In Dahomey in England: A (negative) transatlantic performance heritage

The first all-black American musical comedy on Broadway, In Dahomey (1902-1905), has made a name for itself in America’s theatre annals and in the history of black American performance. Although critics have written about the relevance of the show in America, investigations into this turn-of-the-century performance in its wider transatlantic context have lagged behind. This article examines the reception of In Dahomey in England through specifically British interpretations of race, This article examines the reception of In Dahomey in England through specifically British interpretations of race as a negotiation of blackness, across a spectrum of racialization encoded by the pervasively prevalent minstrel/song and dance show from America and, also, the impact of African colonisation. Thus I will situate the reception of In Dahomey in London as informed by multivalent sets of racial discourses incorporating the heritage of minstrelized stagings of race and the British colonial political and cultural machinery engaged in the production and negotiation of a set of racialized imaginaries for and of Africa and the African. British audiences did not see race in the same way as American audiences but, I argue, they were as driven by racializing strategies. The transatlantic racial narrative in England produced a series of discordant images across a matrix of blackness, negotiating slippage between black American and African. But, ultimately, as Gilroy argues, the “dislocating dazzle of whiteness,” effectively sought to affirm race (white/non-white) as the ultimate marker of difference, dislodging other forms of cultural plurality in establishing an apparently unassailable racial narrative. Thus, race, as racial difference, was the primary, almost exclusive, subject of scrutiny in the press reviews of In Dahomey. Despite claims made in the press of a brotherhood between black performers and white audiences in England, In Dahomey was categorized by reviewers as a form of minstrelized song and dance show entangled in a racialized hierarchy. This article argues that though In Dahomey was formulated with an uplift agenda, to challenge, subtly, racial prejudice, the show’s potential resistance to racialized stereotyping was, ultimately, eroded in England’s auditoria

Replaying and Rediscovering The Octoroon

For over one hundred and fifty years, productions and adaptations of Irish playwright Dion Boucicault’s explosive 1859 melodrama, The Octoroon, have reflected differing and sometimes contentious meanings and messages about race and enslavement in a range of geographic locations and historical moments. Originally staged in New York in 1859, The Octoroon graphically portrayed the suicide of its white-appearing mixed-race heroine who had been auctioned into slavery. But in London, in 1861, Boucicault famously rewrote the ending, allowing the heroine to survive and be united with her white lover. Although theatre historians have known about Boucicault’s original adaption for over one hundred and fifty years, no extant script for that original “British” version has heretofore been discovered. Now, however, our recent archival discoveries reveal portions of that long-missing script. In addition, we have found that The Octoroon appeared on the colonial stages of Australia a full ten months before Boucicault changed the ending for London audiences. Our exploration of the performance history of The Octoroon in Australia further illustrates the potential shifting meanings of racial categories and representations of enslavement in nations whose colonial histories were built upon differing constructions of racist oppression, genocide, and slavery. Moreover, annotations in promptbooks from multiple nineteenth-century productions reveal ways stagings of The Octoroon have served as unique fluid—rather than stable—vehicles for depicting the transatlantic and colonial cultural attitudes that surrounded and tensions that emerged from antebellum representations of racialization, racial hybridity, interracial desire, and enslavement on both sides of the Atlantic and across British colonies in Australia

Ira Aldridge in the North of England: Provincial Theatre and the Politics of Abolition

African American actor Ira Aldridge, was the first black performer that we know played Othello on English stages. From 1825 to his death in 1867, Aldridge performed throughout England, Scotland and Ireland and travelled across Europe, touring widely in Russia and Poland. Over the course of his forty-year theatre career, Aldridge succeeded in negotiating a series of complex political landscapes that circulated around his personal and professional life, significant because his performances as a black actor and as an actor playing black characters, were directly entangled with the coterminous history of racialized debates about slavery and abolition in the Caribbean and United States of America. Such debates were particularly relevant to three towns in England’s North West region – Manchester, Liverpool, and Lancaster – all directly connected to the material wealth of and ideological campaigning around slavery and abolition. Additionally, and pertinent to this essay, all three towns were also part of a cultural movement in provincial theatre, as regional centres determined to acquire rights of royal patent privilege to produce spoken drama, a privilege that had been granted only in London and only to the Theatres Royal of Drury Lane and Covent Garden. I argue, therefore, that Aldridge’s performances in Manchester, Liverpool and Lancaster, and the responses to them, speak to the confluence of abolitionist politics and theatre. I focus on Manchester, Liverpool and Lancaster, as locations overtly and specifically associated with the economic and cultural materiality of, as well political dispute about, the transatlantic slave trade, slavery and abolition. I explore, also, the influence of religious ideologies as well as cultural attitudes on regional politics and theatrical aesthetics. This is particularly relevant to investigations of theatre and race, given the anti-theatre stance espoused by Evangelical abolitionists, notably William Wilberforce. Such enquires into the role of theatre in regional politics and culture reveals splits and schisms over Britain’s involvement in the slave trade and enslavement, illuminating the crosscurrents of a significant national debate, articulating a fuller and richer understanding of the history and legacy of Ira Aldridge

Search for dark matter produced in association with bottom or top quarks in √s = 13 TeV pp collisions with the ATLAS detector

A search for weakly interacting massive particle dark matter produced in association with bottom or top quarks is presented. Final states containing third-generation quarks and miss- ing transverse momentum are considered. The analysis uses 36.1 fb−1 of proton–proton collision data recorded by the ATLAS experiment at √s = 13 TeV in 2015 and 2016. No significant excess of events above the estimated backgrounds is observed. The results are in- terpreted in the framework of simplified models of spin-0 dark-matter mediators. For colour- neutral spin-0 mediators produced in association with top quarks and decaying into a pair of dark-matter particles, mediator masses below 50 GeV are excluded assuming a dark-matter candidate mass of 1 GeV and unitary couplings. For scalar and pseudoscalar mediators produced in association with bottom quarks, the search sets limits on the production cross- section of 300 times the predicted rate for mediators with masses between 10 and 50 GeV and assuming a dark-matter mass of 1 GeV and unitary coupling. Constraints on colour- charged scalar simplified models are also presented. Assuming a dark-matter particle mass of 35 GeV, mediator particles with mass below 1.1 TeV are excluded for couplings yielding a dark-matter relic density consistent with measurements