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Trevor Strunk
10/11/08
“The Brink of a Volcano:” 20th Century Race Riots and the Discursive Violence of Race
In her historical analysis of an 1868 incident of racial mob violence in New Orleans,
Melinda Hennessey quotes a speech by Democratic Senator Robert Ogden which celebrates the
(brief) repression of the violence in the city. In comments made to a crowd of armed and,
ostensibly, pacified whites, Ogden explains that “we have stood on the brink of a volcano – one
of the greatest political convulsions that the world has ever witnessed” (qtd. in Hennessey 180).
While Ogden was proven overly optimistic when the riots in New Orleans picked up again that
same night, Hennessey’s glib critique of Ogden, that he was “not prone to understatement,”
abortively forecloses a deeper discussion of his comments (180). Ogden’s fear of the racial
volcano that was hidden beneath racial relations-as-usual in antebellum New Orleans mirrors
contemporary fears of violent racial explosion. In her play, Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992, Anna
Deavere-Smith engages these fears through transcripts and reenactments of interviews she
conducted with people affected by the Los Angeles Uprising of 1992. Smith’s collected
interviews comprise a poly-vocal reaction to the violence of the 1992 Uprising that suggests the
essential confusion, or ambiguity of any account of racial violence on a massive scale. This
ambiguity suggests a greater pertinence for Ogden’s fear of a racial volcano inasmuch as the
riotous damage and the reactions after the fact present not only an image of fracture, but one of
diffusion. Any explanation of a political convulsion like the 1992 Uprising must go beyond what
Smith calls a “surface explanation” and venture into a manifold “sea of associated causes” if it
wants to account for both the explosion itself as well as the uprising’s purpose (xviii). This
responsibility to assess the diffusion and confusion of massive racial violence is not as
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straightforward as one might expect, however, and leads one to the question of what, exactly, the
meaning of a riot might be?
This paper will take as its focus this very question, although I should note that any
productive potential suggested by positing a purpose for the riot is certainly not assumed in my
analysis, nor is it assumed in Smith’s. Indeed, any sort of wholly progressive model is
undermined by Smith’s title itself, taken from ex-gang member, and gang truce organizer
Twilight Bey, who describes twilight as “that time of day between day and night / limbo, I call it
limbo” (xxv). Smith focuses on Bey’s call, towards the end of his monologue to “reach across
ethnic boundaries,” but the poly-vocal ambivalence of her play’s “message” – hidden as it is in
differing reactions to the uprising – suggests that Bey’s limbo provides a more foundational
aspect to her work than does his call for unity (xxvi). If one takes Smith’s own assertion to
plumb the sea of causes for the riot, one finds a type of limbo like indeterminacy to the riot that
troubles any analysis. In the days, weeks, and years following the violent rupture which a race
riot presents, analyses of the riot must attempt to repair our foundational understanding of race
through politicized recollections and explanations of the violence. Artistic works like Twilight
serve as interventions in this cyclical rupture/repair model that highlight whatever lasting
significance the riot suggests in the scar it leaves on our collective racial consciousness.
The riot, however, cannot be productively considered as a singular event. Indeed, even
ignoring the differences between specific race riots in the interest of constructing a working
paradigm, the L.A. Uprising cannot be distilled into a single event. Smith’s sea of causes branch
out from the Rodney King beating and subsequent verdict, and necessitate consideration of both
racial histories and futures in a reckoning of the riot. For the purposes of this essay, which
mirrors Smith’s major divisions of the riot in her play from “Location” to “War Zone” to
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“Justice,” I want to consider the experience of the riot in three stages: first, before the riot in an
un-ruptured naturalized racial landscape; second, during the riot as an unreadable injury; and
third, after the riot as a series of discourses that attempt to explain the riot. By racial landscape, I
mean to suggest the largely naturalized national understanding of what race means. This, I
would argue, is what Smith means when she references the “sea of associated causes,” namely
the “urban ills and the plight of the urban poor” that serve as historical precedents for racial
inequality and struggle, and provide the various pressures that allow for violent explosion (xvii).
This violent explosion, informed as it may be through historical precedent, is unable to be read
through that precedent. Instead, taking the imagery of Smith’s sea of causes further, the vastness
of the riot’s potential causes adds to the essential difficulty of interpreting what I am calling the
injury of riot. I take this term of injury partially from Elaine Scarry’s The Body in Pain, in which
she describes the “inexpressibility” (3) of physical pain, and the ways in which pain exists as
“that which cannot be denied and that which cannot be confirmed” (4). In other words, as the
riot is taking place, the damage is seen simply as an explosive injury, unreadable as it occurs.
After the fact, readings of the riot range from normative reactions, like Daryl Gates’ assertion
that the “Rodney King incident had nothing to do with race,” (Twilight) to subversive or radical
explanations like Paul Parker’s statement that the riot “was beautiful” (Smith 175). Both of these
reactions constitute what I call discourses of violence, which serve to repair the racial landscape,
thus completing the circuit of riotous violence. The impact of the riot, then, can only be seen in
self-aware artistic interventions like Twilight in which this circuit is made apparent, and in which
the scar of the riot – the lasting “result” – is made clear through focused attention on the
ambiguity of explanatory discourse.
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In performing this artistic intervention into the larger discussion of riot, Twilight
reconstructs the circuit I have laid out, from racial landscape to injury to explanatory discourse.
Smith’s interview with Californian congresswoman Maxine Waters, for instance, suggests a
familiar racial landscape when she asserts that “‘These are the young people in our streets / and
they are angry / and they are frustrated’” (Smith 168). Waters here is telling Smith a story of
how she described to then-President George Bush the need for urban funding during a meeting to
which she was not invited, and the quote expresses an intersection of juridical invisibility, both
for her and her constituents. Waters thus suggests an endemic black racial repression and
suffering that, as noted before, is often considered the cause, via the Rodney King verdict, of the
L.A. Uprising. Paul Parker, an African American man, addresses continuing white domination
in a similar way, saying “You kidnapped us, / you raped our women, / you pull us over daily,”
thus historically connecting police profiling to slavery (173). Earlier, in an answer to an
unspoken, but assumed accusation along similar lines, an anonymous white man tells Smith that,
when he saw the Beverly Center burnt down, he “started to / absorb a little guilt,” suggesting a
penitent, but ultimately fruitless white admission of Waters’ and Parker’s racial landscapes
(140). Indeed, through many of Smith’s interviews, this troubling antagonism between black and
white citizens of L.A. is expressed as the general racial landscape.
Yet, Smith’s tactic of interviewing many different people about the riot – she speaks to
black men and women, white men and women, Latino(a) men and women, Korean men and
women, and so on – undermines the stability of this ostensibly singular racial landscape.
Smith’s interview of Mrs. Young-Soon Han, a Korean who we come to find is a victim of the
riot’s violence (though how she is specifically victimized remains unclear), problematizes an
exclusively black/white racial interplay. Young Soon-Han expresses spite over the African
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American celebration after the retrial and partial conviction of the four policemen involved in the
Rodney King incident, a celebration which shows her that “Korean immigrants were left out /
from this / society and we were nothing” (Smith 245). Smith’s interview with Julio Menjivar, an
L.A. citizen from El Salvador, further problematizes black/white exclusivity in considering the
urban racial landscape before and after the riot. Menjivar, who by his account was minding his
own business, is targeted by the Los Angeles Police during the riot, and, by way of being in the
wrong place at the wrong time, describes his experience with riot very simply:
Now I have a record.
Aha, and a two-hundred-fifty-dollar
fine
and probation for
three years (Smith 128).
Menjivar and Young-Soon Han’s stories, though they occur after the riot, suggest a racially
ambivalent landscape in L.A. both pre and post Rodney King. Smith herself suggests this
ambivalent landscape when she cautions in her preface that “The relationships among peoples of
color and within racial groups are getting more and more complicated” (xxi).
Indeed, at the risk of essentializing the issue, Smith’s interview with Dean Gilmour, a
lieutenant for the Los Angeles County Coroner, placed as it is at the end of the “War Zone”
section of Twilight, suggests that any singularity in the riot exists only in human remains, what
he defines as “what we . . . / you and I leave behind” (193). As the conversation is situated
between a playwright of color and a white male government official, Gilmour’s reiterated
explanation of what “we” entails – you and I – suggests a play on words in human remains,
inasmuch as they are what remains of the human body, and also an indication that, after death
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(only the) human remains. I do not mean to suggest a perverse utopian vision post-riot in dead
bodies of color; rather, in much the same way in which I have suggested an evacuation of
meaning during the injury of the riot, the human remains Gilmour references cannot provide the
“resolution” he feels everyone who has suffered loss needs (Smith 190). As he says, “there
wasn’t a whole / lot of information:” all that remains for Gilmour is explanation and analysis
(Smith 190).
Smith seems to agree, however tacitly, with this assessment, as Gilmour’s interview
rounds off her third act, “War Zone,” which is the lion’s share of the play, and which contains
the meat of her “riot” interviews. Indeed, if one reads “War Zone” as a progression through the
acts of rioting to the mute reality of the human remains, the inarticulate injury certainly obtains
in Twilight. Even if one does not support the idea of a teleological reading of the interviews, the
poly-vocality of Twilight’s first two acts becomes a cacophony in the third, where no clear view
is given of the riot itself, despite the multitude of accounts given. Two in particular stand out in
their depictions of confusion in the riots: Reginald Denny’s, and, again, Paul Parker’s. Denny, a
truck driver beaten nearly to death during the first day of the riots, suggests a coherence to the
riot, when he first asks “does anyone know / what a riot looks like” and then answers, “I mean,
I’m sure they do now” (Smith 104). His account of his own injury, however, does not relate to
this assumed understanding of the identification of the riot. The impact of the riot itself only
dawns on Denny when “important people wanted to come in and say hi” (Smith 106), and his
recollection of his beating is simplified into a description of what his hair looked like when it
was given to him in a plastic bag: “it was just / long hair and / glass and blood” (109). Aside
from this grotesque and disjointed description, Denny takes his narrative of the riot from video
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tape and the accounts of the people who saved him, a narrative that leads him to morosely
wonder why people can’t realize that “It’s not a color, it’s a person” (Smith 112).
This leap to humanity from color is utopic, and echoed ironically in Gilmour’s
appreciation of the leap from color to human remains, but Paul Parker’s interview suggests that a
shift away from color is not the only utopian vision one might take from the injuries sustained in
the riot. Parker’s interview, entitled “Trophies,” is nearly orgasmic in its depiction of the riots.
He begins by telling Smith that “We spoke out on April 29” and continues from there:
“Hoo (real pleasure),
it was flavorful,
it was juicy.
It was, uh,
it was good for the soul,
it was rejuven . . .
it was . . .
(count four, he sighs)
it, it, it was beautiful.” (174-175)
Parker’s inability to articulate the rejuvenation of the riot suggests the recourse both he and
Denny make to unsatisfying emotional and physical synecdoche when describing the physical
moment of rioting. Blood, glass, and hair, while striking, paint only a picture of fracture, and
“flavorful,” “juicy,” “good for the soul,” and, most generically, “beautiful” seem inapt to
describe Parker’s climatic joy at the chance to finally speak and be heard. These substitutions
allow Smith’s readers to react to the physical injury of the riot, but they necessitate distance and
thus analysis.
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This necessary distance is at once the distance between Denny and Parker, the distance
between their interviews and their experiences, and, most importantly, the distance between the
reader and the interviewee, silently filled by Smith. Through this interpretive distance, one can
see the discourses of violence working to explain the riot politically, insofar as they interpret and
analyze the violence after the fact of its injuring power. Smith plays with this distance in the
many different ways in which she has presented Twilight, and, while the book provides an
analytically potent relationship between reader and interviewee through a silent and invisible
Smith, the film version of the play, while it remains equally productive, turns this relationship on
its head. Smith portrays the different people she has interviewed by reenacting their
(presumably) actual speech, and she calls into question the performativity, as well as the
unarticulated, unspeakable “meaning” of the riot hidden behind synecdoche and metaphor.
On videotape, Smith makes a performance piece from the riots, and, further, her art
reveals the performativity and theatricality in all of the reactions to riot. In this performativity,
as Smith rapidly changes identities within the space of a sentence break, rests a sense of
impermanence in the discourses that explain the riot. Henry “Keith” Watson’s statement that,
during the riots, “[t]hat which is normally bypassed or overlooked was shown, it came forward, it
let it be known” is given real purchase only after the tape in which Watson brutally beats truck
driver Reginald Denny is shown (Twilight). Watson’s statement is given more symbolic
relevance in Smith’s impersonation of Rodney King’s sister, Angela King, when she comments
on the appearance of her brother: “You wouldn’t a’ known him or recognized him. It was a hell
of a look…It took three plastic surgeons to get Rodney to look like Rodney again” (Twilight).
Watson’s ideological statement of rebellion and violent exposure contrasts Daryl Gates’
assertion that the L.A. Uprising had nothing to do with race, but both serve, in some way, to
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repair a normative racial landscape. The media-captured and digested injuries of Rodney King,
however, scar the racial landscape. Rodney King’s body is irrepressible and, due to its graphic
nature, set outside of performativity; it thus resists subsumption into Smith’s sea of causes.
Twilight, in both videotaped and transcripted forms, serves to highlight this scar by negation:
perhaps the only person Smith glaringly does not interview is King himself. The absence of
Rodney King in Twilight – in both interview and impersonation – paradoxically allows King’s
broken body to breach the surface of the sea of associated causes and become visible. In
highlighting the indeterminacy around the L.A. Uprising, Smith presents Rodney King’s body as
the only visible human remains – what is left over.
Images like the beaten face of Rodney King are reported upon and held to intense
scrutiny as images of injury, and while there is nothing noble or progressive about a racial injury,
the racialized injury that perpetually resists deferral-by-explanation serves to short circuit the
discourses of violence and so scars the naturalized landscape of race. If this paper pretends to
make any explanation of the race riot itself, it is founded in that unforgotten, but yet unexplained
evidence of the physical injury of riot. Twilight serves as an artistic intervention that maintains
and elaborates upon the physical inexplicability of riot, the sea of murky causes, as it highlights
the scarred racial landscape through pointed ambivalence.
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Works Cited
Hennessey, Melinda Meek. “Race and Violence in Reconstruction New Orleans: The 1868
Riot.” Black Freedom/White Violence 1865-1900. Ed. Donald Nieman. New York:
Garland Publishing, 1994. 171-185.
Scarry, Elaine. The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. New York: Oxford
University Press, 1985.
Smith, Anna Deavere. Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992. New York: Anchor Books, 1994.
Smith, Anna Deavere, perf.. Twilight – Los Angeles. Dir. Anna Deavere Smith. PBS Home
Video, 2000.