| My study examines 1930s Black stage and screen productions for their express and underlying imperial representations and ideologies. Applying Fanon's suggestion that African Americans are post-colonial people, I investigate how post-coloniality and dis-empowerment in America combined with an empowered national gaze in “Negro” culture. I analyze representations of primitivism, exoticism, otherness, and expansion to explore the contradictory position of African American cultural producers during the latter part of the interwar period. I suggest that these productions displayed imperial agency and a profound sense of American nationalism on the one hand, and disidentification with America, national subalternity, American racial difference, and diasporic internationalism on the other. This work is critically concerned with imaginations of subjectivity, protest, coalition, complicity, and power.; In this work, theater and film are linked as arenas for performance, both places where bodies and narratives conjoin to please the public. Imperialism invokes contemplation of the body since, ideologically and materially, control and manipulation of invisibilized subaltern bodies are the very means through which imperial relations come into being. Thus, I employ embodied performances of cultural identities and power relationships on screen and stage to illuminate imperial imaginings through the performances' deployment of the very instrument disciplined in the production of imperial relations.; Chapter one explains my theoretical approach to analysis and provides historical background of the period. Each topical chapter engages a mode of historically racializing imperial discourse. Chapter two analyzes the performance of high modern exoticism in plays “voodoo” Macbeth and Haiti for its contradictory articulations of imperialism and protest. Chapter three shows how blacks' use of images of expansion and notions of open space in film established African American embodiment of mainstream middle-class ideologies. Chapter four explores the significations of “orientalism” in a “Swing” performance of the British imperial play, The Mikado. Chapter five examines the role of anthropological discourses in the formation of black diaspora. The multiple reflections of self in the face of “other,” and vice versa, in the deployment of representations of cultural power creates a palimpsest of identities, disidentifications, and activisms, (the “darkening mirrors”) that demonstrates the deep complexity of black Americans' national identities. |
