Performing Ethnicity, Performing Gender

Transcultural Perspectives

Bettina Hofmann, Monika Mueller

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781134825189
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Asian American Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Performance and performativity are important terms for a theorization of gender and race/ethnicity as constitutive of identity. This collection reflects the ubiquity, diversity, and (historical) locatedness of ethnicity and gender by presenting contributions by an array of international scholars who focus on the representation of these crucial categories of identity across various media, including literature, film, documentary, and (music) video performance. The first section, "Political Agency, " stresses instances where the performance of ethnicity/gender ultimately aims at a liberating effect leading to more autonomy. The second section, "Diasporic Belonging, " explores the different kinds of negotiations of ethnic performances in multi-ethnic contexts. The third part, "Performances of Ethnicity and Gender" scrutinizes instances of the combined performance of ethnicity and gender in novels, films, and musical performances. The last section "Cross-Ethnic Traffic" contains a number of contributions that are concerned with attempts at crossing over from "one ethnicity into another" by way of performance.

Part I
Political Agency

1 Old Print Media, Radical Ideas, and Vernacular Performance in the Life and Work of Robert Wedderburn and Henry Box Brown

Alan Rice

In Cities of the Dead, Joseph Roach observes that “[t]exts obscure what performance tends to reveal; memory challenges history in the construction of circum-Atlantic cultures, and it revises the yet unwritten epic of their fabulous co-creation” (286). His astute comment highlights the importance of performance and performativity in African Atlantic culture in the years 1789–1865, i.e., between the beginning of the French Revolution and the end of the American Civil War. This can be seen in the stellar career of Ira Aldridge (1807–1867), the American-born “African Roscius” who bestrode the stage throughout Europe from Liverpool to Lodz and was the first black actor to play Othello on a British stage. His transatlantic presence has historically been downplayed in comparison to African Atlantic writers (Rice, “Tracing Roots” 16). For, although the slave narrative genre has been instrumental in the development of a thoroughgoing account of the conditions endured by enslaved Africans across the Black Atlantic in this period, political speeches, dramatic interventions, and performance pieces were also key to African Atlantic expression in the period. The slave narrative has dominated a range of disciplines. Especially in literary and cultural studies, it has served as the primary evidential base for discussions about slavery and abolition. This has meant that African Atlantic expression that is not enveloped within this discourse is often ignored or downplayed. William Wells Brown’s act of guerrilla theatre in the Crystal Palace Exhibition of 1851 disrupted the American exhibit of Hiram Powers’s Greek Slave by juxtaposing it with a cartoon image to highlight American slavery, Lisa Merrill reminds us that “[t]he popular cultural as well as the political landscape need be examined together as significant venues for the staging and ameliorating the horrors of chattel slavery” (335).

Over the past two decades, a range of critics, including W.T. Lhamon Jr., Hal Roach, Marcus Wood, Daphne Brooks, Lisa Merrill and Deborah Jenson have written important books and articles that have foregrounded performance, the non-literary, visual culture and the vernacular as central to our understanding of the wealth of radicalism beyond the slave narratives. As Deborah Jenson comments, “the majority of slaves, in all Western colonial slave cultures, were ‘impossible witnesses,’ those whose stories we will never hear” (31). A crucial figure in the Black Atlantic, ignored even by many of the revisionist authors mentioned above—in part because he did not write a conventional slave narrative—is the free black, radical preacher and protean anarchist, Robert Wedderburn (c.1762–1835?). Wedderburn, who was of Scots and Afro-Caribbean ancestry, lived much of his life in Britain, but he is best framed in the context of the Black Atlantic. His scurrilous pamphlet The Horrors of Slavery (1824) regales against the institution extant in his home colony Jamaica and describes how Britain is still tied to it in a nexus of blood and abuse exemplified by his own life as the free mulatto son of the Scottish slave trader and plantation owner, James Wedderburn. As Iain McCalman says, Robert Wedderburn was a “direct product, witness and victim of the Jamaican slave system” (3). However, his political activism was not confined to regaling against the evils of that “peculiar institution” alone, but was directed at ending a domestic British abuse of power he saw as equally antediluvian, namely wage-slavery. His remarkably prescient acknowledgement of the interplay between race and class in capitalism makes his life an excellent example to show the limitations of a dogmatic insistence on the overwhelming primacy of both race and of the written word as the determining factors in the creation of Atlantic personalities. Wedderburn attracted notice from the authorities not so much because of his racial politics, but rather on account of his radical critique of capitalism throughout the British Empire. Also, much of his most pertinent thought was expressed in dramatic political speeches that we only have transcriptions of, highlighting the performative nature of his expression.

Wedderburn’s linkage of the two horrors of wage and chattel slavery and his activism designed to end them brought him into a conflict with the authorities, which differentiated him from those black British liberal reformers of the period, as, for instance, Olaudah Equiano, who did not consistently take such radical, class-based positions or exhibited the same class loyalty as Wedderburn (6). His working-class Jacobinism was already developed at the time of the Gordon Riots in 1780, “when he looked on approvingly and later boasted of his friendship with one of the rioters” (7). His radicalism was also honed, in part at least, during his service in the British Navy aboard H.M.S. Polymethus in the late 1770s and later as a privateer. Paul Gilroy identifies such service at sea as foundational for the development of an internationalist radicalism in black activists of the period and links Wedderburn with the radical William Davidson, also from Jamaica, who was to be executed for trying to blow up the cabinet in the 1820 Cato Street Conspiracy:

[B]oth Wedderburn and his sometime associate Davidson had been sailors, moving to and fro between nations, crossing borders in modern machines which were themselves micro-systems of linguistic and political hybridity. Their relationship to the sea may turn out to be especially important for both the early politics and poetics of the Black Atlantic world that I wish to counterpose against the narrow nationalism of so much English historiography. (12)

Wedderburn’s dynamic internationalism is ironically learned in the service of British imperial power in the Royal Navy. Surprisingly, the ships proved to be a microcosm of radical politics, as attested to by the later mutinies at Nore and Spithead in 1797. His major contribution came as a political activist and rabble-rouser, and his speeches were both cogent critiques of imperial praxis and colorful performances that illuminated the radical fringe of London politics through the early nineteenth century. For instance, he linked oppression abroad against Africans to that against a home proletariat by capitalists who controlled the political machine. At a speech heard by the government spy Sd. J. Bryant at the Hopkins Street chapel, Wedderburn explained:

They would employ blacks to go and steal females—they would put them in sacks and would be murdered if they made an alarm. Vessels would be in readiness and they would fly off with them. This was done by Parliament men—who done it for gain—the same as they employed them in their Cotton factories to make slaves of them to become possessed of money to bring them into Parliament. (114)

The slave trade here is directly linked as oppressive praxis to the exploitation of laborers at home and the most powerful in the land are the guilty parties. Wedderburn’s idea was that an alliance of rebels across racial divisions would create a class-based revolt against international capitalism in all its manifestations. In addition to writing and disseminating pamphlets and contributions to periodicals containing such inflammatory materials, Wedderburn preached sedition in political meetings to the radical working class. He performed his radicalism through a series of speeches in a range of taverns and meeting rooms. Ironically we only have access to these rhetorical delights through the good offices of government spies who repeatedly reported how Wedderburn stressed the importance of the global context in his radical ideology, using Caribbean revolt to urge on the working class in Britain. The Reverend Chetwode Eustace reported on a speech in August 1819 where

[o]ne of those men who appeared to be the principal in their concern is a Mulatto and announced himself as the Descendant of an African Slave. After noticing the insurrections of the Slaves in some of the West India Islands he said they fought in some instances for twenty years for “Liberty”—and he then appealed to Britons who boasted such superior feelings and principles whether they were ready to fight now but for a short time for their Liberties—He stated his name to be Wedderburn. … (qtd. in McCalman 116)

Inspired by the rebellion on St. Domingo and the activities of rebellious maroons in Jamaica, Wedderburn uses a Black Atlantic discourse of radicalism to incite revolution on the streets of the imperial capital. Although we mainly get access to the speechifying, vernacular rhetoric of Wedderburn through his enemies, his performative power nonetheless shines through the perfunctory narrative of the straight-laced Reverend’s discourse. These official narratives cannot drown out the authentic voice of Black Atlantic radicalism that the imperial state apparatus sought to neutralize. In fact, they provide a window on black involvement in these movements that rescues these seminal figures in British radicalism from marginalization. Wedderburn should not only be identified as a black radical or even merely as a proletarian revolutionary, but as a key intellectual figure in the circulation of a new vernacular discourse. His language, learned in his struggle against the plantocracy in Jamaica, honed in his travels aboard ship, framed a new counter-hegemonic ideology that challenged the imperial polity before being unleashed in the metropolis where the chapel and the prison both contributed their specific discourses to what became a unique and splendidly polyglot transatlantic dialect. His is the logical outcome of a truly “routed” experience that transcends the national boundaries of traditional historiography. Wedderburn’s life journey is testament to this mobile radicalism. He combined a vernacular Caribbean perspective with a demotic metropolitan dynamic to create a truly unique political discourse. Furthermore, the English language could not contain this new kind of voice. This is demonstrated by the way his written discourse is littered with “italic, bold, and upper-case characters from the typographer’s case” as he attempts to bend the King’s English to his oral mode and distinctive vernacular dialect (Linebaugh and Rediker 403). For instance, in his The Horrors of Slavery, Wedderburn describes the extremities of his upbringing in Jamaica and plain type is shown as wholly inadequate to detailing them:

I being a descendant of a Slave by a base Slave-Holder, the late JAMES WEDDERBURN, Esq. of Inveresk, who sold my mother when she was with child of me, HER THIRD SON BY HIM!!! She was FORCED to submit to him, being his Slave, THOUGH HE KNEW SHE DISLIKED HIM! … I have seen my poor mother stretched on the ground, tied hands and feet, and FLOGGED in the most indecent manner, though PREGNANT AT THE SAME TIME!!! her fault being the not acquainting her mistress that her master had given her leave to go and see her mother in town! (50–51)

Wedderburn manipulates the King’s English here to tell a new story from the colonies, one from its subterranean reaches literally inscribing what Gayatri Spivak would later term a “subaltern” perspective. In order to do so he imbricates his voice through the use of various typographical estrangements so that the plain discourse of written English is, as Homi Bhabha would term it, hybridized. The Horrors of Slavery cannot be related in the plain prose of normal typography; it is too large a horror, a horror that must be challenged with a vernacular discourse outside the traditional literary language. Such hybridization “reverses the effects of the colonialist disavowal, so that other denied knowledges enter upon the dominant discourse and estrange the basis of its authority” (Bhabha 175). Bhabha’s description accurately delineates the power of Wedderburn’s vernacular discourse to “unmask” the innocence of the master/slave relationship, showing the perverted and violent relations it perpetuates and moving by florid publication of its evils to a challenge to its hegemonic power in transatlantic discourse. His written pamphlet’s use of capitalization and other orthographic devices is meant to mimic the voice of his oral political discourse, hence imbricating the vernacular radical voice as performative praxis. It is not only in the realm of the printed word that Wedderburn challenges the imperial polity. However, his unique brand of political radicalism uses counter-hegemonic discourse as a motor for physical action, too.

Wedderburn advanced a radical inclusive agenda that saw the problems of the African in the diaspora as related to those of the nascent British working class. His multi-racial, geographically diverse and radical, class-infected politics are expressed in a ludic vernacular mode. His agenda, though marginalized, was not completely lost at his death. In fact, Wedderburn could be seen as an exemplary figure of the Black Atlantic in that he used the possibilities inherent in the apparent geographical and economic straitjacket of that Ocean’s race and class interrelationships to fashion a life that would ultimately be liberating. Yet it is the way that Wedderburn’s career combines Black Atlantic radicalism with a very British concern with the abuses of monarchy and the nobility that I want to foreground. His polemical, regicidal reaction toward the Prince Regent in the wake of the Peterloo Massacre in Manchester in 1819 where at least eighteen working-class activists for voting reform were trampled and sabred to death by government forces and over seven hundred injured is exemplary of his interventions. Government spies reported him exclaiming at a public meeting in London:

That the Prince had lost the confidence and affection of his people but that he the Prince being supported by the Army and surrounded by his vile ministers nothing short of people taking arms in their own defence could bring about a Reform and prevent the bloody scene taking place at the next Smithfield meeting as had taken place at Manchester; for his part old as he was he was learning his Exercise as a soldier and he would be one if he fell in the cause, for he would rather die like Cashman if he could but have the satisfaction of plunging a dagger in the heart of a Tyrant. (119)

This firebrand speech calls for self-defense in the wake of Government murder, and Wedderburn rallies his fellow radicals to the cause by invoking the Irish sailor, fisherman, and Napoleonic war veteran, Cashman, who had been arrested and executed after a London riot at Spa Fields in 1816. Regicide is justified by class warfare to avenge the dead in Manchester and, closer to home, in London. It is interesting that the only full record of this important and dynamic speech that we have comes from government spies, which illustrates again that in order to fully reconstruct Black Atlantic history it behooves the critic to move beyond traditional literary texts and find black expressivity in the interstices of the majority culture, even at their very heart in court and government records. Black, radical, and performative culture is exemplified by Wedderburn’s splenetic discourse. Without these copious “official” documents gathered about Wedderburn’s “criminal” activities, we would only have a partial record of his contribution to a radical black alterity. The fervent atmosphere in Britain polarized opinion, and Wedderburn’s speech illustrates the way government repression has radicalized him. His clear-headed and polemical analysis is allied to a riotous, satirical, and comedic performance in his piece Cast Iron Parsons, or Hints to the Public and the Legislature on Political Economy … written from his prison cell in Dorchester and published in 1820. This wonderfully scurrilous pamphlet was a response to his imprisonment for blasphemy in 1819. I will discuss later the brilliance of this satire on religion but at the very end of the pamphlet, his hyperbolic scheme is expanded from the clergy to the monarchy:

P.S. In those foreign countries where the Kings are mere drones, sunk in debauchery and licentiousness, troubling themselves with nothing but their own pleasures, and so completely absorbed in luxury and effeminacy that they leave the management of state affairs to the knaves and parasites by whom they are surrounded, signing every paper at random which the minister lays before them—in such cases as these I think a CAST-IRON KING would answer every purpose and be a great saving. (151)

Wedderburn’s Swiftian satire speaks of “foreign countries” but obviously aims at his own here indicting a monarchy, which is a rubber-stamp to a corrupt and undemocratic government. What is most interesting about Wedderburn’s description of cast-iron oppressors of the common man is that they reflect an industrializing process at that moment changing the terms of engagement between the classes. In Wedderburn’s clear-eyed vision the increasingly mechanistic world is best reflected by a futuristic mechanical monarchy. The irony is that in their iron-hearted rejection of the needs of their subjects, the Prince Regent and his acolytes already function as cast-iron rulers. Wedderburn’s attack on Monarchy and the Government are merely the postscript, however, to his pamphlet that concentrates most of its ire on the clergy.

His attitude in the pamphlet illustrates his radicalism concerning religion, too. Robert Wedderburn had also been a Wesleyan convert in around 1786, but his later trajectory was to a more radical nonconformism in a London radical underworld linked to the philosophies of the Jacobin Thomas Spence, becoming, as McCalman asserts, “a dissenting minister who cast himself as Spencean prophet or enthusiast who has undergone an ecstatic conversion to the movement’s ideals and goals” which included millenarianism and redistributive politics (12–13). In his radical blasphemy against the Christian religion noted at a meeting attended by government spies, Wedderburn refuses to honor a messiah whose message to oppressed people is to surrender. ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction Performing Ethnicity, Performing Gender: Transcultural Perspectives
• Part I Political Agency
• Part II Diasporic Belonging
• Part III Performances of Ethnicity and Gender
• Part IV Cross-Ethnic Traffic
• List of Contributors
• Index