From Colonial Saint-Domingue to Contemporary Hollywood

Institute of Advanced Insights Study PerformingPerforming thethe RacialRacial Scale:Scale: FromFrom ColonialColonial Saint-DomingueSaint-Domingue toto ContemporaryContemporary HollywoodHollywood Julia Prest Volume 10 2017 Number 7 ISSN 1756-2074 Institute of Advanced Study Insights About Insights Insights captures the ideas and work-in-progress of the Fellows of the Institute of Advanced Study at Durham University. Up to twenty distinguished and ‘fast-track’ Fellows reside at the IAS in any academic year. They are world-class scholars who come to Durham to participate in a variety of events around a core inter-disciplinary theme, which changes from year to year. Each theme inspires a new series of Insights, and these are listed in the inside back cover of each issue. These short papers take the form of thought experiments, summaries of research findings, theoretical statements, original reviews, and occasionally more fully worked treatises. Every fellow who visits the IAS is asked to write for this series. The Directors of the IAS – Veronica Strang, Rob Barton, Nicholas Saul and Chris Greenwell – also invite submissions from others involved in the themes, events and activities of the IAS. Insights is edited for the IAS by Nicholas Saul. Previous editors of Insights were Professor Susan Smith (2006–2009), Professor Michael O’Neill (2009–2012) and Professor Barbara Graziosi (2012–2015). About the Institute of Advanced Study The Institute of Advanced Study, launched in October 2006 to commemorate Durham University’s 175th Anniversary, is a flagship project reaffirming the value of ideas and the public role of universities. The Institute aims to cultivate new thinking on ideas that might change the world, through unconstrained dialogue between the disciplines as well as interaction between scholars, intellectuals and public figures of world standing from a variety of backgrounds and countries. The Durham IAS is one of only a handful of comparable institutions in the world that incorporates the Sciences, Social Sciences, the Arts and the Humanities. The focal point of the IAS is a programme of work associated with, but not exclusive to, an annual research theme. At the core of this work lies a prestigious Fellowship programme. This programme gathers together scholars, intellectuals and public figures of world standing or world-promise to address topics of major academic or public interest. Their mission is to anticipate the new and re-interpret the old, communicating across and working between disciplinary boundaries. Every year, the Institute invites as many as twenty highly creative individuals to spend up to three months in Durham. They are located in Cosin’s Hall, a magnificent and spacious 18th century mansion which, together with Durham Cathedral and Durham Castle, forms part of Palace Green, dominating the World Heritage Site of Durham Peninsula. During their stay, Fellows engage with departments and colleges, deliver public lectures and seminars, and, above all, join an international community of researchers to address the theme selected for that year. Further details of the IAS and its Fellowship programme can be found at www.durham.ac.uk/ias/fellows Copyright The design and contents of Insights are subject to copyright. Copyright and Reproduction Rights in all submitted contributions remain with the authors, as described in the Author’s Copyright Agreement. Copyright and Reproduction Rights of all other material remain with Insights. Except under the terms of Fair Dealing (UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988), the user may not modify, copy, reproduce, retransmit or otherwise distribute the site and its contents (whether text, graphics or original research concepts), without express permission in writing from the Institute. Where the above content is directly or indirectly reproduced in an academic context under the terms of Fair Dealing, this must be acknowledged with the appropriate bibliographical citation. The opinions stated in the Insights papers are those of their respective authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the Institute of Advanced Study, Durham University, or the staff and students thereof. Institute of Advanced Study Insights PERFORMING THE RACIAL SCALE: FROM COLONIAL SAINT-DOMINGUE TO CONTEMPORARY HOLLYWOOD This piece explores the notion of the racial scale in two performance contexts: first, in the theatres of the French Caribbean colony of Saint-Domingue in the eighteenth century, and second, in twenty-first-century Hollywood. The racial scale as conceived by the colonials in Saint-Domingue was a means of establishing and upholding a social hierarchy that was built on the dominance of white European master over the black African slave, but which had also to accommodate the ever-increasing numbers of free people of colour. One free woman of colour named Minette challenged the whiteness of the colonial stage by appearing in solo roles in a number of productions in Port-au-Prince throughout the 1780s. Her ability to move up the racial scale onstage is significant, though ultimately limited. Moving into the modern era, contemporary casting practices in Hollywood are examined in relation to a modern perception of the racial scale, often known as colourism. The controversy caused by the casting of Zoe Saldana as Nina Simone in a recent biopic reveals the complex politics of casting even ‘black’ actors in ‘black’ roles as perceptions of different shades of colour persist across different social groups. Introduction he identification, creation or application of a scale is one of the key ways in which Thumans attempt to make sense of the world around them. The notion of scale necessarily encompasses the notion of difference, and, as such, can be used as a means to bring about fairness, discrimination or, occasionally, neither. At the heart of my current research project on theatre and citizenship in colonial Saint-Domingue (the western part of the Caribbean island of Hispaniola in the Greater Antilles, now Haiti), there sits the scale that is arguably the most discriminatory in the history of mankind: the ‘racial scale’. The question of the racial scale will be examined here from two complementary perspectives: theatre performance practices in eighteenth-century Saint-Domingue and twenty-first-century Hollywood cinema. It will be seen that two centuries after the abolition of the slave trade, the question of an implicit racial scale has yet to disappear. Its manifestations in the world of theatre and cinema shed light both on broader attitudes towards race and on questions relating to the theatrical illusion more generally. In the period under consideration, Saint-Domingue was a French colony; following a bloody but ultimately successful revolution, Saint-Domingue eventually shook off French rule and became the first black republic in 1804 and named itself Haiti. In Saint-Domingue and other Caribbean colonies during this period there existed a notion, commonly accepted among the colonizing peoples and their associates, of a racial scale that ranged, crudely, from ‘pure’ white European at one extreme to ‘pure’ black African at the other. Between the two sat numerous shades of colour resulting from different ancestral combinations across several generations. Of course one of the problems for proponents of this kind of scale was that an individual’s physiognomy – and in particular his or her skin colour – did not always in practice neatly reflect his or her ancestry. This racial scale was a means of establishing and upholding a social hierarchy that was built on the dominance of white European master over the black African slave, but which had also to accommodate the ever-increasing numbers of free (and freed) people of colour, 2 Institute of Advanced Study Insights most of whom were of mixed racial ancestry. To say that it was an instrument of oppression is an understatement. One of the great commentators on life in eighteenth-century Saint-Domingue was Médéric Louis Elie Moreau de Saint-Méry (1750–1819), a white créole1 born in the neighbouring French colony of Martinique, in the Lesser Antilles, who worked as a lawyer in Saint-Domingue for a number of years and who went on to represent what he considered to be the interests of Saint- Domingue at the French Parliament in Paris during the Revolution. Moreau de Saint-Méry is the author of a number of works, including the would-be encyclopaedic Description topographique, physique, civile, politique et historique de la partie française de l’isle Saint-Domingue (1797–98) in which he drew up one of the most nuanced iterations of the racial scale in existence. Specifically, he identified 13 distinct categories of skin colour among the population of Saint-Domingue; he also drew up detailed tables of the different combinations that would produce each of the 13 types. By way of an example, Moreau de Saint-Méry’s third type is the ‘mulatto’ (his first two types are ‘pure’ black and ‘pure’ white), which, we are informed, can be produced via 12 different combinations and is subdivided into two skin tones: red-copper and yellow-bronze.2 Moreau de Saint-Méry’s quasi-scientific system comprised a set of core racial combinations which, expanded and developed over seven hypothetical generations, resulted in a dizzying 128-point scale. Of course, his scale was never adopted in all its nuances, but notarial and other contemporary documents confirm that a scale allowing for racial combinations across two or three generations was in common usage as individuals were frequently identified, for instance, as being one quarter or one eighth African. One of the purposes of Moreau de Saint-Méry’s scale was to support the colonizers’ wish that an individual’s racial ancestry be physically legible on his or her body. This way other individuals (the white colonials by default) would know if someone were black, white or in-between, and if they were in-between if they were more black than white or more white than black, just by looking at them.

Load more