poor pay when they look poor in the right way. He captures a stereotypical, fanciful moment of colonial encounter, enacting and embodying the representational politics implicated in the cultural logWhile he devotes himself to taking the racist, colonialist sting out of this tableau by resorting to  125  between his local and exotic poor, a parallel between class and color discrimination. What makes this is also how the Reverend D. likes Hester: He reacts to, consumes, and profits from her suffering by displacing it ibeing caught up in any emotional and visceral turbulences her suffering might cause.         While the Doctor, the Welfare lady, and the Reverend D. use Hester for their sexual money- (72), she reveals without reserve that money means much more than anything to her. She always engaged in sewing a nice dress out of the fabric the Welfare gave her, Amiga wonders how much AOr an animDo you she well knows about the exchange value of her racial identity and her fertility, which she schemes to exploit by turning her lived bond with her child int it./ Birth in her own, that Amiga finds possible profit, as revealed by her suggestion of the lesbian show with  126  l economy: guys in the neighbo). This sexual performance becomes the more enticing to the audience (of the performance within the play) because of the exhibition of color fear of and furtive fascination with interracial and same-sex intercourse.  Hester is not in the least engaged in this performance against her will. She situates herself between appearance and reality and even exploits i Miga, . . . thalook, Amiga quotes Hester that African American females are sexually promiscuous, transgressive, and immoral; Thus/nonetheless, she is differentiating her self from her own actions, employing her own body in the spectacular performance and providing the image of a black female the audience is ready figurative posi accept the Objectifying her own body, Hester reveals her sense serving the capitalist system without being uncritically subsumed by it. Hester is true to the Brechtian notion of the actor by performing her part of a hyper-  127   In -Lettered A    Hester is associated with the imagery of blood time and again throughout the play. Although it is a prevgetting imprisoned, ther sins. She is castigated since she is illiterate, unmarried, shiftless, slutty,  HER ). This statement presents a weird yet central image of the play, the letter/words carved onto the body, a spectacle that compellingly conjures lynching. Herein, I read  body against the representational politics of lynching as a punitive institution and a  body becomes the words (bad news), shifting and straddling between the physical and the semantic, the material and the symbolic. Philip Kolin also foregrounds an arbitrary yoking of the form and the content, the body and the letter/word/idea in the essentialist condemnation of Hester in the Prologue by symbolizes In the Bloodlynching, the chorus inscribes their interpretations and meanmaterial evidence for stereotypical ideas they conceive and construct for the black female body, Hester on the stage or, scaffold constitutes the spectacle specific to this particular society, the welfare state which purportedly belongs to the present yet uncannily evokes antebellum slavery and   128  The modernist Othering indicate the postmodern ontological anxiety about the gap between the experience of authenticity and representation and signifying violence to fill in that gap. While a belief in biological determinism or ess desire for authenticity in which appearance and reality, the substance and what it represents are not mediated experiences and the representational gap. Rather than guaranteeing any authentic presented as if it were a given text that should be read and generated as a text in the act of reading it.  The desire for what is authentic and the violence that desire presumably entails are personified by Chilli in this play, the father of her oldest child. In their reunion after being separated from each other for fourteen years, Chilli dresses Hester in a wedding gown he prepares himseThis is real. The feelings I have for you, the 92). His obsession with what is real is revealed every dollar I with his subjective  129  changeable, ostensible, and representable. Jabber, who is a bloody tie between them, is depicted lonely with our child on yr hip. Struggling to make do. Struggling against all odds. And triumphant. Triumphant against everything. Like Here, Chilli does not depict Hester as she is in the picture, but embellishes her image with his conceived lonindicate that his reading of the picture is informed by his cherished picture of Christian motherhood as Mary with Jesus, the very ideal he has of Hester and their son. Hester is his first love, the cornerstone of his life, which would provide a foundation for his quest for the real, the authentic whether it is the relationship, or the person who can embody it. He believes he can contain her within the ideal of the Virgin Mary as he locks her up in a white wedding dress. He model of Madonna, one usually reserved for white mothers, thereby setting himself on a par with t only makes sense that I s of Hester as a black Madonna and the marriage with her get thwarted and shatte  130  Finding out that Hester has more illegitimate children than Jabber, Chilli withdraws his ew options other than to use her body in an attempt to change her socio-the actual Hester as a black single mother. Despite his life-Or he mistakes the self-imposed ideas and images for what is real. For him, Hester changes with time and is thus not real any more, much less able to serve as a source to which he can turn to for authenticity and integrity. While his gold watch serves as a reliable source for verifying his subjective sense of time, Hester, due to her led Hester is now out of order  Indeed, the doubling of Jabber and Chilli son. This socio-committed but Hester has been deserted by Chilli and physically and verbally abused by the Reverend D. While I agree with the contention that she kills her own son for what he represents (Foster 75), I argue  131  that it is not just any father or specific social institution but the socio-symbolic structure behind such oppressive relations as implied by the word Jabber comes to articulate. This climax scene of the play begins by revisiting the word on the wall in the first reading it with my mouth but not with my tongue I was reading it only with my lips and I could language and image which demarcate and differentiate, Jabber would not convey the word to Hester. He is not saying the word but only reading it aloud, transferring it from the realm of the socio-symbolic and the intersubjective to that of sheer physicality. Shifting the organs of articulation from the tongue through mouth to lips, Jabber exports the word to its most surface -signifying and non-matrixed, Jabber expresses his negation oway: As a word divested of its meaning, a sign emptied of its signified, the word a sign of itself, resounding hollow this moment Jabber was testing out such an alternative communication by writing down each name in the text without any dialogue between them:  Hester. . . . Read that word out to me, huh? I like it when you read to me.     132  Hester. Cant or wont?  Jabber. Cant.  Hester Jabber  He knows what the word says,             but he wont say it.(11)   Rather than mere dramaturgy facilitating the switches between scenes and the changes of topics,  ). Marking the failure of language, the spell discredits words as expressive and communicative media, rather foregrounds what cannot be expressed through words in its stead. It was in this non-with Hester, which is uninflected by the semiotic violence of the word. Jabber and Hester come hear music o-7).  Any signifying operation stops, the language dwindles into its physicality, and only reconfigures the relationship between the language and the body ultimately by its specific mode of traffic between the page and the stage. The writing on the page presents the material presence of the body of the performer on the stage rather than representing the figurative presence of the where language absents itself in an effort to evoke a  133  H. how Parks reimagines an unmediated, unalienated, and unabstracted relationship between the language and the bbetween the activities of writing and performing, as well as the interactions between the interpretation of the written marks on the page and the embodiment of the corporeal markings of  As the meaning of the word presides over and the symbolic process intervenes in the relationship between mother and son, however, the play heads toward its violent and tragic catastrophe:  Jabber. You said if I read it youd say what it means. Slut. Whassit mean?  Slomo. Jabber. Slut.  Hester. You need to close yr mouth, Jabber.  Jabber. I know what it means. Slut.  Hester. (Shut up.) Jabber. Slut.  Hester. (I said shut up, now.) Jabber. I know what it means.  Hester. (And I said shut up! Shut up.) (Rest) (Rest) Jabber. Slut. Sorry.  The word just popped out, a childs joke. He covers his mouth, sheepishly. They look at each other. Hester  Jabber  Hester  Jabber   Hester quickly raises her club and hits him once. Brutally. He crises out and falls down dead. . . . (105-6)  When we put a word or a phrase in the quotation marks, we usually indicate they belong to a  slut, I mean the slut as written on the  134  Reverend D. or Jabber. In the above passage, the first four sluts in the quotation marks imply that Jabber is quoting or citing the word. Although he is taking the word out of his head this time, he is not still meaning it to Hester: He is not calling her as slut. He just lets her know that the word ant by Jabber27, having a practical and substantial effect on Hester and his relationship with her. It effects since it acts Jabber himself begins to be abstracted, having himself contained by the symbolic frame of the society. Through his going out with Amiga, he actually steps into the symbolic web of the society. His slow brain becomes smart, armed with the knowledge about women like Hester and how they are trafficked between men.  Abstracted and alienated from what she is, this sexual and racialexemplifies the language that the society uses for representing such a black female as Hester as racial, gendered, and sexual other. This moment is revelatory about the discursive construction of a constitutive, and not merely a reflexive, after-the-representation subjective, identity, politics a formative, not merely an expressive, place in the Putting the word, slut, out of the quotation mark, Jabber does not just cite but speak for the                                                  27 bber seems to be just referring to the word, not calling her that. However, the word slut on the written text is already without the quotation mark. Pretending to be inquisitive about the meaning of the word, he is actually forcing her to painfully admit her position within the symbolic system of the society. By articulating the word without the quotation mark, Jabber does reflect the representation of her race and sex within the society, bringing in the conventions and prejudices of the society that would brand this black female as a slut.    135  -separated from that of his mother, becomes the Word. Hester needs a weapon not just for a physical blow but for symbolic resistance. To beat Jabber, she uses the club, which was stolen by her middle son, Trouble, from a policeman. Hester always herself against their patriarchal violence. While this phallic weapon does not go well with the wedding dress Chilfigure in this play, denies her any financial aid and even physical access to him. Wielding this club, Hester mimics the governmental authority and public power to fight against the socio-symbolic violence they inflict on her body and person. Rena Fraden reads this moment as revealing how the physical violence takes over when languagIndeed, Hester attempts to resolve the glitches in the symbolic realm by physical and literal violence. Punishtaunting with the ultimate form of corporeal violence, Hester might replicate the violent logic of -political progress toward the disembodied citizenship: Hester decides to physically obliterate his son to shut off what is meant level rather than a reflexive violence that takes place in the moment cognitive and rational  136  faculties fail or a momentary confounding of the symbolic and literal violence. Hester resists this discursive violence by reclaiming the body of her son. Her act is not just a physical destruction redressing the dislocation between her body and the word representing it.       As a mother who kills her own child, Hester is located in the lineage of black mothers who argue for their motherhood paradoxically by denying it in the form of infanticide. Laura Dawkins explains the motif of maternal infanticide that frequents in Harlem Renaissance literature less as the failure of of Christian maternal ideal as a model to explain out and embrace the cultural experiences of African American mothers. Such feminist psychoanalytic scholars as Simone de Beauvoir, Marina Warner, and Julia Kristeva have scrutinized and critiqued the Virgin Mary as a feminine and maternal model constructed by Western patriarchy and at the core of this cultural construct lies the model of the mater dolorosa: sorrowing mother or mother of sorroWhile the white mother-society, the black mother-of the child to this secular, hostile, racist world. Thus, such black mothers as Rachel in GrimkéRachelSafe refuse to take the role of the mater dolorosa by reclaiming their children through infanticide: They take back the bodies of their children rather than delivering them to the society that would devour them. In In the Bloodmob does not exist as in the plays and novellas in Harlem Renaissance, however, it might not be I 137  between mother and son takes a semiotic turn. The scene Jabber cathe moment of separation between Hester and Jabber, which is translated into separation between experiences and the mediated representother black infanticidal mothers, however, Hester refuses to see her son as a separate and independent being. By returning him to the blood  and the blood serves as a metonymy for the body here,  she reclaims his body as her own. To make this reclamation complete:  Hester beats Jabbers body  again and again and again. Trouble and Bully back away.  Beauty stands there watching.  Jabber is dead and bloody.  Hester looks up from her deed to see Beauty who runs off.  Hester stands there alone wet with her sons blood.  Grief-striken, she cradles his body. Her hands wet with    Hester. Looks good, Jabber, dont it? Dont it, huh? (106)   -embodied sign, Hester and Jabber, the body and the part of the body separated from it, the body and the language born of its abstraction, are  asked by the Welfare lady to write down the name even sensuous images  138   rewriting her story and identity which have been mistreated and misrepresented so far. Also -en as an allegory of resistance to the politics of representation involved in racist spectacle. 139  CHAPTER 4  Black Body as Remains/ Black Body Remains: Venus (1996) as a Racial Spectacle   It is not until near the end of Suzan-Lori Venus that the audience is enlightened 28 The Grade-School Chum reveals that The Negro Resurrectionist is originally postmortem class./ An ill or have been, as he himself insists  engage-d had dug at0, emphasis added), was not allowed believed (Jiggetts, 310)-length play, Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World, digging up and resurrecting Black Man from father and son of The America Play who excavate The Great Hole of History to an entire family in the novel Getting MotheBody (2003) who are engrossed in digging for the remains of their mother. The Negro                                                  28 Suzan-Lori Parks, Venus (New York: Theatre Communications Groups, 1997), 150. Subsequent references to this volume in this chapter will be given parenthetically in the text.   140  4). Unlike other diggers, however, the kind of digging The Negro Resurrectionist is engaged in is  a repentance for his shameful and outlawed career in the past, trying to bury his unearthing craft in the ground of the past:      I used to dig up people  dead ones. You know,  After theyd been buried.  Doctors pay a lot for corpses    And I was always this close to getting arrested.  This Jail-Watchmans jobs much more carefree. (158) The past he tries to revoke is not just digging up the bodies but selling them. As was the case with The Foundling Father in The America PlayNegro Resurrectionist, yet in a more literal sense. The Grade-School Chum tersely turns down digger finally takes gold for the body of the Venus he will dig up for The Grade-School Chum once she dies, attesting to The Grade-      Venus reflects her self--gging around in the Great Whole of who was brought from South Africa to England and France in the first decade of the nineteenth  141  century to be presented as a human curiosity because of her abnormally developed buttocks steatopygia  Venus par excellence. Parks got caught up with an idea of making Baartman a subject of her play when overhearing her director and collaborator, Liz Diamond, discuxcavation of the  the black body in her theatre which has now become so mainstream and lucrative. She is not ignorant of the financial gains of the black body, black life, and black history on stage and unhesitatingly admits to this sad truth:  / A black play knows that racerelations are a holding  This engagement with history which is not reduced to a commoditized spectacle of the black body, and presents how  faking, their imaginative investment in history opens digging as a subversive force for resisting dominant discourse on the black female body and thus as a legitimate way for engaging with history, blackness, and corporeality.   : The Venus as a Racist Spectacle and Venus as a Racial Spectacle    as Parks opines, especially history that has Possession4). Theatre, derived from the ancient Greek, theatron, which implies seeing place, renders visible what is not seen, and presents what is absent, thus making a history. Indeed, the specular economy of theatre lies at the  142  d real-effects a fabricated and reconstructed presence of those who has been disregarded, overlooked, and omitted in the dominant historical discourses. By putting on stage the bodies that have been erased, fragmented, and disjointed from history, it can carve out a space for their historical presence. As the performing body is exposed to a viewing public, its material presence on stage is translated into discursive one in history. By figuring Black Man with Watermelon who dies several times with a rope around his neck, Parks re-members the horrible history of lynching; By mounting a black Lincoln over and over, Parks reminds of and reclaims black presence neglected in the white myth of Abraham Lincoln. By performing subjects who have been marginalized and dispossessed by dominant discourses, Parksas Parks suggests (qtd. in Chauduri and generative space for those who have had their voices muffled and their presence stifled. Parks says somewhat triumphantly      -viving and re-staging of a phenomenal figure from actual history in Venus, between theatre and real- The problem lies in the spotlight on this diasporic black female performer who became a transnational phenomenon. The highly visible  143  Venus sparked much popular and academic interest even in her life time. Her history exists in various forms of entertainment such as a vaudeville play, various folksongs, and satirical paintings. And primary historical sources are textual  court proceedings, newspaper accounts, reaties(Worthen 9). By incorporating into Venus the lectures, court transcripts, and eye-witness accounts she dug up from historical documents and archived records that pertain to Baartman, Parks reveals her It cannot be dismissed either, however, that Parks and her theatre also get implicated in that very discourse. Rather than just serving as a site for recognition of an indigenous subject and thus affirming an analogy between theatre-making and history-of Baartman enters into the discursive arena which is already saturated with the various forms of  stage Baartman again in/through her play becomes more questionable when considering the story of real-life Baartman, her continued status as a stage commodity.  As the historical narrative goes, Saartjie Baartman was born into the Grinqua tribe, a part of Khoi-Khoi (or Khoisan) in South Africa. A twenty-year-old worker on a Dutch colonial farm with enormous buttocks, Baartman drew the attention of William Dunlop, an ex-medical officer in the British army who was planning on launching an ethnographic show in collusion with his manservant Hendrick Cesars. He persuaded her to return to England with him and make a profit Hottentot Venus, in the popular carnival circui 144  in London for four years, she was sold to a Parisian animal trainer named Réaux, taken to Paris, and continued to be exposed in both public and private viewings from eleven in the morning until ten in the evening for the next fifteen months until she died in 1815. The cause of her death nal Museum of Natural History. He assembled a team of scientists and artists to collaborate on nude paintings after her death, with the permission, Cuvier performed a dissection of the corpse, made a plaster cast of it, and presented his findings from the autopsy in publications and lectures all around the world. He preserved her brains and genitals in a jar, which were kept outside the entry doors of his apartment in the museum, and the plaster cast was put on display at the Muséil 1975. Baartman was on display both in life and death.  When Venus  The Negro Resurrectionist:  I regret to inform you that thuh Venus Hottentot iz dead. All:     Dead? The Mans Brother, later Mother-Showman, later The Grade-School Chum: There wont b inny show tonite. The Chorus: Dead! The Negro Resurrectionist:   145  Exposure iz what killed her, nothing on.      And our cold weather. 23 days in a row it rained.       Thuh doctor says she drank too much. It was thuh cold I think (3).  The Negro Resurrectionist contends that she died of cold weather and long days of rain. The fragmented knowledge of her death presented in the Overture riffs on the nature of the exposure scrap/hiding only the privates that lipped in hebut to the gaze and touch of the spectators who are eager to consume her as a sexual object.  While the play seems to accuse those who exposed her to the elements, drink, or the gaze, the re-exposure of Baartman might be the one and foremost accusation that has been directed at -29 of the show called Venus. Venus takes the form of a pseudo-historical report on a real figure, heavily resorting to archival materials from newspaper articles, broadsheets ballads, and personal diary entries, as well as excerpts from the anatomical notebooks and autopsy report. Yet what constitutes the play, except for these texts quoted by The Negro Resurrectionist as footnotes, are the scenes from the theatrical performances in which the Venus is staged as an exotic oddity by The Mother-bodies of the 8 Human Wonders. The Overture frames the entire play as a freak show by the Venus who is revolving as if she were on a display stand:  The Venus facing stage right. She revolves,             counterclockwise. 270 degrees. She faces upstage.                                                    29 365 Days/365 Plays in The New Yorker, Hilton Als calls her as a -  146  The Negro Resurrectionist:  The Venus Hottentot!  The Mans Brother, later The Mother-Showman, later The Grade-School Chum: The Venus Hottentot! The Man, later The Baron Docteur: The Venus Hottentot!   (Rest)                         The Venus revolves 90 degrees. She             (Rest)                                        faces stage right. (1)  As the characters call the name of the Venus Hottentot by turns, the first scene of the play recapitulates the ways in which the Venus Hottentot is cast as a body to be gawked at. The loyal sexuality are commodified. The more you pay, the more pleasure you can get as a Chorus m). Switching around such spatial backgrounds as the sideshow, the courtroom, and the medical laboratory, with their specular dynamics, the Venus is staged as a spectacle over and over. The Chorus of the 8 Human Wonders turns into The Chorus of the Spectators, The Chorus of the Court, and The Chorus of the 9 Anatomists to look, touch, poke, prod, measure, probe, and interrogate the Venus, serving as an audience-within-the-director Richard Foreman created -Victorian the Venus, was costumed in a bodysuit that artificially exaggerated her backside. As the body of the actress is subjected to the  147  voyeuristic gaze of the audience, a historical Baartman is revived and re-exposed as a racist and arouse original violatuncritical The invariable -obviously objectionable racial sexual exploitation of y should this over-exposed body be given again to the visual and sexual desires differentiated from other exposures to which Baartman was historically vulnerable? If so, how?            The controversy surrounding the respectacularization of the black body sparked by Venus anticipates and reverberates with the controversy over the public exhibition of racist images in the US in early 2000s. In 2000, James Allen, an Atlanta antique dealer, published his collection of 145 lynching photographs from 1870 to 1960 as Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America. The publication led to exhibitions in numerous venues including the Roth Horowitz Gallery, the New York Historical Society, the Andy Warhol Museum, and the Martin Luther King Jr. National Historical Site. The images taken during the actual lynching sessions invite the viewer to bear witness to violence. Allen had of the photographs Allen collected were originally trafficked as trophies to celebrate the white  148  -presentation of the images might replicate the ways in which this vigilante violence became a public spectacle and ptheir reproduction of the power of lynching participants in their spectatorshsuch pictures is that while they are taken by and for (and sometimes of) white people, their  The Without Sanctuary -lynching efforts to appropriate the cultural power of spectacle in service against lynching. Photographs and motion pictures popularized and naturalized  However, such visualizing and sensationalizing strategies were not exclusively dedicated to pro-lynching propaganda. By the 1930s, the NAACP began to assiduously employ spectacles of lynching for their anti-lynching crusade. Elizabeth Hale discusses the lynching of Claude Neal that took place in Marianna Florida in 1934 as the event that triggered this shift. While the white press, whether local, regional, or national, dealt with the lynching without going deeper into the details about by whom and how Neal was tortured and executed, the NAACP determined to enter into an investigation into the case and, as a result of investigation, circulated over 15,000 copies of a pamphlet entitled Lynching of Claude Neal which included a graphically detailed narrative and a picture of the dismembered body. The lynching of Claude Neal, which mark the end of  paradoxically offered a momentum for the  149  and even more grisly pictures for the anti- (Hale, Making Whiteness 222). The NAACP used these images to accompany petitions for the passage of anti-lynching legislation and a fundraising drive, and continued to sponsor anti-lynching art exhibitions.  The ways in which the cultural force of spectacle operated in a double-edged way in the anti-lynching crusade by mobilizing the empathic reactions of the viewers and simultaneously threatening to re-inscribe black degradation can also be found in -exposure and respectacularization of Baartman. I argue that the NAACP anti-lynching campaign and the Without Sanctuary exhibit parallel representation of spectacle of the Venus Hottentot as a ritual that involves audiences to challenge the cultural logic of the spectacle without risking its affective powerof this much-exposed body inherits the anti-lynching efforts to envision anti-racist spectacles out of racist spectacles without uncritically replicating them.  Reading lynching as a template for later racial spectacles, Jonathan Markovitz shows how Racial Spectacles 6-10). While the meanings and stakes of spectacle lynchings and their representations were not uniformly embraced, rather fomenting critical black beast rapis30 weakening of its potency by the mid-1930s.31 Venus as another racial spectacle                                                  30 On the rise of investigations, see Sommerville, Rape and Race in the Nineteenth-Century South.  31 The assessment of the anti-pessimistic about anti- 150  for anti-racist struggle, I argue vulnerability, but to critique her objectification for a racialized, fetishistic desire. Parks does not just stage Venus as spectacle but presents Venus as a racial spectacle for re-negotiating collective memory surrounding this iconic figure, ultimately raising essential questions about gender and racial dynamics surrounding this historical scandal. Indeed, Venus is located in the midst of an -exhibited after being discovered in France, Nelson Mandela, newly elected president of South Africa after twenty-seven- remains be returned to South Africa. The French government objected to the idea of repatriation at first and the negotiation took much time and political/diplomatic effort. Until the repatriation was finally approved by the French 2002, scholars and artists had tried to awaken attention to this histBaartman played a significant part in creating a racial spectacle surrounding this African diasporic figure by foregrounding, interrogating, and problematizing the ways in which she had been (mis-)understood and (dis-)remembered. Venus contributed to recasting of her body as a site for arousing a renewed sense of machineries of racial production in order to finally put this body to rest. The Negro Resurrectionist who employs himself as a death-watch for Venus within the play illuminates a role the play plays in the process of a repatriation of Baartman. Venus watches over and attends to the Venus as she is disengaged from the legacy of the Venus Hottentot as a                                                  onal Making Whiteness 226). While Hale deplores the image of the black rapist still remained despite the anti-racist spectacles deployed by the anti-lynching movements, Markovitz puts more value on their   151   symbol of cultural and Negro  with more readiness and awareness.   In Venus, Parks suggests two kinds of spectacle racist and anti-racist that memorialize the Venus Hottentot, echoing archival and embodied historical practices. Such ambivalent repressing and resisting uses of racial spectacles inform the difficulties and complexities the body poses as a medium and agent of history: the body serves as the remains of white colonialist history, and yet black history remains through the body.        Thwarted Presence of the Black Female Body   Venus what remains. Initially, curiosity about and buttocks. Her remains were also left behind. Unless paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould stumbled Baartman and her story never would have been exposed to the light of day. Triggering a heated debate among anthropologists and sociologists regarding ethnographic display,32                                                   32 Due to these renewed interests in Baartman, the remains of her skeleton, brain, and genitalia was exhibited again in 1994, this tiA33).      152  rediscovered remains also attracted artists who felt for and found problematic her subjugated experiences as a colonial subject.33  Venus addresses an ironic and horrific truth that Baartman could remain as the remains of history due to her bodily remains which had been kept in the archives of the Musé When Death met her Death deathd her and left her to rot  au naturel end for our hot Hottentot.   And rot yes she would have right down to the bone Had not The Docteur put her corpse in his home.  Sheed a soul which iz mounted on Satans warm wall While her flesh has been pickled in Sciences Hall. (9)  means of  each respectively resorting to written/textual and embodied/performed practices (18). Georges Cuvier, dubbed his autopsy report and flesh a. While being a transmission kept in formaldehyde as with texts and documents, the types of historical record hitherto prioritized by historians.                                                   33 Venus mixed-media installation Sa main Charmante -Hottentot Venus (2003).     153  Specimens from Baartman were preserved to support scientific racism, an invention of the period in which scientific knowledges supported the subjective belief in hierarchical racial subjects, such as the mythology that Africans are the missing link between humans and apes. As discussed by Sander Gilman, the autopsy and displa were part of the effort of the time to biologically and anatomically ground a connection between blackness and and genitalia supported the stereotype of the sexually avaricious black woman, also reflecting -centupathological summary ).   Preserving body parts for science disrupts and impedes the due course of an organic entity by freezing its time and thus turning it into inorganic components. While keeping it from being corrupted and decomposed, pickling stunts any ongoing changes and prevents any biochemical reactions: as a specimen for historical, scientific, and anthropological research, the body is fixated as it is presented for chemical treatment. Such biochemical fixation parallels, or is less problematic than the mnemonic one, a reductive way of remembering this black woman the lies in fixing Baartmanfixated with sexual fantasies and racial pathologies, thus rendering corporeality the only measure of blackness. Not just securing the physical remains of Saartjie Baartman but containing her within project enacts its implied violence. What is indeed pathological  154  ent, Performing Remains 103).   -and-blood girl in South Africa to an ethnographic type in Europe. While designating its heroine Miss Saartjie Baartmancast list, the play is curiously marked by the striking absence of Miss Saartjie Baartman. After the overture scene, she is first captured as a girl scrubbing a shiny floor in South Africa while being unknowingly atter is launching in England:   The Brother:  Big Bottomed Girl. A novelty. Shes vigorous and meticulous.  (Watch this, Brother!) (Oh, whats her name?)     The Man:  Her  The Brother:  Saartjie. Lovely. Girl! GIRL!? The Girl:  Sir? The Brother:  Dance. (13)  155  Although The Man reminds The Brother that she is the Hottentotfails in recognizing her as his past crush, let alone as an individual.  Brother and is trafficked and traded   13, 10). As she is not called by her own name any    She continues as The Girl until The Mother-Showman gives her a new identity as the Hottentot Venus, a naming that does not lead to redemption but to further reduction. The Mother- freak is being marketed:      What a fat ass, huh?  Oh yes, this girls thuh Missin Link herself.  Come on inside and allow her to reveal to you the Great  And Horrid Wonder   of her great heathen buttocks.  Thuh Missing Link, Ladies and Gentlemen: Thuh Venus  Hottentot: . . .   Plucked her from thuh Fertile Crescent  From thuh Fertile Crescent with my own bare hands! Ripped her off thuh mammoth lap of uh mammoth ape! (43).  The Mother-exual stimulant but for the exoticism, primitiveness, and heathenness her physical shape evokes for her - 156   --4), the Venus those to whom she belonged to possess precisely the kind of shape which is most admired among Book of Days protruding buttocks become the traits generic to her tribe, which helps endorse and legitimize a  The Mother-Showman suggests  or, even prescribes  how to use the body on display:  / Down in the dumps?/ Perhaps yr feeling that yr life is all for naught? Ive felt that/ way myself at times./ Come on inside and get yr spirits lifted. One  In other words, the white audience, feeling a sadistic pleasure and attributing the abnormal, degenerate, and obscene images to the objectified body, can defuse their social and sexual insecurities by displacing the conflicts with their own lives into racial ones. When perceived less as an individual than an ethnographic type, the Venus implies moto the (re-)fashioning of the white audience ic  as a spectacle of racial and sexual alterity.   157   For the Love of the Venus, a play-within-the-play that proposes a framework for the whole, delineates the ways the black female body is craved only to have its presence thwarted, remaining as an empty vessel through which to mediate and negotiate desire and subjectivity. Adapted from The Hottentot Venus, or Hatred of Frenchwomen, a vaudeville play staged in Paris in 1914, this play recapitulates the colonial relations between Europe and Africa by featuring a love triangle between a white couple and a black woman. The Young Man, with his marriage impending, suffers from the boredom of his Bride-to-Be, which he sentimentalizes as a crisis in what is indeed in a pickle is his notion of manhood, at once fantasized and romanticized: ferred and )), even a compromised one with a domesticated version of the Wild. He newspaper (49). As Bride-to-Be asks for a workable plan for the way out, the Mother antically suggests multiple ways of , until she finally comes across a solution which is no less dra-to-Be is presented to The Young Man The Bride-to-Be finally removes her disguise and reveals her own body before The Young Man the play, sacrificing a plausible characterization and narrative The Young MaWild too easily gets abandoned, intimates that closure can be achieved when the possibility of  158  an unruly black presence is contained by a union with the legitimate, socially approved white female, only serving as an imaginary site for negotiating the sexual conflicts and power dynamics between the white man and woman.    Once The Girl joins The Mother-Venus, however, she dreams of her presence  albeit on stage  with her newly acquired identity:  The Venus: We should spruce up our act.  I could speak for them.   Say a little poem or something.  The Mother-Showman:  Count!  The Venus: You could pretend to teach me and I would learn before their very eyes.  The Mother-Showman:  Yr a Negro native with a most remarkable spanker.  That what they pay for.  Their eyes are hot for yr tot-tot.  Theres the poetry. (51) The Venus, who is capable of counting, reading, and even acting, believes her reading of poetry entrepreneur who can capitalize on her body and performance. However, her suggestion is immediately dismissed by The Mother-Showman who is versed in the needs of her patrons. While still being implicated in  159  as a novelty that invites their (intellectual) curiosity than as an affirmation that the African native females are bodily, earthly, and salacious beings that await their wasting gaze and touch. What fantasy, inspiration, and pleasure her black presence could evoke for the white audience come and the sexual fantasies and racial pathologies associated with figurative and metaphoric Saartjie turns into the exotic sexual icon.       Parks shows how the gazes that covet to archive and enshrine it as an emblem of black inferiority. With its Brechtian strategies, however, the freak show in Venus does not just represent the subjection and exploitation of the Venus but While the Venuss provide the main stage for resurrecting her body, Parks is more interested in revealing how they reiterate, reflect, and perform the racist mythologies revolving around the black female body. spectators confront, reaffirm and consume their prejudices, fantasies, and false myths about blackness, the black body, and black female sexuality. conducted by digging for the actual body of Baartman, Venus presents the Venuspresence is invariably fleeting and elusive.   Venus expectations of its presence. The play opens exactly at the point such an expectation has been  160  and miles and miles/ Coming in from all over to get themselves uh look-see) exclaims:   tries to secure and fashion his identity by grounding the difference in and projecting the otherness onto the black female body, the body he seeks to secure in his presence finally turns out to be bogus, effigy, and fabrication. He calls upon the body of the Hottentot Venus, which would give materiality to fictive otherness he conceives, only to find out its absence. While he is indoctrinated by The Bride-to-attaining the object of his initial desire,  the body of the Venus.     The absent presence buttocks in the New York premier of the play. The disparity and discontinuity between the rather than serving for its seamless representation. Jennifer Johung reads from rridean conceptualization of significant meta-theatrical gesture, suggesting a parallel between the audience members within and without Venus particularly in their frustrations to locate the Venus-theatricality is a built-in element of Venus on the textual level. Throughout the play, Parks teases the audience with an intimation sometimes too  161  overt that someone stands for the role of the Venus. As revealed in the dramatis personae list of this play, a group of characters are supposed to be interchangeable with each other, played by the same actor. One of the central ideas that fascinated the playwright at the stage she conceived Venus  (Chauduri 56). For Parks, ) in   While most critics agree on the Brechtian use of the large prosthetic bottom, Harry Elam and Alice Rayner are concerned about the impact it will have as a part of the performing body  celebrating its performative register: The butt, which does not belong to -72). Elam and Rayner astutely encapsulate the political  recuperates and refigures her body as a sign of opposition to colonial exploitation and dehumanization. On the other hand, the play represents and reinscribes these systems of (267). Foregrounding the difficulty of telling apart the represented body from the real one )), Elam and Rayner point to the sense of exposure and the affective tumults the  162  t./ Go on Sir, go on./   Parks seems aware of the ideological limits of her performative use of the spectacle of the -emphasizing the affective impacts of the rforming body, however, Parks actively works on the sense of exposure on the part of rshed in the play, in which the reversal of the spectatorial position occurs. In the Scenes 20A-body is convened to the court to determine whether she is indecent or not since her presence on ve to decency and disgraceful to our [their]  bodily traits and her alleged sexual appetites and moral depravity, these interrogations also work out the ideological resolution embedd[A] writ of Habeas Corpus34 ought before the law as granted by this writ, the dynamic between the Venus and her spectators captured in the court scenes renders the idea of Habeas Corpus questionable and duplicitous: Who possesses her body or the right to (re)present this body? While seems to be not so much interested in the second question as the first. The disarrayed and                                                  34 In Scene 20C, the Venus, who are saNew Collegiate DictionaryHabeas Corpussubmitting. Any of several common-law writs issued to bring the body before the court or the   163  desultory questions that shower upon her presence demonstrate that an illegitimate and unwholesome curiosity rather than truth, justice, and fairness serve as arbiters of judgment in this legal spacetheir own voluptuous desire that led to and fed on her exhibition and yet still mesmerized by her body, The Chorus of the Court asks once again:  The Chorus of the Court: . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  (Rest) One more question, Girl, uh:  Have you ever been indecent? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  The Venus: (Rest)   The Chorus of the Court:  Nasty.  The Venus:  Never.  No. I am just me.  The Chorus of the court:  Whats that supposed to mean?!?! The Venus:  To hide yr shame is evil.  I show mine. Would you like to see? (76).   she poses to goad the spectators (in the courtroom) into looking at her body, it is their own desire and the shame of dissimulating and projecting it noted at the sight of her body. With stark addressing the audience of Venus, summoning them as complicit in the discourses that put the  The play makes the audience willing participants in a voyeuristic dismemberment of the - 164  re-The Baron Docteur reads from an anatomical report on Baartman by Georges Cuvier published in 1817:  The height, measured after death,   was 4 feet 11 and 1/2 inches.   The total weight of the body was 98 pounds avoirdupois.  As an aside I should say that as to the value of the information that I present to you today there can be no doubt.  Their significance will be felt far beyond our select community. All that in mind I understand that my yield is Long in length.   And while my finds are complete compensation for the amount of labor expended upon them I do invite you, Distinguished Gentlemen,  Colleges and yr Distinguished Guests,  If you need relief please take yourselves uh breather in thuh lobby.  My voice will be surely carry beyond these walls and if not  my finds are published. Forthcoming in The Royal College Journal of Anatomy.  Merely as an aside, Gentlemen.  (Rest)               (91-2).     This lights should cmembers of Venus are unwittingly cast as his colleagues in the anatomical theatre. Reading out the autopsy documents, The Baron Docteur figuratively dismembers the Venus by verbally fragmenting her body into the parts. Her postmortem dissection and display are re-enacted here as the graphic details of her body parts are delivered to the audience in such a length as spanning the nine pages of the text. The audience are invited to participate in a vivisection performed on disjointed. The sense of spectacle or display becomes more horrific when we consider the  165  offstage are made to participate in this performative dismemberment, awakened to the alienating are torn from the detached, thus privileged position paradoxically sustained by the presence of the Chorus of Spectators within the play as Brechtian device which has allowed them an analytical approach to the mechanism of voyeurism and consumption of this racialized and sexualized object. The audience members perceive their spectatorship vulnerable and contingent.   Kiss me Kiss me Kiss me Kiss  In terms of the structure of the play, the intermission marks a great shift. In the scene right before this intermission, The Baron Docteur suggests leaving for Paris to the Venus who has by then just one month to go for the two he Mother-Showman, (89), promising her a higher payment, nice clothes, a clean room and a better circle to mix with. show:  The Baron Docteur: Well.  Lets have a look.  Stand still stand still, sweetheart    hands.   166  Well.   Extraordinary.  (Rest)                      (86).   Unlike The Mother-pects ould-, his eyes and hands that he bothers to attribute to the profession of the medicine turn out to be no better than those of Venus any minute, both of whom are eager for using, abusing, and exploiting her body. While moving from London to Paris and being handed over from the Mother-Showman to The Baron Docteur, the Venus just switches from the object of voyeuristic curiosity to the subject of anatomical studies. Coaxing the audience to consuming voyeuristic curiosity and scientific inquiry, postmortem anatomy verbally performed in the intermission punctuatthe freak show in London and her modelling for anatomical experiments and sketching in France  splendid 35                                                  35 Throughout the play, the Venus is considered by male characters as good material out of which they can make something. The Brother brings the Venus over to London to make a mint: splendid freake, convinced of his love for the Venus, The Baron Docteur professes to The Grade-School Chum who is concerned about his fame as an splendid wifeThe Grade-School Chum, who is also casted as The Brother and The Mother-Showman, urges The Baron Docteur to send the Venus into jail and leave her die there to obtain her body for his splendid corpse  167       have a choicesprinkled with gold dust and  laying bare her shame her body as it is displayed and commodified before the audience, the might detect some innocence from this refusal of shame, which renders possible her escape from the accusation of complicity, her body, whether she feels ashamed about it or not, is still implicated in the system that consumes and commodifies it. For the Venus, shame is not a matter pertaining to such values as morality, ethic, or human dignity. What o secure her agency as an economic subject, she even dares to  / I came here black./ Give me the  r captivity that displeased the sovereign, consenting individual with the freedom and agency to trade her human dignity for the  Young argues that Parks re-objectifies and re-commodifies her own exploitation (703). For Young, Venus historical records that say Baartman was a complete victim (699). However, Parks said in an  168  -ms). Parks admits that By leaving out and including some things from  The  The Venus, who helplessly burst into tears with the salacious touch from the spectator  Mother-Venus begins to re-fashion her relationship with the Baron Docteur as intimate and empathic. Now she knows how to appropriate and even consume touch to please herself and claims her body as her own as she feels  /  subject as she lets him know that she is pregnant:   The Venus: Put yr hand here, Sweetheart.  The Baron Docteur:   Drink this first.  The Venus:  No. Feel me.  The Baron Docteur: Fine. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  169  What am I feeling? (128)  As Parks common she  Not just foreshadowing her objectification and exploitation in Paris as a replay, the intermission scene also presages the destiny of the Venus as a deserted lover. While The Baron Docteur is reading his report on the anatomical findings of the Venus, The Bride-to- / Constructed with mans fines powrs/ Will science with love and literature as man-made binaries, The Bride-to-Be seems to convey a hostile ence. Venus lies in loving relationships between the Venus and The Baron Docteur, the Venus and her own body, that is, how she becomes his mistress and how she comes to have agency over her body through her relationship with her lover.       The conflicting narrative of the Ven that the final redemption that the Venus, as a forlorn lover, seeks for lies in affective communion:   tail end of the tale for there must be uh end Is that Venus, Black Goddess, was shameless, she sinned or else Completely unknowing thuh Godfearin ways, she stood Showing her ass off in her iron cage.  When Death met Love Death deathd Love   170  and left Love tuh rot au naturel end for thuh Miss Hottentot.  Loves soul, which was tidy, hides in heaven, yes, that is Loves corpse stands on show in museum. Please visit. (161)  In the very last speech allotted to her, the Venus repeats delivered by The Negro Resurrectionist in the Overture. In her version of the tale, her soul rests visitors to the museum rather than being forced to be placed there as pickled. She implores:  This last appeal sounds even quite striking for the girl who has been consumed by gesture to solicit the spectators with the knowledge of how much further objectification and commodification they would bring up, however, hints at the reciprocity between spectatorship and historiography Parks sets up as a Venus the Venusthrough her   171  the standstill image of the Venus in the last scene of the play once again invites and through a pose implied by it.36  The kind of communion the Venus desires through her plaintive yet provocative invitation is evinced in the last line of the play she uttersKiss me/ Kiss me/ Kiss me/ kiss (162). One would say  by the carnival world, by predicated on his desire to abstract, measure, and appropriate her body, the Loves corpseposing transfixes the hierarchical, teleological, and cathartic relationship between her and her lover, rending it horizontal, reciprocal, and uninflected. Only true to sensual experiences fleshy communion allows, the Venus, the goddess of love, wants her visitors/audience to return the kiss. This is also the level of disciplined relationship of unalloyed reciprocity Parks finally reaches through her unending engagement with the nature of spectatorical desire and experimentation with a number of forms to approach the historical/racialized object as its own referent.                                                    36 As Craig Owens aptly recapitulates, posing is a Lacanian mimicry. By exhibiting oneself as to the spectator. As the gazed represents oneself as the representation, the gaze to locate the object     172  CONCLUSION  This dissertation investigates a relationship between blackness and performance through Suzan-Lori Parksrepeatedly summon, restage, and recast spectacles of historically subjugated African Americans for contemporary audiences. The plays chosen for my discussion feature black performers who repeat, re-enact, and rehearse racist spectacles from the past along with essentialized images of blackness these spectacles disseminated and circulated. By self-just as a performative praxis for discursive resistance to institutional racism but revive it as a visceral practice for working through trauma inscribed on black bodies. While foregrounding the attention to a paradoxical foreclosure and dissimulation of the sentience of the black body through their performances.  By re-locate racist violence in the spectacularization of the black body, blackness, and black suffering. Their performances foreground and problematize figurative violence  spectacle of blackness per se  while disclosing literal violence to which the black body has been vulnerable in spectacularized persecution and dehumanization. As a self-conscious ethnic playwright, Parks focalizes racial spectacularization in her commitment to form. She evinces that her artistic works are less about race than about form and again that her identity as an African-American woman is the form she takes. Parks does not just concern herself with the form of the literary dramatic text but also reveals a keen sense of the form of experiences she has as an African-American woman  -American life, the ways  173  in which the boundaries, temporal patterns, and hierarchies are imposed and enforced in racialized experiences. Spectacularization affords a form for the collective experiences of African Americans by informing how racist violence alternating between the literal and figurative  exploits the spectacle of blackness to endorse and simultaneously dissimulate physical, material, and corporeal violence. Pacialized experiences and her commitment to a historical agenda come across in the citation of such historical prominent instances of racist spectacles that reveal how US society has negotiated and mediated race relations and inscribed social norms through the visualization and spectacularization of the black body.  Parksengaging the ways in which the black body has been appropriated, exploited, and abused for the -fashioning in lynching and minstrelsy. Through the oppressive history of African Americans, they have been often (deliberately) defined solely in engaged in enacting horrific lynching scenes over and over uncannily through the minstrel antics or with whiteface makeup on, foreground the ways in which these two regimes served to relegate transhistorical evocation of the figure of northern dandy, The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World and Topdog/Underdog reveal and interrogate the master narrative of lynching and minstrelsy which contributed to the hyper-sexualized notion of black masculinity  174  culminating in the myth of the black rapist. Black-authored dramas in the early twentieth century tried to dismantle these racist stereotypes by creating African American characters who are entitled to disembodied citizenship and bestowing upon them an ability to think for themselves Crow, Dandy Jim, the welfare queen, and the iconic figure of African female sexuality, all true to the distorted, caricatured, and mocked representation of African Americans.     Pushing their citational capacities to the utmost and employing their bodies for revelation racist spectacles foreground the ways in which the black body has been appropriated as a employ theatre as a consciously racialized form, citing historical figures as sociocultural construction for their conceptual critiques. They do not just rehearse racist spectacles or resurrect historical figures but revive racist mythologiesi.e. stereotypes revolving around the black body for the audience to confront, reaffirm, and consume. The subversion of and resistance to the notions of authentic blackness often lie in the formal inversion as attested to by these Through his ritualistic haunting, Black Man with Watermelon disrupts the aesthetics of closure and climactic resolution that lynching applied to and imposed on the black body as an archaic strategy of symbolic inversion: By performing white and thereby making whiteness conspicuous, work out the reversal of the representational politics of this white form. By turning their bodies into whatever the custo 175  the highly sexualized black female body. They return the gaze of the spectators of their performances and expose their racist and scopophilic desire by pretending to accept the conventional terms in which their bodies are trafficked among men and consumed by their desires.  Such an indictment of racist representational frames through formal inversion, however, runs the risk of replicating the spectacle of the black body lynched, persecuted, and dehumanized. While reviving and resurrecting the black bodies as signs of oppression, racist exploitation, and dehumanization, the reenactments of stereotypes might conversely reinscribe a invariably evoking minstrel characters through stylized acts, (whiteface) makeup, and prosthetic costumes  imitate and pahowever, they might not escape the perpetuation of the stereotypes they try to subvert through their performances by putting the black body once again before the gaze of the audience any way.  Rather than disregarding or eluding such a dilemma in which subversive performances are inherently implicated, Parks vigorously engages with it by problematizing the black performing body as a site charged with its semiotic fungibility and ontological stability. Along with the blatant Brechtian style of acting picked up by these self-conscious black performers, the plays seem to place the contemporary audience of the plays in a privileged position from which to distance themselves from what is performed and the conventional ways this built-in audience react to it, inviting them for critical and disillusioned musings on the spectacle of blackness on  176  stage. Parksposition of the spectators alienated from the stage spectacle by affectively implicating the audience in the performance and simultaneously reminding them of their contingency as viewers by foregrounding that the black body on stage whether theatrical or historical  is a combination of material and discursive elements and mobilizing a dialectic relationship between each.  een the material and the epistemological, as reified in historical racist spectacles, by revealing that blackness is more than just visual imagery, theatrical styles, or commodities culturally trafficked. Parks problematizes the metaphorical politics of race and racist performance in the institution of slavery and racism, particularly the metaphoric use of the black body in racist spectacles, through the jarring moments in her plays in which blackness explodes performance as living, material experiences of paradoxically expose blackness as a contestation between authenticity and appropriation, (Johnson 8). Distanced from his own body through minstrel caricaturing, Black Man with audience, thus debunking and interrogating the political containment of black suffering, pain, and thereby compelling the audience to confront the messiness that the death of the black Lincoln entails, Topdog/Underdog  177  paradoxically impldifficult their distance-taking from her body on stage. As the audience begin to perceive their spectatorship contingent and vulnerable, however, they finally get to participate in the resurrection of African Americans as feeling subjects and palpable embodied beings, responding to their call for affective communion with the reactions from the gut. Through its unending engagement with the nature of spectatorial desire and multifaceted experiments with the form, Parkss theatre envisions a disciplined relationship of unalloyed reciprocity between the bodies seen and the viewing bodies, stage and audience, and history and performance.     178  BIBLIOGRAPHY 179  BIBLIOGRAPHY    Black Public Sphere. Ed. The Black Public Sphere Collective. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995. 81-88. Print.   Alkier, Stephen Robertin American Musical Theatre 1927- 1972.   -Woman: Suzan-The New Yorker. Oct, 30, 2006: 74-81.   Altick, Richard D. The Shows of London. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1978. Print.   Artaud, Antonin. The Theater and Its Double. Trans. 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