Thesis abstract:

This research project discusses postcolonial performances of whiteness in Australia and in Senegal. I use the phrase "performance of whiteness", in conjunction with the term “whiteface”, to describe an act of racial and colonial mimicry, as occurring in artistic representations such as theatre plays, festivals, television series and shows, but also in mundane social interactions. Engaging with nonwhite perspectives of whiteness not only strengthens and disturbs previous research on racial ideology and postcolonial experiences, but also portrays the ways in which imperial whiteness exists, permeates and is confronted in globally and/or domestically marginalised communities.

When reading the preface to Susan Gubar’s Racechanges (1997), in which she comments on “the prominence of clandestine racial parodies [of blackness]” in her white friends’ lives, I remembered different moments in which I had encountered impersonations of whiteness in Senegal (xiii). My brother-in-law's encounter with French tourists was retold with a comical imitation of their voice, language and accent. A comedian in Ndar re-enacted one of his student’s interactions with a white person, wagging his finger and rapidly repeating “ah non, non, non, non, non!”. In a different manner, a little girl, which I had met at the market, exclaimed her desire to resemble me and use skin-lightening products. “Acting white”, whether this be in the Senegalese or Australian context, often contains negative and/or satirical connotations. In this thesis, I intend to read into artistic performances of whiteness, arguing that whiteface can sometimes act as a decolonial method which disturbs hegemonic paradigms based on racial and colonial ideology.

Studying such performances is important, not only because it reveals innovative artistic responses to our colonial pasts, as well as countless manners of interacting with whiteness, but also because whiteface remains a marginalised research topic. To this date, all monographs on this subject, such as Joseph Roach’s Cities of the Dead (1996), Jayna Brown’s Babylon Girls (2008), Marvin McAllister’s Whiting Up (2011) and Faedra Chatard Carpenter’s Coloring Whiteness (2014), concentrate their analysis on the United States. Furthermore, these previous studies often neglect the postcolonial aspect of such enactments, thus omitting the intricate links between race and colonialism. Following Aileen Moreton-Robinson's description of “whiteness [as] an imperial project”, I thus intend to confront whiteness studies’ colonial blindness by foregrounding perceptions of whiteness and whiteface from outside the United States context (Transnational x).