Blackfaced at <i>The Blacks</i>: Audience Participation in Jean Genet’s Lessons on Race
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article considers the audience participation in Jean Genet’s controversial play The Blacks (1959) as it was staged in the New York premiere in 1961 and revival in 2003. The Blacks casts its audience in a painful, confusing, even humiliating role, a role that was aggravated by the 2003 revival’s production strategies, yet the play has been remarkably successful throughout its history. I consider the aspirations and limitations of audience participation as a form of political engagement, as well as Genet’s suspicion, articulated in his recently published “Preface to The Blacks,” that theatre cannot contribute to the liberation of oppressed groups. The American career of The Blacks clarifies some of the reasons we fail to end racism, including the potential pleasures of participating in our own racially inspired humiliation.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".