Blackface and Critique. From T. D. Rice to Frederick Douglass Evelyn Annuß (Berlin) While stage appearances of the comic figure in the European commedia tradition potentially reflect the act of giving a face, the grotesque mask of white actors in American minstrel shows can be determined as a specific performative defacement othering African Americans to invent whiteness. But how does popular theatre as a potentially reflexive mode of performance become translated into these racist practices? Against the backdrop of the Black Atlantic, the transatlantic slave trade and the global history of racism, my paper focuses on the aesthetics of European and North American popular theatre of the early 19 th century from a comparative perspective. I will look at theatrical forms predating our notions of blackface minstrelsy in order to determine specific relations between marking and masking on stage. The objective of my paper is to contribute to the current German-speaking debate on performances in blackface by extending our focus to hitherto under-researched historical and geographical questions. Performances in blackface can be read as a breaching experiment of our understanding of the criticality of theatre - of its nondramatic as well as representational traditions. 1 In her reading of Michel Foucault ’ s What is critique? , Judith Butler refers to the possibility of an “ ethical questioning which requires that we break the habits of judgment in favor of a riskier practice ” 2 - a practice addressing the prerequisites of subjectivation. I would like to shift the focus of Butler ’ s suggestion from politics of the self in the later Foucauldian sense to the issue of signification and performativity prominent in her earlier work on queer parody. 3 The history of blackface as a cross-racial stage appearance prompts us, I would like to suggest, to reflect on the foundations of critical perspectives on performance practices in drag, i. e. as masquerade, as either transformative subversion or performative reification of social hierarchies. 4 As the German debate on blackface, which came to a head in 2012, claimed, the discourse on masking needs to be revised, decolonized and provincialized with regard to acts of marking, of othering. 5 However, this critique itself needs to be accompanied by a thorough analysis of differing theatrical forms and the comparative historicization of the uses of a specific mode of ethnic drag. In the 18 th century, blackface-on-black street violence committed by people of European descent became part of political demonstrations in the US. This may be seen as a precursor to the racist defacement of black characters in minstrel shows established as the first American mass culture during the 19 th century and popularized on a broader scale in the wake of the American Civil War in the 1860 s as a means of ex negativo re-defining whiteness. 6 Still, there is more at stake than tabooing black makeup on white skin as an allegedly unchanging hate theatre in reference to these forms of street violence and grotesque othering of dark skin on stage. In this paper, I will focus on the pre-history of minstrel shows: Some of the early prefigurations of blackface tie the dark mask of comic stage figures to aesthetics of referential aberrations subverting the prerequisite of biological racism gradu- Forum Modernes Theater, 29/ 1-2 (2014 [2018]), 64 - 72. Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen ally established at a time in which the boundaries of US-American whiteness become contested by the Euro-American underclass. 7 What complicates the critique of blackface is that it does not only stand for racist stereotyping of African Americans, affirming their political exclusion, but also for a strand of popular theatre that actually reminds us of the mechanisms of figuration and the possibilities of resignification. The performing history of blackface thus brings home the necessity of clarifying our notion of theatrical masking and the parameters of the critique of representation. The first section of my paper introduces an early North American coining of blackface, which differs from the overt defacement that determined the later minstrel mask and destabilizes the distinction between face and figure, artist and (stage) persona. The second section turns to its contemporary counterpart, the autobiography of a former slave, which rhetorically establishes a speaking black face calling for abolitionism by quoting blackface performance. Outperforming blackface, its rhetoric calls for a reconsideration of the presuppositions and consequences of our current debates on misrepresentation on the one hand and on non-dramatic theatre as aesthetics of political critique on the other. Face and Figuration In 1844, white comedian Thomas Dartmouth “ Daddy ” Rice from New York City ’ s Lower East Side appears on stage as a parody of Shakespeare ’ s Othello at the Chestnut Street Theatre in Philadelphia, a hotspot of American industrialization and a frontier city between the Northern and Southern states. 8 Rice is already a transnational celebrity of underclass theatre singing and dancing in blackface with several appearances in Britain. 9 He exemplifies the transcontinental entanglement of European popular theatre traditions and the ante-bellum development of a specific American popular culture against the backdrop of what Paul Gilroy calls the Black Atlantic, referring to the transatlantic trade in African slaves in the wake of European expansion and the establishment of the plantation system in the Americas. 10 The geographical in-betweenness of Rice ’ s performances and of his stardom is reflected in his stage appearance as Otello - without the Shakespearean “ h ” - in Philadelphia, of which we do not have any image. Rice ’ s “ illiterate ” Otello reacts to the polished reception of Shakespeare ’ s Trauerspiel by members of the educated classes, who had attacked him for his earlier performances in blackface - evoking expulsions of harlequins from the stage. 11 The argument here is about proper stage appearances and their respectable origin stories. To quote “ Colonel ” George Pope Morris from the New York literary magazine The Mirror in reaction to Rice ’ s performance as the blackface figure Gumbo Cuff: Let no one, however, suppose that Mr. Rice has taken a hint from Shakespeare; far be it from his original genius to borrow from any body; (. . .) we deem it no more than justice to inform the reader, that ‘ Gumbo Cuff ’ is not founded upon Shakespeare ’ s Othello. (. . .) We are staunch friends of native talent (. . .). We are very sincere in wishing manager, author, actors, musicians, supernumeraries, and others engaged in its production, all the success they deserve - a sound and glorious pelting from the stage, to the exhilarating melody of ‘ Jump, Jim Crow! ’ 12 The Mirror refers to what initiated the blackface craze: Rice ’ s New York branding of yet another Southern folklore figure - Jim Crow - in the 1830 s as the burnt cork interlude version of a limping runaway slave in ragged clothes singing and dancing to a syncopated, rather Polka-like melody: 65 Blackface and Critique. From T. D. Rice to Frederick Douglass “ Come listen all you galls and boys,/ I ’ s jist from Tuckyhoe. ” 13 Fig. 1: “ Mr. T. Rice as the Original Jim Crow ” , by Edward Williams Calay (Harvard Theatre Collection, The Houghton Library) Rice answers the Mirror critique by signing an open letter as “ the Ethiopian Vocalist, and severely criticized Dramatist, Jim Crow ” . 14 In his response, Rice speaks through the black mask, through the figure of what he calls “ the lowest classes ” , to make fun of the defenders of White Anglo-Saxon Protestant culture in the name of “ New York Desdemonas ” . 15 He mocks the attempt to speak on behalf of a decent audience personified by white women, who need to be protected from rascal theatre, to promote literary drama against a rather corporeal mode of performance considered obscene and therefore to be driven off stage. As Walter T. Lhamon Jr. points out, Rice ’ s Jim Crow figure “ proved too slippery and multisignificant to police. ” 16 Consequently, Rice doubles down on letting referentiality go astray in his letter as well. He extends his stage appearance to a public argument about theatrical aesthetics and the mediality of masking. While assuring the Mirror that his “ representation is as carefully studied from life as any ever brought upon the stage ” 17 Rice underlines his harlequinlike rhetoric, which exposes referential aberrations, by signing the letter in the name of his stage persona. His letter thus questions not only the representational claim of the Mirror, but of his own speaking position. In this sense, the Jim Crow signature can be read as a continuation of the non-dramatic aesthetics of popular theatre exposing the process of figuration Rice stands for. In 1844, he once more responds to the educated defenders of contemporary Shakespearean, i. e. representational, blackface in drama against popular theatre. He appears on stage as the main character in a burlesque opera written by himself, quoting - amongst others - Maurice Dowling ’ s Othello Travesty, one of the many parodies published at the time the Mirror attack came out. 18 Quoting a popular British version of Othello, Rice ’ s black mask is used as a Lumpen trickster against dominant WASP culture. And Desdemona, the icon of an exclusive notion of whiteness in need of protection, is exposed as a spectre. Rice ’ s Otello version doubly inverts racist projections and calls into question who speaks on stage. Singing in an artificial dialect that mingles New York street and Southern plantation slang, his Otello criticizes the black community because of their prejudices against his lover, against Desdemona ’ s whiteness by nature: Otello (second verse) Black folks from sheer vexation Will grumble at me a few; And call dis ‘ malgamation 66 Evelyn Annuß (Berlin) Well, I don ’ t care damn if they do. (pause) If i hab no objection, What de debil ’ s dat to dem? You can ’ t help your complexion; Nature made you as well as dem. 19 Othello ’ s stage appearance transposes Elizabethan cross-gender performances and confusion comedies into ethnic drag. Rice not only relocates Othello in a contemporary North American context, but reflects this act of transposition in changing the plot once more. In contrast to Shakespeare ’ s Trauerspiel, Rice invents an offspring of Desdemona and Othello and ends in happy miscegenation bringing Desdemona back to (after-)life. Rice is definitely not a spokesperson for anti-racism. According to Jenna M. Gibbs, he rather exploits “ his local audiences ’ political persuasions ” . 20 And as Douglas A. Jones Jr. points out, there is an 1837 article in the Baltimore Sun echoing a curtain speech, which can be read in defence of slavery against British abolitionists. According to the Sun, Rice calls himself “ a fair representative of the great body of our slaves ” . 21 But even this pun alluding to his fair skin corresponds with his harlequinesque appearances as Jim Crow, reflexively subverting the dispositif of representation by blurring the distinction between actual face and theatrical figure. Rice ’ s burlesque opera harbours what is kept latent in the bourgeois Shakespeare reception of the time: While Othello is translated into dramatic theater of illusion on respectable stages and read as the tragedy of miscegenation, Rice restores Shakespeare ’ s entanglement with popular theatre traditions. As Susan Faherty has shown, Shakespeare ’ s Othello quotes figures of the commedia dell ’ arte. 22 One could even read his puns on race - on the “ sooty bosom ” 23 of a “ horned man ” 24 - as the afterlife of the mask of the Arlecchino, the comic figure of the commedia tradition. The horned and dark mask of the Arlechino is said to refer to carnevalesque depictions of the devil and to the appearance of impoverished farmers in Italian cities, resembling the dirty face of those forced into precarious labour conditions. 25 In the wake of the British expansion around 1600, Shakespeare translates commedia aesthetics into his rhetoric using his puns to explore the gradual racialization of skin colour as marking someone through othering ascriptions. 26 Two hundred and fifty years later, while American society is swept by commercial, transportation and industrial revolutions, 27 Rice continues this exploration by turning blackface into a signifier, a “ mutual mark ” 28 , of the working poor. It is a time of radical change in which the plantation system, rendered possible by the transcontinental slave trade, clashes with the effects of capitalist industrialization and with claims to extend democracy to the entire population. The black mask of Rice ’ s comic figure is racialized in the context of what Achille Mbembe calls the invention of “ the Negro ” as the figure of precarity in modern capitalism. 29 In turning it against drama - queering so to speak the identification of face and figure on stage, i. e. exposing the arbitrariness of referentiality and the foundation of figuration, this still folkloristic form of ethnic drag in musical theatre established prior to the grotesque defacements of racial stereotyping in later minstrel shows destabilizes representational readings of the black mask. Rice ’ s early coining of blackface within the context of a society in turmoil still aligns itself with the commedia tradition quoted by Shakespeare and undermines contemporary drama as well as phenomenological “ knowledge ” production by exposing the act of figuration as uncontainable. However, fooling with referentiality for fun is something not everybody may be able to afford. What does this imply with regard to our understanding of the relation between blackface and critique? 67 Blackface and Critique. From T. D. Rice to Frederick Douglass Defacement and Critique Mediated through their afterlife in backstage movies about vaudeville theatre from the 1920 s, grotesque masks on white actors ’ faces define our image of performances in blackface. As, for instance, a film poster of the first sound movie, The Jazz Singer from 1927, shows, this mode of blackface defacement works by stressing eyes, mouth and hands, while, at the same time, turning the dark mask into background. Figuration and defacement coincide in reference to blackness. Its flipside is the individualized face presented in the all-white backstage story framing the blackface act and targeting a specific audience. This mode of framing exemplifies a genre shift from popular theatre tradition to film drama countering Rice ’ s folkloristic harlequin figure in ethnic drag. Michael Rogin shows how the Jazz Singer uses the black minstrel mask to dramatize the story of the integration of a secondgeneration Jewish immigrant actor into white North American popular culture, redefining and thereby extending the notion of US-whiteness in the 1920 s. 30 Figurating “ the other ” grotesquely becomes the precondition for integrating one ’ s so far excluded self as a protagonist into the dominant culture of the white melting pot. 31 The act of masking may be exposed, but it confines the black mask to the stage scenes and the actual face of the actor to the realm of white backstage. In contrast to Rice ’ s non-dramatic aesthetics, the dispositif of this use of blackface is thus representational. By framing the blackface act, the film attempts to produce stable referentiality in contrast to Rice ’ s gig. Read in this context, however, Rice contests our current understanding of political theatre as subverting representation. In a chapter on “ Political Theater ” in her book The Art of Freedom, Juliane Rebentisch discusses contemporary German director René Pollesch ’ s work as criticizing political representation: According to Rebentisch, it exposes representation as representation on stage and underlines that there is no authentic face speaking on behalf of a collective entity. 32 Rebentisch ’ s call for aesthetics as political critique may target some of the arguments of today ’ s blackface critics and their clear distinction between black mask and white face, between racist and proper representation. But what does this critique of representation imply if we look back at a social context in which people are reduced to bare life and are therefore also denied a democratic existence, a political subject position - a social context in which blackness is defined as a non-speaking position, as being excluded from the political stage? In 1848, four years after Rice ’ s Otello debut, the famous abolitionist and former runaway slave Frederick Douglass attacks performers of European descent in blackface in his anti-slavery weekly journal North Star Fig. 2: The Jazz Singer (1927) 68 Evelyn Annuß (Berlin) as “ the filthy scum of white society, who have stolen from us a complexion denied to them by nature ” . 33 Read in the context of his autobiography published three years before by the Boston Anti-Slavery Society, his article seems to criticize a specific mode of masking that may endanger his efforts to authenticate himself as a valid spokesman of the enslaved and disenfranchised population. From the very first sentence on, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself - the most influential North American ante-bellum slave narrative - stresses the political need for genealogy and individual histories - for a valid position of a speaking I. 34 In his autobiography published in 1845 Douglass turns the rhetorical figure of the narrator into an exemplary figure speaking on behalf of those excluded from political participation. The birth of the former slave's I seems to be secured by the autobiographical genre - a genre like drama concealing its mediality and that is read by Paul de Man and others as a paradigm for a rhetorical masking which dismisses the act of reference production. 35 However, Douglass, who “ took great liberties with the facts of his life ” , 36 knows about the strategical use of staging himself with a black face. In 1846 Douglass tours England on behalf of abolitionism and writes to a friend: “ I find I am hardly black enough for British taste, but by keeping my hair as wooly as possible I make out to pass for at least half Negro at any rate. ” 37 One year before, Douglass opens his autobiography in a way that implicitly gives an insight into the foundations of his own possibility of criticizing slavery in a context in which a strategic speaking position is required: I was born in Tuckahoe (. . .). I have no accurate knowledge of my age, never having seen any authentic record containing it. By far the larger part of the slaves know as little of their ages as horses know of theirs, and it is the wish of most masters within my knowledge to keep their slaves thus ignorant. I do not remember to have ever met a slave who could tell of his birthday. 38 Douglass translates New York Daddy Rice ’ s Jim-Crow-hit “ I ’ s jist from Tuckyhoe ” into “ the master ’ s ” language for the sake of a political argument. It is not so much his birthday as his birthplace that is at stake here. Rice plays with the toponym of Tuckahoe because it refers to different places in the South as well as in the North, e. g. in the New York area, where Rice himself had come from to stage himself as a Southern fugitive slave in frontier theatre. Douglass reminds Fig. 3: Frontispiece of Frederick Douglass from the first edition of Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave. Written by Himself (1845) 69 Blackface and Critique. From T. D. Rice to Frederick Douglass us that there is a crucial difference between being born in Tuckahoe in the North or in the South for African Americans and that fooling happily with referential aberrations may be a luxury not everybody has access to in every place. 39 Still, the prominent quotation also bears witness to his knowledge of the performative character of the speaking black I. Douglass practices the critical art of quoting without quotation marks, mocking the star of burnt cork and using his theatrical aesthetics of destabilizing referentiality to resignify blackface as the birth of the speaking face on behalf of the subaltern. 40 In his response, Douglass proves that Rice ’ s black mask indeed cannot sustainably be policed, but rather produces unexpected offspring. What we can learn from Douglass ’ art of critique inherent in the strategic essentialism of his autobiography is not just that “ the filthy scum of white society ” criminally neglects the violent social preconditions of performing in blackface. Douglass at the same time claims that even in a context of utmost strategic necessity for political representation people are able to reflect on its slippery foundations, on its theatricality so to speak. Against the backdrop of the current debate on performances in blackface we need to keep Douglass ’ blackface legacy in mind, because his art of critique attacks social exclusion by acknowledging the performative precondition of resignification and political change. Notes 1 On distinguishing non-dramatic theatre traditions from drama in the Hegelian sense, i. e. the dialogic representation and illusionary incorporation of dramatis personae, see Hans-Thies Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, New York 2006. On the alienation effects of breaching experiments, see Harold Garfinkel, “ Studies of the Routine Grounds in Everyday Activities ” , in: Studies in Ethnomethodology, Prentice-Hall 1967, pp. 35 - 75. 2 Judith Butler, “ What is Critique? An Essay on Foucault ’ s Virtue ” (eipcp.net/ transversal/ 0806/ butler/ en/ print, [accessed 1 May 2001]; see also Michel Foucault, “ What is Critique? ” , in: The Politics of Truth. ed by Sylvère Lotringer, Los Angeles 2007, pp. 41 - 81. 3 See Judith Butler, Gender Trouble. Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York 1990. 4 See Katrin Sieg, Ethnic Drag. Performing Race, Nation, Sexuality in West Germany. Ann Arbor 2009, p. 12. 5 See Christopher B. Balme, “ Shitstorms and Blackface ” , in: The Theatrical Public Sphere, Cambridge 2014, pp. 168 - 173; Joy Kristin Kalu, “ Dein Blackface ist so langweilig! Was das deutsche Repräsentationstheater von den Nachbarkünsten lernen kann ” (www.nachtkritik.de/ index.php? option=com_content&view=article&id=10271: in-sachen-blackfacing-zwischenruf-zu-einer-andauernden-debatte&catid=101: debatte&Itemid=84 [accessed 26 November 2014]; Hanna Voss, Reflexion von ethnischer Identität(szuweisung) im deutschen Gegenwartstheater, Marburg 2014, pp. 85 - 131. Regarding the specific history of German performances in blackface see Frederike Gerstner, Inszenierte Inbesitznahme: Blackface und Minstrelsy in Berlin um 1900, Stuttgart 2017. 6 See Jake Austen and Taylor, Juval, Darkest America. Black Minstrelsy from Slavery to Hip Hop. Foreword by Mel Watkins, New York 2012; Annemarie Bean, James Hatch and Brooks McNamara (eds): Inside the Minstrel Mask. Readings in Nineteenth-Century Blackface Minstrelsy, Middletown 1996; Walter T. Lhamon, Jr., Raising Cain. Blackface Performance from Jim Crow to Hip Hop, Cambridge/ London 1998; Eric Lott, Love and Theft. Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class, New York 1993; John Strausbaugh, Black Like You. Blackface, Whiteface, Insult & Imitation in American Popular Culture, New York 2006. 70 Evelyn Annuß (Berlin) 7 On the relation between the establishment of blackface minstrelsy and the “ growing transatlantic acceptance ” of phrenology, see Jenna M. Gibbs, Performing the Temple of Liberty. Slavery, Theater, and Popular Culture in London and Philadelphia, 1760 - 1850. Baltimore 2014, pp. 208 - 209. 8 See Walter T., Lhamon, Jr., Jump Jim Crow. Lost plays, Lyrics, and Street Prose of the First Atlantic Popular Culture. Cambridge/ London 2003, pp. 31, 70 - 90. 9 On the specific relation between London and Philadelphia in transatlantic theatre history, see Jenna M. Gibbs, Performing the Temple of Liberty, on T. D. Rice in particular see pp. 197 - 212. 10 See Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic. Modernity and Double-Consciousness, Cambridge 1995. 11 On the contested status of Shakespeare in 19th-century USA and the nativist, anti- British appropriation of his plays, see Cliff, Nigel: The Shakespeare Riots. Revenge, Drama, and Death in Nineteenth-Century America. New York 2007. Regarding the distinction between Trauerspiel and Tragödie, see Benjamin, Walter: “ Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels ” , in: Gesammelte Werke I.1. Frankfurt a. M., p. 205 - 430 (misleadingly translated as The Origin of German Tragic Drama). 12 The New York Mirror, 5 October 1833, p. 110; quoted in Lhamon, Jump Jim Crow, p. 20. 13 See Lhamon, Jump Jim Crow, p. 95. On the use of Scottish and Irish melodies in blackface minstrelsy, see Charles Hayword, Negro Minstrelsy and Shakespearian Burlesque, Hatboro 1966, pp. 78 - 79. 14 The 1833 letter is quoted in full in Lhamon, Jump Jim Crow, pp. 21 - 23, here p. 23. 15 Ibid., p. 22. 16 Ibid., p. 3. With regard to the class-specificity of multisignificant receptions, see also Dale Cockrell, Demons of Disorder. Early Blackface Minstrels and Their World. Cambridge 1997, p. 82. 17 Ibid., p. 23. 18 See T. D. Rice, “ Otello. A Burlesque Opera ” , in: Lhamon Jump Jim Crow, pp. 343 - 383 (based on a manuscript copy transcribed by John B. Wright, dated April 1853; New York Public Library, Billy Rose Collection, NCOF +). See also Maurice G. Dowling, Othello Travestie. An Operatic Burlesque Burletta. London 1834. On Rice ’ s quoting of Dowling, see Mahar, William J.: Behind the Burnt Cork Mask. Early Blackface Minstrelsy and Antebellum American Popular Culture, Urbana/ Chicago 1999, p. 102. 19 Rice, “ Otello ” , p. 357. 20 See Gibbs, Performing the Temple of Liberty, p. 209. 21 Quoted by Douglas A. Jones, Jr.: “ Black Politics but Not Black People. Rethinking the Social and ‘ Racial ’ History of Early Minstrelsy ” , in: TDR 57: 2, 2013, pp. 21 - 37, here p. 34. See also Gibbs, Performing the Temple of Liberty, p. 210. 22 See Susan Faherty, “ Othello dell ’ Arte. The Presence of ‘ Commedia ’ in Shakespeare ’ s Tragedy ” , in: Theatre Journal 43: 2, 1991, pp. 179 - 194. 23 William Shakespeare, Othello, the Moor of Venice, edited by Michael Neill, Oxford 2006, Act I, Scene 2, Verse 70, p. 213 (Brabantio). 24 Shakespeare, Othello, Act IV, Scene 1, Verse 58, p. 329 (Othello). 25 See Karl Riha, Commedia dell ’ arte. Frankfurt a. M. 1980, p. 29. 26 See Doris Kolesch, “ Wie Othello spielen ” . Jahrbuch der Shakespeare-Gesellschaft 152, 2016, pp. 87 - 103. 27 See Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, The Violent Empire. The Birth of an American National Identity, Williamsburg 2010. 28 Lhamon, Jump Jim Crow, p. 6. 29 See Achille Mbembe,Critique of Black Reason. Durham 2017. 30 See Michael Rogin, Blackface, White Skin. Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting Pot, Berkeley 1999. 31 This mechanism seems to be already at work with regard to minstrelsy and its close connection to the Irish community in the later 19 th century. On Irish performers in blackface, see Jennifer Mooney, Irish Stereotypes in Vaudeville, 1865 - 1905. New York 2015, pp. 30 - 39; on the relation between black- 71 Blackface and Critique. From T. D. Rice to Frederick Douglass face minstrelsy, the production of a white American working class and Irish immigration, see David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness. Race and the Making of the American Working Class, with an Introduction by Kathleen Cleaver, London/ New York 1991, pp. 115 - 163. 32 See Juliane Rebentisch, The Art of Freedom: On the Dialectics of Democratic Existence, Cambridge 2016. 33 Frederick Douglass in North Star, 27. 10. 1848; see Lott: Love and Theft, p. 15. 34 See Fred Moten ’ s problematization of the relation of blackness and performance in his implicit counter-narrative of the slave Betty who refuses to speak up in court, thereby losing the possibility of being freed from slavery: “ Blackness and Nonperformance ” . MoMa Talk: Afterlives, 2 September 2015 (www.youtube.com/ watch? v=G2leiF- ByIIg). 35 See de Man, Paul: “ Autobiography as Defacement ” , in: MLN 94: 5, 1979 (Comparative Literature), pp. 919 - 930. 36 McDowell, Deborah E.: “ Introduction ” , in: Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, written by himself, Oxford 2009 (reissued). pp. vii-xxvii, here p. ix. 37 Douglass quoted in Eric Lott, Love and Theft, p. 245: fn. 39; in reference to Martin, Waldo E., Jr.: The Mind of Frederick Douglass, Chapel Hill 1984, p. 116. 38 Douglass, Narrative. 39 On the illegalization of teaching African Americans to write in the wake of the violent revolt organized by Nat Turner in Virginia in 1831, see Gibbs, Performing the Temple of Liberty, p. 183. 40 On the African tradition of resignification and its correspondences with literary deconstruction, see, Henry Louis Gates, Jr.: The Signifying Monkey. A Theory of African- American Literary Criticism, New York and Oxford 1988. 72 Evelyn Annuß (Berlin)