Hidden Grief behind the Burnt-cork Makeup: Racial Melancholia in Caryl Phillips’s Dancing in the Dark

초록

This article investigates the nature of the artistic and aesthetic innovations highlighted by Caryl Phillips’s Dancing in the Dark, a biological fiction about two Broadway vaudeville stars, Bert Williams and George Walker. Because the Williams and Walker Company features a black coon figure, the duo are fully aware of their audience’s expectations to see conventional racial travesty and stock plantation minstrel figures. With new dancing repertories and humanized characters, however, they attempt to advance past the bugbear of conventional racial phrenology and seek a radical break from earlier African American show business productions as well as from plantation minstrelsy. Their new American characters are daringly experimented with in a musical titled In Dahomey. My argument is that their critical innovations In Dahomey are a product of a type of melancholic subject formation that leads to the emergence of their self-critical agency. Williams and Walker’s melancholic reflections on white minstrelsy, indeed, trigger off some critical understanding of their own black coon performance, and the experience of being forced to play racial stereotypes causes another melancholia, from whose critical resources they start to design their musical experiment, In Dahomey.

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