Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Performances of Race and Freedom, 1850-1910 (review)

Abstract

{ 159 } BOOK REV IEWS bolized by language and expression, but in both cases the women recognize a need of and an obligation to a community: in the earlier play, this presumably means a return to society. In the story, the women will create a community of their own in which they accept the child. Hinz-Bode also pays attention to how Glaspell involved her audiences in the constitution of meaning, and she suggests that Trifles and Bernice owed their success at least in part to the fact that the device of the missing protagonist— an absence—forces the spectator to participate in the reconstitution of a woman ’s story.Although she does not take up the issue of audience participation too extensively, Hinz-Bode recognizes that Glaspell’s preoccupation with the creation of meaning is perfectly dramatized by the theatrical situation. She is also aware throughout of the fact that the Provincetown Players were a community formed by actors and spectators who frequently exchanged roles. The outline of Glaspell’s biography is a sensitive summary that reappraises the life, recognizing that at most we can offer a construct and that the works must speak for themselves, the link between life and works being the need, felt by Glaspell and her protagonists, to live life to the full. There are also concise summaries of the plays and of the already published criticism, thus making Susan Glaspell and the Anxiety of Expression an ideal starting place for any student of Glaspell’s oeuvre who is not deterred by the more complex discussions informed by the different models of language. This is a well-argued and coherent study that undertakes to dispel the ambivalence and explain the complexity of Glaspell’s writing, and of her desire to create and understand meaning in a modern world; the fact that Hinz-Bode does not resolve the tensions of the individual in society that Glaspell portrayed can only be read as a tribute to Glaspell. —BARBARA OZIEBLO University of Málaga Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Performances of Race and Freedom, 1850–1910. By Daphne A. Brooks. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2006. 475 pp. $25.95 paper. Daphne Brooks’s Bodies in Dissent offers a dynamic exploration of the complex performance of race in nineteenth-century transatlantic culture. Weav- \ { 160 } BOOK REV IEWS ing together a range of archival materials and interdisciplinary approaches, Brooks offers a useful model for scholars of African-American theatre and culture . As she notes,“My aim is to make visible what was a broad and ambiguous transatlantic cultural network of racial and gender typologies and signs” (7). Brooks draws on numerous scholars, including Elin Diamond, Judith Butler, Carla Peterson, Joseph Roach, Saidiya Hartman, Valerie A. Smith, Paul Gilroy, and Marcus Wood. Her methodologies include “literary criticism, performance studies, social and political history, cultural studies, music history and musicology , theatre and dance history, and visual theory” as well as black feminist theory (7). With a less-adept scholar such a wide-ranging combination might produce an unfocused study, but Brooks’s solid archival research keeps the work grounded, while illuminating new perspectives on the material. The book’s five chapters follow both chronological and thematic trajectories , including the theme of the “phantasmagorical black body” and its links to the nineteenth-century craze for spiritualism, the politicization of race, and the advent of black feminist performance in American culture. Each chapter has a central topic (such as chapter 3’s exploration of Adah Isaacs Menken’s complex performance of race). These topics become case studies and anchors, but without constricting her work too narrowly. Chapter 1 begins with a fascinating exploration of spiritualism and segues into a discussion of Boucicault’s The Octoroon and Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Brooks argues persuasively for a connection among these three seemingly disparate phenomena. Mediums served as vessels for expressing ideas or behavior outside the norm, often crossing traditional racial, social, and gender boundaries through acts of spirit possession. Brooks suggests that Zoe in The Octoroon performed the same function in antebellum American culture, presenting an “ambiguous corporeality” that disturbed white spectators through her “spectacle of confluence” (18–19). From The Octoroon, Brooks...