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Caribbean Theater and the Challenge to Black Diaspora Raj Chetty A

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Caribbean Theater and the Challenge to Black Diaspora Raj Chetty A Race Fundamentalism: Caribbean Theater and the Challenge to Black Diaspora Raj Chetty A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy University of Washington 2013 Reading Committee: Louis Chude-Sokei, Chair Laura Chrisman, Chair Ileana Rodríguez-Silva Monika Kaup Program Authorized to Offer Degree: English ©Copyright 2013 Raj Chetty University of Washington Abstract Race Fundamentalism: Caribbean Theater and the Challenge to Black Diaspora Raj Chetty Co-chairs of Supervisory Committee: Professor Louis Chude-Sokei Professor Laura Chrisman English This dissertation engages with radical Caribbean theater as a crucial literary archive that is nonetheless underexplored as an expression of political culture and thought. The theoretical grounding of the chapters emerges from the analytically generative thrust of a comment by C.L.R. James in The Black Jacobins: “to neglect the racial factor as merely incidental is an error only less grave than to make it fundamental.” While the phrase asserts that race cannot be neglected, it also cautions against ensconcing race as fundamental analytical priority, suggesting a powerfully fluid conceptualization of radical political culture. My chapters argue that radical theater projects in Jamaica and the Dominican Republic share this fluid conceptualization of radical politics with the Trinidadian James’s own plays on the Haitian Revolution. These theater projects differ from more static paradigms within diaspora, transnational, and race studies that reduce political radicalism to race, precisely the “fundamentalist” approach to race against which James cautions. This reduction fails to register how race, diaspora, and nation continue to be fashioned within a context of persistent class struggle, colonialism and imperialism, and sexism. Furthermore, scholarly discussions of race and diaspora often are rooted fundamentally in U.S. experience, obscuring the ways race is negotiated differently in various New World diasporas, including those in the Caribbean region. The plays I analyze open up the articulations between race, class, and gender in anti- colonial, anti-racist, and anti-sexist struggles. Furthermore, I attend both to the intra-Caribbean differences that influence the development of radical political culture and to the important connections across areas too often analyzed along colonially fragmented lines. My pan- Caribbean approach avoids thinking of the region as exclusively understandable through linguistically-determined approaches. Across different linguistic and colonial histories, the plays I study cohere in the way they stage political agency through popular culture, collaboration, and spectator participation, all central to each play’s aesthetic development and politics but irreducible to race. While race does feature in each play as the site for political radicalism, the performances of race, blackness, and diaspora in the plays are often unrecognizable to U.S. elaborations. i Table of Contents Introduction ......................................................................................................................................1 Chapter 1: The Tragicomedy of Anticolonial Overcoming: Toussaint Louverture and The Black Jacobins on Stage .............................................22 Chapter 2: Can a Mulatta be a Black Jacobin? ..............................................................................61 Chapter 3: “Listen, American Negro”: Racial Performance, Dominican Street Theater, and “Global” Blackness ................107 Chapter 4: “Teach his People the Value of Unity”: Black Diaspora, Women, and Una Marson’s Pocomania ...........................................................155 Conclusion: Diaspora, Recognition, and “Conscripts of Performance” ......................................195 Works Cited .................................................................................................................................200 ii Acknowledgements While writing this dissertation, I have benefitted immeasurably from scholarly and personal relationships that have been crucial to my own sense of purpose, my confidence, and the development of my arguments. This dissertation emerges out of the context of rich intellectual and social community, so I feel it appropriate to name these communities as a way to thank all the individuals whom they include: the Ancient Mariners, los Plátanos, Blakeley Village, Ravenna Park Ward, Barrio Mirador, 3rd Ward, Rama Seahurst, the staff of el Archivo General de la Nación, the staff of the C. L. R. James Collection at UWI-St. Augustine, the Simpson Center for the Humanities, EIP/McNair scholars and staff, the Expository Writing Program community, the Mellon Sawyer Seminar on the Borderlands, and Performing the Gap. To my committee, I give special thanks for unflagging support. Monika Kaup, thank you for probing questions and sincere engagement with the final work. Rich Watts, I have appreciated being able to show up, at times unannounced, simply to chat on topics both related an unrelated to this project. Ileana Rodríguez-Silva, I will never forget your enthusiasm when I first approached you about my interest in transitioning to Caribbean Studies. That enthusiasm has not diminished in the years since and has been the foundation of your intellectual support for this dissertation and personal support of me. To my co-chairs, Louis Chude-Sokei and Laura Chrisman, I could not have asked for a more supportive combination of scholarly engagement and mentorship. Louis, you have provided the kind of feedback one always hopes to receive: tough but loving criticism borne of sincere and thorough engagement. I have been reinvigorated by our conversations, which have buoyed me up at moments of self-doubt. Laura, you have seen this project and my doctoral journey from their inception. I will forever treasure that long conversation that marked the turning point in my professional career, the real genesis for this project. Much gratitude for the mentorship before and through this dissertation. Finally, and most importantly, none of this would have been possible without the love and support of my family. Mom, Dad, and Sunil, I’m where I am because of you. Porter, Liana, and Asher, thank you for keeping me grounded and reminding me why any of this matters. And Sommer, ya tú sabes. 1 Introduction This dissertation engages with radical Caribbean theater as a crucial literary archive that is nonetheless underexplored as an expression of political culture and thought. The theoretical grounding of my chapters develops from a comment by C.L.R. James in his well-known 1938 history of the Haitian Revolution, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution, re-issued in 1963. In the comment, James subordinates the question of race to the primacy of class in a way that is indicative both of his political philosophy, at least at this early stage of his career, and of the leftist currents of his Marxist contemporaries: “The race question is subsidiary to the class question in politics, and to think of imperialism in terms of race is disastrous.” Far less attention, however, is paid to James’s subsequent line: “But to neglect the racial factor as merely incidental is an error only less grave than to make it fundamental” (283). This second line qualifies what might be read as the evacuation of race from analytical significance in the first line, which, in light of the second line, perhaps should read, “to think of imperialism fundamentally in terms of race is disastrous.” Clearly, however, James stakes out in these lines the position that making race the fundamental question creates a critical problem even worse than leaving race out altogether. My dissertation emerges from the analytically generative thrust of this phrase. If the first half of the phrase asserts that race cannot be reduced to something “merely incidental,” the latter half cautions against ensconcing race as fundamental analytical priority. In other words, the phrase suggests a powerfully fluid conceptualization of radical political culture. The chapters argue that radical theater projects in Jamaica and the Dominican Republic share this fluid conceptualization of radical politics with the Trinidadian James’s own stage versions of the Haitian Revolution. These theater projects offer important differences from more static theoretical paradigms within diaspora, transnational, and race studies that reduce political 2 radicalism to race, precisely the “fundamentalist” approach to race against which James cautions. This reduction fails to register how race, diaspora, and nation continue to be fashioned within a context of persistent class struggle, colonialism and imperialism, and sexism. Furthermore, scholarly discussions of race and diaspora often are rooted fundamentally in U.S. experience, obscuring the ways race relations are negotiated differently in various New World diasporas, including those in the Caribbean region. The plays I analyze approach questions of race neither in fundamentalist nor fundamentally U.S. terms, instead opening up the articulations between race, class, and gender in anti-colonial, anti-racist, and anti-sexist struggles. Furthermore, in approaching plays from Spanish- and English-language regions, I attend both to the intra-Caribbean differences that influence the development of radical political culture, and to the important connections across areas too often analyzed along colonially
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