As It Turns Out, What Was Being Staged Was: Racist Theatricality, Racial Reality, and The KKK Boutique Ain’t Just Rednecks

Camille Billops and James Hatch’s documentary The KKK Boutique Ain’t Just Rednecks is an allegorical descent through the hell of US American racism, making use of Dante Alighieri’s classic poem from the Italian Renaissance Inferno as its narrative blueprint. This essay brings a performance studies perspective to bear on a reading of the film to argue that, by centering performance and theatricality in their interrogation of race and racism within a US American context, Billops and Hatch articulate a powerful thesis regarding the relationship between theater, race, and racism. Eschewing the redemption narrative at the heart of their source material, in Billops’s and Hatch’s film a desire to ameliorate racism requires much more than a simple journey to hell and back. It requires a negotiation with the theatrical and relational dynamics through which racial realities are constituted. In this sense, an encounter with the film is an encounter with the realization that theater isn’t merely a way to depict race. Theater is one of the ways through which racial meaning is made manifest through and across bodies, space, and time. Whether it is occurring in popular performance forms or in the rituals and scripted performance that structure everyday life, theatricality is one of the engines through which racial reality achieves itself.