Seeing Race in Post-Racial America: Spectatorship and Visibility of the Racial Experience in Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ An Octoroon (2014)

Abstract

Abstract: This article examines the theatrical representation of race and its political implications in Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ An Octoroon (2014), a modern reworking of Dion Boucicault’s play The Octoroon (1859). It offers a critical analysis of An Octoroon that compels readers to recognize that race, although a product of historical construction, holds significant real-world implications. The discussion of the play begins with its prologue, the importance of which has not been addressed sufficiently by critics. After delving into Jacobs-Jenkins’ diagnosis of colorblind American society through his alter-ego character, BJJ, the essay examines how Boucicault’s original play presents an ambiguous gaze that creates a masking practice often overlapping with colorblind subjects who refuse to address the existing racial inequality and prejudice that Jacobs-Jenkins critiques. Despite The Octoroon ’s sympathetic treatment of the mixed-race heroine’s suffering body, Boucicault’s stage version gradually endorses a white hegemony that defines race as an invisible essence while separating the white audience from the racialized spectacle. The final section revisits An Octoroon and argues that the adaptation’s use of the oppositional gaze and the materiality of a photograph as a reflective visual medium challenges the easy separation between the spectacle of race and the perspectives of white viewers.