Present (Ing) Historical Memory:: Beah Richards' "A Black Woman Speaks," Performance, and A Pedagogy of Whiteness

Annette Wannamaker - Present(ing) Historical Memory: Beah Richards' "A Black Woman Speaks," Performance, and a Pedagogy of Whiteness
- Theatre Topics 14:1
Copyright 2004 by The Johns Hopkins University Press. All rights reserved.
Theatre Topics 14.1 (2004) 339-351

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Present(ing) Historical Memory:
Beah Richards' "A Black Woman Speaks," Performance, and a Pedagogy of Whiteness 1
Annette Wannamaker
In this essay, I will discuss the study of and use of an in-class performance of Beah Richards' work, "A Black Woman Speaks," as a means to get students to explore complex historical constructions of race and gender, even in a 100-level core-curriculum course for non-majors taught in a large lecture hall setting. I argue that performance of the work in class is vital because it places the students/spectators into a position where they must question their own subjectivity and agency. Also, Richards' text and a performance of it, work to enhance a "Pedagogy of Whiteness," an attempt to make whiteness visible as a race, to take something that often is unmarked and unexamined by many and to teach the ways that whiteness, as a race, is often constructed in damaging ways against or in opposition to blackness. Finally, a performance of Richards' work embodiesmakes presentthe ways that current constructions of race and gender are shaped through history and the importance of historical memory as a means for understanding our present and working toward a future. Richards' performance piece achieves these pedagogical goals for two reasons: the content of the text and the context established by a performance of it. The text details the ways race and gender have been constructed through history: The way these are connected within a multiple, individual identity and also the ways that blackness and whiteness are dependent upon one another for definition. A performance of the text works to create active audience members witnessing a "Black Woman Speaking"a speaking subject instead of an object. The performance achieves this using direct addresses to the audience that put spectators into a dialogue with the performer and that ask them to consider themselves in relation to the performerultimately, that ask them to examine their own identity in relation to others and within a larger context, and to use this knowledge as a basis for action. Before I discuss my pedagogical goals and the way I use performance in the classroom, I need to put "A Black Woman Speaks" into the context of the "Introduction to Dramatic Literature" lecture course I teach. I begin the course with ancient Greek drama and usually end with Yasmina Reza's Art or Anna Deavere Smith'swork . I structure the course and each play I teach based on three different approaches to reading a script: as a literary text; as a cultural text; and as a performance text. Ideally, by the end of the term, students are able to understand these different approaches and put them together in order to develop a layered understanding of performance texts that acknowledges the affect of culture on theatre and vice versa. I also want them to think about the [End Page 339] ways theatrical form is influenced by culture and the ways playwrights use form to affect the meaning of a play. Finally, in addition to learning about various theatrical forms, I want my students to consider the implications of performance. On my syllabus I ask students to consider, "What happens when a written text becomes oral and visual, playing out on the bodies of actors in the space of the stage? How does this affect a text's meanings? How does the presence of a live audience, a community of readers watching a text unfold in the moment, affect the meaning of a work?" This essay approaches teaching "A Black Woman Speaks" in this three-
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Annette Wannamaker - Present(ing) Historical Memory: Beah Richards' "A Black Woman Speaks," Performance, and a Pedagogy of Whiteness - Theatre Topics 14:1
fold wayas a literary text, a cultural text, and a performance textand demonstrates that this combination of pedagogical approaches enhances students' understanding of the complexities of Richards' work. In 1950, Richards first performed her work "A Black Woman Speaks" before an audience of about 300 mostly white women at the Women for Peace Conference in Chicago. 2 In the performance piece, Richards directly addresses the audience and establishes her right, as a black woman, to speak about white womanhood by explaining the historical connections between the two interdependent racial/gender constructions. Then she works through the histories of white and black womanhood, showing the ways these identities have relied upon one another for definition and the ways black womanhood has always been constructed in opposition to, as an "other" to, white womanhood. She uses careful rhetorical strategies to deftly move between two purposes that seem at odds with one another: getting white women to understand their complicity in racism and their difference from black women, and getting both black and white women to understand the affinities they share with one another. By repetitively calling on ancestral/historical memory, Richards ultimately builds a historically-based affinity between white and black women and calls for the two groups to work together across their differences to fight for justice and peace. When I teach Richards' text, I discuss the history of its production, and I also (as much as I can in an introductory survey course meant to cover all forms of dramatic literature from around the world, in all time periods, etc.) spend a little time contextualizing the work within the history of American theatre. When taught in the context of other non-canonical performance texts, "A Black Woman Speaks" can be used to create a narrative of the history of performance/theatre that interrogates the formation of the theatrical/literary canon and highlights connections among race, gender, capital, access to mainstream theatre, and access to a place in the canon. For example, I teach Richards' work right after I teach Georgia Douglas Johnson's Plumes and after I've discussed with students some reasons playwrights like Johnson wrote plays that were produced in their communities instead of commercial theatres. Plumes and "A Black Woman Speaks" are both included in a course packet, not in the course anthology, and we discuss the possible reasons neither is included in the textbook. I then give students some specific background about the original performance of the piece and about Richards' career. The title of the piece alone marks the significance of this one-woman performance. She was a black woman, alone and vulnerable, speaking to an audience of mostly white women. And, she was speaking. Dramatist and theorist Glenda Dickerson writes of black women that, "That voice has been silenced for centuries, breaking forth sporadically, choked, and gasping for air. It has been variously silenced by the obvious foot on the throat and the subtle whispering thought" (110). In 1950, a time when black actresses like Richards were limited to stereotypical and often [End Page 340] degrading roles written mainly by white screenwriters and playwrights, she was speaking words that she had written and performing a role she had created for herself. Richards later said that she felt compelled to create roles for herself because positive roles for black women were almost impossible to come by in the 1950s. In this sense, "A Black Woman Speaks" could be seen as a response to the problem that black actresses typically were being spoken for, they had to speak words written for them by white playwrights and screenwriters. "I came along at a period when black writers were just being heard from. Most of the plays prior to the fifties were written about black people. In the fifties there were works by black people" (Lanker 59). Despite such obstacles, Richards ultimately built a life-long career as an award-winning actress, 3 even if her work as a writer remains relatively obscure. I have taught her work "A Black Woman Speaks" to students for more than seven years now in my women's studies, women's literature, and dramatic literature courses to counter this obscurity and because I believe it is worthy of more attention than it has received. Furthermore, the accessibility of the text for lowerlevel students and its direct message make it a springboard for fruitful discussions about gender, race, sexism, and racism. Richards' work is addressed directly to white women and explains in detail, using vivid examples,
the historical construction of white womanhood as it relates to that of black womanhood. Richards traces the painful history of slavery, documents the names of victims of lynching, discusses the formation of the Ku Klux Klan, and ties all of these historical events to the present. The Klan was formed, in part, to defend white womanhood against the imagined threat of black men, and black men who were lynched were often falsely accused of raping white women. Throughout the piece, Richards parallels black womanhood to white womanhood to show how constructions of the two have always been interdependent on one another for opposition and definition. White women were constructed as pure because of a fear of miscegenation, and also in opposition to constructions of black womanhood as impure. Also, as Richards points out, within these racial/gendered constructions, white women were constructed as objects, property to be defended and controlled. As she addresses her audience of white women, she punctuates the entire piece with choruses of "Remember?" almost as if, with this direct address to the audience, Richards is asking us all to call up our ancestral memories and to remember the ways that history is present in the present. Richards begins the work by claiming a space to speak about white womanhood, saying: It is right that I, a woman black, should speak of white womanhood. My husbands, my fathers, my brothers, my sons, die for it, because of it. And their blood, chilled in electric chairs [End Page 341] stopped by hangman's noose cooked by lynchmob's fire spilled by white supremacist's desire to kill for profit, gives me that right (33). Richards marks herself, as a performer, as a black womanverbally calls attention to the visible race and gender she embodies on stage and, by doing so, also requires the audience to mark themselves as well. In this opening, she also is claiming a right, as a woman, to speak for the memory of her dead, male ancestors, to mourn for her dead, and to demand accountability for their murders, many of which were committed in order to "protect" the supposed purity of white womanhood. In 1950, the practice of lynching African-American men and women had passed its peak, but was not yet over. Black men were still being lynched for allegedly raping, looking at, or talking back to white women. It is significant that Richards uses the present tense in the opening of the piece"die for it," not diedto mark the fact that lynching and the construction of the "purity of white womanhood" were/are still in existence. Richards' work is one in a long line of works by African-American women that links constructions of white womanhood to the lynching of black men. 4 Her work is further connected to a rich performance tradition in the African-American community by its performance style, that of an individual reciting a poem before an audience. In her essay, "Performance Practice as a Site of Opposition," bell hooks speaks of her own experiences reciting poetry within her community. She says, "Indeed, the roots of black performative arts emerge from an early nineteenth century emphasis on oration and the recitation of poetry. In a number of narratives relating slave experience, African-Americans cite learning to read and recite as crucial to their development of a liberatory consciousness" (212). This tradition carried forward well into the twentieth-century. She says that in many working- and middle-class African-American households children often recited African-American poetry for their families, churches, and communities "both as a means of sharing
our cultural legacy and of resisting indoctrination from Eurocentric biases within educational systems that devalued black expressive culture" (213). Richards' work shares this cultural legacy with groups of people outside of the African-American community by embodying another aspect of African-American performance hooks discusses. hooks says that many African-American performers use multiple or "polyphonic" voices to "convey specific aspects of black experience" (214). Richards speaks for herself as a black woman, but she also channels the narratives of her ancestors and highlights the multiple voices and collective consciousness of historical memory. Richards begins "A Black Woman Speaks" by immediately addressing the complex, difficult historical relationships between white and black women. She is also, I think, assuming that many in her audience may not agree that she has the right to speak. Richards is, at the outset, anticipating meeting possible resistance to her critique of/outing of white womanhood. bell hooks writes that there is still resistance to such ideas even among contemporary women: "When black women challenge racism within feminist movement the dominant response is one of hostility and anger" (hooks, "Yearning" 93). Richards certainly must have anticipated hostility from her audience, especially since the main focus of her work is white women's complicity to slavery, lynching, and continued racism [End Page 342] in Americatopics many white women felt and sometimes still feel uncomfortable acknowledging. She says, for example, And you, women, seeing, spoke no protest. But cuddled down in your pink slavery and thought somehow my wasted blood confirmed your superiority (36). While this passage makes clear white women's silent complicity to slavery and racism, it also begins to create parallels between black and white women. Richards' reference to "pink slavery" is a thread throughout the work that she uses in an attempt to develop affinities with white women by showing the similarities in their situations. At the same time, she also illuminates the fact that many white women did not and still do not fight racism because they derive some benefits from the system, even though it is a system that also works to oppress white women in many ways. Richards carefully uses rhetorical strategies like these, combined with a deep understanding of the complex relations between race and gender, in order to build affinities without oversimplifying or erasing difference and without oversimplifying the complex workings of power. Perhaps the most important work that a discussion, contextualization, and performance of Richards' piece does is to connect contemporary racism (in 1950, in 2004) to the continuum of history. The text makes visible the inheritance of white privilege and its continued effect on both whites and blacks, and through discussion, students are able to connect these ideas to the present. Throughout the piece Richards continuously links past to present in order to illustrate the real effects of history on present conditions. Her ability to illustrate the importance of history in forming current racial identities works to create nuanced constructions of race and gender that are not monolithic. Henry Giroux argues in his essay "White Noise: Toward a Pedagogy of Whiteness" that "Defining 'whiteness' largely as a form of domination, [much] scholarship, while rightly unmasking whiteness as a mark of ideology and racial privilege, fails to provide a nuanced, dialectical, and layered account of whiteness that would allow white youth and others to appropriate selective elements of white identity and culture as oppositional" (Giroux 43). Richards' text helps achieve these complex pedagogical goals because it does the difficult but necessary work of pointing out white women's complicity to racism, while at the same time working to form a coalition between black and white women that allows white women to participate as allies working for social change. "White womanhood too is enslaved," she says, "The difference is degree." Through its many examples of this degree, Richards' work creates a space for white women to enter into a dialogue and to work alongside black women in the present in
order to fight a historically constructed racism. She calls the audience to action, saying, "What will you do? Will you fight with me? white supremacy is your enemy and mine" (39). This focus on the audience's agency, after highlighting racial differences, is key here. Giroux argues that "Analyzing the historical legacy of whiteness as an oppressive racial force necessitates that students engage in a critical form of memory work while fostering less a sullen silence or paralyzing guilt and more a sense of outrage at historical oppression [End Page 343] and a desire for racial justice in the present" (Giroux 68). In other words, marking whiteness as a historical, social construction should not lead to defensiveness or "white guilt," but should instead lead us to a self-conscious racial identity that is politicized. Ideally, once we understand that culture/history constructed the personal and social categories of gender and race and the oppressions associated with these, we can then become empowered not just to alter our personal words and actions, but also to alter the man-made systems these constructions exist within. Peggy McIntosh advocates a similar process when she discusses teaching "White Privilege." She says, "In my class and place, I did not see myself as racist because I was taught to recognize racism only in individual acts of meanness by members of my group, never in invisible systems conferring unsought racial dominance on my group from birth" (168). For similar reasons, well-meaning and intelligent white students sometimes claim, "I'm not racist" or "I'm not sexist" when confronted with issues of race and gender. It is difficult to move students out of such comfortable images of themselves, but in-class performances of Richards' work, which make spectators self-conscious about their own identities, make some students uncomfortable enough to more carefully examine or to question their preconceived ideas about the ways race and gender operate together in our culture. I have been teaching Richards' work for seven years in attempts to "raise consciousness" sometimes successfully, sometimes not so. Even though Eastern Michigan University, where I teach, distinguishes itself as being one of the most diverse in the nationwith a student body that is about 75 percent white, 18 percent black, 2 percent Latino/a, 1 percent Native American, 2 percent Asian-American, and 2 percent international studentsmy classes are still made up predominantly of young white men and women. 5 As a white woman, I've become increasingly invested in making both my students and myself aware of whiteness as a social construction because I believe that marking whiteness as a race is an important step in fighting subtle forms of racism that assume whiteness as a "norm." "White people usually are not seen and named. They are centered as the human norm. 'Others' are raced; 'we' are just people" (Apple x). If we, as white people, are "just people," without a race or ethnicity, then we can never own issues of racism; we can always assume that race issues are somebody else's problem. In the forward to the book, White Reign: Deploying Whiteness in America, Michael Apple argues that it is vital to dispel students' notions that "whiteness" is not a race: In the face of this, in the face of something that might best be called an absent presence, a crucial political, cultural, and ultimately educational project is to make whiteness strange (Dyer 1997, 4). Thus part of our task in terms of pedagogy, political awareness, and mobilization is to tell ourselves and teach our students that identities are historically conferred. We need to recognize that 'subjects are produced through multiple identifications.' We should see our project not as reifying identity but understanding its production both as an ongoing process of differentiation and most important as subject to redefinition, resistance, and change (Scott 1995, 11) (Apple xi). An in-class performance of "A Black Woman Speaks," combined with careful analysis, can accomplish these pedagogical goals because the piece thoroughly works through the historical constructions of race, acknowledges the possibility of affinities among people with different backgrounds and identifications, and tries to establish a multiple, self-conscious identity as a site of resistance and change. [End Page 344] "A Black Woman Speaks" is one of the best literary/performance texts I've come across for discussing the complex historical intersections of race and gender and historical influences on current constructions of identity. In their Theatre Topics essay, "Rehearsing for Revolution:
Practice, Theory, Race, and Pedagogy (When Failure Works)," Wendy R. Coleman and Stacy Wolf discuss the difficulties they faced attempting to complicate issues of race and gender in classroom discussions. "Whatever the day's reading, conversations often focused on issues of black and white. And when those issues arose, there was no sex or gender, no creed or religion, only color, or the presence or absence thereof" (16). While "A Black Woman Speaks" does oversimplify issues of social class and sexual orientation, 6 it does work to illustrate the complex and inter-related ways that race and gender work together to construct a multiple identity and identities that exist in relation to other people within a culture. Over the years, as I've experimented with teaching "A Black Woman Speaks," a number of black women students have either told me personally or said in class discussions that the text made them see affinities they had with white women that they hadn't thought about before. White women students, on the other hand, have told me or said in class that the text helped them to see the ways in which black women are different from them. This difference in perception is key, because it shows that white students, who are used to being the norm against which others are compared, are able to see differences in identity based on race, and the black students are able to build affinities that are based on gender. In this sense, then, "A Black Woman Speaks"discussed, contextualized, performed, and taught in combination with other performance textscan move students toward more nuanced thinking about the intersections of race and gender and our relationships with one another. I teach "A Black Woman Speaks" as part of a section on 20th Century one-act plays. After we read Susan Glaspel's Trifles and Georgia Douglas Johnson's Plumes, we read Richards' text and Art is a Weapon, a piece of agitprop workers' theatre. The example of agitprop works surprisingly well in dialogue with Richards' work because both are examples of marginalized performance and experimentation in theatrical form for political purposes. After we discuss the history and purpose of workers' theatre, I get the students to participate in a mass recitation from the agitprop piece Art is a Weapon: I play the lone evil capitalist and they are the workers shouting me down in unison. By this time in the semester the students are used to performing in class and they enthusiastically chant "Red Front! Red Front!" together. Through discussions that follow our "performance" I can tell that they are able to understand the way the staging of the play adds to the play's populist message: the workers speaking together with one voice are able to overpower the lone capitalist. They also understand why the workers created their own theatre and theatrical forms as an attempt to counter the mass media of the time, something Richards attempted to do as well. We then move to Richards' piece, which is obviously very different in its tone, performance style, and purpose (the time it was written, the message, and the audience). However, the plays are similar in their attempts at persuasion, in their lack of literary ambiguity, and in the ways that their theatrical forms are shaped by economic necessity and by political motivations. After I discuss the history of "A Black Woman Speaks," I get a brave African-American female volunteer to perform the first page of the text in front of the auditorium. I should note here that such an activity might not always be possible or beneficial. First, my lecture halls are the ideal environments for this activity [End Page 345] because I often have about 50 black students in each section of about 300 students. When, before class begins, I ask for a volunteer to read from Richards' text, quite a few hands shoot up. I then talk individually to the student who will read to make sure she will be comfortable standing and reading before the class. I think it would difficult to teach the text in this way at a less diverse school, where there might be no African-American students in a class or where there might only be one or two in a class, who are then singled out as a token representative "speaking for" their race. Furthermore, this performance is done in a context where we have been staging portions of plays all semester long in order to introduce students to various aspects of performance. For example, some of these in-class pedagogical performances include staging the opening of Oedipus the first week of class in order to introduce the many decisions performers, directors, lighting designers, and other theatre practitioners must make in order to stage an interpretation of a text; staging short scenes from Trifles in order to discuss the importance of non-verbal cues and blocking; and staging the "Mousetrap" scene from Hamlet in order to discuss voyeurism on stage and in/among the audience. By the time we've reached "A Black Woman Speaks," students are quite used to exploring questions about the space of the stage, audience constituency, and the embodiment of performers and audience members.
When we've reached the time in the class when I ask a student performer to read from "A Black Woman Speaks," I remind the class of the original context of the performance. I want them to think, not only about the words, but also about the way in which they are embodied. The lone performer on stage stands in contrast to the mass recitation of Art is a Weapon, but students tell me it is more moving and more "powerful" to watch. The direct address to audience is a vital component of "A Black Woman Speaks" as a performance text. In the book Extreme Exposure, Jo Bonney writes of one-person performances, "More than any other form of live performance, the solo show expects and demands the active involvement of the people in the audience . . . The presence of a single performer in front of an audience of many instantly creates conflicting roles for both performer and viewergreat power and great vulnerability" (Bonney xii). After the student has performed the opening of the work, I ask the performer and the students/spectators to comment on witnessing the work. They always respond with words like "strong," "powerful," and "brave." Also, when the piece is juxtaposed against the spectacle of workers' theatre, students are able to see the simultaneous power and vulnerability of a lone woman performer addressing a large group. Furthermore, because the piece is titled "A Black Woman Speaks" and because an African-American woman performs it, we have to discuss identity politics. What is the impact of a live body that is marked female and black, speaking to an audience that is then also marked by the text? 7 This aspect of the performance is more difficult for students to articulate and I have often had to prod them into discussing feelings of discomfort. They often initially describe the performance using phrases like, "seeing it performed makes it more personal than just reading it on a page." Then I ask, "what do you mean by more personal?" and "How did you feel watching the performance?" Questions like these eventually get some students to open up and enter into discussions about the roles of race and gender in constructing personal identity. In the Winter 2003 term I surveyed my students about the text and their reactions to the in-class performance. Even though the surveys were anonymous, the students identified themselves by race and gender and they often framed [End Page 346] their discussions of the text using their personal subjectivity. One response from a student, who identified himself as a "Gay white male," struck me as particularly meaningful. He said, "Seeing an African-American woman perform this play made me feel uncomfortable. She was singling herself out as a specific group. I wanted to stand up there with her and help her read it because I never want to be singled out as a very specific group, specifically that of a gay white male." This particular student spoke up in class about his discomfort with the performance and his empathy for the performer and Richards, which led to a discussion in which a lot of other students agreed that they also felt uncomfortable. When asked why, the students responded that seeing a self-identified "black woman speaking" forced them into a position of "white woman listening" or "African-American man listening." When examined further, the students also had to acknowledge the difference between being a "speaker," a "woman speaker" or a "black woman speaker": Whose identity categories are marked and whose are unmarked, and what are the implications of this? In other words, when Richards and the performer mark themselves using identity categories, the audience members must do the same and, what is more significant, must find a place for themselves within the frame of the discussion that Richards creates. Because Richards has framed the discussion in terms of complex, multiple identities existing in relation to one another, my self-identified gay white male student was able to find affinity with the speaker, some black women students said they saw the connections she made between black and white women, and many white students were able to use the piece to move beyond simpler definitions of race. What I mean here is that students (especially first- and second-year students) often want to simplify race and racism by claiming "we are all the same underneath" or that "race shouldn't matter," but Richards' textespecially a performance of it does not allow us to settle into these comfortable, contemporary platitudes. Students do not express such discomfort or self-consciousness with other performances we do in the class, nor do they express these ideas after only reading and discussing Richards' text (something I did in earlier classes, before I began including in-class performances). This means that an in-class performance of the work is key to stimulating thinking, and also that Richards' text possesses an ability to raise awareness about racial/gender identity that many other performance texts do not. Richards' piece works as an in-class pedagogical performance because of its political stance, the direct address to audience, the speaking persona Richards has created, and because of its focus
on a complex, multiple identity embodied on stage. While in-class performance is not a panacea for racism, after seeing the piece performed, students do have to move out of comfortable ways of thinking into spaces that require them to interrogate identity categories in relation to one another. If students are not black, they must acknowledge that Richards and the performer have experiences they do not share, that there are different ways of knowing we need to work to understand. White students, specifically, must also acknowledge that their whiteness is part of a system that constructs difference in ways that benefit us and harm people of color. The most difficult goal of a pedagogy of whiteness is teaching students that race, as an identity category, has been created by history and culture, but also is something that can be continuously re-created through a political awareness that can lead to personal agency. This goal is difficult to achieve because many believe that an identity that is socially constructed is an identity without agency. Diana Fuss argues that "it has often been remarked that biological [End Page 347] determinism and social determinism are simply two sides of the same coin: both posit an utterly passive subject subordinate to the shaping influence of either nature or culture, and both disregard the unsettling effects of the psyche" (6). To address this problem of postmodernist identity, feminists in the 1990s adopted the phrase "strategic essentialism" to name a careful balancing between humanistic and anti-humanistic ideas about identity that would still allow for political agency. For instance, hooks calls for a kind of strategic essentialism when she argues that identity politics has been an important site for teaching activism through performance. She writes, For African-Americans, performance has been a place where we have reclaimed subjigated knowledge and historical memory. Along with this, it has also been a space of transgression where new identities and radicali[z]ed black subjectivities emerge, illuminating our place in history in ways that challenge and interrogate, that highlight the shifting nature of black experience. African-American performance has been a site for the imagination of future possibilities (220). By asking us all to "remember," Richards works to reclaim or even to create historical memory. By constructing herself on stage as a speaking subject with a complex identity, and by asking the audience to see both her and themselves as possessing multiple identities with the potential for political agency, Richards' piece works to radicalize both black and white subjectivity. Richards' "A Black Woman Speaks" creates a space in the classroom where complex and imaginative concepts of racial and gender identity, coalition and personal agency can be explored. For instance, when Richards describes white womanhood as "a thing apart" she illustrates some of the complex dynamics of race and gender. First, by naming white womanhood "a thing," Richards shifts from the commonly-held (white-centered) perspective that would name black womanhood "a thing," the objectified other against which white male "humanity" is measured. Second, by using "thing" to describe white womanhood Richards also calls attention to the objectification of white womanhood, a concept she returns to later in the piece in order to highlight affinities between black and white women. Finally, this re-imagining of the relationship between white and black women is made present/visible through the presence of a student performer before a live audience. By speaking, the performer works to subvert images of a woman performer as an object a "thing." By directly addressing white women and asking them to act, she also works to move a passive audience to action. For me, this is the ultimate goal of a pedagogy of whiteness: to teach white students that there are ways they can become active allies in the fight against racism. It is important to note here that in-class pedagogical performance is not a panacea for racism or for student resistance or apathy. Shannon Jackson, among others, has cautioned against positioning "performance practice as an authentic antidote to the inauthenticity of theory" (120). We shouldn't assume that the simple act of performing in class will lead students to epiphanies. I believe that "A Black Woman Speaks" works to educate students, not only because of the identity issues embodied in a performance, but also because, as a text, it works on the level of theoryit requires students/spectators to think critically about the world and to examine identities and
relationships that might have remained unexamined. I believe that "A Black Woman Speaks" works pedagogically, not [End Page 348] only because I ask students to perform it, but also because of a combination of strategies that include contextualizing the work within a historical and theatrical context and discussing race/gender as historical constructions. Richards' work shows how we can create affinities without minimizing the importance of difference, especially differences based in unequal power structures. Calling attention to affinities between black and white women can lead to a sense of community and political agency, without erasing differences or calling on "universal," humanist notions of human or feminine identity. Finally, by highlighting the ways that constructions of both black and white womanhood are interdependent on one another for definition, the text does not rely solely on humanist (naturalized, unmarked) or anti-humanist (determined solely by culture, without agency) definitions of identity and instead opens up the possibility of personal and political agency.
Annette Wannamaker teaches in the English Department at Eastern Michigan University.
Endnotes
1. I'd like to thank Craig Dionne, Steven D. Krause, Robin Lucy, Annette Saddik, and Mary Thompson for taking the time to read drafts of this essay and to offer invaluable editorial advice. 2. In her introduction to Richards' text, which is included in an anthology titled 9 Plays by Black Women, Margaret B. Wilkerson explains its performance history. While I have found information about Women for Peace, a group protesting nuclear weapons in the 1950s, I have not been able to find any other information about Richards' 1950 Chicago performance. 3. Richards died on September 17, 2000, just after winning an Emmy Award for a guest role on the television show, The Practice . She played the family matriarch, Baby Suggs, in the film version of Toni Morrison's Beloved, she received an Oscar nomination for best supporting actress in the 1967 drama Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, and she received an ACE Award for her role in As Summers Die on HBO. Her film roles also included parts in The Miracle Worker, Drugstore Cowboy, and The Great White Hope; some of the television series on which she appeared were ER, The Bill Cosby Show, Designing Women, Murder She Wrote, and Hill Street Blues. She also published, most newspaper obituaries note near the bottom of the text, three books : One is a Crowd, A Black Woman Speaks and A Black Woman Speaks and Other Poems. Despite a lifelong distinguished career, Richards' work is relatively unknown. When she died, Bob Davis put up a web site on the "Soul-Patrol" homepage titled "Beah Richards is Dead (&I'm Angry)." Davis said of Richards "During the 1960s when I was growing up, it seemed like anytime there was a TV show or a movie where there was a black family, she played the mother." He goes on to say that he is angry because "I just got thru surfing the web for about 1/2 hour looking for a picture of Beah Richards on the internet. Guess what? (I couldn't find ONE LOUSY PICTURE OF HER!!!!!!)" 4. Judith Stephens points out that "African-American women, such as Ida B. Wells, were the first to articulate the connection between the lynching of black men, the sexual [End Page 349] exploitation of black and white women, and the role white women played in maintaining the system of racial oppression" (Perkins 5). African-American women's treatment of this subject is so prolific, in fact, that there is even an entire anthology of plays about lynching written by AfricanAmerican women. In the introduction to this anthology, Strange Fruit, Stephens writes that, "Lynching plays represent a challenge to the social order of white male supremacy by revealing how the exploitation of black men and women and white women was interdependent and vital to such an order. Additionally, the plays expose the role of white women in maintaining a system of
racial oppression" (Perkins 7). Richards' play is not included in this collection, perhaps because it is a one-woman performance and not a play in a conventional sense or perhaps because the piece is not entirely about lynching. However, "A Black Woman Speaks" draws from the same tradition as anti-lynching plays, especially in its goals of educating an audience and moving audience members to action. 5. I rounded off numbers from an article in the September 1, 2003 Ann Arbor News. EMU's student body is 25.1 percent minority students: 17.9 percent black/non-Hispanic; 0.7 percent American Indian/Alaskan; 2.2 percent Asian/Pacific Islander; 2.3 percent Hispanic; 74.9 percent white; and 2.1 percent non-resident alien. 6. In places, Richards' text assumes that black women are poor and white women are wealthy. While this is an oversimplification of the relationship between race and class, it represents the situations of many and works symbolically to make visible white privilege. She also assumes heterosexuality as a norm, speaking mainly of women's roles within marriage. At times, though, these examples function more at an allegorical level in the ways they connect white women and their position in relation to white men. 7. Feminist theorists have spent decades trying to understand the ways the female body is represented on stage and ways to counter hegemonic representations of women as objects. Elin Diamond, for instance, wrote that "The body, particularly the female body, by virtue of entering the stage space, enters representationit is not just there, a live unmediated presence, but rather (1) a signifying element in a dramatic fiction; (2) a part of a theatrical sign system whose conventions of gesturing, voicing, and impersonating are referents for both performer and audience; and (3) a sign in a system governed by a particular apparatus, usually owned and operated by men for the pleasure of a viewing public whose major wage earners are male" (89). Critics like Diamond, Jill Dolan, and Peggy Phelan have argued that women must use performance techniques that subvert these dominant systems, while also acknowledging that they must still operate within them. Richards' piece is an attempt to counter her "otherness" as both a black person and a woman. She wrote it herself to counter a lack of positive roles for black women and she performed it before an audience made mostly of women. Also, the piece directly addresses and implicates the audience in ways that compel us to enter into a dialogue with her instead of passively gazing at her.
Works Cited
Apple, Michael. "Foreword." White Reign: Deploying Whiteness in America. Ed. Kinchelow, Joe L., et al. St. Martin's Press: New York, 1998. Bondi, Liz. "Locating Identity Politics." Place and the Politics of Identity. Ed. Michael Keathe and Steve Pileeds. Routledge: New York, 1993. 84-101. [End Page 350] Bonney, Jo. Extreme Exposure: An Anthology of Solo Performance Texts from the Twentieth Century. Theatre Communications Group: New York, 2000. Coleman, Wendy R. and Stacy Wolf. "Rehearsing for Revolution: Practice, Theory, Race, and Pedagogy (When Failure Works)." Theatre Topics 8.1 (1998) 13-31. Diamond, Elin. "Brectian Theory/Feminist Theory: Toward a Gestic Feminist Criticism." The Drama Review 32.1 (1988): 82-94. Dickerson, Glenda. "The Cult of True Womanhood: Toward a Womanist Attitude in AfricanAmerican Theatre." Performing Feminisms: Feminist Critical Theory and Theatre. Ed. Sue-Ellen Case. The Johns Hopkins UP: Baltimore, 1990, 109-118. Fuss, Diana. Essentially Speaking: Feminism, Nature, & Difference, Routledge: New York, 1989.
Giroux, Henry A. "White Noise: Toward a Pedagogy of Whiteness ." Race-ing Representation: Voice, History, and Sexuality. Ed. Kostas Myrsiades and Linda Myrsiades. Rowman & Littlefiled Publishers, Inc.: New York, 1998, 42-76. hooks, bell. Yearning: race, gender, and cultural politics. South End Press: Boston, 1990. . "Performance Practice as a Site of Opposition." in Let's Get it On: The Politics of Black Performance. Ed. Catherine Ugwu. Bay Press: Seattle, 1995, 210-221. Jackson, Shannon. "White Privilege and Pedagogy: Nadine Gordimer in Performance." Theatre Topics 7.2 (1997) 117-138. Lanker, Brian. I Dream A World: Portraits of Black Women Who Changed America. Stewart, Tabori, & Chang: New York, 1989. McIntosh, Peggy. "White Privilege: Unpacking The Invisible Knapsack." Race, Class and Gender in the United States: An Integrated Study. 4th Edition. Ed. Paula S. Rothenberg. St. Martins Press: New York, 1998, 165-169. Perkins, Kathy A. and Judith L. Stephens, Eds. Strange Fruit: Plays on Lynching by American Women. Indiana UP: Bloomington, 1998. Richards, Beah. "A Black Woman Speaks." 9 Plays by Black Women. Ed. Wilkerson, Margaret B. New American Library: New York, 1986, 33-39.

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Annette Wannamaker - Present(ing) Historical Memory: Beah Richards' "A Black Woman Speaks," Performance, and a Pedagogy of Whiteness

- Theatre Topics 14:1

Theatre Topics 14.1 (2004) 339-351

Present(ing) Historical Memory:

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Annette Wannamaker teaches in the English Department at Eastern Michigan University.

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