not yet ready – Black & Green Atlantic

We’ve talked about spectacle a number of times in this class. We asked whether Gulliver was a spectacle in Lilliput and the country of the Houyhnhnms, which seems likely in both instances in the way he is seen as almost a tourist attraction. For instance, he writes in Lilliput that “as the news of my arrival spread throughout the kingdom, it brought prodigious numbers of rich, idle, and curious people to see me (Swift, 15).” Additionally, we wondered whether Douglass was a spectacle in Ireland, arriving at a more inconclusive answer.

However, in In Dahomey, the question of spectacle is never in doubt. As Daphne Brooks writes about the play, “The press trumpeted the arrival of African-American performers in a musical of their own making and encouraged the public to attend the production, if only to observe the odd miracle of African-American theater (Brooks, 207).” As this quote shows, the all-black cast was a spectacle regardless of the content of the play. On one hand, this intentional spectacle gave African-Americans an important viewership that at the very least opened the door for black actors to become more prominent in theatre. Yet it also put limitations on what these women and men could achieve through this play. The all-black cast made this play a work of “black art,” which was thus undeniably political. All art made by a marginalized person is automatically political and can longer solely entertain. Thus, if the writers of In Dahomey attempted to present obvious critiques of the color line, racial discrimination, and the Jim Crow South, they would lose the precious viewership achieved by this spectacle (at least in the United States). As a result, the play portrays the racist stereotypes of African-Americans in theatre.

Brooks argues that, through Mose and Me Sing, the play mocks individualism in the black community (specifically through emigration) by exposing the greed and xenophobia that undermines such an attitude (Brooks, 246). In a way, this critique, though not explicit in the text, makes perfect sense. The writers of In Dahomey reject individualism themselves. Though they could have pursued a more overt and aggressive critique of the color line, they instead utilize their spectacle to place a foot in the door so that others, like those writers in the Harlem Renaissance, could present a more overt case. Reversing the rhetoric we have seen in the past, though the subversive critiques of society in In Dahomey show that the writers were ready to attack racial injustice, the finished product of the play shows a recognition that the world “was not yet ready.” Yet, when it became ready, In Dahomey ensured that black artists would have an entryway into the conversation.

As we move into more of the parallel histories of black people in America and the Irish, I have found the most interesting theme of each group’s struggles to escape the oppression and prejudices of the majority of their respective times, with the whites in America and the English colonizers in Ireland. Each dominating majority used the notion of “not yet ready” to describe its downcast group in order to maintain their own positions of power and status. Not only does this phrase create and rapidly proliferate explicitly racist sentiment among the mostly white majority, but its sense of superiority also allows for economic and political exploitation of each group of “others.” In America, whites used these attitudes to pass sweeping legislation, especially in the South, to prevent any sort of racial uplift for blacks. Jim Crow laws prohibited voting for blacks in the South and excluded them from virtually every area of society, essentially limiting them to sharecropping and still fulfilling similar roles to their slavehood for decades. The concept of “not yet ready” pushed writers such as Washington and DuBois to push in a variety of ways for social uplift, especially through education, but this practice only yielded middling success. As DuBois illustrates in “The Souls of Black Folk,” this cultural divide within the same ethnic community created great tensions between the educated and uneducated blacks, which neutralized the effectiveness of Washington and DuBois’s hopes. By facing more obstacles and true social progress, blacks in America were trapped in a harsh social space, unable to reach their reasonable goals while still being grossly mistreated by the white majorities.

Likewise, the Irish experienced similar slander to their culture and representation at the hands of the English majority, who took advantage of their crops to the point of near extinction when the potato famine hit. The introduction of the plantation system echoed its use in the Americas, in which the apparently ethnically inferior group is forced into work and after the abolition of each system, is still held in a form of indentured servitude. This continued colonial practice allowed for Britain to keep its hold over the Irish and profit off of their labor, while the Irish struggled without money for their work and extremely limited food supplies. Also, in the public eye, the Irish, as well as black people in America, were ridiculed constantly, mostly through caricatures which displayed each group as sub-human and apelike. However, one of the key differences between the blacks in America and the whites in Ireland was the Irish’s eventual acceptance into “whiteness” after generations of immigration into America, although this prohibition from full acceptance into modernity remains intact even to this day in several respects for African Americans. Whereas the Irish have been eventually welcomed into the sense of modernity brought about in the 19th century, black people must deal with the oppression of being deemed “never ready,” constantly trying to prove their similarity to the cultural majority to receive a fair chance.

Tag: not yet ready

Using Spectacle to Hold Open the Door: In Dahomey