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Gertrude Stein’s White Wines: Performing (Off) Whiteness, (Un)Voicing Racist Language

This discussion reflects on the politics of whiteness in relation to Jewishness by comparing performances of a play by Gertrude Stein that re-inscribes racist language but at the same time points up performative, non-essentialist, habitual understandings of race. It refracts these politics through a Poet's Theatre performance of Stein’s play in the context of other performance events around Habits of Assembly by Corin Sworn, a contemporary art work exhibited at the 2019 Edinburgh Art Festival. Installed in and speaking to the famous neo-classical sculpture court of Edinburgh College of Art, Sworn’s work (a Bauhaus style walk-through, double-roomed, open steel cage, with video and audio displays) and the performances swirling from it—firstly Iain Morrison’s The Callers, a play (commissioned for performance in and around Habits of Assembly) which invokes D. H. Lawrence’s novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928), with all its casual anti-Semitism—constitute a material framework for investigating and turning the legacies of modernism’s race habits.[1] Sworn’s piece addresses profound questions of somatic habituation and regulation (of gender, sexuality, race) in relation to modernist armatures (architectural and other forms); Morrison’s addresses all of these with more specific focus on class. He did this by the turning, rerouting, or détournement of a modernist novel in the presence of Sworn’s work, itself a détournement of modernist architectonics.[2] Having performed Morrison’s work, I became interested in how questions of race and modernist habituations might be similarly explored. My argument here unfurls, volute-like, from chancing upon Stein’s White Wines in the context of an informal Poets' Theatre project privately performed in and around Sworn's Habits of Assembly in the wake of Morrison's publicly performed piece, while I was also preparing for an academic seminar on whiteness and modernism. It is not my intention to offer a systematic close reading of Stein’s play but to pull on strands of its racial discourse as experienced in material embodied performances.

I knew nothing about Stein’s White Wines, a short three act play, for five “women” players, written in 1913, published in Geography and Plays (1922), until August 2019 when I chose it.[3] Just as the Marx Brothers’ film A Day at the Races (1937) is not actually or only about equine sport, so White Wines is not really or only about alcoholic beverages. Likewise, White Wines spoke to me over the chablis of racial whiteness to the racial instability of Jewishness as a category of identity in early twentieth-century America.  I did not choose or find the play by its title. It sprang from a digital search on the terms habit and house in Stein’s works when I was looking for a short modernist play to try out in response to Habits of Assembly. Prominent in the results that my search yielded was  White Wines, Act Three: “House to house. / (1). A habit that is not left by always screaming, a habit that is similar to the one that made quiet quite quiet and [...] a habit that is cautious and serious and strange and violent”     . Stein's lines spoke to me (and my curly hair) of learned habitual, domestic performances of race, whiteness, off-whiteness, and passing; the instability of Jewishness as a racial category; of stereotyping, minstrelsy, labor, gender, and sexuality. There's no space here to examine my own Jewishness by performance, habituation, or designation, but the performance of this early twentieth-century play in a contemporary moment engages personal and collective experiences of Jewish identity and embodiment as historically intersecting with constructions of whiteness. To conflate Jewishness with whiteness is to disavow this “ethnic multifariousness,” as Cynthia Levine-Rasky argues, and is thus “problematic because it violates the difference within Jewish identity.”[4] It is in the framing contexts of both Sworn’s and Morrison’s interrelated works, the creative energies and insights of the above Poets’ Theatre participants, and scholarship on racialization and Jewish identity that these questions and reflections on White Wines inextricably arise.[5]

Like the Marx Brothers in blackface in A Day at the Races, White Wines brings disturbance, with the offensive word “cooning” in its penultimate paragraph: “A cousin to cooning, a cousin to that and mixed labor and a strange orange” (Stein, White Wines, 214).[6] Is White Wines so obviously a searing punning satire on American racial categorization and anti-Semitic stereotyping? If Jews, along with other migrants to America in the early twentieth century, were designated nonwhite, off-white, not-quite-white by virtue of their status as industrial laborers, then wealthy Jews like Stein might nevertheless pass as white by virtue of their wealth, reproducing oppressive class-based and racist labor-relations.[7] If “White” refers to race, then “W(h)ine” suggests the derogatory stereotype of the nasal whining of a complaining Jew, the diction of an arriviste to whiteness. The pun in White Wines resonates further since Jewishness is accessed in early twentieth-century American Censuses not under “race” data (where whiteness may be habitual and performative except for anyone of Black ancestry—the notorious “one drop”), but entirely through data on Yiddish speakers.[8] Being Jewish might mean in this era sounding Jewish not looking Jewish (Rosenswaike, “Utilization of Census,” 142).The toxic word “cooning,” from the derogatory epithet for people of African descent who perform stereotyped Blackness for white audiences, begs questions. What would it mean to be a Jew—a kind of “self-hating” Jew (another toxic term applied to ambivalent, disavowing Jews)—who inhabits and performs stereotypical subordinated Jewishness?  Stein's racist “cooning” paradoxically points up rather than elides the cultural legacy and the very mechanism of vaudeville Jewish blackface responsible for the shift from multifarious Jewish difference to homogenous whiteness. This is the very “vision of Jewish difference,” for Matthew Frye Jacobson, “that the blackface of an Al Jolson or an Eddie Cantor sought to efface.”[9] Stein’s text may serve to expose, even counter, the “drift” in the 1920s, so clearly signposted by the first “talkie,” The Jazz Singer (1927), “by which American Jews became racial Caucasians [...] illustrat[ing] Frantz Fanon’s contention that, when it comes to race-hatred and race-acceptance, ‘one has only not to be a n*****’” (Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color, 187). A Jewish lesbian who eschews motherhood (stereotyped matrilineal Jewish progeneration), Stein indeed effects “a change a real change” to patriarchy's eugenic status quo. This change requires, proceeds from, a radical shift in discourse, a queer familial change announced (performed) by repetitious incantatory syntax, a change “made by a piece by any piece by a whole mixture of words and likenesses     ” (Stein, White Wines, 214). But disavowal of one Jewish stereotype comes via reference to blackface minstrelsy as performed by Jewish people (with others) establishing their whiteness in an era of designated off-whiteness (See Rogin, Blackface, White Noise). So the genetic essentialism of “cousin” erupts with the performative white racism of “cooning,” signaling a Jewish complicity in anti-Black racism that resonates into the era of Black Lives Matter. 

To debate while reinscribing (albeit under erasure) Stein’s racist term “cooning” is one thing, to perform or ask others to perform it another. I circulated the text to fellow performers, stating my misgivings, asking whether they would still like to perform the play, and if so what to do with the racist term. Was it dishonest to excise it? Should the play be performed at all? If performed, should it be with explanatory preface or apologetic coda? Our collective decision was to perform the play, but the one speaking the line would not say the word while the others would voice in “BLEEP” in its place. The poet Nat Raha encapsulated this compromise: “A bleep shows there’s something troubling that is not being said but doesn’t erase its presence.”[10]

After struggling with this performance issue, I was curious to see if and how other people had performed the play and whether other practitioners and critics had confronted the racist terms in the play. I found White Wines performed online as a disembodied voice recording with music by Radio Free Stein (2016), retaining the word “cooning” without comment.[11] Cast for “four singers and a percussionist who occasionally vocalizes,” this is a stunning orchestration of individual voices, talking and singing (occasionally close to a stylized whining) in unison in places, overlapping in others. Individual words or phrases are taken up by different speakers in the same sentence. The effect is to emphasize the sense already available in the grammatically challenging, repetitious text in a montage of utterances from disparate sources. A scan of the original text is available alongside the recording. A note points out Stein wrote this play “not long after Leo, her brother, moved out of their shared accommodations in Paris, leaving Alice Toklas in place as Gertrude’s primary partner and support” (White Wines, Radio Free Stein). This context seems to speak to the change of gendered domestic habits the play records, and its final statement: “This is not a claim it is a reorganization and a balance and a return” (Stein, White Wines, 214). A reorganization, a détournement, of language and living habits is under way.

Issues of racialization were significant when Lorna J. Smedman directed “a dramatic reading” of White Wines in the mid-1990s. During rehearsals for this, Smedman recounts, “one of the players, an African-American woman, called me [. . .] to say that she was upset by one of her lines: ‘A cousin to cooning [. . .]’. Wasn’t this reference to ‘cooning’ racist?” But Smedman admits to presenting

some etymological background on the word [. . .] which turned out to have a slang usage as a verb, meaning to steal something, and an even more obscure usage attributed to hobo slang, regarding hopping trains. However, the actress was too disturbed by this line to remain in the production. The rest of the cast, all of us white, did not read this use of the term “cooning” as having an explicitly racist intention, and we went ahead and performed the play.[12]

Smedman justifies Stein’s “cooning” as a “cousin” to the play’s refrain of “cunning,” itself a cousin to cunt, and therefore a “space for a nonheterosexist erotics,” where such kinship has “positive value” (Smedman, ‘“Cousin,’” 583–84). Stein’s assertion “white is starched and hair is released” means radical transgression for Smedman: “letting the hair down, and mixing things up” (Stein, White Wines, 241; Smedman, ‘“Cousin,”’ 584). But might Stein’s starched white allude to the straightening of dark curly hair, to attempted taming of “Jewfro” hair? If we pretend white is not a racialized term, or that Jews too are not caricatured by curly hair, negatively by anti-Semites but positively by others including Jewish nationalists, [13] we cannot begin to explore or evaluate this hairy racialized moment. For Smedman, “racialized signifiers which crop up in the play lend additional ‘transgressive’ mileage” to the writing of a “white” modernist. It is doubly ironic given the play’s title—as if “white” could not be a racialized epithet. Is the effect always already racist? Clearly, yes. Even Smedman states the term “leaves a bitter taste in the contemporary mouth” (Smedman, ‘“Cousin,’” 570). In the context Smedman herself creates, where a Black performer’s concerns are dismissed with etymological obscurantism, the term's utterance in this performance perpetuates its racism while pretending it does not. Smedman is not alone in such coy slippage concerning the “probationary whiteness” of Jewishness, as if all Jews can pass (Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color, 95).[14]

To conclude, White Wines may indicate that Stein's work addresses Jewishness earlier than some critics think; and furthermore, that whiteness and off-whiteness are not simply visual markers.      Published in the year of Hitler’s ascendancy, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933), Stein’s self-reflexive portrait of her lover and herself marks Stein’s shift, according to Amy Feinstein, from a racial essentialist to a performative model of Jewishness, manifest in the encounter with a wealthy male arriviste, art dealer, who “looks Jewish,” the only reference to Jewishness in the book.[15] But White Wines (1913; 1922) suggests that Stein’s shift in “habitabitat” came sooner, manifest in its presentation of five women’s voices.[16] In their slippery w(h)ining self-consciously performative sonic play between “cunning” and “cooning” they may indeed sound Jewish while pointing up the role of Jewish blackface in achieving a probationary whiteness, itself clearly undone by such w(h)ining. Where the designated off-whiteness of Jewishness has been elided into an opaque homogenous concept of whiteness, where Stein’s allusions to her own Jewishness are not factored into assessment of the queerness her writing celebrates, it is difficult to access never mind fathom her marked playing on a racist term.[17]

Notes

[1] Corin Sworn, Corin Sworn: Habits of Assembly, Edinburgh College of Art, July 25–August 25, 2019, eca.ed.ac.uk/event/corin-sworn-habits-assembly. This sturdy steel cage of pleasing classical proportions is in dialogue with the “houses” of enlightenment, modernity and modernism. Inside were two “rooms” each with a video screen showing two different sequences by two dancers. Sworn “looks at the ways in which the increasing entanglement of technology with the human body is profoundly affecting the way we navigate the world around us, while also allowing us to explore the previously invisible interior structures of our bodies.” The dancers’ regulated, disciplined bodies were in one video hooked up to digital technology rendering their movements as lit-up signifiers making abstract patterns. In the other their more conventional garb blended with the colours and classical lines of a rehearsal room. A further source of sound emanated from a modern shower-head at the centre of the installation. Standing directly underneath it one could hear the disembodied voices of Sworn and poet Colin Herd speaking a dialogue poem on habit, houses and bodies.

[2] See Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, trans. Ken Knabb (1967; rpt., Berkeley, CA: Bureau of Public Secrets, 2014), 110: “Détournement is the opposite of quotation [...]  the flexible language of anti-ideology. It appears in communication that knows it cannot claim to embody any inherent or definitive certainty.”

[3] Gertrude Stein, White Wines, in Geography and Plays (Boston: Four Seas, 1922). gutenberg.org/files/33403/33403-h/33403-h.htm#WHITE_WINES.

[4] Cynthia Levine-Rasky, “White Privilege: Jewish Women’s Writing and the Instability of Categories,” Journal of Modern Jewish Studies 7, no. 1 (2008): 51–66, 64. See also Michael Rogin, Blackface, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting Pot (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996); Ira Rosenswaike, “The Utilization of Census Mother Tongue Data in American Jewish Population Analysis,” Jewish Social Studies 33, no. 2–3 (1971): 142; and Tudor Parfitt, Black Jews in Africa and the Americas (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), 1–11.

[5] Corin Sworn, Iain Morrison, Fred Carter, Dominic Hale, Colin Herd, Nat Raha, Calum Rodger, Maria Sledmere, and Shola von Rheinhold.

[6] “Scat Singing Ivie Anderson All God’s Chillun Got Rhythm,” A Day at the Races, directed by Sam Wood (Beverly Hills, CA: MGM 1937), YouTube; see youtube.com/watch?v=wSK508WDkM8. The title A Day at the Races speaks to us over the nags’ heads of American racism in the era of German Nazism in scenes such as scat singer, Ivie Anderson’s rendition of ‘All God’s Chillun got Rhythm’ (written for her by Eastern European Jewish immigrants), where the Marx Bros controversially appear (first and only time) in blackface.

[7] See Karen Brodkin, How Jews Became White Folks & What That Says About Race in America (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1998).

[8] “1930 Instructions,” in Fifteenth Census: Instructions to Enumerators, U. S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census Washington (Washington, D. C.: US Government Printing Office, 1930), 26: “Personal Description, 151. Negroes.—A person of mixed white and Negro blood should be returned as a Negro, no matter how small the percentage of Negro blood. Both black and mulatto persons are to be returned as Negroes, without distinction. A person of mixed Indian and Negro blood should be returned a Negro, unless the Indian blood predominates and the status as an Indian is generally accepted in the community.” See census.gov/history/pdf/1930instructions.pdf. Compare the much briefer paragraph in the 1920 Instructions, 27–28: census.gov/history/pdf/1920instructions.pdf

[9] Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 1999), 186–87.

[10] Nat Raha, SMS to Jane Goldman, August 21, 2019.

[11] Gertrude Stein, White Wines, produced by Adam Frank (Vancouver, BC: Radio Free Stein, 2016), audio ed., 23 min, radiofreestein.com/plays/white-wines/.

[12] Lorna J. Smedman, ‘“Cousin to Cooning”: Relation, Difference, and Racialized Language in Stein’s Nonrepresentational Texts,” Modern Fiction Studies 42, no. 3 (1996): 569.

[13] See Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color, 184, on the long “tradition entwin[ing] Jewish nationalism with Jewish racialism. The proto-Zionist Moses Hess, in Rome and Jerusalem (1862), had flatly announced that ‘Jewish noses cannot be reformed, nor black, curly, Jewish hair be turned through baptism or combing into smooth hair.’” Jacobson cites Hess as quoted by Sander Gillman in The Jew’s Body (New York: Routledge, 1991), 179.

[14] See also Levine-Rasky, “White Privilege,” and Parfitt, “The color of Jews,” in Black Jews in Africa and the Americas.

[15] See Amy Feinstein, “Gertrude Stein, Alice Toklas, and Albert Branes: Looking Like a Jew in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas,” Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies 25, no. 3 (2007): 48.

[16] Iain Morrison, The Callers (2019), unpublished play, 3. See issuu.com/cheapbentiain/docs/newspapery_version.

[17] Such conflicts continue: see Deborah Joseph, in “Glamour’s Deborah Joseph on BAME, fashion and racism,” The Times Magazine (September 19, 2020), 22–27, on her experience as a British-born Jewish-Iranian woman and government racial categories.