The Amalgamation Waltz: Race, Performance, and the Ruses of Memory

Performance studies finds itself in unlikely yet productive places in Shane Vogel’s The Scene of Harlem Cabaret: Race, Sexuality, Performance and Tavia Nyong’o’s The Amalgamation Waltz: Race, Performance, and the Ruses of Memory. Both books participate in an ongoing transAtlantic turn in black performance studies exemplified in books such as Daphne A. Brooks’s Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Performances of Race and Freedom, 1850– 1910 (2006), an important consideration of 19th century transAtlantic black performance, and Jayna Brown’s Babylon Girls: Black Women Performers and the Shaping of the Modern (2008), a significant examination of modern black dance history’s international dynamic. Exploring the ways performances reshape locations and offer modes of social, class, and racial stratification, Vogel’s book leverages the term “cabaret” to evoke both particular places, “from the bohemian streets of Paris to the jook joints of the Deep South before finally settling in Harlem,” and a specific tradition, the “Cabaret School” of artists and writers associated with the Harlem Renaissance: “a queer literary tradition that is deeply embedded within performance practices and culture” (43, 6). Through the flexibility of the term “cabaret,” Vogel’s book asserts the political power of a bastardized space. Working similarly along the edge between the material and the symbolic, Nyong’o’s book refashions Michel Foucault’s motif of the fold. As Nyong’o explains, “This fold, as reduplication, is both an operation of discourse and a historical event” (18). The fold is used to designate both discursive and social practices. Adapting Foucault’s term for black diasporic purposes, Nyong’o’s book explores “the circum-Atlantic fold” which “names the period and the problematic that appears between the potential and the performance of emancipation” (18). Without naming a particular location, The Amalgamation Waltz uses the spatial resonance of the term “circum-Atlantic” to comment on historiography and the ripples in the circum-Atlantic fold’s unfolding. Similarly, Vogel examines the cabaret as a place and as a source of imaginative possibility.