To Make You Feel Something: Analyzing Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s An Octoroon
Location
King Building 339
Document Type
Presentation
Start Date
4-28-2017 4:30 PM
End Date
4-28-2017 5:50 PM
Abstract
My research investigates the relationship between representations of blackness and audience reception, using the play An Octoroon by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins as my case study. The play is an adaptation of Dion Boucicault’s 1859 classic The Octoroon, which chronicles the lives of the residents of the Louisiana plantation, Terrebonne. Jacobs-Jenkins’s adaptation is controversial for its use of blackface, redface, and whiteface, along with the explicit racial language used by the characters, all of which is part of Jacobs-Jenkins’s intention to “make you [the audience] feel something.” I will use the concept of the “black body” as constructed by the theorist Harvey Young to interrogate the ways in which Jacobs-Jenkins uses his black characters (those played by black actors and those in blackface) to achieve his goal of making the audience “feel something.” Harvey Young claims that the “black body” comes into being when popular connotations of blackness are mapped across or internalized within black people. By understanding the myriad ways that an audience can follow Jacobs-Jenkins’s intentions for his audience (ranging from walking out of the theater to critically praising the play), I intend to highlight the ways that performances of blackness are judged and used to reify existing racial hierarchies.
Keywords:
theater, blackness, spectacle, affect and emotion
Recommended Citation
Moaton, Anthony, "To Make You Feel Something: Analyzing Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s An Octoroon" (04/28/17). Senior Symposium. 42.
https://digitalcommons.oberlin.edu/seniorsymp/2017/presentations/42
Major
Performance Studies (IM)
Award
Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship
Advisor(s)
Caroline Jackson Smith, Theater; Africana Studies
A.G. Miller, Religion
Project Mentor(s)
Matthew Rarey, Arts of Africa & the Black Atlantic
April 2017
To Make You Feel Something: Analyzing Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s An Octoroon
King Building 339
My research investigates the relationship between representations of blackness and audience reception, using the play An Octoroon by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins as my case study. The play is an adaptation of Dion Boucicault’s 1859 classic The Octoroon, which chronicles the lives of the residents of the Louisiana plantation, Terrebonne. Jacobs-Jenkins’s adaptation is controversial for its use of blackface, redface, and whiteface, along with the explicit racial language used by the characters, all of which is part of Jacobs-Jenkins’s intention to “make you [the audience] feel something.” I will use the concept of the “black body” as constructed by the theorist Harvey Young to interrogate the ways in which Jacobs-Jenkins uses his black characters (those played by black actors and those in blackface) to achieve his goal of making the audience “feel something.” Harvey Young claims that the “black body” comes into being when popular connotations of blackness are mapped across or internalized within black people. By understanding the myriad ways that an audience can follow Jacobs-Jenkins’s intentions for his audience (ranging from walking out of the theater to critically praising the play), I intend to highlight the ways that performances of blackness are judged and used to reify existing racial hierarchies.
Notes
Session III, Panel 15 - Black | Authorship
Moderator: Gillian Johns, Associate Professor of English and Africana Studies