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Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Performances of Race and Freedom, 1850–1910 (review)

2007; Society for the Study of American Women Writers; Volume: 24; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/leg.2007.0017

1534-0643

Alison Piepmeier,

American History and Culture

Reviewed by: Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Performances of Race and Freedom, 1850-1910 Alison Piepmeier Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Performances of Race and Freedom, 1850–1910. By Daphne A. Brooks. Durham: Duke University Press, 2006. 475 pp. $94.95/$25.95 paper. In Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Performances of Race and Freedom, 1850–1910, Daphne A. Brooks presents the theatrical bodies of African American performers as "corporeal manifestation[s] of a turbulent era" (22). Bodies in Dissent offers a complex, fascinating, and theoretically rich account of how African Americans used performance strategies to construct resistant bodies and identities during slavery and in the years following. Brooks coins the term "Afro-alienation acts" to refer to these strategies of intervention that both documented the suffering of African Americans, especially women, and worked to change social structures (4). In particular, she is concerned with texts and performances that exhibit an excess of meaning, often materially enacted through layers of costumes, aliases, and genres. This broadly interdisciplinary study draws on performance theory, feminist theory, literature, and the history of the theater. Brooks takes a broad view of the transatlantic popular performance culture of the nineteenth century, examining minstrel shows, spiritualism, abolitionist performances, and theatrical genres that may be unfamiliar to some readers, such as the pantomime and the tableau. According to Brooks, using and combining these genres allowed African American performers to experiment with and create strategies for [End Page 340] bodily self-representation and agency. The book's first chapter offers a discussion of two popular nineteenth-century theater productions, The Octoroon and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, both of which reveal the shifting and uneasy politics of race and representation in the time periods she considers. By examining these plays and how the performances were altered in the United States and Britain, she is able to track changes in the perception of African American identity from the antebellum to the post-Reconstruction eras. The remaining four chapters offer complex examinations of particular figures—Henry Box Brown, Adah Isaacs Menken, Bert Williams, George Walker, Pauline Hopkins, and Aida Overton Walker—situated within the performance contexts that give their work meaning. Brooks provides a theoretical scaffolding that is sensitive and nuanced. Her approach is particularly interesting when she is examining the intersections of gender, race, sexuality, and other categories of identity. In fact, the more complex the performance, the better Brooks's reading. For instance, in her third chapter she offers a fascinating study of the performer Adah Isaacs Menken, a woman who is increasingly becoming canonized as a Black woman, but whose profound racial ambiguity was a central factor in her popularity in the nineteenth century. Indeed, Brooks notes that the speculation about her "cultural identity" during her life and after her death speaks to the importance of race and how it is constructed in conjunction with gender, class, and sexual identity (134–35). Rather than attempting to pin down Menken's race—a task that she notes "risks recycling the very racial and gender epistemologies that her work at times challenged and at other times reinforced"—Brooks offers a model for "read[ing] the intersections" at the site of Menken's body (136). She considers Menken in conjunction with Sojourner Truth to examine how both women perform race and gender: "Taken together the acts of these two women offer glimpses of the disparate scope and range of female corporeal performances in antebellum culture, and they each remind us of the renegade ways that racially marked women used their bodies in dissent of the social, political, and juridical categories assigned to them" (162). The photographs included in the book add an additional layer to Brooks's discussion of these performers and their constructions of their public personas. Another of the book's strengths is Brooks's refusal to allow for easy readings that flatten the performers under consideration. She contends, Romantically capitulating to a familiar rhetoric of resistance, we may in fact choose to ignore the complex dynamics involved in Reuben Nixon's masquerade as "Hill" the fugitive "house servant" from Baltimore or those in Henry Box Brown's allegedly willful "abandonment" of his family, but overlooking the quotidian [End Page 341...