Alliances across the margins.

The August Wilson/Robert Brustein debate held at the Town Hall in New York City in February, 1997, and moderated by Anna Deavere Smith, was a public performance of an old historic bind between the narrowly defined limits of legitimacy granted Black culture in the United States and the burden of speaking for a whole community. It raised issues of cultural reparation, cultural sovereignty, and the struggle for empowerment that continues for Black people--and, by extension, other minorities--within well-funded theater institutions and the broader theater culture in the United States. Most importantly, it brought to a head the question of where we are headed toward in the next century through the areas of concern the debate elided or failed to consider seriously, such as the impact of popular social movements on the theater, organized around broader political coalitions. I shall focus on the subject of cultural sovereignty, which has efficaciously been staged through Black cultural resistances in the United States, with international repercussion in both first and third world countries struggling for democratic representation in the twentieth century.

Wilson's speech "The Ground On Which I Stand" is a provocative reminder of the struggles for cultural sovereignty that continue to inform minority artistic expression. By cultural sovereignty, I mean the ability of a group to define its cultural practices and meanings as representative expressions of the group. Wilson's position draws on the rich vein of Black Radicalism's history of revolutionary struggle and on bourgeois cultural nationalisms running from such activists and intellectuals as Elijah Mohammed, Martin R. Delany, and Marcus Garvey through the Black Arts Movement and radical Black intellectuals such as W. E. B. Du Bois, Amiri Baraka, June Jordan, Stokley Carmichael, Ron Karenga, Angela Davis, and Harold Cruse, all architects of the Black discourse on cultural sovereignty (Williams 114-17). Wilson's demand for cultural ownership, the creation of Black culture by Black artists for the Black community, as well as his efforts to work within the establishment of mainstream theater should be seen in this context. As I understand Wilson, his prescription for cultural ownership of African American culture is not a suggestion of a return to a former segregationist moment, but rather a self-conscious declaration for cultural sovereignty within the watered-down rhetorics of multi-culturalism. His speech evokes a loss of faith in the way the establishment works in the interest of African American cultural sovereignty today.

By framing his speech in the language of migration, diaspora, and maritime travel, Wilson invokes the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade as the founding crucible of African American experience. He reiterates the trauma that distinguishes African Americans from other minorities. This is a profoundly effective act which highlights the fact that minority communities share different foundings and shaping violences; and hopes. Wilson reinforces the position that questions of cultural sovereignty and the attendant issues of cultural ownership and cultural recovery are shaped by specific minority histories.

Although Wilson's historical references hint at broader coalitions that admit progressive possibilities, the fact that he frames his discussion of American theater in terms of Black and White issues distracts us from the complex, post-Civil Rights history of the American theater, which includes Chicana/os, Asian Americans, Native Americans, and other communities--such as socialists, feminists, workers, labor unionists, and communists--who have also struggled, often in conversation with each other, for forms of cultural expression in the interests of an egalitarian society. While keeping in sight the importance and relevance Black/White discourse within American cultural production, we should not lose sight of the demographic complexity through which minority cultural production is experienced in the United States today.

While the discourse of Black Radicalism and Civil Rights has shaped contemporary left culture, other discourses of colonial and postcolonial histories, of neo-imperialisms and transnational, globalizing networks of relations have nuanced our understanding of communities and complicated the ways in which we relate to older rhetorics of '60s nationalist stances and separatist movements. Black cultural workers such as Claudia Jones, C. L. R. James, Walter Rodney, Charles White, Elizabeth Catlett, and others have cautionary tales of history to remind us about the struggles for cultural sovereignty, arguing for multiple fronts of engagement against dispossession and disenfranchisement.

Claudia Jones, an African American communist, worked on the Scottsboro Defense Committee and fought for the recognition of Black domestic workers as an organized labor force. She was imprisoned at Alderson Federal Reformatory for Women, then deported to Britain under McCarthyism. There she started the West Indian Gazette, a journal with a broad readership from the culturally diverse West Indian communities in London at the time (Davis 171; see also Pinnock).

Elizabeth Catlett moved to Mexico during the 1920s so that she could produce work for a broader audience. This allowed her to create more heterogeneous visual work about working women and Black femininity than was possible in the United States during the 1920s and 1930s.

Paul Robeson's sojourns in Europe during the war years, culminating in his Paris Speech in 1949, along with his commitments toward radical politics, global Black self-determination, and communist sympathies in the United States, drew upon a wide range of political influences from Europe, the U.S., and Africa. Robeson's pivotal role as an international spokesman situated him in much more complicated ways in relation to the establishment in the United States because of the powerful sense of the international from which he operated as an actor and radical. Robeson refused to be pinned down within categories of race, nation, or political party, as he broke the permissible boundaries of what was possible in the United States at the time, politically and culturally, to offer glimpses of more emancipatory ways of coping with bigotry, prejudice, and racism (Duberman 340-42).

Finally, the impact of W. E. B. Du Bois in the struggle for cultural sovereignty was influential in shaping initiatives for modern citizenship across national contexts. By mobilizing the pan-identity of Pan-Africanism, Du Bois lobbied colonial forces by harnessing international histories of subjugation and interconnected struggles for independence and sovereignty through organizing the first four Pan-African Congresses from 1919 to 1927. In all four congresses, issues of self-determination and territorial sovereignty for different African and Caribbean colonial states were raised under categories such as land, capital, labor, education, territorial sovereignty, juridical rights, political representation, and the creation of independent states (Padmore, Adi, and Sherwood 65, 68, 70, 71). The domain of cultural sovereignty, however, would always be subsumed under the above categories until the radical politics of the '60s, which foregrounded culture as a valid and powerful terrain for contestation and self-determination.

Each one of these cultural practitioners worked across national and ideological boundaries, drawing upon broader coalitions of transnational socialisms, international labor movements, and emergent nationalisms, and developing new ideas of Black modernity. But the power of these insights worked beyond the binding logic of race toward broader concerns about cultural, economic, and legal rights, and toward international black struggles that linked with Latin American, Caribbean, Cuban, and Pan-African interests.

Similarly, we need new strategies of coalitions across nationalisms, political ideologies, identitarian movements, and histories of oppression such as slavery, genocide, and colonialism. Anna Deavere Smith's complex one-woman shows, Yvonne Brewster's edited theater volumes, Catherine Ugwu's programming at the London Institute for the Contemporary Arts, George Wolfe's transformation of the impact of New York's Public Theater, and the public programming at the Africana Studies Program at New York University are some notable instances of practitioners who have created institutional spaces for cross-cultural talk that make possible broader coalitions and room for dialogue. It is this breadth of vision that I fail to see in Wilson's position, which is fundamentally insular, still framing American theater in terms of Black and White discourse instead of across broader coalitions and possibilities. White America or mainstream America is not the only forum for our work.

Wilson's speech privileges the proscenium, locating the possible impact for African American communities in the halls of official culture. This is undeniably important, and Wilson's points concerning the necessity of having centers where African American actors and directors can workshop and experiment are well-made. They cannot be dismissed as expressions of a simple-minded segregationist appeal, as Robert Brustein suggests, for to do so is to deny the cultural rights of accountability and remuneration that the territorially and historically dispossessed have through history.

However, the alternatives to the proscenium open up more effective ways of impacting local communities outside official theater culture. Instead of the restricting expectations of social realism and capital-intensive productions to which commercially viable theater has increasingly submitted itself, theater practitioners should reconsider the modes of performance more conducive to democratic consumption. The practices of ritual theater, street theater, agit prop theater, environmental performance, and poor theater have been subsumed as aesthetic devices, while their political pertinence has been lost in the increased commodification of the proscenium in the United States. Safdar Hashmis experiments in Delhi before his murder, Ngugi Wa Thiongo's experiments in Kenya during the 1970s, Paulo Friere's pedagogy of the oppressed, the broad range of East African improvisational traditions that the Tanzanian Penina Mhando uses for her theater for development, as well as the community-level theater involvements as means of community building employed by developing nations are still viable avenues of experimentation. The San Francisco Mime Troupe, the dance company Batoto Yetu in Harlem, and the recent production of the Los Angeles-based Cornerstone Theatre Company's project with a demographically diverse high school in Chinatown, New York City, are other models that merge high production qualities with progressive politics through non-proscenium theater processes that are conducive to inclusion yet do not sacrifice product quality. Each one of these examples draws upon broader coalitions under insurmountable resistance to produce social transformation and entertainment at a micro-level, something from which big-budget theater has, for the most part, abnegated itself in the United States.

Wilson raises important issues for those of us working at the intersections of theater and minority cultural expression. He reiterates that African American history cannot be disavowed and concealed under the guise of multi-culturalism. This emphasis is inconvenient for mainstream America's quotas for "people of color," but history is inconvenient. Wilson distinguishes African American territorial rights of legitimacy in terms of historic accountabilities. The myth of forty acres and a mule haunts his arguments for African American rights to access in culture industries and artistic spaces. The question of how much reparation or how long it takes for a community to experience cultural recovery cannot be dissolved or brushed aside with the nonchalance of postmodern multi-cultural accommodation. But this could only be part of the cure.

Wilson does not leave open enough avenues for younger generations of African American cultural artists who struggle in the industry and want to work outside the boundaries of cultural insularity. Cultural sovereignty can only fully test itself by transforming the culture around it, which is what African American culture has done historically on a global scale, so why not grant it the power and legitimacy it deserves as one of the United States' most valued sources of artistic innovation? Certainly the transnational impact of African American culture over the last few decades far exceeds the narrow geographical boundaries of the United States, influencing in turn ideas of cultural sovereignty and civil rights in African, Asian, Latin American, and other regions. The recent exhibition at the Studio Museum in Harlem, In the Spirit of Resistance, explores the connections among the 1920s and 1930s African American Modernists, the Mexican Muralist School, and international socialist identities through the first half of this century is an excellent case in point. This exhibition emphasizes an earlier transnational movement of African American intellectuals, ideas, and aesthetics to Mexico, and vice versa.

The economics of the theater over the last thirty years has made many younger practitioners less reverent and more pragmatic about their theatrical hopes. Instead of the proscenium stage revered by Wilson, younger theater practitioners are looking elsewhere, to a rich and vibrant array of options for breaking the boundaries of institutional racisms: the extensive performance traditions of American experimental innovations of the '60s and '70s, the diasporic African traditions of orature, community-specific workshops, the performative poetry of Amiri Baraka and the Last Poets, the improvisational rhythms and innovative forms of Black music, Black dance, and the politically pertinent performances of street and guerrilla theaters from Latin America, the Caribbean, and West and East Africa.

The lack of opportunities for minority performers, directors, and playwrights to find steady work within mainstream theater has led many artists in urban areas to create more locally viable options. Younger generations of minority cultural artists who have benefited from the legacies of a post-Civil Rights discourse are increasingly working at the intersections of broader coalitions, such as feminism, race, sexuality, labor issues, questions of youth rights, inner-city issues, immigration, slavery, colonialism, and genocide. Examples of this alternative movement include the proliferation of one-person shows, community-based theater organizations, and, where possible, collectives or collaborations that are multi-ethnic in composition. The work of Roger Guenvere Smith, Dan Kwong, Hank Smith, The Raven Theater Group and Cornerstone Company in Los Angeles, The Swamp Gravy project, Urban Bushwomen, Patricia Hoffbauer, George Emilio Sanchez, the Theater for the New City in New York, and New World Theater in Amherst are some examples of successful attempts to continue to work across the margins, on the peripheries of mainstream support. The struggles for cultural sovereignty have to accommodate the shifting terrains of audiences, generations, and globalizing tendencies, continuously to innovate a politically pertinent, economically viable, and culturally meaningful impact of communities through performance.

Work Cited

Davis, Angela Y. "Communist Women." Women, Race and Class. New York: Vintage, 1981. 149-71.

Duberman, Martin. "The Paris Speech and After (1949)." Paul Robeson. New York: New P, 1989. 340-42.

Padmore, George, Hakim Adi, and Marika Sherwood, eds. The 1945 Manchester Pan-African Congress Revisited. London: New Beacon, 1995.

Pinnock, Winsome. A Rock in Water. Black Plays: Two. Ed. Yvonne Brewster. London: Methuen, 1989. 45-91.

Williams, Mance. Black Theatre in the 1960's and 1970's. Westport: Greenwood, 1985.

May Joseph is Assistant Professor of Performance Studies at New York University. She has received a Ford Foundation Grant, a Rockefeller Fellowship at the Asian/American Center, CUNY, a Pembroke Center Post-Doctoral Fellowship at Brown University, and a PostDoctoral Fellowship at the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her books The Performance of Citizenship and Performing Hybridity are both forthcoming from the University of Minnesota Press, and she has published in Women and Performance, Praxis, Oxford Literary Review, Late Imperial Culture, and The Blackwell Dictionary of Cultural and Critical Theory and served as guest editor for Women and Performance. Professor Joseph wishes to express her indebtedness to Claude Purdy, Rosalind Bell, Gene Nesmith, and Benny Ambush for the lively conversations and support that fueled this paper and to express her thanks to Paul Carter Harrison for his astute editorial suggestions.