"Talking B(l)ack": Construction of Gender and Race in the Plays of Eulalie Spence

Abstract

\ “Talking B(l)ack” Construction of Gender and Race in the Plays of Eulalie Spence —ADRIENNE C. MACKI Every dialect, every language, is a way of thinking. To speak means to assume a culture. —FRANTZ FANON, Black Skin, W hite Mask s Although Eulalie Spence was writing at the same time as other prominent black playwrights and authors, such as Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and James Weldon Johnson, her plays have often been overlooked by contemporary scholars, who tend to dismiss her work because of its inclusion of black dialect (with its echoes of minstrelsy) and because of her failure during her lifetime to sustain a career in theatre. However, by creating theatre for African American audiences through her work with the Little Negro Theatre movement in the 1920s, Spence provided an alternative to stereotypical black minstrelsy. Moreover , by codifying the performance of black identity through the use of dialect, she underscored race consciousness. According to linguist John Edwards, language serves as an instrument of communication and a system enabling communities to maintain their identity.1 Spence’s inclusion of dialect functions not only as a representation of African American identity but also as an act of resistance. “Talking black” enables Spence to dramatize self-actualized black women who ¤ght against oppression and consumption while struggling to maintain racial and gender subjectivity. Yet, at a time when black authors and artists were encouraged to think in terms { 86 } of racial uplift, and when black dialect was becoming a subject for anthropological study—a relic of folkways—the use of black dialect onstage was at once a bold and a dangerous choice. Her use of black dialect empowered Spence and her audience on two levels: she claimed both a racial and a feminist identity on the stage, and she created an intellectual and linguistic path for others to follow. Her theatricalcontributions as a dramatist, actress, and director have earned Spence a rightful place in literary and dramaturgical history. While her record of production is especially noteworthy within the context of the art theatre movement, where art was set against commercialism, it is more important in terms of African American theatre history.This history is characterized by multiple attempts to redress what Stuart Hall calls the “politics of representation” as well as to identify how images of blackness were produced and how representations of race were conveyed.2 Black theatre artists were continually aware that their racial representation and identi¤cation were simultaneously acts of social protest and artistic expression. Even so, con®ict surrounded the role and responsibility of black drama in terms of whether theatre should employ art for propaganda or create art for its own sake. As a result, interpretation and promotion of folk culture were especially vexed concerns for African Americans and the Little Negro Theatre. The inclusion of dialect only exacerbated these concerns . Although black audiences and practitioners contested folk dialect in the mid- to late nineteenth century and the early twentieth century, it continued to appear in race drama. In fact, the connection of dialect with cultural history (particularly a diasporic history) and how dialect as a linguistic concept preserves memory emerge as signi¤cant facets of Spence’s dramaturgy. Spence’s work serves as a paradigm to examine the presence of dialect on the stage in black drama, taking into account how linguistic patterns con¤rm ethnicity onstage and what that suggests in performance. Whereas the dramas of Zora Neale Hurston present black dialect in the context of an anthropological experiment, and the comedies of Bert Williams and George Walker trade on its comic values, the dramas of Eulalie Spence position dialect at the intersection of race, ethnicity, gender, and geography. Dialect enables her to subvert stereotypes, as in Her (1927): “we’re colored through an’ through . . . ’sceptin’ that we’s allus on time”;3 and to provide social commentary , as in Fool’s Errand (1927): “Ef such doins keeps on, reckon our young people’ll be jes’ as brazen’s white folks.”4 In Spence’s plays, dialect becomes not merely a historical object but a tool for pulling a fragmented past into a more coherent future. Spence creates a distinctive diasporic language...