Please post your response to the lecture for June 14th to this thread.
Thank you.
You do not have to respond to these questions in your paper, but think about:
How is Professor Nyong'o's work illustrating examples of historical performance? What is the function of Peter Sewally as both historical figure and performative archetype? Can you bridge the work we read with the performances we saw by Kalup Linzy? How is Linzy's work historical?
Louis Jargow
ReplyDeleteIntroduction to Performance Studies
José Muñoz
Response to Tavia Nyong’o’s "Amalgamation Waltz" PART 1
6/14/2011
The Black Body and Biopower in Nyong’o
In his 2009 book, "Amalgamation Waltz", cultural historian Tavia Nyong’o traces the construction of race in the Nineteenth Century, and it’s many resonances: a conception of sexual identity, a production of the body, and an image of blackness. These themes help to problematize any easy reading of how the black body was constructed. Nyong’o draws upon Michel Foucault’s theory of “biopower” to understand what role did cultural institutions have in demarcating race along the topic of sexuality. Nyong’o uses “The Man-Monster,” a transgendered black prostitute who was made by history in 1836 when he was arrested scandalously, as a reflecting pool for the public’s sentiment at the time. By examining “The Man-Monster” through the lens of biopower, we he uncannily resists it by brazenly defying established norms about race, gender, sexuality.
In attempting to highlight the sexualized and politicized nature of amalgamation, Nyong’o turns to Foucault, who recognized,
“Sexuality” was neither a biological given nor solely the object of official repression, but was on the contrary targeted, nominated, and assiduously elicited over the course of the nineteenth century. The body was governed by ascertaining the truth of its sex." (Nyong'o, 76)
This is the essence of biopower, described in "The History of Sexuality." Foucault’s understanding of the Nineteenth Century is one that doesn't repress sex, but, instead obsessively makes sex an object of study. This obsession by the medical community and government officials produced and regulated bodies, determined what a body is, and the marked different bodies. The body was created to give the Bourgeois a sense of subjectivity, against which a biopolitical blackness was born. Black is the negative to the white subjectivity: the Other.
Jargow PART 2:
ReplyDeleteNyong’o, cleverly, uses biopower to examine how sexuality impacted race, by looking at respect. One key example is David Ruggles, who was a famous black activist from the Nineteenth Century. Ruggles had many friends and allies among the northern, abolitionist white elite, and was famously depicted to be asexual. It was through his asexuality that Ruggles could gain the respect of the white elite, his body was a non-issue because it was desexualized. If Ruggles were more actively sexual, he would revert to the animal-Other sexuality, he would revert to being black.
Another important development to this theme of the black body is linked to a shocking thought from Thomas Jefferson, speaking about black’s inability to blush,
"Are not the fine mixtures of red and white, the expressions of every passion greater or less suffusions of color in the one, preferable to that eternal monotony, which reigns in the countenances, that immovable veil of black which covers all the emotions of the other race?" (Nyong'o, 86)
Jefferson equates this inability to blush with an inability to express passion. Until this point, blacks were disempowered on basis of a perceived lack of cognitive, communicative, and moral faculties, now Jefferson turns the debate to the black body. The black body cannot express itself. Nyong’o notes that Jefferson, “Evoked a juridicio-biological principle of black shamelessness that had already been established in American law.” (Nyong'o, 87) The black body was constructed to be animalistic, with no shame or guilt, especially around the topic of sex. Blackness here is created, biopolitically, through the imaging of a shameless body.
Drawing together the ideas of biopolitics, respectability, and the body, we can now explore the story of “The Man-Monster,” Peter Sewally, a black man who dressed as “respectable” white woman, and solicited himself to a white man, Robert Haslem, who realized Sewally’s anatomical sex and had him arrested. (Austin, 96) The event was a scandal because of how Sewally was performing himself as a woman of class. In one act appropriation of respectability, we see the entire moral framework around identity being ratted. By being black and dressing as a wealthy white woman, many contrasting biopolicical forces begin to operation to construct Sewell’s subjectivity. “The Man-Monster,” on so many levels, resists being subjected to biopower. He flatly rejects gender and racial categories assigned to him. And, in a purely uncanny gesture, Sewally, a transgender black prostitute, had sexual relations with a heterosexual, white man. The power dynamic is inverted, he emasculates Haslem, and removes his status, privilege, and respectability. Sewally’s strength as a historical figure is in his queerness, in the unique way he resists biopower, despite its otherwise overbearing force.
Melanie Van Allen
ReplyDeleteProf.: Jose Muñoz
TA: Sujay Pandit
Introduction to Performance Studies PERF-GT 1000.001 – Section 2
15 May 2011
Lecture 2: Professor Tavia Nyong’o /Kalup Linzy
Antebellum Genealogies of the Hybrid Future focuses on the history and racial institutions of the antebellum United States and how they affect attitudes of a hybridized future. The mongrel past, referring to cultural miscegenation, and the term hybrid future, often works in tandem where past and future equally leverage a critique of the present. (Nyong'o, Introduction: Antebellum Genealogies of the Hybrid Future 7). These terms, alongside the prospect of a hybrid, or race less future, is presented as a response of the racial stigmas, that segregation and slavery provide, in present day America.
In the chapter Nights Eye- Amalgamation, Respectability and Shame focuses on the 1830’s and the origins of Abolitionism, and white moral panic, which involve taboo social subjects and social tension surrounding amalgamation. With this, the ranks of clergy, media and the professions respond to a social crisis by identifying a dangerous social contagion against which they can lead a public campaign (Nyong'o, In Night's Eye: Amalgamtion, Respectibility, and Shame 72). In this sense of the word, amalgamation was synonymous with miscegenation, but its origins were not associated with a racial meaning, rather the scientific of metallurgy. Affects like shame, embarrassment, and outrage were routinely deployed to accentuate and refract the bourgeois semiotics of sexuality, and morality, when it came to the issue of amalgamation. (Nyong'o, In Night's Eye: Amalgamtion, Respectibility, and Shame 76) Professor Nyong’o’s lecture: The Man-Monster- A Sapphic Tale of 1830’s New York, puts this historical account into the framework of a moral panic and highlights the public’s collective fascination and curiosity of the queer, transgender body. The newspapers wrote articles with satirical tones regarding the way Peter Sewally was dressed for his court date: “Her or his dingy ears were decked with a pair of snow white ear rings, his head was ornamented with a wig of beautiful curly locks, and on it was half hid amid the luxuriant crop of wool” (Nyong'o, In Night's Eye: Amalgamtion, Respectibility, and Shame 98) Interestingly, the papers also describes Sewally’s activities as “moneymaking” and “practical amalgamation” with implying that the standard abolitionist charge is equality in theory meant amalgamation in practice.
Part 2
ReplyDeleteKalup Linzy’s lecture/demonstration of his performance pieces showcased a personal ethnography by drawing on African-American cultural stereotypes, his family lineage and issues of homosexuality and acceptance. In relation to Antebellum Genealogies of the Hybrid Future and The Man-Monster, Peter Sewally, there was a connection with acceptance and shame, in reference to being a gay African American in Linzy’s video piece All My Churen. One scene depicts a disapproving, shameful mother, ranting about her gay son’s feminine mannerisms, lifestyle and her overall disapproval. Returning to text of In Night's Eye:
Amalgamtion, Respectibility, and Shame:
Shame effaces itself, shame points and projects, shame turns itself skin inside out; shame and pride, shame and dignity, shame and self-display, shame and exhibitionsim are different interminglings of the same glove. Shame, it might finally be said, is performance.
The current issues regarding racism and sexuality in America have amalgamated since 1930. Issues and questions have forged as they take different forms and the process repeats itself; therefore it is a never-ending progression that eventually leads to a new performance.
Chloë Rae Edmonson
ReplyDeletePERF-GT 1000.002 – Sujay Pandit
Reading/Lecture response for 14 June 2011
Tavia Nyong-o’s “Intro” and “Night’s Eye” from Amalgamation Waltz
Kalup Linzy’s All My Chirun
Lecturer: Tavia Nyong-o and Kalup Linzy
In his “Introduction: Antebellum Geneologies of the Hybrid Future,” Tavia Nyong-o defines some key terms and concepts necessary to engaging with his book, Amalgamation Waltz. Using Barack Obama to flesh out some big questions about race, racism, and the modern hybrid, Nyong-o introduces “the Thing…a powerful force shaping the nation as our source of enjoyment” (Nyong-o 3). He argues that cultural anxiety about race and exclusion of other-groups comes out of our need to preserve the Thing. In contemporary slang we ask, “is that a thing?” when we want to know if something is part of The Cloud of shared cultural thought. Nyong-o’s definition of THE Thing ultimately answers this question: YES, and, and it is only ours, and we must preserve it.
Quite appropriately to our course of study, Nyong-o also describes how the performative negotiates memory and the present/future (Nyong-o 13). Bringing in Foucault, he turns historical memory-constructed time on its head with the concept of “countermemory.” This inspires his formulation of the “circum-Atlantic fold,” which is the critically important period preceding emancipation, alight with discourse about race, freedom, and questions about hybridization (Nyong-o 18). Inside this “fold,” conventional thought gives way to a less-methodical engagement with new and dangerous ideas.
In his lecture, Nyong-o dealt primarily with content from his chapter “In Night’s Eye: Amalgamation, Respectability, and Shame,” namely, the account of Peter Sewally, alias Mary Jones, the cross-dressing prostitute indicted for grand larceny of Mr. Robert Haslem’s wallet. Using Sewally as a vehicle for understanding antebellum attitudes towards sexuality and race, a major point in Nyong-o’s lecture was the nature of Sewally’s legal charge – not prostitution or cross-dressing, but the imposition upon another man, robbing him of property, and in that sense, his manhood. Performed on the courtroom-stage, this verdict (speech-act) stated to its audience what was clearly most detestable about Sewally’s behavior: his imposition upon Haslem, a symbol of the imagined upper-class white fraternity of men.
Edmonson PART TWO
ReplyDeleteDuring the lecture, we were also invited to take in a variety of slides, which visually performed for us some of Nyong-o’s concepts. H.R. Robinson’s lithograph of Mary Jones depicted the cross-dresser in fashionable dress and appropriate, respectful and even beautiful. Another image, Lezley Saar’s “Con Art of Peter Sewally,” was an oscillating frenzy of colorful vignettes back-grounding Sewally/Jones’ doubled-bodies. A major contrast between these pieces was the vivid background in Saar’s painting and the absence of background in the lithograph. The lithograph image floats in the whiteness, a paper doll to be cut out; there is nothing to it except the image of the man-monster, whose monsterdom is unapparent until you know the back-story. With Saar’s painting, the background nearly overwhelms the foregrounded subject, a collage of vibrant pastorals and still-lifes of domesticity, sharing distinct borders but in disagreement which direction to orient. In either piece, the foreground is Peter Sewally; a rare peek, as his status as a black cross-dressing criminal positioned him in the margins of society.
Our second lecturer, Kalup Linzy, brought to us a series of soap opera-inspired performance pieces. Though we go to warm up to him as a person with an early piece from high schook, Linzy’s piece “All My Chirun” really connects to his current body of work. In the vein of Eddie Murphy’s family scenes of The Nutty Professor, Linzy assumes nearly all of the characters in his melodramas. His are stock characters – the overbearing mother, cross-dressing misunderstood brother, the absent workaholic sister, an emotional nutcase sister, a loser brother – all unified under the most-powerful matriarch: grandma. The episode structure reflects Linzy’s thorough understanding of the soap-structure – bouts of slow motion, stings of emotional music, a surprise ending, and over-reactions galore. In an interesting departure from this form, though, Linzy created an animation with a team from the Portland Institute. As an episode within an episode, the animation was a character’s artistic work-come-to-life. Linzy’s distinctive voice animates simple black silhouettes of characters, handless, who reenact the events leading to the death of a main character. Devoid of Linzy’s charming physical antics, the sequence gives gravity to the tragic account of one character’s unnecessary death. Like the Mary Jones lithograph, the simple background and silhouetted soap-opera icons contribute to a larger, more complex story – cultivated and told by Linzy. Likewise, bared before a courtroom, Peter Sewallly’s objectification by the public robbed him of his personal background. In all cases, the absence of detail leaves space for the audience to imagine things about the characters or narrative. We fill this space not just with facts we deem true, but also with social attitudes about the content, personal reactions, and our historically derived conclusions. In this way, in gazing at Linzy and Sewally, we see a reflection of modernity, however beautiful or ugly.
Alyssa Pereira
ReplyDeleteProfessor José Muñoz
Performance Studies Intro
14 Jun 2011 – Nyong’o & Linzey
Identity has long been a struggle for America to decipher; collectively, America lacks the ability to accept a multifaceted identity that includes one’s race, sex, gender and sexuality. Where is the line drawn between these aspects that supports just one in being the primary force in defining an identity? At first glance, Barack Obama, Peter Sewally and Kalup Linzy all face the obstacle as being black in America, but the conflict goes much deeper than race. Public figures in America may present various layers of their self, but ultimately as public figure, the media assigns an identity based on challenges to the American idea of normalcy.
When Obama assumed the presidency, he did not fit mold of “African American” in America nor did he fit the mold of white. As a male he was accepted as such, but racially, he was not accepted into any category. Obama faced scrutiny because he was essentially too white to be black and too black to be white. The de-crowning of the middle-aged white male on the presidential throne left America unsettled about the change from the stereotypical president. Race as “a theory of history” begins to be challenged when the assumption of what it entails to be a president is challenged. Furthermore, when a figure’s race, especially that of the head of America, does not fit the mold of the collective perception of normalcy, his history is brought under fire. Hybridization, in this aspect, is disturbing to these collective national concepts of what it is to be white and what it is to be black. As a response to this unsettling, America zooms on this focal point. The national Thing grabs America’s attention as the media discusses the role of race in politics. Shortly thereafter, Obama is now defined by the hybridization of his race; his ethnic background takes center stage in defining him as a person.
Just as race is a struggle when hybridized, so is sex. When one becomes a public figure, society focuses on his or her components of identity in an effort to paste on a label on any part that seems to be a challenge to the norm; the most discussion-prompting aspect of their identity becomes their entire identity. The best propagator of these discussions is the media. The media concentrates on this aspect and exposes the identity’s dysfunctional relationship with itself. Obama was exploited as both a Kenyan and an Irishman; as both a descendant of a slave as well as a slave owner. This discordance complicated society’s easy acceptance of what became a mongrel ethnicity and thus complicated society’s understanding of his identity.
Alyssa Pereira, part 2
ReplyDeleteNow, turning to Nyong’o’s “In Night’s Eye,” we see a different type of hybridization under fire. Peter Sewally, as a black cross-dressing man prostituting as a woman in the 1830s, clearly faces a disjointed projection of identity. However, this disjunction is not racially charged. Sewally’s turn as a woman highlighted his sex over his race in the public eye, thereby emphasizing this singular aspect of his identity as his complete identity. Sex and Race cannot be hybridized as races can be; one will inevitably prove dominant. Obama, as a heterosexual male with a nuclear family, did not face any scrutiny for his sex or gender. Conversely, the press’ spotlight on Sewally’s cross-dressing (as Mary Jones) as a spectacle of his identity over his race proves that the more seemingly outlandish aspect and the most disturbing feature to American society will prevail as the descriptive force in one’s personal makeup.
Back in modern day, we also see this struggle in a performative sphere. Kalup Linzy, a performance artist presents a dichotomous and therefore conflicted sexual identity. Linzy’s cross-dressing performance on the soap opera General Hospital is carefully orchestrated and delivered in order to soften the performance’s reception by its intended audience of “soccer moms.” As he mentioned in his discussion of his time on the soap opera, a lot of performance choices had to be made based on “what the daytime [soap opera] audience could handle.” In his performance in the episode, Linzey plays a musical performer who in one scene is costumed to resemble something similar to Robert Johnson (a mysterious and notoriously camera-shy early 20th century blues guitarist), and in the latter part of the episode cross-dresses as a female lounge singer. One thing noteworthy of this performance as well as in Sewally’s case is that each one’s complementary identity as black is not relevant here. Perhaps this proves that tension in assigning a sex is a greater marker of identity to the American public than tension in assigning a race.
While both sex and race inform identity, the two components do not equally define someone in the public eye. Ultimately, if the public’s task of assigning a singular sex or race to a public figure becomes difficult, this struggle will take over and define that identity.
This lecture was a great follow-up to Piper's speech-act in "Cornered". Nyongo'o's chapter starts off with the irony laden story of a black man who is traveling by stagecoach and gets into a discussion with a group of white people about what would happen if slaves were freed. He is cloaked and so there is no cause for them to hide their opinions because of shame. Many of them seem frightened by the very idea of black people going into society among whites rather than returning to Africa. The whole thing is hilarious because that is exactly what is actually occurring: a black man is among white people in society. This idea of color phobia is still present to this day in America. Sadly, I believe some white people are still shocked that President Barack Obama is in office. Nyong'o does a great job of considering performance in the context of culture, history, and politics.
ReplyDeleteNyong'o discusses race and racism in "Introduction: Antebellum Genealogies" on page 6 where he quotes Jennifer Brody: "' Race is fiction. Racism is real'". He then goes onto state that some worry that a "yearning for a racial transcendence will lead us to neglect the inequalities that form our historical inheritance". I think this is a valid argument and very relevant for our culture. There is this question that if we forget about race or ethnicity, what about the celebration within cultural diversity? This might be a bit idealistic. Beyond that, referring back to Piper's cornered, what does it mean to be black? Obviously, from her performance we know that it is not really a color. One may look white, but by American law and genetics, actually be black. What is blackness? What is whiteness? Are these things important?
The Peter Sewally/Mary Jones case is very important in terms of black performance. It's highly interesting that Sewally was never charged with sodomy or prostitution, but rather grand larceny. The whole police operation that was to entrap Sewally seemed almost like a performance of sorts. Also, the terminology of "man-monster" should be highlighted because although the picture has this label, the actual drawing does not look like a man-monster in the least. In the drawing, Sewally looks like a pretty and modest woman. Nyong'o even showed us some slides of pictures of women that were grotesque, but Sewally was not drawn in this manner. Furthermore, Sewally was accepted by the African American community and even encouraged to dress as a woman. Were black people perhaps more accepting of differences than white people in this era? It seems likely. Nyong'o states on page 100 of "In Night's Eye" that the black community was "unified in struggle" and "normative in sexuality" which is exemplified in their acceptance and support of Sewally.
Even today, black Americans seem to be on the cutting edge of performance. Kalup Linzy was an artist like I have never seen before. For much of my life I had watched soap operas, so his production "All My Churen" was very entertaining for me and helped me to think of soap operas in a way I had not previously considered. It is undeniable that he goes against the status quo. But does this not make his performances even more revolutionary? In my last paper, I discussed the idea that if to have felicitous performatives one must coincide with pre-established conditions, but I think that Kalup works against this in the best way. His work was different and surprising. Of course I have seen wonderful art and performances by people of various ethnicities, but I think that this was an interesting parallel within the lectures.
On page 72, Nyong'o discusses "antiamalgamation rioting that targeted a group that presented itself as righteously political and morally reformist" and I think this rioting could be considered a performance analogous to some performances we see in politics today. In Pellegrini's lecture, she spoke of the Tea Party and performances within this entity. I could not help but think of the righteous indignation of most Republicans when they speak of Health Care Reform or gun control or immigration in the United States. I think back on Michele Bachman's separate rebuttal to President Obama's State of the Union Address. This begs the question: what role does performance play in politics? Politics often times seems like one big performance. Does this make politics disingenuous as a whole? How can we tell who is sincere and merely performing or both?
ReplyDeleteNyong'o made it clear in his lecture that Sewally's case was important in the context of erotohistoriography and queer performative theory. Many questions about the case are still left unanswered, but I believe it is wise of Nyong'o to leave the gaps. There is much room for interpretation, but his analysis of these subjects was superb and left me thinking about how important it is to really search out for instances of performance from the past, even in unlikely places.
Hybridity, The Amalgamation Waltz, and the Travestí
ReplyDeleteExamining the concepts of hybridity in the construction of racial identities, Tavia Nyong’o turns first to a contemporary public figure upon whom so many false hopes were projected. President Obama, who invoked in his election-night speech a single (non-racialized) United States of America, would be lauded by some commentators as proof of a final transcendence of race in the United States. Of course, as Nyong’o emphasizes, other commentators would question Obama’s claims to African American identity (and still others would reject Obama as an American, demanding his birth certificate as proof and then rejecting it once produced), undermining Obama’s own celebration of a unified national identity over plural identities (Nyong’o 2).
Tracing the history of similar discourses of racial identities, Nyong’o identifies both “lure and loathing” for the concept of hybridity, which has become a central tenet in the U.S. “national Thing,” or the force that “shapes our enjoyment” of the country (Nyong’o 3). (Perhaps the concept of the “national Thing” could itself be seen as a hybrid of the performative ideas of U.S. national identity and the American Dream?) In fact, he writes, the national Thing relies upon a racial hybridity that is always beyond us: “American national fantasy […] does not so much dismiss as defer racial hybridity, endowing it with the peculiar privilege and power of a horizon, one at which we never quite arrive” (Nyong’o 9). This notion of a deferred hybrid future, which can be traced to antebellum discourses on race and the nation, grows out of this dual and dueling desire for and fear of “racial mixture and transcendence” (Nyong’o 27).
(To be continued...)
(Continued from above)
ReplyDeleteIt is important to note that we are delving into a discourse with roots in scientific racism, as Nyong’o traces in the etymologies of the terms ‘miscegenation’ and ‘amalgamation’ (Nyong’o 23-24, 27). As he notes, the concept of amalgamation, especially within his temporal/geographic focus on the circum-Atlantic fold, is consistently linked with sexually loaded language that blindly ignores “how amalgamation was historically mobilized,” i.e. through interracial sexual activity, consensual or no (Nyong’o 75). Amalgamation is rooted in the use of sex and sexuality, a process “through which American subjects were gendered and racialized” (Nyong’o 75-76). Drawing on Foucault’s writing on governmentality, in which power structures and prohibition render the body “knowable and categorizable,” Nyong’o offers various examples of amalgamation at work in defining whiteness against racial others (Nyong’o 76). For example, the visual culture reflected in E.W. Clay’s prints from the 1830’s; the performance of Tom and Jerry, or Life in London adapted by William Moncrieff from Pierce Egan’s drawings in 1823; and the surviving documentation of the 1836 trial of Peter Sewally/Mary Jones/Beefsteak Pete/the Man-Monster all served to define “bourgeois sexuality and racial whiteness” in contrast to “subaltern, racialized, and proletarian life” (Nyong’o 77, 78, 96-98, 78). These particular deployments of performance and visual culture had a second purpose, as well: to shock or even disgust their audiences.
Nyong’o sees shame as a performative tool that may convert the body into a site for both policing and subversion. He draws on the concept first in examining Clay’s satirical images of The Amalgamation Waltz, in which elegant mixed-race couples dance, flirt, and (shocking!) grasp bare hands (Nyong’o 81). The drawing invokes a misattribution of certain African and Afro-Celtic dances as “distortions of the elegant waltz,” while also invoking a certain disdain for European “decadence” (Nyong’o 83, 82). To borrow from Austin, Clay’s perlocutionary statement was to meant to shame, to portray a hybrid distopia, to link abolitionist sentiment to loose sexuality. Nyong’o’s conception of shame here is interesting, and is more easily understood when he compares it to Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s definition within the field of queer theory; she examines shame and stigma as “resources in the production of new modes of meaning and being,” or a potentially subversive response to exclusion (Nyong’o 88). Nyong’o indicates as much in his own, repeated use of the word “travestied” (Nyong’o 83). In English, the word can mean to imitate, debase, or distort, or, from the Latin, trans- (over) and vestire (to clothe), hence to disguise (“Word Origin and History”). In Spanish, however, a travestí is a cross-dresser, hirself a hybrid of sorts. In borrowing from this dialectic of shame/subversion, Nyong’o gestures to the transformative power of hybridity to contest stable categories of the nation—and it is this destabilizing potential, Nyong’o says, that makes hybridity useful as a ‘mobilizing’ force (Nyong’o 32).
Works Cited
Nyong’o, Tavia. “In Night’s Eye: Amalgamation, Respectability, and Shame.” Pp. 69-102. The Amalgamation Waltz: Race, Performance, and the Ruses of Memory. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009. Pp. 69-102.
Nyong’o, Tavia. “Introduction: Antebellum Genealogies of the Hybrid Future.” The Amalgamation Waltz: Race, Performance, and the Ruses of Memory. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009. Pp. 1-32.
“Word Origin and History.” Dictionary.com. Online. 15 June 2011. Available at: http://dictionary.reference.com/etymology/un+travestied.
part1
ReplyDeletePatricia Valladolid
Response to “Introduction: Antebellum Genealogies of the Hybrid Future” and “In Night’s Eye: Amalgamation, Respectability, and Shame” from Amalgamation Waltz
Race as a social construct for postmodern theorist often negates the historical memory of the black body and how bodies of color experience race. Scholar Tavia Nyong’o begins to explore race theory in terms of historical record in his work “Introduction: Antebellum Genealogies of the Hybrid Future” and “In Night’s Eye: Amalgamation, Respectability, and Shame” from Amalgamation Waltz; and moves concepts that are fixed and linear in the American imaginary towards places of suspension. He calls us to explore specific historical records and people to examine how race, gender, sexuality, and location in terms of history and how moments of discontinuity are left out or ignored. In his Introduction, Nyong’o provides a concentrated understanding of his position on race in the United States, which we then can use in understanding the narratives he provides us with in the following chapter.
Race in the United States is binary and through this black/white dichotomy Nyong’o locates how “America” came to elect President Barack Obama. His use of President Obama as a primary example to demonstrate racial formation in the U.S. speaks to the current discourse of “colorblind” society and ethnic identity. How does President Obama come to represent racial history in the U.S. as a visible black body? And further how does racial hybridity challenge the “colorblind” discourse? These questions come out of the current conversation of the “national Thing”. Nyong’o provides us with this “National Thing” not only to locate the way race functions in the U.S., but also to explore the ways race is embodied and experienced because “ if race is an evasion and a fiction, it is an eminetly political one, that is, it is collectivly experienced and enacted.”(Nyong’o, 6). By deconstructing the “national Thing,” Nyong’o argues that the use of imagined communities can highlight subversive moments (Nyong’o, 7). These subversive moments then rupture historical narrative and challenge the temporal/spatial model.
The focus on temporal objects in terms of historical bodies is a useful tool in speaking about the past. Given that these temporal objects occupy a specific moment, Nyong’o suggests that these spaces provide a historical narrative where hybridity unsettles the collective and corporeal memory, by exposing the fictions of race (Nyong’o, 12).
Sung Yeon Park
ReplyDeleteProfessor Jose Munoz, T.A. S. Pandit
PERF-GT 1000 001 Introduction to Performance Studies
June 14, 2011
Socially Constructed
Our life is constructed by interaction among the people in a society. Each individual participates in this society based on their identity. As individuals consider themselves as a member of society, they recognize what role they play in society, and so the social construction of class becomes apparent. Not only because of wealth and poverty, but race and gender also affects the gap of classes. From the readings and lectures on June 14th, I was able to remind the serious inequality problems from the society, and further this readings and lectures made me look back what is my status now. While the social construct of classes are invisible, there are definitely a lot of inequalities among classes in society generated by people in terms of race and gender.
Tavia Nyong’o’s book Amalgamation Waltz’s Introduction: Antebellum Genealogies of the Hybrid Future shows whole concept of the racial hybrid along with gender and sex issues in these days. As this quotation shows “Obama promised to turn a page by making backness secondary to Americanness. In the spiritual idiom of American politics, Obama was a candidate who would transcend race,” this reading illustrates President Obama’s election case in detail to grasp the current situation in the society. As Nyong’o’s another reading chapter 2, In Night’s Eye: Amalgamation, Respectability, and Shame provide historical performance and the racial situations in the past, the lecture was more clear to understand how things are changed politically in the United State. Moreover, the story of the man-monster, an example of Peter Sewally’s cross dressing represent as both historical figure and performative archetype. “Peter Sewally, alias Mary jones, became a minor figure in New York City’s rogues gallery after his trial and conviction the next day in the Court of General Sessions. Induced to appear in court in the women’s clothing he defiantly entered a plea of not guilty to the official charge of grand larceny” (96). This quotation shows social situation in race 1830s New York very well. And finally these two related readings come back to the questions about a national future which has no racial conflicts.
ReplyDeleteSecond lecturer, Kalup Linzy was video producer and director. He showed his several works. In my perspective, his pieces’ subjects were very diverse. He handled socially constructed problems such as rape, race, speak, and even family problem. The remarkable point was every work showed each theme very well. Moreover, as he showed from his early works to until now, I was able to see his passion for the works. Taken all together, the overall feeling about his works about social issues makes me reflect on these matters that he brought so that I really appreciated to him.
Indeed, Nyoung’s work and Kalup’s performances made me think about my status in depth. In my personal situation, I am a Korean who is living in the United States. I realized that as a middle class Asian woman who is studying in America and coming from South Korea two years ago, being a categorized person largely affected the way I experience other vectors of my identity. Once I became settled in, my racial class became “Asian.” When I lived in Korea, I seldom considered myself as an Asian, rather I considered myself as a person who is living in the world. But after I moved to the United States, I started to consider myself an Asian. I feel my racial identity was socially constructed by the people living in the United States, and with that, being Asian became a big deal in my life even in these centuries.
Reading: Amalgamation Waltz (Book) By Tavia Nyong’o
Introduction: Antebellum Genealogies of the Hybrid Future
In Night’s Eye: Amalgamation, Respectability, and Shame
Lecture: Tavia Nyong’o and Kalup Linzy
Tavia Nyong’o’s Introduction: Antebellum Genealogies’ of the Hybrid Future speaks to the concept of hybridity within the United States and the cultural implications of amalgamation and miscegenation in the present day. While miscegenation was outlawed into the early 20th century, liaisons between whites and blacks in and before the antebellum era were widespread in the United States. Ironically, most instances of miscegenation and relationships (at least sexually) were initiated by white men who had authority over their black slaves and over freedmen and women even after slavery. Though it was not socially acceptable and even outlawed, the number of narratives that describe relationships, both consensual and non-consensual, between blacks and whites through Reconstruction suggest that miscegenation was a common practice. This is ironic primarily because historically during this period, black slaves were considered chattel and were legally seen as the property of white men, a status that created a sense of power and entitlement of whites over blacks in the United States.
ReplyDeleteToday, the subject of hybridity is still linked to the miscegenation of the past. The long lasting effects of the “race problem” still spark controversy today, most notably in relation to President Barack Obama and his heritage (Nyong’o 1). Hybridity is no longer about black versus white, but about the varying degrees of whiteness and blackness that exist in innumerable variations. Now, the intricacies of race are even more specific and emphasizes exclusiveness in and between racial groups.
Verda Habif
ReplyDeleteN11134358
Introduction to Performance Studies
Report #2
06.15.2011
Constructing and De-constructing Identity and Hybridity
Is history constructed by the memory of the ways in which the dominant discourses have dealt with the “other”, or is the “other” constructed by history itself? Traces of this major question can be followed through Tavia Nyong’o’s (2009) discussion of race as a theory of history with relation to sexuality and ideology in the “Amalgamation Waltz: Race Performance and the Ruses of Memory”. Nyong’o makes a specific stress on the performative nature of history to highlight the contiguous nature of the relationship between the societal and cultural phenomenon and history making.
In the third chapter of his book, titled “In the Nights Eye: Amalgamation, Respectibility and Shame”, Nyong’o discusses the “biopolitical presumptions of race thinking” through the performativity of specific tales of moments that define history of slavery and segregation in America and how these presumptions were in correlation with the construction of an American national identity (2009, p.70). This can be defined as a performative relationship. In addition, proposing to engage with the slavery question also on a level through “sexual and gender non-conformity” his work deals with the concept of amalgamation as historically “was a political deployment of sexuality through which American subjects were gendered and racialized” (2009, pg.75-76). Moreover, he brings the matter into another level, the level of the ideological, by pointing to the challenging nature of early black activism and abolitionism in America in terms of the positioning of sexuality in the bourgeois culture.
The relationship of race and gender with the mainstream cultural ideology is as valid a matter to deal with today as it was during the time of slavery and segregation. A central question to this discussion is what role does hybridity play in opening up new interspaces that can not be identified by the system and can not be placed within the sphere of the system, to serve as a front of liberating politics of identity and confront the mainstream ideology.
The critical question that must be addressed at this point regards the construction of identity. Is it through the other that one defines himself, or do we define the other, or both? Is it possible to take a step back and relate to the “I” and the “other” through a transcended perspective abolishing the descriptive distinctions imposed by the mainstream ideology?
Kalup Linzy’s work is interesting in this sense. In the artillery, he declares, “we are all performing to create an identity" (May/June, 2011). Linzy’s work, questions the generally undertaken identifications of the self and the tension between the visible, that is the body and inner reality by making visible in a hybrid fashion the simultaneous co-existence of layers that seem to be contradictory in somewhat united identities. Especially notable in his work “All My Churen” (2003), by deconstructing the notions of the other and the self he creates new constructions of identities in his characters and storyline that are unique. The idea that, nothing is the way as it seems, comes forth as all the generally presumed distinctions between the male and the female, the human and the non-human, life and death are played with in an illusionary sense to deconstruct the delusions of the identity and its visible characteristics. The fact that he plays all the different characters –depicting the relationships within a family, especially mother-child relation that constitutes the origin of one’s construction of self in psychoanalytical theories-, his cross-dressing, tricking his audience into the illusion that the loss of a loved one is a spouse whereas it really is a dog and the way he creates and then destructs an illusion of death within the storyline all are examples of how he achieves to embed the above characteristics in his work. There is also a constant stress in the story to being accepted as who you really are.
In fact, one might trace, this questioning of the visible and the actual truth, back in Nyong’o’s discussion. The anecdote of David Ruggles that marks the beginning of the third chapter, as does the phenomenon of the man monster addressed later in the same chapter similarly question the same concepts of the visible body and the actual reality of it.
ReplyDeleteFinally, the tension between the visible and the actual reality are keys to understanding identity and hybridity as can be followed through in Linzy’s works.
Ana Chavez
ReplyDeletePERF-GT 1000.002 – Sujay Pandit
Reading/Lecture response for June 14, 2011
In Professor Tavia Nyoung’o work “Introduction: Antebellum Genealogies of the Hybrid Future” and “In Night’s Eye: Amalgamation, Respectability, and Shame” from Amalgamation Waltz he argues, amalgamation “was a political deployment of sexuality through which American subjects were gendered and racialized. Insofar as amalgamation conjured up the body as the site of visibility, responsibility, and a potentially aberrant ‘taste,’ amalgamation discourse helped constitute what David Kazanjian has called ‘racial governmentality.’”(75) In both the text and lecture he calls out the story of Peter Sewally, to speak to this racial governmentality and the performative effects of history. Peter Sewally acts as a historic figure and performative archetype in this way.
About hybridity he writes‘If hybridity is persistently figured in terms of what Lee Edelman has called ‘reproductive futurity,’ it is also figured though the trope of a mongrel past.”(7) Peter Sewally’s figure is used as a means to explicate amalgamation but also as a way to come back to this idea of hybridity brought into the introduction of his book. It is in the back and forth of these relationships that we begin to see where the image of Sewally lives in the public sphere (site of visibility), the weight attached to this racialized and gendered figure, and the affects of shame and outrage, that linger in the “taste” of the mongrel past.
But in order to explore how Peter Sewally is situated as both a historical figure and performative archetype, Nyoung’o first calls attention to how visual images such as the cartoon work of E. W. Clay’s cartoon work elicit reactions from abolitionist & activists and give agency to “moral entrepreneurs”. This he calls out as performative qualities of such cartoon and early tabloid work. At the same time in the case of Peter Sewally aka Mary Jones, the tabloid becomes a historical document, certifying the conviction his conviction for Grand Larceny. This is also a point of interest in the story because Sewally is not convicted of any racial or gendered crimes. He was not arrested for cross-dressing or sodomy.
Part 2
ReplyDeleteOn that point is where I want to break for a moment, to explore why Nyoung’o leads up to presenting Peter Sewally through this conversation of affect as in shame, embarrassment, and outrage and why those affects end in criminalizing Sewally for Grand Larceny instead of the other numerous crimes he could have been arrested for in this circumstance. Also it was discussed that even the performative image of Sewally in the tabloid takes on a different iconography than the repetitive image of the gendered male black masculinity equated to grotesque or dangerous. The image in this case is actually closer to the images in of French models displaying a morally appropriate femininity that does not match the image’s title of Man-Monster. I was unclear as to why or how the repetitive image in this instance is disrupted. It seemed that in historical records, and by what Professor Nyoung’o shares with us, that the acknowledged participation of the johns, police officer, and the police officer’s brother is left out of the performative narrative of the law with great intention. I wonder what, if any correlations there were between the dismissal of that unacknowledged information and the disruption of the repetitive image that was brought up in during to the lecture. This brought up the question of what implications this has for the historic figure our current President and the performative archetype which his role in the public sphere will produce.
Through presenting examples of the Sewally archetype image resurfacing as a hand-drawing and then, even as a tattoo on a queer white woman, Nyoung’o might be asking us to consider how these images talk back to the notion of amalgamation which during Sewally’s time “functioned primarily as an index of this impending chaos, not as literal reproduction across the color line.”(99) speak to the chaos that the election of a black president is might be ensuing across the miscegenation of time. I think we can make connections between the moral entrepreneurs that appears during the time of the abolotionsit to the current state of affairs where even Obama’s blackness stirs up “moral panic” even among other groups of black identified individuals. The texts leaves me interested in understanding how the performative archetype will operate in the “national fantasy of transcending race” and what of the performance will go on to remain and be reproduced.
Works Cited
Nyong’o, Tavia. “In Night’s Eye: Amalgamation, Respectability, and Shame.” The Amalgamation Waltz: Race, Performance, and the Ruses of Memory. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009.
Nyong’o, Tavia. “Introduction: Antebellum Genealogies of the Hybrid Future.” The Amalgamation Waltz: Race, Performance, and the Ruses of Memory. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009.