Acts of Provocation: Popular Antiracisms On/Through the Twenty- First Century New York Commercial Stage
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City University of New York (CUNY) CUNY Academic Works All Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects 6-2017 Acts of Provocation: Popular Antiracisms on/through the Twenty- First Century New York Commercial Stage Stefanie A. Jones The Graduate Center, City University of New York How does access to this work benefit ou?y Let us know! More information about this work at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/2025 Discover additional works at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu This work is made publicly available by the City University of New York (CUNY). Contact: [email protected] ACTS OF PROVOCATION: POPULAR ANTIRACISMS ON/THROUGH THE TWENTY- FIRST CENTURY NEW YORK COMMERCIAL STAGE by STEFANIE A. JONES A dissertation submitted to the Graduate Faculty in Theatre in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, The City University of New York 2017 S A Jones © 2017 STEFANIE A. JONES ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ii S A Jones Acts of Provocation: Popular Antiracisms on/through the Twenty-First Century New York Commercial Stage Stefanie A. Jones This manuscript has been read and accepted for the Graduate Faculty in Theatre in satisfaction of the dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. _____________ ____________________________________ Date David Savran Chair of Examining Committee _____________ ____________________________________ Date Peter Eckersall Executive Officer Supervisory Committee: Kandice Chuh Robert Reid-Pharr James Wilson THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK iii S A Jones ABSTRACT Acts of Provocation: Popular Antiracisms on/through the Twenty-First Century New York Commercial Stage by Stefanie A. Jones Advisor: David Savran This is an abolitionist feminist study of the role of liberalism in the twenty-first century political economy. It takes as its object New York City bourgeois cultural productions (in particular Broadway theatre and the New York Times) from approximately 1984 to 2009. It offers insights into important yet widely-misunderstood features of turn-of-millennium US society: class, art, political practice, and war. In order to understand liberalism’s political and economic agenda, I look at how these objects are pitched in the struggle over racism. Sometimes when we say “liberal” we mean it in the philosophical sense, with particular attention to liberal humanism. At other times, we mean “liberal” to refer to contemporary US Democratic party politics. When this dissertation examines the role of liberalism, it uses “liberal” in both of these senses simultaneously, even though liberal political practice does not always perfectly conform to liberal humanist philosophy. I examine the calculus of inequalities and hierarchies that are an inherent, structural part of both of these definitions, the particular way in which the defense and uplift of some is used to justify the oppression of others, concomitant with the disavowal of this very relation. This unique formation of liberalism (as hierarchizing with disavowal) takes on particular power in the realm of performance. iv S A Jones This dissertation is ultimately about bourgeois gatekeeping and the performance and practice of class (an always already racial class) as a phenomenon in racial capitalism, with a particular focus on the liberal bourgeoisie of theatre and its role in the formation of social structures. It goes beyond a critique of white behavior or whiteness studies, to discuss class behavior as a whole. Around the turn of the millennium, this class struggled over defining antiracism in order to delineate appropriate political behavior and shape popular political practice. Through the relationship between these antiracisms and their enactment within increasingly more impactful institutional arenas, I shed light on both stalwart and novel hierarchies in turn-of-the-millennium distributions of symbolic, economic, political, and military power. This work traces one project of New York Times theatre critics deployed around August Wilson and three musicals (Avenue Q, Hairspray, and Wicked) as sites of struggle within this field of racial capitalism, and the positions and capital that the liberal bourgeoisie maintained or gained from these struggles. Chapter One provides historical background as a depiction of the field leading up to the changes around 9/11, and, in preparation for later chapters, establishes the importance of the New York Times in making theatre’s meaning. It draws from legitimated archives of theatre history in order to establish my methodology before I turn it, in later chapters, to untraditional archives of theatre history. It also is the only chapter not to focus on a Broadway musical; instead, the theatrical objects that are the focus of my critique are the New York Times theatre critics’ reviews. I read these reviews in the context of August Wilson’s work and the culture wars to explore the Times’s exercise and ongoing acquisition of symbolic power. I argue that this symbolic power was used to define and delimit appropriate political action on a contemporaneous political-economic issue of theatre: colorblind casting and arts funding for v S A Jones black theatre companies. This chapter establishes, for the rest of the dissertation, the importance of the New York Times in the operation of popular political ideology and practice. Chapter Two examines the social relations of the musical Avenue Q, in particular its hit number “Everyone’s A Little Bit Racist.” In addition to reproducing racial hierarchy and deferring radical political action, the musical positions the act of consuming a commodity as the only permissible political action to resolve the racial hierarchies that result from that commodity’s production. This logic is echoed in the marketplace for housing in the Brooklyn neighborhood Bedford-Stuyvesant. Expanding “Everyone’s A Little Bit Racist” within that context, I argue both that there is a shift in the site at which commodity fetishism operates, and that the racializing nature of economic exploitation remains a central component of the twenty- first century liberal economy in practice. Chapter Three works through the social relations of Hairspray to examine the significance of “postrace” to popular political practice. Hairspray utilizes “postrace” to generate a nostalgia for political activism that can only be fulfilled by the consumption of black culture, such as the musical Hairspray itself. This nostalgia is made appealing by providing unfettered access to audience identification as both victim and hero; this access is linked to both black culture and a universalized white protagonist, yet recreates rigidly racialized roles. This postrace logic, especially the appeal to the victim-hero, was taken up by the 2008 Barack Obama presidential campaign and its associated media support, with an important distinction: the campaign provided an outlet for material political action. The reading of campaign materials alongside Hairspray’s “postrace,” however, reveals how the campaign strongly delineated the Democratic Party and Barack Obama as the only viable form for that material political action to manifest. In other words, Hairspray’s popular antiracism accounts for how Barack Obama was vi S A Jones positioned as the only possible antiracist candidate in 2008 despite Obama’s political alignment with racial capitalism. Finally, in Chapter Four I take on the complexity of race and racism disavowed through greenness in the musical Wicked. The show structures “If You See Something, Say Something” as popular antiracist action, and hails its deployment for the defense of security in the name of representing oppressed others. Tracing a history of popular participation in policing and security, I place the musical within this context to account for the expansion of this participation in both geographical scale and ideological scope after the turn of the millennium. Finally, the musical’s popular antiracist practice provides an illuminating framework for understanding the appeals by which US counterinsurgency policy works to shape popular political practice abroad. US counterinsurgency connects the practice of participating in surveillance and security to both a representational imperative and to its global production of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death. The consequence of Wicked and counterinsurgency, I argue, is the production of global popular participation in the US’s racial security regime. In the Conclusion I clarify the stakes of antiracist political practice and interrogate theatre’s promises and limitations for achieving racial and economic justice. I work both to pay legacy to some of the material costs of bourgeois cultural production, and to delineate productive future directions for research and action. vii S A Jones ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This project so far is the result of an immense amount of labor, both my own and other people's, and I am sure there are many names I will not be able to document. I would not be who I am today without the mentorship, space, and inspiration from David Savran, who has the rare gift of both getting it and knowing how to put it into practice. He has never feared nor failed to put intellectual challenges before me, and his faith in my work has been cherished and invaluable. David has graced my life and intellect with the opportunity to expand, develop, and flourish; I have grown immeasurably because of his teachings. With kindness, openness, and generosity James Wilson has been a light guiding me both intellectually and professionally from my first moments in the program, as well as a font of heartful conversations. Kandice Chuh’s extraordinary insights have challenged me to think otherwise in every step of my research, and have reminded me to struggle for the world worth bringing into being. Robert Reid-Pharr has been a compassionate yet rigorous mentor, always asking the hardest questions. He has also always been willing to be asked the hardest questions in return. Each has helped me remain anchored as a human and a scholar, and has intervened in the grinding classism, sexism, and ablism of the academy by giving tirelessly of their intellectual and emotional labor.