Performative bondage or the limits of performing race in Caryl Phillips’s Dancing in the Dark

In his novel, Dancing in the Dark (2005), Caryl Phillips fictionalises the life story of the Caribbean-born black American minstrelsy entertainer Bert Williams who became America’s most famous and best-paid performer at the beginning of the twentieth century. Other stories interwoven into Phillips’s imaginative retelling are those of Williams’s wife Lottie; his black stage partner George Walker; and Walker’s wife Ada. This polyphony of adopted voices — along with the inclusion of (fictional?) authentic material such as newspaper clippings, excerpts from interviews and original lyrics from some of Williams’s and Walker’s musical shows — allows Phillips to provide the reader with a sense of Bert Williams the person as well as with a sense of the times in which the novel is set.