White People Do Not Know How to Behave at Entertainments Designed for Ladies and Gentlemen of Colour
Damn it all.
The breathtakingly lovely Flash site(s) for Le fabuleux destin d'Amélie Poulain seem to have been lost to the ephemeral nature of the Web, or the failure of film studios to renew the domains for movies that are catalog material, or something. Major suckage; if you never saw 'em -- the French and English ones were very different, but both quite well-done -- you missed a treat.
Same thing if you haven't seen the movie yet. Which my moms still hasn't; I ended up looking at it alone in the living room while the rest of the fam watched judge shows in the kitchen.
Later, at dinner, suggestions were tossed around about which not-present other family members needs to get dragged onto one judge show or another so they finally cough up the cash they been owing.
(Ah, there is a site at http://video.movies.go.com/amelie/, but it's not nearly as good as the originals. Typical.)
Don't really care for the judge shows myself -- wretched displays of human desperation and misery, tortured emotions blatantly displayed for the amusement and mockery of the public. . . I'm being too sledgehammer-like again, ain't I?
Anyway, about that graphic and the title:
Confronted with the "twoness" of being both American and "Negro" in the United States, [William Alexander Brown, a free man of color and former ship's steward] demonstrated that African Americans did not have to privilege one cultural identity at the expense of the other. In fact, as a garden host and theatrical manager, Brown would attempt to represent all New Yorkers—African, European, Indian. From 1821 to 1823, Brown successfully but precariously integrated the U.S. stage and audience; provided African American actors complete yet frequently contested access to theatrical representation; rehearsed his black actors and audiences for full participation in public life; explored multiple but often conflicting European, African, and Indian performative identities; and showcased a New World Africanist aesthetic marked by skilled appropriations and unresolved hybridities. Brown's model national institution emerged in four specific stages or phases: an initial backyard pleasure garden on Manhattan's predominantly white West Side; the Minor Theatre on the fashionable and centrally located Park Row; the American Theatre in the remote Greenwich Village; and finally the African Company, featured in a brand-new Village theater. With each phase in this institutional journey, manager Brown encountered artistic, location, and audience challenges that can prove instructive for any truly diverse American theater.In this study, I also contend that certain disapproving or dismissive Euro-Americans did not know how to "behave" at these mutually African and American entertainments. Although Brown enthusiastically celebrated the young nation's triracial and multiethnic potential, many white pessimists declared this overwhelming pool of multiplicity unworkable and undesirable. During America's early national period—the formative years between independence and the early 1830s—many Euro-Americans were unwilling to imagine an openly heterogeneous national character that embraced African Americans as legitimate cultural claimants. Specifically, competing white theatrical managers, incensed white newspaper editors, insecure white circus workers, and overzealous white patrons vehemently rejected Brown's intrepid participation in national self-definition. Even as this black impresario designed his entertainments for the pleasure of all Manhattanites, escalating racial divisions in nineteenth-century New York transformed his Minor, American, and African Theatres into exceptionally volatile and even dangerous social spaces. After a physical assault in August 1822, an irate William Brown allegedly responded to the rioters with a provocative sign, claiming that "Whites Do Not Know How to Behave at Entertainments Designed for Ladies and Gentlemen of Colour."
From, oddly enough, White People Do Not Know How to Behave at Entertainments Designed for Ladies and Gentlemen of Colour: William Brown's African and American Theater, by Marvin McAllister.
Amazing how little shit changes over a century or two, give or take.
Want to know more? Drop by http://fr.movies.yahoo.com/fc/amelie.html, and look for cognates, unless you're one of them bi(+)-lingual types. We don't like those here in America. If English was good enough for our lord and saviour Jesus Christ. . .