Introduction:

“The Great Pretender,” released by The Platters in 1955, became the first song by a Black vocal group to reach No. 1 on the U.S. charts, at a moment that almost exactly overlapped with the early stirrings of the Civil Rights Movement.

Although it appears to be a song about masking heartbreak and loss—about pretending to be fine—its evocation of the gap between “who one is” and “how one is seen” makes it resonate, for me, as a song of double consciousness.

In my 2015 performance The Great Pretender, two women—one in Brazil and one in Japan—matched in age and dressed identically, sing the song in English, a language that is not their own.

As globalization accelerated, English seeped into daily life and work across the world, at times more deeply than people’s native tongues, while Black music and fashion traveled globally through acts of imitation.

Within this landscape, what is it that they are pretending to be?