Performing blackness in Caryl Phillips’s Dancing in the Dark

Abstract

This paper investigates the theatrical stage both as a walled-in space where ethnic difference can be safely experienced and consumed, and as a gateway for black performers to achieve public visibility and recognition as appears in Caryl Phillips’s novel Dancing in the Dark (2005). Phillips’s main character puts blackface on his own black skin to handle what Edward Said would name the “anxious power” of performance; this power becomes, in Phillips’s own postcolonial rereading, a device to expose the performativity of racial borders and gateways. Here, the theatrical curtain works as a gateway to acceptance and, in some cases, integration; yet it also becomes a wall enclosing the performer in her/his own performance of “the Other”.