WINTER/SPRING 1992
Guest Editor: Esther Kaplan
In this culture we’re born with certain tattoos. Or rather, we’re told that various aspects of our bodies mean certain things, and then we’re encouraged to help make those meanings clearer—how we do our hair, how we talk, or don’t.And then, sometimes, we figure out how to use those codes in other ways, to recreate ourselves and this world. What links this issue of the Performance Journal, Speaking Ethnicity, to the last one, Gender Performance, is that they both seek to explore the languages of those markings, and understand how they speak—or how we can make them speak. And one of the best reasons for this issue to follow the last is to reiterate the need for sexuality, gender, and race to be understood in terms of each other (like the Fierce Pussy street posters on this page) and in relation to political change (see David Chan and Fred Ho). These pages try to get at what the images, sounds, and voices are that constitute ideas of ethnicity, how we use them in our work, how racism is reinforced, and how it is resisted. Especially for dancers and performers, whose work is articulated in their bodies, these questions are central.
Now, as I once learned in school, there’s the literal meaning of words, and the meaning of the act of speaking them (which at times could be translated as attitude; at others, as force). This layered meaning resonates throughout the writings in this issue. Tricky kinds of art and writing involve the active play of that doublespeak—corrupting racist images in speaking them, by overarticulating them, or saying them wrong, the literal meaning changed in what Darius James calls an act of alchemy (see also Suzanne and Stephanie Jones, and Celina Davis and Sandye Wilson). But when race is spoken about directly, affirmatively (see, for example, Cheryl Dunye, or the David Rousseve company), the meaning still works on two levels: it’s not just the absolute identification with a term like “black lesbian” that’s being put forth, but the ability to speak it—the self-possession that implies. Because all of this writing and artmaking occurs within power relations that spring from the history of institutionalized racism in the arts and the struggles against it (see Kalamu ya Salaam), and the dissimulating rhetoric of “multiculturalism,” which is at best naïve (too little, absurdly late), and at its worst, reflective of a cultural neocolonialism (see Merian Soto). And always, when speaking about race, one does it in relation to whether one is abiding by or overstepping the established proprieties of such conversation (what might not be so polite in certain company), as Adrian Piper’s Cornered and Robbie McCauley’s Sally’s Rape make quite clear. These two pieces, along with Coco Fusco’s, which hints at a common refusal to acknowledge complex, hybrid identities and cultures, begin to ask about what isn’t being said about race. Which is certainly a question that could be asked about this issue of the journal.
When word got out about “Speaking Ethnicity,” we began to receive calls about the “nonwhite” issue, the “ethnic” issue, which makes me worry that people saw this as Movement Research’s ghetto issue for artists of color—far from what I sought to express in the solicitation letter. At the same time, many “white” performers I approached for this issue were uninterested in speaking about their work in ethnic terms (Jeannie Hutchins, Alyson Pou and Judith Sloan are notable exceptions), and I worry that their absence from the issue warps the discussion. And what about my own nervousness about editing the issue, my sense of inappropriateness? At one point, it seemed important to tell my history as a Jew raised in a rural white Christian community in order to explain my relation to questions of ethnicity, even “otherness.” This background certainly informs me. But I feel that I edited this issue more as a “white” person than a “nonwhite” one—not least because that’s how the contributors responded to me—and the logic and spirit and political hope behind that is my utter belief in the need for “whites” to take on race and racism, not to leave that responsibility to people of color, and to work from our own complicity in the history of racism as we work for political change.
I hope this issue succeeds in pointing to certain absences in the rhetoric and writing about dance, performance, art, and music with regard to ethnicity, and that it makes steps toward offering alternatives, both aesthetic and political, that will further our work and our discussions. Thanks so much to all the contributors. I dedicate my work on the journal to Kevin Kennedy, who taught me so much about all of this.
