Signifyin(g) Ritual: Subverting Stereotypes, Salvaging Icons

Abstract

In recent decades, at least one groundbreaking work of black theater has caught fire, engendering a new genre and/or body of work. The 1950s yielded A Raisin in the Sun, the '60s Dutchman, the '70s for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow was enuf, and the '80s The Colored Museum. When The Colored Museum made its off-Broadway debut in 1986, Newsweek theater critic Jack Kroll hailed playwright George C. Wolfe as a bold new voice in black theatre (85). Wolfe's razor-edged satire, which explores the sometimes painful contradictions of being black in America, has inspired a number of writers to expand on a theme he introduced--the ritual of assessing the value of the culture's daunting legacy of stereotypes and icons. The premise of The Colored Museum involves exhibiting culturally specific characters, situations, and behaviors with the goal of having African Americans evaluate them to determine which are assets and which are detrimental to our progress. As part of a younger generation, Wolfe, rather than being paralyzed by the spell of shame, has consciously chosen to grapple with racial and gender stereotypes in order to move forward freely. His work evokes the iconic figure of the Mammy (Aunt Ethel and Aunt Jemima) but reserves in-depth investigations for her descendants--Mama, Topsy Washington, Walter-Lee-Beau-Willie, Miss Roj, et al. The play ends by asking us which cultural baggage we, as a people, wish to claim and which we want to discard. The approaching millennium seemingly provides added incentive for the timeliness of this ritual of inventory and assessment. Wolfe did not write the play with such a lofty agenda in mind, however. His goals were more personal: I want to remove these dead, stale, empty icons standing in the doorway, blocking me from my truth (Wolfe, qtd. in Kroll 85). Stereotypes, in addition to being limiting and reductionist, often provoke powerful feelings of shame and anxiety in people, and in this way can be crippling inhibitors which undermine self-esteem, ambition, and progress. Wolfe's play is an attempt to exorcise the limitations that stereotypes place on people in general, and artists in particular. Although The Colored Museum established a formidable starting point, the exorcism of racist black stereotypes was a task too enormous to be accomplished with one work. Other dramatists working in the genre include Robert Alexander (I Ain't Yo' Uncle--The New Jack Revisionist Uncle Tom's Cabin), Matt Robinson (The Confessions of Stepin Fetchit), Michael Henry Brown (King of Coons), Bob Devin Jones (Uncle Bends: A Home-Cooked Negro Narrative), Carlyle Brown (The Little Tommy Parker Celebrated Colored Minstrel Show), Breena Clarke and Glenda Dickerson (Re/membering Aunt Jemima: A Menstrual Show), Marcia L. Leslie (The Trial of One Short-Sighted Black Woman vs. Mammy Louise and Safreeta Mae), and Kim Dunbar (Porch Monkey) is a well-established ritual deeply rooted in the African American ethos. In The Monkey, Henry Louis Gates argues that African American literature is double voiced, with texts talking to other texts, offering critique and revision. The process of repetition and revision with a signal difference Gates terms signifyin(g). Gates himself signifies on the work of other scholars, notably Roger D. Abrahams, whose attempts to define signifyin(g) preceded his own: The name Signifying Monkey shows [the hero] to be a trickster, signifying being the language of trickery, that set of words or gestures which arrives at direction through indirection. ... signal aspects of [Abrahams'] extensive definitions [include the fact that] ... Signifyin(g) can mean any number of things ... [including the] ability to talk with great innuendo. (74-75) In 1992, Harry J. Elam, Jr., applied Gates's theory to African American theatre, more specifically to The Colored Museum. …