In this article I argue that Douglas Sirk’s maternal melodrama, Imitation of Life (1959), advances an ideology whereby Black women are equated with and consigned to domestic labor. The film features two mother-daughter pairs, one Black and one white. The Black mother, Annie, works as a maid for the white mother. Annie’s light-skinned daughter, Sarah Jane, passes as white to avoid following her mother’s condition. But Annie’s death at the film’s end seems to bring a contrite Sarah Jane back to her subservient place in the white family. I consider Imitation in relation to nineteenth-century traditions of racial melodrama and current theories of Black materialism to trace how US labor practices worked with discursive systems such as the movies to make the “Black maid” ubiquitous and the modifier unnecessary. Moreover, the structural inequality that relegates Black women to service requires them to act as if they are free agents within a rigged system: that is, to perform an imitation of life. However, the Black characters seize agency from a scopic economy of pleasure founded on Black women’s embodied pain and labor. The emotional power of Annie’s funeral, heightened by Mahalia Jackson’s performance as choir soloist, appropriates melodramatic sentimentality and subverts Sirk’s intended irony to convey Annie’s value on a different scale. Sarah Jane’s protest through passing registers despite her capitulation after Annie’s death because Sirk’s technique for criminalizing her backfires. The film weaves elements of noir, including striptease, into the visual register to construct her as a dangerous femme fatale. But Sarah Jane inverts the narrative’s attempt to strip away her whiteness by making Black servitude the costume, not the essence. Thus, she destabilizes the racial binaries asserted by the tragic mulatta conventions. By theorizing Black agency in scripted performance, revealing Imitation’s hybrid genre of melodrama noir, and reconsidering representations of Black women’s labor, this essay contributes to work in Black materialism and Black feminist performance studies.

中文翻译：

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表演作品：女仆、情节剧和模仿黑色电影的生活

在这篇文章中，我认为道格拉斯·西尔克的母性情节剧《模仿生活》（Imitation of Life，1959 年）提出了一种意识形态，即黑人女性被等同于并被委以家务劳动。这部电影有两对母女，一黑一白。黑人妈妈安妮是白人妈妈的女仆。安妮的浅肤色女儿莎拉·简 (Sarah Jane) 以白人的身份出现，以避免追随她母亲的状况。但安妮在电影结尾的死似乎让悔恨的莎拉·简回到了她在白人家庭中屈从的位置。我将模仿与 19 世纪的种族情节剧传统和当前的黑人唯物主义理论联系起来，以追溯美国的劳工实践如何与电影等话语系统协同工作，从而使“黑人女仆”无处不在，而修饰语变得不必要。而且，将黑人妇女降级为服务的结构性不平等要求她们在被操纵的系统中表现得好像她们是自由人一样：也就是说，模仿生活。然而，黑人角色从建立在黑人女性体现的痛苦和劳动基础上的享乐经济中获得了代理权。安妮葬礼的情感力量，由玛哈莉亚·杰克逊作为合唱团独奏者的表演增强，挪用了戏剧性的多愁善感，颠覆了瑟克有意以不同规模传达安妮价值的讽刺。尽管莎拉·简在安妮死后投降，但莎拉·简通过登记册提出抗议，因为瑟克将她定为犯罪的技巧适得其反。这部电影将包括脱衣舞在内的黑色元素编织到视觉记录中，将她塑造成一个危险的蛇蝎美人。但莎拉·简颠倒了叙述试图通过使黑人奴役成为服装而不是本质来剥夺她的白人的企图。因此，她动摇了悲惨的混血儿公约所主张的种族二元论。通过对剧本表演中的黑人机构进行理论化，揭示模仿黑色情节剧的混合类型，并重新考虑对黑人妇女劳动的表现，本文有助于黑人唯物主义和黑人女权主义表演研究的工作。