Staging American Voice by Caitlin Simms Marshall a Dissertation
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‘Power in the Tongue’ Staging American Voice By Caitlin Simms Marshall A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Performance Studies and the Designated Emphasis in New Media In the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Abigail DeKosnik, Chair Professor Shannon Steen Professor Susan Schweik Professor Nina Eidsheim Summer 2016 Abstract ‘Power in the Tongue’: Staging American Voice By Caitlin Simms Marshall Doctor of Philosophy in Performance Studies Designated Emphasis in New Media University of California Berkeley Professor Abigail DeKosnik, Chair Voice is the chief metaphor for power and enfranchisement in American democracy. Citizens exercising rights are figured as ‘making their voices heard,’ social movements are imagined as ‘giving voice to the voiceless,’ and elected leaders represent ‘the voice of the people.’ This recurring trope forces the question: does citizenship have a sound, and if so, what voices count? Scholars of American studies and theater history have long been interested in nineteenth-century national formation, and have turned to speech, oratory, and performance to understand the role of class, gender, and race in shaping the early republic (Fliegelman 1993, Looby 1996, Gustafson 2000, Lott 1993, Deloria 1998, Nathans 2009, Jones 2014). However, these studies are dominated by textual and visual modes of critique. The recent academic turn to sound studies has produced scholarship on the sonic formation of minoritarian American identity and an American cultural landscape. Yet this body of research all but overlooks voice performance as site of inquiry. As a result, research has disregarded a central sensory pathway through which democracy operates. Without academic inquiry on the vocal contours of citizenship, we are left with an incomplete understanding of how America selects its constituents, and on what terms. My project, ‘Power in the tongue’: Staging American Voice addresses this lacuna by analyzing the racialized and queer disabled dynamics of American voice from 1828 to 1861. Leading up to the Civil War, socio-political shifts in settler colonialism and slavery necessitated a new mode of American governmentality. These exigencies catalyzed the reconceptualization of voice from embodied performance practice to a sonic symbol that could record, reproduce, or contest a soundtrack of American citizenship. Taking up dramatic and dramatized literature, and using original archival research on minstrelsy and melodrama, dime museum exhibition, concert song, and dramatic reading, I show how popular performances “split” black, Native, and queer disabled voices from their originary bodies nearly half a century before the phonograph. Staged as the signs of corporeal difference, these voices were deployed in contradictory ways and in service of competing social interests. In this dissertation, I go behind the scenes of performances by Edwin Forrest, Chief Push- ma-ta-ha, P.T Barnum, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Mary E. Webb, Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield, and Japanese Tommy to understand how each deployed subaltern voice to underscore their claims for national rights and recognitions. 1 ‘Power in the Tongue’ began in the archives. In examining playbills, broadsides, newspaper reviews, songsters, and scripts at research centers like the Harvard Theatre Collection, the Harriet Beecher Stowe Center, the Library Company of Philadelphia, and many more, I began to hear a pattern that disrupted dominant narratives of American history. While scholars concur that by the nineteenth- century the ascendancy of print culture eclipsed public speech as the primary medium of national formation, the primary archival materials I viewed told a different story. They attested to the persistent importance of oral culture as a site of struggle over belonging in antebellum America, particularly for persons excluded from the elite, literary idea of nation: women, especially women of color, Native Americans, African Americans, and, prior to Andrew Jackson’s election, the white, common man. This dissertation hones in on voice performance as the site of struggle of, and between these social actors. Further, the dissertation plots how race and queer disability influenced an evolving counterpoint between embodied voice performance and textuality. I argue that whites like Edwin Forrest, P.T Barnum, and Harriet Beecher Stowe deployed subaltern voice performance alongside textual innovations to ensure their own entrée to American cultural hegemony and bring black, Native, and queer disabled bodies under control, while vocalists of color like Push-ma-ta-ha, Mary Webb, Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield, and Japanese Tommy played-back their sonic difference to contest both the aesthetic and ideological foundations of American citizenship, and white attempts to (re)produce such sonic and written scripts through subaltern bodies. In tracking the sonic signs of race and queer disability as they reel between archive and repertoire, I offer an historically located genealogy of performativity that accounts for the socio-political force of speech act. ‘Power in the Tongue’ also develops new methods for hearing history and listening to the past – methods that ultimately offer new strategies for registering vocal difference today. 2 TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION: SOUNDING AMERICAN………………………………………………….1 CHAPTER 1: A VOICE LIKE THUNDER: METAMORA’S SONIC BODIES………...............................................................................................................................................14 CHAPTER 2: VOICE’S SECOND NATURE: P.T BARNUM’S ‘WONERFUL TALKING MACHINE………..........................................................................................................................................36 CHAPETR 3: HARRIET BEECHER STOWE’S ACOUSTICS OF PASSING………………….52 CHAPTER 4: CRIP VOICE AND FUGITIVE SONG: TWO BLACK SWANS………………..73 CONCLUSION: CRIPPING THE ARCHIVE…………………………...…………………….102 i Introduction: Sounding American At the dawn of the 19th Century, the United States was a new political entity and a burgeoning cultural formation just beginning to stake a nation out of the sprawling North American continent. Speech, the primary arbiter of affairs of state and the moral public sphere, was central to the new republican project.1 Clark and Halloran describe this period as the golden age of American “oratorical culture,” wherein “[t]o become a “complete orator” was not a personal achievement but rather the public responsibility of citizenship.”2 As the century wore on, however, scholars chronicle the decline of American oratorical culture, arguing that literacy and a culture of letters progressively supplanted the national emphasis on oral and aural performance as the primary mechanisms for making Americans.3 Yet, as Malea Powell notes in her powerful “Rhetorics of Survivance,” such a text-centric, master narrative is relentlessly Euro-American, and points to the forced absencing of subaltern figures in the recorded history of American speech and rhetoric.4 Indeed, as this dissertation argues, oral performance persisted as a central site for claiming national rights and recognitions well through the American Civil War, particularly for persons excluded from the elite, literary idea of nation: women, especially women of color, people with disabilities, Native Americans, African Americans, and, prior to Andrew Jackson’s election, the white common man. In discussing “oral performance” in antebellum America, I want to clarify that scholarship on the topic has heretofore largely been concerned with the question of rhetoric, or the formal features of persuasion deployed in the verbal composition of argument. Such concern, and its current disciplinary ties to writing and composition, means that studies of oral persuasion generally fail to analyze oral performance qua performance or performativity. In studies by Cmiel, Fliegelman, Gustafson, Warren, and Kramer, oral performance collapses into text.5 As Matthew Rebhorn has pointed out, such a methodological approach fails to recognize the space of difference between text 1 Kenneth Cmiel, Democratic Eloquence: The Fight over Popular Speech in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: William Morrow) 1990; Jay Fliegelman, Declaring Independence: Jefferson, Natural Language, and the Culture of Performance (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993); Christopher Looby, Voicing America: Language, Literary Form, and the Origins of the United States (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996); Sandra M. Gustafson, Eloquence is Power: Oratory and Performance in Early America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000). 2 Gregory Clark and S. Michael Halloran, Oratorical Culture in Nineteenth-Century America: Transformations in the Theory and Practice of Rhetoric (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1993), 8. 3 Michael Warner, The Letters of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth Century America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990). Clark and Halloran, Oratorical Culture in Nineteenth-Century America; Nan Johnson, Nineteenth-Century Rhetoric in North America (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991); Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (New York: Verso, 2006). See also Cynthia L. Selfe, “The Movement of Air, the Breath of Meaning: Aurality and Multimodal Composing,” College