1. Clifford Geertz, quoting Wittgenstein, Ludwig in “Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture,” in Geertz, , The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic, 1973), 13Google Scholar.

2. There is a good deal of controversy about how American directors cast actors. When James Earl Jones played Judge Brack in Hedda Gabler, people said this was unrealistic because there were no black men in Norway in the 19th century, and yet no one complained that everyone in the cast was speaking English. Our collective sense of realism is based on conventions. See Hornby, Richard, “Interracial Casting,” Hudson Review 42 (1989): 459–66CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Newman, Harry, “Holding Back: The Theatre's Resistance to Non-Traditional Casting,” TDR: The Drama Review: A Journal of Performance Studies 33 (1989): 22–36CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Schultz, Roger, “Non-Traditional Casting Update: Multicultural Casting Providing Opportunity for Minority Actors While Stimulating Innovative Productions,” Drama Review 35 (1991): 7–13CrossRefGoogle Scholar, for more on nontraditional casting.

3. Richards, Sandra L., “Caught in the Act of Social Definition: On the Road with Anna Deavere Smith,” in Acting Out: Feminist Performances, ed. Hart, Lynda and Phelan, Peggy, (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993), 42Google Scholar.

4. Fires in the Mirror: Crown Heights, Brooklyn, and Other Identities opened in New York City at the New York Shakespeare Festival in 05 1992, directed by Ashley, ChristopherGoogle Scholar; the video of Fires for PBS was directed by Wolfe, George C.. Twilight: Los Angeles 1992 premiered on 05 23, 1993Google Scholar, in Los Angeles, produced by the Center Theatre Group/Mark Taper Forum, directed by Emily Malin; in New York City, again at the New York Shakespeare Festival, in 1994, Twilight was directed by Wolfe. Smith has toured Fires, and Twilight has been produced on Broadway; both plays have been published and widely distributed.

5. Richards, , “Caught in the Act,” 35Google Scholar.

6. Lahr, John, “Under the Skin,” New Yorker 69 (06 28, 1993): 90Google Scholar.

7. Lee, Sae, “Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992: Theatre Review,” ed. Mason, Susan Vaneta, Theatre Journal 46 (1994): 118Google Scholar.

8. Smith, Anna Deavere, Fires in the Mirror (New York: Anchor, 1993), 116Google Scholar.

9. Ibid.,58.

10. Ibid., xxiii.

11. Jill Dolan has described Smith as a great postmodern artist who highlights the “anxious incongruity” of identity, thus keeping the theater a site where dangerous feelings, identities, and connections are made and unmade, where the rules of representation may be broken and refashioned (Dolan, , “Geographies of Learning: Theatre Studies, Performance, and the ‘Performative,’” Theatre Journal 45 [1993]: 434CrossRefGoogle Scholar). Charles R. Lyons and James C. Lyons have argued that Smith appeals both to humanists and to those postmodernists critical of humanism (Lyons, and Lyons, , “Anna Deavere Smith: Perspectives on her Performance within the Context of Critical Theory,” Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism 9 [1994]: 43–66Google Scholar). Smith so neatly fits the categories scholars think of now.

12. Smith, Anna Deavere, Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 (New York: Anchor, 1994), xxvGoogle Scholar.

13. Insofar as Smith both claims to unsettle identities by taking on so many and to ground them in the sound and expression of her body, she stands in as an example of the struggle between postmodern theorists and humanists, especially as that struggle has been articulated in feminist debates. While acknowledging the theoretical and practical importance of seeing experience as socially constructed, women of color, in particular, have also seen that this argument undercuts the legitimacy of certain groups of people (women, women of color, the working class) who are expressing themselves as subjects just as the subject is under attack. Valerie Smith has pointed out how so often black women are solely portrayed as bodily figures of essential experience (Smith, , “Black Feminist Theory and the Representation of the ‘Other,’” in Changing Our Own Words: Essays on Criticism, Theory, and Writings by Black Women, ed. Wall, Cheryl A. [New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1989]Google Scholar). In an article concerned with Smith's contention, Margaret Homans shows how certain postmodern feminists (Haraway, Fuss, Butler) continue to use women of color as the experiential grounding for their theoretical critique of experience; in the process, women of color are reduced to an example or even erased altogether. Homans ends with a reading of passages by two African-American women writers, Alice Walker and Patricia Williams, both of whom testify to the ways in which postmodern socially constructed identity and the authority of experience inform their sense of who they are; see Homans, Margaret, “‘Women of Color’ Writers and Feminist Theory,” New Literary History 25 (1994): 73–94CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

It may be that the kind of polarization that has occurred between postmodernism and some version of humanism is, as some feminists have taken pains to argue, not necessary or even desirable. Both Valerie Smith and bell hooks have refused the choice offered to black women, in particular. At the very least, postmodern culture, according to hooks, with its decentered subject, can be a “space where ties are severed or … the occasion for new and varied forms of bonding” (hooks, , “Postmodern Blackness,” in Yearning: race, gender, and cultural politics [Boston: South End, 1990], 31 [my italics])Google Scholar.

14. Richards, , “Caught in the Act,” 41Google Scholar.

15. Smith, , Fires, xxxix, xliGoogle Scholar.

16. Ibid., 9–12.

17. Chang, Elaine K., “A Not-So-New Spelling of My Name: Notes Toward (and Against) a Politics of Equivocation,” Displacements, ed. Bammer, Angelika (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 251, 253Google Scholar.

18. Perhaps Smith edited out places where those interviewed gestured explicitly to her; there are very few occasions in either Fires or Twilight where the interviewee acknowledged her presence, making this one all the more striking. Is he talking to her when he says “My blackness does not … exist in relationship to your whiteness”? Had she disappeared altogether or become figured as white in his mind during their interview?

19. Love, Nancy S., “Politics and Voice(s): An Empowerment/Knowledge Regime,” Differences 3 (1991): 90Google Scholar.

20. Brown, Wendy, “Feminist Hesitations, Postmodern Exposures,” Differences 3 (1993): 80–81Google Scholar.

21. Feingold, Michael, “Twilight's First Gleaming,” Village Voice, 04 5, 1995, 97Google Scholar.

22. West, , Fires, xxiiGoogle Scholar.

23. Ibid., xviii.

24. Blanchard, Bob, “Drama of L.A.'s Anguished Soul,” Progressive 57 (12 1993): 36Google Scholar.

25. Richards, David, “One Woman Defines a City's Anguish,” New York Times, 03 24, 1994, B5Google Scholar.

26. Smith, , quoted in Meri Nana-Ama Danquah, “The Voices of Twilight,” Village Voice, 03 29, 1994, 96Google Scholar.

27. Guy, Joyce, “Twilight, Los Angeles, 1992: Theatre Review,” ed. Mason, Susan Veneta, Theatre Journal 46 (1994): 116Google Scholar.

28. Smith, quoted in Danquah, , “Voices,” 96Google Scholar.

29. Smith, , Twilight, xxivGoogle Scholar.

30. Smith, quoted in Blanchard, , “Drama,” 36Google Scholar.

31. Smith, , Twilight, 232–34Google Scholar.

32. Bhabha, Homi, “Frontlines/Borderposts,” in Bammer, , Displacements, 269–70 (my italics)Google Scholar.

33. Romero, Lora, “‘When Something Goes Queer’: Familiarity, Formalism, and Minority Intellectuals in the 1980s,” Yale Journal of Criticism 6 (1993): 121–41Google Scholar.

34. Martin, Carol, “Anna Deavere Smith: The Word Becomes You,” Drama Review 37 (1993): 51CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

35. This in angry response to the Pulitzer jurors who turned her down for a prize because they felt only Anna Deavere Smith could perform these interviews, in part because she had gathered them and had, in some way, authored them (Weber, Bruce, “Rebutting Pulitzer Perceptions,” New York Times, 04 22, 1994, B10Google Scholar).