Esther Romeyn,
Street Scenes: Staging the Self in Immigrant New York 1880-1924.
University of Minnesota Press, 2008.
ISBN: 978-081664522 0
US$25.00 (pb)
320pp
(Review copy supplied by University of Minnesota Press)

We seem to have acquired a class of individuals whose so-called sense of humor takes the form of uncouth flippancy, a type of mind that stares blankly in the face of the real article, and laughs noisily at the things that should command respect… The tremendous influx of Continental foreigners – the raw and often the waste material of the countries they came from – into a democracy, English-speaking and founded upon Anglo-Saxon morality, is a powerful factor in the creation of a new type… Among other changes a perversion of the idea of humor occurs when the American mental habit is grafted upon minds of a different color. (pp. 164-5)[1]

We do not get our material by inspiration but by theft, assault and battery and otherwise. A solemn, honest, peace-loving commonality is grabbed, thrown down, turned inside out, and reconstructed into an absurdity. A feeble, hoary-headed idea is ruthlessly set upon, crippled, torn to pieces, put together backwards with a new head or tail on it; the King’s English is deliberately murdered – all for a joke! (p. 165)[2]

In Street Scenes, Esther Romeyn draws upon an abundance of rich archival material in which various individuals and groupings of immigrant New Yorkers, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, expressed and performed themselves, responded to others, and were responded to. Part 1, “The City as Theater”, examines the pleasures of New York’s inhabitants – in the form of New York guidebooks, Mystery and Misery Novels, slumming expeditions, sketches in popular magazines, and vaudeville, for example – as pleasures infused with “the cognitive imperative” of making sense of “the fragmentation, discontinuity, and phantasmagoria of the modern metropolis” (p. xxvi). One of the texts she examines in the second chapter, “Detecting, Acting, and the Social Body”, features James McParlan, an Irish immigrant police officer recruited by the Head of the now infamous Pinkerton Detective Agency, Allan Pinkerton, to infiltrate the Mollie Maguires, a secret society that developed amongst Irish Catholic coal miners in Pennsylvania in the last quarter of the 19th century. In The Molly Maguires and the Detectives, published in 1877, not long after the execution of the first members charged with murder, Pinkerton as author tells how he wanted to “get within” the “apparently impenetrable ring; turn to light the hidden side of this dark and cruel body, to probe to its core this festering sore upon the body politic” (p. 31). This he did by having the respectable, professional (and apparently very convincing and winning) McParlan temporarily play the part of a less “white” Irishman, an enthusiastic participant-observer of a less civilized tribe, as it were. (McParlan had been an undercover streetcar conductor. He lived as a Molly for several years, and became involved with a Molly woman, to the point where the fault-line of identity between McParlan and McKenna was probably not known by the person himself much of the time.) Throughout the book, Romeyn will focus her attention, she says, on the (nature of these) borders separating the “real” from the “theatrical” (p. xxv).

Part II, “Stages of Identity”, encompasses discussions of the performances of Italian-American clown and mimic, Farfariellio (Eduardo Migliaccio), racial or dialect comedy, and the playing of Irish, Jewish and Black identities, bringing in the likes of David Warfield, Joe and Ben Welch, Eddie Cantor, Al Jolson, Fanny Brice, and the Marx Brothers. Romeyn concludes with one of the book’s most revealing chapters, “Blackface, Jewface, Whiteface: Racial Impersonation Revisited”, where she discusses the lives and performances of African-American artists like David Coles, George Walker and Bert Williams. In this second part of Street Scenes, Romeyn sees her task as examining the American popular stage, where “the analogy between immigrants’ exploration of the boundaries of selfhood, its ‘realness’ or ‘falsity’, and the theater’s play with the boundaries of reality, establish the theater as a natural staging ground for the investigation of identity, change, and the potential for and limits of self-transformation” (p. xxviii). Many second generation immigrants, as people like John Higham have noted, gained a special capability for the arts of the theatre through their experience of displacement and assimilation. Sport has also been a performative arena for immigrants and minorities, though this is not Romeyn’s chosen domain. But it shares the idea of the game, a game than can have certain effects in the everyday world. Culture “is not merely hegemonic and disciplinarian”, she notes. It is the playground for what Cornelius Castoriadis, one of the key theorist-activists of Paris in May ’68, calls the “radical imagination” (p. xxv). Where the playground ends, of course, has consequences, and the games that can be played can be forcefully shaped by various factors. Class and skin colour have usually been of crucial influence.

It is from the on-record history and utterances of particularly Jewish and black showpeople that the book’s final, and, for me, strongest chapter draws its strength. Not long after Bert Williams’s death in the early 1920s, Romeyn presents us with Eddie Cantor paying tribute to this man who had shared the stage at the Ziegfield Follies with him. Williams, said Cantor:

had the advantage of belonging to the race which we all more or less imitate when we put on burnt cork… He knew each mental attitude of his own race and its humorous reaction to every situation. He had the ability to stand off and affectionately analyze the attributes of his race. As a natural blackface comedian he was far superior to any of us who put on burnt cork. But as an actor Williams was far more than this… [J.J. Schubert] made a phrase which I heartily endorse of Williams both as an actor and a man. “Bert Williams was one of the whitest actors I have ever known”. (p. 187)

Ziegfield himself described Williams as “one of the greatest [comedians] of the world, and the whitest man I ever had the honor to deal with” (p. 187). We don’t have to assume racism on these men’s part because of their use of this race-derived adjective. “White” had become, and continues to function today for many in an older generation, as something of a knowing metaphor used in everyday speech. William Blake’s “black boy” had a “white heart”, and when I have thanked some older people for something, they have replied that they would “do the same for a white man”. The point is, of course, as Romeyn stresses, that a Bert Williams was “emphatically barred” from whiteness, “as a man and as an actor” (p. 187). Black skin meant being trapped and condemned to metaphor and impersonation, whatever he thought, did or created. Williams himself said that strictly speaking:

the colored performer is today more an entertainer than an actor, and naturally so. The white population, upon whom all shows must depend for success, refuse to take him seriously. Our poets must stick to dialect to make themselves heard, or to sell their wares, and our composers must write ragtime for the same reason, until the white man’s serious consideration has been earned…. (p. 191)

His wife, actress Aida Overton Walker, like him, noted a popular prejudice, for example, against love scenes being enacted by negroes. They had to be comic. Overton Walker used to sing a song, “Vassar Girl”, about a young woman passing as “exotic” (Madagascan!) to get into college. It is easy to believe Romeyn when she suggests the performer is worthy of a study in her own right.

I had been appalled twenty years ago when a friend hearing the great Paul Robeson on a record dismissively commented, “Singing for Whitey”, making assumptions about the singer and his place in the world, knowing nothing of the man’s many talents, his convictions, and history of activism. (She had just completed a Sociology degree, and learned no minority history while studying theories of domination.) But I myself had not known that African American artists like Bob Cole had issued the “Colored Actor’s Declaration of Independence of 1898”, wanting to free themselves and their company from white control, withdrawing his music because of a conflict with a white manager. Previous managers then threatened to blacklist any theatre company that would sign his and Billy Johnson’s production, A Trip to Coontown, a musical comedy written, produced and managed by African Americans. After taking it to Canada, where the production was highly successful, the blacklist was defied and it became a success in New York. The show itself was a spoof of a popular play, A Trip to Chinatown, which had featured Cole as a tramp – in white make-up. Says Romeyn:

With the inclusion of Ernest Hogan’s popular double-edged song “No Coons Allowed” just before the finale, Cole’s defiance of the strictures of blackface minstrelsy was just about as blatant as it could be. The refrain, in which Cole, in whiteface, mouths off the racist rhetoric with which, in Plessy vs. Ferguson, the Supreme Court in 1896 upheld the legality of segregation (“No coons allowed/This place is meant for white folks that’s all/So move on darky down the line/We don’t want no kinky-head kind/No coons allow’d in here at all”) amplifies once more that this performance was anything but simple “darky” entertainment. (p. 194)

Before joining the Ziegfield Follies, where his most popular designation was “Mr Nobody” (in blackface), with George Walker, Bert Williams had set up the “Williams and Walker International and Interracial Ethiopian Theatre in New York City”. The club was designed, says Romeyn, “to legitimate African American dramatic talent and emphasize their status as professionals” (p. 194). When they staged ambitious musical comedies like Abyssinia (1906), however, critics recognized the “assault on the color line in theater for what it was” (p. 200). The show was generally regarded as too “uppity”, the actors regarded as feeling themselves to be “above” blackface. One critic’s response provides a good example of the inexorable policing of a category of people to stay in their labelled box. The writer for the New Jersey American said: “It was not until the amiably colored Mr. Bert Williams deliberately wrenched himself away from the grandiosely operatic melodrama…and condescended to sing to us in his de luxe ‘darky’ way that the ice was broken” (p. 201). Fellow performers were aware that this intelligent talent was boxed-in. Fanny Brice remarked when Williams died that his career “was seriously marred by a lack of material befitting his talent, and was narrowly circumscribed by the color line in theatre” (p. 203).[3] It is precisely in relation to certain Jewish comic performers that Romeyn brings out significantly different opportunities that were aggressively embraced.

In earlier chapters, we have learned about critical realist writer Abraham Cahan, “Russian immigrant, socialist, prolific journalist, editor, essayist, critic, polemicist, and writer of feuilletons in the Yiddish press” (p. 83). And there is an extensive discussion of the contradictions involved in the reception of a novel like Cahans’s The Rise of David Levinsky, at a time when many Russian Jews, by way of manufacturing and commerce, were overtaking other immigrants and constituting a new sector of the middle-class. If a conservative Anglo-American middle class might have mistaken Cahan’s critical-realist work for that of an anti-semite, it is not hard to imagine the response of many people to the vulgar and visceral “New Humor”, which made strange bedfellows of middle-class identified immigrants and Puritan America. Most vocal opposition in the first decade of the 20th century, Romeyn tells us, was to the “Hebrew Comic”. Performers like Joe Welch, on the vaudeville stage, became a casualty of boycotts instigated by the Anti-Stage Jew Ridicule Committee.[4] A writer for The Chicago Herald said of a Barney Bernard performance, for example: “A gentile can never cease to marvel why the Jews, who are such loyal patrons of the theater, permit the outrageous blackguarding of their race which is the feature of so much current fooling in the playhouse” (p. 172). There was much worry about the effect of the “coarse and stupid jokes, gesticulations, songs, stories, and obnoxious moving pictures” upon the “unthinking” and “impressionable” public, who nevertheless, and maddeningly, attended the theatre in droves.

The cluster of contradictions and ironies around David Warfield, researcher-performer of the Lower East Side ghetto Jew, provides fascinating illustrations of self- and other-understanding, of the impossibility of any notion of identity which is clear-cut and incontestable. When Warfield moved “above” burlesque, to more “realistic” theatre, David Belasco, producer of the play he appeared in, The Auctioneer, is reputed to have said that he hoped the play would “take the place of a slumming expedition” – it would be more real than the real (p. 154). The actor later denied studying from life to create his character, Simon Levi. So was David Warfield a Jew? His own answer was both yes and no. Romeyn notes that in truth, Warfield, probably of German Jewish origin, might, like many other such Americans of Jewish origin, have felt quite a sense of social and cultural distance toward the recent Eastern European Jewish immigrants. In “How I Created Simon Levi”, Warfield presented his official perspective in 1902:

From time immemorial the Israelite people have been split into factions between which the lines of demarcation have been so strongly defined as to equal those between them and other nations. The Portuguese and Spanish Jews, better known as Sephardim, form one community, the English and Americans a second, the French a third, the Germans a fourth, while the Russian and Slavic Jews constitute a regular series each different from all the rest. (p. 248)[5]

Warfield converted to Christianity after marrying a Roman Catholic woman. But he eventually won the higher acclaim he sought in a play by an Elizabethan Englishman, in the role of Shylock in The Merchant of Venice.

But there was a post-Warfield generation of Jewish performers who presented something different. While Bert Williams was widely known as an “aristocrat of comedy” and a gentleman, Fanny Brice, Al Jolson, Eddie Cantor, George Jessel, George Burns and the Marx Brothers, rather than “upgrading” the “lowly Hebrew” stock character by playing him “realistically”, or trying to adapt him/her to a middle-class respectability or gentility, downgraded the figure. Brice, for example, was brought up in a middle-class English-speaking Jewish family. She practised mimicry by taking on the talk of immigrant servant girls in her household, the dialect comedy routines of Joe Welch, and the “nigger talk” of black neighbors and entertainers. Consider her first vaudeville hit of 1909, “Sadie Salome”, about a stage-struck Jewish girl and her boyfriend Mose:

When his Sadie came to sight,
He stood up and yelled with all his might
Don’t do that dance, I tell you Sadie,
That’s not a bus’ness for a lady!
Most e’rybody knows
That I’m your loving Mose
Oy oy oy – where’s your clothes? (p. 204)

It was Russian-born, and from the other side of the New York tracks, Irving Berlin, who wrote this song, advising Brice to perform it with an exaggerated Jewish accent. Berlin had sung in Bowery saloons for prostitutes, pimps, and German and Irish immigrant workers. Employed as a singing waiter, at “Nigger Mike’s” (owned by a Russian Jew and in Chinatown), Berlin was accustomed to morphing between musical styles and dialects for an audience that was a hangout for slummers. At the Ziegfield Follies, Brice performed “coon” songs, “Yiddishe” songs, and, for example, impersonated a black housewife with a Yiddish dialect. Her “Indian Squaw”, Rosie Rosenstein, must have really been something. Among these performers, pastiche was performed and enjoyed nightly.

Cultural critics like Gilbert Seldes recognized the success of some of these performers, linking their “contempt for artificial notions of propriety”, with their status as racial outsiders who brought something to America that it lacked and loved (p. 206). Romeyn herself says:

It can be argued that the performances of Eddie Cantor, Fanny Brice, George Jessel, Al Jolson, and the Marx Brothers, for all their internal differences, reshaped “Hebrew Comedy” into a Jewish “minor language”. Their travesties represented an “apotheosis of the low”, a “de-centering” of the “superior” cultural norm of Anglo-Saxondom and its hierarchies of taste, race, and caste. By inflecting this norm with their own low (Jewish) vernacular, these comedians not only assaulted the standards of the majority culture. Exerting their own claims of cultural ownership, they transformed the conventional racial stock types of vaudeville into vehicles for a distinctively modern, Jewish voice. (p. 207)[6]

There was a distinctively Jewish capacity for mutability, Romeyn argues, and quotes Fanny Brice, in support of this:

I believe it’s because I’m Jewish that I have been a steady climber on the stage… Not that my success has been brought by my imitations of Jewish types, but the versatility with which I have been credited, is peculiar to Jews. There is no need of my giving historical justification for my statement, as scholars have long determined that a variety of experiences, and a constantly changing environment have produced an adaptability in the Jew, rarely possessed by other people. (pp. 207-8)[7]

Romeyn also enlists the likes of celebrated contemporary theorists like Zygmund Bauman to reprise this “understanding of the Jew as the incarnation of the protean, indefinable, modern self” (p. 208). Jews, Bauman argued:

had entered modern times as ambivalence incarnate… In the mobile world, the Jews were the most mobile of all; in the world of boundary-breaking, they broke the most boundaries; in the world of melting solids, they made everything, including themselves, into a formless plasma in which any form could be born only to dissolve again… They embodied incongruence, artificiality, sham and the frailty of the social order and the most earnestly drawn boundaries. (p. 208)

Romeyn too briefly gathers scholars of “Jewishness” to gesture to the phobia-inducing and freeing aspects of this “protean” quality, drawing on Jonathan Freeman, Daniel and Jonathan Boyarin, and, of course, Michael Rogin and his much discussed Blackface, White Noise.[8] But she does link her discussion of comic style to African American performance and possibilities on stage and in life. That the “modern, excessive, Jewish voice”, of performers like Jolson, Cantor, Brice and the Marx Brothers, says Romeyn:

owed much to mimicry of African American vernacular styles, as transmitted (however problematically) through blackface comedy and ragtime, and that it therefore must be seen as an expression of the mongrelization of culture in New York’s urban borderlands…is undeniable. (p. 209)

(Romeyn attributes this observation to Ann Douglas, in what sounds like a must-read for anyone interested in identity, performance and urban existence, Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s.) I am not sure about Romeyn’s “must”, but this breaking of codes and self-transformation, linked to the quality of being “American”, was indeed, as she says, played out against the backdrop of African American actors who still had to remain “real” darkies, the appearance of a fixed relationship between inner being and outer appearance being enforced.

Though writing about performance is a challenge in itself, in Romeyn’s discussion of the Jewish comedians in question, there is somehow an overly cognitive/cerebral attribution of meaning which neither gets close enough to the humour of the non-verbal id unleashed by Harpo Marx jumping into random, shocked arms, or to one of the “little people”, Eddie Cantor, crossing what we call gender and race to play “Salome”, and disobeying a social order that takes itself as stratified, serious and given. “Class” is as relevant and slippery an explanatory category here as “Jewishness”, the conceptions of both notions changing, relational and geo-historical. Yet it is still relevant and implicated in stagings of the self. When the “Yankee Doodle Dandy”, George M. Cohan, and George Nathan talked about the “Mechanics of Emotion” for McClures readers in 1913, they saw their audience as coming to the theatre to have their emotions played on. These emotions were tears, laughs, and thrills, basic responses common to all of us. The “New Humor’s” appeal to such visceral elements in the human (social) organism constituted, as Romeyn too notes, “the direct opposite of a bourgeois aesthetic that valued distance, emotional control, and ‘refined’ laughter” (165).[9] But like many cultural theorists, Romeyn seems to jump a little too quickly away from this relatively raw and common aspect to suggest that the New Humor “borrowed” from Mikhail Bakhtin’s tradition of the “carnivalesque”, the “aesthetic of gross realism” and Rabelais, in its positive, redemptive aspect, and suggests its “daemonic” aspect (as described by Gilbert Seldes) was “undoubtedly informed by the intense, neurotic energy of metropolitan life” (p. 165). Somehow, it reads here as if life, which cannot be pinned down by definitions and ultimate meanings, did not come first, and labels only afterwards.

Eisenstein, Romeyn notes, was inspired by vaudeville’s emotional intensity and aesthetic fragmentation when he developed his conception of the “montage of attractions” (p. 127). For Marinetti, vaudeville, or variety, “born as we are from electricity”, offered speed and “astonishment” (p. 127). And Baudelaire’s flâneur was a “kaleidoscope endowed with consciousness”, who “dives into the urban crowd as if in a reservoir of electric energy” (p. 242). Romeyn quotes Georg Simmel’s 1903 lecture, “The Metropolis and Mental Life” concerning the “intensification of nervous life”, the profound alteration in the self’s “psychological foundation” in the city (p. 125). And she notes that Walter Benjamin wrote of the modern man as “cheated out of his experience”, shock becoming the “norm of everyday life in the city”, and a “mechanical conditioning of man” its correlate:

Benjamin argued that human consciousness, like a bumper, parries the shocks experienced by the walker in the crowd and the assembly-line worker, and gradually becomes desensitized. It engages impressions and sensations that are experienced as shocking on the level of reflex, rather than letting them penetrate into conscious experience as a traumatic effect. (p. 126)

We have had a great deal of cultural (including film) theory in the “Benjaminic” tradition, But whose experience, self and consciousness are being posited here? Who, empirically, is mechanically conditioned and anaesthetized by the city/factory? Are these processes supposed to be complete? And don’t we need to understand and acknowledge ourselves as always/already “wired” creatures with electro-chemical responses, who are also capable of emotional intensity and conscious thinking, action and reaction? (Castoriadis’s notion of man as a mad animal who invented reason, is a pretty good one, I think.)

Allan Pinkerton’s discussion of McParlan/McKenna and the Mollie Maguires was mentioned earlier as an example of an urban-based professional’s “self-serving” story (p. 33) of sending an employee to play a role for the good of American society at large. McParlan’s temporary becoming McKenna is indeed fascinating and strikingly brings to the fore the mobile continuity of the borders between the real and the theatrical – questions of the performance of a “professional”, of loyalty, and the connection of a self to an ideal, a contract, or a community. Involved in heavy drinking, fighting, intrigue, and we might presume, some interior emotional turmoil, McParlan’s appearance changes. He loses hair, becomes thin, looks the rough vagabond that he is playing – full-time and for years. One of Pinkerton’s chapters is titled “The Detective Sings, Fights and Dances Himself into Popularity”. Some suggest, Pinkeron wrote, that under the influence of his environment, McParlan/McKenna became “the wildest Irishman of the mountains, and the most unprincipled Mollie in the whole country” (p. 33). And once it has been revealed that the infiltrator was in fact a detective, an acquaintance is supposed to have said: “It’s a mystery to me, anyhow!…He’s a counterfeiter, a thief, a gentleman, a singer of songs and a dancer of jigs, an’ be gorra, now they say he’s a detective!” (p. 34). But the account cries out with questions about “knowing” and invested middle-class professional individuals mapping the minds and lives of an underclass – in this situation, a non-urban one.

Romeyn is aware of the impossibility of discussing race and class apart from each other, racist depictions of national groups being fuelled by differences in class and degrees of assimilation into the larger social body. Yet when she suggests that after the successful capturing of Mollies condemned to death by hanging for murder, the trial “was precisely about making Irishness white and respectable”, I am left with the uneasiness I have with much semiotic narrative analysis to the extent that it foregrounds one strand of a complex whole (never knowable in its totality), and neglects vital ties to reality. While wanting to be fair and distinguish Romeyn’s project from what I might be wanting done, I am still concerned with that “indexical stickiness” Bill Nichols talks about in relation to ethnodocumentary representations (on film – but the stickiness is just more evident on film than in written narratives).

Mollie Maguire history comes from oral and strongly partisan sources, pro and con, since secret society members left little hard evidence of their existence. (The Molly Maguires were, in fact, within an Ancient Order of Hibernians.) Molly history has become mythical, but it cannot be reduced to a fiction, as abundant contemporary popular cultural tributes and labor and judicial histories show. Whatever else, one of the Molly Maguires’ raisons d’être was “socio-political” reality – not devoid of, and partly constituted by and expressed in the “theatrical” and the “mythical”. Labor – with little alternative option – was pitted against capital (with civilizing ideologies and often violent, literally sickening, and even murderous methods of achieving its aims – usually the accumulation of the maximum amount of profit). Protestant industrialist Irishman, Franklin B. Gowen, Head of the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad and of the Philadelphia and Reading Coal and Iron Company, hired the Pinkerton Detective agency, which had already been present in the coal fields as a private police force organized by railroad and mining interests, as part of his struggle against organized labour. He argued that the union, the Workingmen’s Benevolent Association, had the murderous, criminal association of Irish Catholics at its core. He also acted as prosecutor of some of the alleged Mollies at their trial. Gowen’s double role being backed by social-political force mattered.

One telling of the story, Martin Ritt’s 1970 film of The Molly Maguires was firmly with the underdog, focussing like Grierson on the miners’ working processes and environment, but also documenting the company stranglehold on the lives of people without options. But if the miners worked deep under the ground with cockroaches and rats, they were not successfully conditioned to feel less than men. They acted, however disastrous the ultimate outcomes. Richard Harris’s incarnation of McParlan gave a sense of the exhilaration and existential drama of his double character, and his ultimate betrayal of friendship, romance and community warmth – rising on the social scale at great cost to all. (In French-speaking Canada the film was known as Traître sur commande). Sean Connery played a teetotalling Jack Kehoe (the original man was a saloon owner), full of fire and refusing the servility he was supposed to accept. (Interestingly, 90 years after his hanging, Kehoe was officially pardoned of the crime he was supposed to have committed.) More recently, Deadwoodbluntly and humanly showed the strata of deemed worthlessness of the various groupings of miners, and the thugs-for-hire who killed labor organisers in the US frontier. Its depiction of Pinkerton professionals was equally harsh. But even this unique series, in its weaker third season, suggested that neither craft nor imagination could overleap the reality of big, thoroughly ruthless and organized capital embodied and executed by George Hirst.

Back in Romeyn’s Introduction, the power of theatre to move us is discussed. If the theatre and the social world are “theatrical”, the “fictionality of an ontologically stable and coherent” identity can be underscored (p. xxiii). Gathering together phrasings and quotations from Foucault, Derrida, Butler and other performance theorists, Romeyn concludes here that the “excess of the theatrical cannot be contained” (p. xxiv), and she emphasizes that some scholars see the performative

as a series of overlapping, disjunctive, contradictory, and possibly conflicting performative acts. The reproduction of the social world, Lois McNay suggests, involves “value clashes between groups, changes in consciousness, social protests, and repression based on force”. Thus, she argues that “the cultural necessity for a performative reiteration of these symbolic norms highlights the extent to which they are not natural or inevitable and are, therefore, potentially open to change.” (p. xxiv)[10]

But despite Romeyn’s strong evidence and eventual ending upon African-American performance and reality of the period in question, the desire for a relatively autonomous actor is here; whether the “resignification” involved in transgressive performances and practices are “inherently or only conditionally subversive” is still asked. What can theatre/stage (or film) performance move people to?

A decade ago, at a seminar in Paris, Castoriadis decried the homogenisation of his city, the deadening massification of culture around him. As an old man this theorist of autonomy and creativity was sounding very like Max Horkheimer or Theodor Adorno in the 1940s. But Castoriadis was greeted by protests from many at the gathering. Did he have any idea of the life and activity out there in the banlieue, the suburbs, of all the dedicated teachers and initiatives that young people, first and second generation immigrant and native French, were taking part in? He did of course, and hurried to say so. But if the playground, the local pub, or the theatre provide spaces where a certain transcendence, criticism, self-conscious comment on social structures and conditions can take place in exchange between like-minded souls, how this translates into radically changing structuring processes and relations is unfortunately, another question. People who play the role of rulers tend to end up believing in their own publicity, seeming to become addicted to power. They can regard most of the population as extras and their environment as temporary backdrop. Power tends to be exacted at any human and natural price.

Lorraine Mortimer,
La Trobe University, Australia.

Endnotes

[1]  Romeyn is quoting Katherine Roof, in Henry Jenkins’s What Made Pistachio Nuts: Early Sound Comedy and the Vaudeville Aesthetic (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 47. A feature of Street Scenes is its acknowledged usage of (often excellent) work by other writers. Sometimes, however, what is gained in the scholarship drawn upon can result in frustration for the reader wanting to know the context of quotations, and hoping for Romeyn to pursue her own arguments in more depth. Jenkins’s book is used a great deal.
[2]  This quotation is from performer Tom T. Morgan, and found in Pierre Bourdieu’s Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979), 44.
[3] Brice, in an unidentified clipping in the Williams and Walker File, Locke Collection, 69, NYPL-PA. (Unfortunately, I do not think the latter acronym is ever spelled out. It is The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.)
[4] It is interesting, however, that one of the first such watchdog groups formed was the “Society for the Prevention of Ridiculous and Pervasive Misrepresentation of the Irish Character”. 167
[5] Warfield’s article appeared in Theatre Magazine that year.
[6] Romeyn is quoting from her earlier book, co-authored with Jack Kugelmass, Let There Be Laughter: Jewish Humor in America (Chicago: The Spertus Press, 1997), 10, and Stephen J. Whitfield’s “The Distinctiveness of American Jewish Humor”, in Modern Judaism 6, no. 3 (October 1986): 251-52.
[7] Fanny Brice, “As I see myself and Others”, Jewish Tribune, 12 June 1925, Fanny Brice File, Billy Rose Theatre Collection, NYPL-PA.
[8] See Michael Rogin’s Black Face, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting-Pot (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996).
[9] Romeyn footnotes Pierre Bourdieu’s Distinction here.
[10] See Lois McNay, “Subject, Psyche, and Agency: The Work of Judith Butler”, in Performativity and Belonging, ed. Vicki Bell (London: Russell Sage Foundation, 1999).

Created on: Sunday, 30 August 2009