Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- 1 Discipline and performance: genealogy and discontinuity
- 2 Institutions and performance: professing performance in the early twentieth century
- 3 Culture and performance: structures of dramatic feeling
- 4 Practice and performance: modernist paradoxes and literalist legacies
- 5 History and performance: blurred genres and the particularizing of the past
- 6 Identity and performance: racial performativity and anti-racist theatre
- Notes
- Select bibliography
- Index
6 - Identity and performance: racial performativity and anti-racist theatre
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 March 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- 1 Discipline and performance: genealogy and discontinuity
- 2 Institutions and performance: professing performance in the early twentieth century
- 3 Culture and performance: structures of dramatic feeling
- 4 Practice and performance: modernist paradoxes and literalist legacies
- 5 History and performance: blurred genres and the particularizing of the past
- 6 Identity and performance: racial performativity and anti-racist theatre
- Notes
- Select bibliography
- Index
Summary
The orientals have no vital drama because they are fatalists, because they do not believe in that free will without which the drama cannot exist … A belief in free will is always favorable to the drama, whereas a belief in foreordination may be not be unfavorable to the novel, the chief figures of which are not required always to know their own minds.
Brander MatthewsI can't let you get away with thinking you know what I mean.
Ntozake ShangeProfessional passing
One of the most well-circulated essays by an artist of color in the 1990s begins with a description of a university gathering. It is a “new graduate student reception,” and the artist in question is also an entering student in Harvard's doctoral program in philosophy. This would-be philosopher is thrilled to be there, proud and giddy to be surrounded by the men whose work she has read and heard lauded for many years.
As often happens in such situations, I went on automatic pilot. I don't remember what I said; I suppose I managed not to make a fool of myself. The most famous and highly respected member of the faculty observed me for awhile from a distance and then came forward. Without introduction or preamble he said to me with a triumphant smirk, “Miss Piper, you're about as black as I am.”
Adrian Piper uses this anecdote to open “Passing for White, Passing for Black,” a meditation, analysis, and indictment of the interpersonal structures that reproduce and entrench the larger structures of American racism.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Professing PerformanceTheatre in the Academy from Philology to Performativity, pp. 176 - 219Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2004