Amy Beatrice Huang
Brown
Amy Beatrice Huang is a PhD candidate in the department of Theatre Arts and Performance Studies at Brown University. Her dissertation explores nineteenth-century performances of spectacular secrecy in relation to projects of national belonging, racial oppression and dispossession. She has presented work at various venues including C19, MELUS and ASTR.
In this age of online harassment and commercial and government surveillance, it may well be time to reconsider our histories and theories of privacy and secrecy. Our current climate animates our return to the roots of liberal privacy in the nineteenth century with the intention of thinking anew about possibilities lost along the way. We tend to assume that privacy and the private sphere serve only to sanctify conventional forms of intimacy, domesticity, and property, though scholars including Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner, Stacey Margolis, and Katherine Adams have complicated this understanding. But as privacy rights wane today, we might begin to question this consensus. What might we gain through a renewed inspection of and investment in the secret, clandestine, and private worlds of the nineteenth century?
This roundtable charts new understandings of secrecy across the nineteenth century in response to the new political and cultural climate today. Scholars like Jedediah Purdy, Sisella Bok, and Simone Browne will guide the questions of this roundtable. Much as Purdy has characterized the conflicting uses of nature in After Nature: A Politics for the Anthropocene (2015), secrecy is both essential and dangerous; it protects and destroys individuals, groups, and what we think we know. Likewise, in Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness (2015), Browne argues that modern surveillance and its techniques are inextricably intertwined with histories of slavery and racism, and that African Americans have long resisted this surveillance through techniques of disguise and secrecy. This panel aims to think about the nineteenth century through these new theories of secrecy and privacy, and show how they make possible new ways of imagining – and potentially transforming – the field’s approach to questions of secrecy and privacy.
Each roundtable participant will speak on the following topics:
Amy Beatrice Huang: Following William Wells Brown’s suggestion in 1847 that were he to tell the history of slavery, he would have to “whisper it to you,” I track how playwrights staged anti-slavery sentiment in a whisper, privately rehearsing race to protest its more public portrayals. While scholars such as Catherine Burroughs have importantly showed how closet dramas trouble norms of gender and sexuality, I further link such plays’ ambivalent approach to the stage to representations of racial oppression. I trace how they move beyond the spectacular scene, delineating the spatial and temporal reach of slavery’s systemic violence. How do private encounters with closet dramas implicate spaces such as the home and theatre as invisibly and secretly—and yet enduringly and intimately—connected to propagating slavery and racial capitalism?
