Commedia Dell'arte and the Staged Lives of Black Celebrity Marriage
Open Access DepositedNeo-Negro Nuptials
This dissertation argues that Black celebrity marriage is a staged performance of legibility, containment, spectacle, and profit. Through the framework of commedia dell’arte, I reveal how Black couples of prominences perform and (re)negotiate freedom within constraints under racial capitalism. Despite their wealth and hyper-(in)visibility, Black celebrity couples, remain bound by scripts of legibility that force them into cyclical performances of respectability, redemption, and economic viability. Marriage does not stabilize Blackness
rather, it demands that Black folks continuously perform their relationships for both Black and white audiences via differentiated and negotiated depictions of commemoration. Even under the most ideal circumstances like wealth, traditional marriage structures, espoused Christian values, notoriety, and accolades, Black marriage is not a site of freedom or redemption but a scripted stage where couples act out pre-determined roles in exchange for reverence, increased wealth, and tenuous freedom. Through an intentionally interdisciplinary archive, this project examines Black celebrity marriage as a performed cultural form with a primary emphasis on the period from 2000’s to the present. It includes television sitcoms, film, award show footage, advertising campaigns, social media content, tabloid journalism, and self-authored media such as interviews and memoirs. While marriage has long functioned as a site through which Black respectability, survival, and citizenship have been (re)negotiated, the contemporary moment offers a distinct convergence of visibility, platform proliferation, and racialized scrutiny that intensifies the demands on marriage performances. This work focuses on high-profile couples as both exceptional figures and legible surfaces through which broader cultural understandings of love, labor, and legitimacy become visible. The project situates these contemporary performances within longer histories of Black domestic performance, theatrical labor, and racial spectacle. It draws on commedia dell’arte as a comparative framework to historicize improvisation, archetype, and audience foci. Rather than treating the contemporary archive as a rupture from the past, this work reads it as an extension and amplification of earlier regimes of performance that are shaped by slavery, minstrelsy, respectability politics, and racial capitalism.
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McClinton_gwu_0075A_17809.pdf | 2026-06-24 | Open Access |
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