Casting away tradition: The performance of blackness in contemporary American culture

This dissertation examines the role of casting practices upon the production of racial meaning for blacks within contemporary American culture. Using the cultural politics surrounding nontraditional casting practices as a specific site of analysis, this project looks at the effect of racially transcendent and racially transgressive performances on the construction of public blackness. This project investigates the mechanics of racial performance in three different cultural sites: the institutional framework of American theater, Hollywood film, and writing for the theater. In the first context, I discuss the role of economic support in cultivating particular types of black performance---especially through nontraditional and colorblind casting---at the expense of others. I juxtapose the liberal argument in favor of colorblind casting against the counterarguments which suggest that colorblindness only serves to eradicate black culture and erode black institutions. My discussion of Hollywood film focuses on the career and crossover celebrity of black actor Denzel Washington to examine the role of audience reception upon the ability of an actor to signify in a colorblind fashion, particularly in contexts involving the representation of interracial heterosexuality. Finally, my discussion of textual practices analyzes a dramatic text by playwright Suzan-Lori Parks in which she consciously rewrites historical narrative in order to denaturalize assumptions about the black female performing body. This dissertation argues that nontraditional casting practices can participate in the redefinition of blackness within the public sphere by contesting traditions of black performance that previously granted authority only to texts, actors, and productions that reproduced familiar stereotypes, whether positive or negative. Rather than threatening the end of black cultural identity, racially transgressive performances and colorblind practices may help to disprove the fictions of black performance history's past.