FIGURE 11.1 Ike Ude, Sartorial Anarchy #12.
Source: Courtesy of the artist.
Monica L. Miller
Contemporary artists of African descent use pantomimic gestures of performance and racial play to send us backward and forward in time. They force us to range across the globe, to travel between “Africa” as an idea and an actual place, to reimagine modernist Paris through, for example, Harlem Renaissance New York, to consider Toyko’s transformation from Edo (its name in the Tokugawa period) to “modernity” via modernist Paris (again) and the Bronx in the 1980s.
(Meta-)Modernist Harlequins
Consisting of gesture, music, and costume, a pantomime can mean in and on multiple registers, manifest differently across time and space. Because pantomime—the actor, the form—can be a metaphor for performativity and the contingency of performance itself, it is impossible to conceive of it as truly conventional or even temporally and spatially bound. The stage that I would like to construct here is a place in which pantomime is noun, verb, or adjective and, as such, an act of translation, a part of the grammar of modernism that in particular relates black and white, “Africa” and the “West,” the visual and the oral/aural, time and geography. Because pantomime is a phenomenon that employs masks and forms of minstrelsy, it functions as a particularly apt aesthetic within which to explore the politics of racial performance and play that forms a signature and constitutive part of the modernist era. The “actors” on this pantomimic stage will be contemporary images of the black body that enact and then move beyond earlier key modernist moments, changing the time, place, and space of modernism. As they convey blackness in/for the modernist world and assert the central importance of blackness to a sense of being and feeling modern, these images encourage us to think critically about the global dimensions of twentieth- and twenty-first-century art and aesthetics.
A short history of pantomime demonstrates that it has been, over time, a form of spectacular performance productive of a myriad of cultural and political effects and critiques. As the form evolved from Roman times to the late nineteenth century, pantomime included, according to the theater historian John O’Brien, “acrobatics, spectacle, song, dance, travelogue, slapstick comedy and special effects”; indeed, the pantomime in its heyday “exploited all the material resources that play houses had to offer in order to create a kind of fantastic world where spectacular transformations happened as a matter of course.”1 In ancient Rome, the pantomimi, elaborately masked professional actors and dancers, were almost as popular as the gladiators and charioteers of the imperial theater; as a theatrical form, pantomime was a multimedia experience that was designed to engage the ear and the eyes, to appeal musically and in terms of movement and scenic design.2 These pantomimi coexisted with Roman mimes, who, often donning a patchwork tunic and a square-hooded cloak, were part of an improvised theater of social critique with sometimes violent political effects.3 Pantomime outlasted the Roman Empire as a theatrical form and also as a vehicle of politics; up until the medieval period, it was occasionally banned because its theatricality often included political critique.4
Fully emerging in the Renaissance as popular comic theater that nevertheless preserved a societal analysis, commedia dell’arte was a form that pantomime took—its lead “clown” Harlequin became an heir to the pantomimi’ s antics.5 An original character from the commedia dell’arte and star of the comic extravaganza in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century pantomime named for him, the harlequinade, Harlequin encapsulates and performs a kind of self-interested, anarchic play. The masks (and costumes) that accompanied the commedia’s characters—Harlequin, Pantaloon, Columbine—allowed them a freedom to transgress, mock, provoke, and entertain. Harlequin, the preeminent trickster, reflected and transcended the cultural and social milieu in which he was born. His mask, originally of white leather but later more frequently a black half-mask, with a “pimple on the forehead, a wrinkled brow, and arched eyebrows,” often had, according to the commedia dell’arte historian Lynn Lawner, “features that may be read as Oriental and Negroid.” Lawner further argues that Harlequin’s physical presentation and disposition “seems to have incorporated European society’s fear of, and fascination with, the ‘other,’ the foreign, the marginal, the different, and in the idiom of the time, the diabolic.”6 A figure of anarchy who in trickster tradition always wins out, Harlequin ushers us into a comic yet altogether serious world full of carnivalesque effects, reversals of status, power, and fortune.7
Perhaps the most recognizable, “conventionally” pantomimic character in the modernist era can be seen on the canvases of one of modernism’s greatest artists, Pablo Picasso. As an alter ego in some of his best-known work from his rose period (1904–1906), the harlequin, along with the saltimbanque and clown (he used these three figures interchangeably), was, for Picasso, a figure of contrasts, a self-Other that he mused over immediately before finding his (and modernism’s) most influential Other, Africa and African art. Picasso’s multiple and highly varied renditions of harlequin figures manifest, on the one hand, his lifelong interest in the energy, anarchy, and passion of the circus, theater, music hall, and other forms of performance and spectacle; on the other hand, his depictions of these theatrical figures often render them in repose, solitude, or melancholy. The harlequin figures in Au Lapin Agile (1905) or Famille de Saltimbanques (1905) (both of which bear Picasso’s own likeness) are thus complex symbols of a modern artist’s alienation, folly, and explosive creative potential, figures of impressive technical skill and extreme agility who nevertheless can be despondent and morose. Judged by the art historian Theodore Reff to be “intimately related to Picasso’s most important formal invention, Cubism,” his harlequins are linked to cubist form partially via the symbolic of their costume, “bright colors and strongly marked patterns both fragment and conceal the underlying forms, assimilating them to a surface design of great decorative brilliance.”8 Additionally, I would argue, they also presage cubism in their complex affect, “a form of concealment that is also a form of revelation.”9 In none of his harlequin images does Picasso preserve the figure’s traditional black mask—one could say that it emerges in a different form in modernism’s masterwork, Picasso’s most famous appropriation of Africa and its art(s), Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907) (more on these African masks later).
The first aesthetic movement born out of a “need to merge with the other,”10 modernism has at its core a duality and ambivalence surrounding Africa and African-descended people and culture. Simon Gikandi explains this dynamic as both Freudian and Lacanian, if not as constitutive of our “modern” consciousness:
For modernism needed Africa as both a site of experimentation and projection, not as a cultural force. If Africa did not exist as a site in which the fears and energies of modernism could be projected, it would have to be invented; by the same token, modernism emerged as an important cultural movement because while it could not do without Africa, it did not know what to do with the blackness it saw in the mirror that was supposed to reflect its repressed side. Africa is the unconscious of modernism—its “absent cause”—a force whose presence can neither be negated nor endorsed and must hence be repressed.11
While modern “writers and artists were themselves aware of the duality of their desire for the other and its elusiveness,” what they did not understand or take into account was that this ambivalence included a further, significant distinction between African people and culture. At the heart of a modernist approach to Africa and African art was the complication that the “modernists’ desire for African art objects, even for an African, pre-modern mentality, was always blocked and often haunted by the apparitional and haunting presence of the African’s body.”12 The African body, the way in which it is both desired and reviled, is the true issue at stake in rethinking modernist experimentation with blackness and black experiments in modernism. It is to this irreducible materiality and harlequinesque performativity of the African body and its masks that contemporary artists of African descent turn when re-dressing modernist appropriations of African and Afro-diasporic art and culture. In that this artwork explicitly takes up and works through some signature moments/instantiations of modernist visual culture, we might think of it as “metamodernist.” A term recently coined by David James and Urmila Sheshagiri to describe contemporary writing that “incorporates and adapts, reactivates and complicates the prerogatives” of modernism (periodized as 1890–1940), “metamodernism” cheekily combines homage and critique as it works to create incisive, astute aesthetic statements about our current moment.13 The artwork in the essay performs a similar gesture, enacting a kind of New World pantomime that comments on and resituates modernist space/time and the place of Africa within that calculation.
Pantomimic images abound in late twentieth- and twenty-first-century art from the African diaspora. Employing masking, mimicry, and minstrelsy, as well as ironic costuming, these images create a kind of stage for the examination, reassessment, and transcendence of modernism’s aesthetic legacy in relation to African art and culture. For example, at first glance, Iké Udé’s Sartorial Anarchy #12 (2013; figure 11.1) could be the studio portrait of a harlequin character fresh from a performance in a contemporary commedia dell’arte. While this portrait names a sartorial anarchy as its subject, a closer examination of the image prompts us to see a series of extrasartorial modernist
rebellions and disorders at work. Both the harlequin and stylist of this shoot, the Nigerian-born, New York–based artist Udé imports a number of distinctions into the image that matter for it as an assessment and performance of modernist black/white, Africa/the West relations, then and now—it is a metamodernist moment. As “sartorial” anarchy, Udé’s portrait displays a riot of influences: he wears a replica of a nineteenth-century “traditional” harlequin suit, distinctive for its multicolored diamond pattern. He accessorizes this with a men’s white cotton organdy jabot, from the eighteenth century, secured by a Victorian red stickpin cravat. A tuxedo jacket from the 1970s is on his shoulders, accented with flowered brooch from the 1960s; contemporary argyle socks and green leather loafers cover his feet. He stands on an antique Aubusson French rug from the late 1800s, perched between two antique armchairs whose provenance is unknown. On his face are “classic” glasses from the early twenty-first century, and his hair is styled in an extravagant “Ramhorn” style reminiscent of Harlequin’s tri- or duo-corned “jester-type” hat. He looks into the distance, lips parted, contemplative, and maybe amused.
If “Africa is the unconscious of modernism” and if the “African’s body” haunts the modernist aesthetic and engagement with the other, then Udé as Harlequin in this pantomimic mise en scene visualizes the modernist unsaid/unseen. One might say, if this portrait were a metamodernist conversation with Picasso, that Udé’s harlequin portrait is, in fact, a manifestation of the missing or repressed black mask from the rose period’s harlequin portraits, an instantiation of the “Africanness” of the cubist period that follows it, and much more. Taking it upon himself to “merge” African and other, doing so on and with his own performative body, Udé transforms the body from an appropriated symbol into a scene of pantomimic play. A riotous, colorful, critical vehicle, the African body here claims a past and a future that extends the “modern” both backward and forward, encompassing but not limited by the modernist Africa/West encounter. This harlequin, in contrast to those of Picasso, revels in his agentive creativity, appreciates the work that he has done—he smiles. As such, he both dons and disclaims a one-way cultural influence and progressive aesthetic teleology. This is not merely an image of a postcolonial and postmodern African writing back or “re-dressing” empire, nor is this simply a portrait of a modern, African artist reconsidering and appropriating Picasso’s many harlequins or even his African masks. Instead this harlequin is involved in more of a remix than a rewriting, referencing the commedia dell’arte, histories of European and black dandyism, the modern artist and his multiple and many appropriative gestures, consumption/globalization, and a kind of postblack, Afro-futuristic “dream work” all in one go.14 This Afro-cosmopolitan harlequin performs and is himself metamodernist.
A character in a W. E. B. Du Bois novel of 1928 described modern art/modernism as “the Congo flooding the Acropolis,” a kind of deluge of difference, a world of otherness, sweeping over but not subsuming Europe’s foundational history and aesthetic forms.15 Udé as harlequin invites us to rethink the origin of “tradition” and to consider it, insistently, more from an African point of view—a flood out from Africa, so to speak. This “flood” has transtemporal consequences for assessing the place of blackness within modernism and in the contemporary period. When discussing his work and its postcolonial or racial possibilities, Udé always eschews talk about what kind of “blackness” he is promoting, saying:
I’m happy not to do so-called “black/political art” that one is/was obliged to do, especially since the 1990s. I HATE the very idea; finding it insulting and particularly stunting to the poetic imagination. So there won’t be any mention of the obvious—“black”/“Africa” . . . because I am. It is nothing short of totalitarianism of sorts that we are all expected to think and do art works invariably laced and based on a socio-political framework. This is obviously myopic for there ought to be as much room for artists such as myself who are primarily keen in doing poetically-inspired work that is individualistic, romantic, radically inventive, beautifully wrought, free of socio-political dogma, without boundaries of any kind.16
Tailoring the costume of a riotous Italian into a cosmopolitan suit, refusing to take on the label of difference (“black,” “African”), Udé is here an unqualified aesthetic and cultural force. The composed anarchy of Udé’s body and its mise en scene in his portrait functions as what Aldon Nielsen has called a kind of “double-fold”—a “postmodernity within modernity that is [the time and place of] diasporic blackness.” Not merely a Du Boisian double consciousness centered on identity formation but a time-space phenomenon productive of aesthetic effects, the “double-fold” encourages us to think about the possibility of reorienting the origins and legacies of modernism in different moments and in other geographies.
Masking and Minstrels
As the real or symbolic transit to a black voice, the (black) mask holds a very special place in modernist art and aesthetics. Famously brought into the modernist milieu via the highbrow Musée d’Ethnographie at the Palais de Trocadero or the more lowbrow blackface minstrel theater, the black or African mask in wood or burnt cork transported white American and European artists and writers to Other worlds as far away as the African Gold Coast or as close as the “dark” interior of the modern mind. For artists like Picasso, Michael North avers, “the [African] mask is not really a cultural artifact, worn for the purposes of concealment or adornment, but a psychological revelation exposing what usually lies behind the face.”17 Described by its liminality, an African mask is capable of performing the modern condition, both revealing and concealing angst, cacophony, disillusion, and a fundamental disorder. As such, it put into relief a radical sense of difference in how the self, the Other, and the here and now looks and feels. When most famously imported into Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, the African mask dislocates (European) identity and in its blankness and inherent mystery unmoors the presumptive stability of conceptions of race, gender, sexuality, class, and geography. Asking a question soon to be current in other quarters, “What does Africa mean to me?”, Picasso and friends answered: “Everything [symbolically, semiotically] . . . and nothing [in reality].”
The African mask exposed modern identity as performative and made manifest the fact that there was and would be a “dislocation between subjectivity and role” for both Europeans and Africans.18 This ontological transformation manifested itself not only in the visual field but also in textual/oral/aural terms via another, previous instantiation of the black mask: blackface racial masquerade. Given blackface’s pantomimic aspect—that it is a drama of costume, mask, song, and talk—the relation of the “mask” of blackness here to the performative body is one of perhaps even greater intimacy. Created by burnt cork and drawn on the face, blackface desires an intense closeness to the black body, so much so that it elicits a “black” voice from that body. Just as African masks were ubiquitous in modernist visual art, a multitude of black voices can also be heard emanating from burnt-cork countenances. The African mask in modernist art or as a modernist aesthetic obscures the material circumstances (the people and place) that created it; similarly, the blackface mask and voice fragments and disappears the supposedly “black” body behind it.
A key object and idea in one of European modernism’s greatest works, the black mask and its volatility is also of enormous importance to one of American modernism’s iconic “texts” or pantomimes, the 1927 film The Jazz Singer. By donning the black mask and singing in a black voice, Jack Robin or Jackie Rabinowitz, Al Jolson’s blackface character in the film, makes a transaction: he exchanges the synagogue for the jazz club and uses his blackface mask, an approximation of blackness, to escape his Jewish immigrant background. His deployment of burnt cork and a stereotypical, (black) dialectical voice simultaneously allows him to communicate the emotional cost of this exchange by accessing the raw melancholy of the blues. Jack’s habitation of a black body—his blackface and blackvoice—is here also catalytic, functioning as an intermediate between Jewishness and whiteness that is essential in the creation of his Americanness. By pretending to be black in an obviously false way, he obtains a whiteness and uncomplicated Americanness that is the opposite of (even a caricatured) blackness. As Michael Rogin insists, blackface performance renders black bodies as (black) holes, “silences their [black] voices and sings in their name.”19
Jack’s blackface masquerade, itself a kind of anachronism in the late 1920s, would like to ignore other masking “effects” that also took place during modernism, in particular the use of the black mask, both visually and orally/aurally, by artists and writers of African descent. Aware of the stakes of stepping into what the dialect poet Paul Laurence Dunbar called a “broken tongue,” or of donning masks so useful in accessing the “exotic” other, black artists nevertheless claimed the mask and its voice as a selfsame mode of identity inquiry.20 African American visual artists and writers such as Malvin Grey Johnson, Aaron Douglas, Langston Hughes, Nella Larsen, and Countee Cullen put on masks of blackness and in doing so also asked “What Does Africa Mean to Me?” For these artists, their African heritage and its distance from their reality yet its evidence in and on their bodies also rendered the black mask and black voice into a tool of performative identity, but one that enabled them to define “blackness” as both a construct and an experiential cultural, political, and social history. This duality turns on contradiction and creates pantomimic aesthetic effects that interrogate the status of the black mask and its voice as mere tools of concealment and ventriloquism.
Working through and beyond the modernist moment, Lyle Ashton Harris addresses questions of masking, voice, and mimicry in a series of related self-portraits, Minstrel, 1987–88, Man and Woman #1, 1987–88, and Man and Woman #2, 1987–88. Though appearing to be an uncomplicated reversal of the emblematic image of Al Jolson singing “Mammy” at the conclusion of The Jazz Singer, “Minstrel” looks beyond Jolson’s melancholic angst. A boater hat perched on his head, in satirical whiteface, with lips closed instead of open in performance of a supplicating song, the minstrel in the photograph looks as much like a mime—silent and critiquing—as he does a minstrel. Simultaneously parodying Jolson yet at the same time indicating that this act exceeds its own Jolson reference, Harris here refuses a reading of Jolson’s racial masquerade as an act of “pure longing.”21 Instead, with his pout and reenactment of minstrel as mime, Harris describes Jolson as silly, even infantile.
FIGURE 11.3 Lyle Ashton Harris, Man and Woman #2.
Source: Courtesy of the artist.
Man and Woman #1 and #2, also in whiteface, expand this critique, transforming Harris’s comment on blackface/whiteface from Jolson’s appropriation to other crises of skin/mask famously analyzed by Frantz Fanon. Imaging that “white masks fail to hide African skin . . . and turn African into European,” these two portraits encourage us to focus on the black bodies as much as the “white masks” on display here. Giving the bodies the majority of the frame and presenting them unclothed, this black man and woman, though still, are hardly passive. They are not in a traditional pose of miming, and their bodies are muscular, taut, and full of potential. In Man and Woman #2, they become animated: the woman turns her head to face the camera with squinted eyes, and the man faces the camera and opens his mouth in a potent, performative, (silent) scream. Not a supplicating song, because it is so violently delivered, nor an “authentic” black voice, because it emanates from a powerful black body counterintuitively wearing a defiant white mask, this scream images the contradictions and consequences of playing in and with “African” masks and “black” voices. Productive of reversals and perhaps a certain kind of freedom, this pantomime and its metamodern mimicry prepare us for something new—a differently raced, differently gendered, differently situated sounding of an anarchic blues.
The West and the Rest
A “mash-up” of late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century African American hip-hop culture and the “floating world” of Tokugawa Japan during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the paintings and performance art of the artist iona Rozeal brown (now known as iROZEALb) capture and extend the complex politics of the time and place(s) of the Euro-American modernist moment. When we look at Sin Titulo (2012–2014) we see not an anxiety of influence but rather an anarchy: an elaborately dressed, coiffed, and made-up geisha, she is not in “traditional” Japanese attire but in a combination of tattooed flesh and a white, fluffy fur coat.22 Sporting two enormous Afro-puffs, gold chains, pearls, and iconic 1980s “door-knocker” earrings, her blackface “mask” is ever so carefully applied, the line between Asian and African American simultaneously precise and besides the point. Framed like an original ukiyo-e woodblock print from the Tokugawa/Edo era, which depicted Japan’s stylish “life deluxe”—geishas, courtesans, actors, and others involved in the performance of opulence—she performs as both the player and the instrument, in that her hair mimics bass speakers, her face a nut-brown violin. Without title (sin titulo) and perhaps actually impossible to define definitively, she practices an improvisational art of sound and style that confuses and complicates the time, place, and race of cultural influence. In this Afro-Asian pantomime, brown, like Udé and Harris, reanimates modernist Europe and America’s appropriations of the Other, domesticating and transforming what was thought of as not-Europe, not-America.
Although the initial inspiration for this image was brown’s discovery of the ganguro, a group of Japanese girls enamored of hip-hop who, in the late 1990s, adopted the clothing, hairstyles, swagger, and even the skin color of African American hip-hop artists and fans, her rendition of their masquerade goes well beyond portraiture and a critique of their cultural appropriation. Instead, brown’s engagement with Japanese/African American culture transhistorically—the connection she makes between Edo-period Japan and late-capitalist America, the cultural and racial insularity of Japan and the globalization of hip-hop—forces us to look for connections and conjunctions between both cultures and places, across time and space. While brown seemingly specifically pivots between contemporary America and a premodern or modernizing Japanese past, her work also recalls an earlier fascination with Japan and the era of the “floating world” in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Euro-American modernist art and culture. “Japonisme” also captured the imagination of Walt Whitman, Alexander Dumas, and Oscar Wilde. In fact, Gertrude Stein famously (and cryptically) stated, while perhaps standing in front of the many African sculptures at her home, 27 Rue des Fleurus in Paris, “Culture is Japanese.”23
Best known for her “afro-asiatic allegory,” brown’s paintings and performance pieces reference and mash up present and past moments of African American, Asian, and modernist cultural contact and exchange. As a child, brown was fascinated by very disparate forms of Japanese and Asian culture—she remembers her mother taking her to a formative performance of Kabuki theater, featuring Bandō Tamasaburō, a celebrated virtuoso performer of female roles (onnagata); brought up on Sesame Street, she also enjoyed Bunraku puppet theater. On weekends, she watched kung-fu films featuring Bruce Lee with her father; she loved Japanese animation too, including Speed Racer and Kimba.24 Initially disturbed by the ganguro’s blackface when she encountered the phenomenon in graduate school, she took research trips to Japan and later Korea and China, where hip-hop has transformed from an exotic import to an increasingly popular form of indigenous popular culture. Her fieldwork in the Asian hip-hop scene and apprenticeship in traditional art techniques complicated brown’s reception and depiction of blackface and “black” urban performance. Complaining at first that “they’ve [the ganguro] got white around their eyes and around their lips” and that they “immediately made me think of Al Jolson,” brown decided not to parody or mock the ganguro but instead created an even deeper, pantomimic critique of appropriation, excess, and materialism, whether in contemporary, globalized hip-hop culture or Edo Japan (or somewhere in a Euro-American in-between).25 Blacking up geishas and samurais and transforming them into MCs, brown’s address of racial stereotyping is inseparable from her critique of both cultures’ love of luxury and conflicted politics of gender and sexuality. Neither African American culture, Japanese culture, nor modernist culture, past and present, gets a pass here; instead brown’s mash-up creates something new: a statement on and vision of modernity and its aesthetics or the difficulty, necessity, and complexity of cross-cultural engagement as a description of modernist art. These interconnected modernisms are sometimes depicted in metamodernist pantomime.
Not just an investigation of contemporary, globalized cultural flow and cross-cultural influence, brown’s work is also an object lesson for the future of modernist literary and cultural inquiry. As Doyle and Winkiel insist in Geomodernisms, a fuller investigation of modernity and modernism will require discovering and recovering connections between the West and the rest or even two “minor” modernist spaces and places.26 Though centered on Tokugawa Japan and contemporary African America, brown’s “afro-asian allegory” also reminds us that Commodore Perry celebrated the “opening” of Japan in 1854 by putting on a minstrel show; at the same time we must consider that three of African America’s preeminent “race men,” James Weldon Johnson, Langston Hughes, and W. E. B. Du Bois, all traveled to Japan as part of their antiracist, people-of-color solidarity work.27 When we think of these connections, not to mention Richard Wright’s attendance at the 1955 Bandung Conference and his authorship of over four thousand haikus near the end of his life, we are encouraged to think, along with Doyle and Winkiel, of “interconnected modernisms—[which will necessitate] a rethinking of periodization, genealogies, affiliations, and forms.”28
All of the artwork considered in this essay functions as provocation for this project as they use pantomimic gestures of performance and racial play to send us backward and forward in time. Simultaneously, they force us to range across the globe, to travel between “Africa” as an idea and an actual place, to reimagine modernist Paris through, for example, Harlem Renaissance New York, to consider Toyko’s transformation from Edo (its name in the Tokugawa period) to “modernity” via modernist Paris (again) and the Bronx in the 1980s. Additionally, they ask us literally and figuratively to listen to a multitude of voices, to heed and discern harmony and dissonance. Such reconsiderations allow for the possibility of multiple modernisms as well as metamodernisms. In an article in the New York Times recently, the art critic Holland Carter writes, “Modernism was, and is, an international phenomenon, happening in different ways, on different timetables, for different reasons in Africa, Asia, Australia and South America.”29 To see, hear, and locate modernism and its constituents more clearly, to see the complexity of the work of modern artists and their contemporary heirs, we are going to have to enter into and live within a new metamodern, multiply modern pantomime.
Notes
1. John O’Brien, “Pantomime,” in The Cambridge Companion to British Theatre, 1730–1830, ed. Jane Moody and Daniel O’Quinn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 103.
2. Mark Griffith, “Telling the Tale: A Performing Tradition from Homer to Pantomime,” in The Cambridge Companion to Greek and Roman Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 32.
3. Hugh Denard, “Lost Theatre and Performance Traditions in Greece and Italy,” in The Cambridge Companion to Greek and Roman Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 156, 158. See also Lynne Lawner, Harlequin on the Moon: Commedia dell’Arte and the Visual Arts (New York: Abrams, 1998), 16.
4. Lawner, Harlequin on the Moon, 16.
5. Maurice Sand, History of the Harlequinade (London: Martin Secker, 1915), 1:13. Cyril Beaumont, History of Harlequin (London: C. W. Beaumont, 1926), is suspicious of a direct connection between the Roman pantomimi, mimes, and the commedia dell’arte but nevertheless admits that comedy shares features across the ages.
6. Lawner, Harlequin on the Moon, 18.
7. Ibid., 23.
8. Theodore Reff, “Harlequins, Satimbanques, Clowns, and Fools,” Artforum 10, no. 1 (1970): 30.
9. Ibid., 30. For more on Picasso’s harlequins, see also Yves-Alain Bois, ed., Picasso Harlequin, 1917–1937 (New York: Skira, 2009).
10. Simon Gikandi, “Africa and the Epiphany of Modernism,” in Geomodernisms: Race, Modernism, Modernity, ed. Laura Doyle and Laura Winkiel (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005), 32.
11. Ibid., 49.
12. Ibid., 40.
13. David James and Urmila Sheshagiri, “Metamodernism: Narratives of Continuity and Revolution,” PMLA 129, no. 1 (January 2014): 93.
14. Monica L. Miller, “An Interview with Iké Udé: Mining the Opposition . . . Is My Great Refusal,” in Iké Udé: Style and Sympathies: New Photographic Works (New York: Leila Heller Gallery, 2013), n.p.
15. W. E. B. Du Bois, Dark Princess: A Romance (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1995), 20.
16. Iké Udé, personal communication, August 2013, italics added.
17. Michael North, The Dialect of Modernism: Race, Language, and Twentieth-Century Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 63.
18. Kaja Silverman, qtd. in ibid., 70.
19. Michael Rogin, “Blackface, White Noise: The Jewish Jazz Singer Finds His Voice,” Critical Inquiry 18, no. 3 (Spring 1992): 442.
20. Paul Laurence Dunbar, “The Poet,” second stanza: “He sang of love when earth was young, / And Love, itself, was in his lays. / But, ah, the world, it turned to praise / A jingle in a broken tongue.” See The Complete Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar (1913).
21. Rogin, “Blackface, White Noise,” 442.
22. http://www.edwardtylernahemfineart.com/artists/irozealb-iona-rozeal-brown/#/images/1/. Accessed November 5, 2015. Image is no longer available at this web address.
23. Christopher Bush, “The Ethnicity of Things in America’s Lacquered Age,” Representations 99 (Summer 2007): 74; Christopher Bush, “The Other of the Other?: Cultural Studies, Theory, and the Location of the Modernist Signifier,” Comparative Literature Studies 42, no. 2 (2005): 164.
24. Lyneise E. Williams, “Black on Both Sides: A Conversation with iona rozeal brown,” Callaloo 29, no. 3 (Summer 2006): 829.
25. “Iona Rozeal Brown’s Afro-Japanese Mash-Up,” Interview on NPR’s Studio 360 (June 7, 2013), http://www.studio360.org/story/296845-iona-rozeal-browns_afro_japanese_mashup/.
26. Laura Doyle and Laura Winkiel, introduction to Geomodernisms: Race, Modernism, Modernity, ed. Laura Doyle and Laura Winkiel (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005).
27. Crystal S. Anderson, “The Afro-Asiatic Floating World: Post-Soul Implications of the Art of iona rozeal brown,” African American Review 41, no. 4 (Winter 2007): 662, 657.
28. Ibid., 66; Doyle and Winkiel, introduction, 3.
29. Holland Carter, “Lost in the Gallery Industrial Complex,” New York Times (January 17, 2014), http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/19/arts/design/holland-cotter-looks-at-money-in-art.html?ref=hollandcotter. Thanks to Iké Udé for this reference.
