Join us virtually as Bethany Hughes discusses her first book, Redface: Race, Performance, and Indigeneity (2024), in which she unearths the history of the theatrical phenomenon of redface in nineteenth- and twentieth-century America. Like blackface, redface was used to racialize Indigenous peoples and nations, and even more crucially, exclude them from full citizenship in the United States. Arguing that redface is more than just the costumes or makeup an actor wears, the writer contends it is a collaborative, curatorial process through which artists and audiences make certain bodies legible as “Indian.”
Hughes traces the “Stage Indian” from its early nineteenth-century roots to its proliferation across theatrical entertainment forms to turn of the twenty-first century attempts to address its racist legacy. Using case studies in law and civic life to understand its offstage impact. she connects extensive scholarship on the “Indian” in American culture to the theatrical history of racial impersonation and critiques of settler colonialism, demonstrating redface’s high stakes for Indigenous and non-Indigenous alike.
Bethany Hughes is assistant professor at the University of Michigan in the department of American culture and a core faculty member in the Native American Studies Program. Her work can be found in Theatre Journal, Mobilities, Theatre Survey, American Periodicals, and Theatre Topics.
Wendy Bellion is Associate Dean for the Humanities and Sewell C. Biggs Chair in American Art History at the University of Delaware. At AAS, Bellion held a Jay T. Last Fellowship in 2011-12. In 2022 she led a summer seminar on the visual culture of nineteenth-century American theater for the Society’s Center for Historic American Visual Culture. Bellion’s research and teaching focus on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century art and material culture in North America and the Atlantic World. She is the author or co-editor of three books: Material Cultures of the Global Eighteenth Century: Art, Mobility, and Change (2023); Iconoclasm in New York: Revolution to Reenactment (2019); and Citizen Spectator: Art, Illusion, and Visual Perception in Early National America (2011), which was awarded the Charles Eldredge Prize by the Smithsonian American Art Museum. She serves on the boards of the Biggs Museum of American Art and the journal Early American Literature. Wendy Bellion was elected to AAS membership in April 2011