The Paradoxical Twenty-Fifth: Performance, Race, and Conditional Belonging on the American Imperial Frontier, 1882-1918

Abstract

The Twenty-Fifth Infantry Regimental Band was part of only four segregated Black Army regiments assembled from the Union’s Black volunteer units in the aftermath of the Civil War. Through nearly eight decades of public entertainment, the Band’s performances were both carefully circumscribed as well as spontaneous, choreographed but with room for improvisation. The Band not only acted as military public relations. It was instrumental in the production of a historical consciousness that bound the expanding settler citizenry of new U.S. territories to the idea of nationhood and to the places to which these settlers felt newly entitled. Through extensive archival and ethnographic research, I examine performance as both discourse and ritual mediated by the standards of the Department of War, making the Band’s performances a valuable tool of the ideological state apparatus. The Band’s performances were in support of the ideology of the United States but were also a site of struggle over its terms. That struggle took place in the medium of performance. This dissertation analyzes these performances and how the Band adapted to the changing boundaries of American geography and cultural memory through a variety of frameworks focusing on the visual, aural, and kinesthetic qualities of each type of performance. The musicians’ performative dynamic with a given audience was necessarily reconfigured each time the regiment was assigned to a new location. With each move, the Band contended with novel intersections of the U.S. settler and imperial project and the myriad social relations—interethnic, interracial, and international—that undergirded them.