Racial Authenticity: The Tension between Production & Reception in the Shakespeare Archive

Abstract

It is not often that one gets to read an essay that completely challenges a common critical narrative in our field, but that is precisely what Benjamin Hilb’s essay does. Carefully delineating the way Orson Welles’s 1936 FTP production of Macbeth employed Vodou practices (specific ritualized clothing, objects, staging, music, and movement) and the seemingly ubiquitous interest in, and engagement with, West Indian politics and culture in 1920s and 1930s Harlem, Hilb warns us that our current approaches have significant blindspots and asks us to revisit the archive with fresh eyes. The common critical narrative about Welles’s so-called “Voodoo” Macbeth production is one of racist primitivism. On the one hand, scholars are quick to point out that the production employed lots of actors of colour during the height of the Depression (and was therefore very progressive). On the other hand, scholars argue that Welles’s production essentialized those actors in disturbing ways (and was therefore very regressive). Hilb effectively challenges this narrative by employing a different archive (Haitian history, religious history, and Harlem’s sociocultural history) and different theoretical frames (critical race studies, Haitian studies, and cultural studies). He implicitly asks what we can uncover and/or recover if we approach the archive through different critical and theoretical lenses. This is an important intervention that we should heed with some urgency and immediacy, especially those of us interested in early modern race studies and race in/as performance. Yet, I cannot say that I am completely convinced, because Hilb plays it a little too fast and loose with production and reception with regards to what he is calling “authenticity.” While Hilb is very convincing about the