Please join the Theater and Performance Studies Workshop for:

“An Indian in a Hebrew school?” Racial Impersonation and Immigrant Identities in American Vaudeville

Maria De Simone

PhD Candidate, Theater and Drama, Northwestern University

4:30 – 6:00 PM

Logan Center 603

The pre-circulated paper can be found here.

This event is free and open to the public and light refreshments will be served. We are committed to making our workshop fully accessible to persons with disabilities. Please direct any questions or concerns to the workshop coordinators, Arianna Gass (ariannagass@uchicago.edu) and Eva Pensis (pensis@uchicago.edu).

Bio:

Maria De Simone is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Theatre and Drama at Northwestern University, Chicago. She holds a BA in English and Spanish, and an MA in American Literature from CàFoscari University in Venice, Italy. At Northwestern, Maria is the recipient of a Mellon Interdisciplinary Fellowship in Gender and Sexuality Studies. Her dissertation retraces the off-stage and on-stage lives and personas of immigrant vaudeville performers from Europe and China between 1884 and 1924. She is interested in immigrant artists’ deployments of racial impersonation as a stage device and as a tool to grapple with questions of identity, assimilation, and foreignness in the U.S. context.

Abstract:

Early-twentieth-century U.S. vaudeville presented a variety of racialized images in the form of racial impersonations. A leftover from blackface minstrelsy, racial impersonation generated job opportunities in vaudeville for the many immigrants who were able to mimic their own ethnicities and a variety of others. Theatre scholars agree in describing the genre not just as denigrating for the portrayed groups, but also as problematically advantageous for the actors performing it, especially when these were white Americans. In fact, the stark contrast between the “racial mask”and the white person behind it was meant to always highlight the positive traits of whiteness. But how should one theorize racial impersonation when it was performed by recent immigrants who were themselves regarded as non-white?

My paper explores the question of how performance simultaneously posesand transgress boundariesfrom a specifically racial and ethnic point of view. Whileat the beginning of the twentieth century the freedom toembody races and ethnicities wasoften articulatedin terms of “freedom to transgress” racial definitions, the appealof racial impersonationresided in the slippery yet evident boundary between actor and role, racial mask and performer’s private identity. In other words, the “transformation”could happen on the stage by means of make-up, costumes, and accents, yet these performance practices were not necessarily transformativefor their audiences and the way they decoded racial borders.

For this presentation I will focus on the case of early-twentieth-century Jewish immigrant vaudevillians. Eddie Cantor and Sophie Tucker were two well-known Jewish singing actors who came out of a lesser-known tradition of first-generation Jewish racial impersonators such as Lew Fields, Joe Weber, and Nora Bayes. My comparative methodology across immigrant generations highlights asignificant change in time, namely, a switch from “hiding” to “highlighting” Jewishness behind or thanks to a variety of racial masks. What caused this change?I am interested in how performance theory can assist me in answering this fundamentally cultural question. What can performance teach us about racial perception and immigration history?