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WE CAN WELL understand William Wells Brown's fascination with the mulatto-looking Joseph Jenkins, native of Telga, sold into slavery nine times before being brought to England by his master, and where he has to find ingenious ways to earn his living after his master's death. Jenkins performs different roles with a seeming ease unthinkable for most African-Americans in antebellum America for whom the number of roles they could perform was limited. Yet, as Brown also recognizes, Jenkins is constrained to perform in order to survive. The idea of blackness as performance is also captured well by Harriet Beecher Stowe who, several times in Uncle Tom's Cabin, has characters perform a Jim Crow act for their white masters. As the above examples suggest, ideas of race as performance have been central to the thinking of and about African-Americans in antebellum America. But although AfricanAmericans have long had to perform different racial roles in order to survive, it is only recently that the idea of the performative as an explanatory paradigm for questions of identity has gained wide and popular currency Performativity retains agency at the same time as it critiques essentialist notions of identity Identity is what it is performed as. Performativity is mobile, shifting, and polymorphous, inherently destructive of hierarchical cultural and social binary categories, the main one, as Judith Butler has demonstrated, being that of gender.3 As a theory of identity, performativity also differs from other contemporary theories. Postmodern, Marxist theories such as Althusser's explain the process of subjectification through the operation of interpellation via ideological state apparatuses; postmodern, psychoanalytic theories of identity celebrate a Lacanian split subject; and cultural postmodern theories of identity such as Gloria Anzaldua's emphasize location. Performativity, however, celebrates agency, an act of choosing and becoming in the here and now. And through performance, the category being performed becomes highly unstable.
But although performativity has been effectively marshalled to question the permanence and ubiquity of gender and race categories, questions of access and power have often been overlooked.4 The idea of gender as infinite performance, as rebellious carnival, for instance, pays little attention to the pains and problems associated with performing. More importantly, questions of who performs, for whom, for what ends, and who benefits, seem to have been left...