Introduction
The idea of performance can be a valuable paradigm for analyzing Dancing in the Dark in light of the obstacles that racism has put in the way of black Americans’ quest for cultural and personal satisfaction. The book does not seem to have anything in common with Phillips’ other books that discuss slave-related physical migration. Instead, Phillips explores the contradictions of racial stereotyping via the biography of Bert Williams, a man who believed that theatrical performance might be performativity in the fullest meaning of the term.
Bert Williams thought he could overcome the unseen gap between blacks and whites in society via performance. It is sufficient to regard the novel as a work of fiction that meaningfully contrasts language and theatrical performance rather than as a performance in and of itself. It emphasizes the discrepancy between the language of equality that Black artists sought to build and the racist reality.
The book as a genre frequently produces its impact by mimicking the methods of other creative genres or by examining the space between them. African-American writers have repeatedly attempted to overcome the various limitations imposed by language and writing by connecting music and fiction. The article will attempt to demonstrate how Phillips studies the paradoxes of black entertainment in the context of African Americans in Dancing in the Dark. This work heavily relies on writing. It will be accomplished by placing performance at the quiet center of the book and utilizing it to imply an impossibility of achieving self-actualization and an impenetrable gap between desire and satisfaction.
General Presentation of the Book
Phillips’ novel aims to investigate the conflict between literature and other forms of expression rather than to close the gap between them. Phillips explores the shaky line between using language to communicate creative aspiration and the societal factors that prohibit that ambition from being realized through his storytelling approach. Similarly, Caryl Phillips uses vocabulary to demonstrate how fleeting and imprecise it is. Additionally, the concept of performance may give an individual a framework for analysis that helps them to understand some of the aesthetic problems with Dancing in the Dark. Unfortunately, several critics have misunderstood it because of the rather contradictory perspective Phillips took when writing the book.
Bert Williams, a real performer, was once the most prominent and well-known black man in America. One of the things that drew Phillips to Williams was his fascination with a man who seemed to have left no trace on the streets of Manhattan. He has spoken of the difficulty brought on by having access to so little of Bert Williams’ private life. Philip makes a creative catch by attempting to fictionalize Bert Williams, whose real existence appeared to defy fictional treatment.
Comparing this contradiction to the issues presented by performance makes it possible to understand it from an aesthetic perspective. As to analyze Phillips’ fictional depiction of Bert Williams’ life, this article will draw on various performance theories discussed in debates of African American literature. Judith Butler’s notion of post-structuralism as it has been linked to gender and Houston Baker’s definition of culture performance as he provides it in Modernism and the Art Movement. One of these two approaches emphasizes the subversive potential of artistic performance, while the other places certain limitations on the notion of agency and the power of human expression.
Post Structuralism
Philip stresses that, unlike Jews, who established a Yiddish dish theatre as immigrants, black people had no comparable culture from which to borrow specific models. He adds that the early nineteenth-century practice of blackface minstrels impeded the development of what he describes as Negro ethnic theater (Phillips 22). From this perspective, it may be claimed that the minstrel tradition provided Blacks willing to adhere to it with an easy route to financial success. However, black deviance’s stronghold on the American imagination and emotions also placed restrictions on societal tolerance for it. This complex social context is the basis for Caryl Phillips’ fictional depiction of Bert Williams, which uses it to illustrate the entertainer’s life.
The expression of the relationship between public and private experience is where the novel’s structure creates the most important conflict. The performativity perspective of identity questions the line separating private and public expertise by proposing that every behavior may be interpreted in light of standards that render it visible to the critical eye. As it advocates for the punitive system that subject criminals, Michel Foucault criticizes the language of internalization (Phillips 54).
The division between the inner and the outer, private and the public, is the core tenet of the belief in creative creativity as a kind of agency. The entertainer’s artistic vision and the significance of the public conversation that made his demise unavoidable are both reflected in Phillips’ work. Therefore, it is through exploring the difficult line between the public and the private aspects of the entertainer’s existence in Dancing in the Dark.
Public and Private Dialogue
This storytelling method also blurs the line between public and private dialogue, highlighting how these distinctions are socially constructed. The most pernicious aspect of racism and segregation is how it subtly alters individuals’ perceptions of themselves, leading them to internalize the color line. Bert explains to Lottie, who is not yet his wife, early on in the book why he and his colleague George switched positions, with Bert taking on the clown’s character and George playing the straight person. Ironically, Bert’s internalization of the audience’s expectations will decide the repercussions of this discussion on him, not the fact that he was overheard. The narrator’s usage of the word performance emphasizes how the man’s public and private life gradually become mixed up. The word performance and related phrases like role and routine are utilized literally and symbolically.
The author has stressed the extremely reserved nature of someone who was once the most well-known performer in America. The argument over private vs. public experience raises a larger question regarding the novel’s fictional and biographical components. A biographer uses the facts of a person’s life to be an inspiration for a creative recreation of an intimate experience, whereas a writer explores personal thoughts and feelings. In Dancing in the Dark, Phillips attempts to strike a balance between historical and artistic impulses by analyzing how the racial tensions of the early 20th century affected the emotions of his characters through the use of indirect speech. Unfortunately, the extra-diegetic narrator makes the protagonists’ internal dialogue clear in a way that diminishes their intimacy and capacity for initiative.
Culture Performance
Like in his earlier works, Caryl Phillips uses discourse and language in Dancing in the Dark as both a part of the reality being depicted and part of the representation itself. Underneath the countless layers of painstakingly recreated discourse, such as in Crossing the River, lie the many myths created by slavery and its aftereffects and perpetuated by them. Phillips is an expert at illustrating with words how language has two sides and may drag people who trust in its power ever farther into darkness. Bert Williams’ performances of the characters in crossing the River are well-intentioned.
Still, they fall short of transforming them into a language for articulating a new idea of black identity. Like the characters, the words they use are constrained by the cultural meanings of the terms they use to express themselves. This should not be interpreted as a failure on the side of the actor or the author who fictionalizes him. Instead, it demonstrates Phillips’ awareness of how racism permeates both the public and private worlds, frequently impeding attempts by individuals to cross-racial borders.
Phillips looks at Bert Williams’s fruitless attempts to establish himself as an artist using a performance approach that ultimately confirmed preconceived notions. He aims to examine the effects of the race from a sociological standpoint and a performativity phase. Performativity is a crucial framework that enables using a common denominator to read many social behavior types, including language behavior. This method has the benefit of exposing patterns that are hidden under language’s social surface. However, it should not be utilized to analyze literature as just a continuation of the social conversation or as a reflection of its critical approach. If art has any significance, it represents an effort—however improbable—to delve under the surface of societal unrest.
Conclusion
By fictionalizing Bert Williams’ biography, Phillips aims to find a vocabulary that can support Williams’s ambition and remove him from that language to comprehend its limitations. He is making an effort to investigate the constraints and boundaries of Williams’s endeavor to break through the barrier that racial stereotypes have built up around black artists. The narrator uses words to illustrate Williams’ captivity to patterns over which he has no control and the desire and expectation that underpin all language.
Work Cited
Phillips, Caryl. “Dancing in the Dark.” Read Any Book, Paperback. 2005, p.224. Web.