After Wednesday's class discussion on who is able to represent a historical event and the ethics of performing across racial identity I began to think about the ways Anna Deavere Smith performs race. What are the racial signifiers that she employs? How is race portrayed differently in the book than on the screen? And how are we meant to understand race in relation to the traumatic events that led up to the LA riots?
To answer some of these questions I went back to the introduction of the book in hopes of discovering clues of Smith's intentions. As a playwright and actress, Smith's vision for her project is structured around telling a story through multiple voices. Because of the diversity of the population of Los Angeles her project requires her to play multiple races. She admits that one of her primary concerns was her own racial bias as she writes, "My predominant concern about the creation of Twilight was that my own history, which is a history of race as a black and white struggle, would make the work narrower than it should be" (xxii). In her film version of Twilight this isn't bias isn't talked about at all. For her stage production she enlists the help of "dramaturges" (xxii) which were consultants she used to help give her a more varied understanding of the races and cultures she was representing. What is interesting about these "dramaturges" is their backgrounds. She lists them as "Dorinne Kondo, a Japanese American anthropologist and feminist scholar; Hector Tobar, a Guatamalan-American reporter from the Los Angeles Times who had covered the rights; and the African American poet and University of Chicago professor Elizabeth Alexander. Oskar Eustis, a resident director at the Taper, also joined the dramaturgical team" (xxiii). While there seems to be racial and cultural diversity it appears there is a lack of class diversity. All of the above people seem to be well educated and of the middle class. And because Smith doesn't give the racial or ethnic background of Oskar, it leads me to believe he's white (plus I looked him up just to be sure). What does it mean to have "dramaturges" who don't really represent the people Smith is attempting to represent?
The second thing that I paid particular attention to in her representations of and across race were the descriptive blurbs about each individual that appeared before each "interview" in the book. I noticed that Smith was more descriptive about physical attractiveness with the white people she interviewed than with the people of color, which reifies notions of racial attractiveness. There are only two people of color that she calls attractive in her notations, the first is Captain Lane Haywood (113) and the second is Elaine Brown (227). Instead of focusing on the attractiveness of the people of color she interviews she makes many notations about their warmth or there are very little notations at all.
Thirdly, inn both the book and the film, Smith racializes people through their speech. In the book she may choose to write out the interviewee's speech phonetically. One example of this is in her interview with Cornel West. There are some notations about his speech that appear in parentheses while others are actually written out such as "othuhs" (43), "mayan" (42), "ta" (43). While the tradition of including the vernacular of people of color is not new, especially in the tradition of Black writing (think Zora Neale Hurston) I found it curious that at other instances she would spell them correctly, like "other" (43). Now this could really be the way Cornel West speaks, but there is also intentionality that goes in to representing people a certain way. The inclusion of vernacular can serve as a way to racialize West especially in comparison to other interviewees. Mrs. Young-Soon Han is another example of how Smith's choice of including her speech pattern racializes here, both in the book and the film. In the film version of Mrs. Han's speech Smith puts the words in a different order than the book, places pauses and stresses in different places, and exaggerates the words Han's speaks, such as "alone" (247) vs. "arone" (79:55).
One of the major critiques Smith makes about race relation is that "few people speak a language about race that is not their own. If more of us could actually speak from another point of view, like speaking another language, we could accelerate the flow of ideas" (xxv). Anna Deavere Smith's project Twilight is supposed to give voice to the character of Los Angeles after the Rodney King verdict (xvii) by utilizing diverse narrative voices and as an actress she approached each interview with the goal to be able to represent the interviewee on the stage. To circumvent her own racial biases she sought out the expertise of others from different racial and ethnic backgrounds than herself. But all of this wasn't enough to prevent Smith from embodying some of the very critiques she seems to be trying to make about race relations as seen by her representations of racial stereotypes as racial signifiers. The question remains, what are the ethics of performing across racial identities?
Works Cited
Smith, Anna. Twilight Los Angeles, 1992. New York: Anchor Books, 1994. (book)
-----. Twilight Los Angeles. New York: Off Line Entertainment Group, 2000. (film)
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