Racial Performance Research Articles

The Jim Crow routine: everyday performances of race and the end of segregation in Mississippi

The Jim Crow routine: everyday performances of race and the end of segregation in Mississippi

Kathleen M. Gough, Kinship and Performance in the Black and Green Atlantic: Haptic Allegories

ABSTRACT: Kathleen M. Gough’s ambitious and evocative book offers new analytical engagements with the performance of gender, race, and identity among key Irish and African American figures from the 1850s through the present day.

William McCary, Lucy Stanton, and the Performance of Race at Winter Quarters and Beyond

William McCary, Lucy Stanton, and the Performance of Race at Winter Quarters and Beyond

Performances of social class, race and gender through youth subculture: putting structure back in to youth subcultural studies

This paper aims to advance debates in youth studies about the contemporary relevance of social structures of class, race and gender to the formation of youth subcultures. I demonstrate how drawing on a cultural class analysis and education literature on learner identities and performativity can be productive in theorising the continued significance of class, and indeed also race and gender in young people's lives. In examining school-based friendships and (sub)cultural forms through empirical research in urban schools, I argue that not only are young people's subcultural groups structured by class, race and gender but also they are integral to the production of these identities. By examining the discursive productions of two school-based subcultures as examples: the ‘Smokers’ and the ‘Football’ crowd, I further argue that these identity positions embody resources or capitals which have differing value in the context of the urban school and thus demonstrate how race, class and gender privilege are maintained and reproduced through youth subculture.

Mindy Calling: Size, Beauty, Race in The Mindy Project

Mindy Calling: Size, Beauty, Race in The Mindy Project

Performing the Temple of Liberty: Slavery, Theater, and Popular Culture in London and Philadelphia, 1760–1850 by Jenna M. Gibbs (review)

Performing the Temple of Liberty: Slavery, Theater, and Popular Culture in London and Philadelphia, 1760-1850. By Jenna M. Gibbs. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014. Pp. 328. $55.00.)Reviewed by Peter P. ReedSamuel Jennings's 1790 painting Liberty Displaying the Arts and Sciences, or, 7 he Genius of A merica Encouraging the Emancipation of the Blacks offers a striking point of entry into Jenna Gibbs's excellent new study of trans-Atlantic performances of race. The painting, as Gibbs explains, imagines the relationship between Atlantic humanism and chattel slavery. A classically draped female Liberty sits among the neo-classical props of western humanism-musical instruments, architectural ornaments, art supplies, books, even a liberty pole represent AngloAmerican artistic, scientific, and political achievements. Most strikingly, Liberty inclines benevolently toward a genuflecting black audience, slaves or former slaves, more of whom remain outside in the scene's open-air background.That image of a white feminized Liberty offering the fruits of the Enlightenment to slaves, as Gibbs explains, gives tangible foim to some of the book's central questions. How, for example, did the AngloAdantic world imagine knowledge, culture, progress, and liberty? How did neoclassical humanist ideologies intermingle with the emergent national ideologies of the Revolutionary era? Most importantly, what happened when those concepts came into contact with the people, practices, and discourses of slavery, abolitionism, and racial revolution?For Gibbs, the answers to these questions lie not only in the conventional archive of intellectual and literary history, but also in the world of embodied performance, stage pageantiy, plebeian poetry, and popular images. Its sustained attention to the rich interplay between performances and other kinds of cultural phenomena seems one of the most distinctive contributions of Gibbs's study. In the style of Jean-Christophe Agnew's Worlds Apart: The Market and the Theater in Anglo-American T hought, 1550-1750 (Cambridge, UK, 1988) and Jeffrey H. Richards's Drama, Theatre, and Identity in the American Nexo Republic (Cambridge, UK, 2008), Gibbs recognizes that U.S. theatre shared dramatic content and institutional form with its trans-Atlantic interlocutors. Racial performance, however, has long been treated as a distinctive feature of American theatre, and the study of blackface minstrelsy has only gradually outgrown its reliance on national frameworks. After all, as Eric Lott persuasively argued, minstrelsy marketed its invented origins in southern U.S. slavery to working-class white Americans. At the same time, the theatre of racial mimicry also had roots in Anglo-Atlantic folk customs and English pantomime, as Dale Cockrell and John O'Brien have shown. Blackface, moreover, became one of the trans-Atlantic entertainment world's most successful acts, as W. T. Lhamon demonstrates. Gibbs's study avoids searching for folkloric proto-minstrelsy altogether, imagining the history of racial performance as something that from its earliest moments traversed Atlantic routes and overleapt national ideologies.Supported by a thorough and imaginatively assembled range of published and unpublished archival sources, Performing the Temple of Liberty focuses on the performance cultures and intellectual life of London and Philadelphia. Centering on two of the era's most energetic centers of theatrical and cultural production means that Gibbs's study neither promises nor delivers the circum-Atlantic variety of the work of Joseph Roach or, more recently, Elizabeth Maddock Dillon. …

Performative Affectivity and theLetitia Ernestine BrownDivorce Case

AbstractThis article introduces the now-forgotten but then-sensational 1928 Letitia Ernestine Brown v. Carlton Curtis, alias “Harry Brown” separation suit in order to argue for a revitalized theory of the performativity of race, one secured not by the compulsory repetition of social norms (or their subversive undoing) but by the unritualized expression of wants, feelings, and desires. I place this trial alongside the better known Rhinelander v. Rhinelander divorce trial of 1925, which has been an influential site for scholars interested in demonstrating race as performance, whiteness as property, and the provisionality of the color line. While the theories of racial performativity developed through analyses of the Rhinelander case are excellent at delineating the coercive force of performativity, they have been less attuned to performativity’s affective registers. Moreover, such scholarship often unwittingly reconfirms racial performance as tragedy and limits the affective scene of miscegenation to one pr...

Japanese American Beauty Pageants and Minstrel Shows: The Performance of Gender and Race by Nisei Youth during World War II

This essay examines Japanese American youth culture as it was presented in incarceration-camp newspapers. It argues that these publications offered a unique forum for racially suspect Nisei youngsters to represent their bodies, culture, and ideals as fundamentally all-American. Through these publications many Japanese American youth crafted a look that conformed, as much as possible, with white mainstream conceptions of what an American looked like. As such, this essay examines clothing styles, beauty practices, and other cultural means that Japanese American youth used to craft an image of themselves as ideal American citizens. In addition, this essay explores how incarceration-camp newspapers often went a step further by covering the peculiar nature of other American racial minorities, whom they depicted as less patriotic and less American than Japanese American youth. These newspapers reported on minstrel shows put on by Nisei high school students, printed blackface cartoon strips, and ran editorials that critiqued elements of black youth culture. In this way, incarceration-camp newspapers attempted to rework America’s complex racial hierarchy by suggesting that Japanese Americans posed little threat to the United States, while African Americans—the nation’s historic racial other—should be watched with greater suspicion.

Gender (plays) in Tanjung Bara mining camp in Eastern Kalimantan, Indonesia

All mining settlements are heavily gendered, not only because of the masculinity that the industry cultivates and flaunts, but also as a result of the power of capital manifested in the gendered class stratification of labour and space. When global capital penetrates remote resource peripheries in poorer countries, it also ushers mining experts, who are usually expatriate men from older industrialised and/or richer nations, into these areas. The cauldron of race–gender–class within the relatively small geographical space of the mining camp is worth exploring through a postcolonial feminist geographical perspective. This article explores the articulation and enactments of race–gender–class within such a location, the Tanjung Bara mining camp in eastern Kalimantan, Indonesia, where economic opportunities offered by the mining boom have blurred the insider–outsider dichotomy by attracting migrants from across Indonesia as well as from overseas. It analyses the performances of differential power enjoyed by women and men, foreigners and Indonesians within multiple sites in Tanjung Bara. In particular, it illuminates the sites of social interactions: the dining hall, the tennis ground, the golf course, the swimming pool and the poolside bar. The article suggests that place, and how each place is accessed by different actors, is central in shaping how individuals perform gender within mining contexts. But, at the same time it complicates the place-based binary performances of race by exploring how individuals continuously rewrite the strict but unwritten codes of behaviour.

Gettin’ Down Home With the Neelys: gastro-porn and televisual performances of gender, race, and sexuality

This article illuminates how performances of gender, race, and sexuality are integrated with representations of food and food performance in contemporary American cooking television. Interrogating the intersections of food, gender, race, sexuality, and performance, this essay explores how the cable-television show, Down Home with the Neelys, depicts a nouveau gastro-porn anchored in the perceived pornographic level of blackness itself. The author reveals the ways that food and performances of food become a medium of gendering and racialization employed by American popular media. Through the lens of reality television, shows like Down Home (re)produce a certain type of black heterosexuality and gendered enactments of domesticity and space, while challenging dominant televisual reflections of black love and labor. The author argues that the Neelys self-consciously employ a vernacular aesthetic performative of “down home” (a uniquely classed, temporally–spatially situated, and sexualized blackness) to exploit the phenomenon of gastro-porn in a highly lucrative performance that signals the entangled artifice of gender, race, and sexuality. More than offering culinary expertise and education, such cooking instruction reveals the pedagogy of gender, race, and sexuality as visual lessons of a complex and contradictory authenticity. This essay reveals television cooking shows as critical sites for considering the domestic laboring of gendered and racialized sexualities. In particular, shows like Down Home evince the ways that race continues to be rendered in visual terms and the enduring edibility of blackness.

From whiteness to diversity: crossing the racial threshold in bicentennial Argentina

This article examines recent transformations on the discourses of race and nation in bicentennial Argentina, which have shifted from the notion of a fundamentally white nation to an assertion of its racial and cultural diversity. I examine the production of race in contemporary institutional and non-institutional practices that challenge the discourses of modernity according to which Argentina is a white, homogenous and Europeanized nation. The article focuses on a set of cultural manifestations involving Japanese Argentines that – as non-traditional actors in the racial and national stages and as ‘desirable’ immigrants – reveal some inherent fissures in the current official narrative that ostensibly progresses from homogeneity to diversity, and from exclusion to inclusion. By observing the performativity of race and a non-constructivist understanding of race embedded within these cultural manifestations, I argue that the newly multicultural nation continues to inherit its mechanisms of racial production from the modern nation.

Introduction: On Black Performance

Historically aligned with hypervisibility, blackness places the individual on display. Cultural workers have used the transformative power of performance-repeated actions presented before an audience that carry with them the history of their recurrence--to shape viewers' and listeners' perceptions of blackness. Working against the notion that categories of identity, including racial ones, are fixed, performance strategically uses improvisation to instate and destabilize subjectivity. While performance studies is a relatively new field of inquiry, performance has been fundamental to the revolutionary character of black culture from its beginnings. As Cedric Robinson theorizes in Black Marxism: the Making of the Black Radical Tradition, evidence of the tradition's persistence and ideological vitality among the Black slave masses was to be found not only in the rebellions and the underground but as well in the shouts, the spirituals, the sermons, and the very textual body of Black Christianity (311). Along a similar line, Saidiya Hartman's groundbreaking analysis in Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America demonstrates the ubiquitous intersection of subjection, subject formation, and display in black people's earliest experiences in the United States. While Hartman and Robinson may not consider themselves black performance theorists, I include them here to demarcate a line of inquiry pervasive in black studies. Calling attention to performance as a theory that is multisensory, Fred Moten locates an a acoustic materiality that emanates from the scenes of subjection Hartman describes. The sounds that echo throughout In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition necessarily belong to a history of revolutionary action that emerges in relation to degrading and dehumanizing images of black people. As scripted forms of race continue to tear their ugly heads in Will.i.am's blackface performance at the MTV 2010 video music awards alongside a Venus Hottentot-esque Nictd Minaj, the time is ripe to investigate the past, present, and future of black performance and its relationship to the constitution of identity, aesthetic forms, and freedom movements. The articles in this special issue of African American Review demonstrate the centrality of performance to black cultural production from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century. They show how artists have attenuated the hold on blackness on display atop the auction block, as animated in the soft-shoeing of the blackface minstrel stage, or personified in a grin plastered on a bottle of maple syrup. Instead, the authors reaffirm blackness as a process, following E. Patrick Johnson's Appropriating Blackness: Performance Politics and Authenticity (2003) and Daphne Brooks's Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Performances of Race and Freedom, 1850-1910 (2006). Redefining, reshaping, and re-signifying blackness, the cultural workers examined in this special issue make use of the fluidity of identity categories in order to liberate subjectivities and collectivities. …

Problematising the role of the white researcher in social justice research

This article contributes to the debate on decolonising methodologies in qualitative research by considering how a white researcher can try and destabilise white supremacy when explicitly conducting research with social justice aims. It draws on data from a recent ethnographic study of minority ethnic pupils’ experiences in secondary schools in England and interrogates the tensions between the research aim to challenge racial stereotyping in education and issues of race and power emerging from the research process. This article investigates specifically the ways in which interaction is shaped by – frequently hidden, particularly to those privileged by them – structures of white supremacy. Developing an innovative analytical framework which draws on insights from both critical race theory and the work of Judith Butler, the researcher problematises issues of voice and representation in conducting social justice research. It is argued that an approach which engages with elements of both structural and post-structural theory allows a more critical exploration of white supremacy through an understanding of the performativity of race. The author works towards a possible research methodology which not only takes into account, but also tries to destabilise processes of white supremacy in research by both recognising participants’ efforts to do this, and trying to make researchers better able to take responsibility for their own complicity in perpetuating unequal racial structures. It is argued that such a recognition by white researchers will necessarily be an uncomfortable process.

Means of Detection: A Critical Archiving of Black Feminism and Punk Performance

This article recalibrates genealogies of punk by focusing on a black feminist reading of four punk performances. By spending time with Poly Styrene, Tamar-kali, M.J. Zilla, and Janelle Monáe and the sound they produce, the historical rendering of punk takes on a new shape, one that is more inclusive of women of color and the presence of black female sexualities. As a way of drawing together black feminism and punk scholarship, two separate uses of a metaphoric “black hole” are analyzed and become entangled in the act of archiving these black feminist contributions to the world of punk rock. Evelynn Hammonds attends to the “black (w)hole” trope to prompt more analysis and admission of a wider range of black female sexualities and their potential. The other, by Dick Hebdige, uses “black hole” to operate as a challenge for punk to carefully unravel the logic of origin, race, and racism. The “black (w)hole” trope pivots around two senses of “record”: the record(ing) of sound and the historical record. This trope, and its play on space, then turns on the mechanisms and performances of race, gender, and sexuality that simultaneously engage not only feminism's pasts and futures, but punk's as well. The materialization of sound and its aesthetic becomes key in this engagement with black feminism and its performances of resistance. What finally emerges is the question that Jacques Derrida came to when faced with the idea of the origin of Nature and the supplement of its presence in performance: is it possible to arrive at either an origin or a presence (even one that has been absent) when the logic of its supplement continually adds and subtracts? What then does the space of the supplement offer?

Organizational (Performance] of Race): The Co-Constitutive Performance of Race and School Board in Durham, NC

This essay addresses the co-constitutive performance of race and organization through a close reading of two racially divided Durham, NC school board meetings that took place in 2005. The analysis is grounded in an analytical framework that treats performance as organizing and organization as performance. We demonstrate how conflict over the “proper” performance of a school board, as either a business emphasizing efficiency or a public service emphasizing efficacy, is simultaneously a negotiation of racialized subject positions. Our analysis illustrates how racial identities are made meaningful in a contemporary context, as racial identities are taken up, mapped onto, and resisted by individuals and their bodies.

Caffeine influence on the performance of the 5000m race

Background Caffeine is an ergogenic aid used to enhance athletic performance. It has central, intracellular and peripheral effects, which interfere on the prolongation and perception of fatigue during exhaustive efforts. Moreover, it hones and optimizes the cardiovascular, the endocrine, the muscular and the central nervous systems. Thus, its utilization can reduce the time of racing for tri-athletes and other sportsperson.

Bulldaggers, Pansies, and Chocolate Babies: Performance, Race, and Sexuality in the Harlem Renaissance (review)

Reviewed by: Bulldaggers, Pansies, and Chocolate Babies: Performance, Race, and Sexuality in the Harlem Renaissance Margo Natalie Crawford James F. Wilson . Bulldaggers, Pansies, and Chocolate Babies: Performance, Race, and Sexuality in the Harlem Renaissance. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010. Pp. 195, illustrated. $49.50 (Hb). Now that we know that the 1920s and 1930s Harlem Renaissance was not heteronormative, how do we analyse the cultural movement's fluid performance of sexuality and race without fixing and normalizing its queerness? How do we begin to develop a language that does not name the unnamed and unintentionally translate the performance in cultural movements into a non-moving object of study? In Harlem Renaissance studies, we have "looked for Langston" and "queered the color line," and now we need more studies like James Wilson's Bulldaggers, Pansies, and Chocolate Babies: Performance, Race, [End Page 399] and Sexuality in the Harlem Renaissance that approach a queering of the queer. Wilson does not make a meta-claim about the queerness of the Harlem Renaissance. As opposed to a relying on the frame "queer," he foregrounds "drag" as he makes us think about drag as, literally, the "underground" weight countering the ascendancy of racial uplift. Wilson's study ranges from the drag of Lulu Belle (the white woman impersonation, in blackface, of a sexually free, black working class woman) to the "bulldagger" drag of Gladys Bentley. His focus on the drag of the Harlem Renaissance, as well as the touristic aspects of the movement, leads to an appreciation of the drag performances by white and black performers as the deformation and slowing down of the normative white viewer / black performer tourist show. He reads Alice Handy (W.C. Handy's daughter) as the "Madam" (a most respectable one) who promised to provide "thrills" during her guided tours of Harlem. As he uncovers the eroticism in advertisements, like Handy's, for Harlem tours, he opens up a new way of thinking about the tourism that shaped this movement. There were constant detours, taken by white and black people, during the tours. People took everyday detours around the tours that have now become the dominant archive of the cultural movement. Wilson uses the term "semi-private" as he moves away from the rent parties that can be documented through public invitations to the rent parties that were "semi-private," anti-heteronormative, and advertised through word-of-mouth underground channels, invitations that cannot now be translated into a concrete archive. These other rent parties remain semi-private as Wilson analyses them. The beauty of the text is his impulse not to convert the happenings into a normative archive. As he explores the happenings, some of the most compelling parts of the text are the stories and figures that can only be partially known through the records of the movement. We can, for instance, only partially know Sepia Gloria Swanson, the black, male cross-dresser whose performances as a white woman diva lit up the Harlem underworld. Wilson's analysis of the unknowable as the unrecorded fully surfaces when he focuses on Wallace Thurman's collaboration with William Jourdan Rapp in the writing of the play Harlem (1929). Thurman, in an unpublished essay entitled "My Collaborator," laments the lack of a "movietone camera" that, during his writing sessions with Rapp, could have captured the "picture of Bill Rapp, excited over the possibilities or difficulties of a scene, leaping from his chair, pacing the floor, frantically gesturing the while he shouts Negro dialect with decided East Side overtone" (56). In the most engaging parts of Bulldaggers, Pansies, and Chocolate Babies, Wilson adopts the approach of an alternative type of movie camera that reconstructs the gestures, "leaping," and "pacing" that produced the written texts and the formally staged performances. The study sometimes fully gestures toward the [End Page 400] anti-textual performance-studies approach, encapsulated in Diana Taylor's insistence that the archive cannot contain the "live" (Taylor 173). Wilson's analysis of Gladys Bentley adds a new twist to our understanding of the tension between the live and the archive. Years after her Harlem Renaissance performance of the butch swagger, Bentley, in 1958, performed heteronormativity in a "live," television...

The uncanny character of race: an exploration of UK preparedness through youth performance

Performance is a key tool in emergency preparedness and the rehearsal of professional response, simultaneously raising questions about the practice of cultural assumptions in this context. Usually the actors in preparedness exercises are civil servants who perform the work of the nihilistic imagination in often-apocalyptic fictional scenarios, performing the unthinkable without an audience. Their improvised words and actions reveal decisions of life and death made by the few on behalf of the many which are then filtered, through preparedness publications, to the public. This article examines a public preparedness exercise called Emergency Exercise 2010: Operation Snowman, which took place during the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) Festival of Social Science in 2010. It formed part of an ESRC-funded project, ‘Preparedness Pedagogies, and Race: An Interdisciplinary Approach’ (2009–10) which was informed by Critical Race Theory (CRT) and psychoanalytic interpretation. The exercise was held in a local authority nuclear bunker in Sussex. Young drama students were invited to perform in the roles of preparedness professionals to explore the validity of cultural assumptions perceived in preparedness exercises. Through the use of Freud's writing on the uncanny, this article explores the performance of race in the preparedness exercise, focusing in particular on the uncanny role assigned to a black minority ethnic (BME) corpse in this context. Following Zizek's analysis of the relationship between government and cultural industries (2002, 16), this paper critiques such a use of theatre application as a tool for the elite and argues for the application of othered performance for public preparedness.

No safe spaces: re-casting race, ethnicity, and nationality in American theater

No Safe Spaces opens up a conversation beyond narrow polemics . . . Although cross-racial casting has been the topic of heated discussion, little sustained scholarship addresses both the historical precedents and theoretical dimensions. Pao illustrates the tensions and contradictions inherent not only in stage representations, but also in the performance of race in everyday life. A wonderful book whose potential readership goes well beyond theater and performance scholars.---Josephine Lee, University of MinnesotaNon-traditional casting, increasingly practiced in American theater, is both deeply connected to our country's racial self-image(s) and woefully under-theorized. Pao takes on the practice in its entirety to disentangle the various strands of this vitally important issue.---Karen Shimakawa, New York UniversityNo Safe Spaces looks at one of the most radical and enduring changes introduced during the Civil Rights era---multiracial and cross-racial casting practices in American theater. The move to cast Latino/a, African American, and Asian American actors in classic stage works by and about white Europeans and Americans is viewed as both social and political gesture and artistic innovation. Nontraditionally cast productions are shown to have participated in the national dialogue about race relations and ethnic identity and served as a source of renewed creativity for the staging of the canonical repertory.Multiracial casting is explored first through its history, then through its artistic, political, and pragmatic dimensions. Next, the book focuses on case studies from the dominant genres of contemporary American theater: classical tragedy and comedy, modern domestic drama, antirealist drama, and the Broadway musical, using a broad array of archival source materials to enhance and illuminate its arguments.Angela C. Pao is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at Indiana University.A volume in the series Theater: Theory/Text/Performance

The Amalgamation Waltz: Race, Performance, and the Ruses of Memory (review)

Reviewed by: The Amalgamation Waltz: Race, Performance, and the Ruses of Memory Sika Alaine Dagbovie Tavia Nyong’o. The Amalgamation Waltz: Race, Performance, and the Ruses of Memory. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2009. 230 pp. $22.50. In one scene in Ishmael Reed’s Flight to Canada (1976), Mammy Barracuda, a slave, and Abraham Lincoln waltz out of a room while Barracuda sings “Hello Abe” to the tune of “Hello, Dolly!” Her white master, Master Swille, and another slave, Uncle Robin, joyfully clap along. The scene, ludicrous and absurd, in some ways speaks to Tavia Nyongo’o’s description of what the “ ‘amalgamation waltz’ is meant to evoke: a momentum that spins the body into and out of the symbolic order, a performance that becomes a mirror in which seeing and being convene, without ever quite converging” (103). While Reed’s pairing satirizes Lincoln’s assumed affinity with blacks, Nyong’o’s discussion of antebellum “amalgamation waltzes” underscores the panicked public discourse about racial hybridity. Nyong’o’s The Amalgamation Waltz: Race, Performance, and the Ruses of Memory examines responses to the threat of [End Page 317] amalgamation in the U. S., exploring the performativity of race. “The external, intersubjective, and embodied aspects of social remembering,” Nyong’o declares, “are critical to the ways in which I make use of performance and performativity in this study” (13). The first half of Nyong’o’s title draws on the title of a nineteenth-century political cartoon by E. W. Clay, An Amalgamation Waltz. This satirical cartoon attacked abolitionists’ views of black freedom and equality by illustrating the supposed hideousness of black and white interracial couples dancing “cheek-to-cheek, breast-to-breast” (81–82). Nyong’o informs us that the waltz was initially seen as a sensual, transgressive, and threatening dance in its European birthplace; it thus serves as apt metaphor for thinking about racial amalgamation and performance in the U. S. With a mixed-race president, a myriad of mixed-race memoirs and biographies, and ongoing academic inquiry into and public interest in racial mixing, racial crossings, and racial identity, The Amalgamation Waltz is timely and relevant. Nyong’o’s goal is to “both assert and show the performative effects of history rather than simply add to the weight of history’s pedagogy” (7). To this end, the book’s four body chapters chronologically examine four “historical flashpoints”: competing and conflicting representations of Crispus Attucks, black abolitionism in the 1830s, blackface minstrelsy in the 1850s, and present-day artistic responses to race and racism in the antebellum South. Throughout the book, Nyong’o employs the motif of the “circum-Atlantic fold,” a metaphor that concerns both time and space. As he explains, “[b]etween the potential and performance of black freedom . . . there lies the hollow of a fold within which many of our conceptualizations of race, inheritance, and hybridity were formulated” (18). In chapter one, “The Mirror of Liberty: Constituent Power and the American Mongrel,” Nyong’o explores contradictory portrayals of Crispus Attucks, the first martyr of the American Revolution, and demonstrates how the figure of Attucks has been (mis)construed and reproduced in the fold. Examining various illustrations of the Boston Massacre, Nyongo’o discusses how artists of the late eighteenth century (such as Henry Pelham and Paul Revere) and nineteenth-century abolitionist texts (such as the frontispiece of William Cooper Nell’s The Colored Patriots of the American Revolution) portray Attucks as whitewashed, mulatto, or black, according to their political purposes. Nyongo’o highlights how Attucks (and his “blackness”) has been both included and excluded from pictorial representations, revealing a national ambivalence about this revolutionary exemplar. He ends by describing how Attucks was recovered in black collective memory, a move prompted by black abolitionist William Cooper Nell. In chapter two, “In Night’s Eye: Amalgamation, Respectability, and Shame,” Nyong’o asserts that the 1830s present a unique decade because of its “lawless violence” and the “moral status of the scapegoated minority” (72). He reminds his readers that abolitionists saw themselves as morality enforcers. Not all abolitionists were amalgamationists; many abolitionists portrayed the South as a cesspool of cross-racial immorality, pointing to the sexual exploitation of black...