“Embodying Race, Performing Citizenship” investigates racial and ethnic impersonationsin American popular entertainment, especially vaudeville, between the 1870s and the 1920s. I focus my analyses on first-generation Irish, Chinese, and Jewish Eastern European artists and their American-born children during a time when the United States had absorbed the highest number of immigrants from the most varied ethnic, national, and cultural backgrounds since the country’s foundation. While racial impersonation often reiterated stereotypical and derogatory representations, I highlight immigrant artists’ awareness of its power to reshape identity politics. I argue that due to racial impersonation’s potent impact on audiences, immigrant artists deployed it as a tool to challenge fixed conceptions of racial subjectivities, race relations, and belonging to the national ethos. Immigrant performances, more effectively than racial impersonations by white, Protestant, American-born artists, highlight a tension between the validation of ethnic origins— interpolating between authentic and stereotypical depictions—and their rejection. Such a tension suggests that the pathway towards “Americanization” encompasses sudden sprints, false starts, and missteps. Thus, American immigration history should not be framed as a progressive narrative concluding with the assimilation of the foreign, but rather a complex process of negotiation that requires the performance of race to assert or contest self-identified or externally assigned racial identities. Whereas racial impersonation has already received the attention of scholars in theatre and performance studies, critical race theory, and cultural studies, this study goes beyond stage representations to focus on the particular immigrant experiences motivating or affecting them. I ask, what role did immigrant experiences play in the creation and evolution of theatrical racial representation in the United States? What do immigrant racial impersonations tell us about contemporaneous ideas of race, civic relations, and national belonging? Lastly, how did immigrant racial impersonations impact the way audiences came to understand race?

Creator

• De Simone, Maria

DOI

• https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-aa5v-sg22

Subject

• Performing arts
• Theater history
• American studies

Language

• en

Alternate Identifier

• etdadmin_upload_844553
• http://dissertations.umi.com/northwestern:15740

Keyword

• Jewish American
• Chinese American
• Irish American
• Racial impersonation
• Immigration history
• American popular entertainment

Date created

• 2021-01-01

Resource type

• Dissertation

Rights statement

• In Copyright