White Rebels in Black by Priscilla D Layne

Author:Priscilla D Layne [Layne, Priscilla]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Michigan Press

Punk and Circumstance

Similar to Slumberland, Mark Stewart’s musical Passing Strange also confronts Germans’ stereotypes about black popular culture.22 However, while Beatty dramatizes the conflict around national identity between white Germans and black Germans, Passing Strange outright rejects a German identity dependent on whiteness given that all of the characters are played by black actors. Presenting an all-black Europe also challenges the reader’s notions of a stable identity because the same actors who play black Los Angelenos at the start of the musical become Dutch in Amsterdam and German in Berlin.

The (in)stability of race and identity is a theme that Passing Strange has in common with Slumberland. The protagonist of Passing Strange is simply referred to as “Youth.” Since it is a semiautobiographical piece, the name suggests that this is the younger self of the narrator, who is played by the musical’s creator, Mark Stewart.23 The generic name “Youth” could also be a reference to the common practice of using such general names for characters in Weimar-era expressionist and later in the situationist street theater of the late 1950s and early 1960s. The name makes the protagonist a universal figure with whom many can identify. After all, Youth’s progression from adolescent rebellion against his background to acceptance and love for his family is a common journey across many cultures.

Although Passing Strange begins several years earlier than Slumberland, in the late 1970s, there are several similarities between Youth and Ferguson. Youth is also an African American male raised in a middle-class family with a love of music, and he, too, has grown dissatisfied with LA’s eternal sunshine and feigned happiness. Youth describes himself as coming from “a big two-story, black middle-class dream [with] . . . manicured lawns, [and] some saving bonds,”24 a stark contrast to the poverty-stricken images of African Americans that circulated in Germany in the 1960s and 1970s. Youth’s conflict with his mother arises because he does not want to follow the straight-and-narrow path laid out for him. While he wants to play music and travel the world, his mother would be happiest if he would go to church regularly and marry the upstanding Edwina. A carbon copy of his mother, Edwina portrays their future life together as living in “a sprawling two-story house fulla African sculptures from tribes we know nothing about, kente cloth couch covers, and Malcolm X commemorative plates lining the walls of our airy, peach-colored breakfast nook!!!” (PS 19). While these objects are supposed to ground Edwina’s middle-class dream in black popular culture, they are still dehistoricized, decontextualized, and stripped of any political meaning connecting them to African American history.

Youth’s mother is most representative of the strict African American tradition, and it is through her that Stewart plays with familiar stereotypes of black popular culture. At the beginning of the musical, the character “Mother” is introduced to the audience speaking black vernacular in a southern accent: “Lawd ham mercy, child, look at cho head! Look jus’ like a feathuh bed! Now let go dat pillow! Leave dat dangerous dream be.

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