On November 1 1920 in a tiny playho...

On November 1 1920 in a tiny playhouse onward Macdougal Street, the Provincetown Players wowed audiences with Eugene O'Neill's newest play, The Emperor Jone The company's reputation for innovation and disputation was outdone by this latest performance. In the first week of the production, critics from major newspapers, who generally gave next to the first billing to off-Broadway shows, clamored along with centurys of other patrons to have a peek at the Emperor: "They are turning away dozens. commonalty squat on their coats forward the hard and not immaculate floors, or sit cheerfully forward radiators, or stand patiently for pair hours while the tragedy of fear of a african porter and ex-convict, turned primitive man again, spread outs itself before the fascinated imagination" (Castellun 1)

The Emperor Jones's even of success is legendary. In the first week alone more than undivided thousand subscrip tions were sold and the uniqueness of the production cat apulted it to Broadway. The play also transformed Eugene O'Neill, largely an unknown, into the Great American playwright, or as Heywood Broun of the of the present day York Tribune wrote:

"Perhaps we ought to be a little more courageous and say right without the best of American playwrights, however somehow or other a superlative carries the implication of a certain static quality. We not see a play by O'Neill without feeling that something of the sort will be done better within a season or in this way and that O'Neill will doit" (1)

Touring continuously during the 1920 The Emperor Jone be delighted withed numerous revivals in various recent York theatres. In 1933, the same year the film version premiered, Louis Gruenberg transformed the play into an opera for the Metropolitan Opera. Additionally, there have been a seemingly incalculable number of productions of the play from one side of to the other the last eighty years. The Emperor Jone was also twice adapted for the radio, first in 1971 and then in 1990 with James Earl Jone playing the title role1 principally recently, in 1999, the Library of Congres announced that it would allocate grant foundations received from the Pew Charitable Trust for the restoration of "the renowned 1933 film starring Paul Robeson" (Library). The play now pervades critical race theory syllabi in U universities.2 Because the play has been explicitly and tacitly counted a significant object of U cultural history and a narrative meriting preservation, analysis of The Emperor Jone must be ethical, focusing in succession the reasons for the "distance between what is and what ought to be" (de Certeau 199 emphasis added).

Nevertheless, in its early inceptions, the play was not embraced through all of its audiences. In an anecdote not seldom cited by contemporary critics, Langsten Hughes enumerateed a Harlem audience's distaste for the play in their shouts: '"Why don't you issue on out o' that thicket - back to Harlem where you belong?'" (Pfister 130) Likewise, Charles Gilpin, the African American actor who created the part of the Emperor, was recurrently forced to shield what some considered a negative characterization of African Americans (Krasner 189-205)

The Emperor Jone also received mixed answers from prominent African American cultural leaders in the 1920 Occasionally, these critics were smooth ambivalent within a single criticism. structure Du Bois, Alain Locke, James Weldon Johnson and Jean Toomer all illustrationed on the play, but as theatre scholar Susan Curtis notes, principally concerned themselves with praise of Gilpin rather than with conspiracy analysis or even explication (217) The reasons for these guarded analyses remain debatable, on the other hand they do indicate the difficulty faced by the agency of African Americans in negotiating desired visibility, stereotype and representation.3

Since the play's premiere, the narrative has been embroiled in a debate regarding the representation of race forward the U.S. stage and in film. However, critical analysis has almost exclusively focused upon the implications of racially marked portraits forward the play's male bodies.4 Absenting sex issues from the discussion has serv to efface racism's symbiotic relationship with sexism, heterosexism, and the analogies of inferiority that sustain oppression.5 While The Emperor Jone transposes Stereotypie "black" and "white" male parts in order to expose race as a social institute or rather to purport that any man can be white or black, it simultaneously maintains the racially marked, form relative to sexed roles of female characters based forward skin color - Darwinian derived theories of biological determinism. Thus, it creates a vision of racially marked boundary deconstruction as an exclusively masculine possibility. Moreover, in this play, racial mobility is inextricably jump to, in Luce Irigaray's word s the circulation of women as the two material and reproductive capital (170) Examining the female characters in the play as a mechanism for male racial mobility show in one's real lights "whiteness" as a gendered universal - that is, masculine.

In what run afters I offer a sketch, which draws onward concepts from feminist anthropology, of the ways in which race relations and capitalism in the United States advance to construct categories of woman. From this perspective, I will examine the racially marked, sexed representations of women in The Emperor Jone as constitutive of male racial mobility. Finally, I will investigate the material results of blackface and black self-representation in the original production of The Emperor Jone as potentially further inscribing race and sex value on the female carcass Thus, I complicate the debate surrounding race representation in popular cultivation through recognition of gender and sexuality as constituting vital airs of race.