categories and offers possibilities to resist or remake those same categories. Her first book, Redface: Race, Performance, and Indigeneity, draws on the fields of Native American Studies, Theatre, and Performance Studies asking questions about racialization, representation, authenticity, and authority.
Hughes applied the “Page 99 Test” to Redface and reported the following:
Page 99 of Redface: Race, Performance, and Indigeneity describes the final scene of an 1886 comedic play by Welland Hendrick called Pocahontas. Pocahontas and a European female character, Ann, exchange coats to disguise themselves as one another and then dance with John Smith and John Rolfe in a marriage ceremony. Their true identities are revealed, and Pocahontas marries the true to history John Rolfe despite John Smith pursuing her. Smith ends up with the false to history Ann. The play presents Pocahontas as mixed race and European looking, which helps explain why a Native American character is so easily mistaken for a European character. The final paragraph on the page explains that this mix of racial identification, gendered identification, connections to historical accuracy (minimal though they might be), and legibility as an embodied “Stage Indian” are the ingredients of redface, a curatorial and collaborative process that links the idea of the racialized “Indian” to actual and historical Indigenous peoples. The last sentence of the page primes readers to understand the stakes of redface, the political impact of seeing “Indians.”Learn more about Redface at the NYU Press website.
Reading page 99 of Redface would give readers a decent snapshot of the main project of the book. The book is interested in theatre history, “How did American theatre artists create, circulate, modify, and perpetuate the Stage Indian?” But it is more interested in the stakes of the Stage Indian, “What does a Stage Indian create for Native Americans and non-Native Americans?” This page provides a glimpse of how theatrical technologies like costume, dialogue, and plot work together to connect a racially homogenous idea of the “Indian” to a human being understood to be representing Indigenous peoples.
An important aspect of the book that page 99 doesn’t show is that of the essay, “Hinushi Inla,” which is interspersed throughout the book. Alongside the close attention to how commercial American theatre depicted and created the Stage Indian, the book argues that redface is not just a representational practice, it is a reading practice. The audience has to read a character as Indian in order for redface to work. “Hinushi Inla” is an invitation for the readers of Redface to practice reading differently. The short essay discusses Native American theatre artists and performers, their aesthetic and political work, and the ways in which Native American performance has always existed alongside the much more widely known redface.
--Marshal Zeringue
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