"Epaulettes and Leaf Skirts, Warriors and Subversives: Black National Subjectivity in Macbeth and Haiti"

A discussion with

Stephanie Batiste

Thursday, November 4, 2004
Board Room, Stanford Humanities Center, , 4:00-6:00 PM

Readings: "Epaulettes and Leaf Skirts, Warriors and Subversives: Black National Subjectivity in Macbeth and Haiti" by Stephanie Batiste and "New Ethnicities" by Stuart Hall.

Abstract: "Epaulettes and Leaf Skirts, Warriors and Subversives": This essay analyzes performances of primitivism and exoticism in the WPA Federal Theater Negro Unit plays "Voodoo" Macbeth (1936) and Haiti (1938) for their contradictory articulations of imperial sensibilities and radical protest. Both of these plays experienced extreme popularity, exhibited violently exotic aesthetics, and appropriated the 1802 Haitian Revolution to provide a black context for American production. The United States' imperial occupation of Haiti from 1915 to 1934 fueled both sides of this dichotomy, allowing Haiti to be positioned as a primitive "other" and, contrarily, as an historical inspiration of black unity. This essay examines how these controversial representations projected meanings of national identity for African Americans. While exotic and primitive performances in Macbeth and Haiti identified African Americans with dominant American imperial culture through primitive representation and cultural appropriation, these same images permitted the communication of radical desires for resistance and insurgency expressed through diasporic identification and the dramatization of revolution.

Stephanie Batiste is an assistant professor of Literary and Cultural Studies in the Department of English at Carnegie Mellon University and is on the executive board of the African American Cultural Center in Pittsburgh. She graduated Cum Laude from Princeton with an A.B. in Sociology and then earned a Ph.D. in American Studies from The George Washington University. Her teaching and research areas include African American Literature; theories of performance, race and imperialism; 19th and 20th century American urban cultural history; and the 20th Century American Novel. She has recently published articles in Text and Performance Quarterly and Women and Performance. She also performs in and directs dramatic works as well as analyzing films and theatrical shows for their expression of African American racial and national subjectivity. During her time at the Research Institute she will be working on her manuscript entitled Darkening Mirrors: Discourses of Imperialism in African American Performance.