| In this dissertation, I examine two signal performances by the singer, actor, and activist, Paul Robeson during the early Cold War era. Once a heralded singer, Robeson was vilified as “mad” by the anti-Communist Right for his outspoken performances in opposition to the persistence of racial violence in the U.S. as well as against American and European imperialism abroad. Through investigating his 1956 appearance before the House Committee on Un-American Activities and his 1949 concerts in Peekskill, New York as part of a larger set of performances that contributed to the cultural configurations of Cold War America, I hope to illustrate how a politicized discourse of psychopathology operated as a part of the discursive formations that regulated Cold War culture by linking culture discourses of madness, Communism, homosexuality, theatricality, and blackness to develop a semiotics of disloyalty, which Robeson challenged through performance.; I argue that the culture of the post-war era was shaped and regulated by the dictates of Cold War politics, which mobilized performance practices including informing, surveillance, lynching and civil defense exercises. However, I argue that Robeson resists the psychoanalytic imperative and the stagecraft of the Cold War state, by drawing on radical black performance traditions that challenge the scopic imperative surveillance culture, through the “burning voice” of fugitivity, revolt, and freedom. Despite the overwhelming force of Cold War violence, I argue that Robeson's performances became sites to enact community and militancy in the face of Cold War repression and to resist interpellation into the “military government play” that was the Cold War. |
