“Blackface Lynchings”: Performing Black Deaths and Eerie Intersection in Suzan-Lori Parks’s Lincoln Plays

This article explores the portrayal of two black Lincoln impersonators in Suzan-Lori Parks’s The America Play and Topdog/Underdog to examine the limited potential of their cross-racial performances. Reversing the racial/racist dynamics of the minstrel show, the black performing the white can serve to debunk and rebuke the exploitative intentions inherent in blackface masking. The ritual of black man assassinated every night in Parks’s two Lincoln plays, however, serves as an eerie yet revelatory site where two American racist institutions—blackface minstrelsy and lynching—intersect, juxtaposing symbolic rites of scapegoating in blackface with the corporeal violence of lynching. Reminding the audience of collective memory of lynching, each black minstrel’s performance might only replicate a punitive structure embedded in minstrelsy. This article argues this thwarted endeavor paradoxically accuses a genocidal white psychology behind blackface by locating the relevance of the two black Lincolns’ performances to the historical theatre of blackface minstrelsy in the fatal clash between theatre and reality, culminating in the chaotic and unmediated confrontation with death as an embodied reality. De-familiarizing and problematizing “that expanse” between the symbolic and literal death implied in these historical racist spectacles, Parks’s two Lincoln plays force the audience to confront the racialized trauma embedded in America’s cultural memory while simultaneously questioning the ethics of its representation and consumption.