Abstract
The plays of Naomi Wallace constitute a form of historical study. Her diligent research includes reading widely in labor history literature, engaging labor historians in conversations, and delving into critical race theory, particularly through the work of James Baldwin.1 Her refusal to traffic in historical stereotypes and tropes, along with her use of imagination, ghosts, magical realism, and poetic language, has enabled her to create dramatic work that challenges audiences to see workers not only as the products of the historical development of structures of class, race, gender, and sexuality, and the interaction of these structures with each other, but also as the possible architects of new social realities. Her theatre encourages us to think critically about how the power wielded by class, race, gender, and sexuality has shaped our history and how it is shaping our own lives today.2
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Notes
At the end of her published plays, Wallace provides a bibliography of sources, which are often the most insightful and provocative available work on the given subject. Wallace has also sought out such historians as David Roediger, Howard Zinn, Robin Kelley, Tera Hunter, Joe W. Trotter, Jr., Marcus Rediker, and me for in-depth conversations. See also James Baldwin, The Price of the Ticket: Collected Nonfiction, 1948–1985 (New York: St. Martin’s, 1985).
My eyes were opened on these questions by Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1997),
and Harry Elam, Jr., The Past As Present in the Drama of August Wilson (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004).
David Roediger’s The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (New York and London: Verso, 1991) initiated this paradigm shift among labor historians.
Also, see his edited collection, David Roediger Black on White: Black Writers on What It Means to Be White (New York: Schocken, 1999).
See Alan Dawley, Class and Community: The Industrial Revolution in Lynn (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976)
and Bruce Laurie, Artisans into Workers (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997).
See David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness, quoted in Theodore Allen, The Making of the White Race vol. I and II (New York: Verso, 1994 and 1997)
and Alexander Saxton, The Rise and Fall of the White Republic (New York: Verso, 2003).
See Alexander Saxton, Indispensable Enemy: Labor and the Anti-Chinese Movement in California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975);
Neil Foley, The White Scourge: Mexicans, Blacks, and Poor Whites in Texas Cotton Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999);
and Iver Bernstein, The New York City Draft Riots (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990).
See George Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998);
Cheryl Harris, “Whiteness as Property,” in Critical Race Theory, ed. Kimberlé Crenshaw et al (New York: The New Press, 1995, 276–91);
and Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York: Oxford, 1995).
See Douglas Dowd, The Twisted Dream: Capitalist Development in the United States Since 1776 (Cambridge: Winthrop Publishers, 1977);
David F. Noble, Forces of Production: A Social History of Industrial Automation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986);
and Barry Bluestone, The Deindustrialization of America (New York: Basic Books, 1984).
See George Lipsitz, Rainbow at Midnight: Class and Culture in the 1940s (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994);
Jeremy Brecher, Strike! The True History of Mass Insurrections in U.S. History (Boston: South End Press, 1999);
and Stanley Aronowitz, False Promises: The Shaping of American Working Class Consciousness (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991).
Among the valuable memoirs and personal narratives situated at these crossroads, these stand out: Mark Naison, White Boy: A Memoir (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002);
Thandeka, Learning to Be White: Money, Race, and God in America (New York: Continuum, 1999);
Bérubé, Allen and Florence Bérubé, “Sunset Trailer Park,” in White Trash: Race and Class in America, ed. Matt Wray and Annalee Newitz (New York: Routledge, 1997, 15–41);
Tim Wise, White Like Me: Reflections on Race from a Privileged Son (New York: Soft Skull, 2011);
and Robert Jenson, The Heart of Whiteness: Confronting Race, Racism, and White Privilege (San Francisco: City Lights, 2005).
Also, see Naomi Wallace’s film Lawn Dogs (Strand Releasing, 1997).
This and all further quotations from Slaughter City come from the edition published in Naomi Wallace, In the Heart of America and Other Plays (New York: TCG, 2001).
In her bibliography, Wallace cites my book, Peter Rachleff, Hard-Pressed in the Heartland: The Hormel Strike and the Future of the Labor Movement (Boston: South End Press, 1993).
This and all further quotations from the play come from Naomi Wallace, Things of Dry Hours (London: Faber and Faber, 2007).
Also see Robin D. G. Kelley, Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990);
Theodore Rosengarten, All God’s Dangers: The Life of Nate Shaw (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000);
Nell Painter, The Narrative of Hosea Hudson: The Life and Times of a Black Radical (New York: W. W. Norton, 2002);
Tera Hunter, To joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women’s Lives and Labors After the Civil War (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998);
and Joe W. Trotter, Jr., Black Milwaukee: The Making of an Industrial Proletariat (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985). Kelley, Hunter, Trotter, and I were all involved in the play’s first production in Pittsburgh in April 2004, engaging in conversations with Wallace, director Israel Hicks, and the cast.
This and all further quotations from The Hard Weather Boating Party are from the edition found in Hansel, Adrien-Alice and Amy Wegener (eds.), Humana Festival 2009: The Complete Plays (New York: Playscripts, 2009). See “Rubbertown: The Louisville Area’s Largest Source of Industrial Emissions” by the West Jefferson County Community Task Force, “History of Rubbertown” in the October 10, 2006 Louisville Courier Journal; and West Jefferson County Community Task Force, “Health Consultation: Rubbertown Industrial Area, Jefferson County, Kentucky” by the United States Department of Health and Human Services (Public Health Service: Atlanta, Georgia, August 3, 2006). A Google search for “Rubbertown” in September 2012—more than three years after the play’s 2009 premiere in Louisville—turned up several stories of deadly accidents in 2011 and 2012.
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© 2013 Scott T. Cummings and Erica Stevens Abbitt
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Rachleff, P. (2013). Journeys into the Heart of Whiteness: A Labor Historian Looks at the Work of Naomi Wallace. In: Cummings, S.T., Abbitt, E.S. (eds) The Theatre of Naomi Wallace. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137017925_12
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