Resisting simplification at every turn, Darkening Mirrors deftly describes the complicated negotiations Depression-era African-American performers entered into with the hopes of incorporating themselves within a national body. The desire for national inclusion often meant that the performers participated in a culture of US imperialism even as they fought for racial equality and worked to build international coalitions among people of colour. Batiste's study considers how African-American Depression-era performers presented themselves on stage and screen as US citizens and international actors while contending with factors that intercede in the formation of national identity, from ‘entrapping discourses’, including ‘primitivism, expansion and its very westerliness, orientalism, and ethnographic representation’, to ‘the imaginative process’ and ‘the media’ (p. xv). Taking an unpopular stance, the book claims that ‘colonized people were at times invested in or complicit with power’ (p. 4). To offer a full understanding of the dynamic ways in which performance practices mediate, produce and consolidate power, Batiste examines how the multiple positions actors occupy in any given moment function to reproduce ‘imperial identity even as they contested, changed, and undermined it’ (p. 25).
After establishing the theoretical ground of the argument and offering a prehistory to Depression-era performance through an overview of the Harlem Renaissance and the performance practices of Paul Robeson and Josephine Baker, chapter 1 examines the depiction of western expansion in three black films, a theme returned to in Chapter 3. Batiste argues that the representation of western expansion allows black performers to situate themselves as modern subjects and to counter their exclusion from discourses of nationalism. The imperialist drive for expansion functions internationally in chapter 3, which explores the 1938 Chicago Federal Theater revival of the classic British operetta The Mikado. Keeping intact the orientalism of the original, in the Chicago production ‘African Americans seemed to possess hyperperformative bodies able to carry multiple cultural and national meanings on the stage’ (p. 134). Similarly focusing on how black performers adopt degraded identities as a mechanism to solidify their national belonging, chapter 2 considers the representation of two Federal Theater plays that depict the Haitian Revolution and chapter 6 examines the film Stormy Weather. Both chapters analyse production processes from the mandates on the Federal Theater to the biases and protocols of Hollywood film-making that layer the performances and their receptions with meaning. Chapters 4 and 5 examine how black artists formulate black internationalism against the backdrop of ethnographic representation. Chapter 4 focuses on ‘Katherine Dunham's ethnographic research and performance in the 1930s’, while chapter 5 takes as its subject the film The Devil's Daughter. The chapters consider the implicit imperialism at the core of anthropology and the ways black performers deployed ethnography to imagine ‘modern identity, national belonging, and diaspora’ (p. 167).
Darkening Mirrors is a thoughtful and rigorous study of an underexamined era of black performance. Batiste's book not only draws attention to an all-too-frequently neglected body of work, it also offers a theoretical corrective to the impulse to position black cultural workers as either heroes or villains.
