Enacting Others: Politics of Identity in Eleanor Antin, Nikki S. Lee, Adrian Piper, and Anna Deavere Smith

339 Pages·2011·10.74 MB·English

by  Cherise Smith

Enacting Others

Enacting Others
Politics of Identity in
Eleanor Antin,
Nikki S. Lee,
Adrian Piper,
and
Anna Deavere Smith
Cherise Smith
Duke university Press
Durham & London 2011
© 2011 Duke University Press
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper ♾
Designed by Jennifer Hill
Typeset in Chaparral Pro by Tseng Information Systems, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data appear on the
last printed page of this book.
Duke University Press greatly appreciates the support of the University
of Texas, Austin, in the publication of this book.
Duke University Press gratefully acknowledges a University
Co-operative Society Subvention Grant awarded by the University
of Texas, Austin, which provided funds toward the production of
this book.
For
G and S
and
W and B

Contents
ix Preface
xiii Acknowledgments
1 Introduction
1
27 “The Politics of My Position”
ADriAn PiPer AnD Mythic Being
2
79 The Other “Other”
eleAnor Antin AnD the
PerformAnce of BlAckness
3
135 “Other-Oriented” Performance
AnnA DeAvere smith AnD
twilight: los Angeles
4
189 Nikki S. Lee’s Projects and the
Repackaging of the Politics of Identity
233 Conclusion
243 Notes
277 Bibliography
293 Index

Preface
The ideas delineated in this book grew out of insights gained
from the course “Cyborgs and Synthetic Humans” taught
by Scott Bukatman in the fall of 1999 at Stanford Univer-
sity.1 In the course of my duties as a teaching assistant, I
came to realize that many science fiction texts are thinly
veiled allegories that meditate on racial difference and iden-
tity. Human characters are surrogates for whites: they and
the fictional societies in which they are embedded are de-
picted as normative and sought after. By contrast, non-
human characters are substitutes for blacks: they are por-
trayed as possessing key differences, such as superhuman
strength or subhuman intelligence, which normalize their
powerless and debased position in the fictional social peck-
ing order. These narratives typically take one of two courses:
they advocate for integration and tolerance by encourag-
ing viewers (who are always presumed to be white) to see
the “humanity” in nonhuman characters, or they promote
the maintenance of strict boundaries between humans and
nonhumans in order to preserve the established hierarchy.
I was eager to apply that framework to Ridley Scott’s Blade
Runner (1982 and 1991)—the ever-popular film based on
Phillip K. Dick’s novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
(1968) and to which considerable critical energy has been