(I can send you notes, but will just reference some key points here to make my arguments) the genre encapsulates artistic alter-ego creation such as my own attempts at it as well as the related arts of stage and screen acting, performance art, and includes morally questionable, even illegal practices such as impersonation and certain other types of fraud, as in criminals on the lam using assumed names.
On the one hand, one of the gifts to humanity that fiction provides is in its empathy, as writers of fiction generally attempt to write about characters other than themselves. This empathy is transferable to the reader, who also identifies with the protagonist typically. Traces of the author's personality as well as incidents and anecdotes, stories, scraps of dialog, and insight into the character or personality of another living being: these are commonly accepted as building blocks of fiction writing. In the course of creating characters, an author may essay to live inside the character they are writing, to overlap the fictional personality onto their own, to harmonize the two, not for the sake of changing themselves but to make the character come alive on the page. There are of course innumerable examples of authors' successful attempts to create characters different from themselves as well as characters based upon themselves throughout literary history. Now extend this idea of empathy to the creation of an alter-ego. The argument from this direction might conclude that if we begin from an empathetic starting point anyone should be able to portray anyone else, and harmful stereotypes based on race, sexual orientation, placement on a political spectrum, or any other of a number of qualifying criteria would be self-censoriously ruled out. That's the York Notes summary of one possible point of view.
But let's expand our point of view to include context, so we can see the issue from other angles. Reference was made to Cindy Sherman's use of blackface in her Bus Riders series of 1976. Sherman's oeuvre is problematic to feminists as well as people of color for its overreliance on stereotypes, effectively propping up an oppressive status quo rather than helping to dismantle it. Critiques of the referenced work are fair and honest, noting that Sherman at the time was capable of creating a range of white characters before the camera, as seen in the photographs, but her black characters have a feeling of interchangeableness due to the use of the same traditional blackface makeup for every persona as well as other details of styling.
It seems clear that the images can't be defended on artistic grounds, as the blatant exploitation of unfair racial stereotypes is not only offensive to the people who are lampooned as well as lazy, which deflates whatever seriousness the work might have had in the artist's mind at the time of its conception and production. Now of course some might try to defend Sherman by calling attention to her youth at the time of the work but such an argument can be, and often is used in defense of all sorts of antisocial actions by young people. Youth is no more an excuse than ignorance.
My own habit is to ask "what fresh insight does this work provide?" This isn't a moral question. In spite of my personal tendency to denounce Cindy Sherman's racist explications in Bus Riders I also hold the conviction that art has no mandate to moralize, that didactic art and literature constitute some of the most vacuous and insipid works of the imagination humanity has produced, and furthermore whether or not a work is offensive isn't sufficient grounds to deem it entirely without value. And yet when I ask myself "what insight does the work provide" in this case it doesn't strike me as particularly revealing of anything other than the author's own prejudicial assumptions about blackness, and about poor, marginalized people as simply "others" who are held at a distance, if not in contempt.
If I were to add something to this critique, I might point out that use of alter-egos may be morally questionable in itself, as an act of deception, but that in the case of some types of performance, such as acting, it’s an agreed-upon deception, a handshake lie, for the audience understands that the actor and character are not synonymous, but when the actor is any good the audience forgets it’s seeing an actor and is swept along in the story. It’s an agreed-upon deception and a fundamental prerequisite of theatrical arts.
It’s also worth mentioning that an element of play is involved in all artistic creation, play being here defined as a certain childlike freedom and enjoyment in the pure act of doing, or making. Sometimes play will get us into trouble.
Spartanburg
March, 2023