Performance Studies Alumni Spotlight: Jill Lane, Ph.D. [Blackface Minstrelsy in Cuban Culture]
Jill Lane is a 2000 graduate of NYU's Ph.D. program in Performance Studies. She is currently an Assistant Professor of Spanish and Portuguese at NYU where she is also Associate Director of the Hemispheric Institute for Performance and Politics. Prior to joining NYU's faculty, Lane was an Assistant Professor of American Studies and Theatre Studies at Yale University from 2003 to 2006. Taking a performance studies approach to cultural history, Lane wrote her dissertation on blackface minstrelsy in nineteenth century cuban culture under the tutelage of Diana Taylor and Jose Esteban Munoz. Her subsequent book, Blackface Cuba, 1840-1898 (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005) was winner of the 2006 Erroll Hill award from the American Society of Theatre Research and examines racial impersonation, national desire, and anti-colonial sentiment in Cuba. Lane is currently editing an anthology on Latin American performance for Routledge Press and is also the co-editor, with Peggy Phelan, of The Ends of Performance (New York University Press, 1998).More on Lane's book from University of Pennslvania Press:
"Blackface Cuba, 1840-1895 offers a critical history of the relation between racial impersonation, national sentiment, and the emergence of an anticolonial public sphere in nineteenth-century Cuba. Through a study of Cuba's vernacular theatre, the teatro bufo, and of related forms of music, dance, and literature, Lane argues that blackface performance was a primary site for the development of mestizaje, Cuba's racialized national ideology, in which African and Cuban become simultaneously mutually exclusive and mutually formative.Popular with white Cuban-born audiences during the period of Cuba's anticolonial wars, the teatro bufo was celebrated for combining Spanish elements with supposedly African rhythms and choreography. Its wealth of short comic plays developed a well-loved repertory of blackface stock characters, from the negrito to the mulata, played by white actors in blackface. Lane contends that these practices were embraced by white audiences as especially national forms that helped define Cuba's opposition to Spain, at the same time that they secured prevailing racial hierarchies for a future Cuban nation. Comparing the teatro bufo to related forms of racial representation, particularly those created by black Cubans in theatres and in the press, Lane analyzes performance as a form of social contestation through which an emergent Cuban national community struggled over conflicting visions of race and nation."
"Blackface performance, treated in U.S. scholarship as if it were an exclusively national phenomenon, has not until now been the subject of an extended study for Cuba, where it was the main vehicle for shaping a sense of hybridity. Lane shows that performance reiterated the contradiction between blacks and whites while trying to overcome it. From acting up to impersonation, Lane links some liberating practices of anticolonialism in the Americas with the binding mechanisms for a new national unity."—Doris Sommer, Harvard University
Category: "What is Performance Studies?"
By highlighting the research of current students and scholars in the field of performance studies, the "what is performance studies?" is intended as an online resource for newcomers to the discipline.
Previous Posts in this Series:
Spotlight on Berta Jottar, Ph.D.
Spotlight on Farai Bere
Spotlight on Beth Sarah Wright, Ph.D.
Spotlight on Jeffrey Q. McCune , Ph.D.
Spotlight on Shante Smalls
Spotlight on PopMatters Conference
Spotlight on Methods in Performance Studies
