In performance scholarship so much is said about the unmarked white body. The unmarked white body is still something I am working towards being able to explain coherently but let's give it a go.
In the West, Whiteness is the default, it is the given race. In film, television, and any mass entertainment their is an unspoken understanding that the audience is made up of white people. This is why their are channels in television line ups like BET and Telemundo but not a channel called Caucasian! The same can be said with magazines. Urban Latino, or Vibe are available on newsstands but White Girl doesn't exist. Well, it does but it's called Elle or Vogue.
Are you starting to see what I mean by Whiteness being the default? This draw towards a desired level of whiteness can also be found in our desire to see whiteness around us. There may have been times in our past when we saw a person of a marked race acting differently then what how we expect a person to act and we say "why can't they just act normal?" It is very possible that what we are actually saying is "why can't they just act white?"
At the same time, scholarship on borders and their crossings also tells us that borders are manufactured. They are created to keep people in and keep other people out. So what happens if we stop believing in borders and their magic defining power. What if we just say, "look, science tells us that Africa was the cradle of life. Therefore we are all African. Let's hold hands and sing about how much we love Coke!"
Would that actually work? Or are our borders so ingrained in our bodies that we would actually need to start a new civilization with babies that would no knowledge of borders and therefore not create them.
Bad sci-fi movies aside, thinking about how borders are written on our bodies before we are born got me thinking about my own personal borders. If you will indulge my navel gazing for just a bit I would like to think about how borders effect me.
So my borders are hidden beneath my skin. I am divided in twain as a person of European decent on my mother's side and of Palestinian decent on my father's. My dad is what someone might call a "boater". He came to the United States in the mid 1970s after living in several different places in the middle east. He originally lived in Palestine but right as the Israeli/Palestinian war was breaking out his family packed up and left because as my Jeddo (grandfather) said, the wealth and land they had in Palestine is not worth the pinky nail on any of his children getting hurt. Thus, I grew up knowing that my own pinky nail is worth more than the entire world to my father. My father is a refugee.
However, european jeans both from the crusades and from my mother are strong and both my brother and I are blonde hair blue eyed children. I do not wear my Palestinian heritage on my body or sleeve and sometimes because of that, I feel disconnected from it. Even in myself I default to whiteness*. This is why I sometimes overtly mention how I am apart of the Arab race. "My people!" It is important for me to confuse people about what the Arab woman looks like.
I have read a lot of scholarship on border crossings and very little of it is interested in Arab-Americans. In general there seems to be a lack of Arab-American theatre scholarship and definitely a shortage of scholarship concerning the image of the Arab Women, American or otherwise, in theatre and film. Is this a void that I could possibly fill?
I definitely think that it will devote my week of discussion in my American Theatre class to this topic.
*I have to point out that when looking at the typical selection of boxes for state and federal papers their is not an Arab box to check. When my mother was trying to enroll my brother in public school, she asked why there was not an Arab box for her son and was told, by a white woman, that she should check the caucasian box because being Arab was the same as being white.
So according to the state and federal government, I have no internal borders to cross.
Cheers,
E
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