Hey y'all! I'm a senior studying Environmental Science and minoring in Anthropology and Theatre Arts & Studies. Moving forward, I want to continue exploring how different artistic mediums can be used to build empathy and encourage open-minded and open-hearted conversations between people who live drastically-different lives and hold seemingly-contrasting beliefs.
My project is a living biography of Zora Neale Hurston, the reknowned anthropologist, folkorist, and novelist. I chose to focus on ZNH as she was in 1931, the year she was ready to publish Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo,” the story of Kossola (or Cudjo Lewis), the last survivor of the transatlantic journey.
I’ll give you some personal context. I am writing this living biography for the purposes of the National Great Blacks in Wax Museum whose mission is to “Reawaken people to the beauty of Black history.” As an Asian (adopted by white parents), I have had much to learn about Black experiences–not to be confused with The Black Experience. No experience–Black, Asian, etc.–is universal. There are numerous subgroups of Black, Asian, and all other races and there are dangers in grouping people based on any trait into monoliths. I still have much to learn about Black experiences–and the experiences of all other racial groups for that matter, including those who fall under “uncategorizable”–but one thing I do know now is that racism is nuanced and complex. In fact, it is so complex, an elaborate literature has grown out of it.
In this day and age, people can be very quick to judge and quick to “cancel.” I believe that ZNH would not do this, but would rather be slow to examine and slow to question. One thing I really appreciate about ZNH is that she appreciated racial differences and even explicitly wrote, “I have no race prejudice of any kind. My kinfolks, and my "skin-folks" are dearly loved.” I chose to focus on this aspect of her in my version of her living biography. Pulling mainly from her 1942 autobiography Dust Tracks on a Road and a little bit from her introduction of Barracoon, I took note that she spoke fondly of the friendships she had developed with white people in her life, all the while recognizing her experiences with racism. I also noted what she explicitly learned from Kossola about the diversity that exists within the monolith that is The Black Experience. ZNH appreciated racial diversity both across and within racial groups and hoped to bring people together, and I hope to do the same.
03/03/23 - On fostering empathy through art…
I wonder about how we can create art that speaks to people who we don’t agree with. I wonder how we can create art that speaks to these people without forcing them to agree with us, but simply invites them to listen…
A very nebulous idea that has been floating around in my head–that I have not yet sat down to write–centers on the notion of “home.” “Home” makes me think about how I moved around a lot during my childhood. It also makes me think of refugees–war refugees, climate refugees–and people who are displaced due to gentrification. At the heart of all of our experiences is this loss of home. This feeling isn’t political. The stories surrounding refugees and gentrification may be politicized, but the loss of home is not. If I sit down to write this piece, I hope I can get at something that speaks to people in a way that is unique to them. I hope that I can make a statement that is simultaneously political and radically apolitical. The politics can come later. I just want people to forget the politics for a second and feel something. I want them to feel connected. I want them to feel at home.
03/24/23 - On identity…
After reading Chapter 6 (Performance and/as Pedagogy) from Patrick Johnson’s Appropriating Blackness, I now feel less intimidated about playing a Black person in performance–not that Johnson has given me the “green light” to just go ahead and play the Other* (i.e., someone who has an identity other than mine, whether we differ in terms of race, sexuality, ability, etc.). I particularly appreciated Johnson’s example of Sally, a white student of his who performed the role of the mother in Alice Walker’s “Everyday Use.” He was respectful of her performance as well as the critiques of the Black students who were unhappy with her portrayal of the mother. He neither praised nor condemned Sally or the Black students. He recognized the students’ disdain and Sally’s unintentional stereotyping of the southern Black woman, but he also recognized that both Sally and her peers (Black or otherwise) had much to learn about what constitutes Blackness. Sally later said that she appreciated being able to engage in an honest conversation about race after her initial performance. I appreciate the grace he showed his students and the space he gave them to question their identities together throughout the semester. They became increasingly sensitive to the Other through the process of performance creation (and ultimately were able to experience union with the Other??).
Obviously, I am the only non-Black person in this class. Initially, I was definitely glad to not be white, but now I’m thinking that shouldn’t be the case. I think the class dynamics would be different if I wasn’t there, and they would also be different if I were white. I had worried that I was going to disrupt the class and prevent conversations from happening that might only happen in a group that’s entirely Black. Though I recognize that this may still be happening, I’m glad to know now that non-Black people can play important roles in conversations surrounding Black performance and Blackness, specifically by bringing to light the questions “What does it mean to be Black?” and “Who gets to authenticate Blackness?”
The question of what defines Blackness brings up the same question for all identities: What does it mean to be “Asian” or “white” or “straight” or “gay?” I heard that Foucault wrote about the emergence of sexuality as identity (as opposed to sex as action?), and I wonder how this applies to race, since race (not to be confused with skin pigment) is not genetic, but a social construction. Johnson tells us about how he came to realize his own Blackness when his white first-grade teacher referred to him as a “colored” boy (he later asked his mother what that meant at home): “More to the point, like others who come into their Blackness through trauma, it was a painful knowledge of identity (as opposed to learning it from my mother or James Brown) because it came to me as a reprimand” (251). This really resonated with me. Being an Asian person adopted by white parents, I’ve always considered myself a “banana:” white on the inside, “yellow” on the outside. I’m not sure when I started becoming more aware of my own Asianness, but I don’t remember a distinct moment the way Johnson did. He wasn’t aware that he was Black until that moment, and even in that moment, he didn’t fully understand the significance of what his teacher said. At the end of the day, I think he felt this sense of being Othered by his teacher, while simultaneously Othering his teacher for the first time(?). I think I’m in a state of limbo.
Johnson discusses who has the authority (legitimate or assumed?) to speak on Black texts and Black experiences and how he automatically is viewed by his students (and peers) as an authoritative figure, being a Black professor. He says, “Because of the association of the object of inquiry to the critic, certain readings become more “legitimate” than others. This is why many African American students resent having white professors teach them “Black” books, for in their minds these texts necessarily reflect a worldview and experience of blackness to which their white professors have no access. In these instances, black corporeality problematically becomes a prerequisite for reading black cultural production” (247). I’m still having trouble understanding this. He talks about how there’s a lot of grey area in terms of what it means to be Black and who can authenticate said Blackness, but I still don’t fully understand how to explain that it doesn’t necessarily make a white professor racist or in the wrong by teaching Black texts…
I am still concerned about how people will perceive performances of Black people by non-Black people. Even if the performers are aware that this doesn’t have to be an automatic no-no, it doesn’t mean the audience is, so how can we share what Johnson says with the audience? Perhaps a Q&A at the end?
04/06/23 - On performing ethnography…
In his essay, “Performing as a Moral Act: Ethical Dimensions of the Ethnography of Performance,” Dwight Conquergood discusses the morals surrounding and potential of ethnographic performance. He speaks on the potential power of embodying other cultures via performance, describing “empathetic performance as a way of intensifying the participative nature of fieldwork, and as a corrective to foreshorten the textual distance that results from writing monographs about people with whom one lives and studies” (2).
He moves to discuss four ethical pitfalls that performers of ethnography often come across (i.e., the Custodian’s Rip-Off, Enthusiast’s Infatuation, Curator’s Exhibitionism, and Skeptic’s Cop-Out). The Custodian’s fault is that they experience simultaneously strong attraction toward the Other and extreme detachment–the Custodian acquires and fails to genuinely inquire. The Enthusiast trivializes the Other by making the assumption that they and the Other share an identity–they generalize the Other and fail to notice what makes the Other distinctive from the Self. The Curator, on the other hand, is committed to recognizing the Difference between Self and Other, but focuses on astonishment over understanding. Finally, the Skeptic is committed to Difference and is detached, assuming the Other to be “irremediably inaccessible” (8).
As I read about the four pitfalls, different aspects of the pitfalls resonated with me: paradoxically, those being the Enthusiast’s “quicksand belief, ‘Aren’t all people really just alike?’ ” and the Skeptic’s perception that they are unable to empathize with the Other (6). Thus, I think I might be more susceptible to the Custodian’s pitfall: I am curious about / attracted toward the Other, but I feel detached, like I won’t ever be able to understand the experiences of the Other. I will never be the Other; I don’t have the same life experiences as the Other; thus, I’ll never be able to empathize with the Other. That said, what is acting if not “becoming” Others whom you are not? You pretend to be someone else. You don’t have to be that someone else. If people were only limited to playing themselves, then we wouldn’t have theatre or cinema.
Later in the text, I developed a new way of looking at empathy. I like to now think of empathy not as a full understanding of the Other, but an approach to full understanding. Empathy is an asymptote that can never be reached, but rather, can be approached. Conquergood references Clifford Geertz who describes “ethnographic understanding” (which I will equate to empathy) as such: “ethnographic understanding is more like… reading a poem–than it is like achieving communion” (11). The goal of the ethnographer, ultimately, is to bring “the enormously distant enormously close without becoming any less far away” (2).
This is the goal of “dialogical performance,” which Conquergood describes as bringing the Self and Other together, while holding them apart. Dialogical performance keeps the dialogue between (a) the text/interlocutor and performer/ethnographer and (b) performer and audience open. The Self and Other speak to each other and work WITH each other. The Difference between Self and Other is (a) recognized without being used as an excuse for an inability to develop empathy, and (b) used as a tool to reflect upon the Self’s preconceived assumptions about the Other. Conquergood compares the relationships generated in ethnographic fieldwork to those that are personal: “…as in personal relations, the illusion of fusion is sweet, but it is an illusion, and its end is bitter, to recognize others as others permits loving them better…Dialogical performance celebrates the paradox of ‘how the deeply different can be deeply known without becoming any less different’” (10).
04/12/23 - On my project’s relevance to public health...
The effects of the Transatlantic Slave Trade reverberate today and will continue to do so moving forward. We can’t go back in time and change history, but we can move forward and try to create a space where everyone, regardless of skin color etc., has the equal opportunity to live the life they want to live. In order to do this, however, we have to recognize that there is a problem in the first place. In telling one story (of millions) from the slave trade, Zora Neale Hurston and Kossula, together, engage in public health communications. In projecting the injustices Kossula faced starting the moment he was kidnapped til the end of his life, we get to see a detailed first-hand account of what it was like to be an enslaved African. We hear Kossula tell us about how his enslaver took advantage of him, when he was granted his freedom (it seemed like a very confusing experience), how his children and wife died (some of them due to lack of access to proper healthcare), and how the law was not there to protect him. Kossula pulls us back in time to show us that the injustices Black people face today existed long before the present. (And the history goes far beyond Kossula’s time–I believe back to the spread of Christianity via the Crusades…?)
Storytelling is vital to public health because how are we to know how to improve our public health system if we don’t hear stories about what’s wrong with it? If we don’t realize that the father of gynecology performed extremely unethical experimental surgeries on three Black women, we’ll continue celebrating him blindly. If we don’t share stories about how doctors tend to perceive Black people as having higher pain thresholds, how will doctors be able to recognize their own biases? Sure, we see the numbers, but where is the context? This is where storytelling comes in. Scientific articles aren’t accessible to everyone, but storytelling is. We need to tell people stories so they can empathize with the injustices in the health system. Numbers don’t stick. Stories do.
04/25/23 - On my living biography performance...
You have to get the audience to feel things, even if those things are uncomfortable. Make the audience uncomfortable! Make them feel things they don’t want to feel! Make them question how they live their lives! And it’s okay if they question you, as well!! That’s the perfect opportunity to better understand how your performance is being interpreted and understood so you can make necessary adjustments to portray your character more authentically.
It's interesting because the living biography is almost a weird mixture of giving a speech and acting. It’s partial improv (like in a speech) but you’re embodying somebody who isn’t you (acting).
I am still intimidated by the idea of having to KNOW Zora Neale Hurston inside and out. I feel like I have to read all of her books in order to understand her but I’m going to have to get over that. I just need to get more comfortable talking from her perspective (eventually without a script or notes). Moving forward, I want to add in what ZNH learned about “The Black Experience” from Kossula. I also want to focus more on her views on racism, her relations with non-Black people, and her hopes for the future.
In the video, you will see a segment of my performance of an early draft of my project for Blackstorytelling on April 18, 2023. In this draft, I had written the performance as an interview (with elements of a living biography) about Hurston's book, Barracoon: The Story of the Last "Black Cargo," in which Deborah G. Plant (who edited of the book; played by Justine Prince) and Alice Walker (who wrote the foreword; played by Rachel Mak) asked Hurston about her ethnographic methodologies in getting Kossula's story on paper. I directly quoted both Zora Neale Hurston and Deborah G. Plant. Some of the quotes I pulled from Deborah G. Plant were spoken by Hurston. In my final project, I cut the interview aspect and allowed Hurston to speak for herself.
