New Zealand critics and audiences in 1903 hailed Tapu (by Alfred Hill and Arthur Adams) as the harbinger of a new ‘national drama’. They thought that the comic opera captured the national essence and would broadcast the nation's advantages to a global audience. Yet the production never made it beyond Sydney, and has since disappeared from the historical record. My analysis of the script and critical reception shows that Tapu faltered in its confused adoption of a wide array of techniques of racial mimicry (borrowed from metropolitan theatres) to represent indigenous Māori and white visitors, but not the native-born settler population. The story of Tapu's failure, I argue, reveals something about the transnational conditions for the constitution of a national public sphere, and the indispensability of race as a supplement to that nation. It attunes us to the force of performance genre and repertoire as vehicles of racial information and affect, pointing to the ways in which conformity, rather than invention, was the ticket to success in the emergent global culture industries. If popular performance, and specifically racial mimicry, operated as a public experiment with the racial properties of citizenship – as a generation of scholarship on race and performance has argued – to what extent was that experiment controlled by the conventions of the global commodity market? This essay reaches insights that will be of interest to scholars of (trans)national performance history, settler whiteness and global indigeneity, and is germane to disciplinary debates on minstrelsy, ethnological show business, and cultural appropriation.

中文翻译：

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南太平洋棕脸：种族歧视、全球市场和塔普国家剧院（1903 年）

1903 年新西兰评论家和观众欢呼塔普（由阿尔弗雷德希尔和亚瑟亚当斯）作为新的“国家戏剧”的预兆。他们认为，相声戏抓住了国粹，将国家的优势展现给全球观众。然而，该作品从未超越悉尼，从此从历史记录中消失。我对剧本和批评接受的分析表明塔普在混乱地采用各种各样的种族模仿技术（从大都会剧院借来）来代表土著毛利人和白人游客，而不是土生土长的定居人口时，它步履蹒跚。的故事塔普我认为，他的失败揭示了构成国家公共领域的跨国条件，以及种族作为该国家补充的不可或缺性。它使我们适应了作为种族信息和影响工具的表演类型和曲目的力量，指出了在新兴的全球文化产业中，顺从而不是发明是通往成功的门票。如果大众表演，特别是种族模仿，作为对公民身份的种族特性的公共实验——正如一代关于种族和表演的学者所争论的那样——那么该实验在多大程度上受到全球商品市场惯例的控制？本文得出的见解将引起（跨国）表演史学者的兴趣，