Abstract
The amount of academic research on the portrayals of African Americans in the media has surged in recent years, with scholars investigating the representations of African Americans in popular films and television shows and the ways that African Americans have navigated a segregated and stereotypical industry. Additionally, the study of black masculinity has gained attention in recent years, particularly with the presidency of Barack Obama. Michelle Ann Stephen’s Skin Acts: Race, Psychoanalysis, and the Black Male Performer brings these conversations together, adding an important layer to this analysis by drawing academic attention to the meaning of the skin through the lens of psychoanalysis. Through four case studies of the vocal and cinematic routines of black male performers, including the early 1900s minstrel performer Bert Williams, the 1930s singer Paul Robeson, the 1950s singer and actor Harry Belafonte, and reggae musician and 1970s star Bob Marley, Stephens aims to “understand…blackness at its most material signifier, the skin, as the site of sensory, interpersonal contact and racial, intersubjective knowing” (2014: 29). To this end, she utilizes a wide array of visual texts in her analysis including album covers, cartoons, film stills, and photographs, which are included throughout the book.
Stephens’ main argument is that black male performance underscores the ways that the white gaze aims to locate and understand racial and gender differences as essentialized features of the body, best understood by the skin. To this end she states, “The flesh represents the body that sits on the very edge, on the underside, of the symbolic order, pre-symbolic and pre-linguistic, just before words and meaning” (2014: 3). She brings Frantz Fanon’s idea of the epidermalization and the white gaze into conversation with Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytical framework. In doing so, she expands contemporary racial theory by contending that the gaze, color complexion, and physiognomy alone are not enough to explain the cultural success of these artists. Rather, it is the intersubjective and sensuous notions of the flesh that connect the audience and the performer.
Each chapter focuses in-depth on one performer. It is within these pages where Skin Acts particularly excels, as Stephens succeeds in placing these four performers within their cultural moment. Stephens argues that the historical context is essential for shaping the strategies that the performers utilize to reclaim the black male body. She contends that although the performances of Williams and Robeson are shaped by the reimagination of the black self in the wake of emancipation and reconstruction, Belafonte and Marley are shaped instead by decolonization, indicating a shift in the meaning of black male performance across the twentieth century. Black male performers came to represent the relationship between race relations and the boundaries of the political–cultural norms of the decade, making their performances a particularly interesting microcosm of larger social forces.
Although it would be easy to lose the connection to masculinity within the focus on race and the politics of the skin, Stephens treats masculinity closely within her analysis, particularly through the psychoanalytic concept of phallicization. Although masculinity is often thought of as something that can transcend skin, Stephens argues that each of the performers that she investigates includes an element of gender relations within their performance, coming together in black masculinity. In doing so, she adds the concept of embodiment to Lacanian psychoanalysis.
The book is well written and rich with analytic detail regarding each of the four case studies, particularly through the use of visual materials. Skin Acts is a valuable contribution to the literatures of race, psychoanalytic theory, masculinity, and performance. However, the book’s heavy reliance on psychoanalytic theory may limit its accessibility for readers without a working knowledge of Lacanian psychoanalysis.