Tuning the Black Voice: Colour-Deafness and the American Negro Theatre’s Radio Dramas

Abstract

In September 1945, the New York radio station WNEW engaged Harlem’s celebrated American Negro Theatre (ANT) to perform a series of weekly radio plays, beginning with Arthur Laurents’s drama The Face. It was an anomalous venture in US radio, which rarely broadcast black voices. In order to avoid controversy, WNEW attempted to regulate the political significance of the series by advertising it using language couched in the modern rhetoric of colour-blind casting. However, despite these limitations applied to their efforts, the ANT infused their performances with an unexpected challenge to the racial status quo in the country. Defying stereotypes of black aurality, they subverted expectations of how African Americans were supposed to sound. They did so by destabilizing the essentialist concept of the “black voice” and exploiting the disembodied medium of radio. This article reinstates this undervalued moment in both theatre and radio history by examining The Face in detail and considering how race functions on the radio.