Karen Sotiropoulos. Staging Race: Black Performers in Turn of the Century America

African American Review, Summer, 2006 by David Krasner

Karen Sotiropoulos. Staging Race: Black Performers in Turn of the Century America. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2006. 298 pp. $39.95.

The subject matter of this engaging but unoriginal book refers to black performers during one of the most tumultuous periods of African American history. The era witnessed the vigorous leadership of people such as Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois, and coincided with social events such as segregation, migration, racial uplift, and the Niagara Movement. This book seeks to illuminate the ways that black performers involved themselves with these people and these movements while re-imagining their world.

The bulk of Staging Race describes straightforwardly major transformations in black culture. Bert Williams and his partner George Walker, Walker's wife Aida Overton Walker, Robert "Bob" Cole, poet Paul Laurence Dunbar, musicians W. C. Handy, James Reese Europe, Will Marion Cook, and Cook's wife, Abbie Mitchell, partook in the wholesale makeover of the African American stage. Despite the "coon song" craze and the continuation of blackface even on the part of black actors, the stage, according to Karen Sotiropoulos, served as a platform on which black performers undertook the responsibility of presenting an alternative image. They "wore the mask," as Dunbar famously noted in 1895, but they also revised the mask from behind it. Black performers, Sotiropoulos says, presented "hokum" and "played 'darky' roles," yet they still "made clear they were not that which they performed." (196).

For many, performing was not merely a job; it was, as the title makes explicit, an arena for "staging race." The stakes were high, considering the period's deplorable injustices. The book accurately notes the balancing act required of most black performers: needing to satisfy whites' desires for "darky" musicals, and desirous of satisfying the demands of black audiences for more original characterizations. Sotiropoulos reminds us that the generation of black artists "did not just attempt to hook audiences with hokum; they subverted and manipulated stereotypes as they struggled to present black identity" (105). Amidst all of the difficulties of producing shows, they "struggled to interpret the souls of black folk through modern cultural forms, all the while maintaining a commitment to presenting traits that were 'strictly Negro' and demonstrating an incipient Black Nationalism" (121-22).

Despite its reasonable thoroughness, the book contains factual errors. Among them are the report that Ernest Hogan "had just completed an impromptu curbside performance" when he was attacked in 1900 by a white mob (42). Hogan, in fact, was completing his performance at New York's Winter Garden Theater. Some dates are also incorrect, among them the book The Negro in Etiquette: A Novelty was published in 1899, not 1896, and Du Bois's The Star of Ethiopia premiered in 1913, not 1911. There is scant evidence, only rumor, that Jes Lak White F'lks was performed, nor can it be said with certainty that Bob Cole attended Atlanta University, or that Will Marion Cook (despite earning a scholarship) ever went to Berlin to study music. The book misses the point that black performers were media savvy; like the boxer Jack Johnson, they sought publicity to stay in the headlines. Hence, many remarks were sometimes show business hyperbole rather than statements of objective fact.

A certain amount of exaggeration is understandable. But when the book jacket says that "This story--of how African Americans entered the stage door and transformed popular culture--has until now been largely untold," and when the author says that "This book is about one such unrecognized cohort of artists" (1), the publisher and the author are not being entirely transparent. Bert Williams, to cite just one example, has been the subject of no fewer than three biographies (by Charters, Rowland, and Smith). While these biographies are cited, other recent works focusing on Williams, such as Louis Chude-Sokei's The Last Darky and Caryl Phillips's novel Dancing in the Dark, receive no mention. Chude-Sokei's and Phillips's works might have been published too late to receive mention; however, the late Errol G. Hill's chapter in Hill and James V. Hatch's magisterial A History of African American Theatre (2003), which examines this period at great length and draws many of the same conclusions, surely was not. Yet Sotiropoulos overlooks the Hill and Hatch book. The author's research also bypasses the Hatch and Billops Collection, which is exasperating to say the least because it is the largest archive of African American theatrical ephemera.

Although the book uncovers new information while examining events such as the 1893 Chicago World's Fair, the life of Will Marion Cook, the importance of the Marshall Hotel as a safe haven for artists, Bishop Henry McNeal Turner's influence on Williams and Walker's In Dahomey, and the "Frogs" (an African American social club for performers), hardly any new light is actually shed on the subject. (Full disclosure: much of the analytic conclusions reiterate my 1997 book Resistance, Parody, and Double Consciousness in African American Theatre, 1895-1910, and my 2002 book A Beautiful Pageant: African American Theatre, Drama, and Performance in the Harlem Renaissance, 1910-1927). While it is good to hear the retelling of this story, Staging Race basically reports what has been said before--that black performers at the nadir resisted racism and were in the vanguard of social change. The author fails to credit theories that appear elsewhere, such as materials concerning the influence of Du Bois's double consciousness on black theater, the resistance to stereotypes by black performers, the irony of performing before segregated audiences (particularly which audience laughed at which jokes), the performers' connection to racial uplift, the importance of the 1900 New York City race riot to African American theater, the debates over racial authenticity in theater, and the compromises black performers had to make in light of pressures from white audiences and the black middle class. Other troubling appropriations without credit include specific references to plays, songs, and performances, such as Ethiopianism's influence on Williams and Walker's Abyssinia; the evolution of three texts, Jes Lak White F'lks, The Cannibal King, and In Dahomey; the grace of Aida Overton Walker's cakewalking and her negotiation of sexuality and propriety; the use of double entendres in the lyrics of Bob Cole's "No Coons Allowed"; balancing social decorum and theatrical buffoonery in productions; the difficulty of presenting love scenes in black shows; and Aida Walker's struggle to present her Salome Dance artfully. Providing endnotes indicating where these and other discussions have been raised would have blunted the potential for harsh criticism. The book might have even offered a firm rebuttal; scholarly disagreements energize the field. What this book does do, very forcefully, is show that the subject matter of African American performers at the turn into the twentieth century remains a vibrant field of inquiry and elucidation.