If flesh is interrelational, the concept of skin has become, over centuries of colonial, scientific and psychoanalytic discourse, a hardened barrier ‘attach[ing] human difference indelibly to the epidermal surface’ (p. 12). Michelle Stephens investigates ‘skin acts’ – psychic and social structures of black performance – across film, music, theatre and visual culture, from the early twentieth century to the 1960s and 1970s. Stephens's project takes up Frantz Fanon's injunction to critically interrogate the epidermalization and phallicization of the racialized body. Each of Stephens's featured black male artists – Bert Williams, Paul Robeson, Harry Belafonte and Bob Marley – negotiates this relationship amid cameras, screens, sheet music and paraphernalia, causing complex sexual relations to emerge in ‘skin acts’ accented by female partners and liaisons.
Mobilizing a significant group of diasporic black theorists, Stephens shows how the ‘libidinous black body moves chiasmically between body and flesh, the sexual and the consensual, phallic closure and invaginated openness, but also between phallic signifier and epidermal image, flowing in and around the discourse, visual codes and languages of race’ (p. 19, emphasis added). The first chapter explores the face, or ‘faciality’, in critical blackface minstrelsy (p. 33). The minstrel mask inverts the ‘white wall/black hole system’ that Deleuze and Guattari characterize as the ‘face on the symbolic grid’ (p. 32). While blackface reifies blackness, Bert Williams's New Negro affiliation upended faciality, making strange the constraints within which he and his partner(s) danced, sang and worked.
Chapter 2 chronicles the ‘skin acts’ of Paul and Essie Robeson, against a modernism that made ‘blackness . . . a surface to get close to and take pleasure in, a tactility extending from the face across the entire body’ (p. 72). Robeson's nude body, photographed and sculpted, ‘figured and idealized the New Negro's newborn autonomy in the suggestion of the lines and contours of a masculine muscularity that lies just beneath the skin’ (p. 75). Stephens links C. L. R. James's reading of black athletic aesthetics to athlete, scholar and artist Robeson's stage and screen career. Miscegenation plots echo from this to Stephens's discussion of Harry Belafonte on film. Opening with James Baldwin's reminiscences of Belafonte's nearly global sex appeal, Stephens catalogues Belafonte's rise, in tandem with black ‘Third World’ anticolonial politics (p. 127). As the (last) black male body under society's regulating gaze, Belafonte's character cannot elude the grid or the photograph; he reminds us that the symbolic order lives on.
Bob Marley adds a ‘phono-graphed’ component: ‘the black subject as . . . a written, recorded, but also revivified and revivifying sound’ (p. 162). Marley, mortified (albeit immortalized) on magazine and album covers, ‘universalized the black condition into a human condition by translating blackness into a political discourse of difference rather than a biological one’ (p. 169). Engaging discussions of negritude and Fred Moten's observations on black music, Stephens shows how Marley's music ‘disrupts a phallic discourse and opens up a space for reimagining the role of a female, consensual, acoustic voice’ (p. 175). Skin Acts concludes through the looking glass, as it were. We see Barack Obama peering into a mirror, photographed from behind, his back accompanying his reflected face. It is this ‘doubling of the performer and his image – his surrogate, his shadow – a tripling, according to Fanon, of body, gaze, and self, or flesh, skin, and face’ (ibid.), that Skin Acts investigates, in an exhilarating sweep of theorists and cultural texts.
Thematically, Skin Acts touches Faedra Chatard Carpenter's Coloring Whiteness: Acts of Critique in Black Performance. Theoretically and chronologically, Skin Acts and Coloring Whiteness traverse productively different terrain. The texts navigate divergent yet overlapping fields of critical race theory; whiteness studies; and performance, cultural and media studies. While Stephens constructs a diasporic, transnational psychosexual history of black male performance, Carpenter focuses on a historico-materialist United States. Chronologically, Carpenter picks up where Stephens leaves off: in the mid-1960s and the black aesthetic vanguard of the civil rights movement. After chronicling a diverse succession of works, Coloring Whiteness culminates in the present, with Obama resurfacing as touchstone.
Carpenter aims to study representations – and presentations (within Brechtian quotation marks) – of whiteface (which, for Carpenter, is not synonymous with whiteness nor inverted blackface), in multimedia works created by African-American artists. She examines these variants in works of theatre, Michael Jackson's music videos, Dave Chappelle's comic sketches and the visual/performance art of Daniel Tisdale and Jefferson Pinder. Carpenter's artists ‘interrogate and disturb the boundaries and circumscriptions that have historically privileged whiteness over blackness’ (p. 6), subverting whiteness's discursive associations of privilege, normativity and purity, and bringing forth its connotations of terror and death.
In lucid prose, Carpenter charts a scrupulous and at times revelatory course through densely coalescing racial and cultural politics, intentionality and reception. Her methodology and conceptual framework take cues from theatre and performance studies as she surveys foundational works in this intersection. Drawing upon production histories and interviews, Carpenter pursues a dramaturgical approach: she situates works in their contexts of creation, taking into account textual analysis, embodiment, reception, artistic framing, and an ‘awareness of interpretive possibilities versus interpretive absolutes’ in aesthetic realization (p. 13).
After two theatrical case studies, Carpenter branches out into a reading of Michael Jackson's ‘naturalized whiteface’ alongside Tisdale's whitened portraits of black leaders. After roving through Jackson's output, Carpenter dissects the racial and identitarian controversies of comedian Chappelle. Her final chapter extends ‘whiteface’ to oral and aural vocality, in style shifting (e.g. ‘bidialecticism’) and code switching (pp. 197–202). Construing ‘race’ as a multi-sensory phenomenon, Carpenter shows how audiences engage in what she terms ‘racial synesthesia’ by mapping one sensory signifier of ‘race’ onto another (p. 211).
The ‘Obama years’ motivate Carpenter's rumination on the rise of descriptors such as ‘postracial’, ‘postsoul’, and ‘postblack’, four decades after the civil rights activism with which the book began. While rejecting the idea of a United States ‘beyond race’, Carpenter advocates for the use of ‘postblack’, which ‘takes exception not to blackness but to the ways it has been framed and limited both by dominant Western culture and sometimes from within black culture as well’ (p. 236). The final work examined – Pinder's Afro-Cosmonaut/Alien (White Noise) (2008) – accords with such ‘postblack’ aesthetics. Its whiteface is a product of Butoh techniques and visual accident: Pinder's cameraman found the artist's act of ‘whiting up’ compelling. Yet despite Pinder's stated lack of intentionality, Carpenter asks whether the artist is ‘trapped . . . by whiteness’, and what it means for the paint to have been applied by his own hands (p. 228). Her questioning opens space for critique, in a multiracial era that eschews monolithic identities. Yet, as Carpenter shows, whiteface performances – or ‘dramaturgies of whiteness’ – have often been contingent and open-ended. Transracial performance should not be a taboo subject, since racial ‘authenticity’ is a myth. This argument carries currency, even as the hegemonic power of whiteness continues to shape the politics of racialized visibility and vocality. Bound within distinct spatio-temporal parameters and addressing diverse media and methods, Skin Acts and Coloring Whiteness bring complementary and mutually enriching paradigms to questions of the flesh, skin and face of blackness at a moment of de-essentialized difference and invigorated racism.
