On Memory and Movement

Abstract

On Memory and Movement Amy B. Huang (bio) Cities of the Dead covers a lot of ground. As Joseph Roach incorporates his experience of walking in the city of New Orleans into his book, he also invites readers to move with him, giving us a sense of being grounded in this particular locale. But even as Roach focuses on New Orleans and London, he shows us that these are spaces of vast intercultures, and that moving within them calls up other moves. In his chapter "One Blood," which centers on Dion Boucicault's play The Octoroon; or, Life in Louisiana (1859), Roach explains that although Louisiana has been the site of policies that emphasize and reinforce monoculturalism, it is also a "plural frontier of multiple encounters."1 Indeed, the chapter carefully tracks the play's repeated ventures in exploring racial difference and liminality. Having first encountered this book in my first year as a graduate student in a Theater and Performance Studies program, I came to understand performance theory's emphasis on "twice behaved behavior" and the relationship between performance and reproduction through Roach's introduction of these concepts, and his linkage of them to specific contexts in the circum-Atlantic world. Cities of the Dead grounded and concretized performance studies for me, showing me the historical impact of how performance has offered substitution and reinvention (rather than exact reproduction), transmitting both memory and forgetting.2 I could see the stakes of surrogation, or the process of substituting to fill in gaps and vacancies, as Boucicault's wife, the white actress Agnes Robertson, delivered performances as an octoroon character, Zoe. Robertson's embodiment of Zoe sensuously enhanced The Octoroon's intrinsic investment in spectacularizing racial liminality as the play delinked Blackness from slavery, and showily substituted the figure of a suffering white woman for the catastrophes of the system of slavery.3 At the end of the play, Robertson's embodied surrogation of Zoe highlights the play's erasure and forgetting of Blackness.4 In further following the concept of racial liminality off the proscenium stage by looking, for example, at the performances by Mardi Gras Indians, Roach also sees how these Black performers [End Page 21] engaged in "masking Indian."5 Challenging early ventures of American theater historiography that emphasized the written word, and which often precluded the study of Indigenous dances and ceremonies, Roach makes clear the significance of orature, which includes "gesture, song, dance, processions, storytelling, proverbs, gossip, customs, rites, and rituals," forms that are "produced alongside or within mediated literacies of various kinds and degrees."6 Orature, Roach points out, can hold onto complex intercultural encounters and transmit knowledge and memory. Thus the Mardi Gras parade routes and the splendor of the costumes and performances place Indigenous and Black people in tight relation to each other, while offering Mardi Gras Indians opportunities for self-fashioning and communing with the past. Such performances offer important modes of repetition and reinvention; their examination greatly widens the scope and method of the study of American drama. Cities of the Dead's prominent role in my education as a Theater and Performance Studies scholar helped me to learn to challenge genealogies of performance that cement the boundaries of nation or period. Even as Roach asks readers to attend carefully to place and time, we crucially also learn to see how performances move across space and time, as this "One Blood" chapter traces fascinating figures of racial liminality from Boucicault's play to the Mardi Gras Indians to Storyville to the Plessy vs. Ferguson case. Although Cities of the Dead does not move further to consider other intercultural encounters, such as those involving European and American Orientalism and Chinese immigration, studying Asianness and Asian diasporic flows also unravels genealogies of American theater and performance. Plays and performances centering on frontiers do not only hold onto the force of Manifest Destiny, but often promote policies of Chinese exclusion as well. While representations of Asians on American stages have flourished particularly from the nineteenth century onward, such surrogation of Asian characters (often in the form of yellowface) is significantly charged in periods of exclusion and abjection. As I eventually moved on to study...