Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-m9kch Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-05-06T16:22:34.436Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Slave Spectacles and Tragic Octoroons: A Cultural Genealogy of Antebellum Performance

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 July 2009

Joseph R. Roach
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

In recent critical theory, the word performance has undergone a significant expansion, some would say an inflation. As the Editor's Note to the May issue of PMLA (“Special Topic: Performance”) observes, “What once was an event has become a critical category, now applied to everything from a play to a war to a meal. The performative … is a cultural act, a critical perspective, a political intervention.” Theatre historians will perhaps greet such pronouncements with mixed emotions. On one hand, they may welcome the acknowledgment by the principal organ of the Modern Language Association that performance (as opposed to drama merely) can count for so much. On the other hand, they may wonder what exactly is intended by the conceptual leap that takes performance beyond the established theatrical genres to encompass armed conflict and comestibles.

Type
Research Article
Information
Theatre Survey , Volume 33 , Issue 2 , November 1992 , pp. 167 - 187
Copyright
Copyright © American Society for Theatre Research 1992

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Kronik, John W., “Editor's Note,” PMLA 107 (1992): 425Google Scholar.

2 See also my companion piece to this article, “Mardi Gras Indians and Others: Genealogies of American Performance,” forthcoming in Theatre Journal.

3 Schechner, Richard, Between Theater and Anthropology (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985), 36–38Google Scholar; de Certeau, Michel, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Rendall, Steven (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984)Google Scholar, especially “Walking in the City,” 91–110.

4 Gates, Henry Louis Jr., “The Face and Voice of Blackness,” in Facing History: The Black Image in American Art 1710–1940, ed. McElroy, Guy C. (Washington, D. C.: Corcoran Gallery of Art, 1990), xxixGoogle Scholar.

5 Foucault, Michel, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Sheridan, Alan (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), 31Google Scholar.

6 Gilroy, Paul, ‘There Ain't No Black in the Union Jack’: The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 157Google Scholar; on “contact zones,” see Conquergood, Dwight, “Rethinking Ethnography: Towards a Critical Cultural Politics,” Communication Monographs 58 (1991): 184–186CrossRefGoogle Scholar; for the construction of the trans-Atlantic world in earlier periods, see Agnew, Jean-Christophe, World's Apart: The Market and the Theater in Anglo-American Thought, 1550–1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7 Blake, W. O., The History of Slavery and the Slave Trade, Ancient and Modern (1857; Columbus, Ohio: H. Miller, 1861), 29Google Scholar. For cautious use of the limited evidence, see Westermann, William L., The Slave Systems of Greek and Roman Antiquity (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1955), 11–12, 37, 98–99Google Scholar.

8 Daily Picayune, 26 March 1853.

9 Harper's Weekly, 21 January 1863.

10 Carlson, Marvin, Places of Performance: The Semiotics of Theatre Architecture (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989), 10–11Google Scholar.

11 Daily Picayune, 20 February 1853.

12 Historical Sketch Book and Guide to New Orleans and Environs (New York: Will H. Coleman, 1885), 77Google Scholar.

13 Gumbo Ya-Ya: A Collection of Louisiana Folk Tales, compiled by Saxon, Lyle, Dreyer, Edward, and Tallant, Robert (1945; rpt. Gretna: Pelican Publishing Co., 1988), 226Google Scholar.

14 Bullwhip Days: The Slaves Remember, an Oral History, ed. Mellon, James (New York: Avon Books, 1988), 291–292Google Scholar.

15 Genovese, Eugene D., Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York: pantheon Books, 1972), 416–417Google Scholar.

16 See Senelick, Laurence, “The Erotic Bondage of Serf Theatre,” The Russian Review 50 (1991): 24–34CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

17 Zanger, Jules, “The ‘Tragic Octoroon’ in Pre-Civil War Fiction,” American Quarterly 18 (1966): 63–70CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

18 Kosok, Heinz, “Dion Boucicault's ‘American’ Plays: Considerations on Defining National literatures in English,” in Literature and the Art of Creation, ed. Welch, Robert and Bushrui, Suheil Badi (Totowa, N.J.: Barnes & Noble, 1988), 95Google Scholar.

19 American Theatre Companies, 1749–1887, ed. Durham, Weldon (New York: Greenwood Press, 1986), 502Google Scholar.

20 Daily Picayune, 28 December 1855 and 14 January 1856.

21 Kendall, John A., The Golden Age of New Orleans Theatre (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1952), 38–39Google Scholar.

22 The Octoroon; or. Life in Louisiana (1861; rpt. Miami, Fla.: Mnemosyne Publishing Company, 1969), 40Google Scholar. Subsequent citations of this edition will be given in the text.

23 Daily Picayune, 24 December 1859.

24 Degen, John A., “How to End The Octoroon,” Theatre Journal 27 (1975): 170–178CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

25 Booth, Michael, Victorian Spectacular Theatre (London: Routledge, 1981)Google Scholar; Meisel, Martin, Realizations: Narrative, Pictorial, and Theatrical Arts in Nineteenth-century England (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 1983)Google Scholar.

26 See Honour, Hugh, The Image of the Black in Western Art, Vol. 4, Part 1 “Slaves and Liberators,” Part 2 “Black Models and White Myths” (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989)Google Scholar.

27 See Davis, Tracy C., “The Spectacle of Absent Costume: Nudity on the Victorian Stage,” New Theatre Quarterly 20 (1989): 321–333CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

28 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, “The Quadroon Girl,” in The Complete Poetical Works (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, and Co., 1902), 28Google Scholar.

29 Reid, Captain Mayne, The Quadroon; or, A Lover's Adventures in Louisiana (New York: Robert M. De Witt, 1856), 308–309Google Scholar.

30 White's, Lulu “Octoroon Club” brochure, quoted in Al Rose, Storyville, New Orleans (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1974), 126Google Scholar.

31 Senelick, Laurence, “Eroticism in Early Theatrical Photography,” Theatre History Studies 11 (1991): 1–50Google Scholar.

32 Lomax, Alan, Mister Jelly Roll: The Fortunes of Jelly Roll Morton, New Orleans Creole and ‘Inventor of Jazz’ (New York: Duell, Sloan, and Pearce, 1950), 127Google Scholar.

33 Boime, Albert, The Art of Exclusion: Representing Blacks in the Nineteenth Century (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1990), 2–4Google Scholar; cf. Clayson, Hollis, Painted Love: Prostitution in French Art of the Impressionist Era (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), 6, 16Google Scholar.

34 Quoted in Rose, 149–50.

35 Longfellow, “The Quadroon Girl,” 28.

36 Les Wade, “New Orleans French Theatre and Its Cultural Containment: The Origins of Bourbon Street Burlesque,” forthcoming in L'Annuaire theatral: Revue d'histoire et de recherche.

37 Gilroy, 165.

38 Madonna, , “Material Girl,” from Like a Virgin (1985)Google Scholar.