Currencies of Cruelty:
Slavery, Freak Shows, and the Performance Archive
by Danielle Bainbridge (NYU Press)
Even as not an easy read in terms of material the author keeps finding new, more sophisticated ways of looking at the facts, in ways that make it hard to put down.
This book is about the exhibition of people in U.S. sideshows in the 19th Century. They are mostly Black and mostly disabled, but in all cases the condition of their bodies is part of the attraction (their enfreakment). While the histories of the book’s subjects are under-represented in the public consciousness, this is not a book of biography, though it doe provided a lot of biographical data. Rather, the author looks at these people as performers, and the already strange locus of control that creates (performer versus audience) made still stranger by law and time.
A through-line here is that the act of performance was a means of maintaining or exerting control in a world where the people themselves did not have it, either legally for the ones who were enslaved or as subjects of a sideshow and outside of an idealized norm on many different levels. A lot of the study here is about their legal battles or contract disputes, which often provide better means to read between the lines of their work than their (auto-((?)))biographies.
These people performed in order to create value as performers, and looked to emphasize their performance. This forced an audience to appreciate them as talented individuals who could express those talents for an audience, rather than objects. Or at least it gave an edge to it where their skills rather than their bodies were what was marketable, which provided more control over their futures. We should see it as both savvy self-branding and ways of escaping the sorts of the various social constraints put on them.
Or that is where the book I think works the best. The central topic is more about how we reckon with this in contemporary society. This primarily is in the form of the capital A-archive of their work. The author uses the term ‘future perfect’ to describe this sort of way in which the material we have is what was meant to be preserved for future memory, with both its context being affected by the historical audience and the historical audience’s perception of a future audience. This intersects with the notion of performance, in that you can see the ways that the people looked to subvert, employ, or were bested by it.
How was their records kept of their work and why? How did what they do try and subvert or control that? How should we now address their work? This last bit also covers contemporary performance, include the author’s own, about the performers and other Black people in history. There is always a tension in these performances, (what is the ethical freak show?), that becomes deeply tangled up in the commodification of Black bodies in general. It is pointedly not something where the author provides an answer as much as an analysis of theirs and others goes at it. Some sound interesting, some sound misguided.
The book is good. The strongest sections are on the theory of the performances, as the author creates a theoretical structure that applies in general, but becomes clearest in the acts of performance for this sort of sideshow. It is a book that encourages a deep empathy for its subjects, in showing how they did not want to be subjects but actors, and what they may have been able to manage to make that the case.
My main critique is more about the avenues of further study that the work here suggests. I readily admit this has to do with my own context, but there are points where the book makes sociological clams that I want to consider from a historical or materialist way. For instance, to contrast performance and archive is as much a question about technology as it is about ideas. Likewise, I feel like like the sort of analysis that the author aptly uses on the extra-performance materials needs to be applied to the performances themselves.
The only real problem here is that the book keeps trying to make fetch happen by a novel lexicon, the most notable of which being the term “future perfect,” which is plain distracting. At best, the author is taking big ideas that deserve a treatment focused only on the terms as opposed to fusing them into this work. At worst it blows up any value in the concepts that they suggest by dragging in irrelevant baggage.
My thanks to the author, Danielle Bainbridge, for writing the book, and to the publisher, NYU Press, for making the ARC available to me.
CITATION HEEDED 