Studies, and the founding Associate Director of the Center on Forced Displacement at Boston University. She is the author of Modernism's Mythic Pose: Gender, Genre, & Solo Performance and Learning to Kneel: Noh, Modernism, & Journeys in Teaching.
Preston applied the “Page 99 Test” to her latest book, Complicit Participation: The Liberal Audience for Theater of Racial Justice, and reported the following:
Page 99 of Complicit Participation appears early in Chapter 4 and describes the history of blackface minstrelsy that informs George C. Wolfe’s Shuffle Along, or the Making of the Musical Sensation of 1921, and All That Followed (2016), the main focus of the chapter. This history is also important to the performance genealogy of Jean Genet’s The Blacks (1959) and its revival at The Classical Theatre of Harlem in 2003 – the topic of Chapter 1 – and Dion Boucicault’s The Octoroon (1859) and Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s radical adaptation An Octoroon (2014) – Chapters 2 and 3. From 1830 through the Harlem Renaissance, blackface minstrelsy and later derivatives like jazz, tap dancing, and ragtime were tremendously popular entertainments. They represented an ambivalent fascination with the Black male body and featured cross-gender costumes, dancing, music, and short skits. Page 99 starts the story of the supposed invention of blackface minstrelsy when T. D. Rice overheard the song of a Black stage-driver in Cincinnati singing “Jump Jim Crow.” The section ends with the argument that blackface minstrelsy is more complicated than we tend to assume, especially when the popular press associates minstrelsy with the emergence of offensive pictures of political leaders dressed in blackface in their youth. Minstrelsy was undeniably constructed for racist pleasure, particularly to serve as a pressure valve to relieve competition over jobs. It was also understood, by the eminent abolitionist Frederick Douglass, among others, as having the potential to perform new racial identities and cultivate an audience to appreciate them. Minstrelsy was not simply racist or antiracist, but like so many cultural products, much more complicated.Learn more about Complicit Participation at the Oxford University Press website
Readers picking up my book to learn about allyship and audience participation in contemporary theaters of racial justice would probably be surprised to turn to page 99 and find a history of 19th century minstrelsy. In that sense, the Page 99 Test would not introduce the browser to the main concern of my book. At the same time, I am very interested in the longer histories of racial performance that inform contemporary theaters, particularly minstrelsy and melodrama. My book is also particularly committed to the principle that understanding the complexity of historical performance helps us understand our current moment – in relation to theater and activism more generally. I give the Page 99 Test a 5 (out of 10) for my book.
I wrote much of this book during what felt to me like the dark days of the first administration of Donald Trump, never imagining that it would appear in the shadow of his second, nonconsecutive term as president. Much has not changed. I still believe that complicit participation is the prevailing framework through which many white liberals who identify as allies participate in theatrical and other institutional efforts grouped under the rubric of diversity, equity, and inclusion. I wrote the book to improve efforts for racial justice, not undermine them. Yet, in this moment, it can feel like there is no room for critiques of allyship from allies themselves, critiques from within. Today, I would emphasize most that allyship cannot be an individual practice but must involve communities in solidarity, resisting oppression and injustice wherever it emerges.
--Marshal Zeringue
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