Article
Why on earth are you talking like an extra from The Wire?
Alt. theatre
(2019)
Abstract
In the performing arts, Frantz Fanon’s chapter on the lived experience of the Black man in Black Skin, White Maskshas been particularly generative. In oft-quoted passages, Fanon perceives that he has been fixed “by the legends, stories, history and above all historicity … battered down by tom-toms, cannibalism, intellectual deficiency fetishism, racial defects, slave-ships” (Ibid. 112). He illustrates his point by suggesting that young Blacks in the Caribbean could go to the movies and identify with Tarzan against the anonymous Blacks positioned in the background of the mise-en-scène, but the Black migrant in the West finds it more difficult to do so because “the rest of the audience, which is white, automatically identifies him with the savages on the screen” (Ibid. 152-3 n15). In Europe and North America, where social scientists go about their work collecting data on gang violence, and journalists chronicle Black children raised outside of two-parent homes as evidence of a supposed cultural pathology, one quickly learns that one cannot be Black without problems.
What is to be done in a context that has failed to develop a coherent and nuanced notion of a Black adult? In societies in which the Black man “among his own has no opportunity, except in minor internal conflicts, to experience his being through others” (Ibid. 109)? In a world in which all Blacks are “always-already an-other … each Black stands in for and substitutes for all other Blacks” (Keeling 2003: 95)?
Keywords
- The Wire,
- Frantz Fanon,
- Black Canada
Disciplines
Publication Date
2019
Citation Information
Daniel McNeil. "Why on earth are you talking like an extra from The Wire?" Alt. theatre Vol. 15 Iss. 2 (2019) p. 10 - 15 Available at: http://works.bepress.com/danielmcneil/34/