(Un)doing Settler Colonialism Abroad: Paul Robeson’s Fight for Aboriginal Rights in Australia

• In Event: Performing under Settler Colonial Crisis: Black and Indigenous Mobilizing on the Stage, Screen, and Streets

Abstract

From the late 19th century onward, Americans consumed a particular narrative of the southern past, one in which docile and unwaveringly faithful black slaves happily served their benevolent white masters against the backdrop of sprawling plantations. From radio shows featuring white actors speaking in Negro dialect to consumer products like the mammy-esque Aunt Jemima pancake syrup, the mythical Old South saturated American popular culture. This romanticized and distorted way of remembering the southern past, or what Karen Cox calls a “magnolia shaped lens”, was fundamental to sectional reunion and the emergence of the U.S. as a modern empire (Karen Cox, 2011). The familiar black-white racial binary of the plantation landscape offered a convenient optics through which white Americans could make sense of the unfamiliar non-white bodies they were encountering at world’s fairs, circuses, and other public amusements. While this fictional, regional past buttressed U.S. imperialism, it was also intimately tied to the ongoing process of settler colonialism and violence against indigenous peoples that resulted. Nostalgia for the southern landscape and fantasies of conquest over the western frontier overlapped in Wild West Shows, minstrel shows, and later in film and other forms of popular culture, and both relied on derogatory images of black and indigenous bodies (Susan Courtney, 2017). In short, the romanticized Old South (and the intersection of blackness and indigeneity that it encouraged) was critical to the nation’s commitment to (and anxieties about) whiteness in both its settler colonial and imperial projects.

Yet how did the relationship between blackness and indigeneity change once Old South nostalgia traveled outside the U.S. to other white settler societies? In what ways was this relationship used in the service of or to challenge settler colonialism in these new spaces? This paper takes up these questions by looking at one of the most well known actors attached to this transnational nostalgia industry—Paul Robeson—and how he used his role in screen and stage versions of Show Boat to speak out against anti-Aboriginal sentiment in Australia. A story about the lives of performers and workers aboard a Mississippi steamboat between 1880 and 1920, Show Boat reproduced the romanticized southern landscape in its many iterations. Within a national context in which Old South nostalgia was often a platform through which indigenous bodies were read as black (and thus inferior), Robeson capitalized on this nostalgia and the international celebrity he gained from it in order to critique settler colonial practices in Australia like indigenous child removal that continued underneath what was known as the “White Australia Policy”. In his activism off the stage and screen, Robeson thus called for coalition building between African Americans and Aboriginals.

Author

• Felicia Bevel, University of North Florida