No laughing matter: visual humor in ideas of race, nationality, and ethnicity 9781611688214, 9781611688221, 9781611688207, 1611688213, 1611688205, 1611688221

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NO LAUGHING MATTER

Visual Humor in Ideas of Race, Nationality, and Ethnicity Angela Rosenthal with David Bindman and Adrian W. B. Randolph

No Laughing Matter

Interfaces: Studies in Visual Culture Editors Mark J. Williams and Adrian W. B. Randolph, Dartmouth College This series, sponsored by Dartmouth College Press, develops and promotes the study of visual culture from a variety of critical and methodological perspectives. Its impetus derives from the increasing importance of visual signs in everyday life, and from the rapid expansion of what are termed “new media.” The broad cultural and social dynamics attendant to these developments present new challenges and opportunities across and within the disciplines. These have resulted in a trans-disciplinary fascination with all things visual, from “high” to “low,” and from esoteric to popular. This series brings together approaches to visual culture — ​broadly conceived — ​that assess these dynamics critically and that break new ground in understanding their effects and implications. For a complete list of books that are available in the series, visit www.upne.com Angela Rosenthal, ed., with David Bindman and Adrian W. B. Randolph, No Laughing Matter: Visual Humor in Ideas of Race, Nationality, and Ethnicity Robin Veder, The Living Line: Modern Art and the Economy of Energy Tanya Sheehan, ed., Photography, History, Difference Ory Bartal, Postmodern Advertising in Japan: Seduction, Visual Culture, and the Tokyo Art Directors Club Ruth E. Iskin, The Poster: Art, Advertising, Design, and Collecting, 1860s–1900s Heather Warren-Crow, Girlhood and the Plastic Image Heidi Rae Cooley, Finding Augusta: Habits of Mobility and Governance in the Digital Era renée c. hoogland, A Violent Embrace: Art and Aesthetics after Representation Alessandra Raengo, On the Sleeve of the Visual: Race as Face Value Frazer Ward, No Innocent Bystanders: Performance Art and Audience Timothy Scott Barker, Time and the Digital: Connecting Technology, Aesthetics, and a Process Philosophy of Time

Visual Humor in Ideas of Race, Nationality, and Ethnicity

Edited by Angela Rosenthal

with David Bindman and Adrian W. B. Randolph

Dartmouth College Press | Hanover, New Hampshire

Dartmouth College Press

An imprint of University Press of New England www.upne.com

© 2016 Trustees of Dartmouth College All rights reserved

For permission to reproduce any of the material in this book, contact Permissions, University Press of New England, One Court Street, Suite 250, Lebanon NH 03766; or visit www.upne.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data No laughing matter (Dartmouth College Press)

No laughing matter: visual humor in ideas of race, national-

ity, and ethnicity / Edited by Angela Rosenthal; With David Bindman and Adrian W. B. Randolph.

   pages   cm.) — (Interfaces: Studies in visual culture) Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-1-61168-820-7 (cloth: alk. paper) — ​

isbn 978-1-61168-821-4 (pbk.: alk. paper)) —  isbn 978-1-61168-822-1 (ebook)

1. Wit and humor in art.  2. Race in art. 

3. National characteristics in art. 4. Ethnicity in art. 

5. Art and society.  I. Rosenthal, Angela, editor.  II. Title.

n8212.n6 2015 700.973—dc23     2015006496

Contents Preface | Adrian W. B. Randolph  ix Introduction | No Laughing Matter: Visual Humor in Practice and Theory | David Bindman  xiii one | Carnivalesque and Grotesque: What Bakhtin’s Laughter Tells Us about Art and Culture | Kobena Mercer 1

Part 1 

Encountering Humor: Racial, National, and Ethnic Stereotypes two | Bartolomeo Passarotti and “Comic” Images of Black Africans in Early Modern Italian Art | Paul H. D. Kaplan  23 three | “If You Tickle Us, Do We Not Laugh?”: Stereotypes of Jews in English Graphic Humor of the Georgian Era | Frank Felsenstein  49 four | James Gillray, Charles James Fox, and the Abolition of the Slave Trade: Caricature and Displacement in the Debate over Reform | Katherine Hart  76 five | The Other Within | Allen Hockley  104 six | Material Culture, Slavery, and Governability in Colonial Cuba: The Humorous Lessons of the Cigarette Marquillas | Agnes Lugo-Ortiz  118

Part 2

Racial Humor and Theories of Modern Media seven | Fake Nostalgia for the Indian: The Argentinean Fiction of National Identity in the Comics of Patoruzú | Ana Merino  149 eight | Passing for History: Humor and Early Television Historiography | Mark Williams  176

nine | Comical Conflations: Racial Identity and the Science of Photography | Tanya Sheehan  201

Part 3

Performative Comedy and Race ten | Laughter as Performance: Some Eighteenth-Century Examples | David Bindman  233 eleven | Bittersweet Blackness: Humor and the Assertion of Ethnic Identity in Eleanor Antin’s Eleanora Antinova | Cherise Smith  242 twelve | Traveling Humor Reimagined: The Comedic Unhinging of the Western Gaze in Caribbean Postcards | Sam Vásquez  270 thirteen | Springtime for Hitler Every Year: Dani Levy’s Hitler Comedy My Führer (2007) | Veronika Fuechtner  294 Contributors  315 Index  319 Color plates follow page 170

Preface This collection of essays treats a topic very much at the core of the being and writing of my late wife, Angela Rosenthal. She, along with David Bindman, conceived and convened a term-long “Humanities Institute” at the Leslie Center for the Humanities at Dartmouth College that took place in 2007 addressing race and humor in visual culture. The institute brought together scholars from a range of disciplines and subfields to explore issues relating to visual humor and difference, broadly conceived in terms of religion, race, nationality, gender, and identity. Subsequently, Angela drew together some of the papers presented at Dartmouth and some other materials, with the plan of publishing a collection of essays. The project, however, was cut short when she died in November of 2010. In the last year of her life, Angela sought to complete a number of projects and brought this one tantalizingly close to publication. This volume is, therefore, a memorial to Angela and a contribution to her life’s work. Angela was a joyous and critical individual and scholar. She passionately believed in the transformative power of art and imagery. Her scholarship on eighteenth-century art focused on gender and race, and emerged quite naturally from political commitments to equity. Yet she was never simply a partisan voice; she believed in the richness of history, wherein one may find all manner of unexpected traces. She also never shied away from difficult topics. This is especially the case when treating such potentially explosive materials defined by the terms “race” and “humor.” There is little doubt in my mind that her interest in both these topics stemmed from her personal experiences growing up in Germany, and from her early engagement with the art of William Hogarth. In Germany, Angela was involved in various movements fighting for women’s rights and human rights. Intellectually, she was drawn to eighteenth-century British art, and, working with David Bindman, first at Westfield College and then at University College London, she developed a deep interest in William Hogarth and the comic visual tradition. She was fascinated with British humor and felt a deep affinity for its balancing mordant directness with a certain obliqueness. This mapped well onto her own frank and open yet complex personality.

x Preface

Choosing to match humor with race did emerge, as David Bindman points out in the introduction that follows, from topical events. Writing as I am, in the wake of the tragic killings in Paris in January 2015, it is impossible not to reflect on visual humor’s power to move. Among those killed were those working for Charlie Hebdo, a publication known for its scathing visual humor. Without fully knowing or understanding the motivations of the killers, I think it clear that the events demand we reflect, yet again, on the ways in which we interpret visual humor. Much is at stake in such interpretations. Angela’s engagement with race developed not only in response to such events, but also from her fascination with contemporary diasporic art. She was an avid student of contemporary art, and it was in the galleries and exhibitions of New York, London, Cologne, and in Italy, as well as in her personal contact with artists from around the world, that her interests in race were forged. She treasured the opportunity offered by the Humanities Institute at Dartmouth to examine, in deep conversations, the problematic entwinement of humor and otherness that bedevils so many discussions of race. Angela did not write a finished introduction to this collection; David Bindman has stepped in to provide that. I would, however, like to include here some notes Angela did pen in preparing this volume; these draw on a text she and David prepared to accompany an exhibition at the Hood Museum of Art, which complemented the Humanities Institute: Humor has always been a valuable strategy through which highly sensitive

and difficult issues could be raised for “serious” consideration. Etymologically

derived from the ancient Greek theories of the bodily fluids, or “humors,” this word now describes a fundamental human emotion. Humor fulfills a broad range of functions, and because it is linked to subtle mental processes and

moral issues, it can also tell us much about the mentalities, customs, sensibilities, and anxieties of different peoples and cultures. It is a powerful force that

can elicit pleasure, release, or outrage, and those who wield it often intentionally transgress social boundaries. Humor can be a form of self-assertion and defense. It can also be a particularly effective weapon with which to ridicule others, as is so often the case in visual satire and caricature.

This book seeks to deepen our understanding of the wounding and healing

properties of humorous representation. The collection of essays engages with a broad range of objects and images, ranging from seventeenth-century Italian

paintings and eighteenth-century satires and caricatures to nineteenth-century Japanese woodcuts, and from racist cartoons from Argentina to humorous

passing in U.S. American television. These works do not address one “race” or nationality but demonstrate how humorous stereotyping has been deployed

across and between groups that only in the nineteenth century were classified

into races. All, however, reduce the subject to a limited number of easily grasped cious. Contemporary artists have sought in various ways to demonstrate and counteract the continuing influence of such imagery, by exposure, irony, and

appropriation, in some cases turning the tables by inverting stereotypes. In order to come to grips with both past and present prejudice, it is essential to analyze,

historically and critically, the sometimes deeply offensive ways in which humor has been used to posit cultural, ethnic, racial, and national differences.

The goal of this book is not to reopen old wounds but to initiate discussion

about the multilayered and complex ways visual humor has attracted our attention throughout history, and across different media and geographies. The

essays here collected explore the interrelated themes of human representation

and classification, and how visual images (not just “art”) have constructed and provided the means to produce troubling degrees of human worth, through

stereotyping, emphasizing beauty or ugliness, by association, or by ascribing spiritual properties to facial features, or a combination of these. These have

often been linked to “race,” nationality, or ethnicity, which are best understood

not as fixed categories but as historically contingent and fluid. Such issues show history acting directly on the present in ways we do not sufficiently under-

stand, but which we need urgently to examine if we are to deal constructively

with increasingly multicultural societies and their diverse historical memories, constructs, and — ​importantly for us — ​images. To begin thinking about such

racially inflected visual images constructively requires expertise across the dis-

ciplinary boundaries that often separate art, literary, political, and social history, psychology, perception, geography, ethnic studies, etc.

I have decided to focus on humor because it is simultaneously easy and diffi-

cult. Easy because everyone responds almost automatically to the comic; it is a transcultural way of dealing with human difference. Difficult because it can be

a weapon of prejudice and it can provoke involuntary reactions and discomfort. It is a topic that immediately stimulates debate and therefore seems appropriate for a publication that I hope will have a long-term impact.

Angela would want to have thanked many individuals, but especially her mother and father, Anneliese and Peter Rosenthal, and her sister, Felicia Rosenthal. Many of the ideas that fueled this project were the topic

Preface

generalities. The effect of such condensed imagery is both powerful and perni-

xi

xii Preface

of conversation with our friends Agnes Lugo-Ortiz and Diane Miliotes. Thanks must also go to the participants in the Humanities Institute and the attendant conference — ​the contributors to this volume, along with Michael Chaney, Ada Cohen, Marty Favor, Deniz Göktürk, M. Thomas Inge, the late Esiaba Irobi, Alexandra Karentzos, Adam Kern, K. Dian Kriz, Josh Kun, Christopher Marshall, Jacqueline Stewart, and Rebecca Wanzo. I also wish to acknowledge the generous support of the trustees of the Leonard Hasting Schoff Publication Fund of the Columbia University Seminars. Angela’s colleagues and friends in the Faculty Seminar on Eighteenth-Century European Culture applied for this funding in her memory. Thanks, in particular, go to Al Coppola, Frank Felsenstein, and Alice Newton. Moreover, I would also like to mention the formative relationship that Angela enjoyed with other scholars and practitioners: the sadly departed Maud Saulter, Viktoria Schmidt-Linsenhoff, and Susanne Zantop, as well as Roland Augustin, Malcolm Baker, John Brewer, Marie-Antoinette Chiarenza, Chris Cozier, Bernardette Fort, Mark Hallett, Andreas Haus, Daniel Hauser, Lubaina Himid, Melissa Hyde, Christina Threuther, and Karl Werck­meister. The colleagues at Northwestern and Dartmouth who supported Angela in her work and life are too many to mention, but I know that she appreciated the intellectual community she found at both institutions. The exhibition that took place at the Hood Museum of Art in 2007 embodied Angela’s belief in the productive symbiosis that should exist between museum and the academy. I know that she would want me to thank Kathy Hart for her efforts in staging that exhibition, as well as those of Brian Kennedy, then director of the Hood. Moreover, I know that Angela would want to extend her warmest thanks to Jonathan Crewe, director of the Leslie Center for the Humanities when her proposal for the institute was accepted, and to Isabel Weatherdon, who addressed the administrative details of arranging for the institute with such professionalism. And finally, thanks go to David Bindman, Angela’s adviser and friend. It is fitting that he should be the one to help draw this collection together and, in the text that follows, introduce it. I would like to add my thanks above all to David, for helping me through this rather difficult but important project. Adrian W. B. Randolph

Introduction   No Laughing Matter

Visual Humor in Practice and Theory 

David Bindman

The idea of connecting humor with race, nationality, and ethnicity was stimulated by recent evidence of the topicality and even urgency of the subject and the way it demonstrated that history was a living force in contemporary life. The first impetus was the furor over the publication in Denmark in September 2005 of newspaper cartoons satirizing the prophet Muhammad, and the violent events that followed it. Another, less-serious example from the same year was “the Flying Pigs” advertisement put out by the British Labour Party, in which two Conservative politicians were shown with their heads on the bodies of flying pigs, with the caption “The day the Tory sums add up.” The fact that both politicians, Michael Howard and Oliver Letwin, were Jewish reminded some Tories of the racist association, going back to eighteenth-century satirical prints, made between Jews and pigs, and the supposed forbidden desire of the former for the latter. These cases were very different examples of the power and offensive potential of visual images and the persistence of memory across the centuries. Humor can of course also be for minority groups a form of self-assertion or a defense, adopting the terms of hostile assumptions as a way of coping with them. At the heart of such humor is the stereotype that implies a deviation from the unstated norm of the dominant group and which opens the minority group to contempt or ridicule. A stereotype may be verbal or visual, but it can be critically “adopted” or internalized by those stereotyped, or disguised and implicitly reasserted through “passing” as a member of another group. In addition to the topicality of visual satire there has been a resurgence of interest in its history, especially that of eighteenth- and early nineteenthcentury England, with notable books by Richard Godfrey, Diana Donald, and Vic Gatrell, and a number of exhibitions in London and elsewhere that have brought such artists as James Gillray, Thomas Rowlandson, George Cruikshank, and Richard Newton into the artistic canon. The concern of

xiv Introduction

recent writers on the subject has been to look at such images in their own right, with their own methods and conventions, not just as illustrations to political history. These new concerns have brought up a number of issues Angela Rosenthal and I thought would provide the focus for the two-month-long seminar we convened in 2007 at Dartmouth College. Is there a process by which visual humor works in a similar way across global, racial, national, and ethnic divisions, over different periods of time? In other words, are there common strategies in the way humor is used to demean or give identity to racial, national, or ethnic groups? Does humor work differently in different media, such as the cartoon strip, photographs, film, video, television, and physical performance, with their interplay between the visual, the verbal, and the performative? And connected with this, what work does visual humor do that goes beyond verbal humor? Such questions determined our choice of participants, and we were delighted to recruit scholars with a wide range of geographical and temporal experience, encompassing Europe, Africa, Japan, and South America, working on periods from the ancient world to the present, in a wide range of media, including comic strip, photography, early television, and contemporary film. The institute, as will be evident from the chapters that follow, was in the fullest sense interdisciplinary, and, quite unusually, ranges over issues in relation to Africans, Jews, Japanese, and the Hispanic and native peoples of South America. The chapter based on the keynote address to the institute by Kobena Mercer is concerned with the theory and practice of humor, and especially of laughter, which Mercer identifies as predominantly communal rather than private, but, in defining the limits of belonging to a group, potentially divisive. Noting that laughter not only is essentially human but distinguishes our humanity both from nature and from higher ideals, Mercer considers Mikhail Bakhtin and his definition of the “antagonistic interdependence” of laughter and seriousness, as found in late medieval society, expressed particularly in paintings by Pieter Brueghel the Elder. He is therefore concerned with the ambivalence of humor and the way it counteracts lofty and abstract ideals by emphasizing the physicality and contingency of normal life. For that reason it is necessarily opposed to the claims of official or high art, just as in Bakhtin’s late medieval world the comic and the serious represent antagonistic worldviews, and the comic can itself be redemptive

xv Introduction

to the extent that Protestant religious authority tried with limited success to suppress it or reduce it to a “low” genre. Above all, the low road, with its emphasis on bodily functions as opposed to the “spirit,” lives on in modern art and in popular culture, from Duchamp’s urinal Fountain to the more racially inflected work of Chris Ofili. Turning to blackface minstrelsy, Mercer notes the ambivalence of the genre, how the imitation of black figures by white men can contain the flattery of imitation as well as a process of “othering,” but could also be identified with by immigrant groups struggling for assimilation. But it is only in the 1960s that African American artists were fully able to exploit the “carnivalesque” implicit in blackface and other demeaning representations. Laughter becomes another weapon of protest against marginalization, along with more serious images, and, as in Robert Colescott’s paintings, deliberately subverts with coarse humor icons of “serious” art, while other artists have worked with the most abject materials of demotic life. The next five chapters deal with historical satire, works conceived within a humorous context with the aim of comic ridicule based on stereotypical images. While the chapters of Frank Felsenstein and Katherine Hart look mainly at eighteenth-century English satire, Paul Kaplan’s looks at a unique late sixteenth-century Italian painting by Passarotti, in which an African couple has a prominent place in a “low” tavern scene, the very epitome of a Bakhtinian emphasis on bodily functions. This fascinating painting shows that some of the tropes of later racism were already established in the sixteenth century: an emphasis on Africans’ sexuality, louche associations, and animality. Felsenstein’s chapter on the representation of Jews in England highlights the particular characteristics ascribed to each “race.” Following Shakespeare’s characterization of Shylock, Jews appear in English eighteenth-century caricature prints and in popular culture as rapacious tradesmen and especially as peddlers, selling trinkets and hats, which they wear multiply on their heads. Their vocation is to swindle Christians, but they are also represented as uncommonly lecherous, and this they share with the characterization of Africans and with other racial, national, and ethnic groups. If Felsenstein’s chapter explores the specific characteristics ascribed to Jews across the centuries, Hart’s chapter emphasizes the importance of chronology in the humorous representation of those of African descent. In eighteenth-century England there were distinctive conditions that governed

xvi Introduction

their representation. First there was the presence from the previous century of chattel slaves in wealthy households, then there was the influx of former slaves from the American War of Independence that brought many of them to the streets of London. Above all, following the French Revolution, there was the threat of upheaval in both the French and English slave colonies that heightened the fear of difference. There were also, as Hart points out, changes in the theory of representation, so that the physiognomy of blacks could be related to their supposedly lower level of civilization, the basis of scientific racism in the nineteenth century. The complications surrounding the concept of a racial other are brought out in Allen Hockley’s chapter, which discusses a French humorous illustrator in late nineteenth-century Japan, Georges Bigot, whose comic strips were deeply admiring of traditional Japanese culture and defensive of it against the influx of European “globetrotters” or tourists. Yet he was also increasingly critical of Japan’s urgent move toward modernity and centralization in the later part of the century, and in the end left Japan to return to France. This is a case that goes against the simple stereotyping of the other but nonetheless plays with national stereotypes for comic effect. Agnes Lugo-Ortiz’s chapter addresses two themes that are important in this collection. The first is the complex racial dynamics of South America, with its long-established tradition of importing slaves in large numbers from Africa and the persistence of plantation slavery until the 1880s, and the way in which racial prejudice against those of African descent became an overwhelming presence in the advertising and packaging of everyday goods, especially in Cuba. The discussion of Cuban marquillas cigarreras or cigarette wrappers, though emphasizing their use of traditional demeaning stereotypes, also points out their topicality in relation to the political-racial conflicts of their time. This is a case of visual imagery at its most potent. It is very difficult even with hindsight to grasp fully the corrosive effect on any society of the omnipresence of such imagery, not only in South America but in the United States and European countries. Ana Merino’s chapter inaugurates the part titled “Racial Humor and Theories of Modern Media.” It is also concerned with South America, in this case Argentina, but it deals with graphic novels and their more complex relationship to racial stereotypes. Patoruzú, created by Dante Quinterno in 1928, is a stereotypical if fantastic native Indian who arrives from Patagonia with Carmela, a large domesticated ñandú, a species of American ostrich.

xvii Introduction

Patoruzú is a noble innocent thrust into the urban world of Buenos Aires, where he is adopted by a porteño, or man about town, Don Gil, whose way of life is the main object of the satire. Patoruzú bears little relationship to the real fate of the Argentinian Indians; in fact he becomes closer to a Walt Disney character, and indeed Quinterno eventually struck up a relationship with the American company. Though Patoruzú became something of an Argentinian archetype himself, he exists in a world of deeply racist stereotypes of Africans, Chinese, Japanese, and also Galicians, and is arguably a racist stereotype himself in his very innocence, though he was treated with great affection by both author and public. Mark Williams raises two fascinating issues. The first is the almost lost world of early Los Angeles television and the phenomenon of “passing” — ​ that is, of adopting the concealed persona of someone of another race, nationality, or ethnic group. By focusing on the extraordinary career of the musician Korla Pandit, an African American who successfully adopted the career, appearance, and manner of an upper-class Bengali, to the point of total concealment of his own origins, Williams draws out the power of stereotypes to be actively misleading. The humor lies in our own recognition in hindsight of the incongruities of the construction of an alien character, enabled by the new medium of television. Photography, as Tanya Sheehan brings out, from its beginnings in the mid-nineteenth century was caught up in the urgent matter of race and skin color in both Britain and America. The racial implications of the use of the negative, which made white people appear black and vice versa in one stage of the process, was almost from the beginning a source of humorous racial comment, and given a particular charge by the advent of Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the American Civil War. My own chapter begins the third part, “Performative Comedy and Race.” I look specifically at laughter and what I argue is the ambivalence in the idea that we laugh at someone or something, that is, the ambivalence between the physical act of laughter and what may be a silent mockery. In other words, laughter can be performative, involving physical actions, or it can be implicit in a comment, text, or image. This raises the question of what spectators of minstrel shows, racial postcards, or advertisements actually do with them. Though people do actually laugh in a communal situation, even horrifyingly at lynchings, they do so less frequently when they are on their own looking at a print or postcard.

xviii Introduction

Cherise Smith deals with contemporary performance art through the work of Eleanor Antin, who acted out fully the persona of the Ballets Russes ballerina Eleanora Antinova, who is presented as a black woman. There is a clear sense here of “passing,” but, unlike with Korla Pandit, the clear artistic intention is to tease out the implications for herself and her audience of adopting another persona. As Smith argues, “It is, in fact, a work of art, a rhetorical performance, and a performance of a performance wherein Antin exercises and negotiates her many selves.” Antin points to the fact that blackness is a sign separate from and sometimes but not always related to African Americans and African American culture. She plays on the humor that arises from the incongruity of her different roles as a pretend ballerina with the exoticizing Ballets Russes and as a Jewish woman adopting the role of a black ballerina, calling into question the signs of race and ethnicity. Sam Vásquez opens up another visual genre for examination: the postcard, and in particular twentieth-century postcards from the Caribbean. She probes beyond the obvious signifiers of colonialized leisure, the perpetual sunshine, the golden beach, women either provocatively dressed or carrying buckets on their heads, mules, and so on, to see resistance to, collusion in, and the ambiguity of such stereotypes, noting in some of them mockery of Western tourists. Veronika Fuechtner’s chapter also deals with contemporary imagery, this time of humorous representations in German film of Adolf Hitler, through an examination of Dani Levy’s 2007 feature film My Führer: The Truly Truest Truth about Adolf Hitler. The question of whether Hitler can be regarded as a laughing matter is, of course, bound up with the whole history of Germany since the fall of the Third Reich, and questions of denial, acceptance, and the fear of bad taste in finding humor in such a monster. Fuechtner argues that in a subject surrounded by taboos Levy broke a particularly sensitive one by applying Jewish humor to the Third Reich, creating, rather as Charlie Chaplin had done in The Great Dictator, a kind of Jewish antitype to the Führer. It will be clear from this brief account of the content of the volume that the subject of the relation between visual humor and concepts of race, nationality, and ethnicity is a complex and rich one that defies easy generalization. Though in one sense prejudice and stereotyping of others are common to all periods, places, and times, they are nonetheless subject to a host of historical and social factors, inflected always by the medium in which they are expressed. What will be clear from the range of contributions in this

xix Introduction

volume is the sheer variety of media that raise the question of humor and race, nationality, and ethnicity, at least since the invention of photography and film. What are the common factors in visual satire as applied to groups? The first is the reduction of complex signs to the general and recognizable — ​in other words, caricature. Dark skin or prominent lips can stand for a person of African descent, a big nose for a Jew, or a peasant-like demeanor for an Irishman, and so on. The second is surely repetition, for techniques that allowed for multiple production like engraving, invented in the fifteenth century, allowed for the possibility of the endless replication of stereotypes. It is often assumed, as Bakhtin claimed, that humor is essentially subversive of the established order; but though this is the case in certain times and circumstances, it was very frequently deployed to reinforce racial hierarchies. Furthermore, visual humor is not always applied on behalf of one race, nationality, or ethnicity against another; it sometimes may be deployed against errant members of the same group by invoking those from outside. A final thought, one that I leave with readers to explain. It is striking that in the study of visual humor, and humor in general, the authority of theorists of the early twentieth century still remains dominant. The authors most cited in this volume are Freud, Bergson, and Bakhtin; why has their analysis of what makes people laugh yet to be superseded?

No Laughing Matter

One   Carnivalesque and Grotesque 

What Bakhtin’s Laughter Tells Us about Art and Culture  Kobena Mercer Laughter matters for all sorts of reasons, and, by way of beginning, I will try to identify three of them. Because it gives us pleasure, laughing is something we enjoy for its own sake: it really serves no useful purpose, and yet it has the power to change our feelings in an instant. When we say that good humor lightens our mood or lifts our spirits, we acknowledge the way pleasure mitigates anxiety. In the face of tensions that inevitably arise when one self encounters another, we might observe that humor breaks the ice — ​it lifts the tension in a way that loosens us from rigid bodily postures of fear or anxiety. This brings me to a second observation, which is that although we may laugh alone, laughing is an intrinsically sociable experience. Whatever its medium of expression — ​verbal, visual, literary, or theatrical — ​there is a communal aspect to laughter whereby the boundaries that separate one solitary individual from another are momentarily lifted as we become members of an audience, a crowd, an imagined community. As Henri Bergson suggested in 1899, “laughter appears to stand in need of an echo . . . our laughter is always the laughter of a group.”1 But if laughter is highly sociable, then this is also the very point at which humor and comedy reveal their antisocial side. Wherever “in-jokes” are performed at the expense of “out-groups” that find themselves on the receiving end of a punch line, laughter reveals its violently divisive potential. Laughter is thus essentially ambivalent as a phenomenon of social bonding that also brings to light the symbolic boundaries of group belonging. Examining such artists as Betye Saar, Robert Colescott, and David Hammons — ​who each welcome laughter into the critical reception of contemporary works that address the legacy of blackface minstrelsy in American visual culture — ​the issue of ambivalence, and how to examine it, is one of my overarching themes of concern. Ordinarily we try to get at this ambivalence by asking whether an audience is being invited to “laugh at” or to

2 No Laughing Matter

“laugh with” a given comic situation. When we make this distinction we get a handle on the enunciative directionality of comic performance; but to the extent that we presuppose a grammar or syntax for laughter — ​with clearcut distinctions among subject, object, and predicate, and neat separations between the sender and the receiver of a message — ​we risk losing sight of the paradoxical and contradictory relationship of laughter to language. It is often said that analyzing a joke succeeds only in killing it. Reflecting on this puzzle, we might well push it further: Is there something about laughter that actively resists language, something that disrupts cognition and confounds the intellect? And does not the pleasure we take in laughter arise precisely because we are being momentarily liberated from rational thinking? Such thoughts suggest a third point of departure, namely that laughter matters, quite simply put, because it humanizes us: it brings our lofty ideals and our noble aspirations back down to earth, for it reveals us to be the creatures of a finite and contingent world, with little ultimate control over our material conditions. In slapstick this occurs quite literally when a comic performer slips on a banana skin and falls. For Bergson, we laugh because the action is a manifestation of a “mechanical inelasticity” that interrupts the vital flow of life. Insisting that the element of surprise that brings incongruous elements together in comedic performance is not just a matter of logical incompatibility, Bergson viewed laughter’s “social signification” as an ontological corrective to the willful rigidity with which humans often pursue their aims. For this reason Bergson argued that laughter “does not exist outside the pale of what is strictly human. A landscape may be beautiful, charming and sublime, or insignificant and ugly: it will never be laughable. You may laugh at an animal, but only because you have detected in it some human attitude or expression.”2 Charles Baudelaire would seem to agree on this matter, for his 1855 essay “On the Essence of Laughter” begins by stressing the “shock effects” of comedic incongruity: “In fact, since laughter is essentially human, it is essentially contradictory, that is, it is at the same time a sign of infinite grandeur and infinite misery, infinitely miserable by comparison to the Supreme Being of which it possesses only the conception, and infinitely grand by comparison to the natural world. It is from out of the perpetual shock of these two infinities that laughter emanates.”3 Whereas Bergson addressed the sight of someone falling, Baudelaire raises the stakes by evoking laughter as a sign of humankind’s universally fallen condition. What both thinkers seem to be asking

3 Carnivalesque and Grotesque

is, does laughter have a historicity? In the case of slapstick, originating in seventeenth-century commedia dell’arte in the loud noise or batacchio made whenever a performer was struck, the notion of “mechanical inelasticity” also fits with the deadpan physical comedy of Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times (1936), for example, for the world of industrial modernity provides innumerable opportunities for the mechanical and the organic to coincide with incongruity. Baudelaire’s use of the term “shock” — ​in the sense that modern life brings constant jolts or shocks to daily consciousness — ​similarly suggests a correlation between the disruptive effects of laughter and the interruptive logic of modern art as a questioning of received tradition. Arguing that “in the earthly paradise . . . joy was not expressed through laughter . . . man’s face was simple and all of a piece; his features were undistorted by the laughter that agitates all nations,” Baudelaire’s view took shape in the aftermath of Romanticism.4 Sensing something subversive in laughter, something with the potential to shock, agitate, and disturb the rules of convention and decorum, the idea that laughter originates in the demonic — ​that laughter is indeed satanic — ​led Baudelaire to a reappraisal of caricature and satirical cartoons as textual items worthy of attention, despite being dismissed as mere amusement within the bourgeois public sphere. Throughout his essay, Baudelaire quotes a maxim — ​“The Sage does not laugh without trembling” — ​which alludes to a proverbial saying that I recall hearing expressed more recently in a song by Kate Bush: “Did you ever see a picture of Jesus laughing?”5 This may be a roundabout way of saying that humans laugh and deities do not, but it nonetheless points up the foundational exclusion of laughter from the realm of official culture, in which laughing is regarded as “sinful” and is deemed to be antithetical to seriousness and hence incompatible with the solemnity of high art. This is precisely where Mikhail Bakhtin comes in. On the face of it, Rabelais and His World is a scholarly study that identifies the primary sources of the Renaissance novel Gargantua and Pantagruel (1534). Documenting folk culture materials associated with end-of-winter festivals in late medieval Europe, where carnival rituals were absorbed into the Christian calendar as holidays, Bakhtin offers much more than a discrete literary study, however, for his analytical methods reveal how the hierarchical differentiation of “low” or “high” culture stems from historical struggles among competing worldviews. In Pieter Brueghel the Elder’s painting The Battle of Carnival and Lent (1559; fig. 1.1), the riotous and bawdy scene in the town square is polarized between

4 No Laughing Matter

Figure 1.1. Pieter Brueghel the Elder, The Battle of Carnival and Lent, 1559. Oil on panel, 118 × 164 cm. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.

the tavern and the cathedral. The composition dramatizes an antagonism that divides “the people” from “officialdom,” but Brueghel also shows us how struggles that bring opposing forces into a space of “battle” or agon are sites of mutual interdependence: the two sides form a motley procession of heterogeneous couplings, in the foreground, much like the human-animal hybrids found in Hieronymus Bosch. For Bakhtin, laughter’s relationship to seriousness is one of antagonistic interdependence rather than logical incompatibility. Carnival’s etymology — ​ the Latin carnem levare gives us “to lift meat from the diet” — ​reveals its symbiotic relation to Lent as a licensed time of merrymaking and excess prior to a period of sacrifice: the injunction to consume all fat before fasting on Ash Wednesday thus gives us Fat Tuesday, or Mardi Gras. As curator Timothy Hyman explains: “While Carnival is first recorded as a pre-Lenten feast only in the latter Middle Ages, most anthropologists locate its origins much earlier, in pre-Christian ritual and especially in the Saturnalia — ​the

5 Carnivalesque and Grotesque

period of licence and excess, when inversion of rank was a central theme.”6 Describing how, in the Middle Ages, “laughter was eliminated from religious cult, from feudal and state ceremonials, etiquette, and . . . the genres of high speculation,”7 Bakhtin examines folk rituals such as the “feast of fools” and diagnoses carnival laughter as it is “linked to the overturning of authority”8 through a poetics of anarchic inversion and utopian reversal expressed in parody, mockery, and mimesis: “As opposed to the official feast, one might say that carnival celebrates temporary liberation from the prevailing truth of the established order; it marks the suspension of all hierarchical rank, privileges, norms and prohibitions. Carnival was the true feast of time, the feast of becoming, change and renewal. It was hostile to all that was immortalised and complete.”9 Laughter matters for Bakhtin because it counteracts fear. Stressing the “earthy” quality of carnival laughter, he identifies emancipatory potential in its holistic dimensions as a socially regenerative experience: “It is, first of all, a festive laughter. Therefore it is not an individual reaction to some isolated ‘comic’ event. Carnival laughter is the laughter of all of the people. Second, it is universal in scope: it is directed at all and everyone, including the carnival’s participants. Third, this laughter is ambivalent: it is gay, triumphant, and at the same time mocking, deriding. It asserts and denies, it buries and revives. Such is the laughter of the carnival.”10 The cultural significance of laughter, however, was fundamentally transformed by the rise of Protestant modernity, and Bakhtin’s richest insights draw attention to the ways in which comedy was marginalized and pushed down into “low” genre status from the Renaissance through the Reformation to the Enlightenment. Arguing that “Rabelais, Cervantes and Shakespeare represent an important turning point in the history of laughter,” Bakhtin contrasts the “Renaissance conception of laughter” — ​which “has a deep, philosophical meaning, it is one of the essential forms of the truth concerning the world. . . . Therefore laughter is just as admissible in great literature, posing universal problems, as seriousness”11 — ​with subsequent periods in which the triumph of secular officialdom both subordinated laughter as the low “other” of high seriousness and also entailed a logic of specialization in which the regenerative and communal dimension of laughter was atomized and fragmented: “The attitude toward laughter of the seventeenth century and of the years that followed can be characterised thus. Laughter is not a universal, philosophical form. It can refer only to individual and individually typical phenomena of social life. That which is important and essential cannot be comical. Neither can

6 No Laughing Matter

history and persons representing it — ​kings, generals, heroes — ​be shown in a comic aspect. The sphere of the comic is narrow and specific . . . therefore, the place of laughter in literature belongs only to the low genres, showing the life of private individuals and the inferior social levels.”12 Where Protestant modernity, with its logic of rationalization, separates ambivalence into dichotomy, the dominance of classicism in the arts established a visual order of harmony and perfect bodily proportions that was constantly shadowed by the counter-modern image repertoire of grotesque realism, which lies at the heart of carnival. The Oxford English Dictionary defines grotesque as “comically distorted figure or design” or else as “distorted, bizarre, ludicrous from incongruity, absurd”; but whereas the term originated in the fifteenth-century discovery of erotic drawings in excavated Roman grottoes, Bakhtin shows us that our modern usage — ​to mean something ugly and unsightly, “gross,” as it were — ​is an extreme foreshortening of the term’s multivalent connotations. Far from the moralistic associations assigned by the Protestant imagination, the grotesque for Bakhtin opens onto a regenerative cosmology that is underpinned by the iconography of “the lower bodily material principle” in which “grotesque realism imagines the human body as multiple, bulging, over- and under-sized, protuberant and incomplete. The openings and orifices of this carnival body are emphasised, not its closure or its finish. It is an image of impure corporeal bulk with its orifices (mouth, flared nostrils, anus) yawning wide and its lower regions (belly, legs, feet, buttocks and genitals) given priority over its upper regions (head, ‘spirit,’ reason).”13 The lower bodily material principle is indispensable to the grammatica jocosa of carnival because it performs “debasement.” Just as inversion of rank was expressed by coarse and vulgar speech in which insults were traded among carnival participants with irony, so carnival’s poetics of defilement, degradation, and humiliation aimed to bring down “low” all that was solemn, serious, and self-important. The importance of the recent Carnivalesque (2000) exhibition co-curated by Timothy Hyman and Roger Malbert is that it reveals the durability of grotesque realism as a counter-discourse of modernity in which — ​f rom the eighteenth-century cartoons of James Gillray and Thomas Rowlandson, through to Francisco Goya, James Ensor, and George Grosz — ​laughter signals an attitude of subversive dissent toward Western culture’s Apollonian ideals. The lower bodily material principle does not always have to be visible

7 Carnivalesque and Grotesque

to make itself felt. Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain (1914) is today a canonical modernist work of the historical avant-garde: scholars take it very seriously indeed because, in presenting an upended porcelain urinal for gallery display, signed R. Mutt, the artist produced a “readymade” that invited us to question the institutional category of art and related concepts of authorship that had defined art as wholly autonomous from society. But why choose a urinal? Snow shovels and bicycle wheels served Duchamp equally well, but once his inverted urinal is connected to grotesque realism, the critical laughter it provokes is redolent of carnival laughter. Are we laughing “with” Duchamp, who is laughing “at” the institution of art? Or is this an all-inclusive and ambivalent laughter that momentarily detaches us from the solemnity invested in art so that we may look afresh at received “truths” that are now loosened out of static oppositions and shown to be neither immortal nor absolute, but contingent and open to change? Coming up to date, the notion of the “avant-garde grotesque” as a distinctive strand in twentieth-century art would not only include works by Cindy Sherman, Mike Kelley, and Paul McCarthy, but would also include works that factor “race” and ethnicity into a contemporary aesthetics of the carnivalesque, such as Chris Ofili’s Blue Moon (2003; fig. 1.2). A defecating black pixie with a pointy beard and an Afro is certainly an incongruous “surprise” when encountered within the pristine white cube of a prestigious gallery setting. Ofili’s sculpture relates to recent works that portray the expulsion from Eden, but visit any souvenir shop in Barcelona around Christmastime and you will discover his source material: the Catalan figure of the caganer that appears alongside the three wise men in local nativity scenes. The caganer embodies the grotesque realism of carnivalesque because, while making a mockery of the sanctimonious and the sentimental, this scatological figure helps fertilize the earth and thus anticipates the renewal of agricultural life after the end of winter. As such the caganer is an anachronistic “survival” from the medieval practices Bakhtin described and could thus be taken as a sign of the counter-modern that subverts the authority of Protestant embodiment. Turning to the vernacular domain of blackface minstrelsy in nineteenth-century America, we encounter an entirely different cultural formation, in which the politics of “debasement” are placed in the service of cultural hegemony. In Duchamp’s L.H.O.O.Q. (1919), the aesthetic strategy through which the “high” is brought “low” — ​the childish act of drawing a mustache on one of Western culture’s most revered icons — ​is readily intel-

8 No Laughing Matter

Figure 1.2. Chris Ofili, Blue Moon, 2005. Bronze, 205 × 120 × 166 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Contemporary Fine Arts, Berlin © Chris Ofili.

ligible as an act of carnivalesque debasement. But in blackface minstrelsy, the axes of debasement are radically reversed: that which is socially low is pushed even lower by acts of symbolic degradation whose outcome was to “deface” the enslaved black African subject as an object of derisive laughter.

Minstrelsy and Modernity Bakhtin’s tendency toward a utopian view of carnival has been widely criticized, and, in The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (1986), Peter Stallybrass and Allon White point out that “carnival often violently abuses and demonizes weaker, not stronger, social groups — ​women, ethnic and religious

9 Carnivalesque and Grotesque

minorities, those who ‘don’t belong’ — ​in a process of displaced abjection.”14 Because it dehumanizes difference, thus marking out the Other as all that is “not self,” the blackface image is grotesque in our received sense of ugly, comically distorted, ludicrous, and bizarre; however, Bakhtin’s conception of ambivalence allows us to explore alternative lines of inquiry into the enduring appeal of this icon in the visual culture of modernity, revealing the dilemmas it created for African American artists, who mostly avoided humor and comedy for the best part of the twentieth century in their struggle to be “taken seriously” and to win recognition among the institutions of high culture. Two important elements need to be taken into account once we approach the cultural analysis of “race” and representation from the point of view of Bakhtin’s insights into the ambivalence of carnival laughter. Where the carnivalesque emerges as a literary and artistic trope against the background of its historical decline as an actual festive ritual, the study of the survival of numerous Africanisms transplanted into the New World as a result of slavery shows how carnival practices continue to thrive, especially in cultures where Catholicism is pervasive, such as Brazil, or in multi-faith societies, such as Trinidad. As a locus of hybridization, where black mockery subverts the prevailing order in parodic excess, the quality of the laughter found in the “folk humor” of black vernacular cultures — ​whether manifested in Br’er Rabbit stories in the American South or in Jamaican tales of Anansi the spider (adapted from Akan mythologies in Ghana) — ​warrants further investigation. In such historical contexts laughter was not merely a mode of survival but a manifestation of aliveness in the face of loss and dispossession. Where diasporic carnivals survive as a kind of “anachronism” within the culture of modernity, can we not conversely view the very institution of slavery as itself a political anachronism, fundamentally at odds with the rationalist models of Enlightenment philosophy? Viewing racial slavery as a structural anomaly within capitalist modernity, we can think of blackface minstrelsy as a cultural “retention” from the premodern realm, just as the public spectacle of violent punishment under slavery retained a premodern logic whereby power displayed itself openly, in contrast to forms of surveillance in which the modern operation of disciplinary power became increasingly “invisible.” Discussing the origins of blackface, art historian Hugh Honour describes how the English actor Charles Matthews, when he toured the United States in 1822, was “struck by the dialect, songs and dances of the blacks he encountered and, blacking his face, he began to mimic them in his very successful one-man entertainment entitled A Trip to America.”15 Matthews was

10 No Laughing Matter

followed by other comic impersonators, such as Thomas Dartmouth Rice, but Honour’s account points toward a scene of double-mimesis in which ambivalence features prominently. At the level of the visual, the homogeneous sheen produced by burnt-cork maquillage indicates a social fantasy about appropriating “blackness” as an abstract or exchangeable property that is thereby seen to exist independently of black (African) bodies. A splitting emerges that is characteristic of fetishism: if blackness can be put on and taken off as an act of will, then the act of mimesis here is one in which white male comic impersonators confirm mastery over the Other’s body as a mainstay of supremacist constructions of “whiteness.” At the oral level of speech, however, and at the aural level of sound, tone, and timbre, as well as at the performative level of dance, the origin of blackface minstrelsy in the scene of cross-cultural mimesis also reveals a relationship with the Other that involves both identification and desire: acts of appropriation that Eric Lott refers to as complex and contradictory expressions of “love and theft.”16 If we think of the longevity of aural mimesis in popular music of the twentieth century, the constant copying of the black voice brings to mind the phrase that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Taken together, these two aspects of blackface minstrelsy — ​the performative emulation of the voice and the grotesque masquerade that hides the face — ​animated a contradictory libidinal economy of social “othering” and emotional attachment sharply illuminated by the Bakhtinian view that Stallybrass and White put forward in their insight that “repugnance and fascination are the twin poles of the process in which a political imperative to reject and eliminate the ‘low’ conflicts powerfully and unpredictably with the desire for the other.”17 Blackface iconicity enjoyed an enduring “afterlife” in the cultural imagination of modernity long after the concrete production of material artifacts — ​today eminently collectible — ​went into decline. Approaching the ambivalence of the stereotype from a dialogical perspective, we can draw out the implications of three important themes. Bearing in mind Orlando Patterson’s view that slavery produces “social death” through ritual forms of humiliation and degradation that enact the loss of honor on the part of the enslaved, the blackface image unequivocally encouraged audiences to “laugh at” the lives of African Americans as rendered comic, ludicrous, and bizarre in minstrelsy.18 The mocking parodies of black vernacular speech, however, may also have had a significant resonance among nineteenth-century audiences that included European immigrants

11 Carnivalesque and Grotesque

undergoing acculturation to Anglo-Saxon norms in northern cities, in which case we may speculate whether audiences were also “laughing with” comic impersonators, that is to say identifying with the minstrel figure as a troubadour whose stories addressed the travails of adaptation to modern urban life. Where political critiques of stereotypes often assume a realist epistemology that views representation as a distortion of social relations, the concept of ambivalence directs attention to the political agency of the unconscious as an element in the struggle for hegemony. As the blackface stereotype crosses boundaries of social class and enters the realm of domestic genre painting in works such as Eastman Johnson’s Life at the Old South (1859), which features a banjo-playing minstrel at its center, or Winslow Homer’s Dressing for the Carnival (1895), its symbolic power is further naturalized. Art historian Michael Hatt observes how the prevailing visual culture of “race” and representation in mid-nineteenth-century America created a consensus across high and low culture on the basis of the stereotype that was only briefly challenged by abolitionist iconography, which sought to refute degrading images of black life by assimilating black bodies to the classical Greco-Roman ideal. Noting that “it is after emancipation that racism becomes most intense and virulent,” Hatt describes how commonplace images of “the black body in its extreme grotesque definition as a symbol of the coherence of white America”19 triumphed over the classical idealization of the black body whereby abolitionists sought to impart connotations of dignity and nobility to a newly emancipated social class. What is missing from his account of discursive struggle in competing constructions of the black body, however, is the critical moment of the countervailing “answer-word” as it is articulated from the side of a black Atlantic double-consciousness that questions dominant depictions of otherness. Produced under conditions of self-chosen exile in Rome, the sculpture Forever Free (1867) by Mary Edmonia Lewis demonstrates how black artists of the nineteenth century struggled to find a voice in a visual language in which the image of blackness had been fixed as a sign of the Other. Repeating key tropes of abolitionist iconography — ​the slave kneeling in gratitude, hands raised to show broken manacles — ​Lewis nonetheless introduces a critical difference in terms of gender, suggesting that black emancipation is incomplete without female equality. Using white marble — ​associated with spiritual values in Western classicism — ​her neoclassical composition answers back to the grotesquery of the commonplace stereotype by producing an ideal

12 No Laughing Matter

type as alternative. Although such moments of black self-representation are scarce, we catch a glimpse of a nascent strategy of counter-appropriation whereby key signifying elements are disarticulated out of the dominant visual code and rearticulated by black artists to produce alternate meanings in social discourse on “race.” In The Banjo Lesson (1894), Henry Ossawa Tanner takes the banjo out of the dominant pictorial register where it acts as a signifier of minstrelsy, and re-accentuates it as a signifier of the inner life of a black family, portraying a scene of instruction in which African American traditions (the banjo is a hybrid mix of African drum and European guitar) are passed from one generation to the next. When we consider how nineteenth-century black artists responded to stereotyping, we can think of the symbolic economy of “othering” as an obstacle that stood in the way of their artistic freedom; but once we factor in the stereotype’s twin poles of repugnance and fascination at the level of the collective unconscious, we may appreciate that it was not until the late twentieth century that such strategies of counter-appropriation were able to overturn the “stereotypical grotesque” into a source of critical laughter. Contesting racial stereotypes through strategies of idealization and classicism featured prominently among artists of the “New Negro” era such as Meta Warrick Fuller and Richmond Barthe. While Harlem Renaissance artists such as Palmer Hayden and Archibald Motley turned toward vernacular sources, introducing wit and humor into their affectionate and intimate portrayals of family and community life, it is striking to observe that an outright appeal to laughter does not truly emerge until the breakthrough moment of the 1960s, when the “regime of truth” held in place by representations inherited from the previous century is finally ruptured and torn open. Considered as a distorted manifestation of carnivalesque “debasement” that retained archaic tropes of transgression as an anachronistic reserve within the popular culture of modernity, the power of blackface can be said to haunt the diasporic imagination like a ghost — ​Spike Lee’s Bamboozled (2000) speaks eloquently to this predicament. In the sense that the laughter of dominant social groups contributed to the ways in which black subjectivity was not just subordinated to blackface imagery but was actively terrorized by its mythological power — ​to the point where African Americans were forced to play along with it, applying burnt-cork makeup in vaudeville routines — ​it is highly significant that in opening up the ambivalence of the carnivalesque and the grotesque for

The Return of the Grotesque in the Black Avant-Garde At first glance, the incongruity that takes us by surprise in Betye Saar’s assemblage The Liberation of Aunt Jemima (1972) lies with the shotgun in the left arm of the ceramic figurine and the black power salute emblazoned on an antique postcard showing a crying baby being comforted by its domestic servant. But this is the least original aspect of Saar’s achievement, for the ironic reversal from servility to militancy at the level of the signified had already been performed by sculptor Joe Overstreet in The New Jemima (1964), in which the mammy stereotype breaks free from her packaging on an oversize box of pancake mix while firing a machine gun. Rather, what Saar created by proposing the stereotype as a readymade or found object, re-presented in a cabinet that functions as a vitrine — ​which has the distancing effect of showing an artifact of material culture as if it were an alien specimen collected from a distant and unknown civilization — ​was an act of counter-appropriation that liberated the mammy-as-signifier into an alternative discourse of black self-empowerment. When Saar explains that “the boxes are coffins. They’re all coffins. They contain relics of the past,” we understand that Aunt Jemima is liberated by the very act that lays her to rest.20 The boxes and cabinets act as formal framing devices for an art of counter-fetishism: whereas they mostly contain familial materials, as though to protect the ancestral past from the threat of erasure, the embalming treatment of the stereotype along similar lines reveals a crucial insight — ​in a culture where the fear of being laughed at was synonymous with the fear of being looked at, reversing the subject/object relations of the gaze involves letting go of the trauma inflicted by the stereotype as an “internal foreign object.” Laughter here subverts the seriousness of racist stereotyping not with angry protest or rationalist refutation but with a homeopathic strategy that operates in-and-against the semantic capillaries of the symbolic order it critiques. Such an alternative to the allopathic procedure associated with challenging

13 Carnivalesque and Grotesque

artistic exploration, such post-1960s artists as Betye Saar, Robert Colescott, and David Hammons each turn to laughter as a key resource in strategies of counter-appropriation that were brought into artistic circulation as a result of the broader cultural critique of Eurocentric modernism that gave way to postmodernism.

14 No Laughing Matter

the stereotype through idealization or so-called “positive images” is further highlighted by the painterly parodies of Robert Colescott, which enact counter-appropriation in the form that Henry Louis Gates calls “signifyin’.” In Gates’s theory, to signify upon another’s utterance is to use the verb in the manner of the African American vernacular, which is to express (often with caustic wit) an unremitting critique of the referential effects of racial discourse in Standard English by means of performative moves drawn from the rhetorical, lexical, and semantic resources of the dominant code itself.21 Colescott’s George Washington Carver Crossing the Delaware: Page from an American History Textbook (1975) is a parody of Emanuel Leutze’s academic history painting of 1851, and its cartoon-like rendering solicits laughter on account of ironic substitutions that enact repetition with a sharply critical difference. One of America’s founding fathers is homonymously replaced by the nineteenth-century black agricultural chemist who taught at the Tuskegee Institute with Booker T. Washington. Colescott’s act of blackface substitution draws attention to what is excluded from the original painting; it lays bare the “low” that must be excluded from the “high” in order for “high art” to be taken seriously. We not only see a mooning mammy — ​showing one’s buttocks is a universal gesture of irreverence — ​but notice the banjo player at the rear: Colescott voices neither protest nor complaint, but insight into the miscegenated layers of cultural modernity buried beneath official narratives of national identity. Extending into the canon of European art history, Colescott’s choice of targets for his blackface parodies — ​such as his Demoiselles d’Alabama (1985) — ​sets the lower bodily material principle to work in exposing the “race” and gender matrix of Western beauty standards. Partly inspired by Robert Crumb’s comic art, Colescott’s female figures are heavy-set, and their bodies often slump down toward formlessness. By the time we get to Colescott’s take on Van Gogh — ​Eat Dem Taters (1975) — ​we understand how his practice of “bad painting” was avant-garde in the sense of simply being ahead of its time (fig. 1.3). In 1978, curator Marcia Tucker defined “bad painting” as “figurative work that defies either deliberately or by virtue of disinterest, the classical canons of good taste, craftsmanship, acceptable source material, rendering or illusionist representation,”22 but because avant-garde strategies of appropriation were primarily theorized in relation to photo-based conceptualism, Colescott’s place in postmodernism is often misread as satire. This is misleading because, as Bakhtin shows, satire entails a subject-position of

15 Carnivalesque and Grotesque

Figure 1.3. Robert Colescott, Eat Dem Taters, 1975. Courtesy of the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York.

moral superiority over the target of one’s parody or irony, whereas carnival laughter is inclusively directed toward all the participants themselves: instead of rage or anger, Colescott’s laughter elicits a sense of levity that encourages critical detachment from his subject matter, allowing the viewer’s momentary liberation from the high seriousness surrounding the subject of “race” and history so as to create an opening for rereading the visual text of the past. Working with found objects such as half-eaten spare ribs, cuttings of nappy hair, and empty bottles of cheap wine, David Hammons acts upon waste materials that are expelled and separated from the social body in order for it to maintain equilibrium. By virtue of his specific choices, however, he links abject materials to perceptions of “race,” and yet what we find in works such as Elephant Dung Sculpture (1978) — ​a central point of reference for Chris Ofili — ​is a playful sense of humor that produces a poetics of visual punning in which degraded and devalued objects are transvaluated by acts of counter-appropriation. In the case of How Ya Like Me Now? (1988), initially presented to the public in the form of a billboard, the risks entailed by the ironic reversal of blackface reveal that Hammons’s mode of address is not confined to the demographic majority but is universal precisely because it is aimed at a dialogue with the inner fears and fantasies of his black audiences as well. The image of Jesse Jackson undergoes a topsy-turvy transformation of carnivalesque debasement, and as curator Ralph Rugoff explains: “[Ham-

16 No Laughing Matter

mons] continually pokes fun at stereotypes held by both white and black audiences. He will lampoon the black male’s obsession with street cool, and then turn around and challenge the racist double standards of white America. His billboard, How Ya Like Me Now?, which featured the title spray-painted across a blond-haired, blue-eyed Jesse Jackson, confronted both audiences. When this work was first installed along a Washington DC commuter route, it mockingly taunted passing suburban drivers. At the same time, it so angered a group of young African-American men — ​who understood it as a disrespectful portrayal of Jesse Jackson — ​that they tore down the billboard with hammers.”23 Avant-garde acts that “carnivalize” social constructions of masculinity and femininity have a long-standing pedigree in twentieth-century art, as Duchamp’s crossed-dressed persona Rrose Sélavy attests: but what happens when gender masquerade intersects with critiques of the “stereotypical grotesque” on the grounds of “race” and ethnicity? Adrian Piper offers an answer. In works such as Catalysis IV (1970), where she presented herself in everyday situations as an “art object,” Piper risked being laughed at in her conceptualist inquiries into the social dynamics of the gaze. She undertook temporary plastic modifications to her body by donning sunglasses, an Afro wig, and a handlebar mustache and created a public persona as the Mythic Being. Works such as I Am the Locus (1975) show the Mythic Being crossing Harvard Square in Cambridge. Piper’s words in this image-text piece start in the impersonal tone of philosophical reasoning — ​“I am the locus of consciousness, surrounded and constrained, by animate physical objects, with moist, fleshy, pulsating surfaces” — ​only to switch in the final panel to the earthy idiom of the urban vernacular as the Mythic Being exclaims, “Get out of my way, asshole!” Piper’s practice as artist and philosopher — ​she had begun work on her PhD on Kant at Harvard University in 1974 — ​is centrally addressed to the serious subject of human xenophobia — ​the fear of difference — ​and how to redress it in art and politics, yet critics seem to lose sight of this side of her wit, humor, and laughter for the very same reason, as if humor was incompatible with independent thinking. In Self-Portrait as a Nice White Lady (1995), the hilarity of the title stems from the self-deprecating tone it intends, while the wording within the frame — ​“whut choo lookin at, mofo” — ​parodies the macho lingo of the streets, and does so with ironic affection as Piper returns to one of her central themes: an interrogation of the social relations of looking and being looked at (fig. 1.4).

17 Carnivalesque and Grotesque

Figure 1.4. Adrian Piper, Self-Portrait as a Nice White Lady, 1995. Self-portrait, oil crayon on black-and-white photograph, 20.3 × 30.4 cm. Collection of the Studio Museum, New York. © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation, Berlin.

Whereas novelists excavate the “unrepresentable” truth of slavery through an aesthetic strategy Paul Gilroy refers to as “the slave sublime,”24 the contemporary artist Kara Walker explores the queasy ambivalence of the stereotypical grotesque as a site of abjection. In her short film 8 Possible Beginnings, or the Creation of African-America, a Moving Picture (1997), what provokes laughter is the sheer incongruity that arises between the heavy dread of her chosen subject matter and the handmade modesty of its means of production. By showing the silhouettes being manipulated by hand to produce a shadow play, Walker encourages critical laughter to break with the stock-in-trade imagery that pervades representations of slavery, and thus her work opens up room for alternative approaches that recognize how

18 No Laughing Matter

the sheer scale of historical trauma renders the question of “truth” into an uncanny kind of fiction. By way of an ending, consider the joker from an ordinary pack of playing cards, which, like tarot cards, have an archaic origin that was never finally obliterated by the onward march of modernity. The joker is special because it embodies indeterminacy, which is what Bakhtin values most in the ambivalence of the carnivalesque and the grotesque. Coming up to date, I wonder if I am alone in observing that much black popular culture today seems to have lost its sense of humor: the “bling” aesthetic is ironic and satirical, but rarely seems to welcome the wry ambiguities of carnival laughter. Public Enemy’s pairing between Chuck D, who took his role rather seriously, and Flavor Flav, who was the jester, the licensed fool, suggests the antagonistic interdependence of laughter and seriousness has always already featured as a significant aspect of cultural and artistic production in the modern black diaspora. Joining company with Bakhtin’s awareness of the double-sided character of humor, the joker in the pack suggests that laughter matters most when we know we are alive enough and human enough to also laugh at ourselves.

Notes 1. Henri Bergson, Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic (1899; London: Macmillan, 1935), 4. 2. Ibid., 3. 3. Charles Baudelaire, “On the Essence of Laughter,” in Œuvres complètes, vol. 2 (Paris: Gallimard, 1976), 532, cited in Kevin Newmark, “Traumatic Poetry: Charles Baudelaire and the Shock of Laughter,” in Trauma: Explorations in Memory, ed. Cathy Caruth (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 241–242. 4. Baudelaire, “On the Essence of Laughter,” 245. 5. Kate Bush, “Why Should I Love You?,” The Red Shoes, EMI, 1993. 6. Timothy Hyman, “A Carnival Sense of the World,” in Carnivalesque, exh. cat., ed. Timothy Hyman and Roger Malbert (London: South Bank Centre, 2000), 9. 7. Mikhail M. Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World (1968; Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 73. 8. Hyman, “Carnival Sense of the World,” 14. 9. Bakhtin, Rabelais, 109. 10. Ibid., 11–12. 11. Ibid., 66. 12. Ibid., 67.

19 Carnivalesque and Grotesque

13. Ibid., 9. 14. Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (London: Methuen, 1986), 19. 15. Hugh Honour, The Image of the Black in Western Art, vol. 4, pt. 2, From the American Revolution to World War I (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, Menil Foundation, 1989), 62. 16. Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993). 17. Stallybrass and White, Politics and Poetics of Transgression, 4–5. 18. Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982). 19. Michael Hatt, “‘Making a Man of Him’: Masculinity and the Black Body in Mid-Nineteenth-Century American Sculpture” [1992], in Race-ing Art History: Critical Readings in Race and Art History, ed. Kymberly Pinder (New York: Routledge, 2002), 202. 20. Betye Saar cited in Peter Clothier, “The Other Side of the Past,” in Betye Saar, Selected Assemblages/Oasis, ed. Peter Clothier (Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art, 1984), 13. 21. Henry Louis Gates Jr., The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988). 22. Marcia Tucker cited in Irving Sandler, Art of the Post Modern Era: From the Late 1960s to the Early 1990s (New York: HarperCollins, 1996), 198. 23. Ralph Rugoff, “David Hammons: Public Nuisance, Rubble Rouser, Hometown Artist,” in David Hammons: In the Hood, exh. cat. (Springfield: Illinois State Museum, 1994), 11. 24. Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 187–223.

Part 1 Encountering Humor Racial, National, and Ethnic Stereotypes

two   Bartolomeo Passarotti

and “Comic” Images of Black Africans in Early Modern Italian Art

Paul H. D. Kaplan

Bartolomeo Passarotti’s so-called Merry Company (fig. 2.1) is, at least for a modern observer, both disturbing and perplexing. Though the painting is well known to specialists in Italian art of the late Renaissance and has appeared in one major museum exhibition, its location in a French private collection has kept it out of the limelight, and it has only very recently been reproduced in color.1 The picture’s grotesque comic tone and its ridicule of lust and gluttony are not unusual for its era, but the inclusion of a dark-skinned couple sets it apart from most similar early genre paintings, and this chapter will try to explain that anomaly and its relationship to other early modern images depicting black Africans. It is not always easy to determine whether intentionally racialized humor is part of the content of works of art made prior to the eighteenth century, when racial prejudice against people of black African descent became especially dominant and explicit in Western culture. Human physiognomic difference has surely long played a role in defining what is perceived as visually comic, and there is undoubtedly a case to be made for seeing traces of this in ancient Greek and Roman representations of black Africans — ​though there is no clear consensus about what relation this might have to an early notion of racial prejudice.2 In the post-antique tradition of Western art, there is little in the way of unmistakably comic imagery in the European visual depiction of black Africans before the late 1500s. There are exaggerations of the basic components of black African visual identity as it was understood by Europeans — ​dark brown skin color, tightly curled hair, broad and/or bulbous nose, full lips — ​but even when this verges on caricature it usually does not exceed what is applied to adjoining non-African characters; nor is the behavior of black Africans characterized as especially humorous or bizarre. But Passa-

24 No Laughing Matter

rotti’s Merry Company, probably from the late 1570s, seems to bring us right into the visual discourse of racist stereotypes and caricatures developed in the 1700s and later.3 The Italian art historian Federico Zeri astutely described the picture in 1976 as “one of the oldest references to sexual racism.”4 Born in 1529 in Bologna, Bartolomeo Passarotti helped to give the art of that northern Italian city a particular profile that became still more distinctive in the decades after his death in 1592. Some scholars believe Passarotti trained one or more of the Carracci, the family of painters (two brothers and a cousin) who definitively established the fame of the Bolognese school. There is little doubt that Passarotti, one of the first Italian artists to embrace genre subjects, had a direct effect on the hugely important and influential genre paintings of Annibale Carracci. Though Passarotti is usually labeled a mannerist, and Carracci’s genre pictures are classified as among the earliest examples of early modern realism, it is hard to imagine Carracci’s works without the precedent of Passarotti’s. In fact, the only early reference to the painting we are considering is found in the biography of Passarotti in Carlo Cesare Malvasia’s 1678 Felsina pittrice, where the work is cited as one to which Agostino Carracci (Annibale’s brother) was much attached. In Malvasia’s book Agostino is described as perhaps the most obsessive practical joker in the history of art, with such exploits as disguising a roadside turd as a delicate white handkerchief so that someone would pick it up, and covering a mouse hole with a painting of a mouse hole so that his cat would crash into it. If Agostino Carracci loved the Merry Company, it must have counted in its day as a very pinnacle of comic art. Malvasia describes the picture as “the caricature of an extremely ugly man who fondles the mammaries of an even more monstrous and nauseating old woman, next to whom stands the rival for her affections, screaming with his mouth wide open; this picture greatly pleased Agostino who wanted to get hold of a copy of it, formerly in the study of the Basenghi; Prospero Fontana had a copy too, which first belonged to Count Berò.”5 This is the only known description of this image in print before the 1970s, but it leaves many questions unanswered. Just why was Agostino so interested? Who owned the original? The Basenghi were a local art-collecting family about whom little is known.6 Count Berò was a local nobleman, and one Marco Tullio Berò published a book of Latin poetry on “rustics” in Bologna in 1568, though these country folk are rather well-behaved swains in the pastoral tradition.7 The Bolognese painter Prospero Fontana was a

25 Passarotti and “Comic” Images of Africans

Figure 2.1. Bartolomeo Passarotti, Merry Company, late 1570s. Oil on canvas, 114 × 118 cm. Private collection, Paris. Courtesy ZooID Pictures Limited.

mannerist contemporary of Passarotti, which makes it clear that Agostino was not the only artist who found the work absorbing. Malvasia’s description is a compelling but nevertheless incomplete evocation of the Merry Company, since it omits any mention of the black African couple (and the dog as well). Maybe Malvasia found the dark-skinned pair too troubling to mention, though he is usually eager to describe the most grotesque and ludicrous details in Bolognese painting. It may be, of course, that one or more of the apparently three versions of the composition did not include the black couple or, for that matter, the dog. In the absence of any technical study of the canvas, it is impossible to be sure whether the black figures are original; they certainly occupy an uncomfortably small and asymmetrical space in the work. In the analysis that follows, I shall assume

26 No Laughing Matter

that the black couple was an original component of this work, but it is worth remembering that the couple might have been a later addition to the original composition by either Passarotti or some other artist. The Merry Company has certainly been altered at least once: when it was reproduced in print in 1976, the breasts of the white woman were awkwardly covered with drapery, leaving her partner’s hand squeezing the empty air. By 1988, this bowdlerization had been removed.8 Art historians have mostly referred to this work as a “Merry Company,” a term used in Dutch art of the seventeenth century to describe a group of carousers, often including both men and women, in a tavern-like setting. In the absence of a better obvious alternative, I will use it here. Passarotti’s Merry Company measures 114 by 118 centimeters. Resting their arms on a narrow table that functions as a parapet, three “white” carousers shout, mug, and grope, as a dog with a protruding tongue squeezes in among them. The couple at the right embrace and open their mouths slightly as if to prepare for a kiss. The “rival” (as Malvasia named him) at the left, his mouth wide open, holds a huge jug of wine as a musician might cradle a lute. The dog stares at the man’s open mouth. Just behind the dog appear the heads of a black man and woman, who leer at each other and let their long tongues hang forward from their open mouths. The man has a mustache, while the woman wears an earring and a bluish headdress. These figures show no awareness of the figures in front, and vice versa. The black man holds a glass of dark wine at the upper left. Lined up across the front edge of the table, atop a simple white cloth, are a roll, a salami, a head of garlic, figs, a half-filled glass of pinkish wine, and another roll.9 The old woman and the “rival” seem to have arrived from a Renaissance toga party, wearing ill-fitting, untailored white garments, and more or less antique headgear: his is a simple bacchic wreath, while hers is a blue fillet with four little bunches of yellow ornaments suspended from it. The man at the right, however, is dressed in a white shirt and brown vest, like a member of the working class; this figure, identical in both facial features and dress, reappears as a grinning butcher holding a cut of meat in Passarotti’s Butcher Shop.10 The black woman’s pearl earring provides an exotic note, though European elites were beginning to wear earrings in the 1500s. The foodstuffs are simple ones, except perhaps for the white rolls, which were among the more expensive and desirable forms of bread in their day. The edible objects correspond, at least in part, to the human figures: the two dark figs may allude to the dark-skinned couple, and

27 Passarotti and “Comic” Images of Africans

the ruddy man and pale hag at the right inversely match the white roll and glass of red wine placed before them. What social setting frames these characters? Unlike the peasant barns, market stalls, and butcher shops of other early genre paintings containing food, there are few clues here to follow. The public spaces of carnivalesque performance, so vivid in many of Brueghel’s works, are not a visible element here, nor is there any evidence of a grand banqueting space typical of ancient festivities like Saturnalia.11 The humble food and the costume of the man at the right, along with the out-of-control behavior, would have suggested a plebian environment to early modern viewers, but it is not easy to say if these are city-dwellers or rustics. There is little evidence for the presence of black Africans in Bologna in the 1570s, and still less for their presence in the surrounding countryside. In other parts of Italy people of color could be found in city (Venice) and in country (the estates of Sicily).12 A number of northern Italian princely courts — ​especially Milan, Mantua, and Ferrara13 — ​had a significant tradition of black servants employed by their ruling families, but Bologna did not,14 and in the 1570s the city was ruled by the pope in consultation with a senate made up of local patricians. The important local prelate Cardinal Giovanni Poggi may have had a black serving-woman in his entourage during the 1550s — ​this is suggested by the presence of a black woman in two scenes of the story of Moses by Prospero Fontana on the walls of his city palace, and the more remarkable presence of a conspicuous black woman and child (and also a crowned black man) in a fresco of the Preaching of John the Baptist (fig. 2.2) by Pellegrino Tibaldi in his family chapel in S. Giacomo Maggiore.15 (Both these artists were contemporaries and acquaintances of Passarotti’s, and Fontana was listed by Malvasia as an owner of a version of the Merry Company.16) Cardinal Poggi had served as an emissary to the court of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V in Spain, where black servants and slaves were more common than in Bologna.17 He had also spent time in Rome, where Counter-Reformation popes were eager to promote the global reach of their church with images of Ethiopian and (a bit later) Kongo Christians.18 But none of these other images and cultural affiliations project a comical tone. Though Passarotti was equally familiar with more sober and conventional means of representing black Africans — ​as for example in several images of the Adoration of the Magi19 — ​he does seem to have associated blacks with the comic mode. Sometime before 1584 (maybe around 1575) he labored over

Figure 2.2. Pellegrino Tibaldi, Preaching of John the Baptist, 1550s. Oil on canvas, approx. 400 × 200 cm. Capella Poggi, S. Giacomo Maggiore, Bologna. Courtesy ZooID Pictures Limited.

29 Passarotti and “Comic” Images of Africans

a composition known as Homer and the Fishermen; the painting is lost, but two comprehensive drawings survive (fig. 2.3).20 Made for a Florentine called Giovanni Battista Deti (perhaps the father of a rather unspiritual cardinal of the same name), this canvas told the apocryphal story of Homer’s death: that upon encountering some fishermen from the island of Ios, who made an enigmatic comment about catching lice, which the bard took to be about catching fish, Homer grew despondent about not being able to puzzle out the epigram, fell ill as a result, and died.21 Not part of the written narrative, but playing a conspicuous part in the image, is a statuesque African woman who is described in one early source as a “Zingana” or gypsy.22 (Confusion between blacks and gypsies was not unusual in this period, and gypsies are often shown as very dark-skinned in the art of this era.23) Though the black woman, who is quite prominent in the two compositional drawings, is not depicted as grotesque, she may have been perceived as somehow contributing to the undeniably facetious tone of the painting, which also featured a dog and self-portrait of Passarotti in the guise of Homer. There are some highly finished drawings of a black African (male or female?) which seem to have been made for this project, and here the face seems more caricatured.24 That there was something understood by many Europeans as intrinsically comic about black Africans is shown by the widespread habit of referring to them by antiphrasis, the practice of naming something by its opposite.25 Several black European court servants were known by names like “John White.”26 Isabella d’Este and other Italian aristocrats around 1500 often referred to the black children they acquired as pages and maidservants as buffoni (buffoons), even when there is no evidence that they performed explicitly comical routines.27 There is, however, at least one image of a black African in a traditional jester’s outfit and mocking pose, found in the c. 1510 Grimani breviary decorated by the Fleming Simon Bening.28 The striking contrast of “black” and “fair” became a conspicuous visual trope with the rise of portraits with black pages attending white mistresses (apparently invented by Titian in the 1520s), but it is only in 1672 that the art critic Bellori explicitly characterizes such juxtapositions as comic.29 In the Merry Company no one can really be described as “fair,” and the ruddy and sallow complexions of the “white” figures are scarcely more admirable, in the Eurocentric terms of the day, than those of the Africans. If Passarotti’s grotesque black couple is not easy to contextualize through

Figure 2.3. Bartolomeo Passarotti, Homer and the Fishermen, before 1584. Ink on paper, 52 × 38 cm. Louvre, Paris. Photo Gérard Blot. © RMN–Grand Palais/Art Resource, NY.

31 Passarotti and “Comic” Images of Africans

the prior tradition of European visual humor, we may do better by looking at some of the other associations suggested by the painting. I now want to examine, in sequence, the ways in which Africans were linked by European artists (both before and during Passarotti’s era) to food, to drink, to the display of the tongue, and to animals. The Western association of people of color with food and cookery is by no means a new one. An ancient poem known as the “Moretum,” once attributed to Virgil, refers with some condescension to an African serving-woman preparing food as dark-skinned, full-lipped, and with tightly curled hair; an Italian miniaturist illustrated this character, named Cybale, in 1458, though the image is rather restrained.30 Boccaccio writes of a black cook named Raimondo in the kingdom of Naples (where African slaves were not uncommon in the later Middle Ages) who marries a maidservant of the queen, and the Tuscan author finds his kitchen status (and maybe also his blackness) indecorous and comical.31 One of the first historical (as opposed to legendary) black European saints was the Sicilian Benedict of Palermo (d. 1589), a son of slaves who entered the monastery where he later became famous as a lay brother working in the kitchen, rose to prior, and then in an act of humility returned to the job of cook at the end of his life.32 Black waiters, sometimes in exotic dress but more often in European livery, are frequently represented in Venetian painting of the 1500s, and especially in the works of Paolo Veronese.33 Among Veronese’s transgressions in the eyes of the interrogator of the Inquisition in 1573 was his inclusion of buffoons (surely including the black children who serve at table) in the Last Supper; the interrogator’s objection was evidently that they lowered the solemn tone this sacred subject should have had.34 In the 1600s and 1700s black Africans appear in food still lifes and kitchen genre scenes, of which the most impressive is Velázquez’s Kitchen Maid (c. 1618–1619), wherein an African servant pauses during the washing up to listen in on the Supper at Emmaus taking place behind her.35 This Spanish picture is easier to match with social reality than Passarotti’s painting because there were more laboring people of color in Spanish cities than in Bologna; but unlike the Merry Company, it is hardly a facetious work. Somewhat closer in tone to Passarotti’s canvas is a strange 1634 genre triple portrait (fig. 2.4) by the Netherlandish artist Justus Sustermans, who spent most of his career in Florence. This painting depicts two Italian peasant women and an Afro-Italian called Pietro Moro (who is elsewhere shown

32 No Laughing Matter

as a military page to one of the Medici): the market women hold a duck and a basket of very white eggs, while Pietro makes the fica sign (the thumb through the fist, a mocking sexual gesture).36 The woman at the left is blind, so no one but the viewer sees the fica. This image links food, plebian figures including an old woman, obscenity, and blackness, and these are all components of the Merry Company. The thrust may be that there is something “low” about all these elements, though the pearl earring worn by Pietro lifts him a little above the class status of the women. (Susterman’s painting does, to be sure, have a psychological dynamic different from that of the Merry Company, since Pietro Moro is more subject than object, colluding with the viewer in his apparent mockery of the peasant women.37) In any case, food is a fascinating and innovative subject for Passarotti and his contemporaries in northern Italy, and its associations are generally plebian and carnal (in both senses). Much of the food in the Merry Company is precisely that: not only are the salami, garlic, and figs suggestive of sexual organs, but they are also coarse foods easily digested only by the poor, according to early modern authorities.38 Passarotti’s African man holds a glass of wine, and this too connects to the coarse and the carnal. A group of dark-skinned characters (including women) are conspicuous in Maerten van Heemskerck’s c. 1535 Triumph of Bacchus (fig. 2.5); the antique reference is to India, which Bacchus visited, but Europeans had long confused India and Ethiopia, and in literal or figurative bacchanals by Jordaens and Rubens, the dark figures are surely African in their physiognomies.39 Heemskerck’s revelers, both dark and light, engage in various silly, drunken behaviors: a black child points to the rear end of a goat, while a brown-skinned man walks on stilts. The Netherlandish painter Bartholomeus Spranger, who enhanced his mannerist style in Italy before settling at the Habsburg court in Prague in the 1580s, also provided Bacchus with an attendant dark-skinned boy in his Bacchus and Ceres of 1590.40 Spranger’s picture is of particular relevance because, with its pendant Bacchus and Ceres Leaving Venus, it evokes a famous epigram by the Roman playwright Terence: “Without Bacchus and Ceres, Venus grows cold.”41 In the Merry Company, the wine, bread, and other food that accompany the amorous behavior seem likewise to illustrate the truth of Terence’s dictum, and there are references to the world of the pagan gods: the screaming rival wears a wreath of vine leaves and a simple version of antique costume, just as his faithless beloved’s untailored garment and fillet headdress also evoke the world of classical

33 Passarotti and “Comic” Images of Africans

Figure 2.4. Justus Sustermans, Madonna Domenica dalle Cascine, la Cecca di Pratolino and Pietro Moro, 1634. Oil on canvas, 100 × 94 cm. Uffizi, Florence. Courtesy ZooID Pictures Limited.

myth. Passarotti’s old woman, however, does not quite bear the traditional identifying marks of either Ceres or Venus, though the golden bunches of dangling ornaments to her fillet could be seen as wheat-like. Passarotti’s mix of the pagan and the proletarian, which mocks rather than ennobles his revelers, may have been influenced by the anticlassical engraved caricatures of the Olympian gods produced by Martino Rota (d. 1583) and others.42 By the 1620s artists such as Velázquez and Ribera were also connecting the ancient rites of Bacchus to the carousing of the contemporary lower classes.43 Red wine, however, could also denote a coarse, lower-class environment without bacchic overtones. In fact, the jug in Annibale Car-

Figure 2.5. Maerten van Heemskerck, Triumph of Bacchus, c. 1535. Oil on canvas, 56 × 107 cm. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.

Figure 2.6. Lavinia Fontana, Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, c. 1600. Oil on canvas, 56 × 118 cm. National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin.

35 Passarotti and “Comic” Images of Africans

racci’s famous Bean-Eater looks identical to that in the Merry Company.44 The darker the wine, the coarser, according to some authorities, and the warning “Drink black wine and you will take on its hue” is found in several compilations of Italian proverbs from the 1590s and later.45 But one has to be a little cautious here, since in another work Passarotti depicted a refined older gentleman with an elegant glass of dark red wine.46 Food and drink enter the body through the mouth, but mouths are also instruments of sexual pleasure, and in the Merry Company all mouths are open. Visible teeth are rare enough in early modern art, but the four tongues seen here (those of the black man and woman, the “rival,” and the dog) may be a record. Sticking out the tongue had long been a gesture of obscene disrespect in European culture, and there are a few cases where dark-skinned tormentors of Christ extend or touch their tongues.47 But Passarotti’s tongues are more sensual than aggressive; Albrecht Dürer’s drawing of a coarsely lascivious peasant couple engaging in lingual foreplay makes it evident how we are supposed to read the tongues of the black couple in the Merry Company.48 The tongue of the dog is less obscene, since it expresses fairly normal canine behavior, but it unquestionably draws the black couple down toward a more bestial status. Passarotti and his Bolognese patrons were evidently great dog-fanciers, so it will not do here to read this animal as unequivocally corrupt.49 But European painters often grouped black servants with animals: sometimes to indicate the exoticism of African humans and animals, but in other cases to suggest that black slaves and servants occupied a position no more independent than that of a favored pet. Lavinia Fontana, the daughter of that owner of a copy of the Merry Company Prospero Fontana, painted a Solomon and the Queen of Sheba (fig. 2.6) in modern dress with a mustached black servant just behind a large white dog whose chained leash is held by a dwarf.50 The courtly role of the two men and the dog is not materially different, though here all are aristocratic ornaments rather than exemplars of plebeian status. One aspect of the Merry Company not yet touched on is the issue of “race” and gender. Images of women of color, though by no means absent, are significantly rarer than men in the European artistic tradition. When black women do appear, they are not infrequently imbued with a sensual appeal, as can be seen for example in a Sienese mythological painting of the Fates from around 1550.51 An accomplished bronze statuette of a naked African woman

36 No Laughing Matter

in a Venus-like pose, probably from around 1600 and recently attributed to the French mannerist sculptor Barthélemy Prieur, survives in more than a dozen versions.52 Among the abundance of cameos made in northern Italy in the late 1500s there are quite a number of handsome black female profiles, sometimes by themselves and sometimes (using the differently colored strata of a gemstone) paired with white men.53 Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights has a visible sprinkling of dark bodies among the mostly paler naked women in its central pool.54 In most European visual images from the 1400s and 1500s, mockery does not seem an intrinsic feature of the depiction of eroticized black women, though a look at the texts from the period provides a different impression. Hermann von Sachsenheim’s 1453 mock epic Stories of the African Woman is a parody of a conventional chivalric tale, in which Brinhilt, the dark-skinned lady in question, is everything that an ordinary “fair lady” is not: pagan, sexually forward, physically violent, and a voracious eater and drinker, she mocks the knightly hero but is in turn mocked by the author.55 Just after 1500 the Scottish poet William Dunbar mocks another “black lady” who perhaps actually participated in the ritual of a royal tournament: Long have I made of ladies quit; Now of a black I will write

That disembarked from the last ships How I would fain describe perfectly My lady with the great lips:

How she has protruding lips like an ape And like a toad to feel,

And how her short cat-like nose turns up, And how she shines like any soap, My lady with the great lips.

When she is clad in rich apparel

She gleams as bright as a tar barrel;

When she was born the sun was in eclipse, The night would fain fight in her cause — ​ My lady with the great lips.

Who for her sake with spear and shield Proves most mighty in the field

Shall kiss and with her embrace

And thenceforth her love shall use

And who on the field receives shame And loses there his knightly name

Shall come behind and kiss her hips And never other consolation claim: My lady with the great lips.56

Despite the vicious mockery, however, this poem still treats black sexuality within the frame of aristocratic culture. This begins to change with the arrival of significant numbers of black bondsmen and bondswomen in Iberia in the 1500s, and Spanish texts of the 1540s find a crude humor in parodic characterizations of underclass Afro-Spanish speech and sexuality.57 While it seems unlikely that any of these texts were available to Passarotti, some of the attitudes they embody may have traveled with Spanish troops and administrators into Italy. Passarotti, however, might well have known of a group of songs in circulation from around 1550 that are collectively known as moresche.58 The songs are associated with Naples, where a rather substantial population of black African slaves had developed in the early cinquecento.59 The musical settings of the songs are attributed to a group of notable composers, including Orlando di Lasso (Orlande de Lassus), the famous Franco-Flemish composer who was in Italy between 1547 and 1555; his career as a composer apparently began in Naples in 1549–1551.60 Variously characterized as proximate to the form of madrigals, strambotte, and villanelle or villanesche, the moresche songs’ lyrics (presumably written by Neapolitan writers) are in the voices of several characters (Lucia and Giorgio are the most salient) who describe themselves as “gente nigra.” They are members of an underclass of slaves and recently freed men and women; the men serenade and crudely court the women (usually unsuccessfully) in a sometimes almost nonsensical dialect that nevertheless seems to contain African locations and words drawn from at least one sub-Saharan language.61 Though these songs were published, no illustrations to them are known; but their coarse,

Passarotti and “Comic” Images of Africans

My lady with the great lips.

37

Figure 2.7. North Italian, Black African Man and Woman, c. 1500– 1550. Woodcut, 38 × 26 cm. Civica Raccolta delle Stampe Achille Bertarelli, Milan.

comic, and sensual atmosphere — ​typical of a great many other Neapolitan canzoni — ​is in some ways comparable to that of the Merry Company.62 The moresche, however, are not only songs themselves but continually proclaim the love of music and singing, a feature absent in Passarotti’s picture, and the parodic classicism of the Merry Company is nowhere to be found in the moresche. Actual visual representations of black couples are fairly rare, but they do exist. It is instructive to compare the early sixteenth-century northern Italian woodcut of a black man and woman (fig. 2.7) — ​the man, at least, still exoticized — ​with a set of Netherlandish engravings of “tronies” (genre portraits) from 1564–1565 (fig. 2.8), in which several black Africans are found among a broader group of mostly rural plebeian types.63 (The Low Countries were under Spanish rule in these years.) This series was frequently reissued, and by 1658 verses were added. The following texts were associated with one black couple:

Figure 2.8. J. C. Visscher after Jan and Lucas van Doetecum, Brownie Jump-into-the-Bed and Phil the Devil, 1660s (based on works of 1564–1565). Engraving. Private collection.

Brownie Jumpintothe Bed 40

My skin is like a mole’s. My hair as black as soot.

No Laughing Matter

My teeth like ivory. My curled lips,

They call for love and heated kisses.

My round breasts are cliffs leading one astray.

And what belongs to my womb defies the whitest women. Thus many a man seeks to bide his time with me.

Phil the Devil With black sheep wool my head is crowned. I seem like a devil to the Dutch women.

My nose and flat beak shows a chilling beauty. Thus a prim eye doesn’t dare to rely on it.

However I do give pleasure to my nice Moris.

She wins bread for me and calls me play mate.64

The verses, more than the relatively restrained engravings, call Passarotti’s painting to mind. In the end, one of the most salient features of the black couple in the Merry Company is indeed the plebeian, not to say underclass context in which they appear. Even if bacchic associations initially prompted the inclusion of the couple, the reference to antiquity fails to elevate the genre subject — ​in fact it ultimately deepens the mockery. Once the picturesque aristocratic and exotic associations of black African identity had been dropped, as they largely are here, Passarotti leaves the viewer with little more than the harsh laughter he intended to provoke at the most marginal — ​not only the black, but at the poor, the old, the female, the ugly, the drunk, and the bestial.65 Even the deliberately coarse Neapolitan moresche songs demonstrate some affection for their subjects. Though the attitudes expressed by Passarotti were not entirely new in the 1570s, he may have been the first to express them visually with some degree of sophistication. Apparently, even in an Italian city without a significant black underclass of current and former slaves, such degrading imagery struck a chord with artists and collectors, and it may have encouraged later mocking images of and attitudes toward people of color.66

Notes 41 Passarotti and “Comic” Images of Africans

I would like to thank Jane Kromm, Opher Mansour, Gianfranco Salvatore, and Els Vandenbosch for their very generous help with issues discussed in this essay. 1. Paul H. D. Kaplan, “Italy, 1490–1700,” in The Image of the Black in Western Art, vol. 3, pt. 1, series ed. David Bindman and Henry Louis Gates Jr. (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2010), 93–190, 347–367, 155, 157, fig. 79; The Age of Correggio and the Carracci: Emilian Painting of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Washington DC: National Gallery of Art, 1986), 179–181, cat. 66; Corinna Höper, Bartolomeo Passarotti (1529–1592), 2 vols. (Worms: Wernersche Verlagsgesellschaft, 1987), 2:88–90, cat. G 96, pl. 21b; Angela Ghirardi, Bartolomeo Passerotti (Rimini: Luisè, 1990), 225–229, cat. 59, pl. 59 (and also related drawings on 70–71, 227–229). The picture was first discussed and illustrated by Donald Posner, Annibale Carracci: A Study in the Reform of Italian Painting around 1590, 2 vols. (London: Phaidon, 1971), 1:12, fig. 12. Previously the work had been owned by Eduardo Moratilla (Paris) and further back by one Marquis de Sapela. The artist’s name is spelled both as Passarotti and Passerotti; I use the former. 2. Frank M. Snowdon Jr., Before Color Prejudice: The Ancient View of Blacks (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983); Philip Mayerson, “Anti-Black Sentiment in the Vitae Patrum,” Harvard Theological Review 71 (1978): 304–311; Jeremy Tanner, introduction in David Bindman and Henry Louis Gates Jr., eds., The Image of the Black in Western Art, vol. 1, new ed. (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2010), 1–39. 3. David Bindman, Ape to Apollo: Aesthetics and the Idea of Race in the Eighteenth Century (London: Reaktion, 2002). 4. “La percezione visiva dell’Italia e degli italiani nella storia della pittura,” in Storia d’Italia, vol. 6, Atlante, 51–214 (Turin: Einaudi, 1976), 71, fig. 36. 5. Carlo Cesare Malvasia, Felsina pittrice (Bologna: Erede di Domenico Barbieri, 1678), 1:244 (section on Passarotti, 237–246): “e fù più che vero, che la caricatura di un bruttisim’huomo, che palpeggia le cinne ad una più mostruosa, e stomachevole vecchia, sterminatamente dietro di essi a bocc’aperta gridando il rivale, tanto piacque ad Agostino, che ne volle ricavare una copia, ch’era già nello studio dei Basenghi; si come un’altra cavato ne aveva Prospero Fontana, posseduta già dal Sig. Co. Berò.” The particular presence in Bologna of grotesquely comic genre images is already evident in the local Archbishop Paleotti’s equivocal discussion, in 1582, of whether to approve of such representations; Ghirardi, Passerotti, 69–71. Bologna was already developing its reputation as a capital of joyful gluttony, as reflected in the work of the self-taught poet Giulio Cesare Croce, but black Africans do not appear in his verses. 6. Anne Summerscale, Malvasia’s Life of the Carracci (State College: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000), 101, on prints by Agostino Carracci owned by Signor Basenghi.

42 No Laughing Matter

7. Rusticorum libri decem (Bologna: Giovanni Rossi, 1568); references to a metaphorical black dove (no. 6, line 102) and to an Ethiopian king (no. 4, line 52) can be found, but the tone is elevated and not remotely comparable to the painting. For the very little known of the author, the son of a noted legal scholar, see Gianmaria Mazzuchelli, Scrittori d’Italia, vol. 2, pt. 2 (Brescia: Giambattista Bossini, 1760), 1003. In the eighteenth century Count Berò’s copy of the Merry Company, ascribed to Prospero Fontana after Passarotti, passed to the Sacchi family who lived in Piazza dei Calderini in Bologna; Emilia Calbi, Marcello Oretti e il patrimonio artistico privato bolognese: Bologna, Biblioteca Comunale, MS B. 104 (Bologna: CLUEB, 1984), 103, b129/11: “Vecchio che palpeggia le Cinne ad una Vecchia, già C. Berò ora Sacchi, Piazza dei Calderini.” 8. Compare Zeri, “La percezione visiva,” fig. 36 (breast covered) with Posner, Annibale Carracci, 1: fig. 12 (uncovered) and Age of Correggio, 180 (uncovered). 9. The roll at the left has a complex form that resembles the head of a piglet, and there are also Italian cheeses that are so shaped. 10. Rome, Galleria Nazionale in Palazzo Barberini, inv. 1936; Ghirardi, Passerotti, 236–237, cat. 64, pl. 15; C. D. Dickerson III, Raw Painting: “The Butcher’s Shop” by Annibale Carracci (Fort Worth, TX: Kimbell Art Museum, 2010), 17–20. 11. One of the key elements in Saturnalia is that slaves and servants became guests and their masters waited upon them, but no masters appear in Passarotti’s picture. By the 1780s, however, a young black servant or slave eating ravenously appears in Antoine-François Callet’s Winter or Saturnalia (Paris, Louvre); see Elizabeth McGrath, “Veronese, Callet and the Black Boy at the Feast,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 61 (1999): 272–276. While Passarotti’s emphasis on food (including meat) and drink, as well as sexual licentiousness, may mean that he envisioned his carousers as participating in carnival activities, Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of the carnivalesque (Rabelais and His World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984]) is only peripherally relevant to this picture. Bakhtin’s emphasis is on social practice and literary representations that use food and bodily organs, fluids, and emanations as leveling and ultimately affirming expressions of human identity; Passarotti uses these features to degrade his subjects. On the problems of applying Bakhtin’s carnivalesque to visual images see Timothy Hyman, “A Carnival Sense of the World,” in Timothy Hyman and Roger Malbert, Carnivalesque (London: Hayward Gallery, 2000), 8–73, esp. 8–40. 12. Paul H. D. Kaplan, “Local Color: The Black African Presence in Venetian Art and History,” in Fred Wilson: Speak of Me as I Am (Cambridge, MA: MIT, List Visual Arts Center, 2003), 8–19; G. Anastasu Motta, “La schiavitù a Messina nel primo cinquecento,” Archivio Storico per la Sicilia Orientale 70 (1974): 305–342. 13. Kate Lowe, “Isabella d’Este and the Acquisition of Black Africans at the Mantuan Court,” in Mantova e il Rinascimento italiano: Studi in onore di David S. Chambers, ed. Philippa Jackson and Guido Rebecchini (Mantua: Editoriale Sometti, 2011), 65–76; Elizabeth McGrath, “Ludovico il Moro and His Moors,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 65 (2002): 67–94; Paul H. D. Kaplan, “Isabella d’Este

43 Passarotti and “Comic” Images of Africans

and Black African Women,” in Black Africans in Renaissance Europe, ed. K. J. P. Lowe and T. F. Earle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 125–154. 14. Höper, Bartolomeo Passarotti, 2:89, points to an eclogue of 1508 by the Bolognese writer Cesare Nappi (Marvin T. Herrick, Italian Comedy in the Renaissance [Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1960], 41) as indicating there were black slaves in the surrounding countryside, but the “Moro” who brings wine and simple food is merely a dialect spelling for Mauro, a common indigenous peasant name. 15. Fontana (1556): Vera Fortunati, “Sala di Mosè,” in L’immaginario di un ecclesiastico: I dipinti murali di Palazzo Poggi, ed. Vera Fortunati and Vincenzo Musumeci (Bologna: Compositori, 2000), 228–235 (Trial by Fire, and Pharaoh’s Daughter Giving Moses to a Nurse, 231, fig. 3, and col. pls. on 228, 234). Tibaldi (1551–1553 or a bit later): Vera Fortunati Pietrantonio, “Le metamorfosi della pala d’altare nel dibattito religioso del cinquecento: Il cantiere di San Giacomo,” in La Pittura in Emilia e in Romagna: Il cinquecento, ed. Vera Fortunati Pietrantonio, 2 vols. (Milan: Electa, 1995–1996), 1:218–243, 226, col. pl.; Silla Zamboni, “La Capella Poggi,” in Il tempio di S. Giacomo Maggiore a Bologna (Bologna: Padri Agostiniani di San Giacomo Maggiore, 1967), 147–159, pl. 49. Tibaldi’s black woman and child show the influence of Rosso Fiorentino’s Resurrection in Città di Castello, which has a lighter-skinned gypsy mother and child in a very similar pose and also a black African figure; Eric Darragon, Maniérisme en crise: Le ‘Christ en gloire’ de Rosso Fiorentino à Città di Castello (1528–1530) (Rome: Edizioni dell’Elefante, 1983), pl. A. See also Kaplan, “Italy, 1490–1700,” 120–121, fig. 50, and 145–147, fig. 71. 16. Malvasia, Felsina pittrice, 1:244. 17. Ilaria Bianchi, “Giovanni Poggi nell’età di Bocchi,” in Fortunati and Musumeci, L’immaginario, 33–45; Age of Correggio, 204–205, cat. 77. 18. See the group portrait (1574–1575) once attributed to Giulio Mazzoni in S. Maria degli Angeli in Rome, which includes likenesses of Tesfa Syon (also known as Fra Pietro Indiano), the abbot of the Ethiopian monastery of S. Stefano degli Abissini in Rome, as well as an as yet unidentified black African woman; Teresa Pugliatti, Giulio Mazzoni e la decorazione a Roma nella cerchia di Daniele da Volterra (Rome: Libreria dello Stato, Istituto Poligrafo dello Stato, 1984), pl. 427; Caterina Bernardi Salvetti, S. Maria degli Angeli alle Terme e Antonio Lo Duca (Rome: Desclée & C., 1965), 121–142, 123, fig. 29, and details on 125–126; Francesco Caporale, Antonio Manuel Ne Vunda, Rome, S. Maria Maggiore, sacristy, 1629 — ​a memorial bust of an envoy from the Christianized kingdom of Kongo who died upon reaching Rome in 1608; J. Cuvelier and L. Jadin, L’ancien Congo d’après les archives romaines (1518–1640) (Brussels: Académie royale des sciences coloniales, 1954), 260–300, 520–540, figs. 4–6. See also Kaplan, “Italy, 1490– 1700,” 148–149, fig. 73, and 160–165, fig. 81. 19. The best known of these was once in the Ambrosini chapel in the crypt of S. Pietro, Bologna, now Bologna, Palazzo Arcivescovile; Höper, Passarotti, 2:31–34, cat. G20 (c. 1580); Ghirardi, Passerotti, 148–150, cat. 2 (c. 1565). Ghirardi lists a smaller work in a private collection (166–167, cat. 16) from about 1572. A lost Adoration by Passarotti was once in Casa Negri, Bologna (Höper, Passarotti, 2:96, cat. G119, and Petronio

44 No Laughing Matter

Bassani, Guida agli amatori delle belle arti, 2 vols. (Bologna: Tipografia Sassi, 1816–1817), 1:115). 20. (1) Fawkenor Add. 78; Höper, Passarotti, 2:144–145, cat. Z 139, pl. 26a, and Ghirardi, Passerotti, 79; (2) Höper, Passarotti, 2:181, cat. Z 288, pl. 25a, and Ghirardi, Passerotti, 81; also Kaplan, “Italy, 1490–1700,” 156, fig. 78. The lost work itself is discussed in Höper, Passarotti, 1:64–66, 2:99, cat. G134, and Ghirardi, Passerotti, 78. 21. Part of a biography once believed (but no longer) to have been written by Plutarch, Essay on the Life and Poetry of Homer, ed. J. J. Keaney and Robert Lamberton (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1996), 59. 22. Raffaello Borghini, Il riposo (Florence: Giorgio Marescotti, 1584), 566–567. The black African woman in the drawings is quite close in features and dress to the woman in Tibaldi’s Preaching of the Baptist (fig. 2). 23. See Rosso Fiorentino’s Resurrection, discussed above, and also, for example, Simon Vouet, The Good Fortune, Galleria Nazionale in Palazzo Barberini, reproduced in Francesco Porzio, ed., Da Caravaggio a Ceruti: La scena di genere e l’immagine dei “pitocchi” nella pittura italiana (Milan: Skira, 1998), 131, cat. 10, col. pl. A Leonardesque composition of a young man embracing a grotesque old rich woman (who slightly resembles the old woman in the Merry Company) was, after c. 1669, fitted out with a set of English verses in which “Noe Gibsye nor noe Blackamoore . . . That half so ugly can appeare” as the youth’s “bride”; Bernard Barryte, “The Ill-Matched Couple,” Achademia Leonardi Vinci 3 (1990): 133–139, pl. 1. See also Valentin Groebner, Who Are You? Identification, Deception, and Surveillance in Early Modern Europe (New York: Zone Books, 2007), 117. 24. Two drawings in Modena, Galleria Estense, nos. 1209–1210, and one in London, British Museum, no. 1950–5–3–1; Ghirardi, Passerotti, 70–71; Höper, Passarotti, 2:165, cats. Z 228– Z 229, 2:144, cat. Z 137, who also lists workshop copies of similar type, 2:228, cat. F 116 (Florence, Uffizi), and 2:229, cat. F 122 (Mérignac, Louis Delix Collection?). Deti may have owned some of these drawings as well, and Borghini (Il riposo, 567) says he gave one to an appreciative Giovanni de’ Medici, the patron of Borghini’s book. 25. Dilwyn Knox, Ironia: Medieval and Renaissance Ideas on Irony (Leiden: Brill, 1989), 12. 26. Paul H. D. Kaplan, The Rise of the Black Magus in Western Art (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1985), 15. 27. Kaplan, “Isabella d’Este,” 134. 28. Venice, Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, ms. Lat. 1, 99, f. 4v; Giorgio Ferrari, Mario Salmi, and Gian Lorenzo Mellini, Breviario Grimani, 2nd ed. (Milan: Electa, 1979), pl. 7. 29. Paul H. D. Kaplan, “Titian’s Laura Dianti and the Origins of the Motif of the Black Page in Portraiture,” Antichità Viva 21 (1982): no. 1, 11–18, and no. 4, 10–18; Giovan Pietro Bellori, Le vite de’ pittori, scultori e architetti moderni, ed. Evelina Borea (Turin: Giulio Einaudi, 1976), 281 (on a work by Van Dyck now unknown): “Colorí una dama in forma di Venere appresso uno etiope, la quale si rimira nello specchio e ridendosi di quell negro fa paragone della sua bianchezza.”

45 Passarotti and “Comic” Images of Africans

30. By the Ferrarese miniaturist Guglielmo Giraldi, for the Venetian Leonardo Sanudo; Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, Ms. Lat. 7939 A, f. 48r; illustrated and discussed in Philine Helas, “Schwarz unter Weissen: Zur Repräsentation von Afrikanern in der italienischen Kunst des 15. Jahrhunderts,” in Fremde in der Stadt: Ordnungen, Repräsentationen und soziale Praktiken (13.–15. Jahrhundert), ed. Peter Bell, Dirk Suckow, and Gerhard Wolf (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2010), 301–331, 302, fig. 80. 31. David Bindman and Henry Louis Gates Jr., eds., The Image of the Black in Western Art, vol. 2, pt. 2, new ed. (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2010), 166–168, fig. 148. Raimundo de Cabannis (d. 1334) in fact rose to become an important courtier, and his tomb with a recumbent portrait is in S. Chiara in Naples; Mario Gaglione, Sculture minori del trecento conservate in Santa Chiara a Napoli ed altri studi (Naples: Arte tipografica, 1995), 47, 50–52, nn. 15–19. 32. Salvatore Bono, “Due santi negri: Benedetto da San Fratello e Antonio da Noto,” Africa 21 (1966): 76–79; Giovanna Fiume and Marilena Modica, eds., San Benedetto il Moro: Santità, agiografia e primi processi di canonizzazione (Palermo: Città di Palermo, 1998); Giovanna Fiume, ed., Il santo patrono e la città: San Benedetto il Moro; Culti, devozioni, strategie di età moderna (Venice: Marsilio, 2000). 33. See for example Kaplan, “Italy, 1490–1700,” figs. 61–64. For another take on black Africans and images of the serving and eating of food see McGrath, “Veronese, Callet and the Black Boy at the Feast,” 272–276, citing Passarotti’s Merry Company, 273, n. 8. 34. Venice, Accademia; Paul H. D. Kaplan, “Veronese and the Inquisition: The Geopolitical Context,” in Suspended License: Censorship and the Visual Arts, ed. Elizabeth Childs (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1997), 85–124, 106. 35. Dublin, National Gallery of Ireland (and also in several replicas); Rosemarie Mulcahy, Spanish Paintings in the National Gallery of Ireland (Dublin: National Gallery of Ireland, 1988), 79–82, cat. 4538, fig. 63. For a rich discussion of this work see Tanya J. Tiffany, “Light, Darkness, and African Salvation: Velázquez’s Supper at Emmaus,” Art History 31 (2008): 33–56; Tanya J. Tiffany, Diego Velázquez’s Early Paintings and the Culture of Seventeenth-Century Seville (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2012), 103–123. 36. Pierluigi Carofano, ed., Luce e ombra: Caravaggismo e naturalismo nella pittura toscana del seicento (Pisa: Felici, 2005), 86–88, cat. 30; Kaplan, “Italy, 1490–1700,” 181–182, fig. 95; also, Sustermans: Sessant’anni alla corte dei Medici (Florence: Centro Di, 1983), 54–55, cat. 30, and Portrait of Francesco di Cosimo II de’ Medici, Florence, Pitti, 1631–1632. The Vouet painting cited earlier shows a dark gypsy woman making the same gesture. Pietro Moro may also be represented in a fresco by Angelo Michele Colonna and Agostino Mitelli in the Sala dell’Udienza Pubblica in the Pitti of 1637–1639; Marilena Mosco, “L’appartamento d’estate dei Granduchi,” Amici di Palazzo Pitti: Bollettino (2002), 19–26, 25. 37. A subtler work that nevertheless suggests something of the same subversive effect is in the collection of the Manchester City Art Gallery. This portrait of an apparently Neapolitan gentleman by the name of Giuliani and his adolescent darkskinned servant is dated 1579 and has been attributed to Passarotti or his circle; Höper,

46 No Laughing Matter

Passarotti, 2:238, cat. A41; Concise Catalogue of Foreign Paintings: Manchester City Art Gallery (Manchester: City of Manchester Cultural Services, 1980), 80; Kaplan, “Italy, 1490–1700,” 129–130, fig. 57; Joaneath Spicer, ed., Revealing the African Presence in Renaissance Europe (Baltimore: Walters Art Museum, 2012), 50, cat. 48. Another painting with a black African servant — ​in this case smelling a flower from a grand bouquet but without any other human subject — ​has been attributed to Passarotti, but this work (now Houston, Menil Collection) is surely Spanish and from after 1600; Charles Sterling, Still Life Painting from Antiquity to the Twentieth Century, 2nd rev. ed. (New York: Harper & Row, 1982), 20, pl. 63bis. 38. Barry Wind, “Pitture Ridicole: Some Late Cinquecento Comic Genre Paintings,” Storia dell’Arte 20 (1974): 25–35; Sheila McTighe, “Foods and the Body in Italian Genre Paintings, about 1580: Campi, Passarotti, Carracci,” Art Bulletin 86 (2004): 301–323, 308–312. 39. Rainald Grosshans, Maerten van Heemskerck: Die Gemälde (Berlin: Horst Boettcher, 1980), 126–130, cat. 24. For examples from the Flemish baroque see the works by Jordaens (London, Wallace Collection) and Rubens (Moscow, Pushkin Museum, and Munich, Alte Pinakothek). On India/Ethiopia see for instance the nickname of the Ethiopian abbot mentioned above. 40. Graz, Johanneum; Eliška Fučíkova et al., Rudolf II and Prague: The Court and the City (London: Thames & Hudson, 1997), 21, pl. 1.14. 41. Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum; Michael Henning, Die Tafelbilder Bartholomäus Sprangers (Essen: Die blaue Eule, 1987), 184–185, cat. A35. Terence, The Eunuch, in Terence: The Women of Andros; The Self-Tormentor; The Eunuch, ed. and trans. John Barsby (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 305–443, 397, act 4, line 733: “Sine Cerere et Baccho friget Venus.” An Ethiopian slave girl is part of the action in this play (331, act 1, lines 165–167), as was illustrated in a Parisian manuscript of c. 1412; Bindman and Gates, Image of the Black, 2:2, 129, fig. 102. See also A. Lynn Martin, Alcohol, Sex and Gender in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave, 2001), 9, 11, 21–22, 30, 81–82, which discusses female drunkenness, and also the reputation of Italians (including the Bolognese) for being able to hold their wine, unlike northerners. 42. Jan Muylle, “Tronies toegeschreven aan Pieter Bruegel: Fisionomie en expressie,” De Zeventiende Eeuw 17, no. 2 (2001): 174–204, 189–191, fig. 13, and 18, 2 (2002), 114–148; Anna Omodeo, Mostra di stampe popolari venete del ’500 (Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 1965), 24, cat. 16. On the 1525–1551 façade of a private palazzo in Bologna, a handsome rather than caricatured head of a black African is juxtaposed with heads of a Turk, a satyr, and several ancient divinities, and no explicit tone of mockery is evident; Giancarlo Roversi, ed., Il Palazzo Salina Amorini Bolognini: Storia e restauro (Bologna: Grafis, 1994), 49–51, 87. 43. See works in Madrid, Prado, and Naples, Capodimonte. 44. Rome, Galleria Colonna. 45. Giovanni Torriano, Piazza universale di proverbi italiani, or a Commonplace of

47 Passarotti and “Comic” Images of Africans

Italian Proverbs and Proverbial Phrases (London: 1666), 168, cited in McTighe, “Foods and the Body,” 320, 323, n. 70; see also Jean-Louis Flandrin, “L’alimentazione contadina in un’economia di sostamento,” in Storia dell’alimentazione, ed. Jean-Louis Flandrin and Massimo Montanari (Rome and Bari: Laterza, 1997), 465–489, 480–481. 46. The so-called Dog Breeder, Rome, Galleria Nazionale in Palazzo Barberini; Ghirardi, Passerotti, 282–285, cat. 99, col. pl. 27. 47. Ruth Mellinkoff, Outcasts: Signs of Otherness in Northern European Art of the Late Middle Ages, 2 vols. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 2: pl. 8.6. 48. Milan, Ambrosiana; Mellinkoff, Outcasts, 2: pl. 10.20. 49. See Ghirardi, Passerotti, cats. 7, 12, 19, 47, 54, 56, 70, 72, 85, 87, 94, 99, 100, 109a. 50. Caroline P. Murphy, Lavinia Fontana: A Painter and Her Patrons in SixteenthCentury Bologna (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), 107, 109. 51. Rome, Galleria Nazionale in Palazzo Barberini, formerly attributed to Sodoma, and now to Marco Bigio; Kaplan, “Italy, 1490–1700,” 131–134, fig. 60. 52. Maraike Bückling, Die Negervenus (Frankfurt: Liebieghaus, 1991); Spicer, Revealing the African Presence, 51–52, 128, cat. 40. 53. Gisela Schäffer, Schwarze Schönheit: “Mohrinnen-Kameen” — ​Preziosen der Spätrenaissance im Kunsthisorischen Museum Wien: Ein Beitrag aus postkolonialer Perspektive (Marburg: Jonas Verlag, 2009); Kim F. Hall, Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995), 212–226, figs. 7, 9. 54. Bindman and Gates, Image of the Black, 2:2, 266–267, figs. 249–253. 55. Die Mörin, ed. Horst Dieter Schlosser (Wiesbaden: Brockhaus, 1974); discussed in Hans Werner Debrunner, Presence and Prestige: Africans in Europe (Basel: Basler Afrika Bibliographien, 1979), 60. 56. The Poems of William Dunbar, ed. James Kinsley (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), 106, no. 33, 308–309; Louise Olga Fradenburg, City, Marriage, Tournament: Arts of Rule in Late Medieval Scotland (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), 244–264. Already in the thirteenth century, European scientific texts about the human body had begun to characterize dark-skinned women (but generally not men) as sexually desirable and even voracious; Peter Biller, “Black Women in Medieval Scientific Thought,” in La Pelle Umana / The Human Skin (Micrologus 13) (Florence: 2005, Sismel / Edizioni del Galluzzo), 477–492, 484–487. In the 1470s Pontano (1426–1503), the influential Neapolitan intellectual and courtier, wrote a poem about a “dusky” girl who praises her own erotic charms, and in a satire he suggests that his wife resented his attentions to their black African maidservants; Carol Kidwell, Pontano: Poet and Prime Minister (London: Gerald Duckworth & Co., 1991), 123, 150. 57. Jeremy Lawrance, “Black Africans in Renaissance Spanish Literature,” and also Kate Lowe, “The Stereotyping of Black Africans in Renaissance Europe,” both in Lowe and Earle, Black Africans, 17–47, 70–93. 58. I am very much indebted to Gianfranco Salvatore, of the Università del Salento, for information about this genre, which will be treated in forthcoming publications

48 No Laughing Matter

by him and also by Gianpaolo Chiriacò. The term moresca, related to the English word “moor,” can be understood to refer to Muslims and North Africans as well as blacks, but Salvatore’s set of moresche are those that make reference to dark skin. One of the first essays to note the explicit presence of Neapolitan persons of color in some of the moresche is Paul Nettl, “Traces of the Negroid in the ‘Mauresque’ of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” Phylon 5 (1944): 105–113, esp. 111–112. 59. Giuliana Boccadamo, Napoli e l’Islam: Storie di musulmani, schiavi e rinnegati in età moderna (Naples: M. D’Auria, 2010), 12–13, 18, 21, 28, 34, 39, 52, 123, 126–127, 135–136, 138–139. 60. Orlando di Lasso et al., Canzoni villanesche and villanelle, ed. Donna G. Cardamone (Madison, WI: A-R Editions, 1991), for general information, but without specific discussion of moresche. In addition to Lasso, Massimo Troiano, Cattarino Bianco, Grammatio Metallo, and Giovanni Domenico del Giovane da Nola composed moresche. 61. Gianfranco Salvatore, “Parodie realistiche: Africanismi, fraternità, e sentimenti identitari nelle canzoni moresche del cinquencento,” and Gianpaolo Chiriacò, “‘Nigra vinciuta, ianca fuiuta.’ La battaglia dei neri nell’imaginario della moresca,” papers delivered at the conference “Di fronte all’Africa: Effetti culturali della diaspora africana in Europa dal mondo antico al Rinascimento,” Lecce, Università del Salento, Center for Black Music Research, June 15–17, 2011. Chiriacò’s paper discussed the roots of the moresche in Anselmo de Reulx’s 1546 “Battaglia moresca” madrigal. 62. Moresche first appear in print in 1555 (Antonio Barré, Secondo libro delle muse a tre voci: Canzoni moresche di diversi autori [Rome]), and Lasso’s collection was published in Paris and Antwerp in 1581 and 1582; Lasso, Canzoni, xxxvii. 63. Woodcuts: Achille Bertarelli, Le stampe popolari italiane (Milan: Rizzoli, 1974), 40, figs. 17–18. Engravings: Muylle, “Tronies.” 64. Version by J. C. Visscher; René van Bastelaer, Les estampes de Peter Bruegel l’ancien (Brussels: G. van Oest, 1908); Muylle, “Tronies” (2002), 148, pair no. 34; the rather similar pair 35 are also characterized as black African. 65. On the lack of respect or at least empathy for the lower classes that distinguishes Passarotti’s genre images from those of many northern painters see Posner, Annibale Carracci, 1:11. 66. See the now stolen Laughing Peasants (formerly Lobkovic Collection, Roudnice nad Labem, Czech Republic) by Hans von Aachen (after 1600), in which the figure at the right appears to be a caricatured person of color; Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, The School of Prague: Painting at the Court of Rudolf II (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 158, cat. 1.74. On coarse images of laughter see also Bert W. Meijer, “Esempi del comico figurativo nel rinascimento lombardo,” Arte Lombarda 16 (1971): 259–266, citing a lost composition mentioned by Lomazzo (1584) with four lascivious laughing peasants and a cat created by Michelino di Besozzo; this included an old woman being groped, and so may have been a source for Passarotti. In Giulio Campi’s Cheese Eaters (Lyons, Musée des Beaux-Arts), laughter and the consumption of another “coarse” food are combined; McTighe, “Foods and the Body,” 308, fig. 10.

three   “If You Tickle Us, Do We Not Laugh?”

Stereotypes of Jews in English Graphic Humor of the Georgian Era  Frank Felsenstein

Visual humor often presupposes a textual component. In cartooning and graphic humor, that may present itself as a caption or locution that helps to bind image and idea. We often need the addition of text as an interpretive component or bridge to our understanding. Where a “traditional” art historian might focus on deciphering images, I hope that, as an unreconstructed literary scholar, I won’t be considered too much of an interloper in employing the interpretation of text as a means of commenting on art. My more specific purpose is to track the persistence across the centuries and in different genres of a particularly repugnant stereotype that finds its typological locus in one of Shakespeare’s most famous plays. Using a textual lens as an interpretive instrument to comment on art, this chapter delves into one such expression of the murky netherworld of ethnic humor as it applies to the representation of Jews in English cartoonery. I conclude by offering some, albeit rudimentary, intimations as to why racial “otherness” and ethnic dissimilarities could have been seen as triggers to laughter. My initial point of engagement is with the figure of Shylock, dubbed in mock hyperbole by an early nineteenth-century novelist as “the most celebrated Jew that ever appeared in England,”1 and with Shakespeare’s comedy The Merchant of Venice (c. 1596–1597). Despite the play’s generic status as comedy, modern interpretation has tended to give prominence to its darker qualities and tragic overtones.2 Its uncomfortable ambivalence as comedy is sounded by Shylock himself when, toward the end of the opening act, he offers “in a merry sport” (I.iii.141; my italics) to lend money to Antonio without interest, but with the forfeiture, should the debt not be fully repaid before its due date, of “an equal pound / Of your fair flesh to be cut off and taken / In what part of your body pleaseth me” (ibid., 145–147). We involuntarily shudder at these corporeal terms, but as Shylock reminds us, employing the selfsame adjective, it is but a “merry bond” (167).

50 No Laughing Matter

The precise meaning of “merry” in these two contexts accords most closely with its definition in the Oxford English Dictionary of “amusing, diverting, funny,” an adjective that can be applied to “a tale, saying, jest, etc.” On one level, Shylock reinforces this connotation by his claim that the bond should be taken in jest. It is — ​at least in his terms, if we read him literally — ​something of a laughing matter, a point that is later on rhetorically glossed by Shylock himself when he asks in a famous speech in defense of his tribe, “If you tickle us, do we not laugh?” (III.i.34–35). On another level, its implications are far more sinister both to the configuration of the play itself and in terms of perceptions of the nefariousness of Jews as so often represented in Christian popular culture. In addition, the nature of the “merry bond” and the “merry sport” that accompanies it serves to iterate the darker side of laughter. As is well known, Antonio’s debt to Shylock of three thousand ducats remains unpaid when it becomes due. In the fourth act of the play, having in the interim been cruelly bilked by his daughter and her friends out of any vestige of merriness or laughter that he may once have claimed, Shylock pursues his bond without remittal. The court scene reveals a Jew who is intent on having his bond, and no appeal to Christian mercy will change his mind. Stereotypical perceptions in Western popular culture of Christianity as a religion that preaches the virtue of loving one’s neighbor as oneself over Judaism’s apparently far more primitive and bodily retribution of an eye for an eye are strongly reinforced by the fierceness of his insistence. Johann Heinrich Ramberg’s engraving of Charles Macklin, the actor who reinvigorated the role of Shylock for the eighteenth century, in his right hand a sharpened knife and dangling from his left wrist a pair of scales, captures to spine-chilling perfection the intensity of the Jew’s vengeful urge for justice (fig. 3.1). Ramberg heightens the ferocity of this climactic moment by showing Shylock almost libidinously caressing the pointed tip of the deadly blade with the middle finger of his left hand as he calls for his primal bond: “Most learnèd judge! A sentence: come, prepare” (IV.i.299). The artist’s clever use of chiaroscuro and shadow reflects well this darkest moment of the comedy, the moment when Shylock’s implacable demands are about to be realized. Yet, in the subsequent unfolding of the court scene, the clever casuistry of the cross-dressed Portia (disguised as Balthasar, a young lawyer) prevents Shylock from fulfilling his homicidal intent. By invoking a legal quibble that distinguishes between the taking of a pound of Antonio’s flesh (as stipulated

Figure 3.1. Johann Heinrich Ramberg, Charles Macklin as Shylock, frontispiece to The Merchant of Venice, Bell’s edition of Shakespeare, 1785. Engraving. Private collection.

52 No Laughing Matter

in the contract) and the shedding of Christian blood,3 Portia contends that if the Jew exceeds the taking of an exact pound of flesh by even “the estimation of a hair” (325), he will be punished by death and all his goods confiscated. Instead of enacting the deed, Shylock is forced by this double bind to give up all his lands and wealth, and humiliated into becoming a Christian. From a Christian perspective, the conversion may seem more like an act of grace, but to Shylock, it is an ignominious end. “I pray you give me leave to go from hence,” he finally pleads, “I am not well” (IV.i.191–92). When Shakespeare created The Merchant of Venice, there were, to all intents and purposes, no Jews in England. Their expulsion had taken place under Edward I in 1290, and their readmission into the country only began under Oliver Cromwell in the 1650s. However, the renewed presence in eighteenth-century England of actual Jews did not lead to a simultaneous banishment of the tainted image of the mercenary and vengeful Hebrew that increasingly discovered its locus in the figure of Shylock. In addition, the motif of besting a Jew, or, as a cynical contemporary novelist described it, “out-jewing a Jew,”4 is recurrent and very common in humorous anecdote and fictive and graphic representations. A sampling of the legion of anecdotes found in jest books of the era will suffice to point up the idea. In one of these frequently republished repositories of English humor, we come across what is literally a clever sleight of hand, a shrewd separation of dexter and sinister, by which some dishonest Jewish peddlers are outsmarted: “A Dutch merchant in Amsterdam had sold a thousand pounds worth of gloves to some Jews, who not standing [t]o their bargain when they brought their money, would have but half. The Dutch merchant desired a little time to sort them, and told them they should have half; so he commanded his men to put ‘all the right-handed gloves in one parcel, and the left in another.’ When the Jews came again, he bid them take their choice; which being done and the money paid, they began to pack up; but perceiving at last they were all for one hand, they were forced to take the rest at the merchant’s rate.”5 Another anecdote entitled “You are a Jew,” drawn from a very early nineteenth-century compendium of jests, is no less illustrative: “‘You are a Jew.’ said one man to another; ‘When I bought this pig of you, it was to be a guinea, and now you demand five and twenty-shillings, which is more than you asked.’ — ​‘For that very reason,’ replied the other, ‘I am no Jew, for a Jew always takes less than he asks.’”6 Each of these examples presupposes as a

53 “If You Tickle Us, Do We Not Laugh?”

stereotypical given that the Jews are cunning and zealously pecuniary, and that it requires extraordinary wiliness as against straight dealing to outdo them. With such a reputation, it is little wonder that another jest book distinguishes “the Jewish Nation” as “certainly . . . the most Perfidious and base People in the World,” or that an errant tradesman in an anonymous fiction of the period is represented physiognomically as having been given by nature “the countenance of an honest man, with the heart of a Jew merchant cheating even his brother.”7 These are random examples that can be multiplied manyfold to suggest that close and sometimes distant replicas of an abhorrent Shylock still continued to color the rendering of Jews in English popular humor even two centuries or more after his first invention. It has been promulgated recently that, even though he makes extensive and knowledgeable reference to the Jewish Bible, Shylock’s main action in the play ultimately “violates everything that his religion stands for.”8 Unhappily, such a claim too easily minimizes the historical fact that most eighteenth- and nineteenth-century readers and witnesses to the play had no difficulty in particularizing Shylock as, to their view, in every sense a Jew. The far from comedic image of Shylock as a knife-wielding assassin (“the Jew / That Shakespeare drew” as Alexander Pope is reputed to have called him) intent on drawing Christian blood both harks back to the medieval blood libel and darkens the textual and visual representation of the Jew for later ages.9 Among the more immediately recognizable biblical allusions made by Shylock in the play are his references to the patriarchal figure of Abraham, elided by Shakespeare almost certainly for purposes of metrical accommodation to his pre-covenantal name of Abram (“our holy Abram,” I.iii.68; “father Abram,” I.iii.156). In an odd but salient way, Abraham may be linked to our broader theme of laughter. It will be recalled that he himself has reached the venerable age of one hundred years, and his wife, Sarah, is ninety, when God imparts to Abraham that she will bear a child by him. Abraham’s immediate reaction to this is to burst into laughter. When he breaks the news to Sarah, she is no less flabbergasted, laughing inwardly at what seems at her age to be physically impossible. Her laughter causes God to question Abraham as follows: “And the Lord said unto Abraham, Wherefore did Sarah laugh, saying, Shall I of a surety bear a child, which am old? Is any thing too hard for the Lord? At the time appointed I will return unto thee, according to the time of life, and Sarah shall have a son. Then Sarah denied,

54 No Laughing Matter

saying, I laughed not; for she was afraid. And he said, Nay, but thou didst laugh” (Gen. 18:13–15, King James Version). As the Bible explains it, Sarah’s denial of her laughter reflects a fear of having transgressed through showing disbelief of God’s avowal that she is expectant at ninety. But, surely, the real point of the story is that Sarah cannot stop laughing. Indeed, her laughter has by now become so infectious that she is totally incapable of suppressing it. She is no less able to conceal it than she is her pregnancy. When her son is born, her elation is so immeasurable that she has to admit that “God hath made me to laugh, so that all that hear will laugh with me” (Gen. 21:6). It is one of the most joyous moments in the whole Bible, a dramatic reversal of God’s earlier punishment of Eve (“in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children,” Gen. 3:16) for her apparently far more consequential transgression. In the Bible, it seems that, even though it may be brought about by God, laughter is predominantly a human rather than a godly trait. When Sarah and Abraham come to name their son, they even call him Isaac (yitzhak), which translates literally as “he laughs.” A recent commentary to the Hebrew Bible explains Isaac’s birth by stating that it “represents the triumph of God over the limitations of nature.”10 Yet the central biblical story that we associate with the son of Sarah’s old age, the episode known in Jewish thought as the Akedah, or binding of Isaac, and in populist Christian thinking as the sacrifice of Isaac (Gen. 22), appears as anything but a laughing matter.11 Exegetes of both faiths continue to puzzle over why God should have commanded Abraham to take his young son to the land of Moriah and “offer him there for a burnt offering upon one of the mountains” (22:2). They are no less puzzled over why God waits until the telling moment, when Abraham raises his knife in order to slay his son, before sending his angel to divert the faithful patriarch to the “ram caught in a thicket by his horns” (22:13), which is to be sacrificed in place of Isaac. Conventional wisdom interprets this episode as an ultimate test of faith. Many present-day Jewish commentators also construe it as a manifestation of God’s abhorrence of human sacrifice. In Christian typology, the story is often seen as anticipating God’s generous consent to sacrifice Christ in order to save mankind. Arguably the most famous visual representation of this decisive scene in the Bible is Rembrandt’s painting of Abraham and Isaac (1634), formerly in the collection of Sir Robert Walpole at Houghton Hall in Norfolk, purchased by Catherine the Great, and now in the Hermitage Museum in St.

55 “If You Tickle Us, Do We Not Laugh?”

Petersburg (fig. 3.2).12 In Rembrandt’s portrayal, a heavily bearded Abraham is shown with his left hand thrusting down Isaac’s head to expose his son’s bare throat for sacrifice, while dropping the knife from his right hand as God’s angel grabs his wrist to arrest the action. The visceral enactment of the scene leaves little doubt that the artist has in mind (and possibly shares) the common belief in Christian Europe that the near sacrifice of Isaac should be seen and understood as a typological precursor to the passion of Christ. A much reprinted eighteenth-century Christian commentary captures the parallel whereby Isaac should be seen as “a distinguished type of our Saviour! How often promised; how earnestly desired; how long expected; and how supernatural his birth!” Yet, continues the writer, Christ was “hated, mocked, persecuted, and murdered by his Jewish brethren,” and the “expense” for them must be “their own rejection from the church of God.” Forfeiting God’s blessing, he adds, “the Jews were cast out; while the Gentiles, his younger seed, became the highly favoured, but much afflicted people of God.”13 In anti-Semitic discourse, such a view leads to a widely expressed belief in the cosmic threat posed by the Jews, who seem robotically impelled into reenacting the vicious murder of innocent Christians. Witness one such account by a pamphleteer at the time of the Jew Bill of 1753 when sentiment against the Jews became particularly impassioned: “Should we rake into the abominable Practices of this very People. . . . what could more effectually raise . . . Indignation . . . than the high Contempt and Despite they have frequently discovered against the Person and Passion of Christ, which they have maliciously acted over and over again, in Representation, not only by piercing his Image with Swords and Spears; by abusing the Sacramental Bread; and by crucifying a Ram at Easter; but by crucifying several Christian Children on Good-Friday; as could be instanced by seven or eight Facts in England alone, of which they were detected.”14 From any rational perspective, the falsity of these extravagant claims, which consistently defied substantiation by empirical proof, may be self-evident, but their persistence in eighteenth-century popular discourse uncomfortably magnifies the visual image of Abraham about to strike Isaac, or of Shylock whetting his knife against Antonio. However unwittingly, they served to perpetuate the darker picture of the Jew in the popular culture of early modern England. If representations of the Jews in English caricature of the Georgian era strike us today as more often than not fairly innocuous in their content, we should also realize that we are looking at them with perceptions and mental baggage

Figure 3.2. Rembrandt, Abraham and Isaac, 1634. Oil on canvas, 193 × 132 cm. The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg. Photograph ©  The State Hermitage Museum. Photo by Vladimir Terebenin.

57 “If You Tickle Us, Do We Not Laugh?”

quite different from those of our ancestors two or three hundred years ago. For the contemporaries of Hogarth and Gillray, the humorous and, for the most part, lighthearted depiction of Jews in graphic satire would be insufficient to completely filter from their minds sinister fears of endangerment posed by these supposedly inveterate enemies to all good Christian folk. Although there existed during the Age of Enlightenment numerous works of theology that endeavored to explain with varying degrees of accuracy the actual religious practices of the Jews, the renewed presence of Jews in England after the 1650s did little to dilute the darker image that had held fast in the mind’s eye of many English Christians from the late medieval times onward. Visual representation in contemporary caricature supplements that image by random reference both to real Jews and to the fictive figure of old, often producing an indiscriminate admixture of the two. Repeatedly, the stereotypes that are created (as is commonly the case with stereotypes) contain inherent contradictions within them. Jews are portrayed both in a condition of extreme impoverishment as itinerant peddlers only too willing to steal and as immodest plutocrats with legendary wealth that they will use to buy up the Englishman’s patrimony. Long-standing allegations of their pusillanimity and physical cowardice are placed in a peculiar imbalance with counter-images that emphasize their physical strength and prowess. Where sometimes they are portrayed as sexually incontinent, more often than not that is offset in caricatural representation by their assumed libidinous excesses. The well-known biblical interdiction for Jews against the consumption of pork is contradicted by a widely held rumor, the subject of many satirical prints, of their alleged secret yearning for such forbidden food. These images and counter-images appear with frequency in both textual and visual representations.15 As one of the most common forms of visual humor, caricature creates what the art critic Ernst Gombrich describes well as “a visual interpretation of a physiognomy which we can never forget and which the victim will always seem to carry around with him like a man bewitched.” According to Gombrich, the function of caricature is to produce “not . . . likenesses but . . . equivalences which enable us to see reality in terms of an image and an image in terms of reality.”16 Interestingly, a comparable idea to this was expressed almost two hundred years earlier by the artist Mary Darley, who contended that “Caricatura . . . exhibits a comical similitude.”17 In such a condition, we adopt an alternative mode of perception whereby the caricatural figure stands in for and sometimes replaces the original upon whom it is based.

58 No Laughing Matter

Yet, as Francis Grose, another contemporary writer, was to recognize in an important early work that attempted to theorize on the nature of caricature, the effect has to be carefully balanced for this to be achieved. “Caricaturists,” he opines, “should be careful not to overcharge the peculiarities of their subjects, as they would thereby become hideous instead of ridiculous, and instead of laughter excite horror. It is therefore always best to keep within the bounds of probability.”18 In caricatural representation of the Jews during the so-called “long” eighteenth century, that advice is followed for the most part. The created equivalence consists of a strangely uncomfortable amalgam of perceptions of actual Jews and their putative practices with the demonic Shylock-infused image that we have already delineated. Where these two aspects find common ground is in a shared perception of Jews as aliens or outsiders, whose difference can easily be stereotypically highlighted through such characteristics as physiognomy, clothing, food, and also (because many caricatures represent speech through captions) their dialect. Graphic caricature also indiscriminately amalgamates Jews from the predominantly wealthy Sephardic community, whose financial acumen had become proverbial, with their impoverished Ashkenazic brethren, who eked their living as itinerant hawkers and old-clothes-men. Of the more than seventeen thousand English satirical prints published before 1832 in the collection of the Department of Prints and Drawings of the British Museum, perhaps fewer than three hundred contain Jewish figures or motifs.19 If that number seems small, we should recall that the Jewish population of England has been estimated as having reached about six thousand by 1738, and perhaps a little more than twice that number by 1800.20 These figures compare with an estimated total population of the British Isles in 1750 of about six and a half million people, and of more than sixteen million in 1801 (the first year in which an official census was taken), with almost nine million living in England. By simple arithmetic, the number of Jews in England during the whole of this period represented but a minuscule fraction of the population at large, with the likelihood that most English people would never even have encountered a Jew. Despite that, they were at various times rumored to be on the point of “swamping” the nation with their vast numbers. Indeed, throughout the period, the omnipresence of Jews in the fantasy lives of ordinary English men and women hugely belied the smallness of their total. In such circumstances, it is evident that, however much their renewed presence in England may

59

have either mitigated or exasperated the situation, no simple way offered itself for the Jews to extricate themselves from long-held and widely believed endemic prejudices. A selection here of a small number of graphic images of the Jews of Georgian England will serve to illustrate the strange and uneasy commixture of factual knowledge and fantasy that is a constant in such representation. Through his portrayal of Shylock we have already encountered the Hanoverian engraver Johann Heinrich Ramberg, who spent much of his early career in England and became a favorite artist of King George III. In Moses Chusing His Cook (1788, reissued 1803; fig. 3.3), one of several prints that he made of Jewish figures, Ramberg shows a minyan of ten Jews — ​the minimum number required for a communal service — ​obsequiously attending to the dietary needs of Lord George Gordon, a famous convert to Judaism, who had been jailed in Newgate Prison. As Dorothy George notes, the Jews are all “of grotesque and exaggerated type,” whereas, significantly, Gordon is “not caricatured.”21 Several of them carry steaming plates of food, and one of them is in process of feeding Lord George with an extended spoon, very likely in comical allusion to the traditional proverb that he who sups with the devil should have a long spoon.22 Facing us in the center of the print is a bearded Jew, his hands raised in ecstasy, while behind the seated Gordon

“If You Tickle Us, Do We Not Laugh?”

Figure 3.3. Johann Heinrich Ramberg, Moses Chusing His Cook, 1788; reissued 1803. Engraving. Courtesy of The Library of The Jewish Theological Seminary, New York.

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is a rabbinical figure with a long dark coat (reminiscent of Shylock’s “Jewish gabardine”), goatee beard, and hooked nose, who seems to be directing proceedings in the dungeon, which they have appropriated as a kind of home away from home. Gordon himself dangles a fork in his right hand, and his knife (not here an object of menace) is laid sideways on the table. With the index finger of his left hand he points toward yet another plate of exotic food, denoting the fanaticism of his conversion as he obsesses over his diet with far more particularity than the pet spaniel that is gnawing on a bare bone behind him. However, Ramberg’s humorous coup de grâce is in the action that takes place within the archway leading into the cell to the left of the scene, and deliberately sited out of view of the noble convert to Judaism. Here, a startled English cook, carrying into the company a roasted piglet on a platter, is accosted by two vile-looking Jews, the one holding his nose in disgust at the smell of forbidden food, the other attempting with his foot to waylay the unwelcome intrusion of this abhorrent fare. The print plays on an awareness of a well-known dietary prohibition, and in so doing exaggerates the otherness of the Jews, who are seen openly practicing their seemingly dubious faith in a quasi-infernal prison. It is a good example of the way in which food is employed as a marker of difference in graphic caricature. Ramberg was to become known in his native country as “der deutscher Hogarth,”23 and as with his English master many of his prints contain within them a narrative strand that can be teased out by close observation. The “old-fashioned laced waistcoat” (as noted by Dorothy George) worn by the small elderly man who faces Gordon from the far side of the round table reminds us that by far the most commonly depicted avocation of the Jews in eighteenth-century English caricature is as dealers in old clothes. A good half of English caricatures of the period that exhibit Jewish characters illustrate them as peddlers or old-clothes-men. Others show Jews either wearing garments that, as here, are long out of fashion or (more often than not in the portrayal of their well-to-do kindred) are particularly garish and hideously outlandish. In a street scene from his “Cries of London” series, Thomas Rowlandson, one of England’s most celebrated caricaturists, presents a pair of rascally Jews on the doorstep of a London mansion purchasing old clothes from an innocent young housemaid (fig. 3.4). She has what appears to be a shirt over one arm and a jacket under the other, while in her left hand she holds a worn-out pair of shoes. The one Jew holds up with both hands

61 “If You Tickle Us, Do We Not Laugh?”

Figure 3.4. Thomas Rowlandson, Cries of London, no. 7, Old Cloaths any old Cloaths, 1799. Etching. Collection of the late Mr. Alfred Rubens, now in the Jewish Museum, London.

a pair of breeches with a distinct tear in its back seam, while his companion has his left fist through the hole with his forefinger visibly erect and pointing in the direction of the pretty girl, who looks innocently down.24 The phallic innuendo is unmistakable, as is also the implication that nefarious Jews will use such opportunities not only to promote sexual conquest but also to spy out potential properties to burglarize. As with Shylock before them, these street Jews are shown driving a hard bargain in their transactions, and, in this instance, the simple maid in the open door clearly risks falling victim to their guile. In more than one sense, the ill-fitting eyeglasses worn by one of the Jews provide a visual metaphor of their sexual and mercantile duplicity, slyly alluding to the proverb “to be worth a Jew’s eye,” which applies here more to the maid than to the castoffs that she is trying to sell.25 The lottery office opposite, out of which emerge a hapless couple who have apparently just squandered all their savings, also supplies implicit commentary on the

62 No Laughing Matter

hazardousness of entering into mercantile or other dealings with such ostensible villains.26 That the building is under construction denotes the precariousness of a British economy that is founded, according to the print’s graphic symbolism, on reckless wagering and Jew dealing. Rowlandson appears to be indebted in his use of the architectural motif to Hogarth’s Beer Street and Gin Lane (1751), in which national greatness or decline is measured by the physical state of the buildings depicted, though here the brokering that has brought into being the construction of the lottery office is what is deemed suspect. The pile of slouch hats on his head (in fact here just three!) worn by the one peddler and the bulging sack carried by the other are iconographic motifs that are frequently replicated in contemporary images of itinerant Jews. A patched sack is balanced under the folded arms of another Jewish figure in Richard Newton’s engraving Any-Bad-Shillings! (fig. 3.5) of 1797, part of that artist’s own “Cries of London” series. The print shows a disgruntled-looking peddler with a hanging beard and bushy eyebrows and wearing a tricornered hat and a double cape over his shoulders. From his unbuttoned coat pocket a pair of large clippers or shears is visible, which would have been employed for the cutting of coins, an illegal trade that (perhaps because of their reputation as dishonest money changers) was indiscriminately associated with the Jews. A more sinister aspect here is that it was sometimes given out that Jews armed themselves with shears — ​a latter-day equivalent of Shylock’s knife — ​in order to pursue their clandestine agenda of forcibly circumcising their gentile brethren. As early as 1594, Thomas Nashe refers to the Jews as “fore-skinne clippers,”27 and later commentary suggests that it was broadly feared that their ritual practice of severing the male prepuce impelled them to extend the operation upon luckless victims from outside their faith. Even though Judaism (unlike Christianity) is not a proselytizing religion, there was widespread trepidation that this initiating rite was being forced on the gentile population as an illicit means of spreading the faith and ultimately taking possession of the national patrimony.28 Although on first view the bearded vagabond represented in this print is intended for a Jew, to contemporary eyes he would simultaneously be recognizable physiognomically as the Whig politician Charles James Fox, who was frequently reputed to have been bailed out of his debts by Jewish moneylenders. The recurrence of Fox as a swarthy Jew in many prints of the era is a good example of Gombrich’s notion of equivalence, whereby the im-

63 “If You Tickle Us, Do We Not Laugh?”

Figure 3.5. Richard Newton, Cries of London: “Any-BadShillings!,” 1797. Etching. Collection of the late Mr. Alfred Rubens, now in the Jewish Museum, London.

age presents a comical similitude that, in the public perception, stands in for and takes place of the “real” person.29 To tar an individual with “Jewishness” was not exactly a compliment. Although usually so, the peddler figure is not merely confined to representation of impoverished Jews. A print of 1829 by John Phillips, The Man Wot Knows How to Drive a Bargain (fig. 3.6), reveals in profile the exaggeratedly rotund figure of the famous banker Nathan Meyer Rothschild (1777–1836) as a dealer in old clothes, with the traditional peddler’s sack slung over his back and a pair of top (in contrast to slouch) hats on his head.30 Unlike

64 No Laughing Matter

Figure 3.6. John Phillips, The Man Wot Knows How to Drive a Bargain, 1829. Etching. Collection of the late Mr. Alfred Rubens, now in the Jewish Museum, London.

most Ashkenazic peddler figures, Rothschild is depicted as clean-shaven and opulently dressed, with an expensive-looking coat and his legs accoutered with spats above soft leather shoes. He is shown gesturing with his right hand as if in negotiation, while the sack inscribed “French Rentes £ 20,000,” and the label “Policy & Assurance” stuck on one of his hats, make us aware that the bargain he is driving is of far greater magnitude than any old-clothes deal. A newspaper under Rothschild’s left arm marked “Brookman versus Rothschild” and “Newspapers Bought up” alludes respectively to an ultimately unsuccessful and now long-forgotten fiduciary action brought

65 “If You Tickle Us, Do We Not Laugh?”

Figure 3.7. Thomas Rowlandson, Raising the Wind, 1812. Etching. Courtesy of The Library of The Jewish Theological Seminary, New York.

against the banker, and to fears that foreign money was being used by him to purchase otherwise undue influence. The implicit message of the print is to reinforce the assumption that all Jews, whether rich or poor, are intent on using their financial muscle and acumen to further themselves at the expense of their Christian neighbors. By linking peddlers and plutocrats, the print also bolsters the belief in a larger Jewish conspiracy that threatens to undermine the status quo. Such a belief finds focus in the graphic work of Thomas Rowlandson (1756–1827), whose London lodgings were within a short walk of Rag Fair near Houndsditch that was particularly associated with Jewish street merchants and petty tradesmen. Rowlandson obviously took humorous delight

66 No Laughing Matter

in depicting these Jews, though his repertoire — ​there are a good sixty of his prints that include Jewish figures as against hardly more than two or three in Hogarth’s engravings — ​extends to representing them in such roles as mendacious stockjobbers, importunate moneylenders, and sexual finaglers. Proverbially, the title of one of these prints, Raising the Wind (1812; fig. 3.7), means “to procure money,”31 and here we find a pair of unsavory Jewish moneylenders purchasing the title deeds of his estate from an inebriated English libertine, who (judging by the pictures on the wall) appears to have gambled away his inheritance on horse racing, cockfighting, and debauchery. The cartoon pays visual lip service to the second plate of Hogarth’s The Rake’s Progress (1735), where Tom Rakewell’s drawing room is also adorned with pictures of fighting cocks, but it echoes too the famous auction scene in Sheridan’s The School for Scandal (1777), in which Charles Surface sells off the family portraits to his uncle, who has disguised himself as a moneylender and is accompanied by Moses, a Jewish dealer. The painting just above Rowlandson’s young reprobate is a portrayal of the prodigal son kneeling among the swine and is intended as a commentary on the main scene.32 The imputation that Jews would use their mythical riches to buy up the national patrimony is also reflected in prints that depict their supposed sexual shenanigans. We have already witnessed the lecherous gaze of the two Jews in the direction of the bashful English housemaid in Rowlandson’s “Cries of London” series. In Introduction or Moses with a Good Bargain (1806; fig. 3.8), Rowlandson depicts what Alfred Rubens describes as “a caricature showing the interior of a brothel . . . [in which] a Jew is being introduced to a young girl by a procuress.”33 That reading of the print may seem authentic, except that the interior of the house with its expensive pier glass on the wall, gilded settee, and painted ceiling moldings hardly suggests a brothel. An alternative interpretation is that the young Christian girl to whom Moses is being introduced has been brought to his home by her mother, who is prepared to cajole her unwilling daughter into a relationship with the Jew because of his reputed wealth. For him, this pretty morsel is sexually “a good bargain,” as is evident from his state of arousal, which is denoted by his standing on tiptoe and also by the phallic shaping of his upwardly pointed beard.34 As well as the further Hogarthian echo, this time from plate 2 of The Harlot’s Progress (1732) in which Moll Hackabout has become the unfaithful mistress of a wealthy Jewish parvenu, Rowlandson’s print is indebted here to a plethora of stories about Jews seducing gentile women with the promise of

67 “If You Tickle Us, Do We Not Laugh?”

Figure 3.8. Thomas Rowlandson, Introduction or Moses with a Good Bargain, 1806. Etching. Collection of the late Mr. Alfred Rubens, now in the Jewish Museum, London.

gold and diamonds. In one such tale, which provides a meaningful analogue to Rowlandson’s print, a rich Jew becomes “animated” by the prospect of a fair young Englishwoman: “from a Pair of long, dark, bristly Eyelashes, Rhinoceros like, he sidelong gloted [sic] at her, displaying, at the same time, on his little Finger, a large Brilliant of the first Water. The Diamond’s Lustre play’d in her View, she wish’d to be Mistress of it . . . [though] she detested the Wretch. . . . ‘I would not be his Wife for the Wealth of the whole Hebrew Nation. . . . It is his Money . . . that I embrace, not him; him! — ​The Wretch looks in his Love Raptures, like a Baboon in an Ague Fit.’”35 Rowlandson’s Jew, with his extended stomach and partially opened waistcoat, is no less unedifying, and the print is perhaps intended to signify broader fears that

68 No Laughing Matter

such liaisons risk contaminating the national stock. That idea is no less uncommon in popular discourse. “The beautiful among your wives and your daughters,” prophesies a mid-eighteenth-century pamphleteer writing in mock-biblical vein, “shall they [the Jews] take unto them for . . . concubines; and they shall smit them with leprosie and sores, and their loins shall be filled with a loathsome disease.”36 In another engraving, Ladies Trading on Their Own Bottom (c. 1810; fig. 3.9), Rowlandson presents a grizzly old Jew on a settee between two English ladies of the night, one baring her naked breasts, the other with her leg rubbing against his calf and her arm curled around his neck. The single glass and decanter marked “Restorative Drops” on the wall table to the right humorously allude to the sexual incontinence of this aged infatuate, though the high fee of £100 that he is willing to pay each of the prostitutes is an indication of an assumed ineradicable licentiousness. Possibly, the title of the print puns playfully on the old nautical proverb that advises not “to venture all in one bottom.”37 The glazed look on his wizened face as he stares through his thick spectacles expresses his physical exhaustion. Such old Jews present rich pickings for those willing to “trade” with them — ​though, at least in this case, all parties involved seem to have come away satisfied.38 The period from about 1730 through to 1830 is often labeled the golden age of English caricature, and in its visual representation of the Jews it encapsulates many endemic attitudes toward this disenfranchised and — ​as we have seen — ​tiny minority. After the 1830s, single-sheet graphic satire fell out of favor, leapfrogging into a new format with the advent of Punch, or the London Charivari in 1841. Study of the caricatural depiction of the Jews in Victorian England strongly suggests that many of the attitudes we have traced in the Georgian era are almost seamlessly carried over into the pages of Punch. That can be seen in an unsigned cartoon of 1851 titled Christmas in the Minories, stylistically identifiable as the work of John Leech (1817–1864), who targeted the Jews with some frequency.39 Here (fig. 3.10) we observe two foppish Jewish tailors from the Minories — ​the area between Aldgate and Tower Hill in London long associated with Jews — ​cordially greeting each other. Their accrued wealth that has elevated them in a generation from ambulatory street trading is denoted by the Rothschildian top hats that they are wearing and by their modish lorgnettes, which have now taken the place of cheap spectacles. The imputation that they have achieved their financial success at the expense of the gentile population is made by visual

Figure 3.9. Thomas Rowlandson, Ladies Trading on Their Own Bottom, c. 1810. Etching. Collection of the late Mr. Alfred Rubens, now in the Jewish Museum, London.

Figure 3.10. [ John Leech?], Christmas in the Minories. Engraving. Punch 20, London, 1851, 10. Private collection.

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reference to the impoverished little English girl begging on the street, and by the sandwich advertising placard worn by a young boy that publicizes their tailoring business under the telling name of SHAM ABRAHAM & C o.Y. 40 Ominously, the one tailor carries with him an oversize pair of scissors or shears placed sharp side down in his coat pocket, a residual allusion to the so-called Jewish avocations of coin and prepuce clipping. The text that accompanies the print humors the reader with the information that these “Rabbinical” figures belong to “the Firm of Noses,” and that the image is intended to express “the Poetical Thanksgiving by Jew Tailors, for the Love and Mercy associated with Christmas.” The anonymous author concludes his commentary in studied poetical fashion by observing, “On such a theme — ​and for such a money-making purpose — ​J UDAS ISCARIOT were worthy to be the Laureate.” When we read the caption to the cartoon in which the one Jew addresses the other with “I WISH YOU A MERRY CHRISTMAS,” we are perhaps reminded of Shylock’s employment of the word “merry,” and we are left with a similar uncomfortable ambivalence in our endeavor to decipher the constitution of English humor in the depiction of Jews during the late eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth century. Indeed, a final question that can only be briefly touched upon here is why the caricatural representation of the Jews was for so long an unerring source of humor. What was it that made such representation funny for the average Englishman? A useful directional pointer, if nowhere near resembling a full answer, can be construed by combining the pronouncements of a famous seventeenth-century philosopher and a leading present-day American cultural critic. In book 1, chapter 6, of Leviathan (1651), Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury posits the view that it is “Sudden glory [which] is the passion that maketh those grimaces called LAUGHTER; and is caused by . . . the apprehension of some deformed thing in another, by comparison whereof they suddenly applaud themselves.”41 For Hobbes, laughter is a means of asserting one’s own individual or group superiority, and often contains within it an incipiently cruel or sadistic element. He reasserts this elsewhere when he argues that “men laugh at the infirmities of others, by comparison wherewith their own abilities are set off and illustrated.” Laughter, he states, arises “from some sudden conception of some eminency in ourselves, by comparison with the infirmity of others.”42 Hobbes’s argument here can be filtered or reappropriated in conjunction with the persuasive thesis developed by Hayden White in Tropics of Discourse

71 “If You Tickle Us, Do We Not Laugh?”

(1978) that, in any given historical period, it has often proved far easier for a nation or group to describe its own characteristics by delineating what it is not rather than what it is. “If we do not know what we think ‘civilization’ is,” argues White, “we can always find an example of what it is not.” The term that White formulates — ​and I am conscious that I am borrowing it here grossly out of its immediate context — ​is “the technique of ostensive self-definition by negation.” It describes for him what he calls “the need for men to dignify their specific mode of existence by contrasting it with those of other men, real or imagined, who merely differ from themselves.”43 Although it probably applies to other nations too, the English in particular have always shown a marked propensity to characterize themselves through the lens of what they are not, often mocking or laughing at the otherness of the outsider as a largely unthinking means of defending themselves and of defining the “eminency” of their own values as against “some deformed thing in another.” Traditionally for them, the Jew during his long years of expulsion from England had developed into the paradigmatic Other, a fiendish yet (unless he was personalized through such a figure as Shylock) strangely intangible source of fear for the very fact that he was in so many respects different from the normative Englishman. His mythic appearance in earlier times, as well recognized by the early nineteenth-century writer and critic James Leigh Hunt, was as “a willful and savage opposer of all the best things in the world, a sort of human beast, always ready to plunder and bite, a bearded demon.”44 Following his readmission into England from the late seventeenth century onward, the Jew may less frequently have been viewed as so palpably demonic, but residual beliefs even in the Age of Enlightenment still made him an object of laughter, perhaps more often derided than feared. His otherness from the average Englishman — ​whether in terms of his abhorrence of pork, initiation into his faith through circumcision, strange Talmudic codes, outlandish garb, odd dialect, physiognomical appearance, to name only a few of the most prominent differences — ​became a perpetual (if also tiresomely regurgitated) source for humorous comment and satirical delineation. Baiting the Jew or casting him in a negative light became a form of intuitive merry sport almost bound to tickle the Englishman, however uneasily, into laughter. No doubt too that representation of the Jew as a sexual and monetary peculator came to reflect some of the neuroses of English self-definition. Without exception, the caricatural depictions of contemporary Jews that we

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have examined here portray them as everything that the “superior” Christian Englishman would have liked to believe that he himself was not. Indeed, the images often reveal as much, if not more, about endemic English attitudes than they do of the ethnic minority they attempt to caricature. Ultimately, laughter should be understood as self-referential. It can tell us more about the prejudices and dispositions of the laughers than about those who are being laughed at. Today, it remains a moot point for scholarly debate as to whether the two centuries following the readmission of the Jews into England led to an attenuation or to an aggravation of anti-Semitic attitudes. Ironically, it would require our own postmodern era of “political correctness” to give urgency to what a previous age might have considered as little more than an idle issue for discussion. Agendas do have an unerring and also uncanny way of reflecting their time.

Notes 1. Maria Edgeworth, Harrington (1817), ed. Susan Manly (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Editions, 2004), 114. 2. Historically, these aspects have not always been so emphasized. Perhaps as an intentional aide-mémoire to its precise genre, the editors of the current Norton Shakespeare have borrowed from the play’s quarto half title and its entry in the Stationers’ Register of July 22, 1598, naming the drama The Comical History of the Merchant of Venice, or Otherwise Called the Jew of Venice. See The Norton Shakespeare Based on the Oxford Edition, ed. Stephen Greenblatt et al. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997), 1090. All quotations from the play here are taken from this edition. Citations are by act, scene, and line. 3. It is not irrelevant to note here that the Christian sacrament maintains a fundamental distinction between the flesh and blood of its messiah. 4. [Charles Johnstone], The History of John Juniper, Esq., alias Juniper Jack, 3 vols. (London: R. Baldwin, 1781), 3:280. 5. The Court Jester or Museum of Entertainment (London: A. Hamilton, 1795), 15–16. The same anecdote appears almost half a century earlier in The Merry Medley, or a Christmass-Box for Gay Gallants, and Good Companions (London: J. Robinson, 1750), 73. 6. The Encyclopedia of Wit (London: R. Phillips, 1804), 428. 7. London Jests: Or Collection of the Choicest Joques and Repartees (London: C.B. for Thomas Norris, 1712), 15; The Sentimental Spy, 2 vols. (London: T. Lowndes, 1773), 1:228. 8. Jay L. Halio, “Shylock: Shakespeare’s Bad Jew,” in Re-Visions of Shakespeare: Essays in Honor of Robert Ornstein, ed. Evelyn Gajowski (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2004), 59.

73 “If You Tickle Us, Do We Not Laugh?”

9. On the blood libel see R. Po-Chia Hsia, The Myth of Ritual Murder: Jews and Magic in Reformation Germany (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988), and M. D. Anderson, A Saint at Stake: The Strange Death of William of Norwich, 1144 (London: Faber, 1964). 10. Etz Chaim: Torah and Commentary (New York: Jewish Publication Society, 2001), 92. 11. Jewish commentary points out that “although the Torah never explicitly makes the connection,” Sarah’s own death at about this time may have been the result “of shock either because Abraham was prepared to slay their son without informing her or because of the alarming news of his near death” (Etz Chaim, 127). 12. Johann Gottfried Haid’s mezzotint of Abraham Offering Up His Son Isaac, taken from the Rembrandt painting at Houghton, was published by John Boydell in 1767 and later reprinted. The image was sufficiently well known in England to have been often copied in needlework samplers of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, which often depicted key biblical events. 13. John Brown of Haddington, A Dictionary of the Holy Bible (London: Richard Evans, 1813), 393 (entry for Isaac). 14. Britannia [pseudonym], An Appeal to the Throne Against the Naturalization of the Jewish Nation (London: J. Bouquet, 1753), 16–17. 15. On the self-contradictory nature of stereotypes see, inter alia, Sander L. Gilman, Difference and Pathology: Stereotypes of Sexuality, Race, and Madness (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985), 29, and Herbert S. Strean, Jokes: Their Purpose and Meaning (Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, 1993), 172. 16. E. H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation, A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts, 1956, 2nd ed. (New York: Pantheon Books, 1961), 344–345. See also E. H. Gombrich and Ernst Kris, Caricature (Harmondsworth, UK: King Penguin Books, 1940). 17. Mary Darley, A Book of Caricaturas, c. 1762, quoted by Frank Felsenstein and Sharon Liberman Mintz in The Jew as Other: A Century of English Caricature, 1730–1830, exh. cat. (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1995), 5–6. 18. Francis Grose, Rules for Drawing Caricaturas: With an Essay on Comic Painting (London: Samuel Bagster, 1791), 5. 19. The collection was cataloged by F. G. Stephens and M. Dorothy George, Catalogue of Political and Personal Satires Preserved in the Department of Prints and Drawings in the British Museum, 11 vols. [in 12] (London: Trustees of the British Museum, 1870–1954). Much of the collection is now accessible online at http:// www.britishmuseum.org/research/search_the_collection_database.aspx. The largest private collection of such prints, that assembled by the late Alfred Rubens, contains approximately 270 English caricatures of the same period. See Alfred Rubens, A Jewish Iconography, rev. ed. (London: Nonpareil Publishing Co., 1981). Rubens bequeathed the bulk of his collection to the Jewish Museum in London, where it is now housed. 20. These approximate figures are given by Todd M. Endelman, The Jews of Georgian

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England, 1714–1830: Tradition and Change in a Liberal Society (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1979), 172. 21. Stephens and George, Catalogue of Political and Personal Satires, 6:551 (no. 7424). 22. Ramberg may have been more familiar with this ancient proverb in its similar German version, “Wer mit dem Teufel aus einer Schüssel essen will, muss einen sehr langen Löffel haben.” The inference that the Jews are agents of the devil is reinforced by the fact that the spoon is being proffered left-handedly, traditionally associated with the satanic. 23. See Ferdinand Stuttmann, Johann Heinrich Ramberg (Munich: F. Bruckmann, 1929), 16, 31; Alheidis von Rohr, Johann Heinrich Ramberg: Maler für König und Volk, Schriften des Historischen Museum Hannover, 14 (Hannover: Historisches Museum, 1998), 123–125, contains some remarks on Ramberg’s unsympathetic portrayal of Jews. 24. James Hall, The Sinister Side: How Left-Right Symbolism Shaped Western Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), gives numerous examples of artistic representations that “belong to a culture that loves to locate transgressive desires on the left side of the human body” (67). 25. The selling of cheap spectacles was particularly associated with street Jews at this time. Rowlandson may also have had in mind the famous incident in Oliver Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield (1766), in which the eponymous hero’s son enters into a worthless bargain when he is duped by nameless tricksters into putting all his money to purchase “a gross of green spectacles” (chap. 12). Cf. Tobias Smollett’s The Expedition of Humphry Clinker (1771; ed. Thomas R. Preston [Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1990], 26), “while I was cheapening a pair of spectacles, with a Jew-pedlar.” 26. Rubens, Jewish Iconography, no. 1088, Cries of London No. 7. Old cloaths any old cloaths. Rowlandson del. Merke sculp. Pubd. 1799.” The design is very similar to that of “Trafic” by Henry Wigstead, dated 1785, a copy of which is reproduced by Felsenstein and Mintz, Jew as Other, 23. See also Rubens, no. 1125, for a related image, c. 1810. 27. Thomas Nashe, The Unfortunate Traveller, in The Works of Thomas Nashe, ed. R. B. McKerrow, 5 vols. (1904; Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1966), 2:307. 28. On this see Frank Felsenstein, Anti-Semitic Stereotypes: A Paradigm of Otherness in English Popular Culture, 1660–1830 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 137–147; and Madge Dresser, “Minority Rites: The Strange History of Circumcision in English Thought,” in Jewish Culture and History 1 (1998): 72–87. 29. Stephens and George, Catalogue of Political and Personal Satires, no. 6499; Rubens, Jewish Iconography, no. 897. Dorothy George mistakenly dates the print to 1784. The online catalog of the collection in the Department of Prints and Drawings at the British Museum informs us that “this is a fragment from the three-sheet ‘Cries of London’ by Richard Newton, published in May 1797,” and that Fox’s cast here is intended to depict him not only as a Jew but “as a French revolutionary agitator.” See also David Alexander, Richard Newton and English Caricature in the 1790s (Manchester: Whitworth Art Gallery, University of Manchester Press, 1998), 135–136, no. 57, which includes a scaled-down reproduction in color of the full print.

75 “If You Tickle Us, Do We Not Laugh?”

30. Rubens, Jewish Iconography, no. 2142 (not listed in the British Museum collection). The print was published by John Fairburn, July 14, 1829, and is signed by “A Sharpshooter,” which was a pseudonym commonly used by John Phillips. 31. The Oxford Dictionary of English Proverbs, ed. F. P. Wilson, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), 664, quoting Francis Grose, A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (1785). James Kenney’s popular farce, Raising the Wind, which introduced to the stage the swindling character of Jeremy Diddler, was first performed at Covent Garden in November 1803. 32. Rubens, Jewish Iconography, no. 939; Stephens and George, Catalogue of Political and Personal Satires, no. 10486; Felsenstein and Mintz, Jew as Other, 13, no. 5. On the plate, the original year of its production, 1805, has been scored out and replaced with 1812. 33. Rubens, Jewish Iconography, no. 919. 34. According to Joshua Trachtenberg, the so-called Ziegenbart or goat’s beard worn by Jews in prints and folktales from late medieval times onward is “frequently . . . symbolic of satanic lechery” (The Devil and the Jews, 2nd ed. [Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1983], 46–47). 35. George Alexander Stevens, The History of Tom Fool, 2 vols. (London: T. Waller, 1760), 1:200–202. 36. Ben Saddi the Jeweller [pseudonym], A Fragment of the Chronicles of Zimri the Refiner (Edinburgh, 1753), 8. The work is attributed to Robert Dodsley. 37. Oxford Dictionary of English Proverbs, 859. In its nautical sense, a “bottom” means a vessel or ship. 38. Rubens, Jewish Iconography, no. 900. A copy of the print at the New York Public Library can be accessed at http://digitalgallery.nypl.org/nypldigital/. According to the NYPL description, the copy there is watermarked 1815, giving a later date to the print. For discussion of the involvement of the Jews in prostitution see E. J. Burford, Wits, Wenchers and Wantons. London’s Low Life: Covent Garden in the Eighteenth Century (London: Robert Hale, 1986). 39. Punch, or the London Charivari, 20 (London, 1851), 10. 40. Oxford Dictionary of English Proverbs, 719, defines Sham Abraham as a nautical term meaning to feign sickness. Likely, Leech simply borrows the term without directly calling upon its older proverbial sense. 41. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. A. P. Martinich (Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 2002), 45–46. 42. Tripos: In Three Discourses, in The English Works of Thomas Hobbes, ed. Sir William Molesworth, 11 vols. (London, 1840), 4:46. 43. Hayden White, Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (1978; Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), 151–152. 44. Leigh Hunt’s Dramatic Criticism, 1808–1831, ed. Lawrence Huston Houtchens and Carolyn Washburn Houtchens (London: Oxford University Press, 1950), 196.

For now the weirdest combinations of symbols, the most grotesque

conglomerations of images, were no longer merely tolerated as the pardonable

licence of a low medium of illustration. They could be attuned to the taste of the time if they were presented as phantoms, nightmares, and apparitions. — ​E. H. Gombrich, Imagery and Art in the Romantic Period (1949)

four   James Gillray, Charles James Fox,

and the Abolition of the Slave Trade Caricature and Displacement in the Debate over Reform  Katherine Hart

The work of the caricaturist James Gillray (1756–1815) presents the most creative, morally ambiguous, and densely associative political satire of his or any other age. Gillray plied his trade in London as a creator of popular prints in the 1780s, ’90s, and early 1800s and worked in the very early years of caricature’s incorporation into pictorial satire. Along with Thomas Rowlandson he is considered to be one of caricature’s great practitioners — ​it is mainly to these two artists’ works that Gombrich refers in the quote above. With his facility for comic portraiture and clever ridicule, Gillray is the author and artist of works of both bombast and complexity; indeed they are so rich in content, metaphor, and allusion that some of the most revelatory texts on his work are those that focus in depth on only one print.1 What also makes Gillray so fruitful for study is that his work was steeped in the social, artistic, and political issues of the time, a period in which the nightmares of the Romantic imagination coexisted with the threat and promise of political reform. The fashion for terror and the sublime in late eighteenth-century literature and painting presented ripe opportunity for humorous parody — ​Gillray in particular excelled in creating comic worst-case scenarios that fueled both humor and paranoia among his English audience. This chapter seeks to decode the implicit meanings of a single print by

77 Gillray, Fox, and the Abolition of the Slave Trade

Gillray, one that satirizes the prominent Whig orator and statesman Charles James Fox in a phantasmagoric scene that parodies the nightmare visions of such Royal Academicians as the painters Henri Fuseli and Benjamin West.2 Published in 1791, this political print, which is long-windedly titled (in typical Gillray fashion) Alecto and her Train at the Gate of Pandaemonium:__or__The Recruiting Sarjeant enlisting John Bull into the Revolution Service, associates Fox and his cronies with the ideals of the two-year-old French Revolution and its denunciation of monarchy. Fox is the main target here — ​he is seen as aiding the enemy’s cause by inviting the French radicals into England to upend the prevailing social and political order. It is but one of many satirical images — ​many undoubtedly paid for by proponents of the Tory party — ​that imagines him in this treasonous role. This chapter’s main thesis posits that the Alecto, the central figure of the print, stands for race and its relation to slavery within the context of a tumultuous and chaotic moment in English, Continental, and colonial politics. Her association with the reform-minded Fox, who was a strong advocate for the abolition of the slave trade, further underscores a strong subtext to the print, which on the surface refers only to the English politician’s sympathy for republican ideals. To understand the relationship of this work to the subject of race and slavery, I first examine the image of the black in eighteenth-century visual satire and the racial stereotypes that underlie the visual and textual narrative of this political caricature. In addition, a brief survey of the visual tropes surrounding images of slavery itself — ​as seen within satirical prints during the period of debate and later enactment of abolition of the slave trade — ​aids the subsequent discussion of the print’s potential meanings. The history of racial caricature in the later eighteenth century is inextricably linked to the pseudoscience of physiognomic study. In the 1780s and ’90s, the idea that faces, particularly in profile, could be “read” for qualities of character, morality, or level of intelligence gained a strong foothold in the European and English imagination, and visual representation was employed to illustrate this concept. This idea was introduced in the writings of Swiss poet and scholar Johann Caspar Lavater (1741–1801) in the late 1770s, and his published work included plates with profiles of various types and nationalities.3 There is a direct link between his ideas and development of racial hierarchies based on physiognomic measurements of the cranial structure, as well as with the idea that the beautiful was linked to moral superiority.4 The coincidental art of silhouette portraiture — ​both amateur and profes-

78 No Laughing Matter

sional — ​went hand in hand with this fad for physiognomic readings of the profiles of friends and family. The insidious nature of Lavater’s theory can be seen in racial caricatures and visual satires produced throughout the next two centuries. In the latter half of the nineteenth century the scientific categorization of class and racial types was refined as it became integrated into specialized scientific study, and photography became the medium of choice to document and solidify visual markers of difference.5 Another source of visual categorization of the human body emerged in eighteenth-century medical texts, atlases such as the 1747 Tabulae sceleti et musculorum corporis humani (Tables of the Skeleton and Muscles of the Human Body) by Bernhard Siegfried Albinus (1697–1770), illustrated with engravings by Jan Wandelaar (Dutch, 1690–1759), which presented elaborate images of human skeletal structure and musculature that were painstakingly constructed from the measurement of a variety of European specimens. The purpose was to conjure up the perfect human form for the medical and artistic study of the body, and in so doing these texts underlined assumptions of the ideal based upon race. These disparate examples of Lavater and Albinus exist within a complex cultural development of Western imagery of other races. The eighteenth-century European emulation of a classical and moral ideal as manifest in a physical type existed in tandem with the increasing domination by Western powers of colonial subjects as well as the heightened traffic in slaves, mainly from West Africa to the Americas. The most powerful force to reify visual representations of human stereotypes in eighteenth-century society was the popular print — ​particularly in England, where the production of comic visual satires and caricatures rapidly developed into a thriving business for publishers. Caricature — ​the art of portraying a person through the exaggeration of particular features — ​developed in early seventeenth-century Italy. Artists such as Annibale Carracci (1560–1609), his brother Agostino (1557–1602), and later Pier Leone Ghezzi (1674–1755), amused themselves by making quick comical drawings of friends or prominent contemporaries. Through gentlemen on the Grand Tour who were familiar with Ghezzi, the practice of making caricatures of friends and acquaintances became a widespread English pastime of aristocrats and gentry. The underlying functions of these comic distortions of the face were described by the twentieth-century psychoanalytic theorist and writer Ernst Kris in a paper on the psychology of caricature: “The primary social character of tendentious forms of comic expression appears to be conditioned by two

79 Gillray, Fox, and the Abolition of the Slave Trade

factors; in the first place, another person’s approval is used to justify one’s own aggression, and furthermore wit and caricature can easily be recognized as an invitation to that other person to adopt ‘a joint policy of aggression and regression.’ Accordingly, tendentious forms of comic expression . . . assist the ‘conquest and seduction of the partner.’”6 The popularity of the form, indeed its continued practice into the twenty-first century, points to the satisfying and sustained pleasure it brought those who consumed it. At its most aggressive it presented cruel distortions of a person’s appearance and character; at its most benign it was a humorous representation of a friend or acquaintance. Professional artists and print publishers soon realized that this comic art when merged within the already popular form of social and political satirical prints could be a lucrative enterprise. Within a decade of its introduction to English culture, caricature thrived in the London print market.7 Its popularity was aided by another development: portrait prints (engravings and mezzotints after paintings and drawings depicting well-known figures) had become widespread earlier in the century, placing not just images, but likenesses of the royal family, political figures, famous authors, and criminals in the windows of print shops and in the homes of the middle and upper classes. Thus, people could recognize those caricatured through knowledge of the subject’s physiognomy. The front windows of print shops specializing in satire became display areas for their most popular inventory, which documented the latest political scandal or social gossip. The famous or notorious soon became better known through their caricatures than by the more flattering portraits upon which they were based. In earlier emblematic prints, the humor resided most often in the accompanying texts or in the symbols and signs that were embedded in the visual narrative; but with the advent of caricature — ​exaggerated body types, comic gestures, and distorted facial features — ​the comic effect of satirical prints became less word- and symbol-dependent and more immediate. While the bulk of political and social caricatures centered on well-known men and women, print publishers also produced numerous prints that incorporated caricatures of stock types such as the rustic peasant, the arrogant aristocrat, the avaricious merchant, the lazy servant, and the lecherous older man, as well as lampoons of national and racial stereotypes. National stereotypes — ​ all of men — ​included images of the crude Scotsman, the slow-witted and thickset Dutchman, the effeminate, thin, and vain Frenchman, and the stolid

80 No Laughing Matter

but worthy English yeoman, types that had preexisted caricature but were tailor-made for the new art form. Racial caricatures began to appear with more frequency in the 1780s and ’90s and into the nineteenth century as accounts of abuse and rebellion in the West Indies reached the English press, were described in parliamentary speeches, and published in antislavery tracts. In this visual lexicon of satirical prints and caricatures, the black slave or servant emerges as the epitome of ignorance, but often speaks with a naïve directness that provides a foil for his master’s more egregious stupidity or cruelty. Rarely do black men or women or others at the margins of the social order appear in English visual satire as human beings with their own agency. An early example of images of the black servant in visual satire appears in the fourth plate in William Hogarth’s series Marriage A-la-Mode (1745). (Although Hogarth did not consider what he did as caricature, his work nevertheless was influential in shaping later satirical imagery.) In this plate, a black page boy points to the antlers of a small figure of Acteon, signaling that the man and woman sitting behind him (the latter engaged in entertaining visitors in her bedchamber) are cuckolding her husband (fig. 4.1). This child provides an avenue for the satirist to blatantly signal the nature of the relationship between the woman and man behind him. His youth would normally point to innocence, but this is upended by his knowing gesture to the horns. These types of inversions are typical in Hogarth’s visual satires and point to a state of disharmony in which the moral order is subverted by the behavior of the individuals involved. There is a further racial underpinning to the scene, as blacks were understood to be closer to the natural world, making this boy’s innate understanding of the sexual relationship between the young wife and her lover a natural consequence of his race.8 In another Hogarth engraving, Noon from The Four Times of Day series, a black man reaches around a woman, who is distracted by holding a tilting pie, to feel her breasts. The primary narrative of this print contrasts the French, with their emphasis on appearance or vanity, with the more earthy English, who fight and display interest in elemental pleasures like sex and food. The black man once again epitomizes the sexual appetite, commonly attributed to the black male and female, and in this case is shown as part of the lustier English lower classes. This is carried forward later in the century in cruder prints, as The Girl in Stile (1787) (fig. 4.2), based on a contemporary farce of the same title, in which a courtesan or kept woman, attended by a young

81 Gillray, Fox, and the Abolition of the Slave Trade

Figure 4.1. Simon François Ravenet, after William Hogarth, Marriage A-laMode, 1745, plate 4. Etching and engraving on wove paper. Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire. Gift of Manuel and Henrietta L. Glass, Class of 1930.

black man in livery, sits in a room with a framed picture of an amorous naked couple hanging on the wall behind her. The association of this woman with a black youth, as well as the painting, once again points to the conjunction of sexuality with black males. The viewer is clued in on the character of the woman by these signs and tropes, which allows one to glimpse a titillating world of desire and sexual availability while simultaneously mocking it. The woman has all the trappings of the upper class but is unmasked and thus ridiculed for her pretensions. None of the prints cited above use the exaggerated facial types for which caricature would become known, but they show the positioning of the black persona within satirical images where the primary target was white. It is also important to note that the medium of etching, which almost entirely replaced that of engraving and mezzotint in the production of satirical prints in the latter part of the century, lent itself to a lively freedom of line and expression,

Figure 4.2. Unknown, The Girl in Stile, 1787. Hand-colored etching, published by S. W. Fores (the title is from a farce by John Scawen acted at Covent Garden December 6, 1786). The British Museum, London. © Trustees of the British Museum.

83 Gillray, Fox, and the Abolition of the Slave Trade

particularly in the work of talented practitioners such as Thomas Rowlandson and James Gillray. Satirical artists employed the etched line to delineate more aggressively active bodies and gestures, which served to enhance the comic energy of their prints. Their prints took on a more Rabelaisian quality with this introduction of both caricature and a graphic expressiveness, in keeping with a new narrative thrust with characters’ speeches, often contained within balloons of text, with dialects and studied patterns of speech that were without doubt borrowed from theatrical performance. In England, the introduction of caricature into satirical prints, with its attendant exaggeration of physical traits, lent itself to the distortion of physiognomic racial differences between whites and blacks. The exaggerated difference clearly signified “other” to the white audience for these prints, further emphasizing the already accepted concept of the black man or woman as without the same agency or privilege as their caricatured white counterparts. Racially charged caricatures begin to appear in prints from the 1790s, such as Lieu t Gove r Gallston’s Monkey Breaking of Sir Sydney’s Ape (1790), in which black women with monkey tails are shown huddling naked in the background, or James Gillray’s Philanthropic Consolations, after the Loss of the Slave-Bill (1796), which depicts two half-dressed black women dallying with the abolitionists William Wilberforce and Bishop Horsley, signaling that the reformers’ desire for abolition of the slave trade mirrored their desire for sexual favors of black women. In another example, Pigmy Revels (1800) published by S. W. Fores (fig. 4.3), the black man is also shown half dressed (indicative to the print’s audience of his “uncivilized” status) and in striped pants (striped garb was historically a signifier of the marginalized or outcast).9 The loosening of line and the distortion of the man’s facial features is more typical of the crude caricatures of blacks that would become more common in the nineteenth century and were picked up in the United States in mid-century during the debate over the abolition of slavery.10 His dialect is also an indicator of his uneducated and simple state, making him further apart from the white educated class who would have bought these caricatures. He states: “One thing at a time Massa if you please, — ​if you floggee — ​floggee — ​if you preachee preachee — ​but no preachee and floggee too.” The humor here is directed at the sanctimonious slave owner whose proselyting prose is considered equal punishment to the flogging he inflicts on the unfortunate black man. Dialogue in these caricatures, such as that quoted above, further elucidates what is often ap-

84 No Laughing Matter

Figure 4.3. Charles Williams, after George Moutard Woodward, Pigmy Revels (detail), plate 2, 1800. Hand-colored etching, published by S. W. Fores. The British Museum, London. © Trustees of the British Museum.

parent at first glance: the station or class of a person through the dialect, the hypocrisy implicit in words versus gesture or action, the stupidity of a person as the words imply ignorance of a fact that is made obvious in the drawing. All these point to comic situations and incongruities that make the viewer feel superior to the characters depicted. This, along with the use of puns or irony in the titles (such as a descriptive phrase that is contradicted by the scene set out by the artist), provides points of knowing, some that need to be puzzled out and, when eventually comprehended, provide further amusement or satisfaction. These remarks on the appearance of the black figure in eighteenth-century satirical prints and caricature are a prelude to the following exploration that pursues eighteenth-century visual satire’s references to the slave trade and slavery in relation to the aforementioned satirical print by James Gillray. Such satirical prints on the topic of slavery are sparse in number, and few of

In the case of Alecto and her Train at the Gate of Pandaemonium (fig. 4.4), which was published (not insignificantly) on July 4, 1791, the African-descended man or woman does not make an overt appearance. As seen in many of the caricatures cited above, it would be unusual for a black man or woman to be a central character of any eighteenth-century satirical print.12 Instead there is a displacement; the main protagonist of the print discussed in the rest of this chapter is a different category of “other,” masked in this instance as an allegorical figure who exudes a power that was not allowed to those at the margins of society. This masking makes the comedy possible; the reality of a powerful vengeful black figure was probably not palatable to white English print consumers looking for humor and entertainment. In the print, Alecto, one of the three Furies or Erinnyes of Greek mythology, stands in front of the Crown and Anchor, a tavern in the Strand that was known as a venue for meetings of associations and societies such as the Freemasons. Her compatriots who help her in enlisting recruits for revolution are the Whig leader and member of Parliament Charles James Fox (to the right of her with the drum) and his friend and fellow reformer and member of Parliament the playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan (who is the smaller figure playing the fife). John Bull, an incarnation of the English everyman, in this instance shown as a rural peasant type with ties to “farmer George,” or George III, stands to the left. The Earl of Stanhope, who in his bubble of text refers to Alecto as the “Black Sarjeant,” slinks off to the right, giving

85 Gillray, Fox, and the Abolition of the Slave Trade

them deal directly with the treatment of black men and women who were in bondage. The sublimation implied by this absence begs the question of whether there are coded references to slavery and the slave trade in prints that are ostensibly about something else. This lack of references to slavery in conjunction with the trade is particularly notable in light of the statistics on the British slave trade and that the abolition of the trade was the subject of political debate and a growing abolitionist movement and that profit from the trade was responsible for the wealth of many prominent British families. British slavers were shipping African men and women in great numbers to the West Indies and Americas during the latter part of the century, estimated to be about eighty thousand a year in the 1780s. As many as a quarter of the Africans transported by the slavers did not survive the transatlantic journey. The British were in total responsible for the shipment of 3.1 million Africans between 1640 and the cessation of the trade in 1807.11

86 No Laughing Matter

Figure 4.4. James Gillray, Alecto and her Train at the Gate of Pandaemonium;___ or__The Recruiting Sarjeant enlisting John Bull, into the Revolution Service, July 4, 1791. Hand-colored etching, published by S. W. Fores. The Lewis Walpole Library, Farmington, Connecticut. Courtesy of the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University.

the slip to his erstwhile friends at the Crown and Anchor. This tavern on the Strand had been the site of a dinner put on by the Revolution Society the previous year to celebrate the first anniversary of the fall of the Bastille. On this particular fourth of July, Gillray has this eating establishment standing in for the precincts of hell, with flames, smoke, and demons emerging from its fiery entrance. The scene anticipates the second Bastille anniversary dinner that would occur ten days later in Birmingham and unites Fox and company with the recruitment of sympathizers to the cause of revolution.13 The print’s central joke is dependent on exaggeration for effect — ​the dumb

87 Gillray, Fox, and the Abolition of the Slave Trade

Figure 4.5. James Gillray, Alecto and her Train at the Gate of Pandaemonium (detail). The Lewis Walpole Library, Farmington, Connecticut. Courtesy of the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University.

John Bull does not comprehend the obviously nefarious nature of Alecto, who is sporting snakes not only in her coiffure, but also dangling from her breasts — ​as well as on the exuberance of line and great energy with which the characters and bubbles of text are rendered (fig. 4.5). The fearsome Alecto can even be described as jaunty in her hat and French cockade. Gillray intends her to be a perversion of the allegorical figure of liberty: she has a pole surmounted by the Phrygian cap, one of liberty’s most recognizable attributes, held in her left hand. The sight of Englishmen, indeed men of government, recruiting soldiers for a cause linked to England’s traditional age-old enemy France smacks of treason and betrayal, but the ridiculous nature of the scene and the enthusiasm of the portly Fox banging away at his drum give it the appearance of a children’s game more than the violent politics of revolution. The exceptional aspect of the print is the Fury, whose maniacal stare has the appearance of fanaticism. This is a surface reading of

Figure 4.6. Unknown, Arms of Liberty and Slavery, broadside with text of letter signed by John Wilkes, June 1768. The Lewis Walpole Library, Farmington, Connecticut. Courtesy of the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University.

89

this print’s narrative. The underlying associations within it, however, speak of subtexts and displacements. I wish to investigate three particular issues to arrive at a deeper understanding of this print: how the theme of liberty and slavery is linked to the political unrest of revolution; the intertwining and symbolism of the image of Medusa and Gillray’s Alecto; and lastly, the pictorial persona of Charles James Fox in satirical prints. Images of slavery and its opposite state, liberty, became closely intertwined in British political popular prints of the late eighteenth century. It is notable that there are few representations of African slaves and the conditions of slavery in these visual satires. Instead imagery on the theme of slavery tends to show it as a condition or state of being, not as the fate of a particular people or race. An early example of a print on the subject, Arms of Liberty and Slavery, from 1768, is a broadside that reprints a letter by the radical member of Parliament John Wilkes, who was imprisoned at the time for seditious libel. On the top right of the broadside, the artist has set up a faux Mansfield coat of arms of slavery (fig. 4.6). William Murray Mansfield (1705–1793) was the judge who presided over Wilkes’s libel case four years earlier in which the defendant was found guilty of outlawry for failing to appear at his trial.

Gillray, Fox, and the Abolition of the Slave Trade

Figure 4.7. Unknown, A Word to the Wise, or Billy Unmasked, 1784. Hand-colored etching. The Lewis Walpole Library, Farmington, Connecticut. Courtesy of the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University.

90 No Laughing Matter

Figure 4.8. [After F. G. Byron?], English Slavery; or a Picture of the Time (detail), 1788. Etching, published by Holland. The Lewis Walpole Library, Farmington, Connecticut. Courtesy of the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University. The servant/cook as horned devil calls the Englishman “master”; the Englishman asks the cook to give the pig “a Negro flagellation.”

(Ironically, in 1772 Mansfield made the landmark ruling in the Somerset case that slavery was illegal in England — ​and was instrumental through that decision in paving the way for abolition of the slave trade thirty-five years later.) This coat of arms is surrounded by chains, supported on one side by a devil or demon, and surmounted by a twisted snake on its crest. The image of the devil was also associated with the image of the black man. Another crude caricature from 1784 of Prime Minister William Pitt and his political rival Charles Fox puts the slavery/liberty question at the center of an exchange between these political adversaries and leaders of their respective parties. There is an image of a “slave” in this print, but he is conspicuously white (fig. 4.7). Both these images point to a displacement of the slavery of Africans onto other types of issues involving civil liberties. However, in a print from April 1788 titled English Slavery, there is a direct reference to the conditions of black slaves or servants, although by this time the Somerset decision has had an effect on the legal status of blacks in England. This satire contains eleven vignettes — ​one of which shows the Prince of Wales in thrall to his mistress Mrs. Fitzherbert — ​and another (fig. 4.8) depicts a devil striking a pig so it will be as tender as a chicken. The

91 Gillray, Fox, and the Abolition of the Slave Trade

Figure 4.9. James Gillray, Freedom. Slavery, 1789. Etching. The Lewis Walpole Library, Farmington, Connecticut. Courtesy of the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University.

demon servant or slave is inflicting the pain of a “Negro flagellation” on the pig. The butt of the joke is the gluttonous Englishman who is a slave to his appetites. This print is without doubt a direct reference to descriptions of the abuse of slaves that were being offered that same month in speeches in the house of Parliament. The print uses humor to displace the sting of these revelations, and the violent subtext creeps into the print in the form of the flagellation vignette. Another print by William Dent, published very close in date to this one, is titled The Slave Trade and shows ministers of the king bowing down to him in exchange for patronage and favors. All of them have complexions that are darkly shaded. The conceit of slavery as a political or personal state takes a turn after the fall of the Bastille in 1789. A print by Gillray, published fourteen days later, once again uses this now familiar visual idiom of slavery versus freedom to describe the relative states of France and Britain, this time through an enthusiastic

92 No Laughing Matter

Figure 4.10. Leg Shackles Used Onboard Slave Ship Aurore, 1784. From Dessins extraits du livre de Jean Boudriot “Traite et navires négriers: Monographie de l’Aurore,” 1984 reprint.

embrace of the events of July 14 against the contrasting scene of the powerful prime minister Pitt subjugating even the kneeling king to his will. Pitt conspicuously waves a banner depicting shackles, an instrument of torture, and the whip (fig. 4.9). The shackles shown on the banner bear a marked resemblance to the type that are shown in this rendering of a image in a 1784 tract on a French slave ship (fig. 4.10). In a subsequent Gillray work of August 3, 1789, Louis XVI kneels and hands his crown to Liberty, who sits on the ruins of the Bastille. The king and the chained aristocrats are followed by the military and mob and engaged in what appears to be peaceful if coerced transfer of power in exchange for freedom. The absence of images of the African slave in the many caricatures on the subject of slavery — ​with exception of two rare prints, one by Gillray and another by Isaac Cruikshank — ​is perhaps because such scenes were not marketable as visual satire. In 1791, Gillray made two

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references to slavery in caricature, only one of which dealt with the actual atrocities inflicted on black slaves by plantation overseers (fig. 4.11). The latter print references a supposed speech in Parliament that same April (1791) by the abolitionist politician William Wilberforce recounting an incident in which a slave survived being boiled in cane juice; in point of fact the slave in question died, and the overseer was merely dismissed. Another image by Isaac Cruikshank shows the flagellation of a female slave on the deck of a ship by the notorious Captain Kimber. Another Gillray caricature issued five years later (mentioned earlier here) shows Wilberforce and Bishop Horsley consoling themselves by sexual dalliance with two black women after the loss of another abolition bill in April 1796. However, these works are very few in relation to the vast volume of images produced during these years.14 What is conspicuous is the absence of images on this issue despite its prominence in public discourse. The very act of erasure, however, may have made the absence more keenly felt — ​like the proverbial elephant in the room that no one mentions. This is a topic that appears frequently in speeches and social and political discourse, but in the visual realm it is limited.

Gillray, Fox, and the Abolition of the Slave Trade

Figure 4.11. James Gillray, Barbarities in the West Indies, 1791. Hand-colored etching. The Lewis Walpole Library, Farmington, Connecticut. Courtesy of the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University.

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The threatening female is a stock character in the narrative dramas of eighteenth-century visual satire, and Gillray’s Alecto is but one manifestation of this type. She is named for a Greek mythical figure and as such claims a relationship with the gorgon Medusa, who also figures prominently in satirical images. Neil Hertz, in “Medusa’s Head: Male Hysteria under Political Pressure,” explored “the representation of what would seem to be a political threat as if it were a sexual threat,”15 discussing how images and descriptions of women out of control — ​that is, not behaving according to social norms — ​personified the threat of revolution. Although Hertz deals more directly with nineteenth-century events, he starts his examination of both visual and textual sources with an image by Rowlandson of 1792 showing the allegorical figure of French Liberty as a snaky-headed Medusa holding, on a trident, the decapitated head of the almost naked man at her feet. Hertz, drawing on psychoanalytic theory, quotes Freud’s interpretation of the verb “to decapitate” as also carrying the associated meaning of the verb “to castrate.” “The terror of Medusa is thus the terror of castration.”16 This threatening figure of the Medusa carries over to her snaky-headed sister Alecto. In Greek mythology, Alecto and her sister Furies were born from Uranus’s drops of blood when he was castrated by his son Chronos, a gruesome and perverse legacy tied to the Furies’ roles as seekers of vengeance on those who betray and kill kin. Rowlandson, in a prescient print in 1788 titled The Times (fig. 4.12), on the topic of the first regency crisis, represents rebellion in the form of Furies, naked women with snaky hair and torches seen on the right. And indeed, it was the image of the Furies, not of Medusa, that Edmund Burke evoked in his well-known essay Reflections on the Revolution in France, published in November 1790. Burke, in his description of the mob’s attack on the royal residence at Versailles, refers to the women who watched the execution of members of the king’s guard as the “furies of hell, in the abused shape of the vilest of women.”17 A precedent for Burke’s description is the caricaturist William Dent’s October 1789 print of the same Versailles mob titled Female Furies or Extraordinary Revolution, although the fierce and large-breasted women in his print are not shown as allegorical figures.18 Both Burke and Dent — ​or their source for the description of bloodthirsty women in the French mob — ​may have drawn on Dante’s description of the Furies and the gorgon Medusa in canto 9 of the Inferno, published for the first time in England in translation in 1782.19 Dante describes Alecto and

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her two sisters threatening the author and Virgil his guide with the head of the gorgon Medusa; they are guarding the city of Dis, through whose gates one entered the lower city of Hell, where the heretics are housed in fiery tombs.20 Gillray’s two prints of 1790 and 1791 that represent Alecto as a main character show her to be also a marker of discord and mischief. Gillray’s first rendition of Alecto occurs in the print Lieut Goverr Gall-Stone, which was published in February 1790 and attacks the writer Philip Thicknesse, who had served in the military in Jamaica (fig. 4.13). Alecto the Fury serves as his muse and whispers in his ear. She slings her leg over his in the gesture that Leo Steinberg has identified as symbolizing sexual congress, further reinforced by the opened flap of his breeches. Out of his head springs the figure of Minerva, whose shield lists his misdeeds, the first of which is “running away from my command in Jamaica for fear of Blackamoors” (fig. 4.14, detail). Thicknesse was known as a supporter of the slave trade and for hunting down runaway slaves in Jamaica.21 In Alecto and her Train, published the next year, Gillray’s association of

Gillray, Fox, and the Abolition of the Slave Trade

Figure 4.12. Thomas Rowlandson, The Times, 1788. Hand-colored etching. The Lewis Walpole Library, Farmington, Connecticut. Courtesy of the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University.

Figure 4.13. James Gillray, Lieu t Gover r Gall-Stone, inspired by Alecto;___or___The Birth of Minerva, 1790. Etching. The Lewis Walpole Library, Farmington, Connecticut. Courtesy of the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University.

Figure 4.14. James Gillray, Lieu t Gover r Gall-Stone (detail). The Lewis Walpole Library, Farmington, Connecticut. Courtesy of the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University.

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Figure 4.15. Detail of Charles James Fox from James Gillray, Alecto and her Train, 1791. The Lewis Walpole Library, Farmington, Connecticut. Courtesy of the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University.

Alecto with Charles James Fox, a strong supporter of abolition of the trade, must be seen as ironic, especially as it followed so close on the heels of her very public liaison with the pro-slave advocate Thicknesse. Fox was indeed, as implied here, a vocal admirer of the ideals of the French Revolution (fig. 4.15) and was also an advocate for the repeal of the laws that limited the rights of non-Anglicans, and one of the chief proponents of the abolition of the slave trade during debates in Parliament in the late 1780s and early 1790s. Fox’s speech on April 19, 1791, just a few months before Gillray’s Alecto print, has him venturing arguments against the trade on a number of fronts. He referred to the high mortality rates of the Middle Passage as evidence of the inhuman nature of the trade, and cited the account of a man named Ross who had happened upon the torture of a naked black female slave. He described her as suspended from a beam in an outbuilding while being systematically burned by a man with a lighted torch as punishment for some transgression.22 Fox was often depicted as Lucifer or as a demonic figure in

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satirical prints, or as a particularly hairy and disheveled sans-culotte. An early 1782 print by Gillray shows him as Milton’s Satan standing on a roulette wheel, and he would continue to be drawn in this light by caricaturists well into the 1790s.23 So his place next to Alecto at the entrance of the inferno-like Crown and Anchor is in keeping with his image as a profligate who might find even her dubious charms attractive. Despite his smiling cherub face in this particular print, his caricature-fed persona would have been very easily associated with vice and the smell of brimstone. In a closer examination of speeches transcribed about the heads of certain characters in Alecto and her Train, then, one now notes that at the print’s center is the image of a dark-skinned female Fury telling John Bull that he should forsake his master the Farmer — ​that is, the king — ​and that “I will find you a hundred masters better than he, Zounds, I’ll make you one of the Masters of England yourself.”24 Alecto asks him to “enter boldly in the cause of Freedom.” He, in reply, worries what “Varmer George” would say if he left his service without warning: “ah Varmer George has been a rare good Measter to I! — ​but . . . Zookers, I’ve a good mind to go! — ​but to leave my old Master!” and he trails off, obviously in a quandary. Their exchange refers to the attractions that reform holds even for the stolid and unimaginative men of England, but it also raises the counterargument of allegiance and the benevolent patriarchal power of the monarchy. Their dialogue is about the relationship of the servant to the master, about loyalty and betrayal, and contains echoes of Satan’s temptation of Christ in the desert. Alecto’s allure despite her hellish appearance is the lure of freedom as opposed to slavery or servitude, but obviously a dangerous proposition. She is both the temptress, but also the punisher — ​for in her role as a Fury she will hound the betrayers of family, or, in this context, of nation.25 Revolution will certainly mean bloodshed, the bloodshed of civil war. Underlying this as well is that the revolution she represents existed not only in France, but also in the British and French Caribbean colonies. The eighteenth century saw many slave uprisings, but in particular in January 1791 there was a major if failed rebellion on the British possession of Dominica, one of the Windward Islands, the news of which reached England in March, as well as another uprising in the French colony of Saint- Dominge, on the island of Hispaniola (now Haiti and the Dominican Republic), in the autumn of 1790, which was also brutally suppressed. This latter rebellion was understood to have been prompted by the promise of freedoms in the new French constitution.26

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Although the print’s subject is not ostensibly slavery or slave rebellion, the abolitionist and reformer Fox’s stance next to the dark Alecto may have conjured up not only enslaved Africans and their deprivation of the most basic rights accorded to human beings, but also retribution in the form of violent upheaval. Fox himself, who is often shown in caricature to be blithely inviting the mayhem of revolution down upon his country, is sporting the Medusa head on his drum (fig. 4.16). Thus the black Fury and the white Medusa in Alecto and her Train make for a ridiculously overblown but effective argument against embracing or promoting change. Difference as embodied in race, change and violence in the form of revolution and fanaticism, disloyalty of comrades to one another and to king and nation — ​all combine in Gillray’s print, framed in the guise of harmless humor and ridicule. The power of an image such as the Alecto and her Train is in its aggregate, and, like other, cruder and directly racist prints that have been mentioned earlier, reinforces the inherently xenophobic attitudes that underlie them all. As seen in this one particular satirical print, the confluence of symbols and signifiers — ​both visual and textual — ​and their relationship to one another

Gillray, Fox, and the Abolition of the Slave Trade

Figure 4.16. Detail of Medusa head on the drum of Charles James Fox. James Gillray, Alecto and her Train, 1791. The Lewis Walpole Library, Farmington, Connecticut. Courtesy of the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University.

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would have elicited a variety of associations. The obvious references were probably duly noted by a casual consumer (indeed satire and humor fail if the target of ridicule is not recognizable); others tapped into unconscious recognition of culturally fed stereotypes and anxieties. Popular prints are by their very nature “contemporary” and ephemeral, serving as markers of the social and cultural moment and are useful in elucidating notions of race as formulated within this robust and ebullient print form. As seen in many of Gillray’s caricatures, phantasmagoric scenes in which politicians take leading roles were a perfect vehicle for hyperbole and comic drama that glanced sideways at the deeper fears of the English white population. The close reading of Alecto and her Train at the gates of hell illuminates the deep underlying unease over slavery that colored the English reaction to the early progress of the French Revolution and the earlier success of the American. Slavery and the British relationship with the ill-gotten profits of a brutal and morally bankrupt practice were inextricably tied up with the slow but growing change within British society, one that would be manifested in part by the abolition of the slave trade in 1807, later by the general governmental reforms of 1832, and the abolition of slavery itself in 1834. At this pivotal moment, at the beginning of a decade that would see significant retrenchment and suppression of civil liberties by Prime Minister William Pitt and his government, the Gillray print touches upon the anxiety around the ever-present discourse on civil liberties and abolition in a society so fundamentally tied to the systematic enslavement of thousands of individuals for economic gain.

Notes Epigraph: E. H. Gombrich, “Imagery and Art in the Romantic Period,” in Meditations on a Hobby Horse and Other Essays on the Theory of Art (London: Phaidon, 1963; reprinted 1985), 123. The essay was first published in Burlington Magazine 91 ( June 1949). 1. These studies on singular prints include Jonathan Bate’s article on Gillray’s parody of Fuseli’s Weird Sisters from 1986, in “Shakespearean Allusion in English Caricature in the Age of Gillray,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 49 (1986): 196–210; Lora Rempel’s article “George III in Gillray’s Monstrous Craws at a New Coalition Feast,” Art History 18, no. 1 (March 1995); and John Barrell’s text on The Crown and Anchor Libel, in his book Imagining the King’s Death: Figurative Treason, Fantasies of Regicide, 1793–1796 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 637–642. See also David Bindman, In the Shadow of the Guillotine: Britain and the French Revolution, with

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contributions by Aileen Dawson and Mark Jones (London: British Museum Trustees Publication, 1989), for a discussion of the pictorial imagery that accompanied the English reaction to the revolution. 2. Gillray created a number of visual parodies of other artists’ work, including a few that skewered the paintings after Shakespeare and Milton by artists in the Royal Academy, particularly those who were part of the publisher John Boydell’s project to commission works after the great works of English literature by these two writers. 3. Lavater’s Physiognomische Fragmente zur Beförderung der Menschenkenntnis und Menschenliebe, 4 vols., was published in 1775–1778; this work was translated and published in London in several volumes as Essays on Physiognomy in 1789–1798. 4. Art historian David Bindman in Ape to Apollo: Aesthetics and the Idea of Race in the Eighteenth Century (London: Reaktion Books, 2002) examines the role of aesthetics in forming the concept of racial difference in the eighteenth century. 5. For reference on photography’s use in the nineteenth century to document other races and peoples see Kathleen Stewart Howe, First Seen: Photography of the World’s Peoples, 1840–1880 (Santa Barbara, CA: Santa Barbara Museum of Art, 2004); Elizabeth Edwards, ed., Photography and Anthropology, 1860–1920 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992); and E. Height and G. Sampson, eds., Colonialist Photography: Imag(in)ing Race and Place (London: Routledge, 2002). 6. Ernst Kris, “The Psychology of Caricature,” International Journal of Psycho-analysis 17 (1936): 293. 7. For a valuable study of late eighteenth-century satirical prints see Diana Donald, The Age of Caricature: Satirical Prints in the Reign of George III (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996). 8. For a discussion on the subject of black men and women that appear in Hogarth’s prints see David Bindman’s essay “‘A Voluptuous Alliance between Africa and Europe’: Hogarth’s Africans,” in The Other Hogarth: Aesthetics of Difference, ed. Bernadette Fort and Angela Rosenthal (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001). Also see David Dabybeen’s Hogarth’s Blacks: Images of Blacks in EighteenthCentury Art (Mundelstrup, Denmark: Dangeroo Press, 1985; reprint Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 1987). 9. See Michel Pastoureau’s The Devil’s Cloth: A History of Stripes (New York: Washington Square Press, 2003). 10. The development of these crude and exaggerated caricatures of black men and women appears to be related to the abolitionist debates of the 1780s and ’90s. The medium itself was profoundly influenced by the two great practitioners of caricature Rowlandson and Gillray, whose free use of line that wittily and with great skill created larger-than-life characters on the page was copied by many other contemporaries and successors. Thus, the more bombastic use of line for more racially derogatory caricatures in some respects is a direct influence and inheritance from these two artists, Gillray in particular. 11. See the website of the United Kingdom National Archives for statistics on the

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slave trade: http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/records/research-guides/slave-trade -slavery.htm#17097. 12. An exception to this is the character of Mungo, a comic figure from the opera The Padlock (1768), who is a voice for pro-abolition. Mungo appears as a black character in a number of satirical prints, most particularly as a “macaroni” in a print by Mathew Darley from 1772 and again in a print titled The Rabbits, published by Robert Sayer in 1792. In the former, he may be a caricature of a Scotsman. For a discussion of the operatic work see Julie A. Carlson, “New Lows in Eighteenth-Century Theater: The Rise of Mungo,” in European Romantic Review 18, no. 2 (April 2007): 139–147. 13. Despite the impression given by this print, there were in fact no plans for a dinner at the Crown and Anchor in 1791 to celebrate the second anniversary of the fall of the Bastille. 14. Of the almost two thousand satirical prints in the British Museum collection that were published between 1784 and 1791, for instance, there are eight that overtly refer to the slave trade. 15. Neil Hertz, “Medusa Head: Male Hysteria under Political Pressure,” reproduced in a volume of his collected essays, The End of the Line: Essays on Psychoanalysis and the Sublime (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 160–192. 16. Sigmund Freud, Medusa’s Head, 1940 (1922), reprinted in Elisabeth YoungBruehl, Freud on Women: A Reader (New York: W. W. Norton, 1922), 272. The full quote is “To decapitate = to castrate. The terror of Medusa is thus the terror of castration that is linked to the sight of something.” 17. Bindman, In the Shadow of the Guillotine, 93. 18. This print by William Dent from October 1789 is illustrated in Bindman, In the Shadow of the Guillotine, 93. 19. The first translation of Dante’s Inferno into English was in 1782 by Charles Rogers, followed by another translation by Henry Boyd in 1785. See Frances Amelia Yates, Renaissance and Reform: The Italian Contribution (London: Taylor & Francis, 1999), 33. 20. Those studying Gillray will discover that it is not unusual to find references in his work to specific texts from theater, literature, and the classics, as well as to accounts of contemporary events, parliamentary speeches, scandal, gossip, and popular theater. He was perhaps given some of the more erudite references for these allusions by friends or educated amateurs who paid him to render their ideas, but there is some evidence that he himself was educated, perhaps self-taught, in classical texts and literature. 21. Richard Godfrey’s catalog entry on Lieut Goverr Gall-Stone, Inspired by Alecto; — ​ or The Birth of Minerva, pages 84–85 in the exhibition catalog James Gillray: The Art of Caricature (London: Tate Publishing, 2001). 22. The Speeches of the Right Honorable C — ​J — ​Fox, in the House of Commons, 6 vols. (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1815), 4:189. 23. Many caricatures of Fox show him as a devil or demon or associating with them.

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See the following caricatures: James Gillray, Gloria Mundi, or the Devil Addressing the Sun, July 22, 1782 (BM 6012) as Milton’s Satan; A Design for a Statesman, February 1784 (not in BM); Sayers, Mr. Burke’s Pair of Spectacles for Short-Sighted Politicians, May 12, 1791 (BM 1988,0514.6); Thomas Rowlandson, The Covent Garden Night Mare, 1784 (BM 6543), with the incubus sitting on his chest in parody of Fuseli’s painting; James Gillray, The Nuptial Bower. . . with the Evil One Peeping at the Charms of Eden, February 13, 1797 (BM 1851,0901.844); James Gillray, Tree of Liberty, 1798, as the serpent in the garden of Eden, 1798 (BM 1851,0901.921); James Gillray, Doublures of Characters; __or striking Resemblances in Phisiognomy, November 1, 1798 (BM 1935,0522.5.40), once again as the “lowest spirit of hell.” 24. The full text of Alecto’s speech is: “Come on my brave Lad, take this bounty money, & enter into my Company of Gentlemen Volunteers enlisted in the cause of Liberty — ​I’ll find you present pay and free quarters, & I’ll lead you where you shall fill your Knapsack with Plunder; — ​nay Man, never talk about your old Master the Farmer, I’ll find you Hundreds of Masters as good as he; Zounds I’ll make you one of the Masters of England yourself; — ​come on, I say, heres riches for you, — ​come on; the glorious 14th of July is approaching, when Monarchs are to be crush’d like maggots, & brave men like yourself are to be put in their places here hold your hand, enter boldly in the cause of Freedom. & cry Huzza — ​Vive la Nation! Huzza.” John Bull’s speech goes: “Wounds, Measter Sarjeant, an I should enter into your sarvice, what’ll Varmer-George say to I, for leaving of ’em without warning? — ​and yet I is half in love with the sound of your drum! & wishes to leave off Ploughing & dunging, & wear one of your vine cockades & be a French Gentleman! & yet, dangs it, it goes against ones heart to leave the Varmer; — ​ah Varmer George has been a rare good Measter to I! — ​but, am I to have all them fine paper Moneys. Zookers, I’ve a good mind to go! — ​but to leave my old Measter! Ah me! I dozes’nt know what to do, not I!” 25. While her persuasive abilities in this print look promising, Alecto’s sexual appeal is doubtful; however, for a discussion of slave imagery and texts and their relation to sadomasochistic pleasure see Marcus Wood, Slavery, Empathy, and Pornography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003) and also Wood’s Blind Memory: Visual Representations of Slavery in England and America, 1780–1865 (London: Routledge, 2000). 26. For more information on these uprisings see David Patrick Geggus, “Slavery, War, and Revolution in the Greater Caribbean, 1789–1815,” in A Turbulent Time: The French Revolution and the Greater Caribbean, ed. David Barry Gasper and David Patrick Geggus (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), 1–50.

five   The Other Within Allen Hockley

Georges Bigot (1860–1927), a graduate of L’École des Beaux-Arts, arrived in Japan in 1882 to study woodblock printing and collect materials for the journal L’Art Japonais, which served a burgeoning readership of European artists and collectors interested in Japanese art. Bigot’s short visit became a seventeen-year residency supported, for the most part, by his prodigious output of comic illustration. His often racially charged caricatures and wry political satire appeared regularly in Japanese newspapers and in numerous publications of his own creation.1 Bigot relentlessly critiqued Japan’s late nineteenth-century efforts to modernize, especially its willingness to abandon its indigenous culture. Like many foreigners residing in Japan at the time and the hordes of tourists arriving in ever-increasing numbers, Bigot exhibited a preference for cultural traditions that were disappearing with Japan’s rapid acquisition of Western technologies, social institutions, and customs. But Bigot also recognized that Westerners in Japan were agents of the very changes he so vehemently decried. Among the regular cast of Japanese characters featured in his comic illustrations, foreigners appear as racial and cultural others whose presence complicates both the social critique and the humor he intended. An eight-panel lithograph Bigot designed near the end of the nineteenth century follows the misadventures of one such foreigner (fig. 5.1). The first scene takes place on the deck of a ship about to set sail for Japan. We meet our traveler chatting with the ship’s captain as a deckhand hauls his luggage to a stateroom. We don’t know what the captain is saying, but the traveler clearly seems intrigued. Whatever curiosity or enthusiasm the traveler displays in the first panel quickly disappears in the second. He vomits over the side of the ship as it tosses about in high seas, while a bemused crewman, sea legs firmly planted on the heaving deck, calmly smokes his pipe. Scene three shows the traveler negotiating transport with a jinriksha coolie upon his arrival in Yokohama. The Westerner’s expressive face and hand gestures

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reveal his attempts to communicate, but they elicit only an uncomprehending openmouthed stare from the coolie. The fourth through seventh panels convey the traveler’s exasperation as, having arrived at a traditional Japanese inn, he stumbles through a series of awkward encounters with Japanese culture and customs. He is perplexed when the proprietor of the inn and a maid pry apart his legs and forcibly remove his shoes before he steps on the tatami-matted floor (panel four). Unable to sit on the floor Japanese-style, he crashes through the fusuma (sliding room dividers). The proprietress of the inn comes to his rescue with a proposal for makeshift furniture constructed with wooden boxes (panel five). Perched atop the wobbly stack of crates, our traveler suffers yet another indignity: he spills his meal as he struggles through his first attempt to eat with chopsticks (panel six). Traditional Japanese bedding in the form of a futon spread out on the floor and a hako-makura (elevated pillow) dash any expectations our traveler might have of a well-deserved night’s sleep. His suffering is compounded by a shoji (sliding door) open to the night air and a brightly lit oil lamp that invites a host of flying insects into his room. The maid arrives with mosquito netting just as our traveler realizes that fleas, not mosquitoes, will keep him scratching through what is sure to be a long night (panel seven). In the eighth and final panel, our would-be adventurer rushes back to the port. The tricolore flying off the back of a ship beckons him home. Most readers of this essay have probably traveled to a foreign country and suffered through unpleasant experiences roughly analogous to those of Bigot’s traveler: bad flights, language barriers, different customs, and poor accommodations, all of which led us to wonder why we were foolish enough to leave home in the first place. We sympathize with Bigot’s traveler because we know his plight firsthand. But our willingness to empathize in no way prevents us from smiling or perhaps even laughing at our traveling companion’s expense. The ease with which we move from empathy to laughter raises several questions about Bigot’s lithograph specifically, but also about visual humor generally. For convenience, I group these issues into four broadly conceived but interrelated inquiries. The first concerns viewers and viewing contexts: who empathizes, who laughs, and why? While perhaps analogous, the basis for empathy among Bigot’s late-nineteenth-century viewers was undoubtedly far more specific than ours, thus the need to examine the historical context in which viewing took place. The second addresses the medium that facilitates empathy and

Figure 5.1. Georges Bigot, Untitled, c. 1899–1905. Lithograph, 32 × 22 cm. Kawasaki-shi Shimin Museum, Kawasaki, Japan.

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laughter. Here I refer not to lithography or even illustration (although we need to recognize Bigot’s skill with both), but rather to visual narrative. Visual because Bigot did not title this work, nor did he caption any of the eight panels; whatever empathy viewers feel with our traveler and any humor his predicament elicits are conveyed through visual means. Narrative because none of the eight panels viewed independently affords the same degree of engagement as the full sequence. Every panel occasions a humorous response, but the cumulative degradation of the traveler’s poise and dignity delivers the punch line. Bigot’s narrative centers on the traveler, but it relies on a wide range of supporting characters, most of whom are Japanese. They serve the narrative as the primary source of the traveler’s vexations, and they also provide visual others against which the traveler’s race and ethnicity are read. The third line of inquiry thus addresses the racial and cultural differences Bigot exploits so effectively in the visual presentation of his narrative. As the creator of this visual narrative, Bigot must also be a focus of concern. While the traveler’s tale may aspire to universal appeal, its claims rest on preoccupations Bigot developed during his seventeen-year residency in Japan. This chapter explores these four lines of inquiry independently, but also and perhaps more importantly in relationship to each other. Bigot’s visual narrative possesses, among many qualities, elements of what we might regard as situation comedy — ​humor that emerges from the experiences of a character forced to deal with unusual or unexpected situations. If television is any indicator, situation comedy relies on the affinity viewers establish with the characters over several weekly episodes. We return to the same sitcom week after week because we enjoy watching the characters we have come to possess, and perhaps even inhabit vicariously, respond to awkward situations. Bigot’s lithograph does not offer weeks of viewing pleasure, but it is episodic, and its main character carries the narrative from scene to scene. We might even claim that Bigot’s narrative, presented as eight scenes on a single page, easily lends itself to reruns. Turn-of-the-century viewers likely looked over the lithograph several times at their leisure, a viewing behavior in which they could easily develop affinity for Bigot’s traveler. But how likable is our traveling companion? His oddly proportioned body consists of an oversize balding head perched atop a barrel-chested torso supported by underdeveloped legs. The prominent features of his face include a large nose, bulging eyes, and a mouth that appears from behind his mustache and goatee only when it is vomiting, shouting, and eating. Indeed,

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our traveling companion possesses few redeeming physical qualities — ​he is hardly endearing. But comic heroes do not need to be beautiful to elicit sympathy. And in situation comedy, viewer subjectivity does not necessarily require identification with the physical body of the comic protagonist. The physical traits we find quirky and unlikable are in fact our traveling companion’s greatest comic assets. His ungainly body is the primary site where Japanese customs wreak havoc, and his oversize face is a perfect canvas on which to register his confusion, displeasure, and disgust. How, then, might we understand Bigot’s approach to the other characters? He endows all of them — ​even the Japanese — ​with essentially the same body type and oversize head as his traveler. Are these also comic assets? If so, how are they used in both the visual and narrative sense? And if empathy and the viewer subjectivities it engenders are critical to the humor conveyed by this narrative, then how would viewers react to Bigot’s visual presentation of Japanese people? Responses to these questions first require an understanding of Bigot’s late nineteenth-century audience. Bigot’s lithograph affords an insightful glimpse into one of the late nineteenth century’s most intriguing sites of cross-cultural interaction and exchange — ​the treaty ports of Japan. Opened to foreign residents in 1859, Yokohama, Nagasaki, Hakodate, and later Kobe and Niigata became popular destinations for European and American merchants, entrepreneurs, diplomats, and missionaries. But Japan’s late nineteenth-century encounter with the West was markedly different from that of other Asian countries, and her treaty ports were quite unlike those of nations colonized by Western imperial powers. A fierce persecution of Christian missionaries in the early 1600s, followed by a well-managed exclusion policy, kept the West at bay and spared Japan from foreign intervention for more than two hundred years. Although Japan was eventually opened to foreign trade by the threat of force (an ultimatum delivered by U.S. naval commodore Matthew Perry in 1853), the government in power at the time wisely agreed to accommodation. From the outset, exploitation of this arrangement would never be as one-sided as it was in other centers of the late nineteenth-century colonial world. Foreigners were confined to the treaty ports, and travel outside the borders required passports issued by the Japanese government. While containing the foreign presence, Japan embraced policies of westernization and rapidly transformed itself from an isolated feudal backwater to a modern industrialized state in slightly less than fifty years. Victories in wars with China in 1895 and Russia

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in 1905 elevated Japan to world power status with an imperialist agenda as aggressive as any pursued by European nations in the previous two centuries. Japan’s treaty ports thus bore little similarity with what Mary Louise Pratt termed contact zones: “social spaces where disparate cultures meet, clash and grapple with each other, often in highly asymmetrical relations of domination and subordination.”2 This concept, so useful in colonial and postcolonial studies, holds true for Japan only if one recognizes that the asymmetrical relationships in treaty ports often favored the Japanese. Nowhere was this asymmetry more apparent than in interactions between Japanese and Western tourists, particularly globetrotters — ​a new species of traveler that frequented Japan in ever-increasing numbers in the closing decades of the nineteenth century. Thomas Cook, founder of the travel company that still bears his name, initiated the globetrotter phenomenon in the early 1870s when he led a party of eight adventurous souls on the first round-the-world tour. They departed Liverpool on September 26, 1872, and returned 222 days later. Their Japan leg included Yokohama, which they used as a base to tour the sights of Tokyo before continuing by boat to Osaka and Nagasaki.3 News of Cook’s successful venture sparked widespread interest in round-the-world journeys. Much competition ensued as rival companies quickly developed their own routes. Adventurers and enterprising journalists vied to complete the trip in the shortest possible time. In 1890, Nellie Bly, a reporter on assignment for the New York World, broke the eighty-day benchmark fictionalized in Jules Verne’s novel Around the World in Eighty Days.4 George Griffiths broke this record in 1894, completing the journey in sixty-five days. He booked his entire itinerary through Thomas Cook’s company.5 William Elliot Griffis was the first to apply the term “globetrotter” in a Japanese context. Writing in The Mikado’s Empire, published in 1876 but based on his residency in Japan between 1870 and 1874, Griffis noted that several steamship lines were bringing increasing numbers of “circummundane tourists” to Japan. He states that they “have become so frequent and temporarily numerous in Yokohama as to be recognized as a distinct class. In the easy language of the port, they are called ‘globe-trotters.’”6 The exponential growth in globetrotter visits to Japan in the 1880s inspired Basil Hall Chamberlain to include a tongue-in-cheek taxonomy of globetrotters in his 1889 Things Japanese: Being Notes on Various Subjects Connected with Japan. His classification system ranked globetrotters according to their financial assets and motives

110 No Laughing Matter

for travel. Upper ranks included the globe-trotter elegans, whom Chamberlain characterized as “provided with good introductions from his government, generally stops at a legation, is interested in shooting, and allows the various charms of the country to induce him to prolong his stay.” But as the following examples illustrate, Chamberlain was far less complimentary of most of the subspecies in his taxonomy. “Globe-trotter communis: sun-helmet, blue glasses, scant luggage, celluloid collars. His object is a maximum of traveling combined with a minimum of expense.” “Globe-trotter desperatus: expends his utmost farthing on a ticket to Japan with the hope of making a fortune there, but who, finding no situation, has to be carted home by some cheap opportunity at the expense of his fellow-countrymen.” “Globe-trotter dolosus: travels under some high-sounding name and with doubtful banking account, merely in order to put as great a distance as possible between himself and the home police.” “Globe-trotter locustus: the species that travels in swarms, perpetually dragged around the universe by Cook, or the likes of Cook.”7 For Griffis, Chamberlain, and other Westerners who, through lengthy residencies in Japan, came to know and appreciate Japanese culture, the term “globetrotter” was a pejorative that connoted a superficial engagement with the places, people, and culture encountered on commercial tours. Did Bigot share these sentiments? Is this what motivated him to portray so vividly the travails and frustrations of a traveler’s — ​perhaps a globetrotter’s — ​first encounter with Japan? Bigot’s biography suggests an affirmative response. Shortly after his arrival in Japan, he found employment as an art instructor at the Army Cadet Academy in Tokyo. When his two-year contract expired he ordered an etching press from Europe so he could support himself selling printed souvenirs to foreigners visiting Japan. In 1887, he began publishing Toba-e, a bimonthly journal of humor targeted at the roughly three thousand foreign residents of the treaty ports and whatever tourists might happen to be passing through. He contributed to several Japanese news publications, including Marumaru Chimbun, a humorous weekly with a circulation of fifteen thousand, and Kaishin Shimbun, for which he provided images of Tokyo’s famous sites. He illustrated Japanese translations of Western novels and Western translations of Japanese novels. He married Sanô Masa in 1894, and his son Morris was born a year later.8 Bigot clearly fits the profile of Chamberlain’s globe-trotter elegans, someone who “allows the various charms of the country to induce him to prolong his stay.” We can probably assume that Bigot, like Griffis, Chamberlain, and other permanent residents of the

111 The Other Within

treaty ports, held a disparaging view of globe-trotter locustus, “the species that travels in swarms, perpetually dragged around the universe by Cook, or the likes of Cook.” It is against this background that we must read Bigot’s visual and narrative treatment of the Japanese characters in his lithograph. Chamberlain’s Things Japanese takes the form of an encyclopedia with the entries arranged alphabetically. It includes an entry titled “Books on Japan,” under which he describes and recommends reliable publications on Japanese history and culture. He also commented on poor or inaccurate sources, among them travel books, which he refers to as “ordinary low level of globe-trotting literature — ​twaddle enlivened by statistics at second hand.”9 Bigot’s lithograph parodies many tropes of globetrotter literature. Panel one conveys the excitement and expectation as the journey begins, while panel two documents the ravages of sea travel, a common juxtaposition in globetrotter travel accounts. Globetrotter authors waxed most eloquent when describing the experiences Bigot includes in panel three. Mount Fuji, a spectacular presence on the horizon, greeted globetrotters as they sailed into Yokohama harbor. From the port, globetrotters booked their first jinriksha ride, often the subject of meticulous and sometimes gendered description. Bigot’s coolie is modestly dressed, but during the hot summer months, sandals and a loincloth were preferred, much to the delight — ​but sometimes to the disgust — ​of Victorian-era women who were treated to close-up views of magnificent full-body tattoos and the sweaty buttocks of young Asian men. Removing one’s shoes before entering a residence, unfurnished rooms that required sitting and sleeping on the floor, Japanese cuisine and dining protocols, and the seemingly endless variety of insects with voracious appetites for human flesh occupied the attention of nearly every globetrotting author who visited Japan. Bigot also incorporates globetrotter perspectives on Japanese people in his visual narrative. Men are uniformly given less favorable treatment than women. Apart from the middle-aged gentleman in panel six, Bigot accentuates their toothy mouths in ways that makes them appear coarse and, in the case of the jinriksha coolie, unintelligent. The policeman in the final panel, a special case discussed in more detail below, projects a sinister threat of violence. Conversely, globetrotters were enthusiastically enamored with Japanese women. They found them physically attractive, accommodating, pleasant, and well-mannered — ​precisely the traits Bigot enhances visually and in their contributions to the narrative.

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Bigot’s depictions of Japanese as racial others also conforms to globetrotter preoccupations. Globetrotter authors often adopted the essentializing language of ethnography when relating their first impressions of any nonwhite people they encountered during their travels. Visual differences such as dress and coiffure were often the starting point of their description, but body type and facial structure typically received the most emphasis. As noted above, all the characters in Bigot’s lithograph — ​even the Japanese — ​have the same oddly proportioned body type as the traveler. But whereas the traveler’s oversize head is used primarily as a means to convey his frustration and anxiety, the large faces of the Japanese perform several visual and narrative tasks in which humor and racial difference come together in an uneasy balance. As with his traveler, Bigot uses the large faces of his Japanese characters as comic assets — ​they serve as sites on which he records their reaction to the traveler’s foibles. But there are no reactions apart from the bemused smile seen on the face of nearly every Japanese character in the narrative. The traveler’s distress receives no empathetic response. Instead, his failed attempts to communicate and acculturate make him the object of spectacle in every panel. Even the incidental Japanese characters peopling the background of the Yokohama scenes focus their attention on the traveler. This lack of reaction, or to be more precise, the same reaction on the part of all the Japanese characters, enhances the traveler’s alienation. His experiences become all the more vexatious, but more importantly, all the more humorous, because here everyone looks at him. These internal gazes also function as a clever visual device that cues viewers to enjoy the spectacle and smile along with the Japanese at the traveler’s expense. In effect, viewers temporarily become Japanese, and the traveler becomes a racial other within his own community of non-Japanese viewers. But when, as a matter of visual and narrative expediency, Bigot turns every Japanese face toward the viewer, he also enhances the display of racial difference. He forces viewers into the role of globetrotting ethnographers. And once viewer subjectivity is established along this vector, Bigot’s Japanese characters become objects of racial spectacle open for direct comparison with the traveler. The Japanese may share his disproportionate body type, and their oversize faces may similarly serve as comic assets, but only the traveler has an individual identity and personality. The ubiquitous bemused smiles of Bigot’s Japanese characters — ​their comic asset — ​become racialized masks that make them inscrutable and unknowable. They remain others within the narrative in spite of the vital work they perform generating and sustaining its humor.

113 The Other Within

Because they are not circumscribed by textual constraints, visual narratives readily lend themselves to multiple interpretations. While the globetrotter narrative constitutes Bigot’s primary message, he offers another possible reading, subtly cued by details in the first and last panels of his illustration. The narrative begins and ends in seaports where the traveler encounters men in uniforms: a ship’s captain and deckhand in the first and a police officer in the last. Bigot’s portrayal of these figures is an exercise in contrasts. The French officer is friendly and helpful; the deckhand seems easygoing and amiable. The menacing countenance of the Japanese police officer lacks entirely the pleasant demeanor of the French or, for that matter, the proprietors and staff of the Japanese inn. The eight-panel narrative also implies the passage of time; Bigot takes advantage of this potential to heighten the contrast between the French crew and the Japanese police officer. In the first panel, the traveler glances left, toward the future, toward Japan and the sequence of experiences he will encounter in the next six panels. In the last panel, he casts a harried and fearful glance backward over his shoulder and the previous six panels. These directional glances effectively frame the traveler’s narrative while isolating the policeman outside its chronological frame. The policeman thus represents both a future as yet unrealized and an alternative reading of the narrative. What, then, is the future to which Bigot alludes? Prior to the opening of the treaty ports, Japan consisted of roughly 260 domains (han), each of which was controlled by relatively autonomous local samurai governments. Leaders of these heavily militarized domains submitted to the rule of the shogun through feudal-style allegiances and personal oaths of loyalty, but they retained primary responsibility for managing and policing the affairs of their territory. Commodore Perry’s threat of foreign occupation in 1853 and the unequal treaties Japan was forced to sign with Western governments in 1859 brought about the rapid dissolution of the shogunal government and the feudal relationships on which it relied. The new administration that emerged in 1868 recognized the need for national institutions of governance modeled on the West. By decree, a conscripted military with a centralized command superseded the need to maintain independent militaries in the provinces.10 Similarly, centralized control and command of local police forces was legislated in 1885. The uniformed police officer in the last panel of Bigot’s narrative represents the product of these developments. Foreign residents of the treaty ports had little complimentary to say about Japan’s new police forces, which were particularly prone to abuse their author-

114 No Laughing Matter

ity. Bigot’s predecessor, Charles Wirgman (1832–1891), frequently pilloried them in his caricatures. Wirgman arrived in Japan in the early 1860s as a reporter and sketch artist for the Illustrated London News. In 1862 he began publishing the Japan Punch, modeled on the British humor magazine of similar title. Its earliest woodblock-printed versions were issued irregularly, but Wirgman switched to lithographs in 1883 when demand had grown enough to publish on a monthly basis. Wirgman’s illustrations primarily poked fun at life in the treaty ports, but by the mid-1880s he began to critique some facets of Japan’s modernization. Japanese policing frequently drew his ire. His satire often commented on their unkempt appearance and lack of discipline.11 When Wirgman ceased publication of Japan Punch in 1887, Bigot filled the void with Toba-e. Like Wirgman’s work, Bigot’s satirical illustrations for this self-published journal of humor frequently took issue with the disagreeable aspects of Japanese modernization. Bigot’s satire tended to be more aggressive than Wirgman’s in both its choice of subjects and its methods. Recognizable personalities in Japan Punch tended to be members of the foreign community. Japanese were, for the most part, presented as generic constructions. Bigot also had a cadre of stock Japanese characters, much like those that appear in the lithograph, but his Toba-e caricatures frequently included important politicians, people of considerable social standing, and even the emperor. The police were also one of Bigot’s favorite targets, but he may have had more personal reasons than Wirgman. Bigot’s antigovernment and antimodernization views made him the subject of police investigations. His notoriety became somewhat of a media sensation. The December 11, 1886, edition of the newspaper Chôya Shimbun included the following: “The French artisan Bigot, who has been living in our country these last few years and is presently residing somewhere in Kojimachi 5-chome, is said to call into his home rag-pickers loitering in the streets of Tokyo, as well as other trades people such as jôruri chanters. He sketches these most impoverished examples of Japanese lowlife and sends the pictures back to his home country. Might there not be some way to prevent this practice as it will invite contempt of foreigners toward our national customs?”12 Many of Bigot’s Toba-e illustrations were autobiographical; he appears as a harlequin with vaguely Japanese features. Police harassment of this alter ego recurs as a frequent theme, and Bigot’s uniformed tormentors look strikingly like the specimen in the last panel of the traveler’s narrative: sinister, threatening, menacing.13 Bigot’s unpleasant engagement with Jap-

115 The Other Within

Figure 5.2. Anonymous, Georges Bigot, 1899. Photograph, dimensions unknown. Nihon Manga Shiryokan, Tokyo, Japan.

anese law enforcement suggests that this figure is more than just a member of the Japanese cast of supporting players. There may be another, perhaps autobiographical reading of Bigot’s globetrotter narrative. In fact, the traveler looks strikingly like Bigot (fig. 5.2). But if this is indeed the artist, how do we reconcile the traveler’s narrative of alienation, anxiety, and frustration with a seventeen-year residency during which Bigot appears to have adapted fabulously to Japanese life and customs? The first international test of Japan’s modernization came in the Sino-Japanese War of 1894–1895. Following the model of Western imperialism, Japan sought to expand its sphere of influence on the Korean peninsula. China objected, claiming that Korea was traditionally a tutelary state under its control.

116 No Laughing Matter

A succession dispute within the Korean royal family provided the occasion and sufficient rationale for Japan and China to go to war. Westerns nations predicted a resounding victory for China, but within six months Japan decimated the Chinese forces in Korea, forcing China to relinquish its claims. Bigot became a correspondent for the English news magazine the Graphic with the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War. He produced photographs and illustrations documenting battlefield action in Korea, as well as fervent expressions of patriotism on the home front. Among the latter, his illustrations include depictions of the Japanese police arresting Chinese nationals living in the treaty ports. Throngs of Japanese spectators enthusiastically express their delight at these events.14 Bigot’s images of the Chinese are as racially essentialized as any he ever made of Japanese, but as someone who had invested much time and energy critiquing Japan’s modernization, and who had suffered police harassment because of his views, Bigot, we can assume, sympathized with the victims, rather than with the perpetrators or their adoring fans. Japan used its victory in the Sino-Japanese War and the international respect it garnered to renegotiate the unfavorable treaties it was forced to sign with Western nations in the late 1850s. The war marked Japan’s emergence as a modern nation deserving equal status with Western imperial powers, and the treaty revisions amounted to official international recognition of Japan’s modernity. Bigot divorced his wife, Masa, in 1899 and returned to France with his son a month before representatives of Japan and the Western powers signed the treaty revisions. The last panel of the lithograph thus becomes a site where several competing narratives collide. The generic globetrotter, our traveling companion and the source of much delight, becomes Bigot, an individual with particularly strong views on Japan’s emergent modernity. The globetrotter narrative and whatever humor it embodies confront a militarized, imperialist, modern Japan with its own emergent forms of racism. The inscrutable bemused smiles that so vexed the traveler but helped us laugh at his expense now seem comparatively innocent when compared to the face of the policeman. The traveler, who is also Bigot, rushes to the port to escape not the past but the future.

Notes 117 The Other Within

1. For an introduction to Bigot see Julia Meech-Pekarik, The World of the Meiji Print (New York: Weatherhill, 1986), 185–194. For a more thorough treatment of his career and oeuvre see Shimizu Isao, Meiji omokage Furansu-jin gaka Bigô no sekai (Tokyo: Yamagawa Shuppankai, 2002). 2. Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992), 4. 3. Verne completed the novel in December 1872 while Cook was still en route, but Verne family records indicate he was inspired by a leaflet Cook had published to promote his trip. See Piers Brendon, Thomas Cook: 150 Years of Popular Tourism (London: Secker & Warburg, 1991), 150. 4. Bly departed from Hoboken Pier on November 14, 1889, at 9:30 a.m. and returned — ​to much celebration — ​seventy-two days, six hours, eleven minutes, and fourteen seconds later. See Brooke Kroeger, Nellie Bly: Daredevil, Reporter, Feminist (New York: Times Books Random House, 1994). 5. See Brendon, Thomas Cook, 152. 6. William Elliot Griffis, The Mikado’s Empire (New York: Harper & Bros., 1876), 339. The steamship agencies included, from America, the Pacific Mail and the Oriental and Occidental; from England, the Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Company; from France, the Messageries Maritimes; and several local lines that plied the ports of China and Southeast Asia. 7. See Basil Hall Chamberlain, Things Japanese: Being Notes on Various Subjects Connected with Japan (London: Keagan Paul, Trench, Trubner; Kelly & Walsh Ltd., 1891), 212–214. 8. See Meech-Pekarik, World of the Meiji Print, 85–186. 9. See Chamberlain, Things Japanese, 64. 10. In 1871 the han were replaced by provinces administered by the national government. Universal military conscription began in 1873. 11. For a discussion of Wirgman’s activities in Japan see Shimizu Isao, Waguman: Nihon sobyôshû (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 2004). See 106–107 for reproductions of his Japan Punch cartoons showing policemen. Meech-Pekarik, World of the Meiji Print, 179–180, provides a brief English-language introduction to Wirgman. 12. Quoted in Meech-Pekarik, World of the Meiji Print, 187. 13. For reproductions of Bigot’s Toba-e illustrations showing police harassment see Shimizu, Meiji omokage Furansu-jin gaka Bigô no sekai, 45–47. 14. For Bigot’s war photographs and illustrations see ibid., 81–112.

six   Material Culture, Slavery,

and Governability in Colonial Cuba The Humorous Lessons of the Cigarette Marquillas  Agnes Lugo-Ortiz

Paved with blood and sorrow, with state violence, censorship, and war, the path that led to the legal demise of slavery in colonial Cuba in 1886, and to subsequent attempts to redefine its racialized social contract, was also paved with laughter. It may be difficult to ascertain, though, to what extent slaves themselves actually laughed at the prospect of their manumission and at the price they had to pay for it, or if they expressed any sense of ironic humor at the bittersweet and equivocally promising disciplines offered by a regime of wage labor and unequal citizenship in the post-abolition era. Silent about that possible laughter, our current historical archive, on the contrary, is rich in the intensity of its pathos. It records the centuries-long slave experiences of torture and pain, the objects and technologies by which that suffering was inflicted, and the many tactical acts of rebellion that resisted such an order of things. The Cuban record, in particular, is eloquent in its account (both factual and fictional) of slaves’ insubordinations and insurrections and of their decisive participation in the wars of independence — ​a process that lasted, interruptedly, for a long period of thirty years (1868 to 1898). Partly because of the overwhelming number of slaves and free people of color in the ranks of the revolutionary armies, both as foot soldiers and as prominent military officials, in their bloody course these wars were progressively and torturously, yet unambiguously, transformed from a strictly political project (that is, achieving national independence) into a struggle for the abolition of slavery during the period from 1868 to 1878 and for a rearrangement of the racialized social compact around the post-abolition era, after 1886.1 Thus, not comedy but the solemnity of epos seems to have been the privileged mode that plotted the black experience toward emancipation in Cuba, and Thanatos the ominous sign marking that road.

119 Material Culture, Slavery, and Governability

At least with regard to the articulation of public discourses (no claim could possibly be made here about the more subtle and informal practices of everyday life), for slaves and free people of color in Cuba, more generally, the belligerent path toward emancipation and citizenship was quite probably no laughing matter. However, the same cannot be said of their political opposition. As Ada Ferrer and Aline Helg have demonstrated, one of the most consistent concerns of many Cubans of color engaged in the struggle for equality throughout the period of the wars of independence and during the post-abolitionist years pertained to the battle of derisive images and skewed identifications waged against them by racist and pro-colonial forces on the island.2 From the institutions of civil society and the state, as well as the ranks of the revolutionary army itself, Cubans of color were represented either as anachronistic menacing savages or as not yet fully civilized creatures (that is, as figures of categorical or cultural evolutionary in-betweenness and scorn) whose belonging to the national community and to an order of rights was at best unadvisable and problematic. One of the main fronts for such attacks was the vigorous humoristic and satirical press entirely identified with the colonial regime that flourished in Cuba between the late 1850s and the 1890s. Through verbal and visual humor, publications such as El Moro Muza (1859–1875), Don Junípero (1862–1867), and Juan Palomo (1869–1874) aggressively, and even viciously, engaged with the current social and political issues, and were adamant in their racialized mockery of the revolutionary movement and its leaders — ​as exemplified in an 1870 caricature published in El Moro Muza by one of the most remarkable artists working in Cuba at the time, the Basque painter Víctor Patricio Landaluze (fig. 6.1).3 Landaluze’s drawing, titled Céspedes, anti-republicano y farsante (Céspedes, antirepublican and charlatan), is emblematic of the ideological tenor that characterized the political visual field of the revolutionary years. It satirically portrays the “father” of Cuban independence, Carlos Manuel de Céspedes, as an inebriated and aloof monarch — ​his drunkenness in this and other caricatures is typically marked by the darkened color of his prominent nose. Céspedes, who later was to be iconically mythicized in the Cuban nationalist imaginary for beginning the war against Spanish colonialism by freeing his own slaves and burning his estate, La Demajagua, on October 10, 1868, appears here indulgently served by two infantilized black men. In order to comply with Céspedes’s arrogant royal wish that they lift his mantle, these

120 No Laughing Matter

Figure 6.1. Víctor Patricio Landaluze, caricature published in El Moro Muza, 1870. Biblioteca Nacional José Martí, Havana. “Céspedes pintado por los suyos. Céspedes anti-republicano y farsante. Gran retrato copiado exactamente del natural por los acreditados artistas Ignacio Agramonte y Manuel R. Silva” (Céspedes painted by his own people. Céspedes anti-republican and a phony. Grand portrait copied directly from life by the renowned artists Ignacio Agramonte and Manuel R. Silva).

dwarflike figures are servile enough not to require the action of the lash that is delicately held in the revolutionary king’s right hand. Yet their obedience is nonetheless blithely surveyed by a backward-looking Céspedes, whose prominent scepter-whip seems to subtly mark the steps of his march forward. This image is a visual elaboration of three major issues of political conflict during this period: first, the imminent, although short-lived, triumph of liberal republicanism in Spain, which would culminate in the brief establishment of the first Spanish Republic in 1873; second, the inner conflicts within the revolutionary leadership that pitted advocates of a centralized conduct of the war and a delay in the abolition of slavery (represented by Céspedes) against those who pressed for the immediate establishment of a liberal republican government to lead the war efforts and declared an immediate end to slavery in 1869; and, third, the fearful and ever-present

121 Material Culture, Slavery, and Governability

image in the nineteenth-century Cuban political imaginary of Haiti as a signifier of the ominous idea of a black republic.4 In this cartoon, however, the political future promised by the caricatured revolutionary leadership is not that of a republic but of a degraded kingdom, one led not by a delirious black king à la Henri Christophe but by a laughably debauched and autocratic Cuban white criollo. The subjects of this kingdom are, in no uncertain terms, childlike blacks.5 Rather than seen as a progressive movement toward freedom, the war for Cuban independence is conceived of by the Spanish liberal, republican, and pro-colonial historical perspective of the cartoon as a march retrogressively moving forward, as an oxymoronic, proleptic inversion of historical progress: not as a movement toward liberal republican freedoms, but toward autocratic monarchy; not toward adult citizenship, but toward infantilizing enslavement and serfdom; not toward individual actions that are obedient to the state on the purported basis of the rational deliberation of a free will, but on stultifying violence and coercion; a march not toward civilization, but toward black savagery. It is a derisive and racialized inversion of the teleological liberal creed of modern temporality, one in which the struggle for freedom is nothing more than a farce, as the title of the cartoon itself very well indicates. In his delusional march sustained by barbarians, Céspedes obstinately persists in looking backward.6 Thus, against the Thanatos of the wars, the epic solemnity of national foundation (with its promises of a future palingenesis), and the social and imaginary reconfigurations produced by the abolition of slavery and the subsequent repositioning of Cubans of color within an order of rights, the pro-colonial response was made up not only of military counterstrategies and political repression, but also of laughter. This was laughter that, as a breaking point, appeared to be racially waged against the conception of historical mobility, against the historical narrative lines unleashed by revolutionary discourses and practices. Contrary to their modern proleptic sense, in the pro-colonial visual production of the period these discourses and practices were inversely construed as a suspension of the forward movement of historical time: as an obstacle to be overcome either through the infliction of death or through the fixation of their political impulses as a march toward retrogression (as in the royal and counter-progressive leadership of Landaluze’s Céspedes). In both cases, temporality (acceleration, suspension, retrogression) is what lies at the core of the racialized politics of humorous visuality and its deadly inversions.

Figure 6.2. C. A[nillo], ¡¡¡Vengan a ver esto!!! ( Just look at this!!!), c. 1860s–1880s. Cigarette marquilla, Para Usted factory, Cuba.

Figure 6.3. Anonymous, Agua Florida para blanquear la piel. Antes de untársela. Después. (Flower water for bleaching skin. Before and after), c. 1860s–1880s. Cigarette marquilla, La Honradez factory, Cuba.

Laughter and the Symbolic Elaboration of Material Culture: The Cigarette Marquillas 123 Material Culture, Slavery, and Governability

While the world of satirical cartoons makes particularly evident this racialized war of humor against an emancipatory temporality, a less apparent but nonetheless notable site from which this war was also launched was marquillas cigarreras (cigarette labels), the lithographic and chromolithographic prints that appeared on the paper sheets used in Cuba to wrap packed cigarettes during the second half of the nineteenth century. Among the rich array of subjects represented on these artifacts, people of color and their aspirations for social mobility appear as some of the most remarkable comic objects of derision (figs. 6.2 and 6.3). In this chapter I will explore the mechanism of this laughter: the subtle forms of symbolic constraint that the marquilla image deployed through pleasurable mockery (partly enabled by their aesthetic qualities) and the manner in which these engage epistemological questions of narrative and temporality, so saliently indexed in the broader pro-colonial visual production sketched above. Between the 1860s and 1890s, Cuban cigarettes, which, unlike cigars, were exclusively produced for the local market, were sold in small bundles instead of cardboard packages as is done today. One of the functions of the marquillas was to tightly wrap the cigarette bunch in the shape of a cylinder. In a self-referential gesture, one of the extant examples of these objects, “La cajetilla bocoy” (The pack-barrel, fig. 6.4), provides an image of how such lithographed papers were used at the time. The term marquilla denotes the particular quality of the material used for its production: a thick, lustrous, deep white paper that was highly suitable for drawing, and which is known in Spanish as papel de tina or papel de marcar (marking paper). The term marquilla also refers to the act of marking or branding merchandise to distinguish it from other products.7 The marquillas themselves were relatively small pieces of paper measuring about 12 by 8.5 centimeters. By law, they had a highly standardized visual structure: (1) the invariable trademark that had to be placed on the right side of the label; (2) the escena or estampa, the rectangle at the center where different subjects and themes could be represented once approved by the censor; and (3) the orlas, the elaborate two-inch visual frames that partly surround the estampa. Although the law required that the name and address of the factory appear somewhere on the marquilla, the names of the graphic

124 No Laughing Matter

Figure 6.4. Anonymous, La cajetilla bocoy (The pack-barrel), from the series Alegorías infantiles cubanas del cigarro y del tabaco, c. 1860s–1880s. Cigarette marquilla, La Honradez factory, Cuba.

artists who designed these objects are mostly unknown, since the majority of the images are unsigned. The marquillas were usually issued in thematic series purposefully designed to transform what was basically a utilitarian and marketing device into a collector’s item. The subjects serialized in these prints were of encyclopedic proportions: from butterflies, rare animals, or exotic landscapes to portraits of cultural and political personalities; from entwined patterns of letters and numbers to mythological figures; from visual narratives of Don Quixote and other novels popular at that time to incessant and rather obsessive displays of colonial, Spanish, and international military fashions and armaments, images that appear similar to toy soldiers.8 The historical specificity of these rather complex objects is, thus, constituted in the intersection of multiple values: their functional/use value as a disposable wrap; their commodified symbolic exchange value as advertisements; and their aesthetic value as a collector’s item destined for preservation. Aesthetics, use, and exchange values are all integrated in the very materiality of the marquilla. The drive toward collecting is constitutive of both the marquilla’s market and aesthetic value, of its impersonal/exchangeable condition as a commodity and its potentiality as an auratic object. Collecting here is, most decisively, not the afterthought of the object. The collector that these objects aimed

On the (Humorous) Collecting of People of Color Saidiya Hartman, in her remarkable book Scenes of Subjection, has suggested that hypervisibility is the ruling visual logic of modern plantation slavery.11

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to instantiate had, in no uncertain terms, an anonymous, homogeneous quality, in that he or she would achieve satisfaction through the restitution of the individual marquillas to their serialized (imagined) preexistent whole. The intended accumulation of these objects entailed an incitement toward possession and completion and also an epistemological dimension — ​the desire to restore the encyclopedia produced and promised by the individual images: the taxonomical organization of flora and fauna, the biographical serialization of world leaders, the knowledge of Greek mythology or of contemporary military might. 9 A remarkable core within this epistemologically luscious production was devoted to the humorous and injurious depiction of Cuban blacks and mulattoes, or, to say it differently, to laughing at people of color. They were part of the items to be collected, of the grand visual encyclopedia of the marquillas, right next to images of rare animals, exotic flowers, or foreign armies, and, we must add, beautiful white women, deployed for all sorts of allegorical and non-allegorical functions. Significantly, their injurious incorporation within that complex body of visual(ized) knowledge took place precisely at the moment when Cubans of color were attempting to constitute themselves as political subjects by embracing the promises of revolutionary agency and/ or by demanding in the civic sphere a different position within an order of rights. In both cases, an anti-stasis of the social, a certain sense of motion, of shifting gears and historical acceleration were all intensely at work. If, by engaging Judith Butler’s reflections on “injurious speech” and her assertion that our vulnerability to hateful utterances is a consequence of our being constituted by language, we were to further inquire into the power that visual humor (rather than verbal language) has to injure, we may very well conjecture (in a Lacanian complementary twist) that it is a consequence of our being constituted also by visuality.10 What is then the character of the political injury produced by the visual humor deployed in the marquillas? To what extent could their symbolic and affective technologies be seen as a means to contain the pace of emancipatory temporal dislocations and as part of the anxious imperatives for governability in the face of a post-slavery era?

126 No Laughing Matter

The condition of the slave as the permanent object of a surveying gaze is the fantasy deployed very early on by plantation legal discourses in the Americas, starting with the nefarious “Barbados Act” of 1661, up to the 1665 Louisiana Code Noir, the “Virginia Slave Code” of 1705, and the 1842 “Hispano-Cuban Slave Code.”12 Within this legislation, it was clearly stipulated that in the daily practices of plantation slavery, the slave was expected by law to be permanently visible (even when absent) to the eye of the master or to the eye of the master’s figurative substitution, the overseer. This drive toward the hypervisible that defines the legal/visual logic of the plantation system, with its cognitive and pornographic fantasy of total dominion, is one that strove to prevail during this period as a form of epistemological re-enslavement in the humorous visual depiction of people of color. At the transition from slavery to wage labor, from coercion to discipline, the racialized humor deployed in the marquilla (with its pleasurable, rather banal, but nonetheless rich visual rhetoric) became a symbolic technology by which to create the illusion of “fixing” or “narratively immobilizing” people of color as a déjà-known object. These series had to be reconstructed through the ambiguously commodifying practice of serialized collecting in its double axes of possessive accumulation and completion. Unless, of course, such operations were undermined by an indifferent consumer for whom the image was just a wrapper to be casually looked at, ephemerally enjoyed, used, and disposed. Two series among the diverse production of marquillas were particularly intense in their attempt to reassert the hypervisibility, the procured déjà (mais pas vraiment)-known quality of people of color. Through a game of narrative redoublings and repetitions that at times read as baroque variations, these series freeze time or make a (collectible) frieze of time within a spatial/visual frame. Visualized space becomes the container for narration and temporality in a move parallel to that performed by the legal/visual logic of the plantation upon the existence of the slave. The first of these series is a satirical almanac titled Almanaque profético para el año 1866 (Prophetic almanac for the year 1866); the second is a complex core comprising four series organized around the visual biography of “the mulatta,” constructed here as the subject of a satirical and punitive archetypical narrative. In both series, humorous visuality is waged as a disciplinary device to fix the movement (the mobility) of people of color in a narrative analogous to the proverbial character, evoked by Bergson in his theorization of the meaning of the comic, who absentmindedly slips on a banana peel and falls while rushing

Slowness and Seasonal Repetition: Almanaque profético para el año 1866 Among twelve marquillas, one for each month of the calendar year, ten of the items in this series satirize or caricature people of color by representing their behavior as a compulsive and immoral lack of discipline. The 1866 almanac (issued two years before the beginning of the Ten Year War) proposes and

127 Material Culture, Slavery, and Governability

down the street. For Bergson, in such a case the comic effect, the inducement to laugh, is the result of a lack of “elasticity,” of a “physical obstinacy” that emanated from a “rigidity or momentum” and which led “the muscles [to continue] to perform the same movement when the circumstances called for something else” (thus the slipping on the banana peel). The narrations at work in these marquillas implicitly or explicitly construct the life of people of color either as inapt slowness and repetition or as an acceleration of movement. In any case, to say it with Bergson, what is at stake within this representational/ humorous logic is the visualization of a lack of “flexibility,” an inadequacy with regard to the demands of a hegemonic social temporality, the fantasy that something unreflectively mechanical “has been encrusted upon the living.” While the underpinnings of such a construction are in actuality the opposite — ​that is, the resistance and refusal of ideological racist imperatives to adapt to the transformations of the social — ​the scenarios visualized in the marquillas invert the loci of inelasticity and rigidity by projecting them onto people of color as the agents of an inappropriately mechanized tempo. Through this inversion laughter acquires a rather normative role, divergent from the socio-ethical concerns that Bergson attributed to it as a potential device for the enhancement of difference. In Bergson’s reflection, laughter at “mechanical inelasticity” could be seen as a salutary “social gesture” that allows society to take on the “rigidity of the body, mind and character,” from which it needed to be “rid . . . in order to obtain from its members the greatest possible degree of elasticity and sociability.” In its most unadulterated forms, rigidity is the comic and laughter its corrective.13 In these marquillas, however, laughter is an attempt to symbolically instantiate an injurious immobility. This is indeed the temporal drive at work in the humorous mechanics of these marquillas in their derisive attitude toward the acceleration of time incited by revolution and abolition and the undoing of racialized normativity they mobilized.

Figure 6.5. Anonymous, Enero. Los diablos coronados castigarán tus pecados ( January. The crowned devils will punish your sins), from the Almanaque profético para el año 1866. Cigarette marquilla, La Honradez factory, Cuba.

Figure 6.6. Anonymous, Abril. Habrá espocisión [sic] de cañas gordas (April. There’ll be a fine showing of fat canes), from the Almanaque profético para el año 1866. Cigarette marquilla, La Honradez factory, Cuba.

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prophesies, almost as an inevitability, a “racialized tempo” marked by the four seasons of a cyclical “colored morality.” These seasons comprise four satirical themes that recur throughout the series within its different estampas: (1) fiesta (fig. 6.5; (2) lasciviousness (fig. 6.6); (3) alcoholism (fig. 6.7); and (4) idleness (fig. 6.8). In its chronological/temporal axis the series begins in January with “fiesta” and ends in December with “idleness.” Furthermore, each of the carefully crafted designs of the orlas comes to synthesize two of the remaining moral “seasons” developed in the series (that is, alcoholism and lasciviousness), thus elegantly reinforcing and completing the humorous ontological rigidity of the marquilla’s temporality within virtually the entire spatial totality of the sheet’s design (estampa and orla). Such a satirical intensification runs parallel to the liturgical calendar that appears in each of the objects, indicating the many religious festivities of the month. Religion and profanity, the sacred and the mundane, are placed in contiguity within the same field of vision, barely separated by a thin black borderline, on the verge of potential and mutual contamination. The first marquilla in this series, corresponding to the month of January (fig. 6.5), is a caricature of the festivities celebrated in Cuba since the early colonial period on Epiphany, which for Catholics falls on January 6. On that day throughout the slaveholding era, slaves were allowed to come from the rural areas into the cities and take over the streets, dancing and asking the neighbors for an aguinaldo, the monetary present given in exchange for their dances and performances.14 Víctor Patricio Landaluze’s Día de Reyes en La Habana (fig. 6.9) give us a more complex sense of what those celebrations may have entailed with regard to the performative dynamics of urban public space and the intersubjective social exchanges it may have generated, while still exploiting bodily poses to comic effect. One of the distinctive features of these fiestas was that each African cabildo, the institutions authorized during the colonial era to organize the sociability of the different African ethnicities, would crown a king and a queen for that day — ​in Landaluze’s painting, for example, the king is the figure on the left side of the canvas who is elegantly dressed in a Western tuxedo and distinguished by a sash and a scepter and courteously and solicitously extends his hat to the white ladies that remain well-guarded in their gated interior. The crowned devils will punish your sins is an allusion to these festivities and the carnivalesque inversion of royal dignity that they stage.15 By contrast to Landaluze’s work, this marquilla greatly lessens the visual

Figure 6.7. Anonymous, Julio. Chicharrón te volverás ( July. You’ll turn into cracklings), from the Almanaque profético para el año 1866. Cigarette marquilla, La Honradez factory, Cuba.

Figure 6.8. Anonymous, Diciembre. Pasarán trabajos comiendo guanajos (December. They will sweat to eat turkey), from the Almanaque profético para el año 1866. Cigarette marquilla, La Honradez factory, Cuba.

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energy and complexity of the fiesta. The caricature virtually cancels the city as a historically identifiable environment (which in Landaluze is marked by the recognizable dome and tower of the church and convent of San Francisco) and the systems of cultural and monetary exchanges between heterogeneous social and racial sectors enabled in the streets of Havana by the fiesta. It also, and perhaps most saliently, diminishes the semiotic richness of the diverse costumes: the festive carnivalesque inversions meant to be enacted through the use of Western garb and the relation to a whole system of cultural transmissions and memories connected to Africa indexed in the traditional costumes and masks (so perceptively rendered by Landaluze), and which in the image appear just as simplified and rather ridiculous feather headdress, skirt, and crown. Showing the slaves practically naked and displaying exaggerated dance steps and facial expressions, this marquilla atemporally suspends them in pure affect, apparently disconnected from any system of social and cultural meaning in the present (for example, via the appropriation of Western clothing) and from any ancestral tradition from the living past (such as via the display of identifiable African costumes). The disconnection staged by this marquilla would have certainly been complete if it were not for the ominous relational caption that warns the viewers, from a safe space

Material Culture, Slavery, and Governability

Figure 6.9. Víctor Patricio Landaluze, Día de Reyes en La Habana (Epiphany in Havana), c. 1870. Oil on canvas, 51 × 61 cm. Museo Nacional de Cuba, Havana.

132 No Laughing Matter

of verbal exteriority with regard to the figurative frame of the image, that these crowned devils one day will punish their sins. What sins? Whose sins? What day? The year 1866 thus starts with an ominous fiesta, one in which the caricatured slaves in their temporal suspension could nonetheless, and humorously, become satanic dancing ghosts.16 The endpoint of the chronological frame of this prophetic Almanaque is, of course, the month of December. The image that closes it, They will sweat to eat turkey (fig. 6.8), is a reference to the turkey dinner to celebrate Christmas eve or day, and it satirizes the supposed work that people of color may need to endure to enjoy the holidays, thus closing the chronological axis of the series with the theme of “idleness.” The chronological frame of this series is further enhanced by the framing of the orlas. The orlas satirically complete the four thematic seasons of the year by reference to alcoholism and lasciviousness. Here three apelike and seminaked figures (the men wearing loincloths, the woman exposing her breasts) compete for a bottle of alcohol (figs. 6.5, 6.7, 6.8). In July. You’ll turn into cracklings (fig. 6.7), the competition is resolved in the estampa, where the woman of the orla is shown in possession of the bottle, getting drunk under a smoking, burning sun and the surveying, almost expectant, gaze of a sketchily drawn white man (who protects himself from the sun with an umbrella). The second design of the orlas pertains more directly to the subject of lasciviousness and is more complex in composition and interplay of meanings (fig. 6.6). The image in this orla is divided into two different axes (one vertical, the other horizontal) that establish a visual distinction between present and past, history and myth, reality and fantasy. On the left side of the orla, on the vertical axis, are caricatures of a black and a red-skinned apelike man, one perched on top of the other, with Sambo-like grins on their faces. The one on top spies with lustful delight through a window (a window, one could say, that opens up the black men’s unconscious to the viewer’s gaze) onto a fantastical bucolic space, arrayed along the horizontal axis, where a group of white women are sensually resting. In this dream-like mythological scenario the four carefree women enjoy the delights of an intimate rustic moment in front of a pond where a white swan swims. The scene is, of course, an evocation of the mythological rape of Leda by Zeus in the shape of a swan (a rape that, we may recall, gave birth to beauty in the form of their daughter Helen and to a heroic belligerent contest between men for the possession of that beauty).

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Thus, the threat of rape in this image is played out as an ironic inversion of the whiteness of the swan with the blackness of the slaves. However, the image assuages the fears (and pleasures?) that the visualization of such a fantasy could produce in a white male viewer by inscribing, with humor, the promise of a quick and imminent punishment of the transgressors. For in the left distance, the principle of repression appears, a spectral figure with a whip in his hand, sketchily drawn much like the white surveying figure in July. You’ll turn into cracklings (fig. 6.7): this is the overseer, rushing to punish the black man’s fantasy. In this particular marquilla, the situation posed by the orla — ​its possible fears and pleasures — ​is re-elaborated as well by displacing and heightening the erotic charge of the orla into the rather vulgar but comic dynamics of the estampa. At the center of the estampa we see a black woman flanked by two black men (possibly the same ones from the orla) who hold “cañas gordas” (thick sugarcane stalks) in front of their crotches, to the black woman’s immense delight. In so doing, the image restitutes black men’s supposedly unbridled sexuality (no way to miss those large and erect phalluses) to its proper object — ​the black woman — ​who also appears here as a figure of potential sexual excess by having at her disposal not one but two well-endowed men. The image, then, moves from and in between the figuration of black men’s sexuality in the realm of a fantasy (a mythical desire to possess a white women in the orla) to its deployment in its “proper” place (the scenario of the black woman’s body and of desire in the estampa). This is a game in which the image actually duplicates white fantasies about black sexuality, offering the viewer, with the reassuring and amusing intercession of the overseer, its full visual spectrum. From the racist narrative perspective of the artifact itself, the humorous pleasures deployed in the Almanaque profético para el año 1866 enable the comforting fantasy of placing people of color lightheartedly in their “proper place” by constructing them as quaintly caricatured humorous objects — ​be this because of the amusing fiction of an ontological inevitability and repetition or due to the illusion of capturing their existence in a slow but steady temporal unfolding of a risible immoral sameness. Yet, it is even more in the figure of free mulattas that the plantation gaze strove to fully reassert itself and deploy its greatest epistemological visual lust and laughter — ​to the point of making humorous racialized conventions the implicit substance of tragedy.

134 No Laughing Matter

Figure 6.10. Anonymous, El palomo y la gabilana [sic] (Male dove and female hawk), from the series Historia de la mulata, after 1862. Cigarette marquilla, Para Usted factory, Cuba.

Acceleration and Punishment: The Life of the Mulatta Few other subjects received the kind of obsessive and systematic treatment in the visual production of the marquillas as the mulatta. Besides the numerous free-floating images that show her as an object of both repulsion and desire, there were at least four different series that staged her as the subject of a highly codified moralistic visual narrative, one in which her life was construed as a sequence of incomplete or failed aspirations for social mobility: Historia de la mulata (History of the mulatta, from the Para Usted factory, eight scenes); Vida de la mulata (Life of the mulatta, from La Honradez factory, seven scenes), La vida de la mulata (The life of the mulatta, also from La Honradez, seven scenes); and Vida y muerte de la mulata (Life and death of the mulatta, from the Llaguro factory, fifteen scenes).17 The series titled Historia de la mulata does not concentrate on the life of a single mulatta but on scenes of immoral behavior supposedly common to all mulattas, regardless of their age, complexion, or economic standing. These images insinuate that mulattas are ubiquitous beings and that their immorality pervades all aspects of the social sphere by targeting white men of all classes. They appear to move in a carefree fashion through public spaces,

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from the street to the market to sumptuous interiors, engaging with sailors and merchants as well as with old and pachydermic magnates (as in fig. 6.10). The vidas (with the strong hagiographic connotations of the word), on the contrary, visualize and narrativize the life of the mulatta in a linear temporal fashion — ​with a beginning, a middle, and an end — ​thus producing the mulatta as a discernible and knowable diachronic entity. All these vidas start with a scene of literal or metaphorical “birth” that corresponds to the first marquilla in the series. La vida de la mulata. El nacimiento (Birth) (fig. 6.11) depicts a biological birth (what makes the scene hilarious is the expression of domestic bliss on the faces of the new parents), while Vida y muerte de la mulata. 1a. El que siembra coje (1st. He who sows will reap) (fig. 6.12) narrates the beginning of her corrupt genealogy. This last image, which belongs to the longest and most complex of the three series, shows a black woman in the street engaging in a monetary exchange with a white man. Figuratively, it is a moment that conveys the act of conception, equating the origins of the mulatta with a corrupt sexual/monetary transaction. Even before birth, she is already marked by the signs of commodification and immorality. In a sort of moral inversion of the hagiographic model — ​in which, as Michel de Certeau has observed, everything in the life of the saint has been given from the very beginning, with a “vocation” and an “election,” thus producing the life of the saint as nothing but the unfolding epiphany of the god-given gift of sainthood — ​everything in the life of the mulatta has also been preordained, with an “initial ethos.”18 The unfolding path of the mulatta’s life throughout these series is unequivocally one of progressive, but narratively prefigured, moral degeneration that ends with the mulatta’s final demise either by illness (La vida de la mulata. La conducen al hospital [They take her to the hospital]) or death (Vida y muerte de la mulata. 15a. Fin de todo placer [15th. End of all pleasure]). Like the 1866 Almanaque — ​where the lives of people of color unfold between fiestas and idleness, alcohol and lasciviousness, marking the meaning of their existence through a predictable temporality — ​the lives of the mulattas show a similar drive to produce her as an immoral certitude. Her becoming in time is nothing but the confirmation of her essential truth, one that is offered to the viewer through the many (serialized and collectible) satirical repetitions performed in the marquillas. These repetitions draw a horizon of expectation where the viewer could see and know, without surprises, what is coming — ​a horizon of expectation not so different, to recall Bergson once again, from the banana peel in the street

Figure 6.11. Anonymous, El nacimiento (Birth), from the series La vida de la mulata, c. 1860s–1880s. Cigarette marquilla, La Honradez factory, Cuba.

Figure 6.12. C. Anillo, 1a. El que siembra coje (1st. He who sows will reap), from the series Vida y muerte de la mulata, c. 1860s–1880s. Cigarette marquilla, Llaguno factory, Cuba.

De blanco y negro inexplicable engendro, sublime, cuando quiere se enamora, insaciable en sus iras como el tigre, apacible en su amor como paloma. Antítesis viviente de dos mundos,

cambiante anfibio, esfinge misteriosa,

que el enigma propone a los pasantes, y al que no lo descifra lo devora.20

(Inexplicably engendered by white and black, sublime, she falls in love as she likes, insatiable in her wrath like a tiger, peaceful in her love like a dove.

Living antithesis of two worlds,

ever-changing amphibian, mysterious sphinx, who poses a riddle to the passerby,

and devours those who cannot solve it.)21

The poetic voice in these stanzas from Muñoz del Monte’s poem appears puzzled at the existence of the mulatta, a being that was “inexplicably engendered by white and black.” The bad faith about the sexual violence of slavery

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that elicits the viewer’s anticipation of the laughable fall. Within the logic of these marquillas, the comic pathos of the mulatta is that we can predict the pitfalls of her accelerated movement through the social environment. What makes her risibly pathetic is that her acceleration negates any real movement (of change and difference) — ​it is just the repetitive actualization of a frieze.19 This drive to visually and narratively produce the mulatta as a knowable being is a response to and a reenactment of the uncertainties and anxious ambivalences that her figure actually came to signify in the decades before the legal abolition of slavery in 1886 and in its aftermath. Far from a certainty, the mulatta was conceived as a dangerous enigma, like in Franciso Muñoz del Monte’s “La mulata,” published in Havana in 1845:

138 No Laughing Matter

is barely disguised here. In the poem the mulatta (whose origins are a puzzle) is herself an enigma, an “ever-changing amphibian” (that is, a protean being whose shape eludes clear recognition). She is a “mysterious sphinx” — ​an epistemological challenge. The inability to elucidate that mystery, the poem tells us, could be a deadly predicament; it will “devour” those who cannot solve it. What is the enigma at stake here? First, of course, that of racial identity itself, since the mulatta could pass as white, thus deceiving her white lover. This was an anxiety that was repeatedly inscribed in the marquillas of this period, just as in one from the Historia de la mulata. Café de escauriza, el ponche de leche (The milk punch is nothing but watered-down coffee). Set in a dancehall, the image shows a masked mulatta, solicitously surrounded by a group of elegant white men (but also under the inquiring gaze of a black boy who stares in knowing puzzlement at the scene) while the voice of the caption defines (and unmasks, so to speak), with a play on words, the truth of the situation for the viewer. The enigma in Muñoz’s poem seems to be resolved with self-assurance by the visual production of the marquillas. Insofar as the mulatta defies physiognomic categorization, solving the enigma requires exceptional visual skills. A visual lack, so to speak, could lead to an undesirable transaction, to an inappropriate recognition (as the above image suggests), but, more seriously, to incest. The fear of incest associated with the mulatta as an epistemological enigma (an awareness of who she really “is”) was partly thematized in the most important novel published in Cuba during the nineteenth century, Cecilia Valdés, by Cirilo Villaverde. At the center of its plot is the romance between a beautiful mulatta (Cecilia Valdés) and an irresponsible young criollo, Leonardo Gamboa, who, of course, happens to be her brother. At the end of the novel, Cecilia is pregnant with her brother’s child, and all sorts of tragedies ensue, including her confinement in a sanatorium (a fate not so different from the mulattas of the marquillas). At the beginning of the novel, though, the omniscient narrator, whose own desire for Cecilia is barely concealed throughout the text, describes her physical appearance with sensual gusto and then wondered: “¿A qué raza, pues, pertenecía esta muchacha? Difícil es decirlo. Sin embargo, a un ojo conocedor no podía esconderse que sus labios rojos tenían un borde o filete oscuro, y que la iluminación del rostro terminaba en una especie de penumbra hacia el nacimiento del cabello. Su sangre no era pura y bien podía asegurarse que allá en la tercera o cuarta generación estaba mezclada con la etíope.”22 (What was, thus, her

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race? It is difficult to say. Nevertheless, a connoisseur’s eye would not miss that her red lips had a dark edge, and that the lightness of her face ended in a sort of shadow at the growth of the hair. Her blood was not pure, and it can be assured that in the third or fourth generation it was mixed with that of the Ethiopian.23) The racial truth of the mulatta, or the production of the mulatta as a racial truth, requires the eye of a “connoisseur.” This is the eye that is redeployed in the marquillas not so much as an act of physiognomic recognition (as we have in Villaverde’s novel) but as a moral eye that can ascertain without ambiguities (and in a totalizing fashion) the shape of her moral destiny — ​a destiny that, as we have seen, has no other conclusion than punishment and demise. Or to say it differently: to recognize the physiognomics not of a body but of a moral countenance. Punctuated by ironies and satirical observations, the marquillas devoted to the life of the mulatta nevertheless exhibit as well the signs of melodrama and perhaps tragedy, even if there is no nobility in her “heroism.” However, in all these series, and despite brief moments where moral judgment may give way to glimpses of potential compassion or identification, the process that led to pain and suffering most decisively becomes an object of uncontrollable hilarity. This hilarity does not necessarily emanate from the impersonal moralistic viewer that guides our perceptions and interpretations of the scenes through most of the captions (and whose laughter is rather wittily circumspect). Rather, it emerges through the systematic and overt visual insertion, in each scene, of a mocking spectatorial eye. Without exception, in all these sequences, there is a moment of comic anagnorisis whose agent is the gaze of a black man, a figure who seems to believe that the melodramatic spectacle of the mulatta is a laughing matter.24 In the nonlinear narrative of the Historia de la mulata, for instance, we find, among its fragmentary diversity, an image with the caption “Nuevo sistema de anuncios para buscar colocación” (New system to publicize job wanted ads) (fig. 6.13), in which, at right, a black lad is laughing very heartily. What is he laughing at, and what is so funny? It is the elegant mulatta in this image, who coquettishly reciprocates the gallant attentions and desirous gazes of the solicitous white men who approach her as she walks in the park. Is it possible that the concealed face that elicits such laughter from the boy may resemble, in humorous terms, something like the “whiteface” portrayed in “Agua Florida para blanquear la piel. Antes de untársela. Después” (Flower

Figure 6.13. Anonymous, Nuevo sistema de anuncios para buscar colocación (New system to publicize job wanted ads), from the series Historia de la mulata, 1862. Cigarette marquilla, Para Usted factory, Cuba.

Figure 6.14. Anonymous, 12a. Caridad, Quieres Mecha? ¡¡Siaa!! (12th, Caridad, do you want me to light you up? Suuuuare!!), from the series Vida y muerte de la mulata, c. 1860s–1880s. Cigarette marquilla, Llaguno factory, Cuba.

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water for bleaching skin. Before and after) (fig. 6.3) — ​that is, her face reveals an aspiration for social mobility conceived here as a process of “whitening,” as an act of unwelcome acceleration that upsets the normative, naturalized order of things and which can only be perceived as an hilariously grotesque joke? In the vidas series, the judgmental mockery is no less subtle. The Vida y muerte de la mulata, for instance (fig. 6.14), radicalized the mockery by showing a drunk mulatta ready to respond to the sexual propositions of the black carriage driver, who with derisive and aggressive vulgarity asks her if she wants him to “light her up” (“¿quieres mecha?”). At this point, the series seems to be violently restoring the mulatta to her “proper place” within a system of sexual exchanges defined by racial segregation, very much like the image of the 1866 Almanaque discussed earlier, Abril: Habrá esposición de cañas gordas (fig. 6.6). What is at stake in both these images is a stark opposition to interracial relationships under threat of punishment.25 In all the mulatta series the black man is a figure of displacement, one loaded with the laughter and the scorn of the white male racist gaze that organizes the tragic comic spectacle of the mulatta. What do these black men laugh about? They laugh about the aspiration for social mobility of women of color; that is, at the same kind of humor by which “uppity blacks” were invented as performative incongruences (dancing the minuet, fig. 6.2) and as ontological inevitabilities (staying physiognomically or, more accurately socially, black no matter what, fig. 6.3). They laugh at the satirical capturing of the mulatta’s existence as the temporal unfolding of an immoral sameness; again, at the same sort of humoristic presuppositions we saw deployed in the 1866 Almanaque in which the tempo of people of color’s existence was immorality and vice. It could be said, then, that they certainly laugh at the mulatta, but also that their laughter is a projected complicity with the structures of racist humor through which all people of color (socially mobile blacks, the free poor, and the slaves as well) were rendered knowable as fixed entities that ought to be kept in the “proper” social place. As the totalitarian pretensions of dominion waged by the slaveholding plantation gaze had to progressively confront the new tasks of governability demanded by the slow and violent transition to a (nominally) exclusive regime of wage labor — ​one in which subordination had to be (at least legally) procured no longer by coercion but through discipline, and where space (especially the space of the plantation) ceased to be the legally predetermined border to the movement of workers — ​the humorous temporal logic of the

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marquillas appears as a symbolic re-elaboration and reassertion of fantasies of control and immobility that the end of slavery would not be able to fully uphold. This fantastic elaboration is intensified by the illusion of cognitive completion incited by the accumulative and possessive structure of serialized collecting itself. The humor of this fantasy is certainly not exempt from pain, in fact rather the opposite. If anything, the laughing black men in the mulatta series could also be seen as the ultimate form of mimicry (of a nonmusical minstrelsy, if you will), one that intensifies the white racist mockery at the tragicomic acceleration of the mulatta by visually canceling empathy and solidarity among expected kin, by intensifying the injury through radical dissociation. Only tragedy could ensue from such injurious laughter, as these series, even against themselves, and in the fault lines constitutive of their immobilizing teleological narrative, let us know.

Notes I would like to thank Marianne Hirsch, Stephan Palmié, Leo Spitzer, and Ana María Reyes for their kind and encouraging reading of this essay, as well as Raida Mara Suárez Portal, Margarita Suárez, and Zoila Lapique Becalí for their support and our many conversations about the marquillas under the sun of Havana. I am also grateful to the anonymous readers at the Journal for Latin American Studies (where this essay was first published) who provided clear and thoughtful suggestions to the final version of the text. Diane Miliotes, as always, gave me her “tough love” and helped me with the editing of its many versions. But my special gratitude goes to Angela Rosenthal, who read an earlier version of the essay with her usual intellectual passion and generosity and made many crucial and timely recommendations. Her mind and love live on in the best parts of this piece; its shortcomings are simply the result of my own limitations. 1. In this essay I will use the terms “people of color” or mulattoes, which was the language used in the second half of the nineteenth century to refer to persons of African descent. See Raúl Cepero Bonilla, Azúcar y abolición: Apuntes para una historia crítica del abolicionismo (Havana: Editorial Cénit, 1948); Walterio Carbonell, Cómo surgió la cultura nacional (Havana: Ediciones Yaka, 1961); Manuel Moreno Fraginals, “Desgarramiento azucarero e integración nacional,” Casa de las Américas 11, no. 62 (1970): 6–22; Rebecca Scott, Slave Emancipation in Cuba (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985); Ada Ferrer, Insurgent Cuba: Race, Nation, and Revolution, 1868– 1898 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999). 2. Ferrer, Insurgent Cuba; and Aline Helg, Our Rightful Share: The Afro-Cuban Struggle for Equality, 1886–1912 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995). 3. Landaluze is best known in Cuban art history for his extraordinary and complex

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costumbrista depictions of mulattoes and of urban scenes pertaining to Afro-Cuban life. For a basic introduction to Landaluze’s biography see Lázara Castellanos’ Víctor Patricio Landaluze (Havana: Editorial Letras Cubanas, 1991). The most comprehensive study to date on this rather understudied artist is Evelyn Carmen Ramos, “A Painter of Cuban Life: Víctor Patricio de Landaluze and Nineteenth-Century Cuban Politics” (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 2010). 4. Sibylle Fischer, Modernity Disavowed: Haiti and the Cultures of Slavery in the Age of Revolution (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004). 5. On the broader humorous and caricaturesque iconographic field deployed in the battle between empires within the Spanish-speaking Caribbean at the end of the nineteenth century, and in which the infantilization of people of color and “natives” had a prominent role, see John J. Johnson, Latin America in Caricatures (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1980); Manuel Méndez Saavedra, 1898: La Guerra Hispanoamericana en caricaturas / The Spanish American War in Cartoons (San Juan, PR: Comisión Puertorriqueña para la Celebración del Quinto Centenario del Descubrimiento de América y Puerto Rico, 1992); and La gráfica política del 98 (Extremadura, Spain: CEXCI, Junta de Extremadura, Consejo de Cultura y Patrimonio, n.d). 6. On the question of temporality and space with regard to colonial and postcolonial discursive formations see Anne McClintock’s Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York: Routledge, 1995), 36–42; and Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002). 7. Antonio Núñez Jiménez, Cuba en las marquillas cigarreras del siglo XIX / Cuba as Portrayed in 19th-Century Cigarettes Lithographs / Cuba dans les lithographies de cigarettes au XIXe siècle (Havana: Ediciones Turísticas de Cuba, 1985), 64–65; Núñez Jiménez, El libro del tabaco (Nuevo León, México: Pulsar Internacional, n.d.), 173–174; Núñez Jiménez, Marquillas cigarreras cubanas (España: Ediciones Tabapress, 1989), 33–34. For a beautiful and well-documented history of nineteenth-century Cuban lithography also see Zoila Lapique Becalí’s La memoria en las piedras (Havana: Ediciones Boloña, 2002). 8. Núñez Jiménez, Cuba en las marquillas cigarreras, 67–85; Núñez Jiménez, El libro del tabaco, 177–248. 9. A few extant albums preserved in the archives of the Museo Colonial and at the Oficina del Historiador de la Ciudad, Palacio de los Capitanes Generales, in Havana give us some idea of the possible identities of collectors, among them children and upper-class women, and of the organizational logic applied to the collecting of marquillas. Judging from this small sample, these collectors carefully organized the images in scrapbooks, one of which displays the complete series in succession and features an elegant leather cover with the initials of the owner inscribed in gold letters. It is difficult, though, to say how widespread such practices were, since the archival evidence is so scarce. However, the manufacturers’ marketing choice to produce illustrated series in the first place is indicative of the allure that collecting as a practice

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was believed to have had at the time. Significantly, the decades under examination here for the production of marquillas (c. 1860–1890) also coincides with the beginning of fine art collecting and the proliferation of cartes de visite on the island. Thus, the marquillas may also be seen as part of a broader reorganization of visual economies and cultures in Cuba during the second half of the nineteenth century. The mapping of this complex visual field is a task that still remains to be done. 10. Judith Butler, “On Linguistic Vulnerability,” in Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (New York: Routledge, 1997). 11. Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 36. A development of the concept of hypervisibility vis-à-vis slave (de)subjectification is found in Angela Rosenthal’s and Agnes Lugo-Ortiz’s “Envisioning Slave Portraiture,” in Slave Portraiture in the Atlantic World, ed. Agnes Lugo-Ortiz and Angela Rosenthal (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). 12. Stanley Engerman, Seymour Drescher, and Robert Paquette, eds., Slavery (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 43–142. 13. Henri Bergson, Laughter, trans. Cloudesely Brereton and Fred Rothwell (1911; London: Macmillan and Co., 1999), 9–10, 20–21. 14. Fernando Ortiz, “La fiesta afrocubana del Día de Reyes,” in Etnia y sociedad (1920; Havana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, 1993), 64–75. 15. Fernando Ortiz, “Los cabildos afrocubanos,” in Etnia y sociedad (1921; Havana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, 1993), 54–63. 16. Roberto González Echevarría has observed that the sins to be punished by these ghostly dancing slaves are those of slavery (observation made in a lecture delivered at the University of Chicago, October 2007). For his take on the relationships between art, literature, and fiesta in Cuban culture see his Cuban Fiestas (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010). Similarly, Diana Aramburu, in a suggestive reading of the Almanaque profético para el año 1866, states that in these marquillas, the figure of la culona (the “big-ass woman,” which is a conventional character of the fiestas) carries as well a charge of defiance: “Ella simboliza el tiempo festivo donde se puede ‘tirar todo a relajo,’ donde reina la risa liberadora y el ‘choteador’” (She represents festive time, when everything can be “taken as a joke” and in which liberating laughter and the Cuban joker prevail). See Diana Aramburu, “Las fiestas afrocubanas en las marquillas cigarreras del siglo XIX: El Almanaque profético para el año 1866,” Afro-Hispanic Review 29, no. 1 (2010): 11–34. 17. Vera Kutzinsky puts forward an intelligent reading of the relationships between gender, race, and the masculinist gaze in the series Vida y muerte de la mulata in her Sugar Secrets: Race and the Erotics of Cuban Nationalism (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1993), 43–100. Feliza Madrazo has also addressed these issues in her Ni chicha ni limonada: Depictions of the Mulatto Woman in Cuban Tobacco Art (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Research Paper Series No. 34); and so does Alison Fraunhar in her “Marquillas cigarreras cubanas: Nation and Desire in the

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Nineteenth Century,” Hispanic Research Journal 9, no. 5 (2008): 458–478. For a broader and insightful discussion of the mulatta as a hermeneutic device in post-abolitionist Cuba see Jill Lane’s Blackface Cuba (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), 180–223. Vida y muerte de la mulata is one of a rare marquilla series that is signed, by a “C. Anillo,” about whom nothing is yet known. 18. Cf. Michel de Certeau, “Una variante: La edificación hagiográfica,” in his La escritura de la historia, trans. Jorge López Monctezuma (1978; Mexico City: Universidad Iberoamericana, 1985), 294. For the historical distinctions between hagiography and biography see Daniel Madelénat, La biographie (Paris: PUF, 1984). On the issue of secularized sainthood in nineteenth-century revolutionary Cuba see Agnes Lugo-Ortiz, Identidades imaginadas: Biografía y nacionalidad en el horizonte de la guerra (Cuba, 1860–1898) (Río Piedras: Editorial de la Universidad de Puerto Rico, 1999), 76–79. 19. The construction of the mulatta that we find in the Cuban marquillas seems to diverge profoundly from that found in the works of Agustino Brunias within the eighteenth-century British West Indian context. Kay Dian Kriz has convincingly argued that during that juncture, Brunias exploited the perceived racial/ontological ambiguity of socially mobile mulattas “to represent civilized society under development in a place ‘in-between’ civilized Europe and savage Africa.” See Kriz, Slavery, Sugar and the Culture of Refinement: Picturing the British West Indies, 1700–1840 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008), 45. The social aspirations of these British colonial mulattas were produced as indexical of the benefits of colonialism, of its refining cultural influences upon the primitiveness of black Africans (a construction that Kriz makes clear did not exclude a simultaneous elaboration of their bodies as sexually charged; the mulatta incorporated both rudeness and refinement). Bespeaking the particular tensions of late nineteenth-century abolitionist/revolutionary Cuba, in the marquillas the mulatta’s aspiration to social mobility and cultural refinement is, on the contrary, thoroughly punished by the visual narrative, and it is in no way contemplated as a positive by-product of colonialism. 20. Francisco Muñoz del Monte, “La mulata,” in Poesía afroantillana y negrista (Puerto Rico, República Dominicana, Cuba), ed. Jorge Luis Morales (1845; Río Piedras: Editorial de la Universidad de Puerto Rico, 1981), 196–197. 21. Translated by Kutzinsky, Sugar Secrets, 27. 22. Cirilo Villaverde, Cecilia Valdés (1882; Madrid: Cátedra, 2001), 73. 23. Cirilo Villaverde, Cecilia Valdés, ed. Sybille Fischer, trans. Helen Lane (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 13. 24. Both Fraunhar and Aramburu mobilize Jorge Mañach’s discussion of the term choteo to describe the kind of humor deployed in the marquillas. Mañach’s pivotal lectures of 1928 (published under the title La crisis de la alta cultura en Cuba: Indagación del choteo [1928; Miami: Ediciones Universal, 1991]) are concerned with what he deemed to be the crisis of “high culture” in Cuba during the post-independence era. For him, choteo stands for a problematic and impertinent sort of Cuban (national

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specific) humor that indiscriminately denies gravitas to the serious facts of social and personal life, thus impoverishing it. Or to say it differently, it is humor geared toward melting all that is solid. Such humor, as he saw it, had started as a feature of the lower classes and has progressively contaminated all social stratas. In my view, Mañach’s choteo is a figure that allows him to critically articulate his own anxieties about the social and cultural dynamics of early Republican Cuba and not necessarily an analytical category to project retrospectively (and with the risk of ahistoricity) into the dynamics of the nineteenth century. Thus I will refrain from naming the humor of the marquillas as choteo or from suggesting that their humor could be seen as a sort of an anticolonial expression of Cubanness (as Fraunhar seems to suggest). 25. On interracial marriages in colonial Cuba see Verena Martínez-Alier, Marriage, Class, and Colour in Nineteenth-Century Cuba: A Study of Racial Attitudes and Sexual Values in a Slave Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974).

Part 2  Racial Humor and Theories of Modern Media

seven   Fake Nostalgia for the Indian

The Argentinean Fiction of National Identity in the Comics of Patoruzú  Ana Merino Translated by Elizabeth Polli

Since their debut at the end of the nineteenth century, comics have turned to stereotypes in order to give continuity and aesthetic stability to their characters. The genre of the graphic novel, a recent addition to the scene, has broken with the idea of the stereotypical character, introducing instead literary complexity to the plots and the configurations of the characters. Nevertheless, in this chapter I am concerned with a reflection on the classic construction of stereotypical comic strip characters that aspire to entertain and provoke humor in readers. I will take a close look at the development of humor through the character of Patoruzú, a charismatic stereotypical figure of the Argentine comic tradition, and analyze the contradictions he represents. Patoruzú, created by Dante Quinterno in 1928, is configured around a series of stable qualities that define him and make him a permanent fixture in the memory of his readers. In their book El discurso del cómic, Luis Gasca and Román Gubern elaborate a dense compilation and inventory of the semiotic conventions of comics. They remark on the complexity of the medium, as comics illustrate and narrate at the same time. Moreover, Gasca and Gubern recognize that the codification of conventions, as rigid as they may be, can be broken. In spite of the variations, derivations, or transgressions that take place as comics become more and more avant-garde, Gasca and Gubern attempt to elaborate a classification of character types. In this way they develop three encompassing areas, one iconographic, another of literary expression, and a third of narrative techniques. Within the iconographic section we find stereotypes: “Comics have generated dense families of stereotypes, of archetypical characters which give in to characteristic and very stable iconic representations, starting with peculiar features that turn into permanent signs

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of identity.”1 A list of codified human stereotypes appears in their selection, which they define as a “transnational legion,” as well as experiences and states of being, like astonishment, fright, or pain. The gallery of characters maintains a curious stability in its “iconic representations unmistakable through time, which go beyond social mutations and national particularities.” This stereotypical atemporality is for Gasca and Gubern a type of “cultural anthropological lesson in the era of mass media.”2 Gasca and Gubern do not dedicate enough attention to analyzing the implications of these iconic representations of characters, nor to their permanence. They make the point in discussing the stereotype of the cannibal — ​a figure with African traits cooking up his white victims in a large pot — ​that it is a product elaborated from the ethnocentric Western point of view, and that comics have tended to represent the cultures of other peoples with racist shades. Moreover, in their section on black characters, Gasca and Gubern emphasize how Western comics have tended to represent minorities “under a satiric light, with badly dissimulated racist connotations. In the case of blacks, the idiotic look and the big lips have granted them a clown-like aspect.”3 This sad reality in the history of comics opens a space for reflection on the weight of white Occidental culture in the racial representation of characters. When considering villains, it is clear that these figures reflect the sociopolitical circumstances in which comics emerged. The Second World War saw the rise in the United States of a complex array of evil Japanese characters with sinister traits. For example, the adventures of the character Flash Gordon, created by Alex Raymon for the King Features Syndicate in 1934, develop over a number of years the science fiction plot of Planet Mongo, where the hero must confront the emperor “Ming the Merciless” (fig. 7.1). The choice to endow the character with Oriental traits follows the discriminatory and condescending attitude of Anglo-American culture in the United States evident at that time. Jules Feiffer explains very well the stereotypical Oriental villain in his book The Great Comic Book Heroes: “The unwritten success story of the war was the smash comeback of the Oriental villain. . . . Until the war we always assumed he was Chinese. But now we know what he was! A Jap; a Yellow-Belly Jap; a Jap-a-Nazi Rat: these being the three major classifications.”4 Even in some of the adventures of the Argentine character Patoruzú many examples of the black or Oriental stereotype appear, of course tied to plots of travels that take place in apparently exotic areas. In the episode (fig. 7.2)

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Figure 7.1. Alex Raymon, “Ming the Merciless,” from Flash Gordon, King Features Syndicate, USA, 1934–.

titled “El aguila de oro,” for example, which appeared in the newspaper El Mundo in 1936, one of the negative characters is a Chinese man called Miko, who is depicted with a pigtail, slanted eyes, and big buck teeth. Also drawn into the story is Miko’s brother Chan-Chu-Yoh, a chubby, half-wit cook on a boat. Other negative stereotypical, Oriental figures that will appear in different episodes are Fukumuku and Hong Kong (figs. 7.3 and 7.4). Nevertheless, in order to understand the different time periods and the meaning of Quintero’s comics within the context of Argentina, it is necessary to understand the general evolution of comics in that country in relationship to its own national stereotypes. In different periods strips appear where humor is constructed around genuinely Argentine protagonists, marked by racial traits: there are stories of blacks, Indians, and gauchos. Another group, that of Spanish immigrants and more specifically Galicians, will appear as well in humor magazines, always drawn as stereotypical brutes. The characters of Ramona the maid, created by Lilo Palacio in the 1930s, and Manolito, created by Quino in the mid-1960s, are well known. Both are depicted with one single eyebrow and rough facial traits (figs. 7.5 and 7.6). Many specialists, such as Jorge B. Rivera, Carlos Trillo, and Guillermo Saccomanno, have produced books that offer historiographic approaches to the Argentine universe of comics. But the work of Judith Gociol and Diego Rosemberg, compiled in one

Figure 7.2. Dante Quinterno, scene from “El aguila de oro,” 1936. In El Mundo, Argentina.

Figure 7.3. Dante Quinterno, “Fukumuku,” scene from “El rescate del idolo,” 1938. In El Mundo, Argentina.

Figure 7.4. Dante Quinterno, “Hong Kong,” scene from “Peligro amarillo,” 1940. In El Mundo, Argentina.

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thick volume of more than six hundred pages, is the best, the most detailed, and recent descriptive and chronologic history of the Argentine comics. Therefore, when broaching the study of Argentinean comics and the nature of their characters, Gociol and Rosemberg’s classifications are of great interest. Producing genealogies, they group characters together under labels, which imply clearly marked and stereotypical racial traits. In their work, they define independent sections such as “the blacks,” “the gauchos,” and “the Indians.” In the section on “the blacks” it is explained how at the end of the nineteenth century the black population in Argentina shrank, and therefore the presence of black characters at the beginning of the twentieth century is a surprise. They appear, above all, as secondary characters playing the part of servants or privates (low-ranking soldiers). There exists, therefore, a tendency to represent blacks in the role of subordinates in the plots of the stories. In the first panels of the Indian Patoruzú that I will analyze, a black person working as domestic help appears, someone who will be the brunt of jokes. Nevertheless, there are some Argentine comics in which the character of the black person is transformed throughout the panels. For example, the 1916 strips of Black Raúl, by Arturo Lanteri, give the main humorous role to the Afro-Argentinean title hero (fig. 7.7). The humor of these strips reflects the deep prejudices of Argentine society. The character is represented with graphic racist traits, and the humor is elaborated around the personality of a lazy, partying, illiterate individual, as if those were the behavioral traits that defined the Afro-Argentinean community of Buenos Aires. In Lanteri’s drawing one can see the bulging lips, prominent forehead, and frizzy hair typical of nineteenth-century caricatures of Africans. Similarly, the character of Policarpio, protagonist of Arístedes Rechain’s Page of the Dollar, which appeared at the end of 1922 (fig. 7.8), is also the victim of racial prejudice and is exploited as the unhappy jester laughed at with malice. One day Policarpio and his wife and son visit the zoo. The plot proposes a similarity between Policarpio and a monkey, who calls Policarpio his “little brother” at the same moment he is saying goodbye. Policarpio and his family leave the zoo full of fear. The scene delights in Policarpio’s defenselessness and in his son’s surprise at the similarities between his father and the monkey, and at how the monkey looks at his father while Policarpio tries to explain that he owes nothing to this animal. It is curious how, in their compilation of the examples, Gociol and Rosemberg select commentaries that reinforce not only graphic racism in the strips

154

Figure 7.5. (left) Lilo Palacio, “Ramona,” 1930s. Argentina.  Figure 7.6. (middle) Quino, “Manolito,” 1960s. Argentina.  Figure 7.7. (right) Arturo Lanteri, “Black Raúl,” 1916. Argentina.

Figure 7.8. Arístides Rechain, title scene from “Página del dolar,” 1922–1923. In La Novela Semanal, Argentina.

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but textual racism as well: “God made whites, Saint Peter made the mulattoes, and the devil made blacks for firewood for hell.”5 Even though the two experts don’t explain the importance of such sayings and sentences, one can see in the cited examples the racist perspectives of both the upper and popular classes. In the saying just cited, they constructed their derogatory and burlesque discourses around a religious framework. This humoristic rejection marked the real existence of Afro-Argentineans, who aside from suffering constant humiliation when engaging in the harshest working conditions within Argentine society, had to put up with seeing themselves converted into stereotypes fabricated to entertain the masses. This took place in the wake of the massive immigration of white Europeans in the nineteenth century. The derogatory humor of comics constructed the Afro-Argentineans as part of a racist ideological discourse that aimed to reject and disempower a community that in the seventeenth century had represented 30 percent of the population6 — ​a community that had been key to the foundation of the nation as slave labor; a community that, once liberated, continued carrying out the most difficult tasks, and that in addition filled the army’s lowest ranks. For Gociol and Rosemberg the cartoons that included blacks in a tangential and natural way as laborers or soldiers “fulfilled an unintentional mitigating function.”7 Therefore the surprise of the reader or current scholar faced with the presence of black characters in Argentinean humor at the start of the twentieth century is the consequence of the triumph of the false myth of a white Argentina, since its origins, that has become rooted in its collective imagination. The case of the “gaucho” character is also interesting and relevant as part of the genuine Argentinean stereotypes. The gaucho is the cowboy of the South American pampas and forms a social group that lived on the margins of the laws of the rural world. Because of the gauchos’ very autonomous and nomadic way of life on the plains, they were looked down upon by the organizations of institutional power. Nevertheless, the gaucho inspired a literary corpus that is key to understanding certain aspects of Argentinean culture. The genesis of the gaucho in literature links the traditional oral poetry with that of the courtly love tradition brought by sixteenth- and seventeenth-century colonizers. This is further combined with the improvised verse of the eighteenth-century gauchos — ​which mixed spontaneous poems with traditional ones framed by the rural world — ​and the gauchesco

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poetry created in 1813 by the Montevidean Bartolomé Hidalgo. Los cielitos by Hidalgo were inspired by traditional dance and music and contained revolutionary and patriotic elements directed against Spain. The gaucho as a social type was totally different from the Hispanic peninsular type, and through his work Hidalgo reinforced the image of this new Argentinean figure.8 The tradition was thus established and continues to evolve around a character that restores a unique and authentic rural national identity separate from the coordinates of the Spanish colonizer. Comics also included the “gaucho” in their vignettes, but unlike the “black” characters that were being erased from memory, the gaucho was transformed into a national stereotype, which from the rural perspective defined the errant Argentinean. As a stereotype born of a folkloric universe, it is very successful and is associated with an accentuated masculinity defined as criolla. The gauchesco characters that appeared were drawn as strongly masculine men, with beards or mustaches, who rode horses and lived a difficult and meandering lifestyle in the immensity of the pampas. Examples of this masculinized type of character are seen in realistic adventure comics that play with the idea of maleness as part of the gaucho tradition. The strips of Cirilo, el audaz, created in 1939 by Rapela, develop a folkloric idea of the gaucho appropriating the new Argentinean land. The gaucho Fabian Leyes from 1964, one of Rapela’s later creations, is indicative of this character type as well (fig. 7.9). Only the comic strip of Inodoro Pereyra, created by Fontanarrosa in 1972, breaks with the solemnity of the gaucho hero in order to present for an educated reader a parody of the stereotype and what it represents. In 1968, Oski also created humorous drawings illustrating key historical texts about America and Argentina, offering his own interpretation of the gauchos (fig. 7.10). The “Indians” occupied a geographical limit marked by the small forts of the colonizing culture and a symbolic limit in literature.9 Some comics representing gauchesco themes defined Indians pejoratively as malicious and alcoholic savages who held up stagecoaches and stole cattle. Because of the weight of the prejudices against them, Indian protagonists tend to be very isolated. One of the few but very prominent exceptions, however, is the character of the Indian protagonist Patoruzú. For critics, reading the adventures of Patoruzú is impregnated with ambiguous sensations, which “fluctuate between the satisfaction of the rescue of a historically sought-after character and the repetition of certain stereotypes of the same figure.”10 An academic reader tends to agree with this fluctuating perception of mixed

Figure 7.9. Rapela, “Fabian Leyes,” 1964. Argentina.

Figure 7.10. Oski (Oscar Conti), “Gauchos,” 1968. In Vera historia de Indias, 131. Argentina.

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feelings toward the world Patoruzú represents, particularly when the stories expand and include other family members. Patoruzú is a naïve Indian hero admired for his good heart, richness, and force, who will take care of his little brother Upa and little sister Patorita. The Indian family members turn out to be even more naïve than the main character Patoruzú; they are perfect to expand the humorous dimension of the comic and to develop more stereotypical aspects of the Indian. For example, in 1937, there is a story where Patoruzú discovers his brother Upa — ​ huge and mentally deficient — ​who was abandoned in a cave by their father. It was the physical deformity and obvious mental limitations of Upa that caused the previous Indian cacique (chief ), father of Patoruzú, to abandon the child, hoping that he would die of starvation in the cave and thus avoid bringing disgrace to the family. Fortunately Patoruzú finds his brother and takes care of him despite his physical deformities and mental problems. But the genesis of the Upa character raises the theme of the savage cruelty of Indians, capable of abandoning their own children that have deformities. Only someone exceptional like Patoruzú rises above this norm of intolerance. At the same time Upa’s mental limitations and deformities will be used as a constant element for humor in the stories developed in the city when he goes to live with his brother. Another character is Patoruzú’s sister Patorita, who first appears in 1959 when she arrives in Buenos Aires to stay for a while with Patoruzú and Upa in the big city. She represents the brute Indian girl who falls in love with every city man (fig. 7.11). The Argentinean writer and comic artist Roberto Fontanarrosa claimed in a prologue to the Indian’s story that Patoruzú was the great character of Argentine comics.11 Fontanarrosa stressed the mixture of classical and popular traits as factors constituting the graphic formula that succeeded in establishing roots in the memory of the rioplatenses (residents of the River Plate region) during past decades, as well as in the present. From a perspective that attempts to preserve the memory of the Argentine indigenous character, Patoruzú could be understood as a charismatic figure, representing a postcolonial Tehuelche chief capable of maintaining his own Patagonian empire. He is a hero with no superpowers, characterized by his physical strength, his nobility and sense of justice, his generosity, his courage, and his optimism. In spite of the admiration Fontanarrosa has for this comic strip, he also points out how politically incorrect its adventures were and how atypical the

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Figure 7.11. Dante Quinterno, title scene from “Solterita y Sabrosona,” 1959. In Revista Patoruzú, Argentina.

economic situations were within the strips, seeing that the true indigenous population had almost become extinct and lived in misery after being driven south by General Roca in the Desert Campaign (1879–1884). Thus the few surviving Indians of this genocide ended up living farther south of the Río Negro, while their lands in the pampas region were invaded by capitalist exploitation and were filled up with train tracks that connected the small villages with the capital. William Rowe and Vivian Schelling explain that an essential step in the formation of the modern Argentinean nation-state “was the elimination of the Indians, not just from the lands to the south of Buenos Aires, but from the national consciousness.”12 In this way “the Indians are the inassimilable-to-be-eliminated, they are the disappeared, as opposed to the gaucho who is always there as official voice of the popular.”13 But comics do not always reflect humor, especially when making historical allusions to tragic events. Some comic artists used their work to denounce this horrific period of genocide and to keep it alive in the memory of the Argentinean nation. For example, in his adaptation of the David Viñas text Los dueños de la tierra 1892 (The landowners 1892), Enrique Breccia creates a short graphic story that describes the systematic killing of Indians and the mutilation of their dead bodies (fig. 7.12).

Figure 7.12. Enrique Breccia, adaptation of David Viñas, “Los dueños de la tierra 1892” (The Landowners 1892).

Figure 7.13. Carlos Casalla, “Cabo Savino,” 1954, Argentina.

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There are multiple dimensions for the articulation of the Indian past through comics. An interesting example that combines numerous stereotypes with a realist style (typical of the adventure genre) is the comic Cabo Savino (initially the name was written with a b instead of a v), created in 1954 by Carlos Casalla and developed by different comic artists and scriptwriters. The most fascinating aspect of this story is the main character Cabo Savino, half gaucho and half plains soldier, who witnesses the Argentinean desert reality between 1860 and 1870, when the Indian population was still there. There is even a story where an Indian cacique and an American woman (gringa) fall in love and have a baby together (fig. 7.13). Generally, however, the articulation of the Argentinean Indian in the present forms part of the humorous stereotypical tradition. For example, the character of the gaucho Inodoro Pereyra by Fontanarrosa encounters Indians from different periods (fig. 7.14). The Indian as a character allows comic artist Fontanarrosa to parody, with politically incorrect humor, the differences between the gaucho and the Indian protagonists. In one strip, for example, a group of Indians visits Inodoro to look at him as an attraction because he has a huge nose. Again, Fontanarrosa is playing here with the contrast between noses, making the gaucho the target of the parody. The Indians scream with horror, thinking that the nose cannot be real, that it has to be artificial. Although the humor of the panel is based on Inodoro’s nose, the seminude representation of the Indians conjures up stereotypical elements of the Indian as savage. Another interesting example that plays with the stereotype of the gaucho and the Indian together can be found in the characters of the gaucho Zoilo and the Indian Quécaltrul by Beas. During the Third International Congress of the Spanish Language in Rosario (Argentina) in November 2004, the newspaper La Capital published a small comic booklet with these two stereotypical characters making humorous comments about the Spanish language. The Indians represented by Fontanarrosa and Beas demonstrate no deep genealogy associating them with particular historical events. To the contrary, the Tehuelche Indians that inspired Dante Quinterno were most likely the northern Tehuelches, a hunting group that called itself “Gününa Këna” and was historically located in the territories of the Colorado and Black Rivers up through the central region of Chubut. Nevertheless, with time and the pressure of the colonizers, the Indians moved farther south. In their book dedicated to the Tehuelche, Irma Bernal and Mario Sánchez

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Figure 7.14. Roberto Fontanarrrosa, title scene from “Inodoro Pereyra,” 1994. In Inodoro Pereyra 26, Argentina.

Proaño review the documents that describe the Indians’ encounter with the Europeans. Antonio Pigafetta, who was one of the members of Magellan’s expedition, documented the first European encounter with the Tehuelches (the southern group) in 1520, in the Bay of San Julián. Pigafetta points out above all the giant stature of the Tehuelches. Here was born the legend of the giant Patagonians, which in the twentieth century would connect with the humorous imagery of Quinterno’s character. In his ethnographic study of 1949, Federico A. Escalada defines the Tehuelches: “tall and muscular in their physical appearance, moderate and inclined toward generosity, in a moral sense; their large stature gave origin to the well-known legend of the giant southerners. Their goodness made living with them easy and agreeable, and finally determined the little resistance against fighting that led them to an almost absolute extinction, in many cases ruthlessly conducted by the whites.”14 These traits of strength and generosity are key to the configuration of the graphic character that combines generous kindness with an innocence linked to the stereotypical image of the good savage. The character of Patoruzú, a key referent in the genesis of the Argentinean comics, arose from the hand of Quinterno at the end of the decade of the 1920s and had several origins. In 1927 for the newspaper Crítica, Quinterno

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created the strip Un porteño optimista, which eventually came to be called what could be translated as “The adventures of Don Gil the contented one.” Don Gil represented the stereotype of the porteño, who aspired to be part of the high aristocracy of 1920s Buenos Aires and who liked to live well without having to work. On October 17, 1928, an advertisement appeared in the newspaper, informing the public that the character of Don Gil would adopt the Indian “Curugua-Curiguagüigua”; the text, accompanied by four drawings of different poses, explained that this Indian was the last vestige of the “giant Tehuelches” that inhabited Patagonia, and that he had been left alone after the death of his tutor and patron, who happened to be Don Gil’s uncle, Don Content. Before he died, Don Content, who lived in Chubut, had sent a letter to his nephew asking him to take charge of Curugua-Curiguagüigua, whom he had raised as his own son. The uncle’s fictitious letter, which was also included in the advertisement, proposed to familiarize the reader with the personality of this new character: “I would not want to die . . . leaving this Indian behind to the mercy of human wickedness, and I trust that you will know how to appreciate such a precious legacy, and thus treat CuruguaCuriguagügiua as a cousin or as a brother” (Crítica, October 17, 1928). The advertisement continues to develop the plot through an omniscient narrator who explains Don Gil’s reaction and why he feels obligated, by a “humanitarian sentiment” and by respecting the desires of his deceased uncle, to bring “the Patagonian Indian” from Chubut in order to become his “tutor and protector.” The advertisement ends with a small box that, along with creating great humorous expectations, summarizes the plot, associating it with the stereotypical vision of those who lived in the countryside: “Very soon the unique character ripped from his almost nomadic life in Patagonia will debut in the delightful adventures of the congenial Don Gilito, so as to introduce him into the center of a civilization so advanced as is ours of the great urban center of Buenos Aires” (Crítica, October 17, 1928). By ironically announcing the arrival of a new character, foreign to the referents of “civilization,” Quinterno wished to prepare the readers. The naïveté of this new character who was completely unfamiliar with the civilized world could inspire laughter in the readers who felt that the culture of a more and more modern Buenos Aires was superior. At the beginning of the twentieth century the population of Buenos Aires had grown enormously with the migratory influx of Europeans. In addition, the city was considered the first modern city of South America.

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It would be fitting to ask, why did Quinterno choose an Indian and not a gaucho to represent the “barbaric pureness” that arrived by train from the rural confines of the nation? In the mentality of the Argentine newspaper reader, there did not exist a single bit of bad conscience toward the indigenous genocide carried out decades before. The Argentine nation had become independent from the Spanish imperial metropole, constructing an imaginary whiteness of itself where indigeneity had been erased. The gaucho stereotype remained associated with popular folklore and was characterized by a rough masculinity, an independent and autonomous character. The stereotype of the Indian presented a much more playful humor to the binary relationship between a civilized porteño with no scruples and a good and ingenious savage. The first episode of the strip in which the character of the Indian appears was published in Crítica on October 19, 1928. In this vignette (fig. 7.15) we see the Indian with his poncho, polka-dotted pants, a hair band (where in the future a feather would be stuck), and sandals, which leave his feet bare. He emerges from the door of a railroad car and exclaims in Argentine Spanish, full of stereotypical idioms that attempt to represent indigenous speech, his satisfaction upon meeting his tutor. He introduces himself: “¡Guagua! ¡Piragua! ¿Vos sou meu tutor, chei? ¡Curugua-Curiguagüigua te saluda!” (Guagua! Piragua! Is you my tutor, man? Curugua-Curiguagüigua greets you!). The character of the long-nosed and light-bearded Indian contrasts with Don Gil, a man dressed in a suit with a small round nose and a thin mustache. Don Gil raises his arms to welcome the Indian, exclaiming, “At last you’ve arrived, ‘Patoruzú’! I baptize you with that name because your real name breaks my jaw.” Here it seems as if the first step at becoming a “civilized man” was to rename the “savage.” Nevertheless, the reason for changing the character’s name was not consciously related to the idea of dominating the “Other” by renaming him. When the announcement about the arrival of the Indian appeared two days earlier, the journalist Muzio Saenz Peña warned the young Dante Quinterno against a name so long and difficult to pronounce. He suggested that Quinterno change it to a catchy one that would be easier for the readers to remember. In this way, in the first vignette, Don Gil changes the name, using the “authority” of the “civilized man.” What is curious is that the name Patoruzú was inspired by a dark candy that was sold in pharmacies and made from orozú (licorice) flour. The popular sweet was associated with this new character, and in time, and thanks to the success he

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Figure 7.15. Dante Quinterno, “Curugua-Curiguagügiua Arrives in Buenos Aires,” scene from “Aventuras de Don Gil Contento,” In Diario Critica (Argentina), 1928.

achieved in the press, Patoruzú himself would be transformed into multiple consumer products. Reinforcing the humorous contrast between civilization and the savage world, the Indian — ​now renamed Patoruzú — ​arrives from Patagonia with Carmela, a large domesticated ñandú (fig. 7.16). This species of American ostrich creates tension at home as she cruelly attacks, chases, and pecks away at the head of Don Gil’s poor black servant, who asks for help from his boss: “¡Patlón, mile la manía que ha agalado esta avestruz colompida!” (Boss, look the obsession this corrupt ostrich pick up!). The servant not only exhibits the stereotypical traits that are generally characteristic of the Afro-Argentinean, but in addition there is a comical, stereotypical representation in his manner of speech. Don Gil expresses his dislike of the presence of the ñandú, who dirties the rooms and creates scandal. Patoruzú contemplates the scene but feels no compassion whatsoever for the poor servant, and with his own expressions that imitate the way the indigenous people speak, he states his indifference to what is happening, considering it most natural that the ñandú

Figure 7.16. Dante Quinterno, “Curugua-Curiguagügiua and Carmela,” scene from “Aventuras de Don Gil Contento,” In Diario Critica (Argentina), 1928.

Figure 7.17. Dante Quinterno, “Curugua-Curiguagügiua and the Lightbulb,” scene from “Aventuras de Don Gil Contento,” In Diario Critica (Argentina), 1928.

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has fun pecking at the head of the servant: “¡Y dejala, po, que se divierta!” (Let him be him, man, let him have fun!). The humorous plot is constructed around the civilization/barbarism contrast. When Don Gil opens Patoruzú’s trunk and discovers his bolas (a set of three ropes weighted at the ends, a type of Argentinean lasso used to catch cattle by entangling their legs), he exclaims: “You’ve arrived later than the paychecks of provincial teachers, Patoruzú. I’m going to have to civilize you.” Quinterno jokes sarcastically here about the slowness of the administration in paying the teachers who work in provincial village schools. In the eyes of Don Gil, the bolas that are used to hunt animals represent a savage instrument; thus Don Gil reiterates the need to civilize Patoruzú. Humorous scenes emphasize the naïveté of the Indian by showing him the advances of modern life, such as when we see how Don Gil teaches Patoruzú that by pushing a switch you have electric light (fig. 7.17): “Learn, ignorant Indian. Christopher Columbus discovered electricity. See? By pushing this button with your finger, light appears in this lamp.” In Don Gil’s mind the advances in civilization are the fruit of discovery and conquest, which is why he alludes automatically to Columbus as the discoverer and constructor of civilization. The comic strip plays with the stereotypes of the white civilizer and the indigenous barbarian, who barely recognizes the significance of what the “discovery” of America represents for Western culture. Patoruzú’s surprise is evident when he exclaims upon seeing the bulb light up: “Whoa, man!” He asks Don Gil if it is witchcraft. Patoruzú associates the lightbulb that burns with the magic of witchcraft and to his own cultural practices as a way of explaining the mysterious. The lightbulb got a good deal of play in the comic strip. Don Gil takes Patoruzú out for a walk in the street so he can get to know the city, but the Indian is obsessed with the idea of “making light with your finger,” and he does not listen to anything Don Gil says about life in Buenos Aires. Humor impregnates Don Gil’s descriptions as he jokes about the almost homicidal danger of the public buses, as he emphasizes the danger of possible robbers, or the possibility of a barber cutting one’s hair. Another of the traits that Don Gil points out is that in the city “one eats soup with a spoon,” assuming the Indian’s lack of etiquette. The next vignette changes the rhythm of the scene, because Patoruzú begins to cry like a small child and asks to go home so he can turn the light switch on and off: “WAAAAA! Let’s go home! I want to make light with my finger! BOOO! HOOO!” Don Gil is very surprised at the

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infantile temper tantrum that Patoruzú throws, and he takes him home to play with the light switch to try to calm him down: Indians, like children, need to be educated and taught with patience. The plot thickens in order to present a more intense humor to the contrast between characters when Patoruzú associates the brightness of the light with some “nuggets” that he had found in Chubut. Apparently the ñandú went around pecking at them, and Patoruzú picked them up because he liked how shiny they were. When he shows the bag to Don Gil, the latter discerns that they are gold nuggets. Don Gil thinks to himself “Geeze! GOLDnuggets! This brute doesn’t know what he has!” The popular idea of the existence of cities like El Dorado, awash in gold and containing infinite treasures hidden by the indigenous peoples, was accentuated by the assumption that the Indians were so naïve that they did not know what they had. Don Gil attempts to persuade Patoruzú to give him the nuggets so he can keep them safe, without letting him know how valuable they are. But Patoruzú prefers to use Carmela’s pouch as a “safe” (fig. 7.18). The comic strip ends as Patoruzú caresses the bird’s swollen pouch and Don Gil laments his luck and the brutality of the Indian: “What injustice in the world! . . . So much gold in the hands of such a brutal Indian! And who can get it out of the pouch of that kicking, wading bird?” The interesting thing is that Don Gil doesn’t achieve his goal in spite of being more civilized, in spite of thinking himself superior to the Indian. One can see here that the new character, though framed by stereotypes, actually is quite strong; in fact, in August 1931, Patoruzú became the main character of his own strip in the newspaper La Razón.15 When the interaction of the three characters, “the black,” “the Indian,” and “the white man,” is analyzed in this first complete strip, one clearly sees the construction of humorous discourse regarding race and class in Argentina. Don Gil is a “civilized” white man from the capital who holds a position of power, in spite of being a pleasure-seeker with aspirations of grandeur. He looks for strategies to work as little as possible and dedicates himself to activities bordering on the criminal. His stereotypical black servant belongs to the lowest rung of society; he is totally subordinate to Don Gil and is used in the plots as a joker to boost the humor of the vignettes. Don Gil, positioned in a “middle class,” is no model of exemplary behavior and does not transmit values in an attempt to educate the audience as to the injustices of society. He simply represents the desires of a type of exploitative and acquisitive character who meanders through the new, modern city.

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Figure 7.18. Dante Quinterno, “Curugua-Curiguagügiua Feeding Carmela Gold Nuggets,” scene from “Aventuras de Don Gil Contento,” In Diario Critica (Argentina), 1928.

But because he is white, he is allowed the luxury of putting “Don” before his given name, as well as of aspiring to a life of convenience with hardly any effort. He indirectly reproduces the plundering scheme of conquest and colonization, which assumes as natural the ability to benefit from the riches of the dominated territories. The presence of the indigenous character complicates the plot because it offers the stereotype of the “savage Indian,” but one marked by wealth and power. Patoruzú is a character that represents the indigenous population, but he is nothing at all like the true indigenous people marginalized, in misery, in Patagonia. He is a millionaire chief, and his riches allow him to move up the social ladder. The Patoruzú comics never allude to the drama that the Tehuelche peoples endured, devastated by the military campaigns. Curiously, Irma Bernal and Mario Sánchez Proaño mention in an essay the case of chief Orkeke, “who along with his people [was] imprisoned, stripped of belongings, and sent off to Buenos Aires[;] it is perhaps the most well-known case, because of the repercussions it had at that time.”16 Investigating this case, I discovered that the experience of chief Orkeke, con-

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sidered the most hospitable Tehuelche chief of Patagonia, had been a matter of much interest in Buenos Aires society. In his 1871 book, At Home with the Patagonians, the English traveler George Chaworth Musters documented the generosity and customs of this chief and the people of his tribe. But the world that the traveler Musters relates disintegrated little by little with the intervention of the white man, who wanted to dominate all the territories of this new nation. In 1883 Chief Orkeke and his tribe were imprisoned and taken away to Buenos Aires. But the people of Buenos Aires, who knew of Orkeke’s goodness and honesty through the travel writings of Musters, reacted with unease to what they considered to be governmental abuse. Juan Lucio Almeida gathered testimonies from that period; in an editorial published in the newspaper La Prensa titled “The Barbarous Civilization,” he denounced the capture of the Tehuelches. In light of the reactions, the government took diverse measures assuring that the Tehuelches would be treated well. One of the most interesting aspects of this episode is the attention paid to Chief Orkeke’s reactions to the different things he saw in the city: “Orkeke made a trip by carriage, to Palermo. . . . When he entered the park, what most called his attention . . . was an ostrich from Africa. . . . He appeared to be very content with everything that surrounded him.”17 Orkeke died of lung disease in Buenos Aires, and he never returned to Patagonia. His remains were stripped of their flesh, and his skeleton was conserved as an exotic piece for students to study: “The enormous cranium and the weight of the frontal bone has called much attention to those charged with dissecting Orkeke’s body. The shinbones and his arms are of uncommon dimensions.”18 This story of the large good Indian in the big city welcomed and defended by the inhabitants of Buenos Aires was engraved in popular memory, and it is in a certain way the kernel that grew into the fictitious Patoruzú thirty-five years later. After the character of Patoruzú had become established in his own comic, Quinterno created in 1936 an adventure that appeared in the daily newspaper El Mundo, titled The Golden Eagle; the plot revolves around the genealogy of Patoruzú’s origins, which in fact are traced back to the Egypt of the pharaohs. Patoruzú is revealed to be the direct descendant of Pharaoh Patoruzek I and the One-Eyed Patora. Quinterno also developed this plot in 1937 through a series of four chapters of a humorous story that appeared in the magazine Patoruzú. The story plays with absurd humor that breaks with the coordinates of time, history, and geography. Apparently, the firstborn of this pharaoh, a

plate 1. Robert Colescott, Eat Dem Taters, 1975. Courtesy of the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York.

plate 2. Maerten van Heemskerck, Triumph of Bacchus, c. 1535. Oil on canvas, 56 × 107 cm. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.

plate 3. Rembrandt, Abraham and Isaac, 1634. Oil on canvas, 193 × 132 cm. The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg. Photograph ©  The State Hermitage Museum. Photo by Vladimir Terebenin.

plate 4. Thomas Rowlandson, Raising the Wind, 1812. Etching. Courtesy of The Library of The Jewish Theological Seminary, New York.

plate 5. Unknown, The Girl in Stile, 1787. Hand-colored etching, published by S. W. Fores (the title is from a farce by John Scawen acted at Covent Garden December 6, 1786). The British Museum, London. © Trustees of the British Museum.

plate 6. James Gillray, Alecto and her Train at the Gate of Pandaemonium;___or__ The Recruiting Sarjeant enlisting John Bull, into the Revolution Service, July 4, 1791. Hand-colored etching, published by S. W. Fores. The Lewis Walpole Library, Farmington, Connecticut. Courtesy of the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University.

plate 7. C. A[nillo], ¡¡¡Vengan a ver esto!!! ( Just look at this!!!), c. 1860s–1880s. Cigarette marquilla, Para Usted factory, Cuba.

plate 8. Anonymous, El nacimiento (Birth), from the series La vida de la mulata, c. 1860s–1880s. Cigarette marquilla, La Honradez factory, Cuba.

plate 9. Record cover for “The Grand Moghul Suite” exemplifies the simple Orientalism of Pandit’s address: exotic font, spare use of florid graphics (which includes a pair of phantom eyes at the ends of the diagonal axis), and Pandit’s image seeming to peer through an irregular frame that suggests spatial depth and an access to spectacle.

plate 10. One of the Stars of the Native Floor Shows in Jamaica with “Charlie,” c. 1960. Postcard, Novelty Trading Co., Kingston, Jamaica; Dexter Press Inc., West Nyack, New York. Collection of author.

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prince also called Patoruzek, arrives in Patagonia accidentally when his bus, traveling from Cairo to Addis Ababa, looses control and ends up in a very different place: “When they landed, they found themselves in an unknown district, and upon asking the locals of the land where they were, they were told that they had arrived to Patagonia, but the locals couldn’t help them out, because Columbus had not yet discovered America.”19 Humor combines the Atlantic crossing in a bus with no brakes with the absurd answer from the locals that since they had not been discovered and civilized by Columbus and the Western world, they could not help the Egyptians out. But Prince Patoruzek becomes interested in the “sport” of hunting ñandus with bolas, and he misses the bus that would have taken him back to civilization. Nevertheless, Prince Patoruzek “didn’t miss his faraway homeland, seduced by the sweet tehuelche sounds which he soon learned to translate.” We see how by wittily inserting the blue blood of the pharaohs to the lineage of the Indian, the popularity of the strip surges, and the reader of transatlantic ancestry can feel self-identified. These are not simply the adventures of a character belonging to a community that is in reality marginalized, poor, and underappreciated, but of one who is accidentally tied to it; therefore the possibilities are mythologized thanks to the nobility of blood. In 1935 Quintero created the first syndicated Argentine cartoon, Syndicate Dante Quintero, which would allow him to be the owner of the strip and its characters. This meant he could imitate the North American models and develop a range of consumer products such as calendars. He could also sell Patoruzú’s costume — ​consisting of the poncho, the bow and arrow, the hair band, the feather, and the bolas — ​dolls of the character, bracelets, and brooches. The children who admired the adventures of the Indian could dress up as their hero and play with his dolls. In addition, Quinterno’s characters were adapted as animated cartoons at different times. Quinterno was a great admirer of Walt Disney, and he even visited the Disney studios in the early 1930s. His work found a reading public in the North American market and was published by the newspaper P.M. in New York from 1941 on. Patoruzú had the peculiarity of being a comic strip capable of navigating through the twentieth century and of finding readers in every new generation. For many years no one questioned the social contradictions and the racist elements implicit in the universe of this character. The adventures of the good-natured Indian Patoruzú seemed to be in harmony with the Disney model that Quinterno so respected. Both universes, full of stereotypes that

172 No Laughing Matter

impregnated the imagination of children and youth, were promoted by the discourse marked by the goodness of their heroes. No one would question the good intentions of Mickey Mouse, of Donald Duck (in spite of his bad temper), or of the Indian Patoruzú. Nevertheless, during the seventies, leftist intellectuals questioned the omnipresence of Disney comics in the Latin American markets. The comic books seemed innocent enough, but they were impregnated with racist discourses that manipulated the perspective of the readers. In their book How to Read Donald Duck, Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart elaborated a meticulous criticism of Disney’s world, even dedicating a chapter to the stereotype of the noble savage. Dorfman and Mattelart make a parodic criticism of the adventures of the ducks, explaining Disney’s perspective on race through the analysis of several comic strips: “All races, except the white. Color film is indispensable, because the native(s) come in all shades, from the darkest black to yellow via cafe-au-lait, ochre and that Light orange peculiar to the Redskins. . . . They are like children. Friendly, carefree, naive, trustful and happy.”20 Dorfman and Mattelart’s comical description of the traits that defined the “savages” Disney fabricated coincides with the traits that define Patoruzú and the Western perspective that had been in the offing since the discovery: “The savages are extraordinarily receptive. . . . They are disinterested and very generous . . . they are willing to give up everything material. EVERYTHING. EVERYTHING. So they are an inexhaustible font of riches and treasures which they cannot use. They are superstitious and imaginative. Without pretensions to erudition, we may describe them as the typical noble savage referred to by Christopher Columbus, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Marco Polo, Richard Nixon, William Shakespeare and Queen Victoria.”21 The Cuban magazine C Línea de Estudio de la Historieta, which contained articles and essays dedicated to comics in the 1970s, published a very critical reading of Quinterno’s work and his character. The article by Fernando Mas, dedicated to comics in Argentina, continues the line of criticism established by Dorfman and Mattelart and explains how Argentinean comics were also an instrument used to perpetuate ideology, devoid of a sense of nation and filled with racist and classist assumptions. But as comic artists themselves explained at the same time, the reason their work had “universalistic” shades and lacked national themes was that the local publications also aspired to be exported. Nevertheless, Mas emphasizes how

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the comics from the United States had not made universalistic concessions by thinking about outside readers. What is more, in Disney’s case, the imagery of his comics has dominated the rest of the world, promoting stereotypes lodged in the culture of the United States and in Disney’s own worldview. Therefore Mas’s interpretation coincides with Dorfman’s and Mattelart’s perspective, which saw how Disney represented the inhabitants of underdeveloped nations as children and as good, submissive savages who accepted foreign authority without questioning it. This led Mas to believe that Quinterno behaved like a North American because his Argentinean characters thought, reasoned, and acted “as if Walt Disney had created them.”22 It was thus explained that Patoruzú danced the mambo, which apparently is not an indigenous dance but a gaucho one, to “satisfy the rich American tourists, and tries to show that his set of values is the same as that of the Anglo-Saxon visitors.”23 Mas demanded an autonomous production that consolidated the values of national identity and broke with the North American aesthetic and thematic dependence. He perceived Patoruzú as “a pathetic figure from a country kept in check by underdevelopment.”24 When revisiting the figure of Patoruzú it has become clear how many elements have been mixed together. It is difficult to disentwine them, because the plots within which the character appeared changed with time, even though Patoruzú’s personality remained relatively static. It is interesting, nevertheless, to analyze the written instructions that Dante Quinterno gave to the scriptwriters who worked in the great entertainment business that was born out of the simple humorous comic strip. A now mature Quinterno, with his well-known Indian Patoruzú, could not avoid thinking of his creation as an idealized symbol. The humor that made fun of the innocent Indian from the first strips of 1928 diminished with time. According to Quinterno, Patoruzú had become a “universal symbol in which all virtues were conjugated, unreachable by the common mortal.” He affirmed that Patoruzú was “truly perfect,” and that he represented “the ideal human being that we would all like to be.” Because of that, the scriptwriters that wrote new adventures for Patoruzú had to fit the actions and reactions of the character “within the limits compatible with that ideal perfection.”25 Nevertheless, those strips of the “perfect” Indian who fought against an imperfect world were plagued with racist and xenophobic stereotypes that appeared continuously and became ever harsher in evil characters. Thus, the gypsies Juaniyo and Lola appeared, along with the king of the cannibals, and a Hindu or the already

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mentioned Chinese called Miko; these were all represented by the most stereotypical traits that characterized the Western comics of the twentieth century. Rodríguez Van Rousselt is conscious of this xenophobic reality and explains that Quinterno “is a son of his times, and his first years are spent during the First World War, his personality forms during his youth, and his life culminates before the beginning of the Second World War.”26 Therefore Quinterno simply absorbs and reflects the Western perspective of comics by adapting his imagery to his culture. In spite of being a peripheral nation, Argentina was living the conflicts and tensions of the West, a brutal and racist period that led to the genocidal atrocities of Nazism: “It’s a period of more than thirty years, in a world inconceivable for us where systems are disputed (capitalism–communism–national socialism), British supremacy is toppled, the North American and Russian strengths are born, and the horror of Nazism lurks.”27 In addition, the weight of the images of Western mass culture is added to the North American pulp, where one constantly saw “the prototypical white, blond, Protestant Anglo Saxon.”28 On the path that this character has walked the changes of perspective are reflected in a society that had to learn — ​and that is still learning — ​what identity, diversity, and race signify. The Patoruzú comics are not conscious of the fact that in their humor may be found the painful deficiencies of a society that has forgotten the suffering of a marginalized and colonized people, who have been converted into a nostalgic symbol of a legendary past.

Notes 1. Luis Gasca and Román Gubern, El discurso del comic (Madrid: Cátedra, 1994), 32. 2. Ibid. 3. Ibid., 75. 4. Jules Feiffer, The Great Comic Book Heroes (Seattle: Fantagraphics Books, 2003), 59–60. 5. Judith Gociol and Diego Rosemberg, La historieta argentina: Una historia (Buenos Aires: Ediciones de la Flor, 2000), 285. 6. George Reid Andrews explains in his book The Afro-Americans of Buenos Aires the effort that was made to erase from the registers and even from the census the memory of the Afro presence in Argentina and the construction of the myth of the white Argentinean. 7. Gociol and Rosemberg, La historieta argentina, 238.

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8. Ana Merino, “Inodoro Pereyra, a ‘Gaucho’ in the Pampa of Paper and Ink: Folkloric and Literary Intertextuality and Its Reformulations in Argentinean Comics,” in Cartooning in Latin America, ed. John A. Lent (Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 2005), 79. 9. Gociol and Rosemberg, La historieta argentina, 315. 10. Ibid., 315. 11. Roberto Fontanarrosa, prologue “¡Hija chei!,” in Dante Quinterno, Patoruzú, Biblioteca Clarín de Historieta, 7 (Santiago: Clarín, 2004), 8–13. 12. William Rowe and Vivian Schelling, Memory and Modernity: Popular Culture in Latin America (London: Verso, 1992), 29. 13. Ibid., 30. 14. Federico A. Escalada, El complejo “Tehuelche”: Estudios de etnografía patagónica (Buenos Aires: Imprenta y casa editora “Coni,” 1949), 10. 15. The Don Gil comic strip disappeared from the newspaper Crítica the day after the publication of the adventure of the Indian’s arrival in Buenos Aires. In December 1928 Quinterno initiated the Don Julián del Monte Pío strip in the newspaper La Razón. Don Julián is another pleasure seeker from the city whose characteristics are similar to those of Don Gil. On September 27, 1930, Patoruzú reappeared (with the same name), arriving once again in Buenos Aires, this time as a rich chief, so Don Julián could become his patron. 16. Irma Bernal and Mario Sánchez Proaño, Los Tehuelche (Buenos Aires: GalernaBúsqueda de Ayllu, 2001), 97. 17. Juan Lucio Almeida, “Orkeke en Buenos Aires,” Todo es Historia 10 (Buenos Aires, 1968), 64. 18. Ibid., 68. 19. Text taken from Andrés Ferreiro et al., Patoruzú: Vera historia no oficial del grande y famoso cacique tehuelche (Buenos Aires: Ediciones La Bañadera del Comic, 2001), 12. 20. Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart, How to Read Donald Duck: Imperialist Ideology in the Disney Comic (New York: International General, 1975), 44. 21. Ibid., 45. 22. Fernando Mas, “La historieta en la Argentina,” in C Linea, Revista Latinoamericana de Estudios de la Historieta 2, no. 11 (Havana, 1974?), 9. 23. Ibid., 10. 24. Ibid., 11. 25. Ferreiro et al., Patoruzú, 8–10, collects these interesting guidelines that Quinterno established to help out the scriptwriters. 26. Rodríguez Van Rousselt, “Política, discriminación y xenofobia,” in Ferreiro et al., Patoruzú, 73. 27. Ibid. 28. Ibid.

History is the subject of a structure whose site is not homogeneous, empty time, but time filled by the presence of the now.   — ​Walter Benjamin, “Theses”

eight   Passing for History

Humor and Early Television Historiography

Mark Williams

This chapter will introduce a case study that is central to a larger work about several figures of visual humor in early television, performers whose careers demonstrate historicized complexities between, first, the deployment of racial stereotypes, and, second, practices of racial passing. Passing, like stereotypes themselves, can be understood to participate in a regime of visibility that affords both regularized sites for identification and a difficulty in assuming a stasis or fixity of identity. Similarly, humor can work to either consolidate such a presumed set of fixities, or to undermine them. These performers were notable presences on early television in Los Angeles and include Korla Pandit, Iron Eyes Cody, and Ina Ray Hutton. None of these figures were widely known to have been passing at the time of their celebrity, a fact that imparts some of the historical interest in them today. Also significant is that most did not pass for “white,” but instead for “nonwhite” races/ethnicities. This chapter will introduce these complexities and then focus on Korla Pandit as a case study (fig. 8.1). These entertainers embodied mediated performances of racial passing within a series of empirical and methodological crossroads: between presumed nodes of racial/ethnic identity and representation, between local and national (television), and between the public memory of the performers and contemporary historicized knowledge about them. Despite, or perhaps because there is no evidence to suggest that they were allied in these acts of passing, or aware of one another’s acts of passing, I envision these performers as demarcating within early television history what Gilles Deleuze and

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Figure 8.1. Record cover for “The Grand Moghul Suite” exemplifies the simple Orientalism of Pandit’s address: exotic font, spare use of florid graphics (which includes a pair of phantom eyes at the ends of the diagonal axis), and Pandit’s image seeming to peer through an irregular frame that suggests spatial depth and an access to spectacle.

Félix Guattari called a “minor literature”: they performed “creative lines of escape” within broadly conceived rules and strictures of a culture of white dominance. In this way, they can be seen to figure a previously unforeseen historiographic crossroads.

Historiographic Interval Foucault stresses that history is both a form of knowledge and a form of power, and warns that historical writing may serve to erase the difference of the past and justify a certain version of the present. Part of the value of the analysis presented here is that the past has precisely become open to new issues and understandings — ​a trope of recognition that historical work may

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always be a process of opening, rather than merely or only the reification of an already-understood past. It is significant to underscore the importance of re-understanding these performers and their practices of passing in their own time, in what I would call a historiographic interval, in order to more fully comprehend what was at stake and what can still be learned from these individual careers as a collective minor literature. In terms of humor and comedic effect, this awareness helps to recognize and resist a tendency or capacity to merely collapse the literal and figurative significance of their careers and life experiences into a kind of presumptive punch line that casts them reductively as “inauthentic.” This emphasis on process and inquiry corresponds to the tropes of visual humor and race that are central to this project. Regarding humor, a basic distinction to be critically investigated and deployed is that between a presumed stasis implicit to racist stereotype and caricature, versus the spatially and temporally dynamic design of (racially engaged) joke structures. The implementation of these models of visual humor, related to and contingent upon presumed codes of racial and ethnic difference, will be seen to be important not only to the critical analysis of these performers, but to their historical and historiographic consideration as well. The multiple levels of “performance” considered here exist in several contexts, in perhaps surprisingly unmoored ontological and indexical circumstances. “Knowledge” of the passing of these performers has assumed a localized and gradual process toward public awareness/memory, which relates directly to the process-oriented historiographic emphases noted above. Nevertheless, each performer raises a slightly different set of historical issues regarding racial passing and its intersectional implications. Indeed, these performers’ careers can be seen to afford resistance to multiple simplistic and presumptive considerations of race as a “natural” sociohistorical and readily legible fact. This is one fundamental use value of understanding these careers within a historiographic interval. Additionally, we must recognize that the very concept of race — ​always a problematic and inexact category — ​is now recognized to be genetically unfounded, a false myth of biological determinism, obsolete in its very essence and definition. The implications and effects of this assertion/determination are largely still to be realized. One implication would seem to be the recognition that, whether or not we have been aware of it, we all have been

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“passing,” enacting an assumption of racial essence(s) that may not have a secure basis in nature or science. This recognition places an even greater purchase on work regarding passing and critical race theory in general. Because whatever arguments and rhetorics might evolve regarding a presumably post-race era, the sociohistorical dynamics of racism have had a deep, systematic, prolonged, and historic present and past, the rules and codes of which have set very different stakes for the experiences and practices of raced identity. These include, of course, histories of segregation, colonization, slavery, and lynching, plus palpable contemporary everyday risks of intimidation, discrimination, exploitation, brutality, and worse. Those who have knowingly assumed a racial identity different from what they understood to be their “nature” (and some estimate that this occurs far more regularly than one might typically expect) have often run an enhanced risk for such acts of passing. The place of humor in this analysis therefore involves both the pleasure of these “entertaining” performances and their consideration within an informed historiographic economy. In conjunction with critical race theory, I position the “knowledge” of passing, and these specific performances of passing, in relation to the model of classic joke structure: one that configures the presumptive economies of whiteness as the “object” of historicized visual humor. In this way, I place into relief and newly engage the site(s) of nonwhiteness within an implicitly dominant “white” imaginary of representation, so as to mobilize visual humor about race away from the “comic” fetishization of difference that underlies racial stereotypes. The case study here is the career of Korla Pandit, who was famous for many decades as a musical prodigy from India. His shows on KTLA and other local stations from 1949 to 1952 (estimated to total over 900 “live” shows), plus the many short films he made for early television syndication entrepreneur Lou Snader, established his celebrity in many quarters, but especially in Southern California. He was a surprise phenomenon of early Los Angeles television, prodigiously talented as a keyboard performer but also mysterious and exotic in his self-presentation. Always attired in a jeweled turban (figs. 8.2 and 8.3), Pandit was best known for his silent and intense direct address to the camera. In the various television programs on which he performed, over a period of several years, he allegedly never spoke.1 My previous work about Pandit (before learning that he was passing) historically positions his persona and performance style within the Western

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Figure 8.2. Pandit’s LPs often mentioned his television celebrity, here identified on the record label as “Paramount Television Star,” a reference to the dedicated following of his KTLA program despite a lack of sponsors. His image again seems to peer through a visual gateway.

traditions of “Orientalism” and provides close textual analysis of the extant episode of his KTLA program Musical Adventure with Korla Pandit.2 In most ways, this critical work remains pertinent and valid, especially in its consideration of how Pandit was perceived and received as a television star. But of course there is now much more to say regarding the significance of Pandit’s career and the new critical contexts in which to situate his “performance.”

Early Television Historiography One critical context for this analysis is the unique set of circumstances regarding early television in Los Angeles. Because of its geographic and technological distance from the network formulations on the East Coast, television in Los Angeles developed in a singular way. LA was a distinct market, not least because of its enormous post–World War II boom in population and local economy. It was therefore a prime market for the development of television, the postwar technological marvel that became central to the fundamental

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Figure 8.3. LP cover depicts a rather decorous young woman deep in meditative if florid correspondence (perhaps a fan of Pandit?), plus Korla himself featured as a kind of apparition. This configuration reverses the graphic design of the trope seen on his television program, completing an imagined loop of reception in response to his program by referencing his presumed female fan base.

stimulation of economic exchange in this era (via product advertisements, the promotion of lifestyle and sociopolitical ideologies, and the purchase of television sets themselves). Early television in Los Angeles was most distinctive in its advanced scale of production, especially conditioned by the dominance of its local and independent stations. By early 1949, around the time the television networks had newly configured a “live” link only as far west as Chicago, LA joined New York City as the lone markets to feature a full complement of seven local television stations (which is as many as the VHF spectrum available to them could afford). The network stations were the last to come on the air

182 No Laughing Matter

in LA, where the leading station was KTLA (channel 5), owned and operated by Paramount Pictures — ​itself a rare corporate anomaly in early television. This extremely active but distinctively independent profile for early LA television is important as a context for the appearance of the performers considered in this chapter. Important as well is that Los Angeles was also a notoriously striated space — ​especially regarding racial and ethnic difference. It was characterized by neighborhood and regional concentrations of the nonwhite population, such as the famous Central Avenue district, which was mostly populated by African Americans. Though this sociopolitical striation may not have been foregrounded in the series of nationwide boosterism campaigns that encouraged Americans to move to LA, it had long been a fact on the streets and in the neighborhoods of LA. As I have discussed elsewhere, the fact that marginalized racial and ethnic “performances” were even afforded representation on television in this era is conditioned by the local/independent profile of early LA television.3 The barriers to entry were very different at the local level, affording what, from a network perspective, would appear to be unconventional opportunities and experiments in programming, often tailored to perceived local tastes and preferences. (Ina Ray Hutton’s show, for example, was one of many big band programs on local Los Angeles TV, a programming trend made possible by the still-vibrant post–World War II market for these bands to perform in Southern California.) But these performers/performances are also indicative of a fundamental displacement away from the demographic realities of the nonwhite LA population in this era. Notable African American and Latino stars would have represented the area’s largest nonwhite populations by far, but appeared more rarely than Los Angeles population figures might have predicted. Especially in this context, new knowledge about the acts of passing by several of the performers who did appear regularly on TV compels a reopening of consideration about their careers and representational practices, since it recasts many of the assumptions about them and much of their historical significance. Another televisual context of representation that informs this study is the medium’s characteristic liveness, which was especially pronounced in this era, long before the practices of filmed programming had become the norm, and years before videotape was even invented. The term liveness (or “live”) designates the capacity of electronic media to represent an event at roughly the same time the event occurs, an act of mediation that is often said to be

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experienced (or at least desired to be experienced) as direct or unmediated. Liveness has historically been suggested to be key to the modes of address of television, and also to its promise to provide access to the real. It also designates a central trope in the properties and claims of televisual indexicality, in that liveness seems to provide a complementary temporality of “presence” to the visual indexicality it shares with media such as photography, cinema, etc. The historical specificity of the effects/affects of televisual liveness, and the borders of representational practices related to them, suggest a difference in range and register within emerging debates about indexicality and race. Nicholas Mirzoeff, for example, posits that especially in light of the unfounding of “race” as a scientific category, we should now understand photographs that feature raced subjects to be loci of “the performance of the racialized index”: “By performance, I mean to suggest something that is constituted each time it is enacted and that may vary according to circumstance. As race is not an indisputable fact, the index here is posed as a question of the racial difference in which all . . . are skilled readers. Each time a photograph is looked at, a viewer consciously or unconsciously decides whether and how it indexes the race of its object.”4 Television is certainly included within such a legacy of “photographic” representation, and the performers considered here indeed demonstrate the historicized specificity that Mirzoeff suggests. The context of early televisual liveness also contributes to the understanding of their performances of racialized indexes, by augmenting the temporal dimensions and connotations of these performances. In a great many instances, as television started to become recognized and experienced as a potentially regularized part of everyday life, the topicality of television itself (as an important new medium) often complemented the topicality of what was being represented, which was potentially further augmented by the “live” mode of address of representation. In other words, regarding television within the broader media ecology, there is the historicized capacity for a circularity of “present-ness” that, in a situational way, impacts the mediation/production of indexicality: the “presence” of televisual liveness can support and underscore the “nowness” of the aura of television as “new” medium (literally “new” then; 3D-HDTV, for example, today), particularly if the programming is delivering a marketdriven, topical diversion or spectacle that reconfirms the topicality of the medium itself. The enhanced value of the mediated “presence” of television (in its liveness, but also its protean standards and aesthetics, growing spatial

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ubiquity, and its emergent role in everyday life) could help to reconfirm on more than one level the “presence” of the index. To be clear, this is not to claim that televisual liveness was indispensable to the acts of passing by the performers studied here. It is likely that television’s indexical “presence” affected the credibility of these acts of passing, at least to the extent that audiences may have been disarmed by the new media pleasures of their techno-contemporary present. But all these performers had careers before and after their work on early television, and their acts of “passing” are not wholly specific to their appearances on television. In this light, we can appreciate that the historicized performances of racialized indexes to be considered here were in some sense inflected (perhaps precisely as performance/spectacle) by virtue of their appearance on early television. Their “difference” within a larger media ecology of depictions of racial and ethnic difference (rather than as indifference to such) was enhanced by the context of television itself, which imbued these performances as markedly if naively “live”/present/topical, making a “difference” in everyday life, which registers as part of their historical significance. Especially within non-news paradigms of program formats and dayparts (where programming was divided into thematically separated portions corresponding to different times of day), these shows can be considered within what I have called the “entertaining difference” of early television representations. In relation to the legacies of racism, they corresponded to the striation of Los Angeles’s broader imaginary of whiteness, safely representing racial and ethnic difference via what might be termed the “novelty” performance of racialized indexes. Indeed, the “novelty” aspect of their appeal is almost entirely what has been emphasized in historical work that mentions them, especially histories about early television itself. The paradigm of “entertaining difference” is helpful to understand and position the peculiar semiotic and semantic hybridity of these performers, especially over the long arcs of their careers: rarely considered in a particularly serious way by their audiences, they did inspire fandom, public fascination, affection, and even respect, though today’s audiences may more typically respond to them as camp embodiments of an innocuous past. Significantly, a quality of bemused “novelty” remains intact across these readings, which undoubtedly is part of what inspires our consideration of them within visual humor. That their careers can nevertheless be seen to register with important yet surprising issues of critical race theory speaks to the complexity of the pleasures these performers have provided, a complexity compounded by their

acts of racial passing, which can be best understood within and outside the legacies of racial stereotypes.

Psychoanalysis provides useful definitions and models for terms such as the comic and the joke, but it also provides critical insights related to the operationality of stereotypes. As discussed by theorists such as Stuart Hall, Edward Said, and Homi Bhabha, ethnic and racial stereotypes function as fetishes, “affixing the unfamiliar to something established, in a form repetitious, vacillating between delight and fear.”5 Especially within the traditions and apparatus of colonial power, the stereotype functions as the primary point of subjectification, “the scene of a similar fantasy and defense” to that of sexual fetishism: an arrested, fixated form of representation that denies the play of difference so as to return the colonial subject to “its identification of an ideal ego that is white and whole.” The stereotype functions therefore as part of a recurring hegemonic process by which dominant white subjectivity is continually reinscribed, especially via a fantasy “desire for an originality which is again threatened by the differences of race, color, and culture.”6 Because fetishes of this type must be “seen” rather than hidden or made secret (such as is the case with many sexual fetishes), they participate in a “regime of visibility”: the racial/colonial other is at once a point of identity and a problem for attempted closure within colonialist discourse. The stereotype therefore primarily reveals the constancy of the threat of difference and fetishized defenses against this perceived threat — ​as opposed to, for example, some index of a “genuine” or consistent trait of “racialized” behavior. As discussed by Kalpana Seshadri-Crooks, the stasis of this fetishized cycle corresponds directly to issues of the comic as discussed by Freud. “A joke is made, the comic is found,” Freud suggests in Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious,7 and the distinctions between these models of humor (the joke versus the comic) are signally important to the analysis in the present chapter. For Seshadri-Crooks, Most racial wit in the colony is, predictably enough, comic. On the one hand the colonizer’s inclination to infantilize the natives to sustain the logic of the civilizing mission, and on the other the colonized people’s need to caricature their hated rulers, produce more comic stories than jokes. . . .

In a scenario of outright racial domination — ​be it colonialism or slavery — ​

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Mobilizing Psychoanalysis regarding Whiteness

race relations are often represented as comic, and the prevailing modes of

representation produce a narrative genre and cast of characters who acquire a 186

shock value. As Freud implies, the characteristic aspect of comedy is that it is rarely ambivalent.8

No Laughing Matter

The constancy of stereotypes can be further suggested to hold a readily complementary relation to the temporality of (racial) melancholia. As discussed by Anne Anlin Cheng, the melancholy of race is especially salient in the United States, where the tragic and impaired role of nonwhiteness is often figured melancholically within a presumed “white” imaginary, resulting in a difficulty in moving from grief to grievance regarding the legacies of racism in U.S. history. (Indeed, Cheng suggests that this condition underlies contradictions within the Constitution itself, regarding principles of freedom but allowances for slavery: “Melancholia thus describes both an American ideological dilemma and its constitutional practices.”9) As opposed to the alleged “found” quality (and implied indexicality) of the comic, Freud suggests that jokes “are made,” which is to say intentionally constructed, and involve both an object of the joke and an observer of the joke. This inherently spatial model provides a different range of purpose, tone, and directionality to the joke, and hence a different set of critical precepts by which to address and assess racial visual humor. The fetishized cycle of “comic” stereotypes might be suggested to produce a racist immediacy in the very legibility of the stereotype, an immediacy/legibility that engages a legacy of racial imagery while foreclosing and displacing this history. Oddly, this immediacy is often claimed to proffer empirical and ontological evidence about both the racist object and the reading/reception of that object: as an implicit guarantor of “accuracy” regarding the stereotype, or of some inner “truth” about the relation of the audience member to racial difference (for example, laughter at racist humor seen to betray a “genuine” and “honest” relation to racial difference, regardless of statements/intentions to the contrary). The evident complexity of subjective positions that exists in relation to a racist unconscious within the dominance of whiteness, and the role of psychic economy to induce laughter and the comedy effect/affect in relation to this complexity, suggest a range of dynamic responses to racial/racist humor, responses that are conditioned by the defensive economy of the stereotype/ fetish. Jokes can be mobilized to engage this complexity, and perhaps even

Considering Passing as a Minor Genre Delineating these acts of passing as a “minor genre” mobilizes Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of a “minor literature” in order to posit a pan-media genre of performance that registers a great range of irony regarding historical and historicized discourses of race and ethnicity. This conceit is also inspired by Esiaba Irobi’s concept of “orature”: the study of performances (especially those in oral tradition cultures) that represent and transmit cultural continuities/history/values, with the recognition that these performances and their study are not reducible to “literature” (for example, are not beholden to a Western hegemony over the terms and definition of the “literate”). As Irobi suggests, such studies will greatly enable and enhance our understanding and appreciation for what can be broadly conceived as the uninscribed “literacies” of minor and/or subjugated cultures, and also the complex literacies of race and ethnicity in relation to them. For my purposes, the principles of orature may be applicable to performances that encompass image/voice and image/ sound relations, such as those that appear regularly on television (and which few would equate with literature).10 As suggested in the above discussions of media history, the methods and practices of studying this minor genre

187 Passing for History

to undermine the alleged “certainties” of comic empirical/epistemological/ ontological claims: what we might call, in relation to Rebecca Wanzo’s work, critical race jokes. One last delineation within Freud’s typology of humor further refines the significance of our knowledge that these performers were “passing”: the generic distinction between tendentious versus innocent jokes. Tendentious jokes are generally described as jokes of a more Juvenalian and/or sexual content. But in addition to jokes that contain hostile/aggressive or obscene/ erotic content, the genre includes cynical jokes (such as those that target institutions) and skeptical jokes (those that question the certainties of our knowledge). If the reading of these performers as mere novelty or camp might be seen to place them in the category of innocent jokes, the critique of a dominant regime of whiteness implicit to their passing can be seen to shift the category of their performative joke. The practices and strategies of passing performed by the entertainers examined in this study may be seen to collectively constitute a kind of minor genre that places whiteness itself as the object of a tendentious joke.

188 No Laughing Matter

will be best achieved via an attention to issues of media specificity and historiographic precision. Broadly speaking, practices of passing are likely as old as human classification itself, and even though racial passing is little documented, one can assume it has varied greatly in number and concentration according to both historical period and local context — ​especially the particular assumptions and laws regarding the definition and hierarchy of “race.” The critical literature about passing largely pertains to prose literature that features characters who are or may be passing. Useful as this material can be, its themes and tropes are not always applicable when discussing actual, historical cases. But certain key concepts and figures can be recognized to be central to the critical discourses about passing. Passing involves practices of representation and performance in relation to identity categories and the boundaries between these categories. It also engages anxieties regarding the capacity for boundary crossing, which is to say anxieties about claims and desires that these categories are essentialist and exclusive, both within an identity category paradigm (for example, race), and across such paradigms (for example, race, gender, class). Those who are discovered to have been passing are typically chastised (or worse) for being deceitful but also for being unfaithful to implicit and explicit ties to the identity categories at issue. At an interpersonal level, which is typically the level at which “identity” issues are first strongly associated, passing is often depicted to be at odds with idealized relations to family and/ or community, which may include affiliations regarding civil rights politics, identity politics, etc. The manner in which these interpersonal issues play out can vary as widely as the diffuse plots of domestic melodrama, but “narratively” the act of passing is often judged to be self-defeating or self-deluding. The judgments rendered about acts of passing tend to facilitate and reiterate epistemologies about the identity categories at issue (for example, race and racial identity), a dynamic process of power and knowledge that we can understand to be foundational to the alleged ontological certainties and securities that passing threatens. But as this premise reveals, passing and the critical discussion about it may also provide opportunities to bring such processes to better awareness. At a civic or legal or ideological level, boundary issues regarding identity categories can carry a potent capacity for revealing societal inequities or even societal contradictions. Especially in an avowedly post-race era, in which the notion and concept of “race” are known

189 Passing for History

to be biologically “false,” perhaps this epistemological effect and its related opportunities for social and ideological awareness will gain in significance. This is not to discount the criticisms that may pertain at the interpersonal levels discussed above — ​especially regarding community politics. But it is to suggest that the context and perspectives in which these evaluations and judgments are made might be fruitfully if situationally broadened. There may be much to consider in the space between the reality of the passing “deception,” for example, and the deceptions perpetrated on behalf of “race” as a fiction of essentialist identity categories, some of which entail truly horrific legacies. Especially important to the present analysis is that complexities regarding vision and visibility permeate the social and ideological issues raised in cases of racial passing. The fictive “truth” of race, of course, depends upon racial readability, a premise that is positioned by many to be functionally allied with the “logic of visibility” central to Western identity and subjectivity. As Amy Robinson suggests, “Within a Western metaphysical tradition that has naturalized visibility as the locus of ontological truth-claims about the subject, vision masquerades as the agent of unmediated facticity.”11 Indeed, the suggestion that vision itself can exist as a shifting site of masquerade contributes to anxiety about the blurring of visual certainty via racial passing, anxiety that can carry a strong epistemological charge. But racial visibility in the United States is also characterized by broader, paradoxical issues regarding social mobility. The logos of a raced social order insists upon a regime of visibilities: the legibility and surveillant visibility of nonwhites, delimited to the purpose of ensuring and maintaining a lack of physical contact/proximity, which results in a kind of social invisibility. The infamous “one-drop” rule, which historically played a disproportionately strong role in determining racial relations in the United States, underscored the contradictions inherent to racially striated space: “raced” subjects, including those who were not obviously so, were to forcibly remain in relatively distant, sanctioned concentrations of their own kind. At the same time, this system designated “whites” as absent of racial markings, and so potentially more fully mobile in both spatial and economic terms. In light of these racial and ethnic striations, it does not seem surprising that any number of individuals might work to develop what Louis ChudeSokei refers to as “a trickster strategy to find another place.”12 As the case studies here suggest, the range of performative strategies of passing can be

surprisingly broad, and demonstrate the prismatic nature of what are often assumed to be discrete identity categories, such as racial binaries. 190 No Laughing Matter

Case Study: Korla Pandit Details about Korla Pandit’s career have always been somewhat spotty, even at the height of his fame — ​a fact that today of course seems both intentional and unavoidable. For those not familiar with Pandit, a brief introduction to his mythology should prove valuable.13 Pandit claimed to have been born in New Delhi to one of India’s upper-caste families: his father was a government official and a scholar of English and history, a Hindu Brahman who converted to Christianity; his mother was a coloratura soprano opera singer of French descent. Recognizing their son’s musical abilities at a young age, they sent him to England for tutoring. He later moved to the United States and continued his education at the University of Chicago. Throughout this early period he reportedly appeared in occasional concerts. While attending college, he learned to play the organ (a less than common instrument in India) and began experimenting with intricate tonal settings and performance styles previously unheard on the Hammond organ. His mythology continued in Los Angeles in the mid-1940s, where Pandit worked as a staff musician for local radio programmers as well as the NBC and Mutual radio networks, performing in support of a wide spectrum of musical styles that included big band and country-western programs. Especially in a nonvisual medium, Pandit’s musical versatility lent itself to an open play with his ethnic and racial identification: the Sons of the Pioneers, a famous country-western singing group whom he sometimes accompanied, nicknamed him “Cactus Pandit.” One of his more regular assignments included providing musical accompaniment for two years on the Mutual network’s Chandu the Magician,14 in which he appeared with a vaguely Latin or Hispanic moniker, “Juan Rolando.”15 While he provided atmospheric effects and dramatic musical counterpoint for the soundtrack of Chandu, recordings of his other radio work when billed as Juan Rolando indicate jazz stylings quite in keeping with the traditions and innovations important to the influential Central Avenue music scene of this era. It is the character “Juan Rolando” (fig. 8.4) that offers a functional pivot point between his mythology and the biography that has been brought to light since his death. As detailed by journalist and historian R. J. Smith,

191 Passing for History

Figure 8.4. Juan Rolando was an alternative performing persona for Pandit, featuring a Latinate exoticization of his literal birth name. The more casual turban variation worn here is closer to the more prevalent use of turbans among some African American performers. This “second mask” can be recognized to layer and extend the tendentious joke implicit in Pandit’s acts of passing.

and subsequently on various fan websites,16 Pandit was an African American named John Roland Redd, born in St. Louis and raised in Columbia, Missouri, where he first developed his musical talent.17 “Juan Rolando” was the penultimate performing name of his career, and the only one with a remotely phonetic relation to his birth name. He had reportedly adopted this name (plus a turban as a perhaps incongruous accessory) as early as 1940. It seems likely that this was acknowledged to be a performing persona, since his work as Rolando was still being referenced during his career as Pandit. Exactly when the idea and formulation of “Korla Pandit” arrived is unclear, but this is the identity with which John Redd “passed,” adopting Pandit as an identity as well as a performing persona. This guise almost certainly was a joint effort with his wife, Beryl, who was a visual artist working at Disney when they met. They married in Tijuana in 1944. (The California Supreme Court did not strike down the state’s antimiscegenation laws until 1948,

Figure 8.5 (a, b, c). Musical Adventure with Korla Pandit: A blurred close-up of a jewel on a turban pulls back to reveal Pandit in decidedly direct address, all accompanied by “Arabic” theme music performed by Pandit.

193 Passing for History

which might provide a key rationale for Redd’s passing as Pandit. Their first son was born in August 1948.) At various points in his career, there were rumors about his “real” identity or background, a point that was not necessarily at odds with the underlying quality of ambivalence in his performing style. From the touristic sense of “adventure” connoted in his KTLA television show’s title, to the postwar Western blend of “international” music styles that he performed, and even in the implicit androgyny of his persistent, silent gaze into the camera, Pandit mobilized a connotation of ambiguous foreignness and exoticism that was congruent with the fetish quality of colonialist stereotypes and Orientalism more generally (figs. 8.5 and 8.6).18 His “silence” helped to mask his performance of passing (no conflicting accent or turns of phrase) and complemented the discursive frame of his presentation, which featured a “Western” voice-over to describe and interpret the music. For musicologist Timothy Taylor, this flavor of tempered exoticism is literally evident in Pandit’s musical choices: “What was perhaps most exotic about Pandit was that he was an exoticised Other who did not play exotic music, but, rather, played standards which employed familiar western devices that signify the exotic.”19 Taylor, who wrote his analysis of Pandit before it was known that Pandit was passing, also discusses some of the visual inconsistencies of Pandit’s “performance,” particularly that Hindus (as Pandit claimed to be) do not typically wear turbans, and that South Asians do not tend to wear jewels in their turbans (as Pandit did on his programs). Nevertheless, Taylor recognizes, Pandit’s choices of attire conform to the vague understanding of “Indians” in Southern California in this era, and contribute to the tensions/ambivalences of his overall persona: “Historically, the vast majority of South Asian immigrants to California before 1965 were Sikhs, who do wear turbans as part of their religious beliefs, and it is probably the case that, for most Californians in the 1950s, ‘Indians’ wore turbans. . . . He [Pandit] seems to be an ideal personification of 1950s’ North American views of India and Indians, a perfect but seemingly impossible blend of the mystical and the modern, the enigmatic Hindu on a program in the most technologically advanced communications medium the world had ever known — ​television — ​playing a modern, electric instrument, the Hammond organ, along with an older instrument, the piano.”20 The tensions of this performance persona were doubtless experienced rather differently for many in Pandit’s personal life. He apparently never acknowledged to anyone who hadn’t known him as John Redd that he was passing. According

Figure 8.6 (a, b, c). Musical Adventure with Korla Pandit: Pandit averts his gaze as Geraldine Garcia sings of desire.

To consider the life of Korla Pandit — ​and that’s what I will call him because that is who he became — ​is to consider the weight of wearing a mask for 50

years. It is to grasp the fear of exposure, of a revelation that would have killed his career. One slip and he would have gone from being a mirror of white

America’s mania for things exotic to somebody white America didn’t want to face. He would have been revealed as a fraud, and his fans would have never forgiven him. It is to recognize how he had to cut himself off from a black

community that he’d grown up in, from a culture that had shaped the musical skills, and the survival skills, that he drew on for the rest of his life. He bequeathed to his fans a conflicting set of images.22

Key tropes that Smith indicates here — ​Pandit’s direct address, the mask, the survival skills, and the conflicting images of his passing — ​can be posi-

195 Passing for History

to Smith, his racial passing involved many interpersonal complications, since members of his immediate family and others from his childhood hometown had also emigrated to Los Angeles. But the adoption and performance of this persona was such that Korla and Beryl never informed their two sons about his former identity, even immediately after Pandit’s death in 1998. R. J. Smith, who was a friend if not precisely a confidant of Pandit’s, and traveled with him to various performance and recording opportunities in the final years, was as surprised as any other acquaintance or fan to discover the “truth” of Pandit’s “passing” identity. But almost immediately he characterized this new knowledge in the frame of a kind of elaborate visual joke: “That night when I got home I laid out Korla’s albums and studied them: the concealing smile, his eyes holding my gaze. There was no doubt possible. Korla had spent five decades telling the world he was Asian, and the album covers, with the airbrushing, the makeup, the head wrap, presented him as an Indian mystic. Before . . . I saw what I wanted to see; I saw what Korla wanted me to see. Studying the albums, I laughed out loud at the audacity of what he’d done. Now the portraits looked radically different. My friend was a black man, and he’d conspired to conceal the fact in the most daring of ways — ​before adoring mobs.”21 Smith was compelled to research Pandit’s past, and eventually traveled to Missouri to speak with members of Pandit’s family and neighborhood friends and classmates. While there, he also learned of the legacy of lynching in the area. As a result, he came to a reckoning of respect rather than dismay or disparagement regarding the deception of Pandit’s “passing”:

196 No Laughing Matter

tioned within broader tropes of racial politics and visual humor, and contribute to what we might understand as the minor genre of passing. Surely Pandit can be seen to embody the “trickster strategy to find another place,” referenced by Chude-Sokei in his study of the famous vaudevillian and minstrel Bert Williams. But there are further applications to Pandit regarding trickster traditions. Chude-Sokei suggests that “since direct confrontation is not possible on its home turf . . . trickster strategy allows one group to hide in the skin of another and attempt to resolve its local political and historical relationships from within the language of another. . . . Intra-racial masking and camouflage are as much a part of black cultural politics as they are a part of black political and cultural resistance; the trickster strategy mediates the tensions of a shared racial politics.”23 This shared politics is an important context to a critical framing of Pandit’s performance of passing. Although there are vast differences between Pandit and Bert Williams regarding historical periods, performance styles, and degree of fame, some surprising similarities exist as well. If Juan Rolando was a kind of performative mask for John Redd, then passing as Korla Pandit represents a kind of mask behind the mask. Such a dual-masked strategy is central to what Chude-Sokei investigates as the significance of Bert Williams’s career, which entailed blackface minstrelsy by a black man, but one who, as a West Indian émigré, did not simply or fully identify with African American identity politics. For Williams, performing in blackface was doubly removed from an exercise in authenticity, and was instead an authentic joke on his audience and the culture of blackface in general. Williams discussed these principles in an essay about comedy and race titled “The Comic Side of Trouble.”24 As detailed by Chude-Sokei, Williams writes that “the man with the real sense of humor is the man who

can put himself in the spectator’s place and laugh at his own misfortunes.” In

this case one imagines oneself as an audience to the caged self, witnessing one’s own behavior or tragedies from a distance and from that distance employing

humor as a palliative to tragedy. . . . This is not entirely other to Du Bois’s formulation of “double-consciousness.” . . .

In the political economy of blackface, Williams suggests that the “Negro”

with the “real” sense of humor is the one who must occupy the position of the white viewer. This “Negro” must consume and comprehend the complexity of

racial stereotyping and, in laughing, must distance the “self ” from the political and historical impact of those very stereotypes.25

The regime of whiteness, with attendant tropes of (racial) visibility and invisibility, was the object of an elaborate tendentious joke that Pandit continuously performed for some fifty years, toward which perhaps only Pandit and his wife Beryl can be understood to be the “observers” during that time. With knowledge of his “passing,” we all can now be in on the joke, positioned to better comprehend and become aware of these tropes and this regime. But this is not the only or final theme that Pandit would have desired to be the result of his long career. Indeed, it would be remiss not to recognize that throughout his performance as Pandit, he maintained a hopeful and beneficent message of universality and peace that may actually be enhanced in light of the knowledge of his “passing.” In Pandit’s own words, a metaphysics of music, TV, and spirituality is indicated:

197 Passing for History

While there is no evidence to suggest that Pandit was aware of Williams’s essay, or endowed with the same degree of self-aware political consciousness, the similarity of his performance of passing to that of the performance ethics of Williams is striking. Both are examples of a trickster strategy to engage intra-racial masks behind masks, in order to play an elaborate joke on the codes and regimes of visibility within whiteness itself. As in the case of Williams, troubling issues arise as to an ultimate “invisibility” of the “original” subject, since John Roland Redd was engaged in such an elaborate and proto-simulacral performance of identity as Korla Pandit. As Smith suggests above, perhaps the markers of “original identity” have been permanently and purposefully blurred, so that Korla Pandit is “what I will call him because that is who he became.” But such a mobility in the discourses of authenticity also produces a state of mediated exile, which Chude-Sokei discusses explicitly, if briefly, in relation to Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of minor literature: as a vertiginous state of being a nomad/immigrant/gypsy in relation to one’s own language.26 As a result, suggests Chude-Sokei, the notion that Bert Williams “disappeared,” “like the invisibility of Ellison’s Invisible Man, does not quite signify erasure and remains a palpable absence: a signifying vortex of multiple meanings, languages, dialects and masks.” With an awareness of this mediated exilic state, which is to say from the perspective of an “audience” informed by new knowledge about this performed vortex of the racialized index, Chude-Sokei suggests “it is now possible to explore the multiplicity of shadows cast by the glare of a dominant whiteness.”27 Such a complex exploration might be suggested to be the implicit goal in the study of the genre of racial passing as a minor genre.

What I’m trying to communicate through music is true love and the divine

consciousness (regardless of religious belief — ​that doesn’t matter). TV isn’t real, 198

it’s just light, and in my programs I was expressing love through sound and light vibrations — ​actually, that’s what we are. We reflect light, and that’s what deter-

No Laughing Matter

mines what color we are. . . .

The key to my television programs was: I was able to project this music into

the hearts of listeners. I concentrated on playing music of transcendence — ​that was the whole basis of my programs on TV, recordings, and live performances.

It didn’t matter whether I was playing rock, jazz or classical — ​I captured the true feeling of what that song was supposed to do.28

As Taylor suggests, this message might be considered to be the most distinctive site of Pandit’s generative ambivalences, and indeed the site of his agency: “Pandit’s discursive affiliation with Paramhansa Yogananda marks an early espousal of what we might now call New Age viewpoints; I think this embrace provides a key to understanding him, and it is perhaps where his real agency lies. . . . Pandit’s use of spiritual or metaphysical language, [was] a language far different than that used by other lounge and exotica musicians to discuss music that was quite similar. . . . Pandit clearly believes in his music and in the spiritual power of music generally. While some of Pandit’s metaphysical discussions may evoke cynicism in some readers, his messages are positive and empowering.”29 It seems somehow appropriate that one final effect of our new recognition that Pandit was playing a tendentious joke on whiteness, and by extension on the historical systematicity of racialized indexes overall, is a new context of appreciation for what he always intended to be the explicit moral of his performance. At risk of introducing yet another critical term late in the analysis, one might consider that in his own proscribed, delimited, yet decisively inter-medial way, Pandit sought and constructively worked to realize and perform a variant of Stimmung. A German word variously translated as “harmony” and “mood,” Stimmung references a complex notion of musicality, attunement, and accord that situates both internal/subjective and external/objective capacities in a mélange of stimulus, perception, and affect.30 John Redd renegotiated his being in the world as Korla Pandit, via direct engagement with visual address and the pleasures of performance. The interval that he conjured and occupied was both conceptual and performative, nonvocal yet full of sound, transgressive and tendentious with a goal of harmony and a

Notes 1. Pandit appeared with some regularity on local Los Angeles stations KTLA (Paramount, channel 5) from 1949 to 1951, KECA (ABC, channel 7) in 1951, and KTTV (Los Angeles Times, channel 11) in 1952. He made several short performance films known as “Telescriptions” for Lou Snader in 1951, which played in syndication for many years and reportedly induced great fan mail response. While he never spoke on his television shows, he did sometimes speak when on radio, and often granted interviews with print journalists. 2. Mark Williams, “Entertaining ‘Difference’: Strains of Orientalism in Early Los Angeles Television,” in Living Color: Race and Television in the United States, ed. Sasha Torres (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), 12–34. 3. Ibid. 4. Nicholas Mirzoeff, “The Shadow in the Substance: Race, Photography, and the Index,” in Only Skin Deep: Changing Visions of the American Self, ed. Coco Fusco and Brian Wallis (New York: International Center of Photography; Harry N. Abrams, 2003), 111. 5. Homi K. Bhabha, “The Other Question . . . ,” Screen 24, no. 6 (1983): 25. 6. Ibid., 27. 7. Sigmund Freud, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (New York: W. W. Norton, 1960), 181. 8. Kalpana Seshadri-Crooks, Desiring Whiteness: A Lacanian Analysis of Race (London: Routledge, 2000), 86. 9. Anne Anlin Cheng, The Melancholy of Race: Psychoanalysis, Assimilation, and Hidden Grief (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 11. 10. It is also possible to suggest parallels between oral cultures, the “texts” of which are rarely “inscribed,” and early television, most of the programming of which is literally “lost in the air.” 11. Amy Robinson, “It Takes One to Know One: Passing and Communities of Common Interest,” Critical Inquiry 20 (1994): 721. 12. Louis Chude-Sokei, The Last Darky: Bert Williams, Black-on-Black Minstrelsy, and the African Diaspora (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 92. 13. Sources include an essay in a fan magazine: Leo Gavallete, “The Mysterious Korla Pandit,” Videosonic Arts 2 (n.d.), 10–16. After a career overview, including excerpts from an alleged interview with Pandit, the article discusses Pandit’s experiences with “the science of induction,” which Pandit denied was a brand of

199 Passing for History

revaluation of difference. Our recognition of this interval evokes structures of meaning and feeling that can be seen to illustrate historical mediations between constructions of race and critical responses to those constructions, both then and today.

200 No Laughing Matter

hypnosis. The most detailed biographical and career information available is the long interview that appears in V. Vale and Andrea Juno, Incredibly Strange Music, Volume II (San Francisco: Re/Search Publications, 1994), 112–121, though many names and broadcast stations are misidentified. I should also mention that one individual I talked to during my research questioned Pandit’s background, and even his ethnicity. But this was the least corroborated perspective on Pandit, and in any case demonstrates one aspect of the “ambivalence” projected onto his representation. 14. Perhaps coincidentally, Chandu the Magician was a recently revived radio serial that had been extremely popular in the 1930s, the protagonist of which, Frank Chandler, had spent years learning occult secrets from a yogi in India. 15. “Men of Music,” Radio-Television Life, November 21, 1948, 37. 16. Smith first wrote about Pandit’s identity in Los Angeles magazine, an article that was condensed as part of a chapter in his important book The Great Black Way, a survey of mid-century African American life and culture in Los Angeles. The website www.korlapandit.com features both the mythology of Pandit and, in a section labeled “History Part II,” copious details from the genealogical research about Pandit/Redd conducted by attorney David Marshall-Rutledge de Clue, a practiced genealogist. 17. Smith notes that John Redd was a devotee of pianist Art Tatum, who reportedly could recognize from his performance style, years later, that Redd/Pandit was sitting in at Central Avenue jam sessions. 18. Williams, “Entertaining ‘Difference.’” 19. Timothy D. Taylor, “Korla Pandit: Music, Exoticism and Mysticism,” in Widening the Horizon: Exoticism in Post-War Popular Music, ed. Philip Hayward (London: John Libbey, 1999), 39. 20. Ibid., 26. 21. R. J. Smith, “The Many Faces of Korla Pandit,” Los Angeles, June 2001, 75–76. 22. Ibid., 76. 23. Chude-Sokei, Last Darky, 92–93. 24. Bert Williams, “The Comic Side of Trouble,” American Magazine 85 ( January– June 1918), 33–61. 25. Chude-Sokei, Last Darky, 168–169. 26. Ibid., 50–51. 27. Ibid., 51. 28. Vale and Juno, Incredibly Strange Music, 113, 119. 29. Taylor, “Korla Pandit,” 40. 30. Ilit Ferber, Philosophy and Melancholy (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013), 189–190.

nine   Comical Conflations

Racial Identity and the Science of Photography

Tanya Sheehan

Shortly after the announcement of its invention in 1839, the first practitioners of photography noticed that there was something funny about the medium’s relationship to race. Reflecting on what he would name the photographic “negative,” Sir John Herschel described the “figures” it represented as having a “strange effect,” whereby “fair women are transformed into negresses &c.”1 Photographic literature on both sides of the Atlantic subsequently described the influence of darkroom chemicals on human skin in similarly racial terms. According to one report published in an American trade journal in 1866, a studio patron used the contents of a photographer’s evaporating dish to clean molasses candy off her children’s faces before they were to sit for a portrait. After repeated “dipping and washing,” the horrified woman “left the place crying, with three little negroes, the artist not even giving her anything to take it off.”2 How could a technology that was consumed ravenously by white bourgeois subjects depend so much on blackness? Why, moreover, did light-complexioned sitters seeking to look “white” in their portraits apparently require a change of race in the hands of the photographer? Such questions took shape in the immediate wake of emancipation in the British colonies and at the height of abolitionist activities in the United States, when the social implications of bringing whites in intimate relation to blacks were at the center of heated debate. Throughout this period, a premodern image of blackness persisted, connoting filth and ugliness, darkness and disorder, evil and sin, disease and death — ​everything that whiteness was not — ​and fueling perceptions of the “Negro” race as wholly inferior to the Anglo-Saxon.3 Photography served as a ready metaphor for this conception of social difference. It seemed, after all, to be based on a play of racialized opposites: light stimulated silver nitrate to darken, or blacken, the white ground of a photosensitive surface. A photographer’s manipulations under the skylight and in the darkroom

202 No Laughing Matter

were seen as a constant struggle to keep these terms in balance, one that was comparable to conflicts in the British West Indies and the American South. While early photographers like Herschel looked upon the possible connections between photography and the contemporary social scene with a mixture of trepidation and mild amusement, British and American humorists cultivated a different response: raucous laughter. Their satirical writings and illustrations cast photography’s materials, technical requirements, and scientific principles in racial terms, inviting audiences to take pleasure in the medium’s many and seemingly essential incongruities. This chapter takes a close look at these comic texts and their evolving cultural work in the second half of the nineteenth century. Responding to modern theories of humor that ask “how humor was talked about in [a] culture, what values were attached to it, [and] how it was structured and produced,” it poses similar questions about photography itself, as the medium became a ground on which to reinforce and disrupt contemporary ideas about race.4

Chemical Comedy and Photographic Pleasures Scholars have long been fascinated by early photographic humor, selecting examples of the genre to illustrate their histories of photography. In the popular press, comic literature, staged photographs, and a wide variety of commercial visual culture, humorists poked fun at the overwhelming number of people who flocked to portrait studios and took up amateur photography in the nineteenth century; they also mocked the seeming impossibility of capturing a “pleasing” expression and truthful likeness.5 Historians agree that the first book of photographic humor was penned by the English cleric Edward Bradley, better known by his pen name Cuthbert Bede.6 Bede’s Photographic Pleasures, Popularly Portrayed with Pen and Pencil was printed in London in 1855, with its third, final, and cheapest edition appearing in 1863. Even before the volume’s publication, British readers could have encountered a selection of its illustrations in the humor magazine Punch. Bede’s visual humor engaged audiences abroad at the same time, although it is unclear how many Americans ultimately read Photographic Pleasures; what would become the frontispiece to the book graced the back cover of Philadelphia’s nationally circulated Saturday Evening Post in 1853, alerting readers to the ridiculous dangers that amateur photographers faced in capturing country scenes, specifically impalement by a charging bull.7

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Contributing to this transatlantic dialogue, the book’s racial jokes make reference to African American stereotypes and the institution of slavery. Such a gesture was by no means unique to Photographic Pleasures. As Hazel Waters observed of English theater at mid-century, there was a “general climate that was so fascinated by America, so ready to ridicule it in all its manifestations, so ready, too, to triumph as a monarchy that practised liberty over a republic that practised slavery. The figure of the black was, and continued to be, a conduit for English attitudes towards America.”8 Marcus Wood has likewise shown how African slaves in English print satire served as vehicles for attacking both the continued existence of slavery and the sentimentalism of abolitionists in the United States, while more generally ridiculing the nation’s “democratic pretensions.”9 Although these forms of popular visual culture were directed at “others” — ​portraying Americans as hypocritical, morally corrupt, and as “uncivilized” as the blacks they enslaved — ​they simultaneously looked inward, expressing “native” anxieties about race, class, and national identity. This collection of anxieties informed, for instance, the mid-century debates on slavery and sugar in the West Indies sparked by the inflammatory writings of Thomas Carlyle. Black “idleness” constituted an affront to the state, Carlyle argued, insofar as it contributed to the decline of an industry that was essential not only to the economic prosperity of English plantation owners but also to the vitality of the rapidly expanding British Empire. If the (white) English cannot find “some just manner to command black men,” he reasoned, then “they may rest assured there will another come (brother Jonathan or still another) who can.”10 By the time Carlyle expanded and reprinted his “Occasional Discourse” and Cuthbert Bede published his first satirical illustrations of photography, both writers had found a new object on which to project “native” anxieties about the slave-owning United States: Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or Life among the Lowly (1852). Within a year of its initial publication, a staggering one million copies of the American best seller had been sold to British readers, providing them with a sentimental depiction of black life in antebellum America that would go on to be represented in numerous editions (official and pirated) as well as in plays, musical scores, prints, commercial advertisements, and memorabilia that featured characters or scenes from the novel.11 It was in these multifarious forms that Uncle Tom’s Cabin not only set the terms for debate about slavery and abolition in British political discourse after 1852; it also became the ground upon which a variety

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of questions about social difference were packaged for both the edification and amusement of a popular audience. Marcus Wood’s observation that “strange conflations resulted when the newly expanding Victorian leisure and entertainment industries engulfed abolitionist texts” applies directly to Photographic Pleasures, in which Stowe and her book allow Bede’s light musings on photography to speak to one of the most serious political issues on both sides of the Atlantic.12 To see how Bede’s satire engaged contemporary discourse on race, consider a page of illustrations titled “Photographic Fancies,” which is littered with verbal and visual puns (fig. 9.1). The “negative papers” in the upper left corner refer to both the negative-positive photographic process and London newspapers like the Morning Advertiser, which were known for their harsh attacks on the royal family. “The vices of photographers” in the upper right depicts two posing stands engaged in a fist fight, suggesting that studio portrait photographers’ use of these devices, which gripped a sitter’s head like a vise and kept him still, was one of their most immoral practices. The racial joke on the page consists of a conversation between two illustrations: an image of Uncle Tom’s Cabin at the top captioned “best black varnish,” and a caricatured black figure on the left; described elsewhere in the book as an “Uncle Tom servant,” the latter is shown here “applying the black varnish.” While “varnish” can refer to a chemical compound that commercial photographers spread on the surfaces of tintypes or on the backs of ambrotypes in the 1850s, the black pigment the “Uncle Tom servant” applies to his skin comes from a bottle labeled “Day and Martin,” a British company known for its shoe polish and whose name then served as a colloquial term for “negro.”13 Relying on his readers’ familiarity with such iconography and rhetoric, Bede thus proposes similarities between four seemingly unlike objects: photographic chemicals, the pigmentation of an African slave’s skin, a common shoe polish, and Stowe’s popular novel on American slavery. The modern reader is left to ask: on what bases are these similarities constructed, and what cultural work do the resulting ironies perform? More broadly, how and why does a humorist like Bede use the medium of photography to articulate popular ideas about blackness and whiteness? To begin, it is important to see Bede’s illustrations as conversant with early blackface minstrelsy, an American form of theatrical entertainment first popularized in the 1830s and ’40s that featured white actors performing comic songs, speeches, and sketches in a kind of racial drag.14 By

Figure 9.1. “Photographic Fancies,” in Cuthbert Bede, Photographic Pleasures, Popularly Portrayed in Pen and Pencil (London: T. McLean, 1855).

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mid-century, blackface acts had been incorporated into existing structures of reputable entertainment in Britain, from the music halls and theaters of London to provincial venues and even the private homes of the wealthy; this meant that they tended to be less raucous and bawdy than the American performances primarily enjoyed by working-class whites in northern cities and that they increasingly incorporated “local” comic tropes, such as the English-style puns deployed by Bede. Historians have shown that what most distinguished minstrel shows in Britain from their antebellum American models, however, was the fact that the former brought audiences into close relation with a “black” population about which they held little direct knowledge but an insatiable curiosity and (economically) invested interest. Through these performances, British viewers could sympathize with the plight of the oppressed slaves conjured up before them, relishing the moral superiority of Britain over the United States, all the while imagining that these “emotional and hyperactive blackface characters” needed to be brought under (their) white control.15 Such responses to minstrelsy dovetailed with the idea that Britain’s colonial presence in Africa and the West Indies, which relied on a paternalistic regulation of nonwhite peoples, was not only justified but natural and required.16 In Bede’s “Photographic Fancies,” we find references to minstrelsy in the figure “applying the black varnish” and in the image of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. While the former is suggestive of a theatrical blacking up, the novel borrowed characters and narrative elements from American minstrel shows, only to become a favorite object of blackface humor in Britain and contribute directly to the genre’s surge in popularity there.17 The racial joke on this page, moreover, shares several important assumptions with the early minstrel show. First, both are based on an objectification of blackness; more specifically, they treat it as a commodity that a white male actor/operator can manipulate for his commercial profit. Substituting burnt cork and boot black for the materials of photography, Bede compares racial blackness to photographic varnish and likens the face of the “Uncle Tom servant” to the varnished surface of the photograph, producing a scenario often enacted upon the Victorian stage: black bodies are not autonomous subjects, he jests, but physical materials instrumental to the work at hand. Second, Bede’s “Photographic Fancies” shares minstrelsy’s assumption that black pigmentation is a sign of the “negro” race, though one whose stability is uncertain at best. In the case of the “Uncle Tom servant,” the dark

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color of his skin would seem to require continuous application, as if race were purely cosmetic in character. According to this fantasy, it is the stuff of photography that enables the figure to perform and maintain his blackness, which was crucial to maintaining the value and integrity of whiteness. Bede thus endows photographic chemistry with an invaluable social function: the very (re)production of racial difference. But if blackness and whiteness are imagined to be nothing more than skin deep in this image, what are we to do with the stereotyped physiognomy of the figure “applying the black varnish”? In a period when race science in Britain and the United States was preoccupied by the notion that there are essential, measurable differences between the races, it is unlikely that this figure would have signified anything other than “black,” even in the absence of photographic varnishes.18 We can make a similar observation about the graphic illustrations of Anglo-American blackface performers at mid-century, which often depict these racially white men not only with darkened faces but with the facial structure that Samuel Morton and others associated with the “negro.” Rather than undermining the logic of minstrel performances, these indications of the so-called fixed character of race were precisely what blackface contributed to and satirized. In this vein, Bede’s photographic humor acknowledged contemporary thought on the nature of social difference at the same time it poked fun at its logic. Time and again, Bede combines such work with a representation of photography’s unique powers in matters of race. Anticipating the rhetoric of Victorian soap advertisements, for example, he reminds readers of an ancient fable in which a man attempts to scrub his “Uncle Tom servant” white and clean, assuming his blackness to be the result of neglect on the part of a former master. The reference here would have been all too familiar to British readers, for whom the notion of washing an “Ethiop” or “blackamoor” white had served as a symbol of impossibility and miraculous rebirth, as well as a literary figuration of blackness, since the Renaissance period.19 While the misguided “sanitarian” in Photographic Pleasures was unsuccessful in his efforts, the joke explains that the photographer is not. His “black Positive,” or the exposed photographic print, is infinitely more receptive to the whitening effects of repeated washing and soaking than its human counterpart, whom Bede calls the “positive black.” Not only is photography responsible for manufacturing an ideal “black” that is obedient and capable of sanitary (read: social) reform, in other words, but its chemistry also has the ability to carry out such reform. Where other social measures had failed, photography

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succeeded; the medium managed to tame blackness by reducing it to “the desired tint,” thereby mitigating its transgressive potential.20 As satire, of course, Photographic Pleasures cannot celebrate photographic chemistry as a solution to America’s race problems and as an ideal means of safeguarding whiteness without ambivalence and irony. In fact, we can read the book’s humor as the direct result of Bede attributing unrivaled social power to photographic chemistry, assuming that readers would see such power as an unlikely characteristic of a popular visual medium. The illustrations in Photographic Pleasures encourage viewers to remain skeptical of photography’s ability to effect any real, let alone valuable, social change. Consider the book’s chapter on amateur photography, in which we find a female photographer who had an unfortunate accident with her darkroom chemicals. The young lady’s carelessness with her nitrate of silver, which darkens surfaces in the presence of light, reportedly produced black spots and stains on her otherwise “fair” countenance and “lily white hands,” causing her to appear, as Bede puts it, “like a half-washed Othello at some private theatricals.” This necessitates a trip to the chemist for immediate remedy, which is where we find her in figure 9.2.21 While Bede claimed in a private letter that this illustration depicts a true incident, it also employs a popular literary trope that represents the blackening of racially white subjects as punishment for their immoral behavior.22 At the time Bede published Photographic Pleasures, this trope would have been readily associated with Heinrich Hoffman’s collection of illustrated stories for children, translated for British and American audiences as The English Struwwelpeter. Among the most frequently reprinted stories in the collection were those that featured “white” bodies darkened with “black” ink. In “The Story of the Inky Boys,” a figure modeled on Saint Nicholas dips three light-skinned lads into an inkwell to teach them not to make fun of a dark-complexioned “blackamoor,” while the naughty “Miss Mopsa” accidentally administers her own racialized punishment in “The Girl Who Inked Herself and Her Books.” Motivated by carelessness and a general desire to misbehave, she smears the ink at her writing table over her hands, face, and clothes, and even swallows the black liquid, causing her entire body to turn brown, then slate, then “dusky black” (fig. 9.3). “Blacker than a Guinea negro, / Blacker than the sootiest sweep, / Blacker than the shiny beetles / O’er the chimney’s back that creep,” Mopsa ultimately becomes

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Figure 9.2. “A Photographic Positive,” in Bede, Photographic Pleasures.

“too hideous for a daughter” and is sold by her parents as a “black doll” to a “rag-shop” where she is hung up on an “iron link.”23 Invoking both the so-called ugliness of blackness and the violence of chattel slavery, these are disastrous consequences indeed, intended to encourage right/white behavior in impressionable readers. Similar scenarios were entertained by the American photographic press around the time of the Civil War, as we have already seen in the case of a white mother mistaking photographic chemicals for body wash. That she

Figure 9.3 (a, b). “The Girl Who Inked Herself and Her Books, and How It Ended,” in Heinrich Hoffman, The English Struwwelpeter; or, Pretty Stories and Funny Pictures from the German (London: Dean and Son, c. 1860). Princeton University Library, Princeton, New Jersey. Courtesy of Princeton University Library.

left the portrait studio with “three little negroes” would have made the commercial photographers who wrote and consumed such stories laugh by confirming the naïveté of their clientele. Bound up with their laughter, however, were serious anxieties about the destabilizing effects that photographic chemistry could have on social identities if it fell into the “wrong” hands. Since women and children were called upon to function as reliable signifiers of whiteness and respectability in and out of the portrait studio, their exposure to photography’s many blackening agents posed a troubling threat to such signification, one that could be extinguished only if their curiosity about and involvement in photography’s operations were carefully controlled by white men, literally or comically. There was in this humor also the anxious fantasy of blackness posing a sexual threat to young women, as implied by the image of a white mother producing “negro” children. Miscegenation is made a more explicit threat in

a British poem from the 1860s titled “Perils of the Fine Arts,” which opens with an angry husband interrogating his wife: Good gracious Julia! wretched girl, What frantic fiend has done the deed That rends your charms from me? . . . What fiend, I ask, in human mask Has dared to black your face?

Describing her as darker than “any black-a-more,” he goes on to threaten violence against the “wretch” (consistently gendered masculine) that “painted” the once “stainless pure” woman, whose “black and blue” body has already been violently punished by an “other” — ​justifiably so, the verse suggests. It is in the last lines of the poem that the wife reveals the source of her defilement as none other than her husband: “‘Oh! Charles, ’twas you! / ‘Nay, dearest, do not shrink — ​/ ‘This face and chin! — ​I’ve washed it in / ‘YOUR PHOTOGRAPHIC INK!’ ”24 Returning to Photographic Pleasures, we find that Bede similarly characterizes the wealthy white women in Britain who picked up cameras in the 1850s as socially and sexually transgressive. In the very first line of the book, he presents these women as objects of disdain by comparing them to white female abolitionists in the United States; these are the days, Bede writes, “when calotyping young ladies in civilised society talk about their ‘blacks’ — ​ with all the unctuousness of a Mrs Beecher Stow [sic], when she converses on a subject of a kindred saturnine character.”25 Framing the discussions of amateur photography that appear later in the text, this remark establishes the growing number of lady amateurs in Britain as a threat to the professional photographic fraternity, to dominant notions of female respectability, and to the integrity of the white bourgeois family.26 Bede relies on Stowe as a model for such gendered transgression, bringing to mind her much-publicized trip to England in 1853 and its production of a controversial antislavery petition, which led many international critics to condemn the outspoken American as selfish, irresponsible, and even dangerous, having released powers beyond her control.27 Like the throngs of women who rallied around Stowe, Bede suggests, female photographers speak fervently of processes that they don’t understand and that take their minds away from their domestic duties, all

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What horror do I see?

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the while introducing into polite social gatherings topics that were best discussed elsewhere by male authorities. What is more, he imagined that these white bourgeois women shared a sexualized attraction to “blacks” that was as unavoidable as it was troubling. That attraction is articulated most colorfully in Bede’s “A Photographic Positive,” when he described the blackened young lady as “a half-washed Othello at some private theatricals.” Extremely popular on both sides of the Atlantic at this time, Shakespeare’s vision of the fair Desdemona falling in love with a dark-complexioned Moor who murders her in their marriage bed posed obvious challenges to Victorian prohibitions of miscegenation and the warnings of race scientists against the dangers of amalgamation. Serious performances of Othello on the London stage worked to mitigate these challenges by minimizing the pair’s sexual encounters and deemphasizing the blackness of Othello; the many minstrel parodies of the Shakespearean drama did just the opposite, grossly caricaturing Desdemona’s sexuality and portraying Othello as either a buffoon in blackface or as a whitewashed “negro” in order to render their union a laughable absurdity.28 With his “half-washed Othello,” Bede echoes this latter genre, but does more than simply reproduce its complex comic relations, or “white men imitat[ing] black men who aspired to be white but were actually black.”29 By inserting these into the body of an aristocratic (white) lady, the kind of woman who would partake in “private theatricals,” Bede brought contemporary criticism of Stowe forcibly to bear on the practice of amateur photography among the upper classes.30 What is remarkable about Photographic Pleasures, then, is not Bede’s stereotyping of the African American slave and the female “amateur,” nor his references to transatlantic debates surrounding Uncle Tom’s Cabin; rather, it is the book’s insistent insertion of photography into the political and cultural frame occupied by the American best seller. Ironically, this engagement with the serious matters of slavery and abolition, class conflict, imperial power, and the rights of women gave birth to photographic humor.

Making Light of Black and White In his influential essay on the stereoscope first published in 1859, Oliver Wendell Holmes devotes considerable attention to the characteristics of the negative, or the “reversed picture on glass” then essential to producing

photographs on paper. After a glass plate is sensitized, exposed to light in the portrait studio, and washed in developer, he explains, a set of dizzying relations result:

dark. . . . But where the shadows or dark parts of the camera-picture fall, the

sensitive coating is less darkened, or not at all, if the shadows are very deep, and so these shadows of the camera-picture become the lights of the glass-picture, as the lights become the shadows. Again, the picture is reversed. . . . Thus the

glass plate has the right part of the object on the left side of its picture, and the left part on its right side; its light is darkness, and its darkness is light. Every-

thing is just as wrong as it can be, except that the relations of each wrong to the other wrongs are like the relations of the corresponding rights to each other in the original natural image. This is a negative picture.31

For Holmes, the negative’s reversal of things as they appear in nature is not only curious and “strange,” as Herschel once put it; this “mass of contradictions,” this “lie,” is “perverse and totally depraved” — ​ungodly even, as if possessing “some magic and diabolical power.” Even more extraordinary is that the negative gives birth to a positive print, which the American writer celebrates as a perfect “copy of Nature in all her sweet gradations and harmonies and contrasts.” This allows Holmes to conclude that the negative is morally redeemable; like the “temporary arrangements of our planetary life,” its ugliness and darkness hold out for him the promise of a “better” world thereafter.32 What made the negative-positive process an apt metaphor for the Christian dualisms of evil/good, pagan/holy, and earth/heaven was also what made it common grist for the racial humor mill. The reversals Holmes attributes to the negative — ​of left and right, up and down, dark and light — ​constituted the building blocks of a comical world-turned-upside-down, which yielded some surprising things about race in Britain and the United States. Anticipated by Herschel at the moment of photography’s invention, the details of such a world were explored in an 1853 issue of Charles Dickens’s Household Words, which observed of a portrait on paper that “the light parts were all depicted by the blackest shades, and the black parts were left white,” such that the subject of the picture “was there represented as a negro.” As Holmes would do, the magazine found comfort in the “obvious” fact that the “negro

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Every light spot in the camera-picture [the image before the lens] becomes

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Figure 9.4. Detail of “Photographic Faces,” in Bede, Photographic Pleasures.

stage” was not the “finished portrait” but rather the glass negative, whose placement on light-sensitive paper and exposure to light would soon set things right: “The black face will obstruct the passage of the light and leave a white face underneath, the white hair will allow the light to pass, making black hair below, and so on.”33 Underwriting these remarks were several important assumptions, so fundamental to mid-century Anglo-American culture as to not require justification: that there was a close connection between lighting conditions and racial identity, that photographic surfaces were intimately related (even analogous) to human skin, and that no white bourgeois reader of Household Words would welcome the sight of his “negative” or “black” self. For a contemporary illustration of this last assumption, we need not look further than Bede’s Photographic Pleasures. A page of cartoons titled “Photographic Faces” presents us with a comic “before” and “after” in which a gentleman named Brown “sees himself in the glass and thinks himself rather an agreeable looking fellow,” or one with a light complexion. Brown then “sees his face in the negative,” now blackened thoroughly by the strokes of Bede’s pen. “His second thoughts,” we are told, “are by no means the best” (fig. 9.4). To find this pair of images entertaining was to acknowledge the absurdity of photography’s material effects on the white sitter’s body, as well as to ascribe considerable value to whiteness as a physical and social ideal. Readers were unlikely to have missed its reference to minstrelsy, moreover, just as they would have been attuned to the double entendre of the “negro stage” described in Household Words. Julia Munro has proposed that the racialized description of the photographic negative, such as we find in Bede’s and Dickens’s texts, is “an exaggeration that reveals an underlying anxiety about photographic representa-

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tion” that should be treated like the references to magic that pervade early transatlantic writings on photography.34 While this reading finds support in the examples above, it does not fully account for what nineteenth-century writers found especially absurd about the negative-positive process — ​that is, its radical reordering of a binary (black/white) whose terms were imagined (or at least desired) to be in a fixed and hierarchical relationship. Significantly, this was what British critics saw as most troubling about abolitionist texts like Uncle Tom’s Cabin, whose narrative was built upon shifting and at times incongruous relations between blackness (darkness) and whiteness (light). Stowe allowed the “darkest” African Americans in the novel to embody the “light” of Christian virtue, they observed with alarm. She also described the “mulatto” slave George in stereotypically “white” terms; well-mannered and highly skilled, he presents himself as “tall, with a dark Spanish complexion, fine expressive black eyes, and close curling hair, . . . aquiline nose, straight thin lips, and . . . finely formed limbs.” Such “facts” led a reviewer for the London Times to condemn the book on moral grounds, declaring that an “error . . . is committed by our authoress in the pains she takes to paint her negroes, mulattoes, and quadroons in the very whitest white, while she is equally careful to disfigure her whites with the very blackest black. The worst negroes are ultimately taken to Heaven, but few of the fair colored are warranted, living or dying, without blemish.”35 These racial reversals also served as fodder for comic interpretations of Uncle Tom’s Cabin on the English stage, which were full of puns that challenged audience expectations about what was “black” and what was “white,” substituting gales of laughter for moral outrage.36 Jokes about the blackness of the negative further dovetailed with period debates about the origins of racial differences. Between the publication of Samuel Stanhope Smith’s influential essay on human variety in 1787 and its reprinting in 1810, environmental explanations for skin color dominated Anglo-American scientific thought. According to Smith, mankind had originated in Asia fully civilized and with white skin. Dispersion of the population to different climates across the globe led to unfavorable deviations from this “natural, best, and original” state, with excessively hot regions darkening the skin and generally giving rise to savagery. Focusing much of his observations on the Negro race, he further predicted that the mass transplantation of blacks from Africa to the American environment would “whiten” their racial character over time.37 Smith’s views continued to

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shape discussions of racial change in the early nineteenth century but were increasingly challenged, especially by the rising tide of polygenism, which threw out the very notion that man originated as a single species. Before Darwin, even monogenists were thinking in new ways about the differences among the races, proposing that these may have been caused by breeding or civilization itself, and tracing human origins back to the “Negro.” This latter controversial view received a large international audience when it was promoted by the English physician and anthropologist James Cowles Prichard in the early nineteenth century.38 Its influence can also be found in John Stuart Mill’s vehement response to Carlyle’s “Occasional Discourse,” in which Mill describes the “earliest known civilization” as a “negro civilization.” According to Mill, the “original Egyptians are inferred, from the evidence of their sculptures, to have been a negro race; it was from negroes, therefore, that the Greeks learnt their first lessons in civilization.”39 While this is not the same as saying (as Prichard did) that blacks biologically gave rise to whites, the equation of civilization and whiteness in bourgeois Victorian culture meant that Mill’s “curious” facts pointed to the same radical implications: Anglo-Saxons had not been born naturally superior to “Negroes” and had no innate rights to dominate them. Associating the negative with racial blackness proposed a similarly disruptive social view by suggesting that every “white” face in a photographic portrait originated as a “black” one. Whiteness, in other words, depended on blackness for its very existence, for without the negative there could be no paper print. This notion would not have proven to be so troubling in early writings on photography if those texts had not placed such a strong emphasis on the technology’s role in aiding performances of social identity, specifically that of the white lady or gentleman. The reflections on the negative-positive process in Household Words, in fact, celebrate such work by concluding that “it is not only — ​or indeed chiefly — ​by the reproduction of our own features that we bring photography into the service of our race.” It is the repeated “our” in this line and its implication of the magazine’s predominantly white bourgeois readers that place strict limits on the word “race,” which is being asked here to represent mankind.40 Ensuring that the blackness of the negative would not interrupt this privileging of whiteness therefore meant stressing the temporariness of the “negro stage,” its visibility only to the photographer, as well as the “natural” and “original” character of the body/image before the lens.

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The problem of the negative in early photographic discourse speaks to larger concerns about the relationship between light and race that became the frequent subject of comic representation in the second half of the nineteenth century. Take the idea that color is not inherent to a body but is instead the measure of a body’s reflection of the sun’s rays. This principle of physics formed the logical basis of all photographers’ operations, but when humorists applied it to postbellum America, it resulted in what they saw as a laughable absurdity. Such is the case in Elbert Anderson’s Photo-Comic Allmynack of 1873, which juxtaposes monthly weather predications with horoscopes, dialect jokes, and caricatures; to these the practicing photographer added satirical commentary on photography in the form of illustrations, poems, and dialogues.41 The entry for July features a racial joke, made in a fictional lecture that Anderson delivered to the American photographic profession at its 1873 convention: “Have you ever thought to yourselves, my friends, that when you blow out your candle to go to bed, that you are about as black as the ace of spades? Because, if you hav’n’t, it’s time you did. Yes, my friends, it is believed that nothing of itself has any color; and that a yellow cat and a green man are certainly of the same complexion in a totally dark cellar. You are not to suppose that because it is dark, you cannot see the colors of these animiles [sic]! . . . As the saying is, they are perfectly black, which means destitute of color.” At this point in Anderson’s speech the audience interjects. One voice explains, “According to that, then, a nigger is just as good as a white man,” then a second voice tells the first to “Close your head.”42 The implication of Anderson’s claims in this exchange — ​that whiteness and blackness carry essentially the same value — ​is so disruptive to conceptions of white dominance in the wake of black emancipation in the United States that it can only belong to the world of humor. For Anderson’s fictional audience and his readers, “color” was much more than a “property of light,” just as reflection and absorption were much more than physical principles; in Reconstruction America, it was a sign of racial identity whose boundaries were anxiously being drawn and redrawn, as much by Republican legislation as by popular humor. In a period when cultural anxieties about integrating blacks into a predominantly white social body reached new heights, the challenges of photographically “exposing” raced subjects frequently found comic expression. These jokes were based on serious discussions in American trade journals

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about the difficulties portrait photographers faced when illuminating different sitters in their studios. The specific arrangement of top and side lights that a photographer would employ on a given subject, this literature surmised, depended upon the relative whiteness of the sitter, for it was a face with a “rather fair complexion” and “regular features” that would imprint itself rapidly on a photographic plate and was most likely to generate a “pleasing” print. Dark-complexioned sitters, on the other hand, “required” lighting at a much greater intensity in order for their skin to be “properly” exposed, which often meant looking as “white” as possible.43 In this way, photographers’ lighting schemes were predicated on a taxonomy of social difference whose disruption was likely to have extreme consequences not only for the technical quality of a finished portrait but also for photography’s capacity to serve “our race.” Like the many other American photographers who embraced the comic mode, H. J. Rodgers chose to express and assuage the anxieties generated by the possibility of such “failure” by satirizing the expectations of sitters when it came to photographic lighting. In his popular memoirs, Twenty-Three Years under a Sky-Light (1872), Rodgers recounts a case in which one of his colleagues was asked to sit a “gentleman of dark brown complexion and black hair” with “two ladies of blonde complexion and hair.” When the photographer presented the picture to the group, the dark-skinned sitter declared the portrait “‘horrid! altogether too dark and the ladies too light’ and at the same time with an air of dignity taking a faint, indistinct vignette card picture of himself from his pocket, ‘There! that’s white. I want mine in the group white as that.’ . . . The artist politely informs him that all things are not possible with a photographer; that by sitting him alone, with a view of producing a ‘white picture,’ he would be required to sit longer. The clear white and rosy complexion of the ladies did not require one half as much time in the light, as his dark hued features, black hair and coat absorbing the rays of light.”44 Rodgers anticipates that his readers will find such a scenario amusing, just as he assumes that the object of their laughter is plain: the ridiculousness of the “dark” sitter’s desire to look “white” when he is obviously “otherwise.” He could also count on readers’ sympathy with the “impossibility” of the group portrait he describes. The only solution it presents, after all, is a photographic segregation of the sitters based on their “natural” inequalities. Like the burlesque performances of Othello that graced the Victorian stage, Rodgers’s “light” humor proposes a justification for, and a means of, severing the intimate relations between “dark” men and “white” women. That

Darkness and Dawn Having witnessed the invention of photography, the proliferation of commercial portrait studios, and the emergence of amateur photographic practices, humorists in Britain and the United States attempted to answer a question on the minds of nearly everyone who encountered the camera in the mid-nineteenth century: What made this technology so popular yet so estranging? Their comic responses posed additional questions in the context of debates about slavery and its abolition, demonstrating that early photographic humor shaped the cultural identity of photography and defined the medium’s relationship to a predominantly white bourgeois public at the same time that it served as complex social commentary. How, then, are we to understand the persistent preoccupation with photography’s blacks and whites as a source of laughter long after photography was eclipsed by newer and stranger technologies and abolition had become a reality on both sides of the Atlantic? Paving the way for future investigation of this question, a cartoon that appeared in the American humor magazine Puck in 1909 can show us how and why the “old” jokes examined here were given new life at the turn of the twentieth century (fig. 9.5). Set in a commercial portrait studio, the image rendered by illustrator Samuel D. Ehrhart presents us with a respectably dressed white photographer standing beside the muzzle of a canopied camera whose lens is directed at a group of exceedingly dark-skinned African Americans posed before a white backdrop; two men stand, two women sit, and four young children fill in the spaces around them, all in bourgeois attire. The photographer places a hand to his head in what is described as a gesture of “despair” as he informs the patriarch of the family, “I can’t possibly get sufficient light in my studio to-day to do justice to your family-group, Mr. Lamblack.” To this the latter figure responds, “Can’t? Why, your contemp’ries always uses flashlights when we sits fo’ photos!”45 The caption framing this dialogue, “Darkness and Dawn,” invokes familiar associations between racial blackness and the absence of light at the

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photography seemed to preclude such mixing — ​even if only in the realm of representation — ​would continue to make the medium a powerful tool for addressing fears about miscegenation and African American citizenship after the close of Reconstruction.

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Figure 9.5. Samuel D. Ehrhart, “Darkness and Dawn,” Puck 65, no. 1671 (March 10, 1909), 6. Dartmouth College Library, Hanover, N.H. Courtesy of Dartmouth College Library.

same time that it describes the thought process of the photographer. It has “dawned” upon him that no degree or duration of exposure under his skylight could make these sitters as “white” as he imagines they aspire to be, let alone visible on a photographic surface tailored to the luminosity of light complexions; for their complexions are not merely dark but “lamp black,” suggesting that they reflect almost no light in the visible spectrum. It was precisely this physical property of the common black pigment, created from soot deposited by burning oils, that made lampblack an essential component of photographic retouching inks, the carbon printing process, and (most immediately) the color photography technique (Autochrome) patented by the Lumière brothers and first commercially marketed in the United States in 1907; it was also what made the pigment a theatrical makeup used to

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Figure 9.6. “Darkness and Dawn,” in Richard H. Barry, Snap-Shots on the Midway of the Pan-Am Expo (Buffalo: Robert Allen Reid, 1901), 103. The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Courtesy of the Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.

blacken the performers in minstrel shows. Building upon the groundwork laid by Bede and Dickens, Ehrhart therefore treats us to a recognizable set of relations: black skin/subject doubles as an inanimate photographic material, which in turn evokes the “negro stage.”46 To this he adds the metaphorical possibilities of a novel technology: flash photography. Although magnesium light was first marketed to photographers in Britain and the United States in the 1860s, it wasn’t until the later nineteenth century that this exceedingly bright, transportable, yet highly explosive method of illumination was employed widely in photographic expeditions and surveys — ​at night, underground, in poor weather, or in poor social conditions.47 Ehrhart’s “Darkness and Dawn” would have evoked more than these “photographic” connotations, given that the dialectic inspired a number of

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popular Christian interpretations at the turn of the century.48 The best known of these was an attraction by that name operated by Frederic Thompson and Skip Bundy at Buffalo’s Pan-American Exposition of 1901 (fig. 9.6). Situated on the Midway, the entertainment center of the fair, “Darkness and Dawn” simulated a journey through the underworld, replete with coffins, skeletons, devils in costume, and “apartments” for the damned. Although some considered its combination of pagan and Christian elements a “humorous contrivance for cartooning the stale possibilities of hell,” these were designed to terrify “sensitive and timorous” persons, especially young ladies, by playing on their conceptions of the dark as a mysterious and forbidden place. Relief came to the “unnerved” only at the end of their journey, when they were ushered into light-filled “halls of jasper” with “sweet fountains,” “filmy clouds,” and “pendant angels” that symbolized “the peace and angelic harmony of heaven.”49 The spectacular lighting effects employed in Bundy and Thompson’s concession were recapitulated in the landscape of the exposition itself, which adopted the transition from dark to light as one of its central themes. At dusk, for example, organizers simulated the coming of a new day by extinguishing the hundreds of thousands of electric bulbs across the fairground and then illuminating them in stages, beginning with the pinkish lights on the four-hundred-foot Electric Tower, which slowly shifted to red and yellow. Made possible by the first hydroelectric power station at Niagara Falls, this display impressed visitors on aesthetic and technical grounds; it simultaneously communicated a powerful narrative of progress that asked the world to marvel at the rapid evolution of the United States from the darkness of “savagery” to the dawn of “civilization.”50 That utopic vision stood in direct contrast to the exhibits of nonwhite peoples that accompanied “Darkness and Dawn” on the Midway. Among the most popular of these was the “Old Plantation,” operated by the same pair of showman-entrepreneurs, which treated genteel audiences to “a picture of real Southern life” before emancipation, one populated by singing “pickaninnies,” a perpetually “Laughing Ben,” and a collection of other idle, happy “darkies” like those envisioned by Thomas Carlyle.51 Seeing these “real” caricatured blacks in relation to the “genuine” natives in the exposition’s simulated African village was a concern shared by exposition organizers and critics alike; it was in this “Darkest Africa” that they located the “ancestors” of American blacks, described as “midnight-colored savages” who seemed to do nothing but dance “from

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Figure 9.7. “A Group of Africans—Darkest Africa,” in Barry, Snap-Shots on the Midway of the Pan-Am Expo, 26. The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Courtesy of the Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.

morning to night,” eschewing respectability with their primitive ways and nearly naked bodies (fig. 9.7).52 Through the technology and metaphorics of light, the Pan-American Exposition constructed an image of America as not only a progressive nation but an imposing imperial power whose strength rested on the subjugation of darkness/blackness. Taking cues from its namesake, Puck’s “Darkness and Dawn” similarly assured its audience that neither civilization nor full citizenship could ever come to these blackest of blacks — ​that even a blinding “flash” would not be enough to bring them into the light/white. Further, the illustration mocked the Lamblack family’s intended use of flashlight photography as an instrument of their own empowerment; for even if readers had never encountered the technology themselves, they were likely to have known about its much-publicized use on African expeditions to hunt “wild” and “exotic” creatures in the darkest of night.53 Suggesting that the studio photographer “shoot” a black family with his flashlight and camera therefore amounted to the Lamblacks inviting their own domination, and even death, at the hands of a white man — ​a comic turn, indeed.

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The British readers who laughed at Bede’s Photographic Pleasures and the Americans who were entertained by Puck’s vision of the Lamblacks occupied very different historical moments, but they shared anxieties about how to fix the relationship between blacks and whites in the face of evolving ideas about race, nation, and empire. These dovetailed with a growing faith in photography’s ability to stabilize each of these terms in ways that privileged white bourgeois culture. That a vision of the photographic medium as instrumental to the dominant order could emerge from humorists’ efforts to poke fun at its relationship to social identity — ​efforts that didn’t require picking up a camera — ​was the most intriguing incongruity of their work and arguably its greatest legacy. So why have our histories of photography afforded little to no place for this legacy? More specifically, to what end have narratives of the medium’s development written out the rich, and at times transgressive, interplay of black and white that has permeated photographic humor and shaped popular ideas about what photography makes possible? Returning to the observations of Sir John Herschel with which this chapter began, we might answer these questions by reminding ourselves of the close relationship between photography and racial mutability in Anglo-American culture. As Susan Gubar observes in her study of the latter, “if the concept of whiteness depends . . . on the appropriation of black beings, then perhaps one of the predicaments of white culture has resided in its blindness about its dependency on represented (and thus effaced) black bodies.” For Gubar, then, it is the job of the cultural critic to find ways of “appreciating the extent to which twentieth-century Western culture is indebted to African and African-American tropes, images, mimicries, and masks.”54 So, too, must the historian look with new eyes upon transatlantic photographic culture and the shifting racial boundaries on which it has been built. By taking seriously the work of humor and grappling with its ideas about blackness and whiteness, we can begin to see the social politics of the science, and indeed the very conception, of photography.

Notes The ideas in this essay took shape in fall 2007 while I was participating in a Leslie Humanities Center Institute at Dartmouth College. I am grateful to Angela Rosenthal, David Bindman, and the other institute fellows for enriching the developmentof this essay. I would also like to thank Geoffrey Batchen and Kate Flint for their valuable contributions to my research and writing. Preparation of “Comical

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Conflations” was supported in part by a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Antiquarian Society. Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this publication do not necessarily reflect those of the National Endowment for the Humanities. This essay first appeared in Photography and Culture 4, no. 3 (2011): 133–155. 1. Herschel papers, February 14, 1839, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin; quoted in Deborah Willis and Carla Williams, The Black Female Body: A Photographic History (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002), 1. 2. “Salad for the Photographer,” Philadelphia Photographer 3, no. 26 (February 1866): 62. 3. On the meanings of the black/white binary in Anglo-American culture see Winthrop D. Jordan, White over Black: American Attitudes toward the Negro, 1550–1812 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968), and Kim F. Hall, Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995). 4. Daniel Wickberg, The Senses of Humor: Self and Laughter in Modern America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998), 124. 5. Studies of photographic humor include Rolf H. Krauss, Fotografie in der Karikatur (Seebruck am Chiemsee: Heering, 1978); Bill Jay, Cyanide and Spirits: An Inside-Out View of Early Photography (Munich: Nazraeli Press, 1991); Bill Jay, Some Rollicking Bull: Light Verse, and Worse, on Victorian Photography (Munich: Nazraeli Press, 1996); and Heinz K. Henisch and Bridget A. Henisch, Positive Pleasures: Early Photography and Humor (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998). 6. Bill Jay, “Photographic Pleasures, Popularly Portrayed with Pen and Pencil, 1855,” British Journal of Photography 133, no. 2 ( January 10, 1986): 37–39; Bridget A. Henisch and Heinz K. Henisch, The Photographic World and Humour of Cuthbert Bede (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2002); and Bridget A. Henisch and Heinz K. Henisch, “Cuthbert Bede and the Photographic Scene in the 1850s,” History of Photography 28, no. 4 (Winter 2004): 348–356. 7. “Country Scenes,” Saturday Evening Post 32, no. 1667 ( July 9, 1853), back page. This cartoon was first published with the caption “Portrait of a Distinguished Photographer Who Has Just Succeeded in Focussing a View to His Complete Satisfaction,” in Punch 24 (1853), 208. 8. Hazel Waters, Racism on the Victorian Stage: Representation of Slavery and the Black Character (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 98. 9. Marcus Wood, “The American South and English Print Satire, 1760–1865,” in Britain and the American South: From Colonialism to Rock and Roll, ed. Joseph P. Ward ( Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2003), 107–140. See also Michael A. Chaney, Fugitive Vision: Slave Image and Black Identity in Antebellum Narrative (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008); and Michael A. Chaney, “Heartfelt Thanks to Punch for the Picture: Frederick Douglass and the Transnational Jokework of Slave Caricature,” American Literature 82, no. 1 (March 2010): 57–90.

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10. [Thomas Carlyle], “Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question,” Fraser’s Magazine for Town and Country 40 (December 1849), 678. Carlyle’s critics found a different reason to be anxious about brother Jonathan (the United States), fearing that his argument for compelling blacks to work would bolster pro-slavery sentiments in the American South. This fear was articulated by John Stuart Mill as well as by the many African American leaders who crossed the ocean to weigh in on the “negro question.” See [ John Stuart Mill], “The Negro Question,” Fraser’s Magazine for Town and Country 41 ( January 1850), 25–31; Audrey A. Fisch, “‘Negrophilism’ and British Nationalism: The Spectacle of the Black American Abolitionist,” Victorian Review 19, no. 2 (Winter 1993): 20–47; Audrey A. Fisch, American Slaves in Victorian England: Abolitionist Politics in Popular Literature and Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); and Marcus Wood, Slavery, Empathy, and Pornography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). 11. On the transatlantic history of Stowe’s novel see Douglas A. Lorimer, Colour, Class, and the Victorians: English Attitudes to the Negro in the Mid-Nineteenth Century (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1978); Thomas F. Gossett, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” and American Culture (Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1985); Fisch, American Slaves; Marcus Wood, Blind Memory: Visual Representations of Slavery in England and America, 1780–1865 (New York: Routledge, 2000); Sarah Meer, Uncle Tom Mania: Slavery, Minstrelsy, and Transatlantic Culture in the 1850s (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2005); and Jo-Ann Morgan, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” as Visual Culture (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2007). 12. Wood, Blind Memory, 143. 13. On the racial connotations of “Day and Martin” see Waters, Racism on the Victorian Stage, 61. 14. On the origins of blackface minstrelsy in the United States see Robert C. Toll, Blacking Up: The Minstrel Show in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974), and Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003). 15. Derek B. Scott, Sounds of the Metropolis: The Nineteenth-Century Popular Music Revolution in London, New York, Paris and Vienna (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 147. 16. Douglas A. Lorimer, “Bibles, Banjoes and Bones: Images of the Negro in the Popular Culture of Victorian England,” in In Search of the Visible Past: History Lectures at Wilfrid Laurier University, 1973–1974, ed. Barry M. Gough (Waterloo, ON: Wilfred Laurier University Press, 1975), 31–50; J. S. Bratton, “English Ethiopians: British Audiences and Black-Face Acts, 1835–1865,” Yearbook of English Studies 11 (1981): 127– 142; Michael Pickering, “Mock Blacks and Racial Mockery: The ‘Nigger’ Minstrel and British Imperialism,” in Acts of Supremacy: The British Empire and the Stage, 1790–1930, ed. J. S. Bratton et al. (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1991), 179–236; Waters, Racism on the Victorian Stage; Scott, Sounds of the Metropolis. 17. See Meer, Uncle Tom Mania.

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18. William Stanton, The Leopard’s Spots: Scientific Attitudes toward Race in America, 1815–1859 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960); Jordan, White over Black; and Nancy Stepan, The Idea of Race in Science: Great Britain, 1800–1960 (London: Macmillan, 1982). 19. See Karen Newman, “‘And Wash the Ethiop White’: Femininity and the Monstrous in Othello,” in Shakespeare Reproduced, ed. Jean Howard and Marion O’Connor (London: Methuen, 1987), 141–162; Hall, Things of Darkness; Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York: Routledge, 1995), chap. 5; and Anandi Ramamurthy, Imperial Persuaders: Images of Africa and Asia in British Advertising (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), chap. 2. 20. Cuthbert Bede, Photographic Pleasures, Popularly Portrayed in Pen and Pencil (London: T. McLean, 1855), 66–67. 21. Ibid., 51. A slightly different version of this illustration was first published with the caption “A Photographic Positive,” in Punch 25 ( July 30, 1853), 48. 22. The apparently true basis of Bede’s story is noted in Henisch and Henisch, Photographic World, and Jay, “Photographic Pleasures.” Bede identified the young lady as Miss Hussey Pache, the niece of a photographer named J. M. Heathcote. 23. Heinrich Hoffman, The English Struwwelpeter; or, Pretty Stories and Funny Pictures from the German (London: Dean and Son, c. 1860). The stories in this collection were published in the United States shortly after their English translation. “The Girl Who Inked Herself and Her Books” appeared, for instance, in Little Miss Consequence (New York: McLoughlin Bros., c. 1859–1862). 24. H. Cholmondeley-Pennell, “Perils of the Fine Arts,” in Puck on Pegasus (London: John Camden Hotten, 1868), 127–129. Bill Jay notes in “The Black Art” (unpublished manuscript, c. 1985) that the earliest publication of this poem was 1861. 25. Bede, Photographic Pleasures, ix. 26. This view of female amateurs contrasts that of the 1880s and ’90s, when photography became a “socially acceptable recreational activity for women” in Britain and America, offering them new social opportunities. See Madelyn Moeller, “Ladies of Leisure: Domestic Photography in the Nineteenth Century,” in Hard at Play: Leisure in America, 1840–1940, ed. Kathryn Grover (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992), 139–160. On the gentlemanly character of British amateur photography at mid-century see Grace Seiberling, Amateurs, Photography, and the Mid-Victorian Imagination (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986). 27. See Wood, Blind Memory, and Meer, Uncle Tom Mania. Bede’s criticism of female amateurs and abolitionists also came in the wake of the controversy surrounding the World Anti-Slavery Convention held in London in 1840, when the American female delegates were denied their seats. At the time only men could serve as officers and committee members in the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, and few English women challenged this convention. See Kathryn Kish Sklar, “‘Women Who Speak for an Entire Nation’: American and British Women at the World Anti-Slavery

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Convention, London, 1840,” in The Abolitionist Sisterhood: Women’s Political Culture in Antebellum America, ed. Jean Fagan Yellin and John C. Van Horne (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994), 301–333. 28. Joyce Green MacDonald, “Acting Black: Othello, Othello Burlesques, and the Performance of Blackness,” Theatre Journal 46, no. 2 (May 1994): 231–249; and Kris Collins, “White-Washing the Black-a-Moor: Othello, Negro Minstrelsy and Parodies of Blackness,” Journal of American Culture (Fall 1996): 87–101. 29. Collins, “White-Washing the Black-a-Moor,” 98. 30. In 1997 the Shakespeare Theater in Washington, DC, performed what director Jude Kelly called a “photonegative” Othello, in which “white” actors played “black” characters, and vice versa, while the dialogue remained unchanged. My reading of Bede’s racial humor in this chapter is conversant with criticism of that controversial performance in observing the ways in which photography can operate as metaphor and thus engage “assumptions about identity, race relations, sexual politics, [and] class mobility.” See Sujata Iyengar, “White Faces, Blackface: The Production of ‘Race’ in Othello,” in Othello: New Critical Essays, ed. Philip C. Kolin (New York: Routledge), 105; and Denise Albanese, “Black and White, and Dread All Over: The Shakespeare Theater’s ‘Photonegative’ Othello and the Body of Desdemona,” in A Feminist Companion to Shakespeare, ed. Dympna Callaghan (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers), 226–247. 31. Oliver Wendell Holmes, “The Stereoscope and the Stereograph,” in Soundings from the Atlantic (1864), 134–135. Holmes’s essay first appeared in the Atlantic Monthly 3, no. 20 ( June 1859), 738–748. 32. Holmes, “Stereoscope” (1864), 136–137. 33. “Photography,” Household Words 7, no. 156 (March 19, 1853): 61. 34. Julia F. Munro, “‘Drawn towards the Lens’: Representations and Receptions of Photography in Britain, 1839 to 1853” (PhD diss., University of Waterloo, 2008), 124. See also Julia F. Munro, “‘The Optical Stranger’: Photographic Anxieties in British Periodical Literature of the 1840s and Early 1850s,” Early Popular Visual Culture 7, no. 2 ( July 2009): 167–183. 35. Uncle Tom in England: The London Times on Uncle Tom’s Cabin; A Review from the London Times of Friday, September 30, 1852 (New York: Bunce & Brother, 1852), 4–5. 36. Waters, Racism on the Victorian Stage, 166–167. 37. Samuel Stanhope Smith, An Essay on the Causes of the Variety of Complexion and Figure in Human Species (Philadelphia: Robert Aitken, 1787); Stanton, Leopard’s Spots; and Jordan, White over Black, 517. 38. James Cowles Prichard, Researches into the Physical History of Man (London: J. and A. Arch, 1813); Stepan, Idea of Race, 38–39; and Hannah Franziska Augstein, James Cowles Prichard’s Anthropology: Remaking the Science of Man in Early NineteenthCentury Britain (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999). Prichard’s Researches went through several editions between 1813 and the mid-nineteenth century, ensuring that the idea of man’s black origins remained in transatlantic circulation.

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39. [Mill], “Negro Question.” 40. “Photography,” Household Words 7, no. 156 (March 19, 1853): 61. 41. Elbert Anderson, Elbert Anderson’s Photo-Comic Allmynack (Philadelphia: Benerman and Wilson, 1873). Although humor sections appeared in American almanacs as early as the seventeenth century, the cheap publications known as “comic almanacs” did not became popular in the United States until the 1830s. Early examples of this genre include Charles Ellms’s American Comic Almanac, first published in Boston in 1831, and Frank Leslie’s Comic Almanac, which was published annually from the 1870s to the 1890s. 42. Anderson, Elbert Anderson’s Photo-Comic Allmynack, 35. 43. For period discussions of photographic lighting as tailored to complexion see R. J. Chute, “Hints under the Skylight: The Light and the Subject,” Philadelphia Photographer 11, no. 130 (October 1874): 313–314, and T. R. Williams, “Portraiture — ​ Hints on Lighting,” Photographic Mosaics 3 (1868): 123. On the ways in which photographic technologies have privileged white skin since their invention see Brian Winston, “A Whole Technology of Dyeing: A Note on Ideology and the Apparatus of the Chromatic Moving Image,” Daedalus 114, no. 4 (Fall 1985): 105–123; Richard Dyer, White (London: Routledge, 1997); and Tanya Sheehan, Doctored: The Medicine of Photography in Nineteenth-Century America (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2011), chap. 3. 44. H. J. Rodgers, Twenty-Three Years under a Sky-Light, or Life and Experiences of a Photographer (Hartford: H. J. Rodgers, Publishers, 1872), 175–176. 45. The trade journal Photo-Era reprinted this comic exchange, omitting the illustration and the word “to-day” and identifying the family as a “colored group.” See “Darkness and Dawn,” Photo-Era 23, no. 4 (October 1909): 199. 46. Puck published another cartoon that racializes a photographic material: carbon. In “Photographic,” Puck 58, no. 1498 (November 15, 1905), 10, a group of bourgeois African Americans admires a black baby. One woman comments (in dialect) that the child is the perfect image of his father; another agrees that “he’s a regular carbon copy.” 47. On the history of flash photography see Rupert Martin, ed., Floods of Light: Flash Photography, 1851–1981 (London: Photographers’ Gallery, 1982); Chris Howes, To Photograph Darkness: The History of Underground and Flash Photography (Gloucester, UK: Alan Sutton, 1989); and Pierre Bron and Philip L. Condax, The Photographic Flash: A Concise Illustrated History (Allschwill, Switzerland: Bron Elektronik AG, 1998). Jacob Riis famously employed flashlight photography in his documentation of the urban poor in the late nineteenth century; see Peter Bacon Hales, Silver Cities: Photographing American Urbanization, 1839–1939 (1984; Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2005), chap. 5. 48. F. W. Farrar wrote a fictional account, Darkness and Dawn, or Scenes in the Days of Nero, in which the “darkness” of “decadent Paganism” is driven out by the “dawn of Christianity” and “civilization” (New York: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1893). A collection of poems by Mary C. Sloan Woodward also titled Darkness and

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Dawn (Dayton, OH: Press of United Brethren Publishing House, 1903) similarly equated “light” with Christian virtue that prevails over “dark” vices. The poet placed this dichotomy within contemporary context, such that the late President McKinley embodied nobility and truth, while Cuba (then under partial political control by the United States) exemplified torture, wretchedness, and bondage. 49. Richard H. Barry, Snap Shots on the Midway of the Pan-Am Expo (Buffalo: R. A. Reid, 1901), 50–52. Other descriptions of “Darkness and Dawn” at the Pan-American Exposition can be found in Mary Bronson Hart, “The Play-Side of the Fair,” World’s Work 2 (1901): 1097–1101; and Woody Register, The Kid of Coney Island: Fred Thompson and the Rise of American Amusements (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001). Register recounts the concession’s complex history; combining elements from the Café de la Mort in Paris and an underground ride he designed to demonstrate the mining business, Frederic Thompson debuted “Darkness and Dawn” as “Heaven and Hell” at the 1898 Trans-Centennial Exposition in Omaha, where it became his “first big-money success” (Register, Kid of Coney Island, 57). 50. David Nye, Narratives and Spaces: Technology and the Construction of American Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 122, 124. 51. Barry, Snap Shots on the Midway, 126. 52. Ibid., 72–73; Mary Bronson Hart, “How to See the Pan-American Exposition,” Everybody’s Magazine 5, no. 26 (October 1901), 488–491; and Robert W. Rydell, All the World’s a Fair: Visions of Empire at American International Expositions, 1876–1916 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), chap. 5. 53. See Carl Georg Schillings, With Flash-Light and Rifle: Photographing by FlashLight at Night the Wild Animal World of Equatorial Africa (New York: Harper & Bros., 1905); George Siras, “Photographing Wild Game with Flashlight and Camera,” National Geographic Magazine 17, no. 7 ( July 1906), 367–423; and A. Radclyffe Dugmore, Camera Adventures in the African Wilds, Being an Account of a Four Months’ Expedition in British East Africa, for the Purposes of Securing Photographs of the Game from Life (New York: Doubleday, Page & Co., 1910). On the contributions of these treatises to imperialist discourse and period constructions of manliness see James R. Ryan, Picturing Empire: Photography and the Visualisation of the British Empire (London: Reaktion, 1997), and Finis Dunaway, “Hunting with the Camera: Nature Photography, Manliness, and Modern Memory, 1890–1930,” Journal of American Studies 34, no. 2 (August 2000): 207–230. 54. Susan Gubar, Racechanges: White Skin, Black Face in American Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 40.

Part 3 Performative Comedy and Race

ten   Laughter as Performance

Some Eighteenth-Century Examples

David Bindman

It is almost always assumed that laughter as ridicule and physical laughter, in which the body performs an involuntary if pleasurable bodily convulsion, are essentially synonymous. But one can laugh without ridiculing, and laugh at something or somebody without laughing out loud. Laughter had many roles attributed to it from the seventeenth century onward. In its physical manifestation it could promote the purgation of spleen, whereas for Hobbes its essence was the denigration or ridicule of an inferior, deformed, or immoral person that reinforced the sense of superiority of the person laughing,1 and this is perhaps the sense in which it is used in nineteenth-century racial humor, deriding, for example, attempts by black people to emulate the manners of their social superiors or performing simple tasks ineptly. For Addison at the beginning of the eighteenth century it had two contrasting aspects: it was possible to “laugh Men out of Virtue and Good Sense, by attacking everything that is solemn and serious, decent and praiseworthy in human life,” but it was also possible to laugh men out of vice or folly. It could then assert superiority over others, act as a weapon against enthusiasm and Puritanism, be a way of ridiculing folly and vice, and patriotically assert English superiority over foreign absurdity. For Addison also, citing Milton’s “heart-easing Mirth” from L’Allegro, laughter could have a physical effect as a positive aspect of well-being, and also be a metaphor applicable to beautiful natural objects: laughing fields and flowers. On the other hand its association with the body precluded it from higher perceptions: “sentiments which raise laughter can very seldom be admitted with any decency into an Heroic poem, whose business is to excite Passions of a much nobler Nature.”2 The laughter discussed by eighteenth-century philosophers was, as these examples suggest, generally not reducible to the physical act of laughter, what Baudelaire defined as “a nervous convulsion, an involuntary spasm comparable to a sneeze and prompted by the sight of someone else’s misfortune.”3 We

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do not imagine the Scriblerians actually laughing in the full physical sense or even grinning at their victims, though they may have smiled complacently or wolfishly. Laughter in the physiological sense is usually pleasurable, but it is essentially, as Baudelaire notes, involuntary; it represents a momentary loss of control, which can lead to a loud and involuntary noise, the display of bared teeth, and sudden and disruptive bodily movement. In Milton’s L’Allegro — ​pictured uniquely by Blake — ​a personified figure of laughter “is holding both its sides” as if its body might burst from the force of the convulsion.4 In this sense laughter is in the fullest sense performative; it occurs more naturally in public than private, and is enhanced in its gestural effect by being shared with others. It may even be the raison d’être of a stage production of a comedy or farce where the audience hopes and expects to be provoked into physical laughter. Laughter as metaphor or categorical frame for raillery, ridicule, satire, or burlesque has long been an object of study, but laughter as performance has been almost completely neglected by literary scholars and art historians. Of course physical laughter is often represented in comic novels as a direct response to pompous absurdity, but it is surprisingly infrequently depicted by artists whose idiom was essentially comic. In the episode in Don Quixote where the hero addresses two prostitutes in an absurdly high-flown manner as highborn damsels, the latter, according to Cervantes, were “unable to restrain their laughter,” but an illustration that used to be attributed to Hogarth but is more likely to be by Vanderbank5 does not show them laughing convulsively at all; they are merely responding with surprise to his gracious address. This suggests a reluctance among artists to represent laughter in works even of an inherently comic nature. Physical laughter can be contagious. It can spread and be reinforced by being transmitted from one person to another, most notably in a public place like a theater, and it can catch up even those who might want to resist it. There is an episode in Don Quixote where the knight is terrified by a terrible noise in the night of a nearby battle, but it turns out to have been fulling hammers beating on cloth. As he and Sancho realize this in the morning, Sancho feels the urge to laugh at Don Quixote — ​his cheeks begin to quiver as if they are about to explode, at which point Don Quixote laughs in response, while in turn “Sancho gave in to his mirth and laughed so hard that he had to hold his sides to keep from bursting.” In response to this Don Quixote gets angry and whacks Sancho with his lance, responding not to his own stupidity but to Sancho’s laughter, but he is forced into laughing at himself.6

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The thoughts about physical laughter that this chapter will explore were initially provoked by a print of the early 1780s of the actor Charles Bannister (1741–1804), who had appeared as Macheath in a production of The Beggar’s Opera in 1768 at the Haymarket, but returned in 1782 to the same play, this time as Polly Peachum, no doubt with the sole desire of provoking laughter.7 This performance had, according to the current standard dictionary of actors for the period, a dramatic and extremely unfortunate consequence: “Mrs. Fitzherbert, the widow of a Northamptonshire clergyman, had been with some friends to Drury Lane on the evening of 17 April 1782 to see the transvestite Beggar’s Opera in which Charles Bannister played Polly. This lady was overcome by laughter to the extent that she had to leave before the end of the second act. She continued in hysterics until the morning of the 19 April, when she died.”8 Bannister’s performance as Polly Peachum is recorded in two prints, one by John Raphael Smith,9 and the other — ​almost identical — ​by James Sayers (fig. 10.1), so we can get a glimpse of what caused Mrs. Fitzherbert’s extreme mirth. In the guise of the charming Polly is a lantern-jawed, unshaven middle-aged male in a voluminous dress and head covering, holding a fan, confronting us in a completely deadpan manner: “No antics, or superadded drolleries of his own, drew down the senseless laugh.”10 Anyone brought up in Britain will immediately recognize this figure as a forerunner of a staple of popular pantomime, the Dame, always played by a male comedian prepared to exploit every possible double entendre generated by the Dame’s sexual ambiguity. The pantomime Dame was as essential to the pantomime as was the Principal Boy, the male lead, say the Handsome Prince in Cinderella, who was always played by a fetching young female actress/singer in fishnet tights. If we take the report of Mrs. Fitzherbert’s demise as a real event, and we have no reason not to, it is a case of a humorous situation that provoked laughter that in turn led to an involuntary and irreversible act: death. But the story also contains hints of class transgression, giving it a certain narrative symmetry. The presence of a clergyman’s widow, let alone the physical act of laughter, would have been unexpected in a theater at a performance of a comic play, and her lack of physical restraint might have been expected of a fishwife but not of a person whose gentility could be taken for granted. Physical laughter of the kind experienced by an eighteenth-century theater audience approximated to Bakhtin’s sense of Rabelaisian laughter as a physical and pleasurable bodily release, like shitting. According to Bakhtin, such bodily release was part of a kind of parallel universe uncontrollable by

Figure 10.1. James Sayers, Mr. Bannister in the Character of Miss Polly Peachum, 1781. Etching and aquatint, 24.8 × 17.1 cm. The British Museum, London.

237 Laughter as Performance

authority that was obliged to canalize and indulge it. It represented a popular and communal force, not subject to the normal processes of law and punishment that were applied to the lower orders.11 In the eighteenth century this force often mocked authority through coarse images of a world turned upside down, but it could also, as E. P. Thompson has shown, be conservative, protesting loudly at alterations to the social structure.12 I offer a provisional hypothesis that, in the early eighteenth century, laughter as derision and laughter as physical act began to become disassociated from each other. If physical laughter as an uncontrollable bodily function was by definition disallowed to those of “breeding,” to use the Earl of Shaftesbury’s word, then lack of control, whether in sexual desire, looseness of bowels, rage, or excessive enthusiasm, became a defining characteristic of persons beneath the level of civility, namely children, “savages,” slaves, servants, and other menials.13 This implicit social distinction can be seen in Hogarth’s early Hudibras illustrations of the mid-1720s. In Hudibras in Tribulation,14 two obviously proletarian and simple-minded figures are the only ones to laugh openly at Hudibras and Ralph in the stocks. In the engraving The Laughing Audience15 (not Hogarth’s title), it is the groundlings in the theater who perform laughter without inhibition, while the gentry indulge in activities that might lead to private performances of a different kind. In the painting The Shrimp Girl (London, National Gallery),16 the subject is a real-looking but pretty fishwife who, though she does not laugh, grins uninhibitedly. Laughter in some mid-century satires was recruited against the haughty behavior of the gentry who expected the deference toward them in an urban context they were used to in the country. In John June’s engraving Stand Coachman, or the Haughty Lady well Fitted of 1750,17 a grand lady has parked her coach across a footway, and on refusing to move it has had to endure people opening the coach doors and walking through. The well-bred spectators look on in amusement, but the road sweeper and other proletarians openly laugh at the lady, whose haughtiness we are invited to disapprove. Similarly, in The Countess’s Morning Levee Hogarth shows a grinning black child pointing to the antlers the countess has just bought at auction, to indicate that she is about to cuckold her absent husband. As these examples have taught us, we should not regard laughter as indivisible from other forms of performative mirth, like grinning or smiling. There is the full-bodied “side splitting” physical convulsion that affects the

238 No Laughing Matter

whole body and might be accompanied by other emissions, but it may be contrasted with the equally performative reptilian grin that can encompass the whole body, as in the case of some English anti–French Revolutionary caricatures, like the anonymous satire published by William Holland, Democracy, or the Hopes of the Party, 1798.18 The lopsided, evil yet protective smile of “Democracy” is patently insincere and ingratiating, and therefore the antitype of supposed English good humour that expects well-fed and contented people to express their feelings openly and sincerely. In the first state of Hogarth’s Beer Street of 1751 there is a contrast between the droll laborer on the left whose features express mirth and enjoyment of life, as he contemplates the ejection by a fellow laborer of a Frenchman from this urban paradise.19 His robust joy contrasts with the French inn-sign painter who grins evidently simplemindedly as he copies a bottle onto the sign. In Gillray’s Anti-Saccharites, or John Bull and his family leaving off the use of sugar of 1792,20 Queen Charlotte’s insufferable smugness at giving up sugar in her tea, as part of the campaign against West Indian slavery, is conveyed in a highly assertive grin that contrasts deliciously with the glum faces of her daughters. In Bakhtin’s account of Rabelais, laughter and the object of laughter are caught up in the same process. The performance of laughter and the object that provokes it perpetually reinforce each other. Laughter is provoked by bodily excess and purgation and in turn causes it; laughter loosens the bowels as the loosening of bowels provokes laughter. But in the performance of Charles Bannister as Polly Peachum it is essential to the comic effect that he is a dignified, even handsome figure despite the utter incongruity of his dress and his assumed persona as the wronged amour of Captain Macheath. Bannister was one of the best-known actors of his day, famous for his fine voice and his powers of mimicry, which he employed usually for comic effect. He was described as “uniting in extraordinary perfection, the extremes of a deep bass and high-toned falsetto,” and was well known for his imitations of bass and castrato singers. A German traveler described him as “a Herculean figure with a very beautiful bass voice, the best performer of Drury Lane. . . . He has a very convincing comic action.”21 As Mrs. Fitzherbert left in the second act, the particular scene that caused her fatal seizure must have been the one where Polly, visiting Macheath in prison, despite the obvious evidence of the latter’s infidelity with the jailor’s daughter Lucy Lockit, swears devotion to him in the most moving terms,

239 Laughter as Performance

emphasizing her own womanliness. One might surmise that it was Polly’s pathetic plea to Macheath (probably played by an actress): “Am I not thy Wife? . . . Look on me.  — ​Tell me am I not thy Wife?” in Bannister’s falsetto that set Mrs. Fitzherbert off on her fatal journey. This is an example of the classic incongruity of burlesque, according to Addison, in which — ​to use his example — ​humor is represented as much by Queen Dido acting like a fishwife as it is by a fishwife acting like Dido. With Bannister as Polly, then, it is the incongruity of a female excess of emotion in an emphatically male form that releases the laughter. Mrs. Fitzherbert’s fatal reaction followed from a perceived disjunction between male and female expressiveness. Such humorous disjunctions were of course inherent in the Beggar’s Opera itself, which played on the sexual ambiguities of Italian opera, especially the use of castrati in heroic male roles. In an anonymous print of the mid-1730s, Farinelli the great castrato is shown as a languid and vain figure, while his muse holds his penis, indicating the smallness of its dimensions with her fingers, as a cat plays with his cut-off testicles.22 There are many other caricatures of Farinelli that contrast his lack of manliness with the extraordinary sexual allure he had for fashionable Englishwomen. Yet if physical laughter in public could be a sign of vulgarity, it could also be perceived increasingly as a corrective to the excessive gentility that precludes all manliness and authentic feelings from human relationships. Thus a fat and ungainly John Bull–like Englishman was often used in eighteenth-century caricature to pour comic scorn on an archetypal Frenchman made equally incongruous through his stereotypical effeminacy, as in the ironically titled caricature Politeness by Gillray of 1779.23 Better English coarseness than French or Italian affectation, but in more thoughtful expressions of national difference, better than either a judicious balance between the two that united sincerity in conversation with a measured civility of demeanor. Finally there is the question of our own participation in the performance of laughter at a distance of two to three centuries. Eighteenth-century humor in the form of burlesque and caricature can be highly enjoyable to read or contemplate, but can it make us laugh spontaneously, or have such an effect on those less attuned to eighteenth-century humor? This is harder to answer than it might seem, for laughter is clearly provoked as much by the context in which it is experienced as it is by its object. I remember that in the great Gillray exhibition at Tate Britain in 2001, guffaws could be heard

240 No Laughing Matter

throughout the gallery at times, but then the exhibition created a context in which laughter was allowable, as it would be in a theater. Could one laugh at a caricature if one were on one’s own without anyone to share it? The one caricature by Gillray most likely to provoke an explosion of laughter is surely The Fall of Icarus of 1807,24 with the threatened impalement of Earl Temple’s enormous buttocks on the lethal spike below; but would we actually laugh out loud without the presence of others? Perhaps, but I suspect that for poor Mrs. Fitzherbert it was a collective mood of near hysteria among the theater audience at the sight of Charles Bannister in drag that provoked her fatal seizure. Hogarth’s Laughing Audience reminds us that an audience in the right mood has a dynamic of its own and will laugh at almost anything. This kind of situation in which the performer and audience drive each other to ever greater heights of hilarity is something wholly different from the “laughing at” that constitutes forms of satire, as is demonstrated rather neatly by the late English comedian Bob Monkhouse’s succinct summary of his career: “They laughed when I said I was going to become a comedian — ​well they are not laughing now!”

Notes 1. Indira Ghose in Manfred Pfister, ed., A History of English Laughter (New York: Rodopi, 2002), 35; Ronald Paulson, Don Quixote in England (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 20–21. 2. For a full account of Addison on laughter see Paulson, Don Quixote in England, 12–15 and 20–31. 3. “On the Essence of Laughter,” Charles Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays (London: Phaidon, 1995), 152. 4. John Milton, L’Allegro, line 32. Blake’s illustration is one of twelve illustrations to L’Allegro and Il Penseroso in the Pierpont Morgan Library, New York (Martin Butlin, The Paintings and Drawings of William Blake [New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1981], no. 543). 5. J. Burke and C. Caldwell, Hogarth: The Complete Engravings (London: Thames & Hudson, 1968), no. 170. For the reattribution see Ronald Paulson, Hogarth’s Graphic Works, 3rd ed. (London: Print Room, 1989), 34. 6. Paulson, Don Quixote in England, 15–16. 7. Vic Katz, “The Afterlife of The Beggar’s Opera,” in “Among the Whores and Thieves”: William Hogarth and “The Beggar’s Opera,” ed. David Bindman and Scott Wilcox (New Haven, CT: Yale Center for British Art, 1997), 109–111. 8. D. H. Highfill, K. A. Burnim, and E. A. Langhans, A Biographical Dictionary of

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Actors, Actresses . . . in London, 1660–1800 (Carbondale: University of Illinois Press, 1973), 1:264. 9. Ellen D’Oench, “Copper into Gold”: Prints by John Raphael Smith, 1751–1812 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999), 65 and fig. 80. 10. Ibid., 65. 11. Pam Morris, ed., The Bakhtin Reader (London: Arnold, 1994), 195f. 12. E. P. Thompson, Customs in Common (New York: New Press, 1991), “The Moral Economy of the English Crowd,” 185–258. 13. David Bindman, Ape to Apollo: Aesthetics and the Idea of Race, 1700–1800 (London: Reaktion, 2002), 57–58. 14. Paulson, Hogarth’s Graphic Works, no. 87. 15. Ibid., no. 130. 16. Matthew Craske, William Hogarth (London: Tate, 2000), pl. 55. 17. Jürgen Döring, Eine Kunstgeschichte der frühen englischen Karikatur (Hannover: Gerstenberg Verlag, 1991), abb. 117. 18. David Bindman, The Shadow of the Guillotine (London: British Museum, 1989), cover. 19. Paulson, Hogarth’s Graphic Works, no. 185. 20. Richard Godfrey, James Gillray: The Art of Caricature (London: Tate Publishing, 2001), 173, n. 147. 21. Highfill, Burnim, and Langhans, Biographical Dictionary of Actors, 262: “eine herkulische Figur mit einer sehr schönen Baßstimme, der erste Sänger zu Drurylane. . . . Er hat eine sehr richtige komische Aktion.” 22. David Bindman, Hogarth and His Times (London: British Museum, 1997), 111, no. 52. 23. Bindman, Shadow of the Guillotine, 81, no. 2. 24. Draper Hill, Mr Gillray the Caricaturist (London: Phaidon, 1965), pl. 98.

eleven   Bittersweet Blackness

Humor and the Assertion of Ethnic Identity in Eleanor Antin’s Eleanora Antinova  Cherise Smith

Four people occupy the foreground of a black-and-white photograph of a New York sidewalk (fig. 11.1). Scanning the image, our eyes take in the skyscrapers in the background and the moving trucks and flag in the middle distance, then ultimately bounce between two objects: the campaign poster in the lower left corner featuring the actor-turned-president Ronald Reagan competes for our attention with a woman in the right of the frame whose appearance is odd. With her black wraparound dress, short jacket, and heels, she seems conspicuously overdressed. A hat covers her long, straight hair, and large, dark sunglasses shade her eyes. The tone of her skin is peculiar. Her legs are a few shades darker than other exposed parts of her body. Her left hand, by contrast, is extremely light, and the tones of her face and chest lie somewhere between the darkness of her legs and the lightness of her hand. The figure in the right foreground is Eleanora Antinova, a fictional persona enacted by the artist Eleanor Antin.1 This photograph was taken in Manhattan sometime in October 1981, when Antin mounted a twenty-day-long performance in which she stepped into and lived as the character Antinova. Each day of the nearly three weeks, Antin applied dark makeup to her own light skin in order to masquerade as black. She wore the accoutrements — ​ vintage dresses, flowing skirts, body-hugging shirts, high-heel shoes, long fake nails, and facial makeup — ​that she thought would befit a former prima ballerina. Antin performed everyday actions — ​such as residing in a flat on affluent Central Park West, making use of laborers in the service sector, and eating at posh restaurants like the Russian Tea Room — ​that she thought were appropriate to the station of an ultra-feminine ballerina. Antin-as-Antinova also performed Antin’s professional tasks, including attending gallery and museum receptions and speaking to undergraduates at Columbia

Figure 11.1. Eleanor Antin, Eleanora Antinova performance (1981), from Being Antinova, 1983. Photograph. Courtesy of the artist and Ronald Feldman Fine Arts Gallery.

University. At the same time, an exhibition of Antin’s work — ​photographs of Antinova in past roles and watercolor and ink drawings of costumes and sets by her — ​and a playlike performance titled Recollections of My Life with Diaghilev were mounted at Ronald Feldman Fine Arts gallery.2 This chapter analyzes textual and visual images from the book Being Antinova (1983), which gathers Antin’s writings about the activities in which Antinova engaged during the three-week-long life performance as well as the artist’s reflections on her experiences as and thoughts on assuming this new and imagined identity.3 Containing “documentary” photographs of Antinova in Manhattan, staged “publicity” shots of Antinova in costume, and line drawings of Antinova and other dancers in ballet poses, Being Antinova

244 No Laughing Matter

reads variously as autobiographical memoir, documentary, travelogue, and daily journal. It is presented as a largely personal account in which the artist reports on how audiences reacted to the persona and reveals the intricacies of assuming a different identity. It is, in fact, a work of art, a rhetorical performance, and a performance of a performance wherein Antin exercises and negotiates her many selves. The Antinova persona is a complicated character whose unreal experiences derive from the events of real people and whose knotty story unfurls only long enough to keep viewers hooked in. The Antinova project certainly demonstrates Antin’s skill as a researcher: she knows enough about ballet, Sergei Diaghilev, and the Ballets Russes, among other topics, to collage them into a realistic milieu. Similarly, she effectively binds together the fictional stories that accompany archetypal and stereotypical characters with the life events of actual persons, like those of Russian-Jewish dancer Ida Rubinstein, who performed with Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes for several years beginning in 1909; the Native American ballerinas Yvonne Chouteau, Marjorie Tallchief, Maria Tallchief, Rosella Hightower, and Moscelyne Larkin; and the African American ballerina Raven Wilkinson, who performed with the Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo from the early 1940s through mid-1950s.4 Likewise, Antin’s storytelling talent is undeniable: the predicaments in which Antinova finds herself seem to be real enough. In other words, we can imagine that a black woman dancer would gain fame and notoriety in Europe even while being typecast and marginalized, because Josephine Baker was, just as we can imagine that a black artist would leave America for Europe in search of artistic, social, cultural, and political freedom, because many — ​including Henry O. Tanner, Ada “Bricktop” Smith, and Richard Wright, to name but a few — ​did exactly that. In addition to reflecting Antin’s catholic approach to artistic media and discourses, the Antinova series demonstrates that the artist has a serious knack for humor. The stories she imagines of and for Antinova make viewers and readers laugh because of their ridiculousness and excess at the same time that they are moved to shake their heads and shrug their shoulders in dismay and recognition of the sometimes-unjust ways in which the world works. In Antinova, humor, and not funniness, plays a deeply functional and significant role. Using strategies such as irony, exaggeration, and incongruity, Antin disrupts the illusion of integrity that shrouds narratives and signs of identity. More than that, humor allows the artist to scrutinize community

“White Negro”: Eleanora Antinova and Blackface Performance To move from Antin to Eleanora Antinova required physical, behavioral, and psychological transformation.5 Getting fake nails was the first step of the physical transformation. Antin spent four hours at a salon “having long porcelain nails attached to [her] stubby fingers” and creating “the illusion of glamour” because she believed “long nails add to [a ballerina’s] graceful line both on and off stage.”6 Next, Antin applied dark cover-up makeup to exposed parts of her body, including her face, neck, and hands: “I stroked the brown cake make-up into my face with a gentle, rotating motion. . . . I started coloring my throat with the cake make-up, which I had planned to use only on my face, because it covers such a relatively small area at a time. . . . Then I had to wash off my throat and start over again with the brown liquid color. It did cover more ground but came off in streaks on my skin. It had to be blended, but it’s a nice color.”7 Thinking of her newly dark face as a blank

245 Bittersweet Blackness

and consider how it functions in the building of identity. Humor is, after all, context specific; it is determined by members of a particular audience who share a common set of cultural, political, and social views. This chapter explores the manner in which the artist employs aspects of humor to make a communal identity for herself, which includes distinguishing herself from whiteness and reclaiming her ethnic Jewish identity. It argues that the Antinova project confirms that the assumption, negotiation, and maintenance of identity is profoundly complicated. Antin’s use of humor and nonsense in the Antinova series demonstrates her participation in the conceptualism that was practiced in Southern California during the late 1960s through the early 1980s. Nonetheless, the fact that Antin blackened up to become Antinova was, and continues to be, extremely serious. Initially, I felt wronged by the performance. I steeled myself against acknowledging its humor because, in my eyes, it was no laughing matter. Not until I participated in the conference “No Laughing Matter” did I let down my guard and allow myself to see and, perhaps more important, feel Antin’s wit. What the mishegoss that is Eleanora Antinova allowed me to appreciate is the seriousness with which the artist grapples with identity. Together the conference and Antin’s humor compelled me to make the effort toward cross-cultural and cross-human empathy.

246 No Laughing Matter

canvas, she painted green and silver shadow onto her eyes and likened it to “drawing with a soft chalk.”8 In other words, Antin painted the portrait of Antinova onto her own face. Antin completed the Antinova look by wearing long, flowing, and body-conscious clothing made of rich materials. During the day, she wore a “wrap-around dance sweater” that “snuggled tightly” her “full bosom,” or a green velvet jacket and a purple fedora.9 On special occasions, she wore a 1930s dress that she describes as a “beautiful” black silk covered in “jet and silver beads [that] emit a rich and somber glow over the bodice and flowing sleeves.” She traded in the sensible shoes she customarily wore for high heels or ballet slippers. The artist notes that “it . . . takes a little under two hours to darken and glamorize myself,” which is “in line with the time traditionally taken by glamorous women to represent themselves to the world.”10 Despite the lengthy preparation of her appearance, Antin fretted over her disguise, wondering if she was passing for black successfully or if she would be caught in her masquerade. Before she even embarked on the performance, the artist dreamed that one of her colleagues, the art critic Lucy Lippard, called her out: “You are a fake. If you washed the paint off your face you’d be white.”11 Beginning in this dream state and continuing throughout the nearly three-week-long performance, Antin reminded herself: “A black woman ballerina, I am,” “a small lady with light eyes, long fingernails, a big bosom, and a dark face.” Yet she wondered “if there is still something strange about me” and worried that her “darkness create[d] uncertainty.” She questioned whether she sent “out strange signals.” “Maybe they conflict. Or maybe I fail to send out some signals people with dark skins regularly transmit. Maybe people can’t read me or maybe they can only read me partially.”12 Indeed, the entire Antinova project is an exercise in how incongruity and strangeness can yield critical humor. Antin’s expression of self-doubt does not appear to be a moral or ethical quandary about the availability of blackness and the black mask for performative, and perhaps exploitative, uses. Instead, buried in Antin’s musings is an inquiry to community and what signs members use to communicate to one another. What Antin questions is her mastery of the (cultural) semiotics of blackness. Here we glimpse some of the genius of the Antinova project: Antin points to the fact that blackness is a sign separate from and sometimes but not always related to African Americans and African American culture. Antin’s language also identifies the disconnect between signifier

247 Bittersweet Blackness

and signified and acknowledges the important position of the interpreter of cultural signs. Regardless of her ambivalence about whether she employs identity signs “correctly,” the artist’s mixing of various signs that point to and exaggerate the cultural, sartorial, and phenotypical particularities of identity groups, such as dancers, the elderly, the glamorous, and African Americans, is significant. In Antinova, signs bump against one another, resulting in a studied incongruity that produces comic, if not quite funny, effects. Antin is one of several Jewish performers — ​Al Jolson and Sophie Tucker are others — ​who participated in the blackface tradition, which author Michael Rogin defines as “a form of cross-dressing, in which one puts on the insignias of a sex, class, or race that stands in binary opposition to one’s own.”13 Antin and other Jewish performers used the signs of blackness in the service of personal transformation and identity making. Not only did they activate signs of blackness; they also embodied blackness in their figurative and literal blackface performances. More than a way to gain commercial notoriety, enacting blackness by darking up provided these artists space to navigate away from or toward Jewish identity. In contrast to Eric Lott, whose book Love and Theft studies the nineteenth-century minstrel shows of working-class Irish American men and middle-class Anglo men, Rogin focuses on early twentieth-century instances of Jewish men blackening up and argues that their goal was to achieve unmarked ethnicity or whiteness. He argues that, by masquerading as black and putting on “the mask of a group that must remain immobile, inassimilable, and fixed at the bottom,” a group that is perpetually perceived as a racial contaminant, Jewish blackface performers emphasized their whiteness and were thus carried “to American acceptance.”14 Antin does not appear to have harbored the goal of erasing her ethnic markings, divesting from Jewishness and adopting whiteness. Rather, Antin insists on her own difference from white by putting on the dark mask. In that way, her use of the black mask in Antinova is like that of jazz musician Mezz Mezzrow, who located his own ethnic difference through his metaphoric blackface. In his autobiography Really the Blues (1946), Mezzrow describes his appropriation of aspects of “authentic” blackness to mark himself as “other” and outside.15 For instance, he disregards the perception that blacks are “shiftless and happy-go-lucky” people who “just [don’t] give a damn,” writing that “the real story” is that “the colored man doesn’t often get sullen and tight-lipped and evil because his philosophy goes deeper and he thinks

248 No Laughing Matter

straight.”16 He determines that “Negroes . . . were [his] kind of people,” and he refigures himself as “chocolate brown”: he develops “a Southern accent” in which “every word that rolled off my lips was soft and fuzzy, wrapped in a yawn, creeping with a slow-motion crawl” and uses “so many of the phrases and intonations of the Negro” that he “must have sounded like [he] was trying to pass for colored.” Mezzrow identified not only with the music and culture of African Americans, but also with the marginalized status they were accorded because, as “a Chicago-born Jew from Russian parents,” he had experienced his fair share of prejudice at the hands of white southerners.17 Those experiences made Mezzrow even more resolute about his decision: “Solid. I not only loved those colored boys, but I was one of them — ​I felt closer to them than I felt to the whites, and I even got the same treatment they got.”18 These passages demonstrate that Mezzrow replaced one set of stereotypes about blackness with another and that he picked up and tried on what he perceived as “positive” attributes of “authentic” blackness. Literary historian Maria Damon argues persuasively that Mezzrow’s performance of blackness is remarkable because it reinforces, rather than obliterates, his Jewishness. In other words, blackness allowed the musician to maintain “the special role of critique” that attends being a “social outsider.”19 In contrast to Rogin, she reasons that figures such as Mezzrow and the comedian Lenny Bruce “found in African-American culture the resources for resisting absorption into a dominant culture they found stultifying, hierarchic, unjust, unaesthetic, and un-Jewish” and deems their love affair with African American culture to be an effort to refuse assimilation.20 Antin’s retelling of her first public performance as Antinova, published in Being Antinova, shows that she, like Mezzrow, gets to Jewishness through blackness, all the while using humor, appropriation, and exaggeration to be self and other, Antin and Antinova, simultaneously. For this first outing, Antin attended a course on art-world professions at Columbia University with her gallerist Ronald Feldman, deciding en route to regard the presentation as a “full-fledged performance” and behave as she imagined Antinova would, “as gracious, perhaps even with some of that sleepy Southern charm,” since “most blacks still retain vestiges of southernisms in their voice or speech.” Indeed, Antin seemed to revel in the idea that comic frisson would be created by the incongruity of her own voice, which she described as that of “a Jewish taxi driver from the Bronx,” and the “Southern” voice she imagined for her black ballerina.21

249 Bittersweet Blackness

In a stroke of irony, Antin reasoned that “things haven’t changed much since the 60s,” and so mounted an amplified impression of Stokely Carmichael while giving her presentation. She says she ranted and battled against her “devils — ​formalists, minimalists, systematists, conceptualists, sexists, racists, government bureaucrats, pollsters, oil companies, corporate sponsors, nuclear power, television, ballet and opera companies, symphony orchestras, painters, collectors, museum trustees, certain museums, doctors, Marxists, Freudians, heavy metal sculptors, genius theory, George Balanchine.” Antin labels her “Stokely Carmichael number a success.” She won over her audience just as the “the low-down black hipsters must have” inspired the “white bread . . . liberal lawyers and politicians of the civil rights movement.” While it is difficult to discern whether Antin used the phrases “low-down black hipsters” and “white bread liberals” in a cheeky way, to point out the problematic attitudes of certain groups, such as Beat generation authors like Norman Mailer and William Burroughs, it is clear that she felt she had succeeded because a young black man, who began the class by “glowering” with a “fierce face,” ended it by “laughing louder than anybody else.”22 Antin’s “cranky” affect and indiscriminate ranting hit a chord with the disparate audience members, momentarily joining them as a community through their mutual experience of the artist’s over-the-top humor. While it is difficult to know whether Antin won over the suspicious student with her “cranky style” or her energetic “New York accent,” what is absolutely clear is that a “cranky style” and political ranting resist being separated into the categories of African American and Jewish American, especially considering that her role model Stokely Carmichael, the black nationalist that Antin apes, was a Trinidadian-born African American who grew up in a Jewish area of the Bronx.23 Noting that “all standard caveats and stereotypy apply,” Maria Damon explains that “the African-American and Jewish traditions share a love of verbal display and value language performance far beyond its strictly utilitarian, signifier-equals-signified status as a ‘tool’ for communication.”24 Jews and blacks, she continues, share “a personal relationship with a narrative or textual authority, a relationship that more than permits challenge and interaction,” as well as “an excitement over the possibilities of verbal invention and a recognition of the protean, nonstatic richness of language.”25 So when Antin admits that she “couldn’t get into her character, or more precisely, [she] couldn’t throw off [her] own,” she seems to suppose an ethno-cultural distinction that is, in fact, more of a similarity. In

250 No Laughing Matter

other words, Antin used irony, verbosity, and absurdity — ​well-noted aspects of Jewish and African American humor — ​to get to her Jewishness through Stokely Carmichael and blackness.26 Significantly, Antin accessed and enacted stereotypes of both blackness and Jewishness. She links black people to a “sleepy Southern charm” and to the militant nationalism that characterized Stokely Carmichael’s rhetoric from the late 1960s and early 1970s. She also casts African Americans as people who are hypersensitive to racial discrimination and quick to attribute racist motivations to any and every affront regardless of magnitude. Jewishness Antin connects to New York, aligning both with crankiness, energy, and taxi drivers from the Bronx. Disregarding whether the stereotypes are equally egregious, what is crucial is that Antin attributed difference and “otherness” to both Jews and blacks, defining the two in opposition to “white bread” liberals. Antin’s description of this, her first public performance of Antinova, suggests that she understood identity, including blackness, Jewishness, and femininity, to be a set of stereotypical signs and narratives that were open to amplification and manipulation and best approached through humor strategies. In spite of the fact that Antin employs stereotypes of Jewishness and blackness equally, her use of a glorified and sensationalized blackness not only suggests the debased and disempowered position of blackness but also emphasizes her elevated position in the ethno-racial hierarchy. Even Damon, in her nuanced analysis, is quick to point out that the drive to resist assimilation — ​and, I would add, garner professional success — ​by using blackness and African American culture is “not unproblematic.”27 Because, in the end, Antin’s performance functioned “as a vehicle for . . . ethnic mobility,” as it did for Mezzrow and other Jewish performers.28 Likewise, Antin’s and the other artists’ performances of blackness suggest an erotic fixation and fascination with black bodies at the same time that they indicate the power differentials that exist within difference and among “others.”29

Gender Performance, “Coloured” Eleanora Antinova has rendered critics and historians decidedly silent.30 One suspects that the project’s dependence on Antin’s applying dark makeup to her skin to masquerade as black made it taboo to scholars working in the late 1980s and early 1990s, during the height of so-called “identity politics”

251 Bittersweet Blackness

art. In our current post-ethnic environment, when identity (supposedly) does not matter and so-called “political correctness” has gone out the window, Antin’s blackface performance was rehabilitated by Lisa Bloom in the catalog that accompanied Antin’s 1999 retrospective exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, just as Cindy Sherman’s was revealed in the exhibition and catalog Early Work of Cindy Sherman (2000 and 2001).31 Bloom argues persuasively that Antin’s Jewish ethnicity is a major factor in her art that has been largely ignored by scholars and peers and that critics fail to realize that the artist was working from the specific subject position of second-generation immigrant woman of Eastern European Jewish descent. The author suggests that, in works such as Carving: A Traditional Sculpture (1972), the artist casts herself as an outsider in order to establish her ethnic difference. Our critical paths diverge when Bloom claims that, in the Antinova works, Antin took up the black mask in order to emphasize the historical discrimination shared by Jews and blacks, for that assessment obscures the problems surrounding Antin’s use of blackness and blackface. While many of Antin’s works can, and indeed should, be understood as the artist exploring the deeply intertwined categories of whiteness and femininity, it is unclear whether, in the Antinova performances, Antin distanced herself and Jewishness from the privileges of whiteness by coloring herself black or whether, by painting her skin dark, she inadvertently aligned herself and Jewishness with whiteness in a troubling, albeit ironic, way. Antin’s strategy to send up ethnic, gender, and racial stereotypes through exaggeration ironizes them effectively, but one must question whether such tactics diminish the material penalties that stereotyped individuals oftentimes experience as a consequence of their disenfranchised positions. The racial category whiteness, in contrast to blackness, presents itself as ordinary, normal, and decidedly un-raced. Film historian Richard Dyer explains, in his influential article and book White (1988 and 1997), that whiteness works in myriad ways to normalize white entitlement and black disempowerment.32 He goes on to say that whiteness is a subject that “seems to fall apart in your hands as soon as you begin,” yet it has been “colonized” as the normative (and powerful) position and “the natural, inevitable, ordinary way of being human.”33 “White power secures its dominance by seeming not to be anything in particular. It is often revealed as emptiness, absence, denial.”34 One way whiteness works is to endow certain figures with attributes that

252 No Laughing Matter

characterize them as pure, talented, and ephemeral or powerful, ethical, and neutral.35 Like blackness, whiteness is an ideologically and culturally constructed trope that is endowed with real-world consequences: those who don the cloak of whiteness hope to assume the mantle of entitlement and power. Antin’s early performance personae, such as the Ballerina (fig. 11.2), demonstrate that she invoked humor to examine the discourse of whiteness and the problem of race privilege while also hinting at her own ambivalence toward white entitlement. The Ballerina, dressed in white leotard, tutu, tights, and shoes, and with hair pulled into a tight bun at the crown of her head, might be said to embody the representation of ideal white feminine glamour. Antin explains that she chose the figure of a ballerina because she was “the [most] glamorous female image [she] could think of,”36 and that playing the role of ballerina allowed her to feel like her “most wonderful, grand, beautiful, female self.”37 The artist did not link the stereotype of ultra-femininity represented by the image of the ballerina to race and whiteness when she launched the performances in 1973; however, by 1979, when she launched the Eleanora Antinova persona, she labeled ballet “a white machine.”38 Dyer likewise connects the figure of the ballerina to representations of whiteness. If, as Dyer argues, white women “are constructed as the apotheosis of desirability, all that a man could want, yet nothing that can be had, nor anything that a woman can be,”39 then the ballerina icon is particularly robust because, in her figure, whiteness weds unattainable glamour and femininity: “The white woman as angel was . . . both the symbol of white virtuousness and the last word in the claim that what made white special as a race was their non-physical, spiritual, indeed ethereal qualities. It held up an image of what white women should be, could be, essentially were, an image that had attractions for actual white people. . . . The . . . image is caught in the figure of the ballerina [who, with] . . . the soft, flaring gaslight . . . diffused by the fluffed up, multiple layers of the tutu . . . [was] constructed [as] a translucent, incorporeal image.”40 For Dyer, the image of the ballerina represents the white feminine ideals of virtue and unearthliness. The videotape Caught in the Act (1973) suggests that Antin does not fully buy the idea of the ballerina as an example of pristine whiteness, for she pulls back the curtain on the Ballerina and on whiteness in a pointed and humorous way.41 The film still (fig. 11.3) reveals the Ballerina, balancing herself with the aid of a stick, to be a hack who cannot dance.42 Likewise, in the 1974 video The Ballerina and the Bum, the Ballerina’s seedy background is disclosed,

Figure 11.2. Eleanor Antin performance, photograph from video, Caught in the Act, 1973. Courtesy of the artist and Ronald Feldman Fine Arts Gallery.

254 No Laughing Matter

Figure 11.3. Eleanor Antin performance, photograph from video, Caught in the Act, 1973. Courtesy of the artist and Ronald Feldman Fine Arts Gallery.

for she enjoys rolls in the hay with the Bum. Here, Antin references the reputation of promiscuity that attended ballerinas and other entertainers in the nineteenth century and at least the first part of the twentieth. Antin’s Ballerina tarnishes the otherwise luminous symbol; the figure of unearthliness and unattainable grace is literally grounded. The idea to “colour”43 her characters appeared to Antin sometime in the early 1970s, and first came to fruition in 1974, when the extremely short-lived persona The Black Movie Star surfaced.44 It resurfaced in 1979 when the artist created Eleanora Antinova, another ballerina who is a model of glamorous femininity but whose ambition outstrips her ability. Antin “coloured” the Ballerina by combining her with the Black Movie Star, and Eleanora Antinova was the result. Eleanora Antinova, and the earlier black woman persona, are based on the image of black womanhood sensationalized in film and other media at the time. The myth of the black woman as “superwoman” was prevalent in the 1970s, evidenced in the title of Michele Wallace’s 1977 book Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman.45 Wallace argues that black women, such as Angela Davis and Kathleen Cleaver, were depicted by the media as

255 Bittersweet Blackness

Figure 11.4. Eleanor Antin, untitled line drawing from Being Antinova, 1983. Courtesy of the artist and Ronald Feldman Fine Arts Gallery.

“a crushing burden on the Negro male.”46 The black nationalist Eldridge Cleaver claims that “the myth of the black woman is the other side of the coin of the myth of the beautiful dumb blonde. The white man turned the white woman into a weak-minded, weak-bodied, delicate freak, a sex pot, and placed her on a pedestal; he turned the black woman into a strong, self-reliant Amazon and deposited her into his kitchen.”47 Film historian Donald Bogle writes that the actors Tamara Dobson and Pam Grier played “macho goddesses,” “beautiful, alluring, glamorous” and “ready for sex and mayhem,” in blaxploitation films, such as Cleopatra Jones (1973), Coffy (1973), and Foxy Brown (1974).48 Antin found the figure of the black woman to be “a contemporary image of glamour,” latching on to the elements of sensuousness, overt sexuality, and empowerment.49 Looking at the line drawings of ballerinas that Antin published in Being Antinova, we see that Antin exploits the stereotype of the woman while toying with the binaries black/white, disorder/order, and savage/civilized. In one drawing (fig. 11.4), seven ballerinas stand in battement, but one is out of sync, lifting her right leg instead of her left.50 That ballerina is the black sheep whose figure has been colored in. Drawn in silhouette, her body reads

256 No Laughing Matter

Figure 11.5. Eleanor Antin, untitled line drawing from Being Antinova, 1983. Courtesy of the artist and Ronald Feldman Fine Arts Gallery.

as black in contradistinction to the other figures, whose bodies are constituted by lines that make the blank space read as white skin. Without a caption or title, readers and viewers know that the one who dances out of sequence and whose costume clashes with her skin is Antinova, the black woman ballerina of Antin’s imagination. In another drawing (fig. 11.5), Antin alludes to the excessive sexuality and sensuality that are staples of the stereotype of the black woman. Out of a group of seven ballerinas, the dark figure of Antinova stands upright with arms in fourth position while the other ballerinas’ arms are in port de bras forward. She appears as a stiff banana whose peeling, the white ballerinas, has been pulled back. The black ballerina is a phallus. No doubt, Antin refers to Josephine Baker, African America’s most famous expatriate dancer, who was well known for her cabaret act, which included the notorious Banana Dance. Baker, like the fictional Antinova, was a self-taught dancer who embodied the primitivist exoticism that surrounded blackness, black culture, and black bodies in 1920s France. Here, the fictional Antinova, like her real-life counterpart, goes against the grain, standing erect against the rules of gender propriety that white femininity is said to govern. These images borrow freely from ballet manuals that use line drawings to illustrate poses, as well as from print cartoons. While the former format seeks

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to suggest the movements of the body, and the latter attempts to communicate satire or humor, each relies on economy of line. Indeed, the elegance of line in Antin’s drawings is put in taut tension with the images’ content, the bumbling ballerina, which only heightens their wittiness. On the one hand, these drawings read as lighthearted and funny: Antinova is a self-taught and free-spirited misfit who does not submit to the strict rules of ballet. Her poses are interesting but incorrect. On the other hand, the drawings are deadly serious. Antinova, the dancer with dark skin, is the exotic “other,” confined to roles that emphasize her cultural and racial difference. Though it is difficult to discern whether the line drawings critique or reinforce existing stereotypes about race and gender, it is clear that Antin both imagines a marginalized position for Antinova within the Ballets Russes and draws on well-trod narratives about the underdog-outsider who struggles to succeed. Antin establishes Antinova’s place as outside, “other,” and marginalized both textually and visually, on the level of behavior, narrative, and performance. That Antin collapses her own (ethnic) particularity with Antinova’s and locates each in a sea of homogeneity to comedic effect is no more apparent than in her recollection of a meal she shared with her friend Carrie during which the server ignored Antin/Antinova’s flirtatious advances.51 Antin writes that the waiter admired Carrie because she looked like a “nice girl from an expensive school,” the “high class” kind who “read books and looked at pictures in museums.”52 According to the artist, Carrie is a “golden girl” who belonged in a “Breck [shampoo] ad”: she had “shoulder length brown hair” that “gleamed” as though she “brushed it 100 times a night.” The author sums up Carrie as a “white and privileged” New Yorker. By contrast, she describes herself-as-Antinova as a “low-class person” who wears “too many clothes,” someone the waiter would perceive as an “unsuitable companion.” Antinova is, after all, “the dark one with a foreign name who sleeps with men and comes from the slums.”53 The artist pits Carrie’s airbrushed whiteness against Antinova’s smudged blackness, the artificial blackness of Antin-as-Antinova, and the ethnic marking of Antin. Antin has Carrie and her whiteness come out on top in this duel of attractiveness and privilege. In the retelling of the circumstances, it is unclear whether Antin-as-Antinova or Antin herself (or a combination of the two) is offended, but whatever the case, Antin determines “that waiter is racist.”54 According to Antin, Carrie does not agree with the artist’s assessment, so she responds by attempting

to bring Antin back to reality: Carrie reminds Antin that she is not black and that she is not perceived as black. 258

She looked hard at me. “You do not look black,” she said.

No Laughing Matter

“No, I’m white as the driven snow.” I was angry. With such friends, who

needs enemies.

“You have a lot of makeup on but you’re not black. Nobody would take you

for black.” She sounded upset.

“Everybody thinks I’m black,” I insisted.

“No, they don’t. You’re imagining they do.”

“Well, why doesn’t the waiter respond? I’ve been flirting with him for the

last ten minutes and his eyes are like ice.” “Maybe you’re not his type.”

Carrie sounded distressed. I didn’t understand it.

“Why don’t you want me to be black?” I asked curiously.

“I don’t care one way or the other.” She sounded like she was going to cry.

“You just aren’t.”55

The artist portrays the exchange between Antin-as-Antinova and Carrie as serious, even while her statements, including “With such friends, who needs enemies” and “She sounded upset,” undermine Carrie and reinforce her own authorial voice. Perhaps more significantly, Antin’s authorial voice, critical and sarcastic, is a third persona that destabilizes the reader. The reader does not know whether she should take Antin’s side and express shock at the evaluation that the artist was not perceived as black, or assume the position of an ethnic and cultural Jew, and be offended that Carrie would not acknowledge Antin’s difference. It is not clear whether she should she marvel at Antin’s ability to stay in the Antinova character and play the role of affronted black woman, or be utterly offended at the stereotype of the indignant black woman. Here, humor is disarming and dismaying, a consequence of the confusion and uncertainty that Antin created. While there is no way of knowing if Carrie acted in the precise ways that Antin details, it is noteworthy that Antin employs the straight man / funny man comic device wherein two unequal partners are put together for humorous results. According to this setup, the former feeds reason to the latter, who responds with nonsense, ignorance, or eccentricity, and hilarity ensues. For instance, Carrie provides sensible and rational remarks, such as

259 Bittersweet Blackness

“You do not look black” and “Maybe you’re not his type,” to Antin/Antinova, who comes back with outrageous retorts and passionate indignation, “No, I’m white as the driven snow” and “Why don’t you want me to be black?” Antin’s remarks are funny in their absurdity — ​she is white after all, but not “white as the driven snow” because of her Jewishness and ethnic specificity. The question “Why don’t you want me to be black?” is also deadly serious, for it hints at the discrimination inherent in recognizing prejudice lodged against some groups and not others. Similarly, Antin humorously deflects the appraisal that she “just” isn’t black by projecting onto Carrie sentiments that might more accurately communicate her own emotional state. When, for example, she describes Carrie as “upset” and “distressed” and on the verge of crying, the artist may, in fact, be expressing her own feelings about mis-recognition. Here, Carrie is made to play the straight man to Antin’s and Antinova’s funny man. If we consider the aspects of ethnic humor that Joseph Boskin and Joseph Dorinson outline in their essay “Ethnic Humor: Subversion and Survival,” we see that Antin’s humor is couched in decidedly ethnic terms, for this exchange is tinged with the retaliation characteristic of an ethnic minority getting even with an ethnic majority.56 When Antin recalls Carrie telling her, “You do not look black” and “You have a lot of makeup on but you’re not black. Nobody would take you for black,” she makes Carrie play white straight man. The artist portrays Carrie as if she is trying to reason with Antin, to convince her of the folly of her perceptions. And when Antin remembers responding with the sarcastic, “No, I’m white as the driven snow,” and then with the more serious, “Everybody thinks I’m black,” she casts Antinova as the black funny man and herself as Jewish funny man. Antin portrays herself and Antinova as outsiders who may be a little mad, but are righteous in their indignation. Here, the artist points to the similarly marginal positions that Jewish and African American people have occupied, while also touching on the important role that humor plays in the cultures of each group. For Antin, the dialogue with Carrie becomes, then, an instance of audience participation, an identity-building exercise through which the artist performs her difference and enacts her identification as Jewish. When Antin/Antinova asks, “Why don’t you want me to be black?” she evens the racial and ethnic score by projecting xenophobia and intolerance onto her friend, imagining that Carrie prefers that the artist remain unmarked, unethnic, and white. Carrie’s response, “I don’t care one way or

260 No Laughing Matter

the other. You just aren’t,” is then presented as whitewashing, as convenient color-blindness meant to smooth over racial and ethnic strife. In Antin’s performance, Carrie is required to serve as the emblem of white femininity against which Antinova and Antin define themselves. Accordingly, Antin classifies Antinova and herself as other than and different from the model of white femininity that Carrie is forced to represent. Antin’s performance and relaying of this exchange can be read in another, more ironic way, however. Indeed, the humor and exaggeration of Carrie’s and Antin’s conversation can also be understood as the artist parodying the sensitivity or racial paranoia with which majoritarian groups paint minoritarian groups. To say it differently, we might recognize the depiction of the event as an instance of the artist lampooning minoritarian groups’ efforts to change the cultural and political landscape by publicly cataloging and decrying discriminatory behaviors and actions. If the representation of the exchange is interpreted in that way, then Antin’s duplicity and identification with the white patriarchal majority must also be comprehended. This is a significant instance of critical liminality: the boundary between subject and object disintegrates, Antin and Antinova are collapsed into one. Antin is herself and other at the same time. In this critical liminality, one discerns an altruistic project designed to promote tolerance. Indeed, Carrie is depicted as a borderline racist who has a problem with Antinova’s blackness and perhaps with Antin’s Jewishness. Though she is cast as the epitome of white womanhood, Carrie comes off as the anti-model whom Antin/Antinova must confront — ​in other words, the quarrel with Carrie allows the artist to build community and identify with others in the face of opposition. Yet the liminality that Antin enacts and displays is not just for public consumption and instruction. It is also, and perhaps more importantly, a demonstration of Antin’s assertiveness and imagination, an exhibition of Antin’s power to write her own story and to claim her own identity as artist and creator, as woman, as Jewish, and black. It is an assertion of individualism in the face of collectivity.

Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, Orientalism, and Modernism That Antin’s black woman ballerina was (supposed to have been) making a name for herself in the early 1920s, at just about the same time that African American dancer Josephine Baker and Russian Jewish entertainer Ida Ru-

261 Bittersweet Blackness

Figure 11.6. Eleanor Antin, L’esclave, from Being Antinova, 1983. Photograph from video. Courtesy of the artist and Ronald Feldman Fine Arts Gallery.

binstein were winning over France, was not mere coincidence.57 Locating her black ballerina in that period allowed Antin to link her fictitious character to the real Ballets Russes, its Orientalist productions, and primitivist history, which included capitalizing on Rubinstein’s ethnicity.58 More than just a way for the artist to exercise her childhood fascination with ballet, Antin’s engagement with the Ballets Russes provided a means to critique the Ori-

262 No Laughing Matter

Figure 11.7. Eleanor Antin, The Hebrews, from Being Antinova, 1983. Photograph from video. Courtesy of the artist and Ronald Feldman Fine Arts Gallery.

entalist paradigm and its efforts to fix many, including herself, as exotic and disenfranchised “others.” The artist played up, to comic and critical effects, the over-the-top, fantastic, and campy qualities of exoticist narratives and productions that were popular in the early twentieth century. In that way, Antin participated in the critique of Orientalism that Edward Said initiated a few years earlier with the publication of his influential book Orientalism in 1978.59

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The photographs exhibited in Recollections of My Life with Diaghilev are sepia-toned re-creations designed to pass as vintage production stills. In stills from the fictional ballet L’esclave (fig. 11.6), for instance, Antinova appears as a campy slave. She is dressed in a sheer lace tunic, and her wrists are bound in chains. Antin-as-Antinova is posed with hands open and arms extended in gestures that express erotic submission, and she stands in front of a zebra-skin rug, the universal symbol of primitivist exoticism. All is not as it appears, however. Antin emphasizes the artifice, humor, and camp factor of ballet costumes and Orientalist narratives by binding her slave with a chain composed of large, flat links that look more like a silver necklace than like iron manacles. She also replaces an actual zebra skin with the plush synthetic material reserved for pillows and stuffed animals. Similar campy, anachronistic Orientalist elements appear in Antin’s production photographs for the fictional ballet The Hebrews (fig. 11.7). One suspects that Elizabeth Taylor’s and Barbra Streisand’s overwrought costumes as Cleopatra and Nefertiti were the artist’s inspiration. Like Taylor as Cleopatra, Antin’s face appears to have been stained dark. She wears thick kohl around her eyes, a shoulder-length wig of straight black hair, and a long tunic made from geometric fabric. Positioned in front of a plain backdrop and next to a bushy fern plant, Antin-as-Antinova strikes poses that echo the stylized, two-dimensional flattening of the human form found in Egyptian wall paintings. Antin’s fake production photographs function on several levels simultaneously. On one level, they read as a send-up of a send up-because of the campiness and artificiality of the poses, costumes, and props with which Antinova is positioned. In other words, Antin seems to wink knowingly at the viewer, as if to affirm that we are all in on the joke, that we all know that the costumes, props, photographs, and fictional ballets are a wry commentary on the fiction, but nonetheless reality, of Orientalism. Indeed, the titles Antin gives to her fictional ballets — ​L’esclave, The Hebrews, Prisoner of Persia, and Pocahontas (which she envisioned as Poca-hot-ass) — ​reference the discourses of Orientalism and primitivism that are the bedrock of modern art practices as well as of the Orientalist productions that Diaghilev mounted. By employing already exaggerated representations of “otherness,” slavery, and submission, Antin humorously emphasized the excessive and overdetermined nature of Orientalist narratives that also ensnare the artist as a Jewish woman.

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While it is unlikely that Said’s groundbreaking work on Orientalism had so thoroughly infiltrated the academy as to be fully digested and manifested in the artist’s work, the photographic stills that make up Antin’s Recollections of My Life with Diaghilev portfolio labor in two related ways on behalf of Said’s theory. First, they allow the artist to link the real dancer Ida Rubinstein, who in her Ballets Russes roles was required to play the “Oriental” “other,” to the fictional ballerina Antinova, who was also relegated to playing the exotic “other” in Antin’s imaginary ballets. In that way, the images point to ballet’s exclusion of certain groups from its ranks. Second, they enable Antin to exaggerate playfully the already larger-than-life Orientalist fantasies in which the Ballets Russes trafficked and thus reveal their artifice. Those two lines of attack, in combination with her humorous appropriation of ballet themes, demonstrate Antin’s knowledge of ballet history while also critiquing and poking fun at the so-called objective and universal pretensions of such high cultural pursuits.

Conclusion In collapsing the archetypes of artist and ballerina with the stereotypes of black women and African Americans in the Antinova project, Antin not only built a mythic, modernist history for herself and her persona, but she also short-circuited the meanings of the various signs she used in clever and funny ways. More to the point, by animating the narratives associated with the various stereotypes, she limited and questioned their ability to represent their signifieds. Folding together these conventional narratives and overdetermined signs allowed the artist to experience herself as doubly “other” — ​she could temporarily enact the ultra-feminine ethereality associated with white womanhood and embodied in the ballerina, and momentarily possess the power, sensuousness, and glamour represented in the figure of the black woman. Rather than validating the identities that the stereotypes represent, Antin’s often comic animation of various stereotypical signs and narratives showed the arbitrariness of the constructs and hijacked their significance through sheer excess. Being the black woman ballerina Eleanora Antinova enabled Antin to illustrate the overdeterminedness of these stereotypes, to reclaim her difference as Jewish, and to experience simultaneous consciousness as self and “other.” Yet in spite of the fact that Antin challenges essentialist notions of identity

Notes 1. Eleanora Antinova’s life story begins in Antin’s 1979 play-like piece Before the Revolution, which reveals the character’s background as an American-born black woman who leaves the United States for Europe in the first part of the twentieth century. The self-taught dancer takes the stage name Eleanora Antinova when she joins Sergei Diaghilev’s famed Ballets Russes, where, much to the ballerina’s chagrin, she is relegated to dance in Orientalist-themed productions with names like L’esclave, Pocahontas, The Prisoner of Persia, and The Hebrews, because of her dark skin and rough dancing. The following year, Antinova’s story was expanded in the three-week-long performance that is chronicled in the book Being Antinova, published in 1983. Three years later, Antinova appeared in Help! I’m in Seattle, a play-like performance that is set in the Depression era and explores her life as a black woman entertainer in the racially hostile United States. The final Eleanora Antinova performance, Who Cares about a Ballerina? (1987), is a two-woman theatrical production set in the late 1980s. It finds the washed-up former ballerina attempting to write her memoirs but getting sidetracked by her memories. Later that same year, Antinova appears in Antin’s video From the Archives of Modern Art, a collection of short films that were supposed to have been found at a defunct movie studio in Los Angeles. Clearly, the story of Antin’s black ballerina is as dense and elaborate as it is made up! 2. For each performance of Recollections, the gallery was transformed into a makeshift sitting room, decorated with a Tiffany-style lamp, “Oriental” rug, sitting chair, and potted plants, where Antinova, who Antin described as “black, glamorous, and of an uncertain but advanced age, [and] very much the grand dame,” would reminisce and recount tales about Diaghilev, her life, and her most famous roles. Eleanor Antin, “Recollections of My Life with Diaghilev” in Eleanora Antinova Plays (Los Angeles: Astro Artz, 1994), 45.

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and proposes a radical simultaneity of self and other, she also reinforces the historic link between blackness and “otherness.” The artist’s donning the cloak and manipulating the signs of blackness highlights the intractability of blackface, the persistence of stereotypes of blackness, and the unrelentingly debased position of black people in American culture and society. It is part of a proverbial “vicious circle”: the devalued position of blackness in American history and culture and of black people in American society continues to render blackness available for the taking and black people and culture open to exaggerated representations. Notwithstanding Antin’s enunciation of a Jewish identity as a radical articulation of difference, the Antinova performance reveals the limits of autonomous heterogeneity and intimates the tenacity of hierarchy within difference.

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3. Some portions of this text appear in “The Other ‘Other’: Eleanor Antin and the Performance of Blackness,” in Enacting Others: Politics of Identity in Eleanor Antin, Nikki S. Lee, Adrian Piper, and Anna Deavere Smith (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 79–134. The present essay was written several years before publication of the book. 4. Maria Tallchief is probably the best-known Native American ballerina. For more on the history of the Ballets Russes see Dan Geller and Dayna Goldfine’s film Ballets Russes (New York: Zeitgeist Films / Zeitgeist Video, 2006). 5. In the title of this section I reference Norman Mailer’s essay “The White Negro,” in The White Negro (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1957). In it, he tailors a suit made of several stereotypes of black masculinity, then puts it on to become the hipster or “white Negro.” The “Negroes” on whom Mailer modeled his “white Negroes” were not flesh-and-blood men the author encountered in his life. Rather the “Negroes” he describes are the stereotype of the black man as sexual predator, noble savage, and naive primitive. His “Negroes” were perverse and promiscuous “psychopaths” who were forced “to develop an alternate mode of being” owing to the alienation and discrimination they encountered (220). Mailer imagined that they hated themselves because they were “hated from outside” (220). Michele Wallace suggests, in her book Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman (New York: Dial Press, 1979), 42, that Mailer “was in the grip of a bad case of the I’ve-got-the-psuedo-anglo-saxontechnological-male-menopausal-twentieth-century-civilized man’s blues” for which he “needed an antidote” when he wrote the essay. Mailer’s misogynist fantasy figures were born to carry him from what he perceived to be the emasculating effects of white liberal mores to the supermasculinity, strength, and power the Korean War had wrested from white men. 6. Eleanor Antin, Being Antinova (Los Angeles: Astro Artz, 1983), 1. 7. Ibid., 6. 8. Ibid. 9. Ibid., 16. 10. Ibid., 5. 11. Ibid., 3. 12. Ibid., 8 13. Michael Rogin, Blackface, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting Pot (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 30. 14. Ibid., 92 and 90. 15. Mezz Mezzrow, Really the Blues (New York: Random House, 1946). 16. Ibid., 21. 17. Ibid., 110. 18. Mezzrow also distanced himself from white and Jewish jazz musicians and the “white race” generally, because, he writes, he “never could dig the phony idea of a race — ​if we were a ‘race’” (ibid., 57–58). He went so far as to accuse some of his fellow Jewish counterparts, including Sophie Tucker, Eddie Cantor, and Al Jolson, of playing “a commercial excuse for the real thing.”

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19. Maria Damon, “Jazz-Jews, Jive and Gender: Ethnic Anxiety and the Politics of Jazz Argot,” in Jews and Other Differences: The New Jewish Cultural Studies, ed. Daniel Boyarin and Jonathan Boyarin (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 155. 20. Ibid., 157–158. 21. Antin, Being Antinova, 9. 22. Ibid. 23. I thank John MacKiernan Gonzalez and Frank Guridy for pointing out to me Stokely Carmichael’s background. 24. Damon, “Jazz-Jews,” 158. 25. Ibid., 159. 26. Irving Howe puts forward a similar argument in relation to Jewish blackface entertainers: “Blacking their faces seems to have enabled the Jewish performers to reach a spontaneity and assertiveness in the declaration of their Jewish selves.” Howe, “Journeys Outward,” in World of Our Fathers: The Journey of the East European Jews to America and the Life They Found and Made (New York: Touchstone, 1976), 563. 27. Damon, “Jazz-Jews,” 158. Howe also weighs in on this, seeming to hope that “so many Jewish entertainers” worked in blackface because of “some deeper affinity” with African Americans but admitting that “perhaps it was no more than shrewd opportunism, an eagerness to give audiences exactly what they seemed to want.” Howe, World of Our Fathers, 563. 28. Rogin, Blackface, White Noise, 148. 29. For further discussion of this idea see Susan Gubar, Racechanges: White Skin, Blackface in American Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 167. 30. The word “coloured” in the title of this section comes from Eleanor Antin, interview with the author, August 2005. 31. Lisa E. Bloom, “Rewriting the Script: Eleanor Antin’s Feminist Art,” in Eleanor Antin, ed. Howard Fox (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1999), 159–189, and Early Work of Cindy Sherman (East Hampton, NY: Glenn Horowitz Bookseller, 2000). 32. Richard Dyer, “White,” Screen 29, no. 4 (Autumn 1988), and Richard Dyer, White (London: Routledge, 1997). 33. Dyer, “White,” 44–45. 34. Ibid., 44. 35. Dyer, White. 36. Nancy Bowen, “On Art and Artists: Eleanor Antin,” Profile 1, no. 4 (May 1981): 13. 37. Antin, Eleanora Antinova Plays, 217. 38. Ibid., 119. 39. Dyer, “White,” 64. 40. Dyer, White, 129–131. 41. Caught in the Act documents the making of the performance and photographs Choreography, also from 1973, in which Antin as the Ballerina strikes ballet poses in photographic stills.

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42. Interestingly, the Jewish entertainer Fanny Brice had a regular routine that featured a “klutzy” ballerina. Sarah Blacher Cohen, ed., From Hester Street to Hollywood: The Jewish American Stage and Screen (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983), 46. 43. Eleanor Antin, untitled letter to the editor, in Chrysalis 10 (1980): 7. 44. A published photograph of the persona reveals that Antin darkened her skin and wore a curly Afro to effect her transformation to the Black Movie Star. The character had a short life because Antin felt it had not been fully conceived. Antin interview, August 2005. For an image see Cindy Nemser, Art Talk: Conversations with Twelve Women Artists (New York: Scribner, 1975). 45. Wallace, Black Macho. 46. From Daniel Patrick Moynihan, “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action” (Washington DC: US Department of Labor, 1965), quoted in Wallace, Black Macho, 88. 47. From Eldridge Cleaver, Soul on Ice (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1968), quoted in Wallace, Black Macho, 117. 48. Donald Bogle, Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks (New York: Continuum, 1996), 251. 49. Bowen, “On Art and Artists,” 13. 50. Thanks to Tara Kohn for her assistance in researching the ballet sections of this essay. 51. Bloom contends that Jewish feminist artists were forced to downplay their Jewishness during the 1970s: “The price of admission into feminist circles in the 1970s seems to have been high for Jewish feminist artists and art historians, who had to erase their Jewish identity to be at the center of a movement in which gender overrode all other kinds of identities.” Lisa Bloom, Jewish Identities in American Feminist Art: Ghosts of Ethnicity (New York: Routledge, 2006), 6. 52. Antin, Being Antinova, 12. 53. Ibid. 54. Ibid., 13. 55. Ibid. 56. Joseph Boskin and Joseph Dorinson, “Ethnic Humor: Subversion and Survival,” American Quarterly 37, no. 1 (Spring 1985): 81–97. 57. See Phyllis Rose, Jazz Cleopatra: Josephine Baker in Her Time (New York: Doubleday, 1989). Placing her fictional persona in 1920s Europe is not mere coincidence, since that moment is recognized as significant to the making of (the myth of ) modern art, and Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes was a prime location of that making owing to its fostering of radical collaborations between artists of various media. 58. Even in its very first tour of Europe and America, the Ballets Russes peddled an exoticist vision of the East in productions like The Polovtsian Dances from Prince Igor and Cléopâtre, whose respective costumes and mis-en-scène are derived from the Russian steppes and from the ancient Egyptian art collections at the State Hermitage

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Museum. Alexandre Benois, “The Origins of the Ballets Russes,” in Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes, ed. Boris Kochno (New York: Harper & Row, 1970), 12, 29, and 32. Over the course of its twenty-year existence, the Ballets Russes continued to mount Orientalist fantasy-narratives of Near Eastern culture that allowed European and American audiences to indulge in exotic “otherness.” The company’s 1911 production of Schéhérazade is one example. Based in the legend of Scheherazade, the virgin who saved her own life and that of other women by telling King Schariar of Samarkand stories so engrossing that he was moved to suspend his killing sprees, the ballet featured costumes and décor inspired by “Persian miniatures.” A costume sketch from the production shows a dark-skinned male figure wearing a brightly colored head-wrap and voluminous pants while a photograph of the dance’s star features Ida Rubinstein dressed in a many-layered and bejeweled costume and posing dramatically in front of a Japanese screen. The costumes were designed by Léon Bakst. Kochno, Diaghilev, 42. Clearly, the Ballets Russes participated in a long Orientalist tradition by stitching together and sensationalizing various Eastern narratives and motifs. 59. Said’s book is devoted to studying the discursive matrix that is Orientalism; the manuscript focuses attention on Arabs, Islam, and the Middle East to consider how the “Orient” and the “Oriental” were created by British, French, and American invention, power, and empire. Elusive and difficult to hold on to, Orientalism, as Said describes it, is at once an academic discipline based in nineteenth-century ideas, hierarchies, and pseudo-sciences wherein the “Orient,” its people, and its culture are regarded as exotic and inferior; a system of knowledge based on a binary in which the “Occident” is the model and the “Orient” is its antithesis; a discourse produced, consumed, and dominated by the West as a way to define itself and propagate its power; and a series of institutional practices, which in turn lead to material consequences, by which the West subordinates the East and gains power. Said is careful to point out that both the “‘Orient’ and ‘Occident’ are man-made” ideas “with no corresponding realities” and not “inert fact[s] of nature”: see Said, Orientalism (New York: Random House, 1978), 4–5. Like the grifter’s shell game in which the hidden object appears to be shuffled around but does not really exist, Orientalism is a system of mirrors in which the ideas, fantasies, and practices of one commentator are reflected on, referenced by, and elaborated on by another, which results in the proliferation of the discourse. The Orient is a representation, “a willed human work” created and controlled by the Occident that annihilates the individual and drives his interest (15). Said reveals, in the penultimate paragraph of the introduction, that he, as an Arab, is one such individual, someone who, despite the odds, resisted the clutch of Occidental imperialism. Thus, in addition to providing a ground-breaking method to ferret out the many ways that the West attempts to distribute and maintain its epistemological, discursive, and material dominance, Orientalism is an effort of identity-building, an articulation of the politics of identity, a struggle for power within difference rather than power over difference. He is careful to point out (27) that the rise of Orientalism coincides with the rise of anti-Semitism.

If you go to Antigua as a tourist . . . you might say, What a beautiful island Antigua is — ​more beautiful than any of the other islands you have seen,

. . . in their way, but they were much too green, . . . which indicated to you, the tourist, that they got quite a bit of rainfall, and rain is the very thing

that you, just now, do not want, for you are thinking of the hard and cold and dark and long days you spent working in North America (or, worse,

Europe), earning some money so that you could stay in this place (Antigua) where the sun always shines and where the climate is deliciously hot and dry for the four to ten days you are going to be staying there. — ​Jamaica Kincaid, A Small Place

twelve   Traveling Humor Reimagined

The Comedic Unhinging of the Western Gaze in Caribbean Postcards  Sam Vásquez

In her essay A Small Place, Jamaica Kincaid’s pointed and disturbing humor eloquently highlights the self-serving perspective of many tourists who visit the Caribbean, and in this case, Antigua.1 Despite the unmistakable bite of her tone, Kinkaid does not always invite readers to laugh aloud at such assertions; instead, in revealing the instability and unreliability of European ontological representations of the Other, she demands that her audience question such constructions. For example, her subtle satire highlights tourists’ limited view of the Caribbean and its inhabitants. Specifically, visitors’ reductive and patronizing assertions that the islands are beautiful “in their way” and self-serving criticisms of the “too green” space are unmasked through the author’s satire. In these ways, her text is a literary response to the long and complex history of European and North American tourism in the archipelago.2 The author’s explorations in her book and in the script of the documentary that followed — ​Life and Debt (2001) — ​provide an apt model for humor’s ability not only to seemingly replicate limiting stereotypes, but also to expose and explode such representations.3 Many critical studies on

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Kincaid have brilliantly analyzed the sociocultural and ideological mechanics of her trademark humor, but few studies have noted the semantic and semiotic lineage of this type of humor routinely found in Caribbean literatures. The long tradition of Caribbean postcards, which predates literary texts like Kincaid’s, offers a rich visual genealogy of humor as deployed in many of the archipelago’s literary works. Postcard studies in general are a relatively recent and underdeveloped field of study. Yet there is a significant intertextual relation between Caribbean literary humor and Caribbean postcards. In this essay I examine the hitherto untapped visual archive of counter-discursive humor constituted by these documents. In the Caribbean, the visual genre has historically had a complex relationship with imperialistic touristic projects. Despite their association with colonialist regimes of representation — ​which remains visible today — ​the Caribbean postcards I examine may be said to disempower, discursively, the represented. In the particular case of the Caribbean, the use of humor in postcards appears to follow the binary logic of colonial discourse. However, counter-discursive humor like Kincaid’s has long been present in these images. In exploring the developments in uses of humor in Caribbean postcards, I examine the ways in which both Europeans and non-Europeans deploy this humor to interrogate the limiting representations of Caribbean identity that such documents deployed. I argue that this long-present humor is more pronounced, and ultimately becomes the locus of subversive discourses that emanate from both the center and the margins. Unlike notable theorizations of marginalized individuals’ uses of humor that emphasize subversive properties as inversion — ​notably Mikhail Bakhtin’s Rabelais and His World4 — ​this discussion examines the autonomous space created by Caribbean individuals in humor, which moves away from such rigid polarizations. In order to examine assertions of autonomy that individuals made as images circulated with the advent of modern tourism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this study focuses on both machine-made images and those that appear handmade by Caribbean artists commissioned to re-create island life as they experienced it. Scholars commonly agree that tourism in the region surged during the years between the world wars and then reached new heights in the 1950s and 1960s.5 Some of the distinguishing characteristics of this modern phenomenon included a greater number of persons traveling by airplane and cruise ship and an increased use of other available technology. Modern

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tourism introduced a readily accessible and portable (re)production of images. Unprecedented was the explosion in the distribution of postcards and other memorabilia. Not surprisingly, these images replicated the negative stereotypes propagated throughout colonialism. Malek Alloula has pithily noted that the postcard “produces stereotypes in the manner of great seabirds producing guano. It is the fertilizer of the colonial vision.”6 Humorous representations of native populations as simpleminded and childlike were combined with depictions of these places as out-of-civilization amusement parks for the hardworking, conscientious, and responsibility-burdened subject of European descent. Images of sometimes servile, sometimes savage blacks, as well as depictions of unintelligent, unattractive, primitive, animalistic individuals, typified tourist representations, often to comic effect, and they found a wide market via the postcard. In this sense humor participates in the binary logic of colonial discourse whereby the “native” is childlike and needs the supervision of the colonial “mother” country. Though in recent years scholars have increasingly explored the representation of the “other” in literary and artistic productions, a critique of popular representations of tourism, particularly of popular and visual culture, has been slower, and studies of Caribbean visual culture in general are relatively few. For this reason, the interventions of intellectuals such as Ian Strachan, Krista Thompson, and Beth Fowkes Tobin have been invaluable. While these scholars compellingly highlight the shortcomings of these representations of Caribbean life, they, like numerous other postcolonial and Caribbean intellectuals, continue to overlook marginalized individuals’ capacity to enter into and disrupt such discourses. Notably, Edward Said is one of the most oft-cited scholars who offer productive representations of the “native” while simultaneously failing to sufficiently acknowledge the native’s resistance.7 In line with these critical and methodological guidelines, this chapter focuses on the ways in which sociopolitically marginalized islanders may have subverted these images. In so doing, it retrieves the hitherto silenced voices of the represented Caribbean community. Although deeply indebted to Thompson’s groundbreaking study An Eye for the Tropics,8 which introduced an important conversation about visuality and postcards in the Caribbean, this discussion moves beyond Thompson’s findings, centering on representations of sexuality and humor. As depictions of Caribbean individuals increasingly focused on their sexuality, humor is central in both propagating and dismantling stereotypes. As is the case with

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Kincaid’s use of satire, much of the critique that one encounters in the postcards uses a strident humor to engage the audience and question problematic representations. Addressing such renderings of African diasporic communities in his pioneering study Representation, Stuart Hall notes: “Stereotyping is a key element in the exercise of symbolic violence.” Therefore, intensive critical investigations continue to be necessary for restoring what he calls “symbolic power,” which Hall defines as “the power to represent someone or something in a certain way.”9 This is not to say that I focus on images that invert European and U.S. American stereotypes or hierarchical orders. To do so would be to operate and remain trapped within the “dominant regime of representation” where the “binaries remain in place,” simply reversed.10 Instead, in looking at humor’s assault on stereotypes, I examine a strategy that works within limiting European frameworks, problematizing, calling attention to limiting representations, and suggesting alternative ways of being. John Clarke identifies the three streams that are generally used to divide humor: “the psychological, the sociological, and the philosophical.”11 This discussion takes up this second category, which understands “humor as a strategy for social survival.”12 After all, “humor reveals acculturation: those processes that shape a person’s attitudes toward social practices within a community.”13 In an attempt to move from the very binaries that establish the negative descriptions of people of color, I explore humor as a vehicle that traverses this messy social terrain. Existing in the interstices in much the same way as the complex discourse of the postcards themselves, humor invites engagement and questioning in a less intimidating way than direct verbal or visual assault, particularly when the postcard’s representations are also contentious. Central to my discussion of the strategies of resistance evident in this popular form are postcards from Barbados, the Bahamas, and Jamaica, primary tourist destinations in the Caribbean. Though they may not always prompt outright laughter, many of the representations of these spaces undoubtedly employ well-recognized, humorous tropes such as inversion, absurdity, and ambiguity in addressing hierarchical images. Furthermore, the postcard offers a unique venue for transference of these limiting stereotypes. In summoning the disparaging images of travel narratives, pictorial representation, and popular lore, it merges verbal and visual discourses in complex ways. Limiting and enlightened rhetoric are intertwined, as are stereotypes and recuperative depictions.

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My understanding of the connection between the social function of humor and visual representation and the ways in which these forces are negotiated by distinct communities is indebted to Hall’s “Encoding/Decoding,” a “pioneering essay about the involvement of the viewer in the production of meaning,” as Ayo Coly astutely synthesizes: “Hall traces the semantic course of images, from their ‘encoding’ by their producers to their ‘decoding’ by their viewers, showing that the successful transfer of the intended meaning requires that the two parties share compatible sociocultural and ideological codes.”14 As Hall notes, “Representation functions less like the model of a one-way transmitter and more like the model of a dialogue — ​it is, as they say, dialogic. What sustains this ‘dialogue’ is the presence of shared cultural codes, which cannot guarantee that meanings will remain stable forever.”15 My arguments about the ways in which images are received in European / U.S. American and Caribbean communities are premised on the notion of this shared sociological and ideological code. I suggest that the instability inherent in humor is an apt vehicle for exploring an ever-shifting dialogic system of representation.

Foundational Images Scholars like Ian Strachan delineate the ways in which the Caribbean has historically represented an artificial site for pleasure for many Europeans and U.S. Americans.16 For example, Caribbean postcards eroticized representations of the quotidian and continuously showcased people of particular vocations, such as sellers of produce, transporters of animals, and those working in the tourist industry (unlike representations of tourism in continental North America, where depictions of labor were typically subverted). This exaggeration and eroticization of islanders contributes to some of the disturbing humor of many visual representations. Therefore, it is useful to examine some of the iconic images that became central in representing Caribbean inhabitants and their engagement with labor, flora and fauna, and the seascape. For example, some of the most popular depictions of women involved workers transporting objects on their heads — ​often baskets of fruits. Such images are unfamiliar in an American context in which “the domestic labor of women was often silently erased.”17 Yet clearly, in a Caribbean setting, the need to represent suitably tamed and obedient subjects for European and U.S. American audiences dictated such distinctions. On the other hand,

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unlike the images of women literally carrying their burdens, a popular motif was of men riding or guiding asses — ​sometimes, but not always, burdened with produce. Thompson similarly identifies a visual taming in archetypal postcard images of laboring men and women that does not necessarily invite humor.18 Kay Dian Kriz describes a limiting colonial logic, which suggests that “only harsh physical punishments will serve to contain a labor force of enslaved bodies that engage in . . . savage and wanton pleasures.”19 Seemingly, a version of this logic also informs the representations of marginalized individuals wherein “only harsh, physical constraints [that is, restrictive clothing and labor] will serve to contain [formerly] enslaved bodies.”20 “Two Natives: Nassau” (fig. 12.1), which showcases a man on a donkey/mule cart, is a popular rendering from the Bahamas that typifies representations there and in other tourist destinations like Jamaica. The image in “Two Natives” is not overtly funny. However, it is crucial for showing complex irony in an early Caribbean postcard. The juxtaposition of the man and the mule introduces the most obvious humor.21 Mules reappear throughout Caribbean folk and popular lore. Though these animals have also served historically as symbols of miscegenation, in the Caribbean their value as resilient, if stubborn, beasts of burden is often privileged. They are also disparaged as awkward and unintelligent. The associative value of this symbol is, therefore, crucial as it encourages laughter at both the animal and those aligned with it. This watercolor, though not strictly realistic, too closely approximates realism to appear satirical at first glance.22 It does not have the sharp or even garish colors that would signal extremes and the absurd. Instead, the image promises to lull the viewer into a sense of calm, pleasurable appreciation of the fertile Caribbean landscape so typical of early tourist postcards. One is confronted with pinks, blues, greens, and browns; the only startling color appears as two bright swatches of orange on the mule’s saddle. Unlike the negligible depictions of vegetation in many other images involving men and mules, in “Natives” the surrounding flora overshadows the figure and the edifice behind him. As the flowers appear to conceal the manmade structure, the implications here are clear. If we interpret the building as the embodiment of colonialism, the image serves as an apt reminder of European power structures that rendered peoples of African descent inconsequential in the face of empire. Yet this structure and its inimical implications are fittingly obscured, and the rich flora creates the sense that viewers are encountering a premodern paradise. In beckoning

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Figure 12.1. City Pharmacy Ltd., Two Natives: Nassau, c. 1907–1914. Postcard, J. Salmon Ltd., Sevenoaks, England. Collection of author.

an imperial gaze, the bougainvillea, native to South America and a typical sight in Caribbean countries including the Bahamas, appears to boast of the fertility and prosperity of the island. These biases continue as there is a contrast between the gentleman’s “tame,” “civilized” appearance [read European attire] and the uncontrollable landscape. Similarly, the flora in “Two Natives” alludes to the exotic wildness that tourists can expect in this tropical space. But lest these visitors be intimidated, neatly attired figures

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serve as signposts that the natives are civilized and friendly and that the tourists’ fun will be contained within certain established boundaries. Despite such apparent sobriety, particularly in the figure’s standard clothing, the juxtaposition of the visual and the verbal is crucial in conveying a subtle though poignant humor. When combined they offer a particularly tantalizing commentary on social conditions within the Caribbean. That is to say, new tensions are evident when the words are applied to the image. Arguably, the picture communicates more explicitly than do the words “Two Natives: Nassau.” However, the caption emphatically conflates the man and the mule. Traditional Caribbean representations that conflate islanders and mules already suggest implicit and naturalized connections between humans and these animals. Krista Thompson similarly acknowledges the way in which the postcard “classes both boy and ass as ‘natives.’”23 There is a crucial interplay between the first two words in the caption and the larger social context it establishes. Specifically, an element of the grotesque disrupts this calm, as the man is animalized. In this way, yet another layer of disturbing humor is communicated when the words and images perform in concert on the page. Yet unlike the suggestion in Bakhtin’s work that the grotesque serves “as the force that temporar[ily] liberates ordinary peasants from the humorless intellectual and spiritual regime of official culture,” here the affiliation with the animal has dire implications for the working poor, as it reinforces European hierarchy.24 If we take Michael Harris’s observations to heart that “the European social body had to be defined in contradistinction to the foreign body; at the same time, it had to be protected from the contamination and dis-ease signified by that of the alien body,”25 then this representation occupies a complex semantic space. It invites comparisons between the black (read alien) body and the European gentlemen who wears similar clothing. However, in pairing man and mule, the moniker “Two Natives” explicitly suggests that the well-dressed black “gentleman” is a laughable facsimile of the European male. After all, he is really ass masquerading as man. One also wonders what becomes of images of docile, tamed “natives” in such representations. Certainly, though there is an element of “civilizing,” when one traces the slippery, disturbing humor it becomes apparent that the figure vacillates across a range of signifiers. Stuart Hall reminds us that such a situation may “seem paradoxical. But it does have its own ‘logic.’ This logic depends on representation working at two different levels at the same time.” This is largely because “blacks are trapped

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by the binary structure of . . . stereotype, which is split between two extreme opposites . . . sometimes being represented as both at the same time.”26 Well into the twentieth century, black men continue to be categorized as subhuman, but these stereotypes do not exist in isolation. Albeit a humorous missive, the postcard and its message are shipped internationally, inviting a wide range of primarily European and U.S. American viewers to enjoy their superiority over the “civilized native,” an individual who is simultaneously tamed and ridiculed. However, as the humor lies primarily in the absurdity and surprise of such possibilities, laughter also calls our attention to the ridiculousness of such Eurocentric constructions of Caribbean male identity.27 In other words, even as the combination of images and words sets up a comparison between the two figures depicted, humor inevitably collapses these differences. Such moments push viewers to explore the differences between visual and verbal humor and the ways in which they incorporate sight and sound. The young gentleman’s most convincing form of resistance to easy visual consumption — ​the bold stare and even his European attire — ​remind viewers to consider the flawed designation native. Also, given the presence of other foreign, “naturalized” objects like the bougainvillea, one is compelled to acknowledge that these individuals are not natives. The title becomes a reminder that Europeans annihilated most indigenous people in the archipelago. Not only is the very term on which much of the humor lies questioned, but its legacy in the Caribbean serves as a vivid reminder of the literal and ideological dangers of imperialism. Considering the implications of humor in this way, one can identify some of the incongruities that the interplay between the verbal and the visual introduces to this image. Verbal humor can often capitalize more explicitly on both senses. For example, one can read as well as listen to a joke — ​and such distinctions would be notable, if one were to read the caption in different ways. In addition to numerous mediating factors that make a joke or reading successful, the oral performance of the humor relies on the timing of the speaker for its success. Furthermore, both forms depend on the body in different ways. Verbal humor might engage a speaker, whereas visual humor often relies on gestures.

Late Twentieth-Century Deployments of Familiar Icons The joviality that is depicted in the late twentieth-century images is in sharp contrast to the relative seriousness of the earlier attempts at representing

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a quaint docile peasantry in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century postcards (fig. 12.2). Figures 12.2 and 12.3 demonstrate the progression of more lighthearted and eventually humorous representations of women bearing loads on their heads. The relative sobriety in figure 12.2 is in keeping with ethnographic reports of the “other” and descriptions of the Caribbean as a staid, holistic site. While popular images of the laughing “darky” accompanied commoditization, advertising, and minstrelsy in the United States, fewer such resources in the Caribbean analogously guaranteed fewer such representations in spaces such as Barbados, the Bahamas, and Jamaica. More typical were images in which early renderings of women showed modest attire of long sleeves and flowing skirts. With the exception of their clothing, the individuals in these early postcards were often virtually indistinguishable from male counterparts — ​both in terms of expectations of labor and in literal representations. As was the case with iconic images of men, the woman is absurdly aligned with the mule.28 Both beasts of burden (animal and human) stand rigidly in the process of moving goods. While this conflation with the animal exhibits a subtle and damning humor, one of the central differences between this image and those that follow it is the visual annihilation of these earlier individuals’ sexuality. Yet even this masking of sexuality is productive. Although the serious, modest figure is meant to communicate order, her direct gaze and erect pose refuse easy consumption. As Coly argues in another postcolonial context, “The stern gaze and self-absorbed stiffness of [such] photographic models defy possession of their bodies and secure a distance between viewer and viewed.”29 Such images are in sharp contrast to later representations of overly sexualized figures, often in scanty, colorful, exotic attire, which accompany increased industrialization in the Caribbean some decades later. Figures 12.2 and 12.3, both of which depict a woman guiding a mule, demonstrate the difference in representations from the turn of the century to the later twentieth century. For example, in figure 12.3 the woman’s lush skirt and top both conceal her body and call attention to her sexuality. She literally embodies / is conflated with the island through the bright floral garments. Gone is the quaint, staid landscape open to visual consumption, but often marketed for its healing properties and the manual labor of all its inhabitants. In the later image (fig. 12.3), the woman’s sexual wares are displayed and equated with the lush flora on the mule’s back. She gestures forward in offering but looks down, signaling her unwillingness to confront the viewer. Though the sensual woman’s gesture is as artificial as the stiff posture of the earlier depictions of market women,

Figure 12.2. Going to Market, Jamaica, c. 1914. Postcard, Valentine’s Series, printed in Great Britain. Collection of author.

Figure 12.3. One of the Stars of the Native Floor Shows in Jamaica with “Charlie,” c. 1960. Postcard, Novelty Trading Co., Kingston, Jamaica; Dexter Press Inc., West Nyack, New York. Collection of author.

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Figure 12.4. Anonymous, Cast of Native Floor Show Rehearsing on the Beach in Jamaica, c. 1960s. Postcard, Novelty Trading Co., Kingston, Jamaica; Dexter Press Inc., West Nyack, New York. Collection of author.

the more recent image simultaneously communicates a tension and leisure that invite viewers to engage with her. Furthermore, instead of emphasis on the almost pastoral landscape of the earlier postcard, this sexual offering is presented next to the ultimate twentieth-century playground, the Caribbean Sea. The negative space between the two figures also shows the woman arching into, and by extension being intimately aligned with, the mule. Rather than present a challenge, she invites conquest. Her pose, contrapposto with hips thrust forward, is more dynamic and intentional than the earlier representations of women with mules. Therefore, in these later images, symbolic value changes in depictions of the animalistic native. No longer are women and mules folk analogues; instead, the comparison shifts to encompass an animalistic sexuality using a familiar motif. Yet such conscious manipulation of the visual frame reminds viewers that these self-serving constructions of the exotic other, or what Edward Said famously termed Orientalism, were based as much on the creators’ desire as on reality. An accompanying postcard (fig. 12.4), which depicts the mule’s resistance to entering the water despite numerous individuals’ attempts to force him to do so, dramatizes the complexities that humor introduces and graphically raises the question: What happens if the Caribbean inhabitants are less ac-

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quiescent than early twentieth-century depictions attempt to convey? The animal in this postcard dramatizes how uncooperative the flora and fauna can become, as the overly sexualized female figure meets her male, human counterpart and they wrangle with the stubborn mule that refuses to enter the tourists’ playground. The absurdly dressed animal, with the contrast between its decorative attire and its poor behavior, as well as its seemingly resistant posture, all contribute to the humor in the scene. Given the conflations of mules with marginalized individuals, the animal’s revolt might initially appear to symbolize islanders’ subversive behavior; however, the overwhelming presence of unproblematized generalizations militates against such interventions. This scene encapsulates several of the most persistent stereotypes that appear in late twentieth-century postcards. It introduces the ubiquitous mule, guided by and visually conflated with islanders, including scantily clad women who wear or carry island flora. The display of sexuality echoes the representation in figure 12.3. The same woman strikes a sensual, if artificial, pose in both postcards and appears to assist with the problem at hand. Yet her coyly extended arm suggests posturing, rather than a genuine attempt to subdue the animal. This woman is juxtaposed with the woman laborer (the more fully clothed figure with wares on head) who is also more intimately connected with the work of moving the mule. The contrasting figures suggest past and present possibilities for representing women in the Caribbean. The mule and the associated humor literally mediate polarized tensions between the two islanders and the attendant political implications. Surprisingly, in such a comparison, the oversexualized late twentieth-century figure reveals equal (and arguably greater) participation in limiting stereotypes. Whereas the earlier woman with the basket (fig. 12.2) communicates reluctance, this later figure appears to willingly lend her body to European viewers’ problematic rhetoric. All the hypersexualized figures — ​the shirtless men in the center (one striking a brawny pose) and the playful, scantily clad woman to the right — ​ ground European audiences in familiar stereotypes that are well contained within this visual frame. This approach plays on the controversial though astute assertions of critics like Arthur G. Miller who argue that “people enter situations with preconceptions, and are likely to be most receptive to information that is consistent with these expectations.”30 That is to say, despite the disruptions in this image, there is a stability for the foreign audience who encounters this “native” floor show and is “receptive to information that is

consistent with [their] expectations.” Unfortunately, as I argue above, quite often these limiting expectations are reinforced/shared (to use Hall’s term) by those historically marginalized in such representations.

The figure in “Greetings from Barbados” (fig. 12.5) also stubbornly refuses to enter an ideological tourist playground. In this drawing a small girl carrying a humorously large bucket represents the popular image of the Caribbean laborer. While it speaks to an actual practice in the Caribbean, it also evokes market women who tote their wares in the same fashion. The only colors in the postcard — ​besides the brown used for the figure and the text — ​are the child’s yellow dress, the yellow banana, and the sliver of blue in her bucket. The document in question is from the 1960s and evokes the types of cartoonish representations that characterized mid-twentieth-century advertising. The image, particularly its treatment of hair and skin color, calls to mind the nineteenth-century Caribbean print and American graphic images of flat-black characters with stereotypical and exaggerated features.31 This postcard of the Barbadian child raises central questions about representations of people of African descent in Barbados, and more readily participates in even more nuanced discourses about black identity. More than many of its “realistic” counterparts, such images engage a disruptive humor that Bakhtin aptly describes as the carnivalesque — ​humorous practices that called the social order into question as they also turned it upside down. Already different from the “realistic” photographs, the card’s bright colors and simple drawing style attract the reader to a seemingly light and humorous scene. Yet these elements have more disturbing implications. Most obvious is the exaggeration of the figure’s blackness as an all-consuming characteristic that obliterates any hope of individuality. This technique — ​exaggeration — ​ also echoes the prevalence of hyperbolic performances as early depictions of black identity. Equally disturbing is the codification of this blackness in such representations — ​as if there are no other racial categories in the Caribbean, and in this case, in Barbados. Initially, the relatively blank, matted environment seems to speak more clearly of the girl’s invisibility than her potentialities. Yet this visual vacuity pushes the viewer to ask questions of the representation. The flat opacity

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Late Twentieth-Century Counters from within the Margins

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Figure 12.5. Nank Studio, Greetings from Barbados, c. 1960. Postcard, Letchworth Press Ltd., Barbados. Designed at Nank Studio and hand-painted by handicapped Barbadians. Collection of author.

of the blackness is likely a result of the original medium — ​the watercolors. Ironically, the depiction of the shadow of a self rather than a transparent individual introduces an image that counters racist discourse of an all-knowable other. The drawing reminds viewers of the invisibility of black women; one can see through these individuals, interpret them at will, and dismiss them when necessary. Conversely, when convenient, a viewer can also disparage them as representing excess. Such self-serving, ambiguous interpretations are reminiscent of Kincaid’s critique of tourism in A Small Place. Kincaid directly challenges viewers’ Eurocentric biases with the pronoun you. The figure in the postcard uses ambiguity in a similar way, as her lack of specificity forces viewers to confront unstable ontological grounds. Turning the macabre

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humor of institutions like minstrelsy on their heads, these figures possess a useful opacity, which renders them unreadable to those who approach them with predetermined narratives. Rather than sanction and produce echoes of the past, postcards like this allow for a countering of such biases using an international platform. Despite their potential for productive critique, these gestures are not wholly devoid of limiting impulses. Contrary to assertions that identify “local needs and desires for a society like the ones pictured on many of the tourist-oriented photographs — ​a safe, disciplined, and picturesque locale,”32 I offer a problematization of these representations. Specifically, the postcard suggests complex ways of thinking about Caribbean individuals’ relationship to space. In addition to a generalized landscape, the representation of the figure takes the discourse of spatial ambiguity a step further by highlighting the uncertainty of the child’s posture. We are left to wonder: does the figure approach or move away from us, and is this a confrontation or a dismissal? Are we viewing the figure from the front or from the rear? The position of the feet suggests one direction, yet the direction of the rest of the body is ambiguous.33 The artist creates a tenuous ideological space that expertly juggles humor, sobriety, and viewers’ ability to readily typecast the figure. The spatial ambiguity raises similar questions about the accessibility of the individual represented. Embodying its own trickster-like indecipherability, the image forces viewers to wonder: where in the world are we? Troping on and dismissing early postcards, which often included an inscription that signaled a particular place, the document in question offers a few pebbles and blades of grass on the ground, a sea/landscape that could hardly be more generalized. This reminds viewers of the ways in which the individuality of Caribbean islands was gradually elided in tourist representations. As Krista Thompson explains, “By the 1950s the beach had moved squarely to the center of the touristic ‘tropical experience,’ becoming a primary signifier for the ‘tropics.’. . . [Additionally,] in 1951, as more Caribbean governments developed the tourist trade, a panregional tourism organisation was set up, the Caribbean Tourism Association, to market the region as a whole.”34 In much the same way that black individuality was circumscribed, cultural and sociohistoric specificity was minimized in favor of representing a jovial, relaxing paradise. This tendency to obliterate individuality is increasingly evident in the 1960s and 1970s when producers of images moved away from more careful captions in their pursuit of the depiction of “everyman’s” beach

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(fig. 12.3 and fig. 12.4). In opening a door to such questions about Caribbean identity and space, these images go well beyond Bakhtin’s theories that continually return to a sort of topsy-turvydom in their notions of inverting the social order. Instead, the ambiguity and humor create a space for considering alternative interpretations of Caribbean identity. “Greetings from Barbados” also calls attention to broader imperialistic politics that are at play. In addition to the complex implications of the locale, the figure of the little girl and her striking attire suggest other humorous ambiguity. Introducing ostensibly lighthearted possibilities, the sunny dress reminds us that Barbados is a space wherein “the sun always shines and where the climate is deliciously hot and dry for the four to ten days” that tourists visit the island.35 Yet the yellow of the child’s dress also calls to mind Barbadian expressions that emerged at the height of British imperialism, including the notion that “the sun always shines on the British Empire.”36 Equally disturbing is the figure’s conflation with the natural world: there is of course a semiotic link between the yellow fruit and the child’s yellow dress. The faceless girl in the picture embodies the cash crop — ​the banana — ​ that replaced sugarcane production in twentieth-century Barbados. Though bananas were often consumed in the nation-state rather than shipped as exports, they nevertheless signal an agrarian space. Therefore, this little girl firmly situates us in historical discourses of colonial exploitation.37 Also, unlike earlier images where women modeled and were conflated with the island’s flora, she consumes the fruit, violently disavowing naturalizing discourses that would conflate her with the island’s flora and fauna. As is often the case in humor, the incongruities embedded in the scene confront viewers; in this scenario, the child disturbs one’s sense of propriety by mixing seemingly fixed, if problematic, symbols and calling attention to their limitations. This symbol, the banana, indicates the joining of multiple stereotypes. Echoing representations such as those in figures 12.3 and 12.4, the diligent worker in an agrarian setting is also linked to stereotypes of an overly sexualized black female — ​an image that arises during slavery to justify the mistreatment of women of color, and which is represented visually here. In critiquing the very paradigm that seeks to hinder her, in the most exciting moment in the visual narrative, the child takes a bite out of the phallic symbol — ​the banana. She has been visually conflated with both the colonized space/produce and European patriarchy. Yet in this disruptive and shocking moment, she interrupts the smooth hierarchical chain by literally dismembering the visual representation of colonization, capitalism, and European

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patriarchy. Mirroring writers’ and other artists’ self-conscious play with form in constructing elements like the play within the play, this moment represents a play with the visual within the visual. Therefore, the child’s and her creator’s gaiety can be decontextualized as an assertion of agency as they perform this definitive act and move jovially onward. Thus, the subversive flouting of the phallic symbol, though disturbingly humorous, is also significant on multiple levels. Championing the cause of those like the scantily clad woman in figures 12.3 and 12.4, it is both a disavowal of notions of an overtly sexual individual and a dismissal of particular associations with land and labor. Given the evocation of the phallic object, this moment is also reminiscent of trickster misbehavior/inversion and such characters’ penchant for the profanation of the revered. Mirroring the behavior of African trickster figures, the character enters an African diasporic ontological space in countering limiting Eurocentric paradigms. Freud reminds us that the most illicit behaviors evoke the most uproarious laughter.38 Certainly, in this instance, it becomes apparent that the most illicit behavior also raises some of the most important questions about representations of Caribbean identity. But does our laughter stop short when we remember that this is possibly a child performing this act? Or might we also interpret her behavior as a disruption of Eurocentric stereotypes that seek to infantilize all “natives”? The yellow dress offers several layers of productive ambiguity. Though there is the hint of the ocean in the blue water of the bucket, the dress is certainly not typical beach attire; its ruffled collar suggests propriety and a juvenile style, even as its short length hints at sensuality. The incongruity of the dress’s visual cues and the figure’s actions evokes wry laughter. This individual gestures toward sexuality; yet with the exception of the dress, the figure is noticeably asexual. Despite considerable exposure of her lower body, there are no indications of distinguishing genitalia. Still, such a representation does not indicate that something is lacking in this individual; instead, unlike earlier depictions where labor renders individuals asexual, the use of artistic strategies to achieve such an end highlights a useful ambiguity and a refusal of typecasting. Representations of the ostensibly innocent — ​a child — ​also beg the question: What does it mean to have someone who is potentially very young so central to such discussions? Clearly, children — ​typically a sanctified entity — ​ do not receive the same kind of deferential treatment in racist discourses; these are not angelic or precocious representations that one might expect in European portrayals of the young. Instead, we are reminded that colonialism

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renders even the most unlikely individuals subject to mistreatment. Such an image also suggests to the viewer that childhood years were curtailed during slavery and children were immersed in the workforce as early as possible.39 In addition, the depiction of a child highlights the infantilization of blacks that was the legacy of slavery. Of course this tendency to infantilize individuals was central to the correspondingly corrosive humor that created images of the simplistic “darky.” Furthermore, the child’s presence solidifies the impetus of such racist practices as not merely existing in the past but as well-established discourses that have secured a future. In addition to obscuring issues like race, space, gender, and age, the medium also counters “standard” notions of modernity, which are associated with machine-made postcards. Instead of the manufactured glossy that one might expect in such a context, handicapped individuals in Barbados handpainted and designed this matted document. Thompson argues that “the very act of photographing black inhabitants marked them as domesticated, hospitable, and unthreatening.”40 Therefore, the move away from photography also allows for a more decisive renunciation of the medium’s biases. Clearly with elements like the oversize bucket and the lack of a horizon or foreground, the image drifts resolutely away from realistic portrayal. Therefore, one possible interpretation of the drawing might be that the “primitive hand and observing eye of the native artist are visually encoded as technical crudeness in the way the various elements of the composition fail to come together.”41 Such a reading is especially true if one compares the image to the abundance of photographic postcards. However, the handmade artistic rendering offers other advantages, connoting intimacy and representing a useful counter to modernism and its mass production of people’s images/ identities. As artists become affiliated with their works, one might argue that the source of production, the handicapped workers at Nank Studios in Barbados who draw in service of the problematic tourist industry, serve as apt metaphors for the exploitation of the island. Yet if Erik Cohen’s assertion is true that marginalized individuals “rarely represent themselves, at least not in the major mass media, but are frequently represented by others,”42 then certainly, even ostensibly limiting self-representations warrant closer attention. Clearly, the important questions these artists raise attest to this. Much of the impact of the humor in this image lies not only in its brutality, but in its disruption of the seemingly familiar. Given the provocative visual implications of “Greetings,” one might ask, is this really a “greeting

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from Barbados”? The phrase functions simultaneously as invitation and warning. Though much of the humor is embedded in the incongruities of the image rather than the caption, given this discrepancy the irony of the postcard becomes apparent. Furthermore, the ambiguity of the character, and the fact that one does not know whether the figure is coming or going, add a layer of irony to the representation. One might even imagine that the child makes this sarcastic, ambiguous declaration. Such a possibility confirms Michael Harris’s observation that “verbal games practiced turning circumstances inside out through linguistic exaggeration and inversion.”43 This observation helps explain the child’s vocal and visual denunciation of limiting Eurocentric representation. These vastly disruptive gestures for the historically marginalized do not exist in isolation; instead, they are precursors to more explicit subversive Eurocentric strategies that appear and thrive later in the twentieth century. For example, echoing Kincaid’s description of a “pastry-like fleshed woman” who enjoys “a walk on the beautiful sand, with a man, an incredibly unattractive, fat, pastry-like fleshed man,”44 postcards like figure 12.6 turn the gaze on tourists, playing on the unflattering stereotypes aligned with visitors. Using both verbal and visual cues, the reference to “whale” establishes a connection between the overweight tourist and the seemingly lazy sea-loving animals. The reference to whales in the northern Caribbean signals a striking incongruity and absurdity that pushes one to question the individuals of European descent the animals represent. The symbol simultaneously suggests the foreignness of such visitors and proprietary tourist gazes. This comparison between visitors and animals implicitly perpetuates a long tradition of racist physiognomy (such as the equation of islanders and mules in earlier images); here the stereotype humorously counters white consumer culture. In such documents the producers of postcards reveal a self-consciousness about the representations of the islands that disrupts what have become their stock forms of stereotyping. Also, like the possibility of speech introduced in the other disruptive late twentieth-century image, the caption with its use of colloquial English is aligned with the large white couple, and this speech act suggests some level of awareness of these problematic implications. In these ways, the postcard explicitly performs Hall’s notion that shared sociocultural and ideological codes account for different groups’ interpretations of images. Specifically, these tensions attest to Hall’s observation that “a hegemonic and discursive form of power, which operates as much through culture, the

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Figure 12.6. Having a Whale of a Time in the Bahamas, Bigger and Better in the Bahamas, c. 1990s. Postcard, Charm Kraft Ind., Inc.; John Hinde, Curteich Inc., printed in Ireland. Collection of author.

production of knowledge, imagery and representation, as through other means . . . is circular: it implicates the ‘subjects’ of power as well as those who are ‘subjected to it.’”45 In this instance, these choices of representation suggest that the choice to disparage historically marginalized communities in visual forms, while implicitly venerating other communities, is precisely that: a self-conscious, self-serving choice. Kincaid’s observation that islanders envy tourists’ “ability to leave their own banality and boredom” while turning the Caribbean’s “banality and boredom into a source of pleasure for [themselves]” uses irony to highlight the unrecognized similarities and differences between these two groups. Writers such as Krista Thompson and Bernard Spinrad also acknowledge nostalgic yearnings that followed the production of tourist representations like postcards, which may or may not have been based in reality.46 Instead, these constructions represented the desires of the visitor of European descent. In another context, Erik Cohen similarly describes the tautology of the findings of “the researcher [who] is interested primarily in ethnically ‘marked’ images” and finds what he/she has been seeking.47 This misstep can be applied to the researcher seeking oppression who finds only the downtrodden without noticing moments of rupture. In “Greetings from

Notes 1. Jamaica Kinkaid, A Small Place (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1988). 2. Though the text A Small Place examines specific tensions within Antigua, the documentary uses many of the same paradigms and much of Kincaid’s provocative language to explore tourism’s impact on Jamaica. Such projects certainly risk homogenizing the Caribbean as one nation-state. The artists avoid such pitfalls by attending to the unique experiences within these islands, while acknowledging the commonalities that characterize socioeconomic struggles in the region. 3. Stephanie Black, Life and Debt (Kingston, NY: Tuff Gong Pictures, 2001), DVD. 4. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984). 5. For a detailed exploration of the economic factors that contribute to tourism during this period see Bernard K. Spinrad, Shirley B. Seward, and François J. Bélisle, eds., Tourism in the Caribbean: The Economic Impact (Ottawa: International Development Research Centre, 1982), 14. 6. Alloula Malek, The Colonial Harem, trans. M. Godzich and W. Godzich (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 4. 7. The most pointed critiques of Said’s approach in Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1978) include James Clifford’s argument that Said constructs the West as having “a project, an imagination and a will,” while the Orient is “no more than its silenced

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Barbados” the depiction of the young girl reminds viewers of the stereotypes that maligned Caribbean women during slavery and beyond. Yet a resilient humor wrestles with such typecasting, both to draw attention to such constructions and to prompt a reconceptualization of gendered and naturalizing stereotypes. Popular and foundational images such as the Bahamian postcard “Two Natives” dramatizes stereotyping at its most inimical. Yet even here, the loaded image combined with a provocative caption creates a disturbing humor where incongruity and absurdity produce a useful ambiguity that questions long-held assertions about black male identity. Certainly, in examining the humor from foundational to later images, there are moments when islanders’ problematic participation in representational biases is also evident. Nevertheless, in order to avoid resorting to predetermined conclusions about the Caribbean visual renderings, it is important to consider critical strategies like humor, which open up useful avenues for questions and exploration. The slippages that humor inspires not only allow us to interrogate categorizations of marginalized individuals, but also introduce new paradigms for understanding people not as tourist attractions but as individuals engaging beyond a three-and-a-half-by-five-and-a-half-inch frame.

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object” (Clifford, The Predicament of Culture [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988], 271). Khalid Bekkaoui also writes that Orientalism, by focusing on the shortcomings of the representations, silences the represented by not acknowledging their capacity for counter-discourse (Bekkaoui, Signs of Spectacular Resistance: The Spanish Moor and British Orientalism [Casablanca: Najah El Jadida, 1998], 32). 8. Krista Thompson, An Eye for the Tropics: Tourism, Photography, and Framing the Caribbean Picturesque (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006). 9. Stuart Hall, “The Spectacle of the Other,” in Representation (London: Sage Publications, 2003), 259. 10. Ibid. 11. John Clarke, Looking at Laughter: Humor, Power, and Transgression in Roman Visual Culture, 100 B.C.–A.D. 250 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 3. 12. Ibid. 13. Ibid., 2. 14. Ayo Coly, “A Pedagogy of the Black Female Body: Viewing Angèle Essamba’s Black Female Nudes,” Third Text 24, no. 6 (October 2010): 659. 15. Stuart Hall, “The Work of Representation,” in Representation, 10. 16. See, for example, Ian Strachan, Paradise and Plantation: Tourism and Culture in the Anglophone Caribbean (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2002). 17. Hall, “Spectacle,” 241. 18. For a more detailed discussion see Thompson, Eye for the Tropics, 115. 19. Kay Dian Kriz, Slavery, Sugar, and the Culture of Refinement: Picturing the British West Indies (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008), 94. 20. Ibid. 21. The animal also embodies ambiguity. We do not know decisively whether it is a donkey or a mule. Given its elegant, nonconfrontational stance, its loaded racial imagery/ambiguity, and its provocative place in Caribbean and other African diasporic societies, I will argue that it is a mule rather than a donkey and likely male. As the two figures have been conflated, one must ask what the mule’s characteristics mean for “the young boy.” Power relations here are more ambiguous. Still, this contrast between the boy and the animal, and its possible absurdity, bear some crucial hallmarks of humor. 22. The abstract eyes in the picture are perhaps the most obvious indication that the image is not strictly realistic. 23. Thompson, Eye for the Tropics, 116. 24. Clarke, Looking at Laughter, 8. 25. Michael Harris, Coloured Pictures: Race and Visual Representation (Durham, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 23. 26. Hall, “Spectacle,” 263. 27. Sigmund Freud, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (New York: W. W. Norton, 1963), 86. 28. As was the case in figure 12.1, where humor is partially created through a combination of the scribal and pictorial, the term “native” in the title suggests a conflation of humans and animals. Also, the term “floor show” in many of these later

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postcards describes these typical tourist performances that called for the display of black bodies for Europeans’ enjoyment. 29. Coly, “Pedagogy,” 657. 30. Arthur G. Miller, ed., In the Eye of the Beholder: Contemporary Issues in Stereotyping (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1982), 6. 31. I thank the anonymous reviewer for helping me expand this observation about historical representations of black bodies. 32. Thompson, Eye for the Tropics, 254. 33. I thank the anonymous reviewer for sharing this insight. 34. Thompson, Eye for the Tropics, 280–281. 35. Kincaid, Small Place, 4. 36. Numerous artists, including George Lamming in his novel In the Castle of My Skin (1953; Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1991), have implicitly and explicitly questioned symbols of light and the sun in Barbadian society. 37. The little girl not only mirrors the food produce, but she reminds us that the custom of wearing bright materials originated from the tradition of giving slave women bright fabrics as rewards for contributing to the success of the plantation by producing healthy offspring (often the children of plantation owners). For a more detailed exploration of this practice of rewarding women’s slave “labor” see Beth Fowkes Tobin, “‘And There Raise Yams’: Slaves’ Gardens in the Writings of West Indian Plantocrats,” Eighteenth-Century Life 23, no. 2 (1999): 164–176. 38. Freud, Jokes, 133. 39. See Tobin, “‘And There Raise Yams.’” Tobin describes the ways in which planters in the Caribbean often romanticized the presence of child labor, likening adult slaves to hardworking European peasants, and slave children to apprentices. This implies a level of independence and freedom post-slavery that was contrary to the reality of these individuals’ lives. 40. Thompson, Eye for the Tropics, 115. 41. Geoff Quilley and Kay Dian Kriz, eds., An Economy of Colour: Visual Culture and the Atlantic World, 1660–1830 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), 99. 42. Erik Cohen, “The Study of Touristic Images of Native People: Mitigating the Stereotype of a Stereotype,” in Tourism Research: Critiques and Challenges, ed. Douglas G. Pearce and Richard W. Butler (New York: Routledge, 1993), 40. 43. Harris, Coloured Pictures, 6. 44. Kincaid, Small Place, 13. 45. Hall, “Spectacle,” 263. 46. The discussion of Spinrad et al. in Tourism in the Caribbean is invaluable for its attention to the socioeconomic factors that contributed to the success of the Caribbean tourist industry during various periods. Yet the description of “tourists . . . lured by the natural beauty, warm climate, and friendliness of the local population . . . flocking to the many resorts throughout” the region (14) dangerously echoes the reductive constructions that numerous scholars decry (including several cited above). 47. Cohen, “Study of Touristic Images,” 41.

thirteen   Springtime for Hitler Every Year Dani Levy’s Hitler Comedy My Führer (2007) Veronika Fuechtner

“Springtime for Hitler” is the title of a fictional musical in Mel Brooks’s 1968 film comedy The Producers, which serves well as a point of comparison and a metaphor for my analysis of Dani Levy’s My Führer. The two protagonists of Brooks’s film, the Jewish Broadway producers Bloom and Bialystock, dream up “Springtime for Hitler,” a musical that celebrates fascist Germany, as a sure flop in order to defraud their investors. Much to their dismay, it becomes a big hit. The film carefully depicts the transition in mood in the musical audience from stunned, open-mouthed shock and distaste in face of a chorus line of SS officers, blond dancers with iron crosses as nipple covers, and rhymes such as “don’t be stupid, be a smarty, come and join the Nazi Party” to uproarious laughter once a hippie Hitler appears on the scene and sings jazz tunes. Retrospectively, the audience reads as satire what seemed at first in bad taste. As the film attempts to define the line between successful and unsuccessful visual humor in this scene (not just for the musical within the film, but also for the film itself ), it settles on several key factors: clarity of comedic contrast, cues from an audience within the film, and ultimately the subject position of the humor “producers.” In regard to the latter, the film affirms an inextricable connection of Jewish humor with the Shoah. In the logic of The Producers only Jews could dream up the world of “Springtime for Hitler.” In this world, fascism is always gay (at times in all senses of the word), its horrors have been dissolved into cuckoo-clock kitsch, and the audience is invited into an inclusive, cute and friendly world of Aryan camp, which can be celebrated as an object of nostalgia — ​as if the Shoah had never happened. While the world of “Springtime for Hitler” might provide comic relief for its audience, it lands its Jewish producers in prison for fraud. Throughout the film, Bloom and Bialystock are portrayed as satires of the anti-Semitic stereotypes of the incorrigible Jewish con artist. In prison they plot to produce the next musical flop for which they oversell investment shares: “Prisoners in Love.” However, the film’s satire of a stereotype also

The Inability to Joke Just about forty years ago, the psychoanalysts Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich published their groundbreaking study The Inability to Mourn, which described West Germany post-1945 as a psychologically stagnating society characterized by a collective rejection of guilt and shame about the past crimes. According to the Mitscherlichs, the affective attachments to National Socialism and Hitler were not acknowledged. Thus the experience of loss and the agency in the crimes remained unaddressed by the generation of perpetrators. The younger generation was unwilling “to get caught up in the guilt problems of their parents” and displayed “a massive lack of interest in history,” wrote the Mitscherlichs, ironically in 1967.3 The Inability to Mourn

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gains a poignant dimension as the Jewish con artists stubbornly hold on to producing a world of illusion for their audience, in which fascism can lead only to laughter rather than to genocide.1 Brooks’s original film was not screened in Germany at the time of its release, but its Broadway revival as a musical in 2001 led to a successful German run, and the 2005 Hollywood remake of The Producers was equally well received in Germany. The example of the reception history of The Producers shows how sensibilities in regard to humor on fascism have shifted in Germany. But I started this chapter with a reference to The Producers because the film captures the obsessive quality with which visual humor on fascism is produced and also discussed. Especially in the German context, it seems that every new film, performance, or artwork on fascism provokes a new round of discussions on what the acceptable limits of humor on fascism might be. These discussions often lack a sense of their own historicity, as I will elaborate, and it is — ​to speak with Mel Brooks — ​“Springtime for Hitler” all over again — ​every single year. Taking a cue from Brooks’s comedic analysis of the factors that can produce a successful and timely comedy on fascism against all expectations, I will analyze Dani Levy’s 2007 Hitler comedy My Führer: The Truly Truest Truth about Adolf Hitler.2 I will trace the visual context and historical references of My Führer’s Hitler humor, and I will show in which ways this film represents and at the same time defies a shift in sensibility in regard to humor on fascism. The debate around Hitler comedy in My Führer ultimately reveals itself as an expression of a constant political and cultural recalibration of what is permissible visual humor on a nationally taboo subject.

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could not envision the fundamental social shift that 1968 would mean in relation to the reworking of the history of the Third Reich. Nonetheless, this analysis of a collective affective pathology that might express itself in denial or detachment and in turn influences the psychosocial household of the following generations still could stand. If this unconscious collective pathology results in an “inability to mourn,” it would certainly also affect the psychological mechanisms governing pleasure, and thus be accompanied by an “inability to laugh” or, more important for our purposes, an “inability to joke.” The repeated declarations that it is finally possible for the first time to joke about Hitler become a part of this psychological mechanism. On the basis of this understanding of the German psychosocial condition post-1945, I would like to propose that a series of recent historical and social developments as well as significant changes in the production and marketing of German film or TV comedy led to a shift in what is now publicly perceived as acceptable in regard to humorous representations of the Third Reich in Germany. The aftermath of German reunification in 1990 brought on public discussions — ​on nationalism, the GDR past, and victimhood of the non-Jewish civilian population — ​that were often described as an expression of a revised form of nationalism appropriate for the new Berlin Republic, namely a nationalism that could embrace national symbols and rituals and transcend their fraught history. At the same time, the German film industry experienced a massive reorganization in the 1990s, as the film scholar Randall Halle has outlined. With new transnational production and marketing structures, a new type of “national” film emerged. The adoption of a “post-ideological” perspective, the turn to the genre of the historical feature film or biopic, and the deployment of “national tropes” as easily consumable “setting, background and temperament” now consciously catered to both German and international audiences.4 In the mid-1990s, German TV audiences were introduced to German adaptations of American comedy formats such as The Late Show with David Letterman (Die Harald Schmidt Show) or Saturday Night Live (Samstag Nacht). The German Kabarett tradition, which was characterized by a partly improvised group performance of subtly satirical political skits and witty songs about current events, was superseded by the German comedy boom, with its emphasis on sleek, professionalized stand-up impersonations and joke delivery “about nothing,” like comedian Rüdiger Hoffmann’s homage to the breakfast treat Nutella. Given these seismic shifts in comedy production, format, and acceptable sociopolitical reference system, it is not surprising that a variety of Hitler

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parodies have emerged since the mid-1990s. It is noteworthy that these shifts in regard to what is considered funny or acceptable humor on Hitler played out first in the field of visual humor, mainly film and performance. These new parodies differed distinctly from earlier experimental Hitler representations like Hans-Jürgen Syberberg’s Hitler: A Film from Germany (1978) or Christoph Schlingensief ’s 100 Years of Adolf Hitler (1989), which explored the representational clichés and the collective emotional attachment associated with Hitler in absurdist, grotesque, and slow-moving imagery. In contrast, post-reunification parodies often worked with the incongruity between “the monster” Hitler and “the person” Hitler for a quick comic effect and relief: The Kabarett performer Thomas Pigor impersonated Hitler shaving his mustache in the morning with his “Braun” razor. The actor Serdar Somuncu toured the country performing public readings of Mein Kampf against the grain, claiming that “Hitler minus power is a comedy.”5 The success of his performance was certainly also based on the fact that the visual contrast between Somuncu’s appearance — ​he is of Turkish descent — ​and his performance of Hitler’s text onstage subtly connected discussions on historical anti-Semitism with discussions of contemporary racism in Germany. One could argue that his performances embody the past of Germany, the delusion of a racially homogeneous society, and, in its future, the reality of a racially and culturally diverse society (fig. 13.1). The 2004 film Der Wixxer, a spoof of German Edgar Wallace films from

Springtime for Hitler Every Year

Figure 13.1. Serdar Somuncu’s Mein Kampf. Copyright Serdar Sumuncu.

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the 1960s, featured a butler named Alfons Hatler with a thick Austrian accent and a bad temper. In a defining moment, Hatler conducts his morning aerobics in a track suit, alternately performing the Hitler greeting with the right or the left arm while jumping up and down to the rhythm of David Hasselhoff ’s song “I’ve Been Looking for Freedom.” Like the film, this scene presents Hitler as a cliché like any other next to other national clichés associated with Germany (the large German following of David Hasselhoff, in this instance). The scene smugly and self-referentially calls for a “freedom” from context for the Hitler greeting or Hitler himself, a “normalization.” At the same time the scene carries the awareness that it derives its comic effect from the taboo it is making fun of. The most popular parody became the 2006 music video Adolf — ​ich hock in meinem Bonker (I am sitting in my bunker). Once again Thomas Pigor lends Hitler his voice, this time to a relaxed reggae beat. And the cartoonist Walter Moers presents a purposefully endearing chubby version of Hitler idling alone in his tiny bunker, which stands completely isolated in front of a Berlin skyline and below the shadows of the British bombers.6 This stark-naked cartoon Hitler dangles his legs on the toilet, complains that “no one loves me anymore,” and ponders surrender, since “World War II isn’t fun anymore.” He continues his lament in the bathtub, surrounded by foam, his dog Blondi, and a few little rubber ducky versions of himself, who intone the chorus: “Adolf, you bloody Nazi pig. Won’t you finally capitulate?” Like the Hatler aerobics, this parody tries to deflate the seriousness of Nazi symbols and rituals, thus making fun of the representational obsession with Hitler. Cartoon Adolf is visibly in love with himself — ​he has images of himself as an orator and as a baby on his walls. Even his toilet paper sports an “A” logo. However, his logo is reminiscent of the anarchist “A” sign, and his bunker is smeared with graffiti, including “Nazis Raus,” the leftist rallying cry against the very real threat of right-wing extremism in contemporary Germany. Despite the video’s initial facetious “historical” claim that events take place in Berlin 1945, the location of the bunker has clearly been moved to an imaginary realm of public debate in contemporary Germany. The parody makes the point that there is no outside to the representation of Hitler. Similar to what is often represented as Hitler’s delusional world, in this instance, the Allied voices calling for surrender, the voices calling for an end to fascism in Germany, and the voice that voices Hitler’s loneliness, they all originate from the same insular bunker perspective. Adolf — ​ich hock in meinem Bonker, like Dani Levy’s My Führer, also takes

The Vision for My Führer Dani Levy’s much anticipated film My Führer was released in 2007 and was immediately declared the first German feature film to break the taboo of presenting Hitler as a comedic character. Moreover, it was positioned as a “native” answer to films such as Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator (1940) or Roberto Benigni’s Life Is Beautiful (1997). However, defying these great expectations, the film was a critical flop. Reviewers overwhelmingly saw it as “not radical” enough in its comedy and pronounced it “as funny as a German winter of war.”7 It did not help that the lead actor in the role of Hitler, the comedian and jazz musician Helge Schneider, abstained from its premiere, publicly distanced himself from the film, called the edited final version “platitudinous,” and claimed that it reduced the figure of Hitler to a “weakling.”8 While many reviews indulged in what seems an unwarranted amount of Schadenfreude, the concerns that they raised are not entirely off the mark. The film’s comedy suffers from the burden of references it seeks to mobilize and the expectations it strives to fulfill. The story of My Führer is told to the audience by the actor Adolf Grünbaum (Ulrich Mühe), who begins his voice-over narration at the moment of his death on New Year’s Day 1945. Thus, lending a voice to those murdered, the film is set up as a counterfactual memorial to pre-fascist Jewish culture.9 Grünbaum recounts the events of the last few days that led up to his death. The simultaneously cruel and jovial womanizer Goebbels (Sylvester Groth) tracks Grünbaum down in a concentration camp near Berlin to hire him as an acting coach for Hitler. The Nazi leadership is concerned about Hitler’s morose and disillusioned demeanor and his ability to still inspire the masses. Grünbaum, a former professor of

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a stab at the 2004 feature film Downfall, which excessively claimed historical accuracy and its search for Hitler “the person.” The comedy in Adolf is established in exaggeratedly following the narrative genre convention of the Hitler biopic to the conclusion that, deep down, Hitler is just a lonely and disappointed person. Cartoon Hitler is constantly framed by the bunker window, mirrored by little versions of himself, and most importantly he is stark naked. But there is nothing revealing in this nakedness. The search for meaning or a deeper truth within “the person” Hitler leads only to more surfaces and further refractions. In this video, there is just what the viewer makes of Hitler, and there is no visual possibility to reach beyond that.

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dramatic arts, had successfully coached Hitler in the very beginning of his political career. According to Goebbels, only an “urbane Jewish actor” could help the morose Hitler as only a Jew could tap into his passion, his hatred for Jews. Grünbaum promises to maintain the “staged reality” that Goebbels has created for Hitler, who does not know about the Allied advances and the fact that Berlin is in ruins. In return, Grünbaum negotiates the reunion with his family and the release of his fellow inmates from the concentration camp Sachsenhausen. While his family indeed joins him at the Chancellery, Goebbels tricks Grünbaum into believing that Sachsenhausen was dissolved. Very quickly, Grünbaum diagnoses Hitler as a “psychologically broken” man, and his coaching turns into a therapy of Hitler’s childhood traumas. Grünbaum’s plan to kill Hitler at the first opportunity gives way to his compassion for the early sufferings of the Führer and his desire to heal him. Grünbaum and Hitler increasingly become doubles — ​not just in their megalomania. Grünbaum, however, soon realizes that his fellow inmates are still in the camp, that Goebbels plans to assassinate Hitler with a bomb during his big speech, and that he, the Jew, is to be blamed. On New Year’s Day, Hitler loses his voice, and Grünbaum is ordered to stand under the podium hidden by a curtain to deliver the speech, while Hitler gestures above. Grünbaum starts out performing the scripted speech and declares that the German body steeled by defeat wants to tan on the shores of the Adriatic Sea — ​“the German soul is a clean soul.”10 But then he embarks on his own speech, the speech of his life, in which he unmasks what he has come to understand as the psychological mechanism behind the Nazi killings: “And so we torture those who can’t defend themselves. Like we were once tortured defenselessly. . . . We take revenge on the Jew, the homosexual, the communist throughout Europe for the torment and humiliation in our nurseries.”11 Grünbaum is shot by Albert Speer, and dying, leads the crowd to chant “Heil Myself.” Hitler rushes off before the ticking bomb explodes. As the credits roll, children and adults in contemporary Germany are asked seemingly at random on the street whether they know Adolf Hitler and then whether they know Adolf Grünbaum, with the surprising result that not too many people have a firm grasp on either figure, the historical or the fictional one. The film ends with a little girl declaring that Grünbaum was her “great-great-grandfather,” thus emphasizing a tangible biographical link to the fictitious character, while the historical figure Hitler becomes more and more elusive. The play with history and fiction that this ending suggests is a frequent

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strategy of Dani Levy’s films. The Swiss-Jewish director was born in 1957 and is one of the most influential filmmakers of his generation in German-language cinema. He cofounded the production collective X-Filme — ​which also counts directors Tom Tykwer (Run Lola Run) and Wolfgang Becker (Good Bye Lenin) among its ranks — ​in order to develop a “new” New German Cinema, which would tell “authentic German stories” in the tradition of the American independent auteur cinema.12 In contrast to My Führer, Levy’s previous film Go for Zucker (2004) had been a big critical and commercial success. Most critics agreed that this fast-paced comedy about a JewishGerman family reunion after the fall of the wall presented a breakthrough in reintroducing Jewish humor into the German film production context. Levy himself remarked that Go for Zucker was the first Jewish comedy with German actors “for a long time,” since Jews had so far been allowed to play only one role in Germany — ​“that of the victim.”13 My Führer was intended to continue the project of reestablishing what had been a very vibrant Jewish comedy tradition before the persecution of its protagonists in the Third Reich. Levy was annoyed by the hubris of Hollywood “to want to tell us the truth in regard to the Holocaust” with films such as Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List (1993). He also thought of My Führer as “something small, fast, sassy, politically incorrect,” as a subversive response to the monumental and expensive mainstream production of Downfall.14 Indeed, My Führer is replete with parodic references to the internationally enormously successful Downfall, the 2004 feature film about Hitler’s last days in the bunker.15 Downfall had unleashed a heated public debate in Germany about the problems involved in portraying Hitler the person, rather than (or in addition to) Hitler the genocidal psychopath. However, this and other preceding debates on what is in good or poor taste in representing Hitler seem strangely oblivious of their own historicity and the recurrence of the same visual tropes, which become the point of contention in each new debate. Already in the 1970s, Joachim Fest’s Hitler biography (1973) and documentary Hitler, a Career (1977) had polarized the public around the question of whether it was permissible to present shots of Hitler hugging little children or petting his beloved dog Blondi. Historians such as Hans-Ulrich Weh­ ler critiqued Fest for dealing with the Shoah as a marginal matter to the biography of Adolf Hitler, and more recently historian Hannes Heer has denounced Fest’s project as a one-sided story of Hitler, the man of leisure and emotions, rather than Hitler, the warmonger and strategist of genocide.16

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For our purposes it is important to take a closer look at the representational strategies of Downfall, as they proved to be a touchstone not only for My Führer’s visual humor, but for many parodies of Hitler since then in and outside of Germany. Examples include the vastly popular Downfall parodies on YouTube, which create new subtitles for the film’s climactic scene of Hitler’s angry outburst in the war room — ​thus Hitler’s outburst could be about Michael Jackson’s death or being unfriended on Facebook. Other examples are found in the “Hipster Hitler” comics, in which Hitler appears as a bratty, obnoxious, self-involved Brooklynite, who wears T-shirts with slogans such as “I found my fixie on Krieglist” or “Death Camp for Cutie,” and throws a tantrum when he is not accepted to art school.17 These parodies consciously dehistoricize and trivialize the emotion captured by the original scenes of Hitler’s rage and thus deflate the ethos of earnestness and authenticity, with which Downfall approaches the representation of Hitler. Downfall portrays Hitler as a mentally and physically very sick man and visually continues paying respect to the enigmatic aura surrounding his death. While the audience witnesses the suicide of Goebbels, Hitler shoots himself behind closed doors, and his body is never shown. The event is reflected for the audience only in the grave facial expressions of Hitler’s personal assistant Günsche and Hitler’s secretary Traudl Junge, the identificatory figure of the film, who catches a glimpse of a bloodstain on the floor. As the film reenacts the removal of the body from the viewer, the fear of fetishization of Hitler’s death results in the renewal of the mythic aura surrounding his body, decreed by Hitler himself. In Fest’s Hitler, a Career, Hitler’s anti-Semitism and the Shoah were a facet rather than a constitutive, continuously integrated trait in the narrative of “the person Hitler.” In Downfall they become occasional expressions of a visibly diseased and decaying mind. Ultimately, despite all the gestures of personability and Bruno Ganz’s realistic acting tour de force as Hitler, the person Hitler is gently allowed to remain an enigma, or as the influential journalist Jens Jessen stated, he “remains an incomprehensible monster.”18 The cultural critic Diedrich Diederichsen termed Downfall a “drama of overpowerment,” which presents Hitler’s outbursts as the worst of him, and the murder of the “helpless little Goebbels-children” by their mother as the central crime of the Third Reich.19 Indeed, the instances in which the film solicits disapproval from the viewer are displaced. In focusing on how Hitler’s generals participated in maintaining Hitler’s delusions to the very end, the

Jewish Humor and Healing As I mentioned earlier, My Führer visually references Downfall and the debates on representations of Hitler that surrounded it. In the process it strives to recast some of the visual tropes that are associated with Hitler representations, namely the bunker, Hitler’s dog, Hitler’s mustache, and the climactic Hitler tantrum. In My Führer, this tantrum occurs when Leni Riefenstahl’s niece, a makeup artist, accidentally shaves off half of Hitler’s mustache. In this scene, the name Riefenstahl comes to stand for the opposite of visual propaganda and the creation of iconic images, namely for the unmasking of Hitler, who — ​deprived of his main visual signifier — ​becomes powerless and speechless after his tantrum. Besides playing with well-known visual Hitler tropes, My Führer also creates new comedic imagery for characteristics of Hitler, which are frequently cited in the historical secondary literature, such as his petit bourgeois tastes and habits: Eva Braun and Hitler enjoy an evening of watching Braun’s home movies of themselves together. This

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film points accusingly to the responsibility the German military leadership bears for prolonging the suffering of the civilian population against their better knowledge. However, this disbelief at how the occasional visitors to the bunker could have continued validating the delusions of a sick and crazy man does not seriously engage the fervor and chilling rationality with which large parts of the German population subscribed to and executed a genocidal belief system based on a collective construction of race. In line with many German reviews, however, the conservative political commentator Frank Schirrmacher announced that Downfall had completely reinvented representations of Hitler. Moreover, it presented the emancipation from a representational context that Hitler had shaped himself. Implicitly critiquing the culture of remembrance that the student revolts of 1968 implemented, Schirrmacher argued that Downfall had rendered Hitler “controllable” and therefore symbolized an “act of normalization,” a milestone in the history of coming to terms with the German past.20 But this type of declaration of independence, the forceful proclamation that things are finally “normal,” has long become, like the recurring debate on Hitler representations, another one of the repetitions associated with the collective German reworking of the Third Reich, which thinks of itself as both the first and the last word in the matter.

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Figure 13.2. Parody of the “private” Hitler in My Führer (2007).

image simultaneously evokes and parodies the idea of the Third Reich as the producer of total visual illusion and propagandistic control (Goebbels’s favorite exclamation in My Führer is “staged reality!”). It also extends the awareness of the fascist control over images to the idea of the “person” Hitler: we watch Hitler watching Hitler, and ironically, even Hitler himself is looking for the “private” Hitler (fig. 13.2). Ultimately, My Führer makes the case that no such Hitler can be visually construed as separate from fascist imagery and ideology. In a similar vein, the critic Georg Seeßlen has argued that My Führer presents a tour de force through the history of Hitler images in order to bring on a liberation not from Hitler but from the paralyzing ghosts of his representations.21 Drawing comedy out of the incongruity of the image of the all-powerful Führer with the image of the German everyman with his trivial activities and petty emotions and pointing to the seemingly endless self-referentiality of Hitler’s image are strategies that My Führer shares with several of the already mentioned more recent German Hitler parodies. But no other — ​with the exception of Somuncu’s performances of Mein Kampf — ​attempts to engage the National Socialist discourse on race and the Shoah as radically. My Führer mobilizes the visual and textual archive of Jewish humor on the Shoah. With these references, the film seeks to establish an interdependence between the “Jewish” and the “German” soul, expressed also in mutual pathological fixations surrounding the history of the Third Reich. The title is programmatic — ​everybody has their own Führer. The fictional musical “Springtime for Hitler” was presented as the product of Jewish humor, and My Führer also could be analyzed as containing a film within a film, or a performance

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within a performance, namely Adolf Grünbaum’s construction of his own private Führer, the Führer as a double of the Jewish actor. Before the 2007 release of My Führer, the genre of the “Holocaust comedy” was perceived as a foreign affair in Germany. The “easily defeated” caricatures of Hitler “offered audiences symbolic victories over a thoroughly de-auraticized and disempowered Hitler,” which presented an identificatory conflict for German audiences, who in many cases brought family histories of guilt or complicity to the table.22 Part of the convention for humor on the Shoah in Germany and elsewhere was a stance of innocence. However, comic “Jewish” voices of 1970s Germany such as Edgar Hilsenrath were, unlike in the United States, either misunderstood or unappreciated.23 German studies scholar Lutz Koepnick has argued that “Holocaust laughter” occurred outside the bounds of the comedy genre and still serves as a cathartic release for the German viewer and the German film industry. Koepnick cites as an example the repeated, seemingly carefree laughter of the Jewish protagonist and victim Felice in the 1999 film Aimée and Jaguar, which comes to symbolize an assumed “normalization” in regard to the history of the Third Reich, thus liberating the viewer from the compulsive mechanism of repeatedly trying to overcome the unredeemable past.24 In this context it is important to note that Levy’s film My Führer was originally not only envisioned as a homegrown “Holocaust comedy,” but also intended to make a more radical statement on this genre itself. The first version depicted as a narrator the 116-year old Hitler, who, having survived the war, changed his name to Alfons Grünbaum (assuming the last name of the Jewish protagonist) and spends his old age leisurely painting near Berchtesgaden. The aged Hitler accuses Grünbaum of being responsible for Germany’s defeat by having weakened him, and deplores that in contemporary Germany “gays and erotomaniacs are publicly fornicating” and “Jews are joking again.” Hitler professes that he would, of course, always answer the call to become chancellor again in a reunited Germany and a united Europe. After test audiences rejected this version of the film, the narrative frame was cut. Instead, in the German release version, Hitler’s double of sorts, Grünbaum, narrated the film as counterfactual imagery. The revisions took a cue from the Romanian-French coproduction Train of Life (Radu Mihăileanu, 1998), in which the comedy becomes poignant once the viewer finds out at the very end that the story of the shtetl that stages its own deportation to escape the Nazis is told from the perspective of a concentration

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camp inmate. At the end of Train of Life, the camera surprisingly zooms away from the face of the narrator, and the fence comes suddenly into view. The happy ending, the viewer saw earlier, becomes counterfactual, and the act of telling it becomes an act of hope despite the odds. Contrasting a fairy tale of hope and absurd comedy with life in a concentration camp or ghetto also had been a visual or narrative strategy in films such as Roberto Benigni’s Life Is Beautiful (1997) or novels like Jurek Becker’s Jacob the Liar (1969). In changing the narrative frame and inviting the viewer’s identification with the liberal humanist Grünbaum rather than an incorrigible Hitler, Levy gave his comedy a moral center and a safety net of seriousness. It was this very safety net that critics pounced upon in their reviews. Helge Schneider, the actor who portrayed Hitler and had distanced himself from the film, declared that he would not have participated in the film if he had known that the focus would be “forced” onto “the Jewish history” and that the Hitler character would just be presented as one-dimensional and platitudinous.25 He suggested that the real comedic provocation would be to place Hitler into today’s world, and claimed that it was Levy’s somewhat banal intention to tell his young audience to be “better with their kids.”26 Despite the fact that Levy ultimately still regarded the first film version with Hitler as the narrator as the version that was truest to his artistic vision, Schneider’s reductive analysis of Levy’s intentions is not entirely without cause. Levy cited the work of Swiss psychoanalyst Alice Miller as a major inspiration for his film.27 In her groundbreaking book For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in Child Rearing and the Roots of Violence, Miller outlined the pathological effects of “poisonous pedagogy” with its corporal punishment well into adulthood. She documented the abuse and beatings that Hitler had experienced as a child, and argued that Hitler was repeating his childhood trauma in his hatred and violence. Germany had to be subjected to the adult Hitler as the helpless child Hitler had been subjected to his seemingly all-powerful father. To Miller, anti-Semitism was an easy way to legitimate an unresolved hatred that could not be directed against the father, since the child seeks to love the parents.28 In the coaching sessions Levy envisions between Grünbaum and Hitler, Hitler recovers his traumatic childhood memories (fig. 13.3). As Hitler sobbingly recounts out loud the beatings that he received from his father, Grünbaum finds himself unable to go through with his plan to kill him. In this psychoanalytical setup, which includes Grünbaum taking notes while Hitler is stretched out on the couch, it is, ironically, Hitler who voices Mill-

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Figure 13.4. In bed with Hitler in My Führer (2007).

er’s theory: “My father was of weak nature. He was a miserable worm, who could not help himself but beat a defenseless child.”29 Hitler then proceeds to explain this “genetic” weakness out of the fact that his father was rumored to be of Jewish descent. In an absurdly comic turn, Grünbaum expresses how sorry he is for that. While the scene subscribes to Miller’s vision of Hitler as the unloved child, it certainly also parodies therapeutic practice and what it describes as a Jewish investment in healing. This parody is taken even further in another scene, in which Hitler appears in the middle of the night at Adolf and Elsa Grünbaum’s bed and breaks down crying. Elsa Grünbaum invites him to share their bed, and sings him to sleep with a Yiddish lullaby. Once he’s asleep, Elsa tries to smother him with a pillow, ignoring her husband’s protest that she would kill a defenseless person and that Hitler is “also just an unloved child.”30 Still sleeping deeply, Hitler shakes Elsa off, thanks his father for his punishment, and continues to sleep (fig. 13.4).

Springtime for Hitler Every Year

Figure 13.3. Hitler on the couch in My Führer (2007).

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As these scenes demonstrate, the film invites the viewer to laugh not at the “person” Hitler, but at a “personal” Hitler: at the construction of “My Führer” as a Jewish-German doppelgänger to Adolf Grünbaum. Not only does Grünbaum save Hitler several times over — ​psychologically with his coaching and physically from the bomb at the end of the film — ​but Hitler comes to depend completely on “my Jewish friend.” The fates and the emotions of the two Adolfs become inextricably intertwined to a point that Elsa Grünbaum accuses her husband of being “a meshuggener megalomaniac like him.”31 Visually they assume each other’s roles: Grünbaum starts impersonating Hitler’s aggressive posturing and rhetoric, and Hitler debases himself in the coaching sessions, for example when he pretends to be his own dog, Blondi, and crawls around on all fours in front of his prisoner. In its depiction of Grünbaum as an inconspicuous part of Hitler’s entourage and in the scenes of Hitler’s speech, where Grünbaum stands below the podium, My Führer visually borrows from Woody Allen’s mockumentary Zelig (1983), in which the Jewish protagonist adapts to any historical, ethnic, and social setting like a chameleon to the point that he ends up working with the Nazis. Thus, My Führer, like The Producers, is set up as a narrative about Jewish identity and its potential psychological pitfalls. But even more so, the film presents a mutual fantasy of symbiosis, healing, and redemption, in which the Jew saves the German from himself or herself. While this fantasy might not have played much of a role in German comedy about the Shoah until now, this fantasy is as old as the Third Reich itself. Influential authors of the German exile already championed the idea that “brother Hitler” was “one of us.”32 In 1936, the influential Hitler biographer Konrad Heiden compared Hitler’s appearance during his years in a Viennese homeless shelter to that of an Eastern European Jew. And in 1941 the writer Arnold Zweig envisioned a postwar collective psychoanalytic treatment in which the German people would have to muster a lot of effort and insight to learn how to bear “the yoke of the Jew Freud” and to appreciate it as a “path to change, to a new source of power, to a recovery of its own soul.”33 The idea that a Jewish psychoanalysis might heal the German soul finds its culmination in one of the final scenes of My Führer, in which Grünbaum leads the enthusiastic crowd to chant “Heil mich selbst,” that is, “hail/heal myself.” Not only do these images of healing and the idea of the Jewish doppelgänger to the Nazi recur in historical analyses of Hitler and the fascist mind, but they have also become an important fixture in Jewish humor. In her definitive 1962 collection of Jewish humor, the writer Salcia Land-

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mann defined the Jewish joke as “the weapon of the weak” and as “identical with their [the Jews’] courage to survive despite everything.”34 One of the jokes she cites plays on Goebbels’s resemblance to a Polish Jew. In George Tabori’s 1987 comedic short story (and play) Mein Kampf, the Jewish bookseller Schlomo Herzl takes care of Hitler in the Viennese homeless shelter, advises him to wear his mustache and hair in the way that will define him, and saves him from sure death. In the comedic Mein Kampf as well as in My Führer, the Jew produces the visual cues that make Hitler recognizable for comedic effect — ​be it the mustache or the habitus. Tabori’s Hitler is paranoid and violently anti-Semitic, but also calls out for his mother in his sleep (not unlike the regressing Hitler in My Führer). In the end, Hitler tries to steal the book that Schlomo has been writing: Mein Kampf. Schlomo manages to fool Hitler and his followers by impersonating Hitler. In a reversal of historical imagery, Hitler is finally escorted away by “Madame Death” and her policemen. My Führer is, like Tabori’s Mein Kampf, a story about a Jew saving Hitler. With the knowledge that Hitler will destroy them and their world, this becomes a desperate, Sisyphean act, which nonetheless comes to symbolize strength, self-assertion, and hope. My Führer derives its comedy from this tragic constellation. While earlier parodies like the video Adolf — ​ich hock in meinem Bonker engage the idiosyncrasies of the German public discussion on the Third Reich, My Führer picks up on what it construes as mutually interdependent Jewish-German pathological fixations surrounding fascism and the Shoah. The Nazis watch Grünbaum’s coaching sessions with Hitler through a window in the wall, covered by a painting (fig. 13.5). Seen from Hitler’s office, the painting depicts an idyll in the opulent heroic-realistic style favored

Springtime for Hitler Every Year

Figure 13.5. The view through the painting in My Führer (2007).

310 No Laughing Matter

by National Socialism. Seen from the other side, though, the backside of the painting comes to resemble the colors and strokes of what would have been considered “degenerate art” in the Third Reich. Goebbels and Speer look onto this Jewish-German therapeutic scene of Grünbaum and Hitler working together through a distorted and distorting lens, while Grünbaum and Hitler are unable to look outside the room. With this setup of vision (or blindness) and its refractions, the film comments on the Shoah as the root of a psychological pathology constitutive of German and of Jewish identity. Levy commented in regard to the overwhelmingly negative critical reviews of My Führer that Germany was still not ready to deal with representations of Hitler as a human being.35 Given the previous Hitler parodies I have mentioned, Germany clearly was ready to laugh about the “person” Hitler. So why did My Führer fall flat? Whether it was a lack of context for the humor tradition that this comedy refers to, a lack of investment in the social pathologies that the film makes fun of, a result of the last-minute changes and confusion in identificatory figures, or simply that the film wanted to achieve too much, remains to be resolved as the film ages and invites new viewings and new audiences. When it comes to authoritative advice on what is at stake in pushing the boundaries of socially acceptable humor on the Shoah, it is safe to turn to one of the many offensive characters of the British comedian Sacha Baron Cohen. In a segment for Cohen’s successful TV series Da Ali G Show, Brüno, a flamboyantly gay fashion and lifestyle reporter with a thick fake Austrian accent, solicits reactions of approval or disapproval upon dropping the names of Hollywood celebrities.36 The real-life fashion reporter Leon Hall is gently coaxed into adopting the following labels to express his sentiments on whether someone is “in” or “out”: celebrities may either remain “in the ghetto” or are sent to “the train to Auschwitz.” The obvious humor of the scene lies in the depiction of the fashion world as a superficial and insular world, which takes itself so seriously that it loses any measure for human suffering. The joke goes deeper, though. The layering of “ghetto” as the African American place of origin of what has become mainstream “cool” with “ghetto” as in the “Warsaw ghetto,” a temporary reprieve from deportation to the gas chambers, points to the complicated role that constructions of race play in society. On the one hand, they can become the inspiration to what societies collectively identify with and consume; on the other they can become the projection of what societies marginalize or persecute. Cohen’s joke also brings to the fore

Notes This chapter is an extended version of my presentation for the Dartmouth Humanities Institute No Laughing Matter in 2007. It owes a lot to the intensive discussions and generous feedback of the other fellows and especially of the two institute directors David Bindman and Angela Rosenthal. Angela was an inspiring mentor, and this essay is dedicated to her. 1. It is worth noting that both musicals within the film are based on plays by a German Nazi, Franz Liebkind, whose unironic and visually austere glorification of Nazi Germany presents another level of comedic contrast to the excess of the actual musical production of “Springtime for Hitler.” In addition, the fact that the comedy of “Springtime for Hitler” is based on Liebkind’s play points to the fantasy of a Jewish healing of German insanity that I will elaborate later on in this chapter. See The Producers, dir. Mel Brooks, Embassy Pictures, USA, 1968. 2. Mein Führer: Die wirklich wahrste Wahrheit über Adolf Hitler (My Führer: The Truly Truest Truth about Adolf Hitler), dir. Dani Levy, X-Filme Creative Pool, Germany, 2007. 3. Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich, The Inability to Mourn: Principles of Collective Behavior (New York: Grove Press, 1975). 4. Randall Halle, “German Film, Aufgehoben: Ensembles of Transnational Cinema,” New German Critique 87 (2002): 19 and 26. 5. Süddeutsche Zeitung, November 26, 1996. (All translations are mine, unless otherwise noted.) 6. This video presents a spin-off of Walter Moers’s 1998 cartoon best seller Adolf — ​ äch bin wieder da (Adolf — ​I am back). Adolf survived the war and roams about contemporary Germany, mostly confused and enraged by what he encounters — ​e.g., he lets his Tamagochi die out of spite for the Japanese surrender. All in all, Hitler is depicted as a pop phenomenon encountering others, e.g., Mother Teresa or Michael Jackson. Moers proceeded to publish two sequels of Adolf. Walter Moers, Adolf — ​äch bin wieder da (Frankfurt a.M.: Eichborn Verlag, 1998). 7. “Dani Levy’s Mein Führer,” BZ, January 11, 2007. 8. “Schneider distanziert sich von Hitler-Film,” Spiegel Online, January 4, 2007. 9. In addition, this choice of name evokes the fate of the Viennese comedian Fritz Grünbaum, who was deported in 1938 and murdered in Dachau in 1941. Grünbaum was forced to entertain SS guards, who beat him when he couldn’t make them laugh.

311 Springtime for Hitler Every Year

that joking about Auschwitz is a matter of taste and fashion. And it shows what is at stake in joking about Auschwitz: the comedic release comes only with regret for having momentarily suspended the horror at such suffering. In contrast, My Führer spares the viewer this type of shock. However, that might have weakened its comedy. It is especially when we become complicit that the joke kills.

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He also performed his famous songs and jokes to his fellow concentration camp inmates as a form of defiance of the camp reality. My Führer’s protagonist is thus set up as a fictional memorial to Jewish comedy as resistance on several levels. Rudolf Herzog, Heil Hitler, das Schwein ist tot! (Frankfurt a.M.: Eichborn Verlag), 234. 10. Dani Levy, Mein Führer: Das Buch zum Film (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 2007), 158. 11. Ibid., 161–162. 12. Halle, “German Film,” 43. 13. Henryk M. Broder, “Schläfenlocken an der Glatze,” Der Spiegel, January 3, 2005, 143. 14. Interview with Dani Levy by Johanna Adorjan, “Dürfen wir über Hitler lachen?,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung, December 17, 2006, 25. 15. Der Untergang (Downfall), dir. Oliver Hirschbiegel, Constantin Film Produktion, Germany, 2004. The film was the feature film adaptation of the documentary Blind Spot: Hitler’s Secretary (Im toten Winkel — ​Hitler’s Sekretärin), dir. André Heller / Othmar Schmiderer, Dor Film, Germany, 2002. It was closely followed by other attempts to present Hitler in a feature film format, such as the TV miniseries Speer and Hitler: The Devil’s Architect (Speer und Er), dir. Heinrich Breloer, Bavaria Media, Germany, 2005. 16. Hannes Heer, “Hitler war’s”: Die Befreiung der Deutschen von ihrer Vergangenheit (Berlin: Aufbau Verlag, 2005). Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Entsorgung der deutschen Vergangenheit? Ein polemischer Essay zum Historikerstreit (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1988). 17. See Hipster Hitler, http://hipsterhitler.com. 18. Jens Jessen, “Stilles Ende eines Irren unter Tage,” Die Zeit 36, August 26, 2004. 19. Diedrich Diederichsen, “Der Chef brüllt schon wieder so,” taz, September 15, 2004. 20. Frank Schirrmacher, “Die zweite Erfindung des Adolf Hitler,” FAZ, September 14, 2004. See also David Bathrick, “Whose His/tory Is It? The US reception of Downfall,” New German Critique 34 (2007): 1–16. 21. Georg Seeßlen, “Zu Hitler muß uns immer wieder etwas einfallen,” Dani Levy, Mein Führer, 179–199. 22. Michael Richardson, “‘Heil Myself!’ Impersonation and Identity in Comedic Representations of Hitler,” in Visualizing the Holocaust, ed. David Bathrick, Brad Prager, and Michael D. Richardson (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2008), 277–297. 23. Sander L. Gilman, “Is Life Beautiful? Can the Shoah Be Funny? Some Thoughts on Recent and Older Films,” Critical Inquiry 26, no. 2 (Winter 2000): 279–308. 24. Lutz Koepnick, “Erpresstes Lachen im deutsch-jüdischen Melodram,” in Lachen über Hitler — ​Auschwitz-Gelächter?, ed. Margrit Fröhlich et al. (Munich: edition text + kritik 2003), 315–334. 25. Helge Schneider interviewed by Stephanie Ringel, “Will vom Hitler-Quatsch nichts mehr hören,” Sonntagsblick, January 4, 2007. 26. Helge Schneider interviewed by Peter Zander, “Ich muss den Film nicht mögen,” Die Welt, January 5, 2007.

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27. Levy, Mein Führer, 214. 28. Alice Miller, For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in Child Rearing and the Roots of Violence (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1983). 29. Levy, Mein Führer, 84. 30. Ibid., 143. 31. Ibid., 118. 32. Thomas Koebner, ed., “Bruder Hitler” Autoren des Exils und des Widerstands sehen den “Führer” des Dritten Reiches (Munich: Wilhelm Heyne Verlag, 1989). 33. Arnold Zweig, “How to Stop Aggression,” Arnold Zweig Archive, Akademie der Künste Berlin, Sig. 2793. 34. Salcia Landmann, Jüdische Witze (Munich: dtv, 1972), 12. 35. However, parts of the film were seen as successful, i.e., the ones engaging common visual tropes of comedy on Nazis such as fascist bureaucracy, or the fascist penchant to petit bourgeois aesthetics like in Levy’s declared models Lubitsch’s To Be or Not to Be or Chaplin’s The Great Dictator. Dani Levy, “Lachen ist ein Politikum,” Die Welt, January 20, 2007. 36. Da Ali G Show, dirs. James Bobin, Dan Mazer, and Scott Preston, HBO, USA, 2003–2004.

Contributors David Bindman is emeritus professor of the history of art, University College London, and currently a visiting fellow at the Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at the Hutchins Center, Harvard University, and visiting professor in the History of Art Department, Harvard University. He has written mainly on British art but is also the author of Ape to Apollo: Aesthetics and the Idea of Race, 1700–1800 (Reaktion Books, 2002), and is the editor (with Henry Louis Gates Jr.) of the series The Image of the Black in Western Art (2010–2014). Frank Felsenstein is the Reed D. Voran Honors Distinguished Professor of Humanities at Ball State University. He is the author of Anti-Semitic Stereotypes: A Paradigm of Otherness in English Popular Culture, 1660–1830 ( Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), and of the printed catalog to the exhibition The Jew as Other: A Century of English Caricature, 1730–1830 ( Jewish Theological Seminary, New York, 1995). Among his other publications are English Trader, Indian Maid: Representing Gender, Race, and Slavery in the New World ( Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), and, as coauthor, What Middletown Read: Print Culture in an American Small City (University of Massachusetts Press, 2015). He is at present completing a book based on the refugee correspondence of his parents, who escaped Nazi Germany, and embarking on a study of Rowlandson’s Jews. Veronika Fuechtner is an associate professor of German Studies at Dartmouth College and an adjunct professor of psychiatry at the Geisel School of Medicine. Her research focuses on early twentieth- and twenty-first-century German-language literature, film, and history of science. She is the author of Berlin Psychoanalytic: Psychoanalysis and Culture in Weimar Republic Germany and Beyond (University of California Press, 2011) and the coeditor of Imagining Germany Imagining Asia: Essays in Asian-German Studies (Camden House, 2013) and Towards a Global History of Sexual Science, 1880–1960 (forthcoming). She is currently completing a book on Thomas Mann and his Brazilian mother.

316 Contributors

Katherine Hart is the senior curator of collections and the Barbara C. and Harvey P. Hood 1918 Curator of Academic Programming at the Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, and works primarily in the areas of English art after 1700 and contemporary art. She curated an exhibition James Gillray: Prints by the Eighteenth-Century Master of Caricature in 1995 and has a continuing interest in the field of social satire and caricature. She has curated or coordinated exhibitions on such subjects as contemporary photography, ancient Greek childhood, William Hogarth, Romare Bearden, the visual culture of medicine, and Inuit art and culture. Allen Hockley received his PhD from the University of Toronto in 1995 and is an associate professor in the Department of Art History at Dartmouth College. His research interests include Japanese prints and illustrated books of the seventeenth through twentieth centuries and early Japanese photography. Paul H. D. Kaplan is a professor of art history in the School of Humanities at Purchase College, SUNY.  He is the author of The Rise of the Black Magus in Western Art (1985) and a major contributor to The Image of the Black in Western Art (new edition, Harvard University Press, 2010–2012, essays in vols. 2, 3.1, 3.3, and 4.2).  He has held an NEH fellowship, and in 2008 and 2012 was a fellow at the W. E. B. Du Bois Center for African and African American research at Harvard; he also served as project scholar for the artist Fred Wilson’s installation in the American Pavilion at the 2003 Venice Biennale. Agnes Lugo-Ortiz is an associate professor of Latin American and Caribbean literatures and cultures at the University of Chicago. She is the author of Identidades imaginadas / Imagined Identity: Biografía y nacionalidad en el horizonte de la guerra, and coeditor of Herencia: The Anthology of Hispanic Literature of the United States; En otravoz: Antología de la literatura hispana de los Estados Unidos; and Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage, volume 5. Kobena Mercer is a professor of the history of art and African American studies, Yale University. His first book, Welcome to the Jungle (1994), introduced new lines of inquiry in art, photography, and film in the black Atlantic diaspora, and he is the author of monographic studies on Rotimi Fani-Kayode, Isaac Julien, Renée Green, and Keith Piper, as well as historical studies of

Ana Merino is an associate professor of Spanish and the director of the MFA in Spanish Creative Writing at the University of Iowa. She has published seven books of poetry, a novel, and two plays. Merino also writes about comics and graphic novels, with numerous articles, a book entitled El comic hispánico (Cátedra, 2003), and a critical monograph on Chris Ware. Merino was awarded the Diario de Avisos Award for best critical short article about comics for the Spanish literary magazine Leer. Between 2001 and 2011 Merino was part of the executive committee of the International Comics Art Forum (ICAF ) organizing yearly academic conferences on comics, and she has been a member of the board of trustees of the Center for Cartoon Studies (CCS) since 2004. She has served as curator for four comics exhibitions. Adrian W. B. Randolph is professor of art history and dean of the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences at Northwestern University, as well as the coeditor of Interfaces, the series in which this book is appearing. His research and teaching focus on Italian medieval and Renaissance art and architecture. His articles and essays have appeared in many collections and scholarly journals, including Art Bulletin, Art History, Word & Image, kritische berichte, Frauen Kunst Wissenschaft, and Perspectives, and his recent larger projects include a monograph, Touching Objects: Intimate Experiences of Italian Fifteenth-Century Art (Yale University Press, 2014), and a coedited collection of essays, Renaissance Love: Eros, Passion, and Friendship in Italian Art around 1500 (Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2014). Angela Rosenthal was an associate professor of art history at Dartmouth College, teaching eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European art and visual culture within an international and global perspective. Her publications include the books Angelika Kauffmann: Bildnismalerei im 18. Jahrhundert (Reimer, 1996) and Angelica Kauffman: Art and Sensibility (Yale University Press, 2006) and the collections of essays The Other Hogarth: Aesthetics of Difference (Princeton University Press, 2001) with Bernadette Fort and Slave Portraiture in the Atlantic World (Cambridge University Press, 2013) with

317 Contributors

James Van Der Zee, Romare Bearden, and Adrian Piper. He is the editor of the Annotating Art’s Histories series, published by MIT and INIVA, whose titles are Cosmopolitan Modernisms (2005), Discrepant Abstraction (2006), Pop Art and Vernacular Cultures (2007), and Exiles, Diasporas and Strangers (2008).

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Agnes Lugo-Ortiz. Her interest in visual humor emerged from her work on British eighteenth-century graphic satire during abolitionism and her interest in developments in contemporary art.

Contributors

Tanya Sheehan is an associate professor in the Department of Art at Colby College, where she teaches American art history. She is the author of Doctored: The Medicine of Photography in Nineteenth-Century America (2011), the editor of Photography, History, Difference (2014), and the coeditor of Photography and Its Origins (2015). With fellowship support from the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University and several major research libraries, she is completing a book on race and photographic humor. Cherise Smith is an associate professor of art history and African and African Diaspora Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research has appeared in Art Journal, African Arts, and Exposure and been supported by the Getty Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship and the Ford Foundation Diversity Postdoctoral Fellowship. She is the author of Enacting Others: Politics of Identity in Eleanor Antin, Nikki S. Lee, Adrian Piper, and Anna Deavere Smith. Sam Vásquez is an associate professor of English at Dartmouth College. Her interdisciplinary research focuses on humor and the interrelationship of literature and visual culture in Caribbean and other African diasporic literatures. She is the author of Humor in the Caribbean Literary Canon (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), and her numerous articles have appeared in journals such as Caribbean Quarterly, Journal of West Indian Literature, Meridians, and Small Axe. She is currently completing a book on ekphrasis and visual representation in contemporary Caribbean works.   Mark Williams is an associate professor of Film and Media Studies at Dartmouth College. He has published in a variety of journals and anthologies, including Télévision: Le moment expérimental; De l’invention à l’institution (1935–1955); Convergence Media History; New Media: Theories and Practices of Digitextuality; Collecting Visible Evidence; Dietrich Icon; Television, History, and American Culture: Feminist Critical Essays; and Living Color: Race, Feminism, and Television.

Index Note: Page numbers in italics indicate figures or tables.

abolition movements: and Bede’s photographic humor, 203–4, 206–7, 209, 210; in England, 80, 83, 84–85, 93, 227n27; cost, for former slaves in Cuba, 118. See also slavery; slave trade Abraham, Sarah, and Isaac: juxtaposition of laughter and drama, 53–55, 56, 73n11 Abraham and Isaac (Rembrandt, 1634), 54–55, 56 Abril. Habrá espocisión [sic] de cañas gordas (April. There’ll be a fine showing of fat canes) (1866), 128, 132–33, 141 Adolf — ich hock in meinem Bonker (I am sitting in my bunker) (2006), 299, 309 African Americans, 12–13, 13–18, 202–3, 246–47, 250. See also Antin, Eleanor; blackface minstrelsy Africans, 7, 222–23, 223. See also Italy Agua Florida para blanquear la piel. Antes de untársela. Después (Flower water for bleaching skin. Before and after) (c. 1860s–1880s), 122, 123 Alecto and her Train at the Gate of Pandaemonium (Gillray, 1791), 76–77, 85–87, 86, 87, 89, 97, 98–99, 99, 103n24 allopathic strategy for challenging racist stereotypes, 13–14 Alloula, Malek, 272 Almanaque profético para el año 1866, 126– 127, 128, 129, 130, 131–34, 135, 141 Americans. See United States Anderson, Elbert, 217 Anillo, C., 122, 136 Antin, Eleanor: ballerina persona, 252,

253, 254, 254, 260–64, 265n2; Eleanor Antinova persona, 242–43, 243, 244–65, 254, 261, 262, 265n1; gender performance, 250–52, 253–54, 254–60 anti-Semitism. See Jews Argentinian national identities: Asian stereotypes, 150–51, 152; black stereotypes, 151, 153, 154, 155, 165; classification of stereotypes, 149–51; cultural shifts in twentieth century, 174; Galician stereotype, 151, 154; gaucho stereotype, 151, 155–56, 157, 161; Indian stereotype, 153, 156, 158–59, 160, 161–65, 162, 165–66, 167–74, 169 Arms of Liberty and Slavery (1768), 88, 89–90 Asian stereotypes, Argentina, 150–51, 152. See also Japan avant-garde grotesque, 7, 13–18 “bad painting,” 14 Baker, Josephine, 244, 256, 260 Bakhtin, Mikhail, xiv, 4–5, 6, 8–9, 14–15, 18, 42n11, 235, 237, 238 ballerina persona, Antin’s, 252, 253, 254, 254, 260–64, 265n2 Bannister, Charles, 235, 236, 238–39 Barbarities in the West Indies (Gillray, 1791), 92–93, 93 Barry, Richard H., 221, 223 The Battle of Carnival and Lent (Brueghel, 1559), 3–4, 4 Baudelaire, Charles, 2–3, 233–34

320 Index

Bede, Cuthbert (pseud. of E. Bradley), 202–12, 205, 209 The Beggar’s Opera, 235, 236, 238–39 Being Antinova (Antin), 242–65, 243, 255, 256 Bening, Fleming Simon, 29 Bergson, Henri, 1, 2–3, 126–27, 135–36 Bernal, Irma, 161–62, 169–70 Berò, Marco Tullio, 24 Bigot, Georges, 104–8, 110–16, 115 Black African Man and Woman (c. 1500– 1550), 38 black avant-garde, return of grotesque in, 13–18 blackface minstrelsy: Bede’s illustrations as conversant with, 204, 206–7; and carnivalesque, 8–13; counterappropriation through, 14–16; debasement and cultural hegemony, 7–8; versus Eleanora Antinova, 245–50; and modernity, 8–13; origins of, 9–10; and sexuality in Othello, 212; and social ambivalence of humor, 1–2; Williams’s passing, 196 blackface performance, Eleanora Antinova, 245–50 blackness: Antin’s journey to master, semiotics of, 246–65; as independent of black bodies, 10; Jewish resonance with, 247–50; linking of, with otherness, 264–65; negative connotations in white society, 201; photography as satirical resource versus whiteness, 204, 206–10, 210; social construction versus whiteness, 11, 251–52 Black Raúl (Lanteri, 1916), 153, 154 blacks: American stereotyping of, 222–23, 223; Argentine stereotyping of, 151, 153, 154, 155, 165; in Caribbean postcards, 272, 275–79, 276, 277, 279, 280–81, 281–87, 282, 291, 292–93n28; childlike portrayal

of, 120–21, 288, 293n39; English stereotyping of, 203, 206; as epitome of sexual appetite, 80–81, 133; food and cooking, association with, 31, 32–33, 35; Italian Renaissance depictions, 23–40, 24, 25, 28, 30, 38, 39; Stowe’s descriptive breaking of stereotypes, 215; superwoman stereotype of 1970s, 254–56. See also cigarette marquillas; passing; slavery; slave trade Bloom, Lisa, 251 Blue Moon (Ofili, 2005), 7, 8 Bogle, Donald, 255 Bradley, Edward (C. Bede), 202–12 Breccia, Enrique, 159, 160 Britain. See England Brooks, Mel, 294–95 Brownie Jump-into-the-Bed and Phil the Devil (Visscher, 1660s), 38, 39, 40 Brueghel, Pieter the Elder, xiv, 3–4, 4 Bundy, Skip, 222 Burke, Edmund, 94 Butler, Judith, 125 “Cabo Savino” (Casalla, 1954), 160, 161 Caribbean postcards: and colonialism, 275–78, 286–88; familiar icons, 278–79, 280–81, 281–83; marginal depictions, 283–91, 284, 290, 293n37; social commentary in “Two Natives,” 274–78, 276; strategies of resistance in, 273–74; tourism and Caribbean identity, 270– 72, 285, 287 caricature: adoption by satirists, 79–80, 101n10; early development in popular prints, 78–80; in identifying the Other, 83; Jews as comedic subjects for, 57–58, 68, 70; for purposes of ridicule, 59, 71–72; and stereotype development, xix, 3. See also slave trade Caridad, Quieres Mecha? ¡¡Siaa!!, 12a. (12th, Caridad, do you want me to light

comedic incongruity: in Antin’s portrayal of Antinova, 246–47, 248; Bannister as male in female persona, 238–39; in Caribbean postcards, 287, 289, 291; in Hitler satires, 297, 304; in photography, 224; social function of, 2–3, 13, 17–18 comedy: The Merchant of Venice as, 50, 52, 72n2; Protestant modernity’s marginalization of, 5, 6. See also humor, racial; performative comedy comic strip. See Japan; Patoruzú Conti, Oscar “Oski,” 156, 157 Cook, Thomas, 109 counter-appropriation and overturning of stereotypical grotesque, 12–13, 14–16 Cries of London, no. 7, Old Cloaths any old Cloaths (Rowlandson, 1799), 60–61, 61 Cries of London: “Any-Bad-Shillings!” (Newton, 1797), 62–63, 63 Cuba: and colonialism, 118, 121, 141–42; path to emancipation, 118–19; political satire, 120–21. See also cigarette marquillas Damon, Maria, 248, 249, 250 Darkness and Dawn (Ehrhart, 1909), 220, 220–21, 223 “Darkness and Dawn” (Barry, 1901), 221, 222 Darley, Mary, 57 Deleuze, Gilles, 176–77, 187 Dent, William, 94 Der Wixxer (2004), 298 Día de Reyes en La Habana (Epiphany in Havana) (Landaluze, c. 1870), 129, 131 Diciembre. Pasarán trabajos comiendo guanajos (December. They will sweat to eat turkey) (1866), 130, 132 Dickens, Charles, 213–14 Disney Studios, 171–73 Don Gil (fictional character), 163, 164, 165, 165, 166, 167–69, 169, 175n15

321 Index

you up? Suuuuare!!) (c. 1860s–1880s), 140, 141 Carlyle, Thomas, 203, 226n10 carnivalesque and grotesque: in black avant-garde, 7, 13–18; and Caribbean postcard social commentary, 277; minstrelsy and modernity, 8–13; overview, 1–8 Carracci, Agostino, 24, 78 Carracci, Annibale, 24, 78 cartoon strip. See Japan; Patoruzú Casalla, Carlos, 160, 161 Cast of Native Floor Show Rehearsing on the Beach in Jamaica (c. 1960s), 281, 286 Caught in the Act (Antin), 252, 253, 254 Cecilia Valdés (Vilaverde), 138 Certeau, Michel de, 135 Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel de, 234 Céspedes, anti-republicano y farsante (Céspedes, antirepublican and charlatan) (Landaluze, 1870), 119–20, 120 Chamberlain, Basil Hall, 109–11 Charles Macklin as Shylock (Ramberg, 1785), 50, 51 Cheng, Anne Anlin, 186 Christmas in the Minories (Leech?, 1851), 68, 69, 70 Chude-Sokei, Louis, 189, 196 cigarette marquillas: Almanaque profético para el año 1866, 126–27, 128, 129, 130, 131–34, 135, 141; as collectibles, 124–25, 143–44n9; and “collecting” of people of color, 125–27; materials and themes in, 123–25; mulattas’ failed attempts at social mobility, 134, 134–42, 140 Clarke, John, 273 Cleaver, Eldridge, 255 Cohen, Erik, 288, 290 Cohen, Sacha Baron, 310–11 Colescott, Robert, xv, 14–15, 15 colonialism in Caribbean, 118, 121, 141–42, 275–78, 286–88

322 Index

Don Quixote (Cervantes), 234 Dorfman, Ariel, 172 Downfall (2004), 299, 301–3 Duchamp, Marcel, 7–8, 16 Dyer, Richard, 251, 252 Eat Dem Taters (Colescott, 1975), 15 Ehrhart, Samuel D., 219–21, 220 El Mundo, Quinterno’s comics in, 152, 170 El nacimiento (Birth) (c. 1860s–1880s), 135, 136 El palomo y la gabilana [sic] (Male dove and female hawk) (after 1862), 134, 135 El que siembra coje, 1a. (1st. He who sows will reap) (Anillo, c. 1860s–1880s), 135, 136 emancipation, 11, 118–19. See also abolition movements Enero. Los diablos coronados castigarántus pecados ( January. The crowned devils will punish your sins) (1866), 128, 129, 131–32 England: abolition movement in, 80, 83, 84–85, 93, 227n27; national identities caricatured, 79–80; photography’s play on blackness and whiteness, 202–18; social class and laughter, 235, 237–39. See also Jews; slave trade English Slavery; or a Picture of the Time (1788), 90, 90–91 equivalence, defined, 62–63 Escalada, Federico A., 162 essentialist identity categories, 187–90, 207, 215–18, 264–65 ethnic identity. See identity “Fabian Leyes” (Rapela, 1964), 156, 157 Ferrer, Ada, 119 Fest, Joachim, 301–2 financial schemers, Jews depicted as, 60– 65, 61, 63, 64, 65, 68, 69, 70 Fontana, Lavinia, 34, 35

Fontana, Prospero, 24–25, 27 Fontanarrosa, Roberto, 158–59, 161, 162 food and cooking: association of blacks with, 31, 32–33, 35; association of Jews with, 59 Fox, Charles James, 62–63, 77, 85, 86, 89, 90, 95, 97–99 freedom and slavery in satirical prints, 88, 89–95, 91, 98 Freedom. Slavery. (Gillray, 1789), 91, 91–92 French Revolution, 77, 86, 86, 97, 97, 98, 99, 100 Freud, Sigmund, 185, 186, 187 Galician stereotype, Argentina, 151, 154 Gasca, Luis, 149 Gates, Henry Louis, 14 “Gauchos” (Oski, 1968), 156, 157 gaucho stereotype, Argentina, 151, 155–56, 157, 161 George, Dorothy, 59 German shift in dealing with humor taboo on Nazism, 296–99 Ghezzi, Pier Leone, 78 Gillray, James: Alecto and her Train at the Gate of Pandaemonium, 76–77, 85–87, 86, 87, 89, 97, 98–99, 99, 103n24; antislavery satire, 238; Barbarities in the West Indies, 92–93, 93; etching technology in prints, 83; Fox as satirical subject, 76–77, 97–100; freedom versus slavery theme, 91, 91–95; Lieut Goverr Gall-Stone, 95, 96; as master caricaturist, 76, 101n10; parodies of other artists’ work, 101n2, 102n20; universal humor in, 239–40 The Girl in Stile (1787), 81, 82 “The Girl Who Inked Herself and Her Books, and How It Ended” (Hoffman), 209, 210 globetrotter phenomenon and Japanese tourism, 109–11

Hall, Stuart, 273, 274, 289–90 Hammons, David, 15–16 Harris, Michael, 277, 289 Hartman, Saidiya, 125–26 Hatt, Michael, 11 Having a Whale of a Time in the Bahamas, Bigger and Better in the Bahamas (c. 1990s), 289–90, 290 The Hebrews (Antin), 262, 263 Heemskerck, Maerten van, 32, 34 Helg, Aline, 119 Herschel, Sir John, 201, 213, 224 Hertz, Neil, 94 Hidalgo, Bartolomé, 156 “Hipster Hitler” comics, 302 Historia de la mulata (after 1862), 134, 135, 139, 140, 141 Hitler parodies, resurgence of, 297–311 Hobbes, Thomas, 70 Hoffman, Heinrich, 208, 210 Hogarth, William, 80–81, 81, 237, 240 Holland, William, 238 Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 212–13 “Holocaust comedy,” 305, 309–11

Homer and the Fishermen (Passarotti, before 1584), 29, 30, 31 Honour, Hugh, 9 Household Words, 213–14, 216 Howard, Michael, xiii humor, racial: artistic value of, 3–5; Bigot’s eliciting of empathy and laughter, 107–15; and blacks in early Italian art, 23–24, 29, 35; and Caribbean postcards as resistance, 270–74, 275–78, 276, 280–81, 281, 283–91, 284, 290; in comics, 150; counter-appropriation by African Americans, 12–13; as device for asserting social superiority, 70, 72, 84; in Eleanor Antinova performance, 244– 45, 246, 247, 248–50, 257–60, 263–64; emancipation as impetus for racism, 11; in Jewish satire of Hitler, 294–95, 299–301, 303–11, 304, 307, 309, 313n35; as method for setting boundaries around group, 70–71; psychology of, 185–87; and racial passing as performance, 178, 179; social ambivalence of, 1–2, 5–6. See also laughter; visual humor Hunt, James Leigh, 71 Hyman, Timothy, 4–5, 6 identity: Caribbean relationship to tourism, 270–72, 285, 287; derogatory humor as method for setting boundaries around group, 70–71; in Eleanora Antinova persona, 245, 247–50, 251, 252–60; English national identities caricatured, 79–80; essentialist categories, 187–90, 207, 215–18, 264–65. See also Argentinian national identities; blackness; whiteness Indian (from India) stereotype, 193 indigenous (Indian) stereotype, Argentina, 153, 156, 158–59, 160, 161–65, 162, 165–66, 167–74, 169

323 Index

Gociol, Judith, 151, 153, 155 Going to Market, Jamaica (c. 1914), 275–78, 276, 279, 280 Gombrich, Ernst, 57, 62–63 Greetings from Barbados (1960), 283–86, 284, 290–91 Griffis, William Elliot, 109 Grose, Francis, 58 grotesque, the, 6–7, 8–13, 23, 277. See also caricature “A Group of Africans—Darkest Africa,” (Barry, 1901), 222–23, 223 Grünbaum, Adolf (fictional character), 299–300, 305, 306–8, 309–10 Guattari, Félix, 177, 187 Gubar, Susan, 224 Gubern, Román, 149

324 Index

“Inodoro Pereyra” (Fontanarrosa, 1994), 161, 162 Introduction or Moses with a Good Bargain (Rowlandson, 1806), 66–67, 67 Irobi, Esiaba, 187 Isaac, sacrifice of, 54–55, 73n11 Italy, black Africans in Renaissance: Black African Man and Woman, 38; Brownie Jump-into-the-Bed and Phil the Devil, 38, 39, 40; food and cooking association, 31, 32–33, 35; Homer and the Fishermen, 29, 30, 31; lower bodily material principle, 32, 35–36; Merry Company, 23–27, 25, 31, 32–33, 35, 38; Preaching of John the Baptist, 27, 28; racial humor in visual art, 23–24, 29, 35; sexuality, 32–33, 35–38, 47n56; Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, 34, 35; Triumph of Bacchus, 32, 34 Japan, Georges Bigot’s satirical critique of: autobiographical read of Bigot’s lithograph, 114–16; eliciting empathy and laughter, 107–15; historical crosscultural context, 108–9, 113–14, 115–16; overview, 104–5, 106; racial and cultural differences, 111–13, 116; situation comedy, 107; viewers and viewing contexts, 107–11 Jews: association with food and cooking, 59; clippers and knives as symbols of injury to gentile society, 50, 62, 70; as financial schemers, 60–65, 61, 63, 64, 65, 68, 69, 70; Hitler satire, 294–95, 299–301, 303–11, 304, 307, 309, 313n35; laughter and drama in Abraham, Sarah, and Isaac story, 53–55, 56, 73n11; otherness of, 58, 60, 71, 250; as peddlers, 60–65, 61; portrayal as murderers of Christians, 55, 57; resonance with blackness, 247–50; as sexual finaglers, 61, 66–68; and Shylock legacy, 49–50,

51, 52–53; as subjects of caricature, 57– 58, 59, 68, 70, 71–72 John Bull, 85, 86, 86–87 Julio. Chicharrón te volverás ( July. You’ll turn into cracklings) (1866), 130, 132 Kincaid, Jamaica, 270–71, 284, 289, 290 Koepnick, Lutz, 305 Kris, Ernst, 78–79 Kriz, Kay Dian, 275 La cajetilla bocoy (The pack-barrel) (c. 1860s–1880s), 123, 124 Ladies Trading on Their Own Bottom (Rowlandson, c. 1810), 68, 69 L’Allegro (Milton), 233, 234 “La mulata” (Muñoz), 137–38 Landaluze, Víctor Patricio, 119–20, 120, 129, 131 Landmann, Salcia, 308–9 Lanteri, Arturo, 153, 154 laughter: as antidote to fear, 5; Bergson’s meaning of the comic, 126–27; biblical view as human trait, 54; Bigot’s eliciting of empathy and, 107–15; in Cuban pro-colonial satire, 121, 141–42; ethnic dissimilarities as triggers to, 49; Hobbes on, 70; juxtaposition with drama in Abraham, Sarah, and Isaac story, 53–55, 56, 73n11; and language, 2; and mulatta melodrama, 139, 140, 141; performative comedy of eighteenth century, 233–35, 236, 237–40; at photography’s play of black and white, 202; physical, 233–35, 236, 237–40; selfreferential characteristic of, 72; and social class in England, 235, 237–39; as socially subversive, xix, 5, 6, 13; theoretical perspective, xiv–xv Lavater, Johann Casper, 77–78 La vida de la mulata (c. 1860s–1880s), 135, 136, 137

Madonna Domenica dalle Cascine, la Ceccadi Pratolino and Pietro Moro (Sustermans, 1634), 31–32, 33 Malbert, Roger, 6 Malvasia, Carlo Cesare, 24–25 Mansfield, William Murray, 89–90 The Man Wot Knows How to Drive a Bargain (Phillips, 1829), 63–65, 64 Marriage A-la-Mode (Ravenet, 1745), 80, 81 Mas, Fernando, 172–73 Mattelart, Armand, 172 Matthews, Charles, 9–10 mechanical inelasticity, 2, 3, 127 Mein Kampf (Somuncu’s satirical performance), 297, 297, 304 The Merchant of Venice (Shakespeare), 49–50, 51, 52–53, 72n2 Merry Company (Passarotti, late 1570s), 23–27, 25, 31, 32–33, 35, 38 Mihăileanu, Radu, 305–6

Mill, John Stuart, 216 Miller, Alice, 306, 307 Miller, Arthur G., 282 Milton, John, 233, 234 Mirzoeff, Nicholas, 183 miscegenation, 191–92, 210–11, 212, 219, 275 Mitscherlich, Alexander and Margarete, 295–96 moresche, 37–38, 48n58 Moses Chusing His Cook (Ramberg, 1788), 59, 59–60 Mr. Bannister in the Character of Miss Polly Peachum (Sayers, 1781), 235, 236 mulattas in cigarette marquillas, 134, 134–42, 140 Muñoz, Franciso, 137–38 Munro, Julia, 214–15 My Führer (Levy, 2007), 294, 299–301, 303–11, 304, 307, 309, 313n35 national identities: Argentine stereotypes, 151, 153, 155–56, 159; in English caricature, 79–80 native peoples of South America. See indigenous (Indian) stereotype, Argentina Newton, Richard, 62–63, 63 Nuevo sistema de anuncios para buscar colocación (New system to publicize job wanted ads) (after 1862), 139, 140, 141 Ofili, Chris, 7, 8, 15 One of the Stars of the Native Floor Shows in Jamaica with “Charlie” (c. 1960), 279, 280, 281, 286 Orientalism, 150–51, 152, 193, 261–64, 268– 69nn58–59, 281, 291–92n7 Othello (Shakespeare), 212, 228n30 Other: African American and Jewish common denominator as, 250; Americans as Other for British, 203; Antin’s Antinova persona as, 257, 263–

325 Index

Leech, John, 68, 69, 70 Leg Shackles Used Onboard Slave Ship Aurore (1784), 92 L’esclave (Antin), 261, 263 Letwin, Oliver, xiii Levy, Dani, 294, 299–301, 303–11, 313n35 Lewis, Mary Edmonia, 11 liberty and slavery in satirical prints, 88, 89–95, 91, 98 Liebkind, Franz, 311n1 Lieut Goverr Gall-Stone (Gillray, 1790), 95, 96 Los Angeles television in mid-twentieth century, 180–85 “Los dueños de la tierra 1892” (The Landowners, 1892) (Breccia), 159, 160 Lott, Eric, 10 lower bodily material principle, 6–7, 14, 32, 35–36, 80, 83. See also food and cooking; sexuality

326 Index

65; Bigot’s critique of Western Other in Japan, 104–8, 110–16; blackface as appropriation of, 9, 10; Caribbean tourists’ perceptions of, 270; English proclivity for pointing out, 71; ethnic dissimilarities as triggers to laughter, 49; Gillray’s masking of power of, 85; Jew as, 58, 60, 71, 250; racial caricature in identifying, 83; social status as defined against, 11 othering, symbolic economy of, 12 Overstreet, Joe, 13 Página del dolar (Rechain, 1922–1923), 153, 154 Palacio, Lilo, 151, 154 Pan-American Exposition of 1901, 221, 222–23, 223 Pandit, Korla (aka J. Redd), 177, 179, 180, 181, 190–91, 192, 193, 194, 195–99, 199n1 Passarotti, Bartolomeo, 23–29, 25, 30, 31, 32–33, 35, 38, 40, 42n11 passing, racial, xiii, 138, 196. See also Antin, Eleanor; Pandit, Korla (aka J. Redd), Patoruzú (fictional character), xvi–xvii, 156, 158, 159, 162–65, 165, 166, 167–69, 169, 170–74 Patterson, Orlando, 10 people of color. See blacks performative comedy: eighteenth-century examples, 233–35, 236, 237–40; Hitler parodies, 297–311; My Führer (Levy), 294, 299–301, 303–11, 304, 307, 309, 313n35; The Producers, 294–95. See also Antin, Eleanor; Caribbean postcards; television historiography Phillips, John, 63–65, 64 “Photographic Faces” (Bede), 214, 214 “Photographic Fancies” (Bede) (1855), 204, 205, 206–7 “A Photographic Positive” (Bede), 208, 209, 212

photography and racial depiction: “Darkness and Dawn,” 219–24, 220, 221; documentation of visual difference, 78; as opposed to drawings for Caribbean postcards, 288; negative-positive process, 201–2, 212– 19; Photographic Pleasures, 202–12, 205, 209, 210 physical laughter, 233–35, 236, 237–40 physiognomic profiles as reinforcement of racial stratification, 77–78 Pigmy Revels (Williams, 1800), 83, 84 Piper, Adrian, 16–17, 17 political satire: Cuba, 120–21; freedom and slavery, 88, 89–95, 91, 98; and physical versus derisive laughter, 238. See also Gillray, James; slave trade postcard as locus for stereotyping, 272. See also Caribbean postcards Pratt, Mary Louise, 109 Preaching of John the Baptist (Tibaldi, 1550s), 27, 28 Prichard, James Cowles, 216 Prieur, Barthémy, 36 The Producers (Brooks), 294–95 Quino, 154 Quinterno, Dante, xvi, 152, 159, 162–63, 164, 165, 166, 167, 169, 170–74. See also Patoruzú Rabelais, François, 83, 235, 238 race categories, passing as challenge to, 178–79 racial difference, 185–87, 215–18, 215–24, 220, 221, 223. See also humor, racial; identity; specific ethnic or racial groups racialized index, 183–84 racial mutability, 224 racist immediacy, 186 Raising the Wind (Rowlandson, 1812), 65, 66

Saar, Betye, 13 Said, Edward, 262, 264, 269n59, 272, 281 Sánchez Proaño, Mario, 161–62, 169–70 satire, defining, 14–15 Sayers, James, 235, 236 Schelling, Vivian, 159 Schneider, Helge, 299, 306 Seeßlen, Georg, 304 self-definition by negation, use of humor for, 71 Self-Portrait as a Nice White Lady (Piper, 1995), 17 Seshadri-Crooks, Kalpana, 185–86 sexuality: and blacks as epitomizers of sexual appetite, 80–81, 133; and black superwoman myth of 1970s, 255; eroticization of islanders in postcards, 274, 279, 280–81, 281, 282, 286; Jews as sexual finaglers, 61, 66–68; miscegenation anxieties, 191–92, 210–11,

212, 219, 275; and moral transgression of women photographers, 211–12; mulattas’ failed social mobility attempts, 134, 134–42, 140; naïve Indian girl stereotype, 158; and Renaissance depictions of black Africans, 32–33, 35–38, 47n56; threatening female stock character, 94, 95 Shakespeare, William, 49–50, 51, 52–53, 212, 228n30 Sheridan, Richard Brinsley, 85, 86 Shoah, finding humor in, 305, 309–11 Shylock (fictional character), 49–50, 51, 52–53 slavery: in colonial Cuba, 118; and infantilization of blacks, 288, 293n39; as social death in blackface minstrelsy, 10; and surveying gaze, 125–26. See also abolition movements slave trade, caricature and displacement: early visual representations of black stereotypes, 11, 77–83; Gillray as focus of study, 76–77; racially charged caricature, 83–84; satire on slavery and black displacement, 84–100, 88, 90, 91, 92 Smith, R. J., 190–91, 195, 197 Smith, Samuel Stanhope, 215 social ambivalence of humor: and blurring of racial lines in photography, 215–18; in Caribbean postcards, 284–85, 292n21; carnivalesque and grotesque, 8–13; and functions of laughter, 1, 5–6; photographic-themed satire, 208–9, 209 social difference: English social class and physical laughter, 235, 237–39; English visual humor based on photography, 203–4, 208–10; and gendered judgment of women photographers, 211–12, 227n26; Jews versus African Americans, 250; racial visibility and social mobility, 189

327 Index

Ramberg, Johann Heinrich, 50, 51, 59, 59–60 “Ramona,” (Palacio, 1930s), 151, 154 Rapela, 156, 157 Ravenet, Simon, 80, 81 Rechain, Arístedes, 153, 154 Redd, John Roland (aka Korla Pandit), 191. See also Pandit, Korla Rembrandt van Rijn, 54–55, 56 Renaissance art, black Africans in. See Italy Robinson, Amy, 189 Rodgers, H. J., 218–19 Rogin, Michael, 247 Rolando, Juan (aka Korla Pandit), 190, 191 Rosemberg, Diego, 151, 153, 155 Rothschild, Nathan Meyer, 63–65, 64 Rowe, William, 159 Rowlandson, Thomas, 60–61, 61, 65, 65– 68, 67, 69, 76, 94, 95 Rubenstein, Ida, 260–61

328 Index

Solomon and the Queen of Sheba (Fontana, c. 1600), 34, 35 Somuncu, Serdar, 297, 297, 304 Spranger, Bartholomeus, 32 Stallybrass, Peter, 8–9, 10 Stanhope, Earl of, 85–86, 86 stereotypes: allopathic strategy for challenging, 13–14; caricature in development of, xix, 3; contesting racial, 12; counter-appropriation of, 12–13, 14–16; as heart of offensive power in humor, xiii; psychology of racial, 185–87. See also specific ethnic or racial groups Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 203, 211, 215 Sustermans, Justus, 31–32, 33 Tanner, Henry Ossawa, 12 Taylor, Timothy, 193, 198 Tehuelches Indians, 161–62, 169–70 television historiography: art of passing, 176–77; historiographic interval, 177–85; Korla Pandit case study, 190–91, 192, 193, 194, 195–99; passing as a minor genre, 187–90; psychoanalysis regarding whiteness, 185–87 televisual liveness, 183–84 tendentious jokes, 187, 197 Thicknesse, Philip, 95 Things Japanese (Chamberlain), 109–11 Thompson, Frederic, 222 Thompson, Krista, 272, 277, 285 Tibaldi, Pellegrino, 27, 28 The Times (Rowlandson, 1788), 94, 95 tourism: and Caribbean identity, 270–72, 285, 287; satire of, 289, 290, 290 Train of Life (Mihăileanu, 1998), 305–6 trickster strategy: in Caribbean resistance humor, 285, 287; in racial passing, 189, 196, 197 Triumph of Bacchus (Heemskerck, c. 1535), 32, 34 Tucker, Marcia, 14

“Two Natives: Nassau” (c. 1914), 275–78, 276, 291 Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Stowe), 203–4, 206, 212, 215 United States: Pan-American Exposition of 1901, 221, 222–23, 223; photographic humor, 218–19, 220, 220–24, 221, 223; tourists in Caribbean, 274. See also Antin, Eleanor; television historiography Un porteño optimista (Quinterno), 162–64 Van Rousselt, Rodríguez, 174 Velázquez, Diego, 31 ¡¡¡Vengan a ver esto!!! ( Just look at this!!!) (Anillo, c. 1860s–1880s), 122 verbal and visual humor, 49, 119, 125, 131– 32, 204, 273, 277, 278, 289 Veronese, Paolo, 31 Vida y muerte de la mulata (c. 1860s–1880s), 135, 136, 140, 141 Vilaverde, Cirilo, 138 vision and visibility: and complexity of passing, 189, 197; in photography, 219– 22, 220, 222 Visscher, J. C., 38, 39, 40 visual categorization of human body, 77–78 visual humor: Bigot’s eliciting of empathy and laughter, 107–15; Italian Renaissance, 23–24, 29, 35; of Pandit’s passing performance, 195; in practice and theory, xiii–xix; racialized function of cigarette marquillas, 125–27; and verbal humor, 49, 119, 125, 131–32, 204, 273, 277, 278, 289. See also performative comedy; photography and racial depiction Walker, Kara, 17–18 Wallace, Michele, 254–55

Williams, Bert, 196–97 Williams, Charles, 83–84, 84 Wirgman, Charles, 114 women: in Caribbean tourism context, 274–75, 279, 280–81, 281, 282, 283, 284, 286, 290–91, 293n37; gendered judgment of photographers, 211–12, 227n26; invisibility of, 284, 285; mulattas in cigarette marquillas, 134, 134–42, 140; in Renaissance art and literature, 35–37, 47n56; sociopolitical freedom as essential to black emancipation, 11 Wood, Marcus, 203, 204 A Word to the Wise, or Billy Unmasked (1784), 89 Zeri, Federico, 24

329 Index

Waters, Hazel, 203 White, Allon, 8–9, 10 White, Hayden, 70–71 white consumer culture, postcard critique of, 289 whiteness: and African-American appropriation of Greco-Roman ideal, 12; and Antin’s adoption of blackness, 251–52, 255, 255–56, 256, 257–58; normativity and entitlement, 251–52, 257; photography as satirical resource regarding blackness, 203, 204, 206–10, 210; racial passing’s joke on, 197; social status as defined against blackness, 11, 251–52; supremacy over the Other through blackface, 9, 10 Wilberforce, William, 93 Wilkes, John, 88, 89–90