Can the Thing Talk? Commentary on Robin Bernstein’s ‘Dances with
Things: Material Culture and the Performance of Race’
“A thing demands that people confront it on its own terms” – Robin
Bernstein
Chambi
Chachage
Robin Bernstein’s (2009) article on
‘Dances with Things: Material Culture and the Performance of Race’[1]
invites the reader to embrace a new way of reading the past as inscribed in
artifacts. In a significant way, the article, which, as she notes in her
official Harvard webpage, appears, in part, in her forthcoming book on Racial Innocent: Performing American
Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights, is a bold and ambitious attempt at
‘reinventing the wheel’. In it, as Bernstein puts it in her webpage, she “develop
a new methodology by which to analyze material culture so as to uncover
otherwise inaccessible evidence of past performances”. [2]
A close reading of the text, which
also entails making sense of what made it win two prizes and prompt an
interview, reveals that it indeed provide one with novel, albeit subtle ways,
of historicizing and thus interpreting the past as poetically captured in the
phrase ‘past is present’. The author starts by presenting – and then analyzing
step-by-step by way of adding interpretive nuances and parallels throughout the
article – a ‘racialized’ photograph that is captioned as being taken sometime
in the 1930s. In her preliminary ‘racial’
description, it is a picture of “a light-skinned woman” standing “behind a
larger-than-life- size caricature of an African American eating a slice of
watermelon”.
The choice of the term ‘light-skinned”,
instead of ‘white’, is neither random nor insignificant, a fact that becomes
clearer towards the end of the article when the author reveals the potential
shifting racial identity of that woman through analyzing the censuses and laws
of the times. Using the term ‘African American’, instead of ‘dark-skinned’,
indicates that the author knows for – or claims to be – sure about the identity
of the image of the boy and thus fixes in historical time. To her it is not –
and cannot be – ‘Caribbean African’, ‘British African’ or even ‘African African’.
She thus won’t even stop to ask if it was modeled on a person who was alive.
Nor would she use her “new methodology” to unearth its crafter.
How does she arrive, methodologically, to that
conclusion? By simply using the ‘old’ methods that she is attempting to
transcend, if not do away with, through her “new methodology” that insists that
“historians must place our living bodies in the stream of performance tradition”.
Even though the author provides possible answers to what the identity of the
dark-skinned image of a boy is/was from what she refers to as “panoply of
racist libels”, the possibilities, also couched in the terms “might”, “suggest”
and “could”, are taken as a given as she determined a priori – i.e. stereotypically
– that image is of an “African American”.
It is in this regard that the
author betrays her own “new methodology” to the extent that she specifically concludes
that the image of the boy as a “thing does not come alive” and that, generally,
things “are not alive”. Indeed they are
not literally alive but figuratively they are.
These are the very things that are personified/animated, through individual
and collective lives that construct(ed) them as ‘subjective objects’, to
interact with living beings such as the one the author conceived as a “living
woman” who “becomes a thing” and those who are engaging with that photograph
such as the author and readers. To her credit, though, in an endnote she notes that
the “photograph continues to script actions in the present, from its location”.
Being alive is thus its “ontological scriptivity”.
A thing is a projection or extension
of its creator. The same can be said of those who follow in the footsteps of
its constructor. As such it can outlive its maker yet do his/her biddings as if
s/he was living in it. Like its inventor, it’s not innocent.
Expectedly, the author is also scripted/schemed
by the caricature – the thing – that invites, even instructs, her, as an ardent
critic of racism, to thus continue to denounce racial violence in the past as a
way of denouncing it in the present also:
In these readings, the caricature embodies a
dehumanizing expression of racism or a tool by which white Americans could
symbolically commodify or otherwise control African Americans long after
slavery ended (Bernstein 2009: 68).
Nevertheless, the “new methodology”
is hence only applied, painstakingly, to the “light-skinned woman”. It entails analyzing
the way the woman is “scripted” by three material things, namely the cutout
caricature of the dark-skinned image of a boy, the unseen camera of the
photographer, and the then photograph-to-be. By scripting, the author generally
means the ways material things invites or prompts a person to act/react or
behave as if one is dancing to the choreography of those things. In other
words, things, lifeless as they may be, embody a script that can be read in predetermined
ways by someone and thus influence his/her actions in coded ways. Even though
there is a room for modification and even resistance to the scripting, a person
is generally expected to dance to the tune of the lyrics of the script as if s/he
is being remote-controlled by the personal or institutional force behind the thing.
Thus socialization is analogous to scripting.
In employing this ‘novel
methodology’, the author of the article does not only consult the “archival” “memory”
of “written and material text that can
be housed in an archive” to unearth the identity of the “light-skinned woman”
in relation to the dark-skinned image of a boy, but she also incorporates “repertoire”
memory described as being “embodied
memory of traditions of performance” or “acts usually thought of as ephemeral”
such as “gestures, orality, movement, dance,” and “singing”. Herein – in the subtle
and simultaneous invocation of archival and repertoire memories – lies the
theoretical basis of the author’s celebrated “new methodology”. To her, the
archive should thus be conceived as a “ghostly discotheque where things of the past leap up to ask
scholars to dance” and sense:
Scriptive things are simultaneously
archive and repertoire; therefore, when things enter a repository such as the
Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, the repertoire arrives with them.
Scriptive things archive the repertoire—partially and richly, with a sense of
openness and flux (Bernstein 2009: 89).
To put it simply by way of
paraphrasing, the author is saying it is not enough to use and privilege the
archive after all it is usually a site of history as written by those in power
hence it is equally important to use and privilege the repertoire of those who
writes back by way of performance in response to the dominant historiography –
they are not merely frozen and stilled in the material culture.
In the author’s parlance, to be ‘performance
competent’ enough to employ the “new methodology” effectively, one has “to understands
a thing’s script both by locating the gestures it cites in its historical
location and by physically interacting with the evidence in the present
moment.” This is what the author does with the photograph though, by hastily “accruing
contextualizing knowledge” of the ‘dark-skinned’ image of a boy, she does not
dance with it as much as she does with the “light-skinned woman” thus failing
to live up to the highest rigorous standards of “holding a thing, manipulating
it, shaking it to see what meaningful gestures tumble forth” set by her
proposed “new methodology”.
Regardless of whether only one was alive
in a literal, as opposed to a figurative, sense during the photographing, both the
‘dark-skinned’ and ‘light-skinned’ are now images. They are all things that demand “people to
confront them in their own terms”. And the terms have changed since then. Both can
now talk more.
[1] Robin Bernstein, “Dances with Things:
Material Culture and the Performance of Race,” Social Text no. 101 (December
2009): 67-9.
