Duke University Press Darkening Mirrors: Imperial Representation in Depression-Era African American Performance

In Darkening Mirrors, Stephanie Leigh Batiste examines how African Americans participated in U.S. cultural imperialism in Depression-era stage and screen performances. A population treated as second-class citizens at home imagined themselves as empowered, modern U.S. citizens and transnational actors in plays, operas, ballets, and films. Many of these productions, such as the 1938 hits Haiti and The "Swing" Mikado recruited large casts of unknown performers, involving the black community not only as spectators but also as participants. Performances of exoticism, orientalism, and primitivism are inevitably linked to issues of embodiment, including how bodies signify blackness as a cultural, racial, and global category. Whether enacting U.S. imperialism in westerns, dramas, dances, songs, jokes, or comedy sketches, African Americans maintained a national identity that registered a diasporic empowerment and resistance on the global stage. Boldly addressing the contradictions in these performances, Batiste challenges the simplistic notion that the oppressed cannot identify with oppressive modes of power and enact themselves as empowered subjects. Darkening Mirrors adds nuance and depth to the history of African American subject formation and stage and screen performance. Review " Darkening Mirrors provides insightful detailed critical commentary on theatricality and aesthetics as well as a wealth of details on the milieu and audience responses, with concentrated attention to issues related to empowerment and disempowerment. Batiste is especially strong in revealing the complicated duality for blacks in assuming the imperial culture and protesting against it."--Sandra M. Mayo "New Theatre Quarterly" "Resisting simplification at every turn, Darkening Mirrors deftly describes the complicated negotiations Depression-era African-American performers entered into with the hopes of incorporating themselves within a national body.... Darkening Mirrors is a thoughtful and rigorous study of an underexamined era of black performance. Batiste's book not only draws attention to an all-too-frequently neglected body of work, it also offers a theoretical corrective to the impulse to position black cultural workers as either heroes or villains."--Soyica Diggs Colbert "Theatre Research International" "Throughout, [Batiste's] analysis is rich and meticulous, grounded in and facile at negotiating and nuancing the subtleties of racial and postcolonial theory. Indeed, by demonstrating the variety of ways that black performers in this period not only engaged but also expanded, refined, challenged, and subverted the meaning of blackness in American culture, Batiste's book itself 'performs' important cultural work."--Lori Duin Kelly "Journal of American Culture" "What makes Darkening Mirrors an important contribution to postcolonial studies, performance studies and area studies is that it strengthens our empirical understanding of black performance past and present so as to better theorize both temporalities. Batiste implicitly expands our understanding of the governmentalities that structure modernist artistic discourse in the twentieth century. In the end, Darkening Mirrors skilfully brings together the aesthetic and national to deepen our understanding of these operations."--P. Khalil Saucier "Interventions" "What separates Batiste's work from the existing literature is her ability to pinpoint how modern black film, theater, and dance performances repurposed normative gazes, racist imagery, and dominant narratives to relocate black identities from the margins to a reimagined center.... Batiste achieves an impressive balance...."--Marvin McAllister "Journal of American History" " Darkening Mirrors is a powerful argument that during the 1930s, African American popular performers took part in U.S. imperial and nationalist projects even as they resisted the dominant culture's racism. In vivid, illuminating readings of films an