Resistance, Parody, and Double Consciousness in African-American Theatre. - Review - book review

David Krasner. Resistance, Parody, and Double Consciousness in African-American Theatre, 1895-1910: New York: St. Martin's P, 1997.218 pp. $60.00 cloth/$17.95 paper.

In his only known essay, "The Comic Side of Trouble," Bert Williams wrote, "I have never been able to discover anything disgraceful in being a colored man. But I have often found it inconvenient--in America." David Krasner's book Resistance, Parody, and Double Consciousness in African-American Theatre, 1895-1910, explores how blacks who wrote and performed in musicals at the turn of the century dealt with the inconvenience in their productions through subtle and not-so-subtle lines and routines.

Over the past few years, several books examining minstrelsy have been published. Inside the Minstrel Mask: Readings in Nineteenth-Century Blackface Minstrelsy, edited by Annemarie Bean, and Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class, by Eric Lott, come to mind. Several other books on African American theatre have focused on African American plays written in the 1920s. Black Female Playwrights: An Anthology of Plays Before 1950, edited by Kathy A. Perkins, and The Roots of African American Drama: An Anthology of Early Plays, 1858-1938, edited by Leo Hamalian, are but two. As David Krasner points out in his book's introduction, he takes up "where minstrelsy falls off." His topic lies in an interstitial area, that space between minstrelsy and the burgeoning of African American folk drama in the 1920s. There have been, he remarks, "few attempts to examine black theatre in relationship to black cultural life during the period from 1895 to 1910."

Swirling beneath the seemingly simple storylines of the black musicals Krasner discusses are complex countercurrents of resistance. How could blacks actively participate in productions entitled Two Real Coons, Jes Lak White F'lks, The Cannibal King, and Bandanna Land? According to Krasner, African Americans were not compliant purveyors of images that derided their own culture. Entwined with the song, dance, and comedic routines was a subtext. In efforts to resist racism, many black performers "employed a twofold strategy in countering white claims of black authenticity: reinscription and reversal." Reinscription, Krasner notes, was the "manner in which black performers entered into black face caricature and refashioned it." The musicals he explores became "a form of resistance to the dominant discourse by signifying on the subject of racism." That is, if a black person derides black culture in song lyrics and stage routines, white efforts to do so are undermined and deflated because "racism has been stolen f rom the mouths of whites."

Divided into six chapters, Parody, Resistance, and Double Consciousness explores how many blacks in American musicals, which were usually financed by whites, resisted caricatures of black culture. In the first chapter, which also serves as the book's introduction, Krasner states a twofold purpose: to locate the distinguishing features of "black theatre as a liminal space of resistance, parody, and double consciousness"; and to examine "how, where, and when black performers confront, subvert, or reappropriate representation." In the second chapter, which discusses African American theatre from 1895 to 1900, Krasner prefaces his comments on three musicals with a discussion of the emergence of the New Negro and the tensions between musicals "engineered by white producers" and those "created by blacks." The third chapter discusses the cultural and economic forces that shaped the content of four productions. In his lengthy comments on modernism and masking, Krasner turns to the lyrics of Jes' Lak White F'lks for examples.

The fourth chapter, "Rewriting the Body," delves into Aida Overton Walker's use of the cakewalk as a means of subterfuge. Linked to West African dance forms, the joyous strutting of the cakewalks implied that the plantation was a sunny home with happy slaves; beneath that facade, however, the dance actually mocked the slave owners. There is a sweet irony in knowing that a black woman, Aida Walker, was teaching whites a dance form that blacks had created to deride whites. As the Krasner notes, the cakewalk was a "hail of mirrors." In the book's fifth chapter, Krasner takes up the "signs, codes, and symbols" in the Williams and Walker musical Abyssinia. He discusses, for example, the term cracker and the "racial gaze." Williams and Walker used both the term and the tactic as venues for resistance and protest. Krasner examines The Shoo Fly Regiment and The Red Moon in the sixth chapter. Rather than denigrate black culture, The Red Moon targets Native Americans, depicting them as lower than blacks in the America n caste system. The final chapter explores the image of the homeland in the musical Bandanna Land. The lively comedy is ruptured when the characters pause in their routines to recall their Southern roots and their mothers.

Although I believe this is a valuable book, it does have its weaknesses. I found the writing to be thick. That is, with a book that has 25 pages of end notes and a bibliography of 23 pages, but only 160 pages of text, Krasner's voice is barely discernible amidst his many, many quotations and references. Consequently, there is not so much commentary from Krasner as one might prefer. I wish I had more of his analysis of the productions; his constant reliance on secondary sources can be distracting. Krasner frequently introduces a topic and then lets his sources do the talking. He will, for example, open a discussion and then fill the ensuing paragraphs with comments from his sources. Perhaps the book should have been longer. The topic is surely provocative enough, and as is evident in Krasner's plentiful primary materials and his painstaking research, he is able to navigate through repositories to find materials to illustrate his thesis. Also, the date of original publication of the primary materials should ha ve been checked. Several times the republication date is given. W.E.B. Du Bois's book Dusk at Dawn, for example, was published in 1940, not in 1968; and Zora Neale Hurston's essay "Characteristics of Negro Expression" first appeared in 1934, not in 1990. Given the book's overall value, this is, however, a small matter.