Botface

Evidently, people love watching others pretend to be robots. This article uncovers hidden links between this practice and blackface performance, then theorizes the two as similarly metatheatrical practices in the realm of the infrahuman. Studying the international performance and reception history of Karel Čapek’s R.U.R., the science-fiction melodrama that coined and popularized the word robot, this essay demonstrates how robot characters came to behave how they do and how this behavior blackened them in the eyes of certain audiences. Paying special attention to a repeated trope of botface performance (the scrutiny scene) the essay shows how people were taught to look with paranoid intensity at robots for signs of their failed or emergent humanity. Through close study of the play’s reception, the article shows that it was in learning to look at actors this way—especially white actors in even whiter makeup—that people came to understand robots as Black. Throughout, attention is paid to how these kinds of performance and spectatorship were, in fact, connected to key emerging ideas about acting—especially realist acting—thus suggesting a secret, racialized history for these modes of acting.