Race & Performance in America

Transcript for Student Voices

Patricia Ybarra and Marlon Jiménez Oviedo

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You’re listening to Student Voices, a podcast featuring student-led interviews of Brown University faculty based on the Race & in America panel discussion series, curated by the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America in partnership with the Office of the Provost.

Marlon Jiménez Oviedo: My name is Marlon Jiménez Oviedo and I'm a PhD candidate in the Department of Theater Arts and Performance Studies, and today I have the pleasure of speaking with Professor of Theater Arts and Performance Studies, Patricia Ybarra, about the recent panel discussion on Race & Performance in America. So, I have prepared a couple of questions that I'm gonna get right into. So, Pati, in your panel talk, you mentioned the importance of looking for Black and Indigenous artists within the archive, and highlighting the ways that they negotiated systems of racialization to build careers in the 19th century. What were some of the most striking facts and historical specificities you found, that maybe we don't often get taught in most theater history classes?

Patricia Ybarra: Yeah, well, some of the work I did for this book is archival and some of it wasn't actually archival; it was, and I believe you'll appreciate this, it was in older, published Spanish-language sources, which is to say, some things were found in the archive, but, for example, some of the things I found out, particularly about mixed-race actors in the southern cone–particularly, like, Argentina, Uruguay–they were actually in published sources in Spanish that were not read by the previous editors. And so I had known about some of these performers, for example, and, like, Luis Morante, like, I knew Luis Morante was a playwright, you know, but it took me a little digging and sort of working through some published sources and through the scholar Sarah Townsend to realize that I'd known his name forever, but I never knew he was mixed-race, for example. And if you look at images of him, you know, he is not clearly Afro-descended or clearly Indigenous, right, so there's a way in which, if you were to look at an image of him, you wouldn't necessarily know that, you know, he's from a racially heterogeneous background. And so I thought that was incredibly–that was one of the things that was incredibly surprising.

The other one was really just thinking about how legends of productions of Othello moved through the hemisphere, which is something else I didn't know, right? So that, for example, white European actors of Othello sometimes, but who did not always perform in blackface, actually were using sort of motions or actions or acting choices of Ira Aldridge, or at least the way that those were described in print. So that's sort of, you know, as you know, if you go back to thinking about the archive and the repertoire, right, the repertoire is sort of in the archive, because what we're seeing is non-textual acting choices: use of props, for example, uses of voices and gestures, that get written about and then get re-embodied. So it just demonstrated, also, these ways in which, you know, even if people don't have the original of Ira Aldridge or they don't have that, like, those performances are being–of people of color–being passed through theater history in these very circuitous ways. And that was important, I think, and for my students, also because they can name-check Ira Aldridge, but they don't necessarily know those really complex genealogies of performance, and that one was one I didn't actually know before I started revising this next book.

MJO: Well, first of all, it's interesting that it was published, you know, that you got things that were published but didn't–maybe were overlooked, and especially when thinking about mixed-race-ness in Latin America, you know, I mean, I'm–this is something I'm thinking about profoundly, also. You know, but I did want to ask you something about the purpose of updating a textbook as a kind of archive, right? That you're building it in some sense, you know, for the future, but also looking back. The archive and archival work is a kind of contentious method, you know, some people are more reading against it, against the grain; other people just straight up say, “I don't engage the archive because it's a violent construction,” and as you say, other people look for embodiment, you know, things like the repertoire, that we do in performance studies and other traditions that are embodied to really look for history, you know, historical context. But I was wondering what you thought about this conversation about the archive, when thinking about, you know, updating a textbook, which is a very, in some way, a very traditional sense–did you have a conversation with yourself about it?

PY: I did have a conversation with myself, and I had a conversation with some other people. I guess I have two thoughts. I don't work like Saidiya Hartman, but when I'm reading, like, sort of more research books and not textbooks, I guess my affinity with archival work feels a little bit more like Hartman's Wayward Lives, in the sense that the way that she thinks about how the archive doesn't hold working class African-American women, right, and won’t recognize them as part of modernity or part of–as people who were actively negotiating capitalism, just because they weren't–they didn't have elite status, right? Or they weren't visible in the archive the way someone who I do write about in the textbook, actually, like Ada Overton-Walker, right, became a very famous African-American performer, and I write about her, not in the chapter that I talk about in the talk, but in the next chapter that I've since worked on, since the talk. So, in that sense, I feel like the kind of, sort of, the way that she works in an archive, like, that's kind of where I–my ethical person lies, right. And I had to think about, how do I adapt those processes into a textbook where I'm not going to go into, like, rich, microhistorical detail on one hand, and also, I have to work with a constriction, in some ways, of trying to tell things in a narrative way for students who aren't familiar with the history, right? And because we taught together, when we taught the history class and you were the teaching assistant, you know that there's a sense in which you have to do a bit of the canonical, right, but you have to teach the history in an accessible way, for accessible readers, right? So that was part of it. So, I did use some archive, I used some narrative, but it is a more conservative project, and it was really hard at times, to be honest. I was sort of like, “I'm going to throw it all away!” and start all over again, and I couldn't really do that, so it was interesting, but, again, I think, working on textbooks is a form of activism, right, because if all of the activist work around race, gender, sexuality is only in the research books that maybe only our advanced undergrads or only graduate students read–do you know what I mean? They're never getting the narrative in a way that's inclusive, and it's there, and it doesn't have to be specialized knowledge.

MJO: I had a question about decolonization, but especially when thinking about kinds of activism, and so I wanted to ask you, you know, in the spirit of, like, Tuck and Yang, and Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, who really push for material changes, you know, repatriation, and reparations, and beyond, sort of, the conceptual activism, that we do often, you know, what we may call, like, a symbolic or narrative shift in paradigm that often is sort of invalidated by the material realities, you know, in many countries, and the lack of change. But I wanted to ask you, in relation to that, what you thought the role of this kind of, you know, textbook work–but it doesn't even have to be textbook work, like, the kind of work that we do, you know, as scholars and teachers and artists, how do you–this is a big question–but how do you see that in relation to processes of decolonization that are really pushing for material change? You know that I feel like we're really at a point where that needs to be the conversation and so, you know, I think a lot about that for myself, and I wondered what your take was.

PY: I think about it a lot, and I think I know that what I'm doing in the classroom is not the work of that form of decolonization that is direct repatriation, undoing property; I mean, to be honest, right, like, undoing the concept of property and reimagining shared work, shared use, work, stewardship of the land is, like, the primary way in which we relate to the natural world, so I know I'm not doing that at these moments. I feel like my job is a little bit of a parallel one, and I'm a little terrified I'm going to sound like enlightenment telos here, but just forgive me, you know that's not my thing. If there's something we can do with this textbook, if there's something we can do in the classroom, it's de-naturalizing the thought and discourse that makes us think that decolonization is absurd or impossible. That’s the piece that we're doing in the classroom. You know, many of us have practices outside of the classroom where we're trying to do that more direct-action, radical work, and there are many different ways we need to do that work as activists right now, within the voting political sphere, outside of, you know, outside of that. But I think the work of the classroom is to sort of imagine a way to unthink that, right? And we work in theater and performance, so we can think about the body; so I’m also thinking about the work you did in the classroom, talking about gendered movements of hips and decolonization, right? And it's all part of that collaboration, I think, but that's what I think I’m doing in this moment, right? And in the textbook, too, it was, like, being much more open about bringing decolonization and elimination of anti-Black racism into the same conversation, because sometimes they are separated–and not because people don't have the best interests at heart, but because it's just hard to talk about them both, because they're very different and specific violences that have some overlap. So, you know, that was my hope.

MJO: Thank you for that. That was actually really useful, to think about the undoing or the de-naturalization of that thought, you know, that makes decolonization absurd. I love that way of articulating it, yeah. I want to talk more about that, especially when thinking about, you know, the body. For me, you know, and I’m writing my dissertation, this is not about my dissertation, but I’m really thinking a lot about the way that performance studies or, you know, or the ways that–maybe let’s talk about the panel, that the artists there talked about the body on art as a process of, you know–or those projects as kind of undoing colonial work in the body, you know? How do you not only do it in thought, you know, that we might say in the classroom, but also in the way that we carry ourselves, in the way that we present to others, and the way that we, that other people see us? Now I wonder if you, I mean, there was a beautiful conversation about, you know, healing, in that panel, which I think is a word that we could use for that kind of embodied practice of decolonization. And so I wonder, yeah, just, if you have any thoughts about that? You know, it may or may not show up in the textbook–but I wonder if it did, and the relationship of that.

PY: Yeah I don't know that it's going to be entirely direct in the textbook, although there are probably places in the textbook in different time periods, where that's a little bit more possible. The place it came in is still a little bit discursive, which is inserting, I believe it’s William Apess, who was an Indigenous performer who was making claims about communally-stewarded land through performance at the same time as we have those horrible “redface Indian” dramas. So, trying to put those two things in conversation (which I want to thank Bethany Hughes, who really pointed me in that direction), so I feel like recognizing that there was always decolonizing work in performance, I think, is a piece of it. But you know, in terms of the panel as a whole, I wasn't so concerned with what this project was, I was just, I was glad to be in a room, you know, with women of color who were trying to decolonize themselves, realized it was a lifelong process, and also, we’re trying to decolonize spaces, right? So, the textbook and the museum, right, are not so different in some ways, and I felt like, for me, anyway, what was really rich was trying to think about those two things together.

MJO: Well, I want to thank you for this conversation; I'm definitely going to be thinking a lot more about the classroom as a practice of a parallel decolonial work. Yeah, that's very helpful. Thank you, Professor Ybarra!

PY: Thank you.

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Student Voices is a feature of the Race & in America digital publication series developed by the Brown University Library. Our theme music is “see the unseen” by Butter. Explore the series at digitalpublications.brown.edu