Embracing the Lackluster: Investigating the Life (and Afterlives) of a Nineteenth-Century Workaday Actor
Amy E. Hughes
aehugh@umich.eduUniversity of Michigan–Ann Arbor (United States)
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7710-2062
Abstract
US actor-manager Harry Watkins (1825–1894) was no one special. He yearned for fame, but merely skirted the edges of it. If Watkins has any “historical significance” at all, it is because he left behind a voluminous diary in which he chronicled his experiences during the years leading up to the US Civil War. When the author discovered the manuscript in 2008, Watkins’s lackluster became the subject of her research, focused on the question: what could this minor actor reveal about nineteenth-century US culture—a culture as obsessed with fame and achievement as today’s culture? The author argues that Watkins is significant precisely because of his ordinariness, his obscurity, his run-of-the-mill-ness. His experiences illuminate how “white mediocrity” (Koritha Mitchell) works and deepens our understanding of the insidious power of the American Dream. Watkins’s lack of visibility during his lifetime and subsequently suggests that mediocrity is a stigmatized state of being, a form of abjection. His cyclical highs and lows bring into focus the cultural forces that still shape the aspirations of today’s theater artists, and the triumphs and failures that define their (our) inexorably ordinary lives.
Keywords:
United States, nineteenth century, theater, meritocracy, American Dream, white mediocrityReferences
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Authors
Amy E. Hughesaehugh@umich.edu
University of Michigan–Ann Arbor United States
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7710-2062
Amy E. Hughes - Professor of Theatre and Drama at University of Michigan–Ann Arbor. Her research focuses on theater and performance in the United States during the nineteenth century. Her interests and expertise include material and visual culture, disability studies, animal studies, digital humanities, documentary editing, and culturally responsive pedagogy (h/t Dr. Geneva Gay). Her first book, Spectacles of Reform: Theater and Activism in Nineteenth-Century America (University of Michigan Press, 2012), received the 2013 Barnard Hewitt Award from the American Society for Theatre Research. With Naomi J. Stubbs, she edited A Player and a Gentleman: The Diary of Harry Watkins, Nineteenth-Century US American Actor (University of Michigan Press, 2018).
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