An Algerian in Paris: Habib Benglia's "The Emperor Jones"

In 1923 the Algerian actor Habib Benglia played an uncanny Emperor Jones for the nation that colonized his own. On the stage of Paris's Odéon Theatre, one of France's most esteemed national performance venues, the French-speaking Benglia—a colonized subject—assumed the role of a colonizer (Brutus Jones) in a play that has been central in discussions of racial performativity, empire, and diaspora. Benglia performed the tensions between empire and colonial subject, embodying the spectacle of a failing emperor—a despotic ruler who is destroyed by the indigenous people of the island. This essay shows how this Franco-African performer deployed and subverted tropes of empire while performing The Emperor Jones. It argues that these performative iterations of Jones mark not only a vital lost performance history of O'Neill's groundbreaking drama, but also the layered contexts and performative valences for performing bodies across the black Atlantic. From the 1923 Odéon performance of L'Empereur Jones, to its 1950 Parisian revival, to re-performances of the Congo Witch-Doctor in his Montparnasse nightclub, Benglia was undoing empire while performing roles from O'Neill's drama about imperfect imperial rule.