6 7
Social Text 101 Vol. 27, No. 4 Winter 2009
DOI 10.1215/01642472-2009-055 © 2009 Duke University Press
In a photograph from Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript
Library, a light-skinned woman stands behind a larger-than-lifesize
caricature of an African American
eating a slice of watermelon (fig. 1).1
The
young man, shoeless and dressed in rags,
perches on a fence. The woman poses
behind the cutout; her hand gently overlaps
with the caricature’s. She bares her
teeth, miming her own bite from the fruit.
A typed caption on the back of the image
indicates that the photograph was taken at
the Hotel Exposition, a gathering of professionals
from the hotel industry, in New
York City’s Grand Central Palace. At some
point, a curator at the Beinecke penciled
“c. 1930.”
How might one read this ugly, enigmatic
image, this chip of racial history
archived at Yale? Taking a cue from Robyn
Wiegman, who has influentially called
for a transition from questions of “why”
to “how” with regard to race, one might
bracket questions about the woman and
her interiority: Who was she? Why did she
pose as she did? What did her actions mean
Dances with Things
Material Culture and the Performance of Race
Robin Bernstein
Figure 1. A woman poses with caricature at the Hotel
Exposition in New York’s Grand Central Palace, circa
1930. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library,
Yale University
6 8 Bernstein ∙ Material Culture and the Performance of Race
to her? These questions are unanswerable not only because the woman
never archived a written explanation of her intentions but also, and more
significantly, because the “whys” of race are often unstable and inconsistent,
unspoken or unspeakable. Given the “difficulties of handling why,”
Wiegman suggests, scholars might “take refuge” in the “how,” trusting
the “how” ultimately to register the “why.”2
In the “watermelon” photograph,
“how” questions accrue around the caricature: how did this text
produce historically located meanings? Possible answers appear swiftly as
the caricature channels a panoply of racist libels. The cutout refers to narratives
of the “Old South” through its depiction of a black youth outdoors,
wearing ill-fitting clothes that suggest poverty and parental neglect.3
The
caricature’s bandaged toe might connect to the racist motif of African
Americans attacked by animals, particularly alligators.4
One could place
the image in conversation with films of the 1920s and 1930s, linking the
rural setting to that of, say, Gone with the Wind (1939) or the action of eating
with that of the African American characters in Our Gang/The Little
Rascals (1922–44), who stereotypically feasted on watermelon. The scrawl
on the fence, “I LOVE RASTUS” (with each s illiterately reversed), connects
the figure to the turn-of-the-century Cream of Wheat icon of the same
name and, in combination with the oversized slice of watermelon, associates
African Americans with consumable commodities. In these readings,
the caricature embodies a dehumanizing expression of racism or a tool
by which white Americans could symbolically commodify or otherwise
control African Americans long after slavery ended.5
The “watermelon” photograph constructs race, however, through
neither an isolated woman and her “whys” nor an isolated caricature and
its textual “hows,” but instead through a complex interaction between the
two figures. The woman entangled herself with the wooden caricature: she
slipped her thumb in the crevice of its palm, grasped its forearm, pretended
to consume what it consumed. As she mingled her body with the caricature’s,
posing so they might together flatten into a photograph, she complicated and
disturbed the distinction between person and text, “why” and “how.” Of the
two subjects that posed at the Hotel Exposition in about 1930, only one was
sentient, but she took her cues from the inanimate caricature. The woman
arranged her body in response to the caricature’s coordinates; it prompted,
inspired, and structured her actions. In this dense interaction between thing
and human, the caricature scripted the woman’s performance.
The term script denotes not a rigid dictation of performed action but,
rather, a necessary openness to resistance, interpretation, and improvisation.
As photographs in this essay will show, the woman’s pose was not
unique, but it was not compelled: other people posed with parallel wooden
cutouts, in roughly the same historical moment, in different ways. When I
describe elements of material culture as “scripting” human actions, I am
6 9Social Text 101 Winter 2009
not suggesting that people lack agency. Rather, I am proposing that agency,
intention, and racial subjectivation co-emerge through everyday physical
encounters with the material world. I use the term script as a theatrical
practitioner might: to denote an evocative primary substance from which
actors, directors, and designers build complex, variable performances that
occupy real time and space. A play script, whether Hamlet by William
Shakespeare or Operation Hamlet by Richard Foreman, combines properties
of elasticity and resilience so that the play remains recognizable even
as it inspires a unique live performance each night.6
That which I call
a “scriptive thing,” like a play script, broadly structures a performance
while simultaneously allowing for resistance and unleashing original, live
variations that may not be individually predictable.
As focus shifts from the caricature or the woman in isolation to the
movements enacted between them, questions of “why” versus “how” burst
from their binary configuration into a triangle: psychological questions of
why a person acts and textual questions of how material culture produces
meaning give way to questions of how humans perform with racially meaningful,
three-dimensional material culture. In the moment captured in the
“watermelon” photograph, a caricature was insentient but active, while a
person was agential but reactive. These complexities demand a new question:
how do people dance with things to construct race?
Scriptive Things
Things, but not objects, script actions. Martin Heidegger and more recent
scholars of “thing theory” define an object as a chunk of matter that one
looks through or beyond to understand something human.7
A thing, in
contrast, asserts itself within a field of matter. For example, when an
amateur cook uses a knife to chop an onion, the knife might function as
an object that the amateur barely notices; in this scenario, the knife is
only a tool used to obtain the chopped onion that the human desires. For
a trained chef, however, a knife can never be an object: for such a person,
each edge of a knife glitters individually with potential and stubbornness,
with past, present, and future motions of slicing and chopping.8
The
trained chef’s knife is thus a thing with which a chef negotiates, while an
amateur’s knife is an object to the extent that it is only a means to an end.
If the amateur’s knife should slip and cut a finger, however, that knife
suddenly becomes a thing that has leapt up and asserted itself, a thing
that demands to be reckoned with.9
The difference between objects and
things, then, is not essential but situational and subjective.
Objects are important insofar as they manifest, respond to, or transmit
meaning that originates in humans. A thing demands that people confront
it on its own terms; thus, a thing forces a person into an awareness
70 Bernstein ∙ Material Culture and the Performance of Race
of the self in material relation to the thing. When a thing makes a human
body a “thing among things,” it upsets the boundary between person
and object.10
The thing and person are unmoored from fixed positions
of difference and twirl in sudden mutual orbit, each subject to the other’s
gravity. Thus the thing “names less an object than a particular subjectobject
relation.”11
The destabilizing interaction between human and thing
constitutes what Arjun Appadurai called the “social life of things,” or “the
things-in-motion that illuminate their social context.”12
An object becomes
a thing when it invites a person to dance.
Things are not alive, but people “behave,” as W. J. T. Mitchell notes,
“as if works of art had minds of their own, as if images had a power to
influence human beings, demanding things from us, persuading, seducing,
and leading us astray.”13
Thing theorists have eloquently explored the ways
in which this animative power derives from the psychological investments
of people or from a thing itself. However, things also literally shape human
behaviors. A chef’s knife, a laptop computer, and a wooden caricature all
invite—indeed, create occasions for—repetitions of acts, distinctive and
meaningful motions of eyes, hands, shoulders, hips, feet. These things
are citational in that they arrange and propel bodies in recognizable ways,
through paths of evocative movement that have been traveled before.
Objects become things when they trigger what Joseph Roach calls “kinesthetic
imagination” as a “faculty of memory”—as when a knife cuts a
finger and the person to whom that finger is attached (or was attached, in
the worst case) performs a dance of pain that is stylized through its citation
of gender, class, age, race, and other categories of analysis.14
Kinesthetic
memory is a way of “thinking through movements —at once remembered
and reinvented—the otherwise unthinkable, just as dance is often said to
be a way of expressing the unspeakable.”15
Stylized bodily performances
in everyday life are utterances of thoughts that cannot be expressed in
words. These thoughts are neither conscious nor unconscious, neither
wholly voluntaristic expressions of intention nor compulsory, mechanical
movement. Things invite us to dance, and when we sweep them onto the
dance floor, they appear to become animate.
At the deepest ontological level, then, performance is what distinguishes
an object from a thing. In J. L. Austin’s terms, objects are “constatives”
in that what is most important lies beyond the material or the utterance
(a constative describes something beyond itself: an amateur’s knife
is a means to a diced onion), whereas things are performatives in that they
do something: they invite humans to move. Dances with things, too, are
performative in that they constitute actions: they think, or, more accurately,
they are the act of thinking. Things script meaningful bodily movements,
and these citational movements think the otherwise unthinkable.
71Social Text 101 Winter 2009
Determined and Implied Scripts
Things script performances in two ways: through orders and blandishments.
Orders issue through determined actions that are necessary for
a thing to function. For example, a novel’s determined actions include
opening the covers and reading English print from left to right. While it
is possible to not open a book’s covers and to use a novel as, say, a doorstop,
that use redesignates the novel functionally as something other than
a novel. To use an English-language, printed book as a book, one must
open the covers and read words from left to right. These actions are broad
and necessarily stable across time and geography.
The force of determined actions becomes clear through a close reading
of E. W. Kemble’s 1898 A Coon Alphabet.16
Kemble—a white artist and
writer who is best known for his advertising logos and for his illustrations
in the first edition of Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, an 1892 edition of
Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and works by Joel Chandler
Harris and Paul Laurence Dunbar—wrote and illustrated this vicious
alphabet book in which African American characters are scalded, stung
by bees, bitten by alligators, pummeled, and battered. In A Coon Alphabet,
Kemble directs violence particularly at African American characters who
reach toward social advancement. For example, Kemble opens his book
with the rhyme, “A is for Amos / what rides an ole mule / so he can be early /
each monin ter school.”17
The final line of the verse is accompanied by an
illustration of the mule pitching Amos violently toward a building marked
“Gramer Schole.” Thus the book ridicules African Americans’ education
and connects their learning to violence.
This literary-visual content combines crucially with the book’s physical
properties and the sequential actions that those properties script for
the reader. Kemble formatted his alphabet book as an “alphabet array” or
“worldly alphabet”—that is, one based on the repetition of the phrase “is
for,” as in “A is for Apple.”18
During the nineteenth century, this format
became dominant over other types of alphabet books, such as the “body
alphabet,” in which contorting human figures represent each letter, or the
“swallow alphabet,” in which letters eat other letters or are eaten by children
or animals. By listing objects from apple to zither, or people from archer
to zany (jester), “alphabet arrays” seem to index the world, rendering it, in
Patricia Crain’s words, “graspable, and, most strikingly, obtainable.”19
As
such, the alphabet book “initiates the individual into that world.”20
Crain uses the terms grasp, obtain, and initiate figuratively, but the
physical configuration of Kemble’s book literalizes the first two and sheds
new light on the third. In Kemble’s book, each letter of the alphabet receives
two pages of illustration. On the first page, the reader encounters the first
three lines of a rhyme. For example (fig. 2), “D is for Didimus / what blew
72 Bernstein ∙ Material Culture and the Performance of Race
down a gun; / now he and his sister—”. The incomplete rhyme and interrupted
rhythm create a sense of tension and inevitability: the reader seeks
the satisfaction of the rhyme’s closure. The format of the book instructs the
reader literally to grasp the page and turn it to obtain the missing portion of
the rhyme. The next page (fig. 3) completes the rhyme in a way that brings
violence upon the African American characters—a process repeated with
differences twenty-four times in Kemble’s book (two letter rhymes end
without violence against African Americans: one verse ends with an African
American character punching a fish, and another resolves without any
violence when a group of three swimmers who thought they were threatened
by a whale discover that the hump in the ocean is actually a floating
watermelon). The reader’s literal grasping-obtaining action doubles with the
“worldly alphabet” book’s figurative claim to render the world graspable and
obtainable as knowledge; thus the reader physically causes the characters to
meet their violent fate, while the format of the “worldly alphabet” configures
that fate as an objective, phenomenological part of the world, as apparently
unconstructed and discoverable as an apple.
Kemble scripted this meaningful action for the reader. He could
have included each full rhyme in a two-page spread; instead he chose, less
obviously, to leave every left-side page blank. No evidence suggests that
Kemble consciously thought about the history of alphabet books or that
he aimed to inculcate young readers of any race with a psychological urge
to attack African Americans. Regardless of his conscious or unconscious
intentions, upon which the archive is silent, Kemble designed the book
so as to impel the reader’s grasping-obtaining, to conflate that action
Figure 2. E. W. Kemble, A Coon Alphabet (New York and London: Russell, 1898), n.p. Beinecke Rare
Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University
73Social Text 101 Winter 2009
with the perpetration of violence against African American characters,
to substitute satisfaction at a completed rhyme for any other emotion one
might feel while participating in violence—and to repeat that sequence
twenty-four times.
The act of turning the page of Kemble’s alphabet book, which Crain
might call “initiation” into a world of alphabetically indexed, naturalized
violence against African Americans, I would describe as “enscription”—that
is, interpellation through a scriptive thing that combines narrative with materiality
to structure behavior. Scriptive things such as Kemble’s alphabet
book hail human actors as distinctly as a police officer crying out, “Hey, you
there!”21
Like the police, scriptive things leap out within a field, address an
individual, and demand to be reckoned with. The ontological distinction
between things and objects is that things hail. And they do so persistently,
constantly, when we are alone and in groups, when we think about them and
when we do not, when we respond obediently and when we resist, when we
individually or collectively accept the invitation to dance, refuse it, accept
but improvise new steps, or renegotiate, deconstruct, or explode roles of
leader and follower. A hail demands a bodily response: turning to face the
police or turning the page of the book. By answering a hail, by entering the
scripted scenario, the individual is interpellated into ideology and thus into
subjecthood.22
Interpellation occurs not only or even mainly through verbal
demands followed by bodily actions, as in Althusser’s scenario, but through
encounters in the material world: dances between people and things.
Kemble’s alphabet book determinatively scripts the reader’s graspingobtaining
action and, through that ritualistic behavior (repeated twentyFigure
3. E. W. Kemble, A Coon Alphabet (New York and London: Russell, 1898), n.p. Beinecke Rare
Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University
74 Bernstein ∙ Material Culture and the Performance of Race
four times), initiates or interpellates the reader into one specific version
of the world—one in which violence against African Americans is as
satisfying, inevitable, and banal as the act of turning a page in a book.
To resist the script by, say, flipping the pages in reverse or random order
is to interrupt linear alphabetization itself. Therefore, without executing
the determined physical action, it is impossible to use Kemble’s alphabet
book as an alphabet book.
Things script behavior not only through determined actions that
are required for function, but also through implied or prompted actions.
A useful example appears in a black doll owned in the 1850s by Frances
Eliza Hodgson, a white girl who would grow up to become Frances Hodgson
Burnett, author of many best-selling children’s books, including The
Secret Garden and Little Lord Fauntleroy. This girl called her black doll
“Uncle Tom.” Imagining herself as “the wicked Legree,” she tied the doll
to a candelabra stand and whipped “Uncle Tom” with “insensate rage.”23
The child’s actions did not proceed only from a psychological urge; rather,
her performance of whipping responded to two distinct cultural prompts:
Harriet Beecher Stowe’s narrative and the materiality of the doll itself.
Uncle Tom’s Cabin provided a preexisting scenario that the child entered
through play. Her selection of one particular doll to play Uncle Tom was not
random but was prompted by the doll’s physical properties: its black face,
its grin (which suggested, Burnett later wrote, that the doll was “enjoying
the situation” of being “brutally lashed”), and the plaything’s composition
of gutta-percha, a form of rubber used in dolls specifically to enable them
to survive physical abuse that would destroy a doll made of porcelain or
wax.24
No evidence suggests that the doll’s manufacturer intended for a
girl to name the black doll “Uncle Tom” or to whip it, but the plaything
did script broadly violent play: black rubber dolls were manufactured,
as patent applications for such dolls often specified, to withstand rough
use, and this doll’s smile suggested that violent play was acceptable, even
enjoyable.25
While the materiality of black ceramic figurines can, as Tavia
Nyong’o suggests, propose “blackness as a hardened form of subjectivity,”26
black rubber dolls configure blackness as an elastic form of subjectivity
that can withstand blows without breaking. This elasticity enables the fun
of roughhousing with rubber dolls to extend through practices that would
shatter ceramic figures and thus terminate play. Burnett’s material doll
converged in its historical context with the plot scenario provided by Uncle
Tom’s Cabin to prompt, inspire, and structure one child’s performance of
racial violence, a scene of subjection.27
A novel is itself a scriptive thing that issues both orders and blandishments.
For example, Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, when published in book
form in English, determines that the reader, regardless of historical context,
must open the covers to read the print from left to right; one cannot defy
75Social Text 101 Winter 2009
this determined script and still use the novel as a novel. In Stowe’s historical
context of mid-nineteenth-century sentimental culture, however, the novel
also cued or prompted a reader to weep at the death of Little Eva—another
scene that Frances Hodgson Burnett performed, casting a white doll as
Eva and herself as “all the weeping slaves at once.”28
Burnett understood the novel’s prompt to weep at Little Eva’s death
because she possessed “performance competence,” a parallel to the concept
of “literary competence” developed by reader-oriented critic Jonathan
Culler. Culler argues that literature functions as a system of signs; just as
comprehension of an individual word depends on competence in a linguistic
system, comprehension of a single text depends on a minimal understanding
of literary genre (for example, the competent reader approaches a novel,
a scholarly monograph, and a dictionary with different expectations).29
Similarly, the competent performer understands how a book or other thing
scripts broad behaviors within her or his historical moment—regardless of
whether or how the performer follows that script. Competence differs from
literacy in both reading and performance: a reader who possesses literacy
but not literary competence might read a novel and a scholarly monograph
and understand each individual sentence while failing to understand the
conventions and functions of the respective genres. In parallel, a person
who possesses performance literacy but not performance competence would
understand that a chair exists, literally, as an object to accommodate sitting,
but would not understand that a beanbag chair and a Hepplewhite,
as things, prompt different styles of sitting and that each of those practices
of sitting is embedded in a system of culture, a habitus.30
Unlike an incompetent performer, who cannot decode a thing’s
invitation to dance, a resistant performer understands and exerts agency
against the script. Often, however, an action that appears to be transgressive
actually follows a script’s range of implications. Oscar Wilde gestured
toward transgressive scripting when he famously quipped, “One must have
a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell without laughing.”31
The
humor in Wilde’s observation depends partially on the fact that laughter, in
the nineteenth century or today, is a possible response to sentimentalism.
To laugh at the death (or life) of Little Nell or Eva is not to exile oneself
to a lunatic fringe but to indulge in an apparently resistant action that
the text’s script does permit—or even, covertly, invite (in contradiction,
certainly, to the novelist’s intention). Indeed, in November 1853, a young
woman named Else Elisabeth Hysing Koren attended a theatrical production
of Uncle Tom’s Cabin and observed in her diary that the audience
“laughed and clapped as loud as they could” at Little Eva’s misfortunes.32
This moment reveals a range of implied actions Stowe’s novel scripted in
its historical moment: it prompted actors to dramatize the work and audiences
to pay to attend the show. (Koren was clearly familiar with the novel,
76 Bernstein ∙ Material Culture and the Performance of Race
as she listed discrepancies between the book and the play in her journal.)
Within the theater, some audience members laughed at Little Eva, while
Koren’s reference to the revelers as “they” suggests that she did not share
their mirth (her evening was not a washout, however: she noted that the
scenery was “pretty” and “the theater itself was attractive”).33
The scriptive thing is a heuristic tool for dealing with incomplete
evidence—and all evidence is incomplete—to make responsible, limited
inferences about the past.34
A brief tabulation of some performances considered
heretofore suggests the evidentiary gaps that the scriptive thing
can bridge. In the case of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s performance of
doll-play, the available evidence includes an adult’s published reportage
of her long-past thoughts, emotions, and actions; a narrative frame (Uncle
Tom’s Cabin) that structured the child’s play; Burnett’s description of the
doll’s appearance and composition; and contextualizing archival evidence
relating to the manufacture of similar dolls and to other girls’ practices
with dolls in the 1850s. Burnett’s actual gutta-percha doll, however, is not
extant. E. W. Kemble’s A Coon Alphabet presents an almost inverse configuration
of evidence: in this case, evidence includes the material thing
of the book; but no written archive, published or unpublished, attests to
the producers’ or consumers’ intentions. We have contextualizing information
in the history of alphabet books, but we have no corroborating
archival evidence—no journal entry, no letter, no photograph or film
clip, no eyewitness account—to tell us how living children interacted with
Kemble’s book. These disparities do not necessarily mean, however, that
we can make more reliable inferences regarding performances involving
Burnett’s doll than regarding Kemble’s book. To the contrary, we can
make more reliable inferences about the latter, because it is possible that
Burnett misremembered, distorted, or flat-out lied in her memoir, but it
is not possible that no child ever turned the pages of Kemble’s alphabet
book. By reading things’ scripts within historically located traditions of
performance, we can make well-supported claims about normative aggregate
behavior: in the 1890s, competent performers turned pages of picture
books; in the 1850s, competent performers cried (and laughed, as Koren
observed) at the death of Little Eva. And in the 1930s, recreational sites
such as carnivals and arcades abounded with opportunities for Americans
to pose for photographs in fantasy sets. We can best understand the steps
in the “watermelon” photograph’s dance in the context of these other,
contemporary dances with similar moves.
Parallel Gestures: Arcade and Hotel Exposition
While there is much we do not know about the caricature, we do know
that at least once, at the Hotel Exposition in New York City’s Grand Cen-
77Social Text 101 Winter 2009
tral Palace in approximately
1930, one light-skinned
woman stood behind it and
pretended to enter the scene
and interact with a figure
while posing for the camera.
This gesture is a twicebehaved
behavior that recapitulates
other occasions in
which humans interact with
inanimates for the purpose
of snapping a photograph:
wax museums, life-sized
photographic cutout figures
of celebrities or politicians,
and, especially in the midtwentieth
century, arcade
novelties in which people insert
their bodies into wooden
scenes.35
In one such arcade
scene (fig. 4), a girl enters
a fantasy of regional America
by posing in a covered
wagon with wooden oxen
(the canopy over the wagon, too, may be cleverly painted wood). The
covered wagon is but one of many set pieces in which Americans posed in
the early- to mid-twentieth century; also common were cutouts of boats,
airplanes, cars, and trains.
Many performances in arcade sets provided a safely bounded space
for play at transgression. “Jails,” for example, were common: dating couples,
families, or groups of friends posed in a wooden cell, often grasping
the bars and snarling comically at the camera (fig. 5). Also common were
crudely sexual and comic scenes, as in figure 6, in which a shirtless man
in an apron scrubs a buxom, apparently nude woman who splays her legs
open—a scene that combines mild gender transgression (a man in an
apron) with an equally noncommittal sexual tease (an image of a woman’s
body simultaneously displayed and hidden, a sexual cartoon that substitutes
for and blocks out real flesh).
The “watermelon” caricature appeared in about 1930 at the Hotel
Exposition, a carnivalesque mélange of a business meeting, a county fair,
and a consumer orgy. The Hotel Exposition, an annual gathering of businesspeople
involved in the hotel industry, ran every year from 1915 through
the 1960s and was usually located at New York’s Grand Central Palace, a
Figure 4. Arcade photograph, mid-twentieth century.
A girl performs a fantasy of regional America.
Author’s collection
78 Bernstein ∙ Material Culture and the Performance of Race
massive convention hall that
occupied the city block between
Lexington and Park
avenues and Forty-sixth and
Forty-seventh streets until
it was demolished in 1964.
Although the exposition was
ostensibly for professionals
in the hotel trade, it replicated
many aspects of the
arcades, boardwalks, and
fairs that occasioned posed
photographs in cutout scenery.
Carnivalesque amusements
at the Hotel Exposition
attracted members of
the public, often to the point
that they outnumbered the
professionals. In November
1929, for example, only
three weeks after the stock
market crashed, more than
100,000 people — most of
them members of the public
rather than hotel industry professionals—attended Hotel Exposition events
that ranged from formal lectures and “Hotel Accountants’ Day” to cooking
competitions, dances, and a “musical extravaganza” titled “A Trip to
Havana.” The main attraction every year, however, consisted of hundreds
of booths in which manufacturers and distributors of food, furniture, appliances,
and other items displayed their wares.36
Some of these exhibits
capitalized upon nostalgia by using county fair motifs, as when the booth
for Kirsch’s Richmond Inn displayed, in 1924, the “world’s largest ham,”
a 94-pound slab of pork bequeathed by a 1,064-pound hog owned by E.
Lee Trinkle, the governor of Virginia.37
Other booths celebrated modern
technology as they hawked inventions to steam-clean clothes, wash spinach,
and ventilate buildings.38
Interactive pleasure suffused the exposition’s paeans to both modernity
and nostalgia, urban and rural America. An automatic door, now a
fixture in every supermarket, debuted at the Hotel Exposition in 1931. This
“Stanley Magic Door,” which pleasurably “mystified” visitors, performed
its technological “magic” only in response to a person’s movements.39
Nostalgic
displays, too, used interaction to attract attention: in a highlight of
the 1924 exposition, visitors to the third floor of the palace encountered an
Figure 5. Arcade photograph, inscribed on verso
“2-1-1970.” Eight people of varied ages pose in a set
of the “Long Beach Jail.” Author’s collection
79Social Text 101 Winter 2009
artificial stream “liberally
stocked” with live trout.
For fifty cents, one could
rent a pole, fish for ten
minutes, and take home
whatever one caught (“a
tagging machine was in
operation, so that the fish
might be taken anywhere
without the owner running
afoul of the New York State
Game Commission”).40
Visitors sampled produce,
rode electric hobbyhorses,
played mechanical golf
games,threwsuctiondarts,
tossed bottles into automatic
glass smashers, and
stuck their fingers into the
hose of a vacuum cleaner
to assess its strength.41
By
1937, visitors had come to
expect physical interaction
with the displays, forcing
exhibitors to post Hands
Off signs to mark noninteractive
exhibits, such
as confectionary sculptures prepared by master chefs.42
In this fairlike atmosphere in which manufacturers enticed consumers
and hotel professionals with interactive fun, one woman posed for a
photograph behind a caricature of an African American youth eating
watermelon. It is possible that the woman in figure 1 ducked behind a decoration
not intended for such use, but the context makes it far more likely
that this caricature was yet one more interactive display —that it existed,
like the cutout covered wagon, for the purpose of staging a performance
to be photographed. Evidence within the photograph itself supports the
supposition that the caricature sanctioned, and indeed existed to shape, a
human pose. The lighting is not haphazard but relatively even; it minimizes
shadows by illuminating from left, right, and above. The caricature stands
several feet in front of a wall or painted background, which allows space for
a human body (if the caricature had not been intended for interactive fun,
the gap between the wood and the wall would have wasted expensive space
on the floor of the expo). The carefully coiffed woman, with not a hair out
Figure 6. Arcade photograph, mid-twentieth century.
A woman and man insert their heads into a risqué scene.
Author’s collection
8 0 Bernstein ∙ Material Culture and the Performance of Race
of place, looks not like she just climbed over or through a fence that extends
beyond the frame of the photograph but, rather, like she walked comfortably
behind a delimited segment of scenery. Her pose is still, symmetrical,
with no sense that she is about to bolt if she gets caught where she does
not belong. The woman’s absence of tension or apprehension manifests
itself especially clearly in her left hand, which grasps the caricature’s hand
gently: her pinkie floats as elegantly as that of a duchess holding a teacup.
The caricature’s scale is distorted, yet it conforms generally to the scale
of a human body; the thing is neither two feet tall nor twelve. Indeed, the
limited distortion aligns the caricature with other cutouts, as in figure 6,
where the aproned man’s elongated legs are out of scale to both the human
poser and the woman in the bath. The “watermelon” woman’s mischievous
smile suggests transgression—an intimation, perhaps, that she ignored a
Hands Off sign and inserted her body where it was not permitted. However,
many cutouts built mischief into their scenes, as in “jails” or the risqué
“bathing” image. The sense of naughtiness in the jail, bath, or watermelon
photographs derives from the outlaw, sexual, or racial content of the scenarios,
not the act of stepping into the scene.
Even when an image does not determine a gender-transgressive
performance (as the “bath” cutout does in its aproned man), it can still
Figure 7. Arcade photograph,
mid-twentieth century. A man
and woman insert their heads
above a cutout scene. The
man poses as a primitivized,
muscular man in an animal
skin, while the woman poses
as a bathing-suit-clad, curvy
woman (a likely reference
to Tarzan and Jane, or to
“strong man” vaudeville
acts). The scene includes
depictions of what may be
footlights, implying that the
two characters are performing
on stage. The primitivized
man holds a chain but does
not appear to be shackled.
Author’s collection
81Social Text 101 Winter 2009
imply one. Take, for example, a cutout scene of Tarzan and Jane. A dating
couple, strolling on a boardwalk, pauses to have a snapshot taken: a
man inserts his head in the hole above Tarzan’s muscle-bound body, and
a woman substitutes her face for that of the scantily clad Jane (fig. 7). A
second couple encounters the same scene and conceives an apparently
creative transgression: she floats her head above the ape-man’s body, and
he, grinning for the camera, plays Jane (fig. 8). In this example, the gendernormative
and gender-transgressive performances are both scripted by the
thing (much as weeping and laughing are both scripted by Little Nell’s or
Eva’s death). An appeal of the Tarzan/Jane cutout is that its constraints
allow for a temporary, Bakhtinian inversion that reinforces rather than
undermines existing configurations of power.43
What is most striking about the Tarzan/Jane cutout is not only that it
prompts a heterosexual couple to perform both “proper” and “improper”
gender, but that it “projects” (to use Elaine Scarry’s word) a heterosexual
couple—as does the “bath” cutout.44
Philip Fisher echoes Scarry in his
assertion that “most things imply the human by existing like jigsaw pieces
whose outer surfaces have meaning only when it is seen that they are
designed to snap into position against the body”45
—an image literalized in
wooden cutouts that provide negative space for and thus arrange the human
body. While a jigsaw puzzle calls for positive and negative curves to snap
together, a wooden cutout calls for humans to shape themselves —either
their heads, as in the “bathing” image, or their full bodies, as in the covered
Figure 8. Arcade photograph, mid-twentieth century. A woman and man play at gender
transgression. Author’s collection
8 2 Bernstein ∙ Material Culture and the Performance of Race
wagon and jail sets—into the absent pieces. The Tarzan/Jane cutout “projects”
or “implies” heterosexuality by inviting a woman to configure herself
as the positive to fill the void above one figure and a man to do the same
with the other—and which person performs which role depends on whether
the couple follows the “proper” or “improper” script. Put differently, the
human body functions as what Fisher calls a “latent presence” in things
such as a spoon, which “is, at one end, a negative of the hand, designed to
fit in the space left within a fist,” while “the other end of the spoon is the
positive of the mouth.”46
Certainly, two men or two women, or a woman
and a man who are not a couple, could pose in the Tarzan/Jane cutout,
just as the positive end of a spoon could (and not infrequently does) enter
a jar rather than a mouth. Nevertheless, the concavity of a flatware spoon
is designed in relation to the curve and size of a mouth, not a jar, and the
Tarzan/Jane cutout exaggerates polarized, sexualized gender (Tarzan with
bulging muscles, Jane with tiny waist and oversized breasts) in relation to
the normalized gender polarity of a heterosexual couple. While the Tarzan/
Jane cutout could physically accommodate the pose of a same-gender pair,
it actively invites—scripts—the performance of a mixed-gender couple in
either the gender-normative or gender-transgressive configuration. Thus
the Tarzan/Jane cutout “projects” or “implies” a heterosexual couple,
which in turn functions as a “latent presence” in the thing.
The “watermelon” cutout, like arcade sets of covered wagons or
jails, provided space
for a face and body;
and as much as a spoon
addresses a mouth and
the Tarzan/Jane cutout
projects a mixed-gender
pair, the “watermelon”
cutout invited
a white person to enter
its scene in New York
City’s Grand Central
Palace circa 1930.
Many arcade photographs
invited posers to
mingle with black caricatures,
as is the case in
figure 9, in which two
light-skinned children
enter a giganticized box
of Fairbanks Gold Dust
Washing Powder.47
The
Figure 9. Arcade photograph, inscribed on verso “2/6/63.” Two
light-skinned children insert their faces above the bodies of the
Gold Dust Twins logo on a giganticized box of Fairbank’s Gold
Dust Washing Powder. Author’s collection
8 3Social Text 101 Winter 2009
icon of Gold Dust soap—the wooden bodies against which the children
pose their faces (with differing levels of logistical success)—was the Gold
Dust Twins, a grotesque and immensely popular caricature of African
American children. The designer of the Gold Dust Twins was none other
than E. W. Kemble, author and illustrator of A Coon Alphabet. The watermelon
caricature and the Gold Dust cutout, as much as A Coon Alphabet,
hailed their users and interpellated them, through scripted actions of posing,
into a subjecthood that was specifically raced white. As difficult as it
is to imagine an African American who lived in a time of Jim Crow laws
deriving pleasure from these things, it is even more difficult to imagine
the makers of the Gold Dust and “watermelon” cutouts intending African
Americans or other people of color to pose within the respective scenes.
The Gold Dust and “watermelon” cutouts projected white users much as
the Tarzan/Jane cutout projected a cross-gender couple.
The watermelon or Gold Dust cutouts and the Tarzan/Jane cutout
ultimately framed not just human faces but identities: whiteness and heterosexuality,
respectively. Interpellation, in Althusser’s classic scenario,
begins with a kind of framing: the police officer calls out, “Hey, you there!”
and the individual implicates — frames — herself by turning around.
The scriptive thing hails a person by inviting her to dance. The person
ritualistically engages the matter, and in that process, subjectivation —
how one comes to “matter” — occurs. Interpellation occurs not only
through performative utterances but also through thing-based enscription
into identifiable, historicized traditions of performance from both the
stage and everyday life.
The “watermelon” photograph invited a nonblack person to dance a
dance of racial impersonation that Eric Lott famously called white people’s
“love and theft” of blackness.48
Love and theft is inscribed in the caricature:
the literal declaration of love scrawled on the fence post contrasts
with the past physical violence marked by the young man’s bandaged
toe. The light-skinned woman performed love, or at least tenderness, in
her gently curved left hand, even as she bared her teeth to thieve a bite of
watermelon. By temporarily entering the scene and performing blackness,
and by simultaneously stepping into a performance tradition of love and
theft, this actor asserted not blackness but whiteness—a fraught endeavor
for a woman whose name, according to the caption on the back of the
photograph, was Helen Hernandez.
Helen Hernandez’s Performance of Race
How might we understand Helen Hernandez’s racial identity, and how
does that understanding prompt a reevaluation of her dance with a caricatured
thing? When Hernandez posed at the Hotel Exposition in about
8 4 Bernstein ∙ Material Culture and the Performance of Race
1930, she did so in the midst of a series of dizzying revisions in the
racial designation of people who might now call themselves Latina/o or
Hispanic—revisions that made the 1920s, in the words of historian Mae
M. Ngai, “an extraordinary time when immigration policy realigned and
hardened racial categories in the law.”49
For people of Spanish and Latin
American descent, this hardening dynamic crystallized around the questions
of who was and was not white, and who could or could not immigrate
to the United States. Three touchstones reveal the process by which
some people —including, perhaps, Helen Hernandez — became legally
fixed, in this moment, as white, while managing the cultural contestability
of that whiteness. These touchstones were the Immigration Act of 1924,
the 1930 census, and the 1940 census.
The 1924 Johnson-Reed Immigration Act set a quota system by
which immigration from any European nation was limited to 2 percent
of the number of people from that country living in the United States at
the time of the 1890 census; it also prohibited all immigration from Asia.
North, Central, and South American countries, however, were exempt
from national quotas. As Ngai notes, Mexicans, unlike people from Asian
countries, were “not excluded from immigration on grounds of racial
ineligibility because, for the purposes of naturalization, and therefore for
immigration, the law deemed Mexicans to be white” (as Mexicans and
Mexican Americans had been counted in the 1920 census).50
The 1930 census radically revised this designation by inventing a new
racial category: “Mexican.” The year Helen Hernandez may have attended
the Hotel Exposition, 1930, was the only year in which the U.S. census
designated “Mexican” as a race; thus, for the first time, the federal government
formally identified a Latin American group as nonwhite.51
Census
workers were instructed to visually identify “all persons born in Mexico,
or having parents born in Mexico, who were not definitely white, Negro,
Indian, Chinese or Japanese” and to designate such people as “Mexicans,”
to be counted as nonwhites. The 1930 census also produced a table titled
“Estimated Number of Mexicans Included in the White Population in
1920”—a tally, according to sociologist Clara E. Rodríguez, of people
imagined to have been “miscounted” as white in the 1920 census.52
Thus,
in 1920, the U.S. census registered Mexicans who were not of African,
Native American, or Asian descent as white; in 1930, however, the census
reversed itself, counted such individuals as members of the “Mexican”
race, and took pains to “correct” the previous censuses’ categorization of
such people as white.
The 1940 census reversed the racial designation yet again, recategorizing
Mexicans and Mexican Americans as white, as the 1920 census
and the 1924 Immigration Act had done. Census takers in 1940 received
instructions that “persons of Mexican birth or ancestry who were not defi-
8 5Social Text 101 Winter 2009
nitely Indian or of other nonwhite race [should be described and counted]
as white.” Thus “within a decade,” Rodríguez notes, “Mexicans were
shifted from their own ‘Mexican’ category to being included in the ‘white’
category—unless they appeared to census interviewers to be ‘definitely
Indian or of other Nonwhite races.’”53
The 1940 designation of Mexicans
as white unless identified otherwise applied to other groups that migrated
in larger numbers after World War II: “Puerto Ricans in the late 1940s
and 1950s, Cubans during the 1960s, and Dominicans and Central and
South Americans in the late 1960s and 1970s.”54
When Helen Hernandez posed with a wooden caricature in New York
City sometime around 1930, then, she was most likely designated racially
“Mexican” if she or her parents had been born in Mexico, or “white” if
she was of any other Latin American or Spanish descent—and either
categorization would have been in transition and culturally contested but
also in the process of stabilizing through law. The identity of the Helen
Hernandez who posed for the photograph is unknowable: the 1930 census
counted forty-four Americans named Helen Hernandez, and because the
Hotel Expo attracted visitors from across the nation and around the world,
there is no way to prove which Helen Hernandez grins from behind the
wooden cutout.
Among the forty-four Helen Hernandezes that the 1930 census registered,
three were New Yorkers, and these individuals deserve special attention
for the ways in which they mark a range of complications within the
legal category of whiteness. The youngest of these Helen Hernandezes—
clearly not the one photographed at the Hotel Expo—was six years old in
1930. She was born in Manhattan to Gebano and Esperanza Hernandez,
both Spanish speakers from Puerto Rico, and the 1930 census listed all
members of the family as white.55
Either of the other two New Yorkers
named Helen Hernandez could have been the one who posed at the Hotel
Exposition. The younger of these, who lived in the Bronx, was born in New
York City in about 1906 to parents from Cuba; she lived with her Spanishspeaking
mother, Amelia Hernandez, and worked as a stenographer. The
census counted both women as white.56
The older Helen Hernandez, a
public school teacher born in 1899, lived in Queens with her daughter Carmen;
her husband, Lewis Hernandez, a Spanish-speaking immigrant from
Venezuela; and her mother, Melanie Levy. The census listed all members
of that household, as well, as white.57
New York’s three Helen Hernandezes and their families emblematize
the range of people who were in the process of being legally stabilized as
white in 1930: Spanish-speaking immigrants from Venezuela, Puerto
Rico, and Cuba; their American-born, English-speaking children; and,
in the case of Melanie Levy and Helen Levy Hernandez, perhaps, Jews
(the 1930 census did not consistently record Jewish ethnicity or religios-
8 6 Bernstein ∙ Material Culture and the Performance of Race
ity). Had one of these Helen Hernandezes been Mexican or Mexican
American, the 1930 census would have designated her as nonwhite (as it
did, for example, Helen Hernandez of Fresno, California, who was born
in Mexico in 1901).58
This emerging legal fixity coexisted, however, with
an underlying, ongoing cultural instability.59
In the moment imprinted on photographic film, Helen Hernandez,
whose race—white, “Mexican,” or something else entirely—was in the
process of being legally and culturally codified as well as contested, followed
the script embedded in a thing that projected a white user. She stood
precisely where the thing invited her to stand, and she mugged exactly as
the thing prompted her to mug. In so doing, she and the thing danced a
dance of white racial identity—a racination that originated, coalesced, and
was contained in neither human flesh nor wooden caricature alone, but in
the processual interaction between them. At the same moment that immigration
policy and the census “realigned and hardened racial categories in
the law,”60
Helen Hernandez aligned herself bodily with a black caricature
and thus categorized herself as white, and she hardened that categorization
through the obdurate shine of the photograph’s surface.
Hernandez’s racial impersonation balanced claims of likeness and
distance: even as she entered the scene and ate along with the caricature,
she raised her pinky delicately and looked directly at the camera, thus
acknowledging her audience and alienating herself from her performance.
She danced with the caricature, physically embraced it, while figuratively
winking at the audience to say, “I’m not this.”
“Why” and “How” Revisited
Helen Hernandez playfully embraced and distanced herself from blackness
and thus ratified the project of racial stabilization that was already
under way through law. The rich “how” of this performance makes
repressed questions of “why” resurface—unanswerable but tantalizing
questions about conscious identity and psychological motivation. Was she
Helen Levy Hernandez, and was she Jewish? As she danced her dance
of racial impersonation in about 1930, did she think of her coreligionist
Al Jolson, whose blackface performance in the 1927 film The Jazz Singer
worked to assimilate Jews into whiteness?61
Did she hope, consciously
or unconsciously, to subsume her ethnic and religious difference to the
whiteness constructed through temporary blackness? Or was she Helen
Hernandez, stenographer and daughter of Cuban immigrants? If the year
was 1929 rather than the curator’s estimated 1930, this Cuban American
Helen Hernandez could have posed after attending the Hotel Exposition’s
musical extravaganza, “A Trip to Havana.” The script to that performance
is not extant, so we cannot know whether the show’s representation
87Social Text 101 Winter 2009
of this Helen Hernandez’s parents’ country was exoticizing, derisive, celebratory,
or some combination thereof, or some other tone entirely. And
we cannot know whether “A Trip to Havana” might have filled this Helen
Hernandez with delight, longing, or shame; with an impulse to contrast
her Cuban heritage favorably against blackness, or to mask her racial
complexities beneath the whitening effects of corkless blackface. And we
also can never know whether this Helen Hernandez, a stenographer who
earned her living by receiving the swift flow of speech, arresting it in
shorthand, and then translating that cipher into typewriting, might have
thought, as she danced with the caricature, about speed and fixity, about
code and legibility, about a skilled body that can transform that which
seems fleeting into that which may endure. We can never know what she
thought about the act of freezing a moment in a photograph.
That flash-freeze constitutes the defining gesture in this performance.
Helen Hernandez’s direct gaze into the camera’s lens indicates
that she consciously knew her photograph was being taken and that she
built and oriented her performance around that knowledge. The material
photograph is, then, both a “how” and a “why” of Helen Hernandez’s
performance: the “watermelon” cutout arranged and stylized a human
body—that is, prompted the “how”—for the purpose—the “why”—of
taking a photograph. Helen Hernandez danced with three material things:
the cutout caricature, the camera, and the photograph-to-be. Hernandez
followed the choreography that the three things scripted not only in that
she stood where the cutout told her to stand and “invented” the ostensibly
transgressive joke that it told her to invent, but also in that she oriented
herself to a camera and stilled herself for the snapping of the photograph
for which the caricature created the occasion. The cutout was indeed like
a “jigsaw piece whose outer surfaces have meaning only when it is seen
that they are designed to snap into position against the body”62
—two
bodies, those of Helen Hernandez and the anonymous photographer.
The cutout provided a negative space for the photographer to stand in
as effectively as it provided the negative space where Hernandez inserted
her body. Three things and two humans danced this dance. One of those
scriptive things—the photograph—did not yet exist, but it was perhaps
the most important element, because its production provided the “why”
for the event.
Of the stylized movements that this all-important, not-yet-existent
photograph scripted, perhaps the most crucial one was stillness, because
Hernandez’s stillness conflated person and thing both at the moment of
the pose and then, later, within the photograph. Hernandez playfully
entered a scene and likened herself to the unmoving caricature (even as
she distinguished herself from it) by imitating not only its chomp from
the watermelon, but also its immobility. Hernandez’s performance of still-
8 8 Bernstein ∙ Material Culture and the Performance of Race
ness resulted in a photograph that is free of blurs —a photograph in which
human and caricature appear equally flat and sharp. In this equalizing, the
photograph confuses person and thing: a swift glance at the photograph
might fool the eye into momentarily perceiving two wooden figures or two
masked and costumed humans. Ironically, the sharpness of the photograph
blurs person and thing: had Helen Hernandez flinched at the snap of the
camera’s shutter, the resultant blur would have differentiated her from
the wood, much as one child’s ill fit with the Gold Dust cutout interrupts
any potential illusionism in figure 9. But Helen Hernandez’s photograph
stages no such disruptions.
The distinction and transitivity between person and thing has encapsulated
deep anxieties about race ever since slavery legally defined some
black bodies as property and all black bodies as inherently ownable. Harriet
Beecher Stowe named this anxiety when she originally, scathingly,
subtitled Uncle Tom’s Cabin “The Man That Was a Thing.”63
Stowe’s
novel, as Philip Fisher has shown, performed the cultural work of the
“redesign of the boundary” between person and thing: that is, Stowe
enacted culturally a distinction between African American people and
things that Emancipation later ratified juridically.64
Recently, Bill Brown
argued that this historical ontology “congealed” within black collectibles
such as mammy cookie jars, and that narratives of such objects coming to
life and wreaking havoc “recollect . . . the ontological scandal perpetrated
by slavery” and the “re-enactment of the breakdown of the person/thing
binary” embedded in both slavery and Emancipation.65
In the “watermelon” photograph, however, a thing does not come
alive; rather, a living woman becomes a thing. When Helen Hernandez
stilled herself in a pose for the purpose of taking a photograph, she knew
that she was coproducing, with the camera and the photographer, a material
artifact that would imagistically collapse her and the caricature into one
seamless whole, one thing. By coproducing this photograph, Helen Hernandez
literally objectified herself—or, more accurately, bethinged herself.
The borders of thing/person, black/white—so volatile and dangerous
for African Americans, so provocative to Stowe—became, in Helen Hernandez’s
performance, a controlled space for delimited play, just one more
aspect of the Expo’s interactive, consumer-based fun, no more threatening
than posing in a “jail” or walking through a Stanley Magic Door. Calm
steadiness registers in the balance among the four extremes of Hernandez’s
body: her right hand caresses the caricature, while her left hand grabs it
aggressively, and a mischievous smile dominates her face. But these three
bodily poles, respectively manifesting love, theft, and play, root through the
fourth pole of her body: her feet, which are planted firmly on the ground
and thus cause a sense of control and willingness to pervade and define
her stance. Helen Hernandez was a self-possessed woman who performed
8 9Social Text 101 Winter 2009
blackness and thus constructed whiteness, and who played at being a thing,
a potential possession, and thus affirmed that she was not one.
Archiving the Repertoire
As W. B. Worthen has recently pointed out, a powerful current within
performance studies contrasts “archival” memory—written and material
text that can be housed in an archive—with the “repertoire”—embodied
memory of traditions of performance, including “gestures, orality, movement,
dance, singing—in short, all those acts usually thought of as ephem-
eral.”66
Diana Taylor and others call for “shifting the focus from written
to embodied culture, from the discursive to the performative,” because
the archive “sustains power,” while the repertoire often enacts social
agency and resistance, especially of oppressed peoples in the Americas.67
Taylor describes the “relationship between the archive and the repertoire”
as “not by definition antagonistic or oppositional”; the two forms of
knowledge “usually work in tandem” (as in the wedding ceremony, which
requires “both the performative utterance of ‘I do’ and the signed marriage
license”).68
However, a model of interaction, or even of harmonious
cooperation, reifies a polarity between the two forms of knowledge.
The scriptivity in the “watermelon” photograph calls into question
the very model of archive and repertoire as distinct-but-interactive. The
word script captures the moment when dramatic narrative and movement
through space are in the act of becoming each other.69
Accordingly,
archive and repertoire are one in the materiality of the photograph, which
both records one woman’s past performance and serves as a proleptic
prop in that performance (that is, the future production of the photograph
functioned as a key purpose of the performance; thus, the not-yetexistent
photograph scripted Helen Hernandez’s actions). The caricature,
camera, and photograph are all both artifacts of and scriptive props in a
performance—that is, simultaneously archive and repertoire, with neither
form of knowledge preexisting the other.70
When a thing scripts actions, it manifests the repertoire of its historical
moment. An alphabet book prompts the sequential turning of pages
in coordination with parallel practices with other alphabet books; Uncle
Tom’s Cabin cues actions of weeping and laughing, playing and whipping,
for audiences with performance competence in sentimental culture; a notyet-existent
photograph operates with a camera and a caricature to script
a pose that produces racial subjectivation. Scriptive things are simultaneously
archive and repertoire; therefore, when things enter a repository such
as the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, the repertoire arrives
with them. Scriptive things archive the repertoire—partially and richly,
with a sense of openness and flux.
9 0 Bernstein ∙ Material Culture and the Performance of Race
To glimpse past repertoires through the archive requires a revision
of what qualifies as “reading” material evidence. A scholar understands a
thing’s script both by locating the gestures it cites in its historical location
and by physically interacting with the evidence in the present moment.
One gains performance competence not only by accruing contextualizing
knowledge but also, crucially, by holding a thing, manipulating it, shaking
it to see what meaningful gestures tumble forth. Ultimately, historians
must place our living bodies in the stream of performance tradition. The
archive then becomes a ghostly discotheque where things of the past leap
up to ask scholars to dance; and we listen, accept the invitation, and, hearts
pounding, step onto the floor.
Notes
I thank Hazel Carby for drawing my attention to the “watermelon” photograph during
a workshop conducted by Deborah Willis as part of the ongoing Photographic
Memory Workshop directed by Laura Wexler at Yale University. I also thank the
members of the Performing Marks exploratory seminar at the Radcliffe Institute
for Advanced Study in May 2008. That seminar, convened by Elizabeth Dyrud
Lyman, Claire MacDonald, and Daniel Albright, included Caroline Bergvall, Seth
Brodsky, Elaine Chew, Stephen Farthing, Alexandre Francois, and Vinod Goel.
This essay benefited further from the comments of Vince Brown, Glenda Carpio,
Wai Chee Dimock, Anna Mae Duane, Cheryl Finley, Ellen Gruber Garvey, Amy
Strahler Holzapfel, Matthew Frye Jacobson, Sindhumathi Revuluri, Barbara Rodriguez,
Adelheid Voskuhl, and the Social Text collective.
1. The photograph is part of the Beinecke’s James Weldon Johnson Collection,
but Johnson did not own the image, which was collected in the late twentieth century
by Randolph Linsley Simpson. Patricia Willis, e-mail to author, 10 October 2005.
2. Robyn Wiegman, American Anatomies: Theorizing Race and Gender (Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 1995), 1, emphasis in original. On the transition
from questions of “why” to “how,” see especially “Taking Refuge: An Introduction,”
1–17.
3. Patricia A. Turner, Ceramic Uncles and Celluloid Mammies: Black Images and
Their Influence on Culture (New York: Anchor, 1994), 14–16.
4. Ibid., 31–41.
5. On caricatures as signs of racism, see ibid.; on symbolic slavery, see M. M.
Manring, Slave in a Box: The Strange Career of Aunt Jemima (Charlottesville: University
Press of Virginia, 1998).
6. In her description of meaningful lines of activity, Susan Leigh Foster favors
the term choreography over script because, in her view, “the legacy of the dramatic
text continues to infuse the script with a kind of permanence, whereas the notion of
choreography as a theoretical premise underscores the changeability of events and
their environs” (Susan Leigh Foster, “Geographies of Gender,” Signs 24 [1998]: 28).
In this claim, however, Foster foregrounds vernacular uses of the word script rather
than the actual practices of actors and directors.
7. Martin Heidegger, “The Thing,” in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert
Hofstadter (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), 174–82.
8. I thank Betsy Klimasmith for her observation that a knife becomes a thing
in the hands of a trained chef.
91Social Text 101 Winter 2009
9. Bill Brown, “Thing Theory,” Critical Inquiry 28 (2001): 3–4.
10. Ibid., 4. See also Bill Brown, A Sense of Things: The Object Matter of American
Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003).
11. Brown, “Thing Theory,” 4.
12. Arjun Appadurai, “Introduction: Commodities and the Politics of Value,”
in The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, ed. Appadurai (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1986), 5.
13. W. J. T. Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 7.
14. Joseph R. Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 27.
15. Ibid.
16. E. W. Kemble, A Coon Alphabet (New York and London: Russell, 1898).
17. Ibid., n.p.
18. Patricia Crain, The Story of A: The Alphabetization of America from “The
New England Primer” to “The Scarlet Letter” (Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press, 2000), 91.
19. Ibid., 88, 85, 91.
20. Ibid., 101.
21. Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes
towards an Investigation),” in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays (New York:
Monthly Review Press, 1971), 127–86. See esp. 174–77.
22. Ibid.
23. Frances Hodgson Burnett, From the One I Knew the Best of All: A Memory
of the Mind of a Child (New York: Scribner, 1893), 57.
24. Ibid., 55, 56.
25. Ibid., 55. Frances Hodgson Burnett was far from alone in her actions.
On mid-nineteenth-century girls’ practices of whipping dolls, see Sharon Marcus,
Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), 161–63.
26. Nyong’o reads the “shiny, hard, and brittle” materiality of racist ceramic
figurines of black children as a “racial simile” in which “a black skin is as hard as
stone; not skin at all, but a mask, with perhaps nothing behind it.” Tavia Nyong’o,
“Racial Kitsch and Black Performance,” Yale Journal of Criticism 15 (2002): 377.
The shiny hardness Nyong’o describes is spectacularly illuminated in David Levinthal’s
photographs of racist collectibles (David Levinthal and Manthia Diawara,
Blackface [Santa Fe: Arena, 1999]).
27. See Saidiya V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and SelfMaking
in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).
28. Burnett, From the One I Knew Best of All, 58.
29. Jonathan Culler, Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics, and the
Study of Literature (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1975). See also Culler,
On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 1982). Reader-response theory provides a broad avenue by which
to think about the scriptive properties of things. For example, Wolfgang Iser and
Wayne Booth argue that a literary text actively encourages an “implied reader” to
perform a finite range of actions (Wolfgang Iser, The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication
in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1974]; Wayne C. Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction [Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1961]). A particularly useful adjunct to the scriptive thing appears
in Walker Gibson’s “mock reader.” Gibson, writing in 1950 and within the school
9 2 Bernstein ∙ Material Culture and the Performance of Race
of New Criticism, was a text-oriented literary critic whose “mock reader” is not an
actual human being but is instead “a role that the real reader is invited to play for the
duration of the novel.” See Jane P. Tompkins, “An Introduction to Reader-Response
Criticism,” in Reader-Response Criticism: From Formalism to Post-Structuralism, ed.
Tompkins (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), xi. In tellingly theatrical
language, Gibson described the mock reader as a “fictitious reader . . . whose
mask and costume the individual takes on in order to experience the language [of
a text]” (Walker Gibson, “Authors, Speakers, Readers, and Mock Readers,” College
English 11 [February 1950]: 265–69; reprinted in Tompkins, Reader-Response
Criticism, 1–6; quote on 1). This mock reader is an “artifact, controlled, simplified,
abstracted out of the chaos of day-to-day sensation” (Gibson, “Authors, Speakers,
Readers, and Mock Readers,” 1). The mock reader, like a scriptive thing’s user,
responds to a set of instructions dictated by the text—and that response may take
many forms, including resistance.
30. On the habitus as a system of culture, see Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a
Theory of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University
Press, 1977), and Marcel Mauss, “Techniques of the Body,” trans. Ben Brewster,
Economy and Society 2 (1973): 70–88. The difference between raw comprehension of
words’ meanings or things’ choreographies and literary or performance competence
maps onto the difference between “why” and “how”: the literate but incompetent
performer knows what an object literally is and what actions it determines (that is,
why it exists, as in, “a chair exists to enable the act of sitting”) but cannot understand
the historically located, stylized practices that the thing prompts (that is, how
the thing cues behavior, as in, “a Hepplewhite and a beanbag chair prompt different
styles of sitting that cite and signify in distinct cultural systems”).
31. Quoted in Ralph Keyes, The Wit and Wisdom of Oscar Wilde (New York:
Gramercy, 1999), 6. Judith Butler argues in a similar vein that Althusser underestimates
the range and effects of “disobedience” in possible responses to hails; for Butler,
gender transgression such as drag can simultaneously and ambivalently critique
and ratify gender norms. See Butler, “Gender Is Burning: Questions of Appropriation
and Subversion,” in Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New
York: Routledge, 1993), 121–40.
32. Else Elisabeth Hysing Koren, The Diary of Elisabeth Koren, 1853–1855,
ed. David T. Nelson (Northfield, MN: Norwegian-American Historical Association,
1955), 62.
33. Ibid., 63.
34. On the incompleteness of all evidence, see Donna Haraway, “Situated
Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective,”
in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York:
Routledge, 1991), 183–201.
35. Richard Schechner famously defined performance as “twice-behaved
behavior” in Between Theater and Anthropology (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
Press, 1985), esp. 36.
36. “Hotel Show Orders at New High Level,” New York Times, 16 November 1929.
37. “Exposition Draws 8,000 Hotel Men,” New York Times, 18 November 1924.
38. “Ducks to Dishwashing Range of Hotel Show,” New York Times, 15
November 1927; “Hotel Show Opens with 450 Exhibits,” New York Times, 11 November
1930; “Hotel Show Opens; Business Aid Urged,” New York Times, 10 November
1931.
39. “Hotel Show Opens; Business Aid Urged.”
40. “Exposition Draws 8,000 Hotel Men.”
9 3Social Text 101 Winter 2009
41. “Ducks to Dishwashing Range of Hotel Show”; Meyer Berger, “About
New York,” New York Times, 15 November 1939.
42. “Art Made of Foods at Hotel Exhibit,” New York Times, 18 November 1937.
43. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky (1940;
reprint, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984).
44. Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1985). See especially Scarry’s final chapter,
“The Interior Structure of the Artifact,” 278–326.
45. Philip Fisher, Making and Effacing Art: Modern American Art in a Culture
of Museums (1991; reprint, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997),
243–44, emphasis added.
46. Ibid., 243.
47. As Susan Stewart aptly notes, giganticism provides “a metaphor for the
abstract authority of the state and the collective, public, life.” On Longing: Narratives
of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 1993), xii.
48. Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working
Class (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).
49. Mae M. Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern
America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 7.
50. Ibid., 50.
51. I thank Brian Herrera for his observation that the 1930 census constituted
the United States’ first federal, formal categorization of a Latin American national
group as nonwhite.
52. U.S. Bureau of the Census, 200 Years of U.S. Census Taking: Population
and Housing Questions, 1790–1990 (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing
Office, 1989), 60; quoted in Clara E. Rodríguez, Changing Race: Latinos, the Census,
and the History of Ethnicity in the United States (New York: New York University
Press, 2000), 208–9n21.
53. Rodríguez, Changing Race, 83–84.
54. Ibid., 102.
55. U.S. Census of 1930, Manhattan, NY; Roll 1572, 18B; Enumeration
District 852; Image 1107.0. All census data accessed through Ancestry.com. 1930
U.S. Federal Census (online database) (Provo, UT: Generations Network, 2002).
Original data: United States of America, Bureau of the Census, Fifteenth Census of
the United States, 1930 (Washington, DC: National Archives and Records Administration,
1930), T626, 2,667 rolls.
56. U.S. Census of 1930, Bronx, NY; Roll 1487, 1B; Enumeration District
620; Image 217.0.
57. U.S. Census of 1930, Queens, NY; Roll 1598, 15B; Enumeration District
363; Image 739.0.
58. U.S. Census of 1930, Fresno, CA; Roll 116, 26B; Enumeration District
15; Image 267.0.
59. This slowly emerging legal fixity within ongoing cultural instability continued
for decades. In 1940, the census instructed workers to inspect people we might
now call Latina/o or Hispanic for visual signs of being “definitely Indian or of other
Nonwhite races” (Rodríguez, Changing Race, 83), and if, in the eyes of that census
taker, no such signs were evident, to designate the individual white; at the same time,
however, the definition of the group being so scrutinized was itself in flux. In 1940, the
census identified this group through language, tabulating “persons of Spanish mother
tongue.” In 1950 and 1960, the category of interest was “persons of Spanish surname,”
9 4 Bernstein ∙ Material Culture and the Performance of Race
and by 1970, country of origin supplied the defining factor. “Thus, between 1940 and
1970,” Rodríguez notes, “Hispanics were counted according to three different cultural
criteria[:] linguistic (1940), surname (1950 and 1960), and origin (1970)” (Changing
Race, 102). Even as the group of people who might now call themselves Latina/o or
Hispanic was being legally fixed as white, then, the foundational definitions of the
group itself—whom it included, whom it did not—were in flux.
60. Ngai, Impossible Subjects, 7.
61. On The Jazz Singer and the assimilation of Jews into whiteness, see Matthew
Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the
Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 121, and
Michael Rogin, Blackface, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting
Pot (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), esp. 112.
62. Fisher, Making and Effacing Art, 243–44.
63. Philip Fisher, Hard Facts: Setting and Form in the American Novel (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 4, 100. See also Henry Louis Gates Jr. and
Hollis Robbins, “Harriet Beecher Stowe and ‘The Man That Was a Thing,’” introductory
essay in The Annotated “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” ed. Gates and Robbins (New
York: Norton, 2006), xxxi–xlvii.
64. Fisher, Hard Facts, 4.
65. Bill Brown, “Reification, Reanimation, and the American Uncanny,” Critical
Inquiry 32 (2006): 183, 197.
66. W. B. Worthen, “Antigone’s Bones,” Tulane Drama Review 52 (Fall 2008):
10–33; Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in
the Americas (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 20.
67. Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire, 16, 19, 20.
68. Ibid., 36, 21.
69. Worthen asks an enormously valuable question: “How do we, can we,
articulate writing with/in/through performance?” (“Antigone’s Bones,” 28, emphasis
in original). He undermines efforts to answer his question, however, when he
calls for “renewed attention” to the “interaction” or “interface” between archive
and repertoire (27, 28). This call does not think with/in/through but instead distinguishes
between writing and performance; thus Worthen affirms a model of
distinction-and-interaction between archive and repertoire. The word script as I
use it signals neither writing nor performance alone, neither archive nor repertoire
alone, neither thing nor human alone, but dances between and among all of these
forms of knowledge. The word script “articulates” this dynamic and thus answers
Worthen’s question.
70. The photograph continues to script actions in the present, from its location
in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. When John Berger famously
noted that every photograph issues the same command to its viewer—“Look!”—he
was describing the ontological scriptivity of every photograph (see the chapter “The
Uses of Photography” in his About Looking [New York: Pantheon, 1980], 52). Photographs
invite not only looking, but stylized touching: jumbling roughly through
a stack of snapshots, or pinching gingerly at the edges of an image imbued with
artistic, monetary, or historical value. Kathy O’Dell’s point about photographs of
performance art applies equally to photographs of performances in everyday life: the
photograph triggers a “haptic response . . . as the viewer touches a photograph taken
by a photographer who touched the trigger of a camera as the performer touched
his or her own skin, used his or her own body both as an instrument of touch and as
performance material.” See her Contract with the Skin: Masochism, Performance Art,
and the 1970s (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 14.