19th Century Hood Pass (Dorothy's Blog) - Courtney

There seem to be several competing questions on Dorothy’s blog: How have black Americans been represented or performed by others? How have black Americans represented or performed themselves? And how do these representations and performances relate to questions of black “realness” and authenticity? This seems to be related back, although in a much more nuanced way, to Auslander’s distinctions between person, persona, and character. The levels of identity in the performance of race seem, in many of these representations to peel back in layers from the inauthentic to the ever and ever more authentic. Yet, in the course of Dorothy’s blog this model of black authenticity (as a construction or performance) is problem occuring on the level of representation.

How does Dorothy’s blog do this? One of the most powerful elements of Dorothy’s blog is her juxtaposition of photographic and cartoon representations of black faces and bodies. These images are scriptive in their own claims to realness. The caricatures represented in images like

A Black Woman, Anton Kannemeyer, 2010 (http://broadwayindahomey.tumblr.com/post/29999001579/blackcontemporaryart-a-black-woman-anton), and Swing Wedding (MGM, 1937, 7 min) Directed by Hugh Harman, Rudolf Ising (http://broadwayindahomey.tumblr.com/post/30000511527/swing-wedding-mgm-1937-7-min-directed-by-hugh) invite a reconsideration of the seemingly more truthful medium of photography. By juxtaposing these types of cartoons with photographs and “life-like” drawings such as Two Scenes from “In Dahomey” (http://broadwayindahomey.tumblr.com/post/29999530756), and Bert Williams and George Walker (http://broadwayindahomey.tumblr.com/post/29919830493/when-bert-williams-and-george-walker-first-began and http://broadwayindahomey.tumblr.com/post/29968173062/from-an-article-on-williams-and-walker-in-the) Dorothy scripts her audience’s reading of the authenticity of the photographic medium. Dorothy’s blog is a visual narrative of Laura Wexler’s point in Female Subjects in Black and White that “photography was part of the mater narrative that created and cemented cultural and political inequalities of race and class” (164). Questions of realness function both on the level of the black individual and on the level of the medium of representation. Or rather, what we are meant to see, perhaps, is the way that these two levels  are inextricable, that questions of identity are questions of representation. These scriptive images document performances of race, yet, hopefully, they also allow for a reconsideration of the realness of the images themselves.