Reviewed by:

• Staging Haiti in Nineteenth-Century America: Revolution, Race and Popular Performance by Peter P. Reed
• Andrew M. Pisano

Peter P. Reed's Staging Haiti in Nineteenth-Century America contributes a much-needed, richly researched examination of how the Haitian Revolution influenced antebellum American imaginings of race and rebellion on both the stage and page. Reed's work carefully builds on the recent transatlantic theater scholarship of Matthew Clavin (2008), Lauren Clay (2013), Michael Dash (2005), Marlene Daut (2012), Elizabeth Maddock Dillon and Matthew Drexler (2016), Laura L. Mielke (2019), and others to further probe the "deep ambivalence" (Reed 2022, 9) in how the "dangerous open secret" (10) of the Haitian revolt was represented on the American stage. With the influx of French refugee performers into eastern American cities and increasingly sensational reporting circulating through the American press, there is little wonder as to why, in the first few decades of the nineteenth century, race and revolution became imaginative fodder for American playwrights, performers, and writers. America, too, was embroiled in clashing currents of abolitionist rhetoric, pro-slave legislation, and threats of slave revolt, in some measure inspired by the Haitian Revolution. The 1811 German Coast Slave Revolt, for example, one of several American slave revolts noted by Reed, is evidence of the tumultuous climate in slave-holding states in the US following the events in Haiti. [End Page 286]

Reed carefully lays out these complex American contexts via a variety of primary texts such as paintings, etchings, pamphlets, essays, and other ephemera. A key painting for Reed is J.L. Boquet's Pillage du Cap Français en 1793. This painting adorns the cover of Reed's book and serves as an important entry point in the book's introduction indicating how the Haitian Revolution was portrayed as performative even in the first generation of artistic representation following the uprising. Reed's use of Boquet's painting and its almost carnivalesque imagery is especially valuable in laying a credible, critical foundation for his thesis. In addition, Reed thoughtfully uses secondary research from historians, theater scholars, and literary scholars to interrogate how a vexed notion of Haitian identify is refracted onto the American stage at a time when questions of abolition and perpetual bondage seemed hopelessly unsolvable without civil war among the states.

In what Reed terms "playing Haitian," actors performed "Haitianness" in a variety of ways, although a few commonalities persisted (2022, 10). Much of the stage play involved an "open-endedness" and "incompletion" in the performance which Reed argues are key traits in staging Haiti during this period. Indeed, the lynchpin for Reed's argument, effectively sustained throughout the book, is that "playing Haitian often has the qualities of rehearsal rather than finished performance" (11). Sometimes these performances were done in blackface, capitalizing on popular minstrelsy tropes, as examined in chapters one and four of the book; other times, though, as discussed in chapter three, theatricality and minstrelsy merged with the burlesque to showcase unstable themes of race, class, and gender roles in plays such as J.H. Amherst's Death of Christophe, King of Hayti (1821). In 1825, New York born black actor Ira Aldridge assumed the lead role in London productions of the play which Reeds focuses on as an intriguing look into the Black Atlantic world of theater. In Death of Christophe, as in other primary examples studied by Reed, there is no clear thesis for theater audiences; rather, the play concludes—like the events in Haiti and then on-going arguments over the politics of race in America—as messy, unresolved, and ambivalent. However, by the 1850s the Haitian Revolution figured into a less abjectly race-caricatured, exoticized imaginative form. American writers such as Herman Melville seized on the socio-political implications of the Haitian uprising as a means of interrogating America's inability to contend with its own reliance on slave labor and the still very real threat of slave revolt. [End Page 287]

Moving from the stage to the page, Reed's concluding...

审阅者：

• 在十九世纪的美国上演海地：革命、种族和大众表演作者：Peter P. Reed
• 安德鲁·皮萨诺

彼得·P·里德（Peter P. Reed）的《在十九世纪的美国上演海地》对海地革命如何影响战前美国人对舞台和页面上的种族和叛乱的想象做出了急需的、经过丰富研究的考察。里德的作品精心建立在马修·克拉文（2008年）、劳伦·克莱（2013年）、迈克尔·达什（2005年）、马琳·多特（2012年）、伊丽莎白·马多克·狄龙和马修·德雷克斯勒（2016年）、劳拉·L·米尔克（2016年）、迈克尔·达什（2005年）、马修·德雷克斯勒（2016年）、 2019）等人进一步探讨了海地起义的“危险的公开秘密”（10）如何在美国舞台上表现出来的“深深的矛盾心理”（Reed 2022，9）。随着法国难民表演者涌入美国东部城市以及美国媒体上越来越耸人听闻的报道，毫不奇怪为什么在十九世纪的最初几十年里，种族和革命成为美国剧作家、表演者的想象力素材和作家。美国也卷入了废奴主义言论、支持奴隶立法和奴隶起义威胁的冲突潮流，这在某种程度上是受到海地革命的启发。例如，1811 年德国海岸奴隶起义是里德指出的几起美国奴隶起义之一，它证明了海地事件后美国奴隶持有州的动荡气氛。[完第286页]

里德通过绘画、蚀刻画、小册子、散文和其他短暂的文本等各种原始文本，仔细地展示了这些复杂的美国背景。里德的一幅重要画作是 JL Boquet 的《Pillage du Cap Français en 1793》。这幅画装饰了里德的书的封面，并作为该书引言中的一个重要切入点，表明即使在起义后的第一代艺术表现中，海地革命也是如何被描绘成表演性的。里德对博凯的绘画及其近乎狂欢节的图像的使用对于为他的论文奠定可信的批判性基础尤其有价值。此外，里德深思熟虑地利用历史学家、戏剧学者和文学学者的二次研究来质疑海地身份的恼人概念是如何折射到美国舞台上的，当时废除奴隶制和永久奴役的问题似乎在没有内战的情况下无法解决。状态。

里德所说的“扮演海地人”，演员们以多种方式表现“海地人性”，尽管仍然存在一些共性（2022, 10）。舞台剧的大部分内容都涉及表演中的“开放性”和“不完整性”，里德认为这是这一时期海地演出的关键特征。事实上，里德的论点的关键是“演奏海地通常具有排练的品质，而不是完成的表演的品质”（11），这在整本书中得到了有效的体现。有时，这些表演是用黑脸进行的，利用了流行的吟游诗人的比喻，正如本书第一章和第四章中所探讨的那样；但有时，正如第三章所讨论的，戏剧性和吟游诗人与滑稽表演相结合，在 JH 阿默斯特的《海地国王克里斯托夫之死》（1821 年）等戏剧中展示了种族、阶级和性别角色的不稳定主题。 1825 年，出生于纽约的黑人演员艾拉·奥尔德里奇 (Ira Aldridge) 在伦敦制作的这部戏剧中担任主角，里兹重点关注这部戏剧，以引人入胜的视角审视大西洋黑人戏剧世界。在《克里斯托夫之死》中，正如里德研究的其他主要例子一样，对于剧院观众来说，没有明确的论点；相反，该剧的结论就像海地事件以及随后关于美国种族政治的持续争论一样，是混乱的、悬而未决的和矛盾的。然而，到了 1850 年代，海地革命变成了一种不那么卑鄙的种族讽刺、异国情调的想象形式。赫尔曼·梅尔维尔等美国作家抓住了海地起义的社会政治影响，以此来审视美国是否无力应对自身对奴隶劳动的依赖以及奴隶起义仍然非常现实的威胁。[完第287页]

从舞台转向纸面，里德的结论是……