Exhibiting Black and Brown: Race, Spectacle, and the Archive of Latinx Performance

Abstract

Exhibiting Black and Brown: Race, Spectacle, and the Archive of Latinx Performance argues that the nineteenth-century performing body has profoundly shaped Latinx racial identity. I show that historical performances of what I call “Latinx spectacle,” displays of Latinx subjects as represented in theatre, literature, and popular culture, constructed a Latinx body politic representative of different racial formations with deep ramifications for present-day discussions on racism, immigration, and colonialism. I use deep archival research and close textual analysis to trace how these spectacles constructed a burgeoning idea of Latinidad through the confluence of Anglo-American assumptions of who constituted a Latinx subject and the performers’ use of their body to uphold or contradict these expectations. Through reconstituting these histories, I argue that the spectacular body has been a key arbiter of the privileging of whiteness within Latinidad. I also reconstruct a performance genealogy that centers Black and Indigenous subjects as crucial actors in Latinx history. By developing a relational history of Latinx performance practices, I make significant interventions in theatre & performance studies, critical race studies, and American cultural history.