Abstract
W. E. B. Du Bois’s production of the pageant The Star of Ethiopia opened at the 12th Regiment Armory in New York on 22 October 1913 (see figure 9).3 It was not without controversy, for it raised significant issues concerning the portrayal of African Americans during a period of heightened racism and its antithesis, Black Nationalism, in the United States. Subsequent productions continued to portray African American history quite differently than it had been depicted by white ethnologists, novelists, and playwrights. The Star of Ethiopia stood in stark contrast to the depictions one finds, for example, in Thomas Dixon’s The Clansman: An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan (1905), and later, in D. W. Griffith’s film based on Dixon’s book, Birth of a Nation (1915). In the film, according to Du Bois, the black man was portrayed as a “fool, a vicious rapist, a venal and unscrupulous politician or a faithful but doddering idiot.”4
Colonialism is not satisfied merely with holding a people in its grip and emptying the native’s brain of all form and content. By a kind of perverted logic, it turns to the past of oppressed people, and distorts, disfigures and destroys it.
—Frantz Fanon (1968)1
The claims of no people … are respected by any nation until they are presented in a national capacity.
—Martin Delany (1852)2
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Notes
Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, tr. Constance Farrington (New York: Grove, 1968), 210.
Martin Delany, The Condition, Elevation, Emigration and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States, Politically Considered (Philadelphia: Harper, 1852), 210.
David Levering Lewis, W.E. B. Du Bois: A Biography of a Race (New York: Henry Holt, 1993), 461.
Arnold Rampersad, The Art and Imagination of W. E. B. Du Bois (New York: Schocken, 1976), 230.
George M. Parker, “The Negroid Line in History,” A. M. E. Church Review 25 (October 1908), 28.
Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, 1860–1880 (1935; reprint, New York: Atheneum, 1992), 727.
Du Bois, “The Drama Among Black Folk,” Crisis 12.4 (August 1916), 171.
Fredric J. Haskins, “The Gift of Ethiopia,” Crisis 11.2 (December 1915), 75.
Du Bois, Dusk of Dawn (1940; New Brunswick: Transaction, 1983), 272.
Du Bois, “Criteria of Negro Art,” Crisis 32.6 (October 1926), 296.
Burroughs, a drama student at Wilberforce and the Boston School of Expression, directed all four productions. See Samuel A. Hay, African American Theatre: An His-torical and Critical Analysis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 247
David W Blight, “W E. B. Du Bois and the Struggle for American National Memory,” in History and Memory in African American Culture, ed. Geneviève Fabre and Robert O’Meally (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 46.
Anthony Appiah, “The Uncompleted Argument: Du Bois and the Illusion of Race,” Critical Inquiry 12 (Autumn 1985), 25.
Du Bois, “Can the Negro Serve the Drama?” Theatre Magazine 38 (July 1923), 68.
William Chauncy Langdon, “The Pageant-Grounds and Their Technical Requirements,” Bulletin of the American Pageantry Association 11 (1 December 1914), 1.
Steve Golin, “The Paterson Pageant: Success or Failure,” Socialist Review 13 (1983), 56.
Du Bois, “The Conservation of Races: Speech to the American Negro Academy, 1897,” African American Social and Political Thought, 1850–1920, ed. Howard Brotz (New Brunswick: Transaction, 1993), 487–88.
Linda Nochlin, “The Paterson Strike Pageant of 1913,” Art in America 52 (May-June 1974), 67.
Liah Greenfield, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), 3
Wilson Jeremiah Moses, The Golden Age of Black Nationalism, 1850–1925 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 133.
Joel Williamson, “W. E. B. Du Bois as a Hegelian,” in What Was Freedom’s Price?, ed. David G. Sansing (Jackson, MI: University of Mississippi Press, 1978), 34.
Johann Gottfried von Herder, Outline of a Philosophy of the History of Man (1784–1791), quoted in Elie Kedourie, Nationalism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), 48.
Bernard W Bell, The Folk Roots of Contemporary Afro-American Poetry (Detroit: Broadside, 1974), 21.
Du Bois, The Negro (1915; London: Oxford University Press, 1970), 9.
J. Mutero Chirenje, Ethiopianism and Afro-Americans in Southern Africa, 1883–1916 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987), 1.
F Nnabuenyi Ugonna, “Introduction,” Ethiopia Unbound: Studies in Race Emancipation, ed. J. E. Casely Hayford (London: F Case, 1969), xxiv.
B. F Lee, “Selection, Environment and the Negro’s Future,” A M. E. Church Review 20 (1904), 389.
Edmund J. Keller, Revolutionary Ethiopia: From Empire to People’s Republic (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 34.
See, for instance, Clarence G. Contee, “The Emergence of Du Bois as an African Nationalist,” Journal of Negro History 54 (1969), 48–63.
Martin Delany, Principal of Ethnology: The Origins of Race and Color (Philadelphia: Harper, 1879), 72.
Richard Powell, Black Art and Culture in the Twentieth Century (London: Thames and Hudson, 1997), 36.
For a discussion on Du Bois’s theories based on Franz Boas’s lectures in 1906 on the origins of iron smelting, see Sterling Stuckey, Going Through the Storm: The Influence of African American Art in History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 130.
Du Bois, “The Conservation of Races: Speech to the American Negro Academy (1897),” quoted in African American Social and Political Thought, 1850–1920, ed. Howard Brotz (New Brunswick: Transaction, 1993), 491.
Sterling Stuckey, Slave Culture: Nationalist Theory and the Foundations of Black America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 276.
Quoted in Julio Finn, Voices of Négritude (London: Quartet, 1988], 58.
Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, tr. Constance Farrington (New York: Grove Press, 1968), 213.
Wole Soyinka, Myth, Literature and the African World (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-versity Press, 1976), 129
Edward W Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994), 226.
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© 2002 David Krasner
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Krasner, D. (2002). “The Pageant Is the Thing”: Black Nationalism and The Star of Ethiopia. In: A Beautiful Pageant. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-06625-1_4
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