Performing Race and Erasure

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xiii

   PDF

2. Cuba, Haiti, and the USA: Performing Race, Nation, and Empire, 1898–1940

   • Shannon Rose Riley

   Pages 1-34

3. Imperial Scripts and Vaudeville Skits: Faulty Memory and the Power of Performance

   • Shannon Rose Riley

   Pages 35-57

4. Patriotic Performance Culture and Whiteness: The Trope of Old Glory in Cuba

   • Shannon Rose Riley

   Pages 59-100

5. Re-Racing the Nation: From Cuba—A Drama of Freedom to the Cultural Performance of Negro History Week

   • Shannon Rose Riley

   Pages 101-140

6. Military Occupation in Haiti: Staging Pan-Whiteness in a World of Color

   • Shannon Rose Riley

   Pages 141-172

7. Staging the Haitian Revolution: Performing Blackness and the Role of the Mulatta/o

   • Shannon Rose Riley

   Pages 173-210

8. Biracial Palimpsests: Racing and Erasure in Black Empire and Haiti

   • Shannon Rose Riley

   Pages 211-235

9. Palimpsest-Postscript: Tracing the Past in the Present

   • Shannon Rose Riley

   Pages 237-240

10. Back Matter

    Pages 241-273

    PDF

In this book, Shannon Rose Riley provides a critically rich investigation of representations of Cuba and Haiti in US culture in order to analyze their significance not only to the emergence of empire but especially to the reconfiguration of US racial structures along increasingly biracial lines. Based on impressive research and with extensive analysis of various textual and performance forms including a largely unique set of skits, plays, songs, cultural performances and other popular amusements, Riley shows that Cuba and Haiti were particularly meaningful to the ways that people in the US re-imagined themselves as black or white and that racial positions were renegotiated through what she calls acts of palimpsest: marking and unmarking, racing and erasing difference. Riley’s book demands a reassessment of the importance of the occupations of Cuba and Haiti to US culture, challenging conventional understandings of performance, empire, and race at the turn of the twentieth century. 

• American theatre
• popular culture
• US imperialism
• racism
• biracialism
• palimpsest theory
• military occupation
• Federal Theatre Project
• negro radicalism
• interratial collaboration
• intermediality
• critical theory
• patriotism
• nationalism
• vaudeville
• revolution
• theatre

“Riley’s sophisticated study expands and challenges our knowledge of race, empire, and nation. She shows that the U.S. did not just export racial ideas and practices to the Caribbean islands it occupied and attempted to control. Race at home was also remade in ruling, fearing, and imagining Cuba and Haiti. Seeing music and performance more generally as sites of empire’s memory and forgetting Performing Race and Erasure brilliantly shows that a hardening sense that race could be reduced to black and white took shape outside the U.S. as well as inside.” (David Roediger, Foundation Distinguished Professor of International & Interdisciplinary Studies, University of Kansas, USA)

• San Jose State University, USA , San Jose, USA

  Shannon Rose Riley

Shannon Rose Riley is an interdisciplinary artist and scholar. She is Associate Professor, Chair of the Department of Humanities, and Coordinator of the Creative Arts Program at San José State University, USA, and is co-editor, with Lynette Hunter, of Mapping Landscapes for Performance as Research: Scholarly Acts and Creative Cartographies (2009).