Dissertation Abstract

Stages of Whiteness: Marking Power and Privilege in U.S. and German Popular Performance examines white, male playwrights, television evangelists, and game show hosts and producers on what I am defining as three “performance stages” found within 21st century American and German popular theatre and entertainment. These performances have remained unmarked as white to white people; they remain opaque to them and have persisted into this century as spaces not affected by constructions of race. They remain “just performances.” The dissertation explains how everyday people— audiences— learn to see, hear, and protect whiteness as a universal subject position, as represented through the patterns of storytelling, narrative structure, and binaries of winning and losing. Each “performance stage” has specific audiences that encapsulate lower, middle and upper-class white consumers. These stages, I contend, are used to distribute narratives that warn new audiences against the changing racial, economic, and socio-cultural conditions that have challenged white male patriarchy.

This project is a result of four trips to Germany to visit theatre spaces in Berlin, multiple visits to New York archives and theatre spaces, a visit to Joel Osteen’s Lakewood church in Houston, Texas, and a visit to Los Angeles to attend tapings of game shows, including The Price is Right, on which I was a contestant. Methodologically, as I engage with archives and live performance, I lean upon auto-ethnography where I use my own subject position as a white man from Southeastern, Pennsylvania to see these places anew and to describe how whiteness, once invisible to me in work as a theater artist, emerging scholar and consumer, became racialized to me as “white.”  I am marking my position as a white male to unsettle impulses towards objectivity and universality associated with white male playwrights and their stories which dominate American and German theater landscapes . In addition to my own subject position, I analyze these performances through theories of race and performance and dramatic analysis. The dissertation identifies comparable sites in theater, religious television programming, and game shows in the U.S. and Germany that source their values in tropes from the Germanic Enlightenment. I track how totalizing Enlightenment binaries of good and bad, inside and outside, God and the Devil, and ultimately winning and losing migrate across national borders and have become reproduced and preserved in new spaces.

CHAPTER BREAKDOWN

Within each chapter, I examine German theatre, game shows, and television evangelists in comparison to the U.S. “stages”. I seek to map a transatlantic exchange of values that take place over time that illustrates the “rooting/routing” of particular white European ideals of white heteronormativity that Germanic people who immigrated to the United States in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries sought to establish that are manifest in so called universal ideals of family, whiteness, and success in the United States. These ideals continue to find visibility today in the American dream narrative that is articulated through contemporary performances in American theater and television platforms largely controlled by white males. In contrast, I trace the ways in which the American Dream narratives operate in translation. It is the stage that was originally viewed as and used as a medium through which to spread ideals of the nineteenth century Germanic Enlightenment Project. I frame the professional stage in the United States and Germany as spaces that originated as necessary to spread these values.

I use theories of race and performance, memory, and dramatic analysis to investigate the theater stage, television game shows, and Evangelical Christian television programming; three “stages” that I demonstrate remain invested in constructing and protecting whiteness. Each stage has specific audiences that encapsulate lower, middle and upperclass white consumers. I begin in the United States looking first at television. I discuss the ways in which game shows such as The Price is Right project narratives of winning that are racialized as white and middle class and then transition to Germany where the American Dream as structured in Price can be found in German reality and game shows like Zahltag and Wetten Dass?. I then shift to religious programming and the work of television evangelists Joel Osteen and Jim Bakker, in order to further engage the entanglements of winning with Christianity and white cisgender masculinity. In Germany, I examine German-born evangelists Peter Popoff and Reinhard Bonnke along with the uptick in conversions to Christianity by Syrian refugees. These are white spaces that promise winning to its followers. In theater, I explore Broadway productions Stephen Karam’s The Humans, Bruce Norris’ Clybourne Park, and David Mamet’s November as archival markers that serve as important memories that warn new audiences against the changing racial, economic, and socio-cultural conditions that have challenged white male patriarchy. I do comparative work in Germany tracking comparable theater productions that also seek to protect whiteness for fear of losing power and capacity to non-whites in ways that mirror the current climate of American and German nationalism and exceptionalism.

FUTURE RESEARCH

I remain interested in whiteness and popular entertainment in the U.S. and Germany. Although my dissertation is U.S. centered, there is an opportunity to expand the German subjects of study. Enlightenment values that protect hierarchy, narratives of sameness and universality, and constructions of whiteness remain presented and critiqued upon in U.S. and Berlin theatre and TV performances. In September 2018, I saw Oliver Frljić’s Gorki: Alternative für Deutschland?, which questions whether the German project is worth dying for. King Ubu at the Deutsches Theater warned of totalitarianism, while also reminding its presumed German audience that totalitarianism is coming for them. Game and reality television like Zahltag on RTL celebrate myths of the American Dream, where the prospect of receiving a lump sum of cash in a suitcase is consumed by viewers. I have been creating a trajectory that positions me to return to Germany to conduct further research. In the summer of 2018, I attended the 11th Annual Summer School on Black Europe in Amsterdam, which sought to examine “the contemporary circumstances of the African Diaspora (and “other” immigrants of color) in Europe” through the lens of critical race theory. I was also awarded a two month DAAD German language scholarship from July - September, 2018. This was an opportunity to move past an A1 fluency with the intent of more comprehensively navigating German performance spaces.

MY POSITIONALITY

As a white male who grew up as a middle class American in Southeastern Pennsylvania, I am a product of a white space and people who have a genealogy and collection of values that took shape in Switzerland and Germany. Although that space persecuted my Anabaptist ancestors and forced their immigration to the U.S., these people brought with them values that undergird historical stories of transatlantic white peoples and, by extension, perpetuate contemporary ideals of whiteness. As I examine whiteness, I am examining myself. It is through my personal narrative that I mark ways that I became conscious to whiteness and its capacity to conceal and protect itself and its power. I am working to awaken my own unconsciousness to the fact that the people who think they are white, create performances that circulate ideologies screaming in fear about the rise of  “others” in order to claim their stake in the American Dream and keep it for themselves.

SUBJECTS OF STUDY

The Price is Right
This is a show that allows audiences to participate in the American Dream and escape the struggles of everyday life and their strivings for something better. I am interested in why the game show form is currently seeing a renewed interest among networks in 21st century television programming. Although quiz shows that appeal to the 65+ demographic have persisted for decades, a series of new and revived game shows are now on the air. Price offers contestants the chance at quick and easy access to “success”. Beginning in 1972, Price has established itself as the father of all game shows. It assumes that every contestant is the same and therefore has an equal opportunity to play the game and win. Price embraces the American Dream as truth when contestants win and masks the consequences of those contestants who lose as the fault of the merit or luck or the players, not the nature of the game. 

Joel Osteen
This program works to replicate the game show form within the parameters of Christianity. In order for religion to remain relevant to its participants, it must remain tethered to narratives of success as found in contemporary articulations of capitalism.  Joel Osteen, a straight, white man, who is described as "the most watched inspirational figure in America,” embodies what it means "to win" in contemporary American Christianity, and he offers access to this stage of whiteness through his weekly broadcasts and New York Times best selling books. His message is simple, inspirational, and always motivating. He's an everyman living and selling the "American dream". Osteen invites his spectators an opportunity to rub the lamp in which their god resides in order to make a wish. Their performances requires the use of the game show form in order to sell their Christianity.

Stephen Karam’s The Humans, David Mamet’s November, Robert Askins’ Hand to God, and Unschuld (Innocence) by Dea Loher.

The American and German theatre stages both demonstrate how the straight, white man perceives to be losing. As a result, we witness how this loss impacts non-white people and the manifestation of race in their bodies that can never escape the mark of difference from whiteness. Each site claims to examine the merits and consequences of universals and strives to push past “race” in some way, albeit unsuccessfully. Each site examines how whiteness remains protected in spite of the striving. I examine how these serve as representative examples of the real and perceived loss experienced on the American and German stages as a result of whiteness.