Black and Unmarked

If you visit The Washington Post web site, you may discover a trace of an unspoken rule governing black and white women "performance critics" during the eighteenth and much of the nineteenth century in the United States. This rule affected women reviewers and drama critics as well as women writing within the broader category of performance criticism, commenting on cultural performances of various kinds. 1 At the Post site, you may find a listing for Lloyd Rose, a theatre critic with a column in the Style section, and you may stumble onto a notice of Donna Britt, a performance critic [End Page 465] who writes of everyday concerns for the Metro section. Only Britt's name is accompanied by a photograph. She is embodied, marked for the reader as an African American woman writer. Lloyd Rose, in contrast, remains unmarked, invisible to readers, behind a name that functions as a contemporary male pseudonym. For three years running, my undergraduate students, assigned the task of comparing and contrasting the work of these two critics on the first day of my history-of-women-critics course, have immediately spoken of the African American context of Britt's work, while they have almost uniformly assumed that Lloyd Rose was a European American male, because of the seeming gender designation of her given name, Lloyd, and because of the continuing cultural misapprehension that unless otherwise noted, the writer is white and male. 2

Anonymity · Art · Art history · Political science · Sociology · Law · Race, History, and American Society

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  Frank Kelleter•Anglia - Zeitschrift für…•2025

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