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South Pacific Brownface: Racial Imposture, Global Markets, and National Theatre in Tapu (1903)
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 June 2020
Abstract
New Zealand critics and audiences in 1903 hailed Tapu (by Alfred Hill and Arthur Adams) as the harbinger of a new ‘national drama’. They thought that the comic opera captured the national essence and would broadcast the nation's advantages to a global audience. Yet the production never made it beyond Sydney, and has since disappeared from the historical record. My analysis of the script and critical reception shows that Tapu faltered in its confused adoption of a wide array of techniques of racial mimicry (borrowed from metropolitan theatres) to represent indigenous Māori and white visitors, but not the native-born settler population. The story of Tapu's failure, I argue, reveals something about the transnational conditions for the constitution of a national public sphere, and the indispensability of race as a supplement to that nation. It attunes us to the force of performance genre and repertoire as vehicles of racial information and affect, pointing to the ways in which conformity, rather than invention, was the ticket to success in the emergent global culture industries. If popular performance, and specifically racial mimicry, operated as a public experiment with the racial properties of citizenship – as a generation of scholarship on race and performance has argued – to what extent was that experiment controlled by the conventions of the global commodity market? This essay reaches insights that will be of interest to scholars of (trans)national performance history, settler whiteness and global indigeneity, and is germane to disciplinary debates on minstrelsy, ethnological show business, and cultural appropriation.
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References
NOTES
1 New Zealand Times, 17 February 1903.
2 Werry, Margaret, The Tourist State: Performing Leisure, Liberalism, and Race in New Zealand 1890–1914 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
3 Auckland Star, 19 September 1895.
4 See Stafford, Jane and Williams, Mark, Maoriland: New Zealand Literature, 1872–1914 (Wellington: Victoria University Press, 2006)Google Scholar.
5 See Barlow, Cleve, Tikanga Whakaaro: Key Concepts in Māori Culture (Auckland: Oxford University Press, 1990)Google Scholar, for an introduction to the concept.
6 Denoon, Donald, ‘Settler Capitalism Unsettled’, New Zealand Journal of History, 29, 2 (1995), pp. 129–41Google Scholar, here p. 132.
7 I use supplement in the Derridean sense to refer to that supposedly artificial element which is believed to arrive after the fact as an addendum to the thing itself, but in fact establishes that original thing's originality or naturalness.
8 Lott, Eric, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1993)Google Scholar; Lhamon, W. T. Jr, Raising Cain: Blackface Performance from Jim Crow to Hip Hop (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000)Google Scholar and ‘Turning around Jim Crow’, in Stephen Johnson, ed., Burnt Cork: Traditions and Legacies of Blackface Minstrelsy (Amherst and Boston: University of Massachussetts Press, 2012), pp. 73–103; Michael Rogin, Blackface, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting Pot (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996).
9 Jill Lane, Blackface Cuba, 1840–1895 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005); Melissa Bellanta, ‘Leary Kin: Australian Larrikins and the Blackface Minstrel Dandy’, Journal of Social History, 42, 3 (2009), pp. 677–95.
10 Catherine Cole, Ghana's Concert Party Theatre (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2001); Chinua Thelwell, ‘“The Young Men Must Blacken Their Faces”: The Blackface Minstrel Show in Preindustrial South Africa’, TDR, 57, 2 (2013), pp. 66–85; Louis Chude-Sokei, The Last ‘Darky’: Bert Williams, Black-on-Black Minstrelsy, and the African Diaspora (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2006); Elizabeth Maddock Dillon, New World Drama: The Performative Commons in the Atlantic World, 1649–1849 (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2014); Siyuan Liu, Performing Hybridity in Colonial-Modern China (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013); Anita Gonzalez, ‘Navigations: Diasporic Transports and Landings’, in Thomas DeFrantz and Anita Gonzalez, eds., Black Performance Theory (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), pp. 33–44; meLê yamomo, ‘Medializing Race: Uncle Tom's Cabin in Colonial South-East Asia’, in Tracy C. Davis and Stefka Mihaylova, eds., Uncle Tom's Cabins: The Transnational History of America's Most Mutable Book (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2016), pp. 258–81; Tracy C. Davis, ‘“I Long for My Home in Kentuck”: Christy's Minstrels in Mid-19th-Century Britain’, TDR, 57, 2 (2013), pp. 38–65; Richard Waterhouse, From Minstrel Show to Vaudeville: The Australian Popular Stage 1788–1914 (Kensington, NSW, Australia: New South Wales University Press, 1990); Matthew Wittman, ‘Empire of Culture: US Performers and the Making of the Pacific Circuit, 1850–1890’, PhD dissertation, University of Michigan (2010).
11 Tracy Davis and Catherine Cole, ‘Routes of Blackface’, TDR, 57, 2 (2013), pp. 7–12, here p. 7.
12 Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996); Dillon, New World Drama, p. 8.
13 Phillip Deloria, Playing Indian (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998); Matthew Rebhorn, Pioneer Performances: Staging the Frontier (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).
14 Adria L. Imada, Aloha America: Hula Circuits Through the U.S. Empire (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2012).
15 Shannon Steen, Racial Geometries of the Black Atlantic, Asian Pacific and American Theatre (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); Josephine Lee, The Japan of Pure Invention: Gilbert and Sullivan's The Mikado (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010); Joshua Takano Chambers-Letson, A Race So Different: Performance and the Law in Asian America (New York: NYU Press, 2013).
16 Veit Erlman, ‘“Spectatorial Lust”: The African Choir in England, 1891–1893’, in Bernth Lindfors, ed., Africans on Stage: Studies in Ethnological Show Business (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1999), pp. 107–34; Saloni Mathur, ‘Living Ethnological Exhibits: The Case of 1886’, Cultural Anthropology, 15, 4 (2001), pp. 492–524.
17 Jace Weaver, The Red Atlantic: American Indigenes and the Making of the Modern World 1000–1927 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015), p. 205; Danika Medak-Saltzman, ‘Transnational Indigenous Exchange: Rethinking Global Interactions of Indigenous Peoples at the 1904 St. Louis Exposition’, American Quarterly, 62, 3 (2010), pp. 591–615.
18 Tom Postlewait, ‘George Edwardes and Musical Comedy: The Transformation of London Theatre and Society, 1878–1914’, in The Performing Century: Nineteenth-Century Theatre's History (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), pp. 80–102; Christopher Balme, ‘The Bandman Circuit: Theatrical Networks in the First Age of Globalization’, Theatre Research International, 40, 1 (2015), pp. 19–36.
19 Christopher Balme, The Theatrical Public Sphere (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014); Marlis Schweitzer, Transatlantic Broadway: The Infrastructural Politics of Global Performance (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).
20 This synopsis is taken from Tapu script, in Alfred Hill Papers, MLMSS6357 Mitchell Library, Sydney. It also corresponds to the scores in the National Library of Australia: Alfred Hill, ‘Tapu, the Tale of a Maori Pah’, 5809442; MUS Alfred Hill N A/C HILL 343.
21 See accounts in George Tallis, Hugh Ward, et al., J. C. Williamson's Life-Story Told in His Own Words (Sydney: NSW Bookstall Company, 1913); Arthur H. Adams, ‘Of the Making of Plays’, Lone Hand, 2 October 1911, pp. 563–6; Arthur H. Adams, ‘The Australian Drama’, Lone Hand, 1 December 1908, pp. 233–7.
22 John Mansfield Thomson, A Distant Music: The Life and Times of Alfred Hill 1870–1960 (Auckland: Oxford University Press, 1980).
23 Ashley Heenan and Alfred Hill in conversation, Radio New Zealand recording, 1951. Alexander Turnbull Library [ATL] MSD0433, LC2150 & 2151.
24 Peter Downes, The Pollards: A Family and Its Child and Adult Opera Companies in New Zealand and Australia 1880–1910 (Steele Roberts: Aotearoa New Zealand, 2002); Tom Pollard, ‘Biography’, MS-Papers-2796, ATL.
25 Downes, The Pollards.
26 See Ian Dicker, J. C. W.: A Short Biography of James Cassius Williamson (Sydney: Elizabeth Tudor Press, 1974). Barnes's designs, while never fully realized, remain in the archives: Will R. Barnes, ‘Costume Designs for Alfred Hill's “Tapu”’, E382, Pictures and Drawings, ATL.
27 Daily Telegraph, 25 June 1904.
28 George Leitch, The Land of the Moa, edited and introduced by Adrian Kiernander (Wellington: Victoria University Press, 1990); Diana Looser, ‘The Fiery Pacific: Volcanic Eruptions and Settler-State Theatricality in Oceania, 1780–1900’, Theatre Survey, 55, 3 (2014), pp. 362–92.
29 Auckland Observer, 18 June 1904.
30 Ibid.; New Zealand Herald, 14 June 1904.
31 Alfred Hill's ‘Tapu’, unidentified clipping from Hill Mitchell Papers (press release/advance publicity for RCOC at His Majesty's Theatre).
32 Sydney Mail, 13 July 1904.
33 Oamaru Mail, 6 March 1903.
34 Timaru Herald, 4 March 1903.
35 North Otago Times, 6 March 1903; Evening Star, 9 March 1903.
36 Peter Harcourt, Fantasy and Folly: The Lost World of New Zealand Musicals, 1880–1940 (Wellington: Steele Roberts Ltd, 2002).
37 New Zealand Herald, 20 March 1908 (from a review of ‘Waiata Poi’).
38 See Thompson, A Distant Music; Schultz, Performing Indigenous Cultures; and the correspondence between Frederick Bennett, Makereti Papakura, and Alfred Hill in Alfred Hill Papers, MLMSS6357 Mitchell Library.
39 Michael Beckerman, ‘The Sword on the Wall: Japanese Elements and Their Significance in The Mikado’, Musical Quarterly, 3 (1989), pp. 303–19.
40 Henry Balme, ‘Between Modernism and Japonism: The Mousmé and the Cultural Mobility of Musical Comedy’, Popular Entertainment Studies, 7, 1–2 (2016), pp. 6–20. Tellingly, Hill's greatest popular success was another orientalist fantasia in comic opera form, The Moorish Maid.
41 Oamaru Mail, 6 March 1903.
42 Evening Star, 9 March 1903; Oamaru Mail, 6 March 1903.
43 Several critics felt the performance could have been improved by more make-up. Auckland Star, 15 June 1904.
44 Postlewait, ‘George Edwardes’ (2007).
45 Tapu is rather peculiarly omitted in Marianne Schultz's Performing Indigenous Culture on Stage and Screen: A Harmony of Frenzy (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016).
46 Peter Bailey, ‘Theatres of Entertainment/Spaces of Modernity: Rethinking the British Popular Stage 1890–1914’, Nineteenth-Century Theatre, 26, 1 (1998), pp. 5–24; Len Platt, Musical Comedy on the West End Stage, 1890–1939 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004).
47 Otago Times, 6 March 1903; Oamaru Mail, 6 March 1903.
48 Otago Daily Times, 12 March 1903.
49 Sydney Telegraph, 11 July 1904.
50 ‘Society Gossip’, New Zealand Graphic, 21 June 1904.
51 Arthur Adams was also well known for his 1904 patriotic novel Tussock Land (London: T. Fisher Unwin) which celebrated the New Zealander of the future as the progeny of a half-caste (white-appearing) woman and a Pākehā man. It is also worth noting that in the census-taking of the era, the category ‘Maori’ applied only to those living in rural Māori villages, while those ‘living as Europeans’ or self-identifying as such were categorized as white. ‘Acting white’ or ‘seeming white’ was a real-life cross-racial performance, which bestowed full citizenship upon the actor.
52 Tapu programme, Alfred Hill Papers, MLMSS6357 Mitchell Library, Sydney.
53 Sydney Times, 2 July 1904.
54 Sydney Telegraph, 2 July 1904.
55 Barbara Kirschenblatt-Gimblett, ‘The Ethnographic Burlesque’, TDR, 42, 2 (1998), pp. 160–80.
56 Tapu script, Alfred Hill Papers, MLMSS6357 Mitchell Library, Sydney, 6.
57 Ibid., 5.
58 Ibid., 6.
59 Evening News (Sydney), 18 July 1904.
60 Sydney Bulletin, 21 July 1904.
61 Sydney Morning Herald, 11 July 1904.
62 The Australasian, 27 August 1904; ‘If Tapu goes abroad it will make a wind that will blow tourists by the hundred down to the country where its scenes are laid.’ Sydney Bulletin, 14 July 1904.
63 The Mercury (Hobart), 24 March 1903; see also Tasmanian News, 24 March 1903.
64 Sydney Telegraph, 11 July 1904.
65 Sydney Mail, 6 July 1904.
66 J. C. Williamson to Alfred Hill, 10 March 1909, Alfred Hill Papers, MLMSS6357, Mitchell Library.
67 This description comes from the late Peter Harcourt's Fantasy and Folly, p. 234. I have been unable to locate the script in question: the collection of Hill's papers that Harcourt cites has been relocated twice since he completed his research, and none of the three institutions has any record of this specific document.
68 Werry, Margaret, ‘The Greatest Show on Earth: Spectacular Politics, Political Spectacle, and the American Pacific’, Theatre Journal, 58, 3 (2005), pp. 4–35Google Scholar.
69 Arthur H. Adams, ‘The Australian Drama’, Lone Hand, 1 December 1908, pp. 233–7.
70 J. C. Williamson's Life-Story in His Own Words (Sydney: NSW Bookstall Company, 1913), p. 29Google Scholar.
71 Hill's involvement with Māori musicians (including Frederick Bennett and the Māori Mission Choir, Te Rangi Pai, Princess Iwa (Grace Skerrett), and Makereti Papakura), and the success of his Māori-themed songs such as ‘Waiata Poi’ is well documented by Thomson (A Distant Music) and Schultz (Performing Indigenous Cultures).
72 McClintock, Anne, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (London: Routledge, 1995), p. 209Google Scholar.
73 Kruger, Loren, The National Stage: Theatre and Cultural Legitimation in England, France, and America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), p. 3Google Scholar.
74 Auckland Star, 13 June 1904.