The show must go on: Race, gender and nation in nineteenth century trans-Atlantic performance culture

This project charts the convergence of African-American travel, theatre, and political activism in the period prior to and following the U.S. Civil War. I argue that trans-Atlantic popular culture and performance sustained a complex and meaningful dialectic between nineteenth century constructions of race, gender, nation and the iconography of the black body. Beyond serving as a constitutive element in defining what is "American" in the pre- and post-Civil War era, popular cultural performance offers itself as a vehicular apparatus of identity formation. I explore how traveling black public figures deployed and manipulated the politics of performance and their own bodies as methods of resistance to the exhibition and spectacularization of blackness in popular theatre culture.; The project begins by considering the trope of the transfigured body as central to nineteenth-century performance culture. The first chapter reads Dion Boucicault's The Octoroon (1861) and the American stage adaptation of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) as trans-Atlantic texts which transform the exhibition of racially liminal bodies into expressions of white, patriarchal, ontological anxiety and performative control over the representation of the body. Chapter two reexamines liminality in the biographical discourses and theatrical work of racially-ambiguous actress Adah Isaacs Menken and it situates the performer in a black feminist cultural context which reads her as using her body as an instrument of subjectivity in theatre and in her poetry collection, Infelicio (1868).; The next chapter considers the trans-Atlantic Williams and Walker production In Dahomey (1902-4) and argues that the musical sustained a number of complex inversions of identity and disruptions of geographical space which ultimately pose a radical critique of postbellum black empowerment discourses. The final chapter focuses on comparing Pauline Hopkins's novel Of One Blood Or, the Hidden Self (1902-3) with the work of dancer Aida Overton-Walker and her performances of Salome, the Dance of the Seven Veils to demonstrate how both the novelist and the dancer re-position the figure of the "black diva" and the Pan-Africanist trope of "the Veil" as devices of intervention in black nationalism.