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I:'.5"4~ 0.21.... it I 35’ It lit; at .D \ Av. h . 9 SW A It)! :1 I . ’1‘. . .‘lvi {If} . . .nn.. .— . \ 9....) . A: a; . . I a. h. I: . .5... 1...: .. . . 3.19.2.7: ;. i.-. $3.9. if): I“. ‘5wtll, Illllllll'llll'illllllllllllllillllllllilll 3 1293 00904 8228 Tl . is to certify that the dissertation entitled BLACK BODIES/ BLACK TEXTS: CRITICAL AND CULTURAL "PASSING" AMONG READERS OF NELLA LARSEN'S PASSING presented by Deborah Renee Grayson has been accepted towards fulfillment of the requirements for Ph.D. English degree in (AOL ' r professor Date 4‘ " ‘5 ”Q3; MS U is an Affirmative Action/Equal Opportunity Institution 0« 12771 PLACE IN RETURN BOX to remove this checkout from your record. TO AVOID FINES return on or before date due. DATE DUE DATE DUE DATE DUE MSU Is An Affirmative Action/Equal Opportunity Institution cprma-p.‘ BLACK BODIES/BLACK TEXTS: CRITICAL AND CULTURAL ”PASSING” AMONG READERS OF NELLA LARSEN’S PASSING BY Deborah Renee Grayson A DISSERTATION Submitted to Michigan State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Department of English 1993 ABSTRACT BLACK BODIES/BLACK TEXTS: CRITICAL AND CULTURAL ”PASSING” AMONG READERS OF NELLA LARSEN’S PASSING BY Deborah Renee Grayson Poststructuralist and postmodernist thought has made it increasingly possible for literary theorists and historians alike to scrutinize ”race" as a bracketed concept. When we talk about ”race” as a bracketed concept, we remind ourselves that "race," like ”gender” is a social, political and.cultural construction. I argue in this dissertation that a Black feminist poststructuralist or postmodernist approach to reading enhances Larsen's project of getting readers to read "race” and to some degree, gender, as a way to examine the complexity of subjectivity. The assertion of this dissertation is that the critical reader of Passing is challenged to read more than the most superficial layer of the many layers that constitute the texts of our bodies and those of the novel itself. Nella Larsen demonstrates in Passing, for example, how Black. female subjectivity has been and continues to be constructed in American culture through her use of northern, urban, middle- class mixed-raced "Black" women as her central characters. By constructing her characters the way she does, Larsen invites readers to examine how we are all politically, socially, and culturally constructed. Literary analysis, however, like public discourse rarely reflects this fact. Instead, both literary analysis and public and political discourse often reflect only a superficial understanding of these issues. This dissertation contributes to the scholarship on Larsen, African American and feminist literature and contemporary critical theory by bringing together intellectual camps who resist examining how our texts and our bodies are constructed with those who reject this type of examination. Instead of refusing to engage in dialogues that use contemporary critical theory and that raise questions about our received knowledge, I argue, we should welcome the use of any tools that help us to ask new questions about our texts and about how we are constructed as individuals. Copyright by DEBORAH RENEE GRAYSON 1993 To Mommy, Daddy, Denise, and Googra the wind beneath my wings ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I have a number of people to thank for their assistance, encouragement and prayers in helping me through the process of obtaining this degree. I am grateful to Dr. Lincoln Moore and Dr. Cassandra Simmons for their invaluable advice and unwavering support and for suggesting that I consider Michigan State University as the place to obtain my degree. I would also like to thank Dr. Marvel Lang for teaching me to have a sense of humor about this whole process. To my committee members Dr. Jim McClintock, Dr. Darlene Clark Hine and Dr. Michael Lopez, thank you, thank you, thank you. Each of you has shared your time, your expertise, and your wisdom in helping me to join the community of scholars that awaits me. I want to especially thank Jim McClintock who, as both my adviser during my master's program and as a committee member during my Ph.D. program was always "fighting for me." To my 'sistuhs' Deborah Smith Barney (the other Deborah) , Deborah Dyson (the other other Deborah), Kathy Gainor, Angeletta Gourdine, Renee Hannibal, Catherine Harmon, Benita E. Lewis, Pamela Smoot, Sherry wynn thank you for being my best friends, checking on me to make sure this thing hadn't gotten.me down, and.making me go outside when I began to look vi "pale.” I love ya'll. I would.also like to thank my extended families, the Lewis family of Silver Spring, MD, Ms. Juliette Bethea (fairy godmother and kindred spirit), Ms. (Soror) Sharon worthy and the women of Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Delta Tau Omega Chapter. Thank you to my ”big brothers“ Felix "the cat," Anthony Cheeseborugh, Ronnie Hopkins, Garvin.Mark, Anthony Toomer and Joseph Young. To mommy, daddy, Denise, Googra and Ellie, no one could be more blessed than I am to have a family like you. Thanks also to the Grayson and Lassiter families for prayers and encouragement. To Charles, who came in on the tail end of this process, but who, nevertheless, saw me through to the end. What would I do 'without. your‘ merciless critiques (talk. about "the gaze'!)? Thank you, this is the first of many. Thank you also to the staff in the English department, Ms. Shirley Kirkland, Lorraine, Rosemary and Sharon. If I have forgotten any one else it is not because I don't appreciate you, thank you too. Finally, to Katherine Fishburn, my dissertation director, mentor, teacher/scholar, friend. You have given me more than I can possibly thank you for. The only way I can hope to repay you is to be the excellent teacher/scholar you trained me to be. vii TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 Chapter One: Reading, I'Race," Gender and Passing/"Passing“ . . . . 13 Black Feminist Poststructuralist, Not an Oxymoron. . 13 Toward a Black Feminist Dialogics . . . . . .17 Readers, Writers, and Interpretive Communities . . . 28 Interpretive Communities (Re)Reading Ourselves Reading Passing: 1929-1959 . . . . . . . . . . . . .36 Passing and the Black Aesthetic: 1960-1972 . . . . . 56 Passing: New(er) Critical Directions . . . . . . . . 63 Chapter Two: Fooling White Folks; Or, How I Stole the Show by Messin"with the Gaze . . . . . .80 (Re)presentations of the Body: Hybridized Texts . . .82 Extraliterary Affairs . . . . . . . . . . . . . .85 Passing Glances . . . . . . . . . . . . . .95 Reading, "Race," and the Body . . . . . . . . . . . 103 Disciplining the Body: Race, Rape, and Lynching. . . . . . . . . 108 Disciplinary Constructions of. the Body . . . . . . .116 Parting Looks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 125 Chapter Three: Theories in the Flesh: Poststructuralism, Postmodernism, and African American Literature . . . . . 138 The Politics of Location . . . . . 138 Criticial Theory and African American Critics . . . 147 The Subject is Black . . . . . . . . . . . . . 158 The Black Aesthetic Revisited . . . . 164 Joyce, Baker, Gates and the Difference they Make. . 168 Joyce . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 168 Baker . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 177 Gates . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 181 The Difference they Make . . . . . . . . . . . . . .185 Chapter Four: Loose Endings: What Did I Do To Be So Black and Blues . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .O. . . .197 List of works Cited . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .212 viii INTRODUCTION Since its publication in 1929 critics have generally viewed Nella Larsen’s Passing and her use of middle-class, mixed race Blacks as an indication that she was a part of the racial uplift school of Black artists, politicians, and other professionals who believed that if they were able to prove to members of white mainstream society that ”we are just like you" racism would cease. Other interpretations claim Passing is a novel solely about race with nothing to say about sex or class as the center of identity. As part of this pattern, critics have been inclined to read Larsen’s two central characters, Clare Kendry and Irene Redfieldq as noble and long suffering mulattas whose plights symbolize the oppression of Blacks and the irrationality of prejudice. Important as this theme is to the novel and to the history of African-American literature, such readings have a negative effect of obscuring some of the most significant and.complex:aspects of the issues Larsen raises. ‘What has become increasingly clear in the last five years is that there are many other layers of Larsen’s novel that need to be decoded and further explicated.1 One way to decode the many layers of Larsen's text(s) is to read “passing“ as a culturally mediated act.2 This gives us a minimum of two texts to deal with: (1) the text of 1 2 passing with a little "p“ and (2) the text of Passing with a capital 'P" -- the second in other words, being the novel itself. Reading both texts simultaneously helps us see how the subjectivity'of Blacks has been (and.continues to be) con- structed in American culture. Previous readers of Larsen's text(s) have tended to look upon "passing" as an act and Passing as a text as an individual’s passage from.one unified, coherent and stable self to another. I will argue that readers miss the point when they are unwilling to acknowledge that the idea of passing as an act and Passing as a text is the recognition of the non-biological basis of ”race.“ The concept of 'race' in the last two to three years has come under increasing scrutiny from literary theorists and historians alike. When we talk about "race” as a "bracketed" concept, we remind ourselves that ”race," like “gender“ is a social construction. "Race,” to borrow from Patricia Wil- liams, "is only one of a number of governing narratives or presiding fictions by which [we are] constantly reconfiguring [ourselves] in the world" (Alchgmy 256). With this said, I think it is important to stop here and.make the point that our practice has not kept up with our theories about ”race." To theorize about race and the difference it makes in texts gggg Egg negate the material reality of racist and sexist Oppression that continues to pervade our society and culture. The readings I will do of Passing, then, will focus on Larsen's example of (re)presenting the "Blackness" of her female characters as ”whiteness." I argue that by 3 (re)presenting her characters in this manner Larsen invites readers to examine how the material realities of Black women's lives are the subject of and therefore subject(ed) to a range of conflicting discourses and oppressions. Through the ambiguities she presents us with in her text(s), Larsen provides us with a way to challenge how subjectivity has been and continues to be constructed in American culture. The representation of her characters demonstrates how the position of Black women as “twice biologized and delegitimated public subjects," (Berlant 112) helps us reconsider and reconfigure the idea of the bodiless citizen that underpins Enlightenment thought. The way Larsen constructs her characters also invites us to find useful ways to engage our theories of race and.gender with our theories of reading. Using scholars of African American literature as my example, I will draw'on Stanley Fish's notion.of "interpretive communities" to trace how the critical discourse on race and gender has evolved in readings of Passing. In chapter one, "Reading, "Race,“ Gender and Passing/Passing,“ I examine the ways interpretive communities have read Larsen and have read what are often described.as the ”racial themes“ in her text(s) of Passing/passing. Reviewing the critical responses to Passing by using Fish’s notion of interpretive communities -- or those groups who develop strategies for reading texts —- allows :me to identify' recurring' assumptions and. reading strategies these communities have used in their analyses of 4 Larsen's text(s).3 At the root of the assumptions these groups have made about Passing is an unwillingness to accept the multiplicity of Larsen’s text(s) . Until recently critics have insisted on reading Passing in terms of binaries, eliminating other possibilities for reading her text(s) . The change in perception of Larsen’s text(s) is due largely to critical work done by Black feminist literary critics whose voices have only begun to be heard in the last two decades. Deborah McDowell represents one example of a Black feminist critic who has helped change how we respond to texts in African American literary canons. In "Boundaries: Or Distant Relations and Close Kin,” McDowell outlines some possibilities for why interpretive communities of African American and feminist literature have found it necessary to alter the discourse on reading, race, and gender. In her discussion of interpretive communities of African American literary scholars, for example, McDowell demonstrates how some of these scholars have tried to present an assurance of a ”positive“ self -- a "positive" Black and female self -- that is 'preexistent, coherent, and known" ‘ (1989, 58). Her discussion of how African American and women's canons of literature are constructed is easily exemplified in how interpretive communities have responded to Passing. In chapter one I will demonstrate through a review of the critical responses to Passing how readers of Larsen's text(s) ”pass“ themselves by only responding to the surface of the text(s) of Passing/passing. Because readers believe what they 5 are seeing in their surface readings of Larsen’s text(s), they miss the point by failing to interpret what Shari Benstock calls "the local elements and practices" of the text.‘ A critical reading of Passing which penetrates the surface of the text(s) (of both the physical and.the written.body) should lift the mask that Larsen.has constructed and enable us to see what happens when the normative dualisms of Enlightenment thought (in this case Black versus white) virtually force an individual to choose between one term or the otheru ‘What does it mean to be subject(ed) to these circumstances? How do we as readers, as members of interpretive communities, (re)pre- sent something that departs from or is undefinable within existing systems of signification, something that has been left out of the discourse? Michel Foucault's ideas, particularly those in Discipline and Punish, provide a way to read Passing/passing and the experiences of its‘central characters inwways that acknowledge their complexity and attest to Larsen's skill not only in portraying psychological ambiguity but also the ambiguities of how racial and gendered subjects are formed and defined. In chapter two, "Fooling White Folks; Or, How I Stole the Show'by Messin' with the Gaze,” I draw on Foucault's concept of the gaze to do a reading of gassing that continues a discussion I think Larsen had unsuccessfully attempted to engage her contemporaries in a little over sixty years ago. Foucault’s concept of the gaze -- "the exercise of discipline [which] coerces by means of observation" (Foucault 1979, 170) 6 -— is the tool those in power use to keep those not in power subordinant. The gaze is extremely powerful because the gazers do not have to be present to have their power felt. The gaze works by making the individual who is considered "Other“ always visible (and for the purposes of this discussion ”Other“ designates Black women). At the heart of Foucault's poststructuralist project is the interrogation of subjectivity itself. Because we are all said to be formed through language, the identity of each one of us can be seen as a kind of text. Some would argue that as individuals we have no control over language or how the textual body is written. In my discussion I join those on the other side of this argument who say that as we are introduced and sub- ject(ed) to other texts of the world (other bodies), we are never entirely at the mercy of what we receive. In fact, we rewrite these texts -- our bodies. That they indeed can be rewritten is evident in the actions of Clare Kendry, and to a lesser degree, in the actions of Irene Redfield. By using Foucault's ideas as a way to lift and thus read beneath the mask Larsen has constructed, I am able to argue that Larsen comments on, by inverting, the paradigm of African American literature that Deborah McDowell critiques. Larsen, in fact, manages to cast her own.gaze upon those who would try to control her with their language. She invites us to play with the guises and disguises of ”race” by providing us with the perfect opportunity to ”mess with the gaze." .By (re)pres- enting characters who, on the surface, appear to be something 7 other than what they are, Larsen demonstrates the limitations of the gaze and the limitations of how we construct subjectiv- ity. Having said this, I should pause at this point to state that though I use the ideas of Foucault and other poststruc-fi turalist theorists in my analyses, I am aware that there are those who feel that poststructuralist theories (of any kind) should not be used to explicate texts in African American and feminist canons. While many African American and feminist scholars have contributed extensively to the poststructuralist anti-humanist critique of subjectivity, which among other things "involves exposing the masculine [and or white] bias of supposed neutral subject[s] " (Gatens 1988, 62) , there are others in these same interpretive communities who are hostile to anti-humanist critiques. Chris Weedon tells us that, too often, those who are opposed to anti-humanist critiques of subjectivity often see these critiques "as a way of devaluing people, " particularly white women and women and men of color (74) .5 I go on to argue in chapter two, then, that we must respond to the misgivings of those who are reluctant to use poststructuralist theories or who outright reject them. Instead of refusing to engage in dialogues that use poststru- cturalist theories of subjectivity, we should address the misgivings of interpretive communities of African American and feminist literary scholars who have pointed out the problems of these theories by identifying, analyzing, and attempting to bridge the gaps where poststructuralist theory does not 8 address historical situations of oppression and co-optation. I hope to demonstrate in my arguments how incorporating the shortcomings of the theori(es) into our use of them helps us to transform them. In so doing, I will argue, we are able to ask new questions about texts, about how texts are construct- ed, about ourselves and about how we are constructed as well. Chapter three, “Theories in the Flesh: Postmodernism, Poststructuralism.and.African.American.Literature,” continues the project I began in chapter two. In this chapter I examine more closely the debates and discussions that have occurred and continue to occur within contemporary interpretive communities of African American literature regarding poststructuralist and postmodernist theories, particularly poststructuralist and.postmodernist theories of subjectivity. I am interested in this chapter in further exploring how members of these communities have A responded to poststructuralism's and postmodernism's (de)constructions of 'race' and. gender and. why this deconstruction. is often perceived as a threat to.African.American theorists.‘ In this chapter I return to issues I raise in earlier chapters regarding how and why members of African American interpretive communities disagree about whether or not poststructuralist and.postmodernist theories are useful tools for interpreting texts in their respective canons. I have as my focus in this chapter two tasks. First, I will demonstrate how, in the last three to five years, postmodernist and poststructuralist theories of subjectivity 9 have changed how we view the concepts of "race” and “gender“ and thus how they have shaped and changed our theoretical practices. Second, I will further illuminate the ideas of the first part of this chapter, by outlining and positioning myself within a debate Joyce A. Joyce, Houston Baker, Jr. , and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., waged on the pages of New Literary History regarding the uses of poststructuralist theory for a study of African American literature. This debate, which has gained national attention as a result of its particularly acrimonious tone, is a good example of how individuals within the same interpretive community, who, as Eugene Goodheart has put it, ”share the same assumed purposes" (220), still have serious disagreements. In the second half of this chapter I will enter the debate myself in an effort to: 1) move toward a discussion of African American literature and critical theory that is dialogic and therefore more productive (and hopefully a lot less acrimonious) and 2) move toward a discussion of African American literature that makes clear that theory is not a threat to the integrity of African American literature but is instead a necessary and important component to the development of the literature. Finally, in "Loose End(ing)s: "What Did I Do to be So Black and Blue, " the fourth chapter of this work, I reveal how this study is a hybrid construction, encompassing in its single body multiple layers of contending and contentious issues. I demonstrate in this last chapter through my readings of Larsen’s text(s) and through my construction of my 10 own text(s) in response to hers, how Passing becomes a model for developing a new(er) approach to African American literary and cultural studies. In this final section of my project, I return to an explication of Passing -- this time in order to focus on the novel’s controversial ending. I do so in order to demonstrate how Larsen, a very (post)modern (not-so-) New Negro, shunned the tidy endings that she knew her readers expected from her and instead chose to leave them with an array of possibilities for interpreting the novel's, Clare's, and Irene's "endings.” I argue that Larsen, in not providing us with definitive answers, has provided us with a new model, as Annette Kolodny suggests writers should, for assigning aesthetic, critical and ideological value to texts. 11 Notes 1 See for example Cheryl Wall, "Passing for What? Aspects of Identity in Nella Larsen’s Novels," Black American Litera- ture Forum 20 (Spring/Summer 1986): 97-111,- Claudia Tate, "Nella Larsen’s Passing: A Problem of Interpretation," Biggk American Literature Forum 14 (1980): 142-46; Thadious Davis, "Nella Larsen’s Harlem Aesthetic,” Harlem Renaissance: Revaluationg, eds. Amritjit Singh, William Shriver, and Stanley Brodwin (New York: Garland Publishing, 1989) 245-256. 2 I use "text(s)” here because I will argue that there are several layers to the text Larsen has presented us with. 3 In addition to the assumptions made about Passing in the opening segment of this essay, critics have also argued that: the central themes of the novel are about race and passing, Clare Kendry and not Irene Redfield is the central figure in the novel and she alone is passing, and race subsumes sex as the center of identity. ‘ See Benstock's arguments in her introduction to Textualizing the Feminine. 5 As I write this I cannot help but be struck by my own difficulty with the language of naming. If I use the racial signifiers that I have resorted to using here, then I appear to be supporting what I am attempting to undermine. ‘ Much of what I say about African American literary theorists' responses to using poststructuralist theory can be 12 applied to feminist theorists as well. To make this a more manageable project, however, I usually restrict my comments to African.American critics. This is not to say, of course, that ”African American" and ”feminist" are mutually exclusive categories. The terms "African.American critics“ or "critics of African American literature" obviously include feminists among'themn I feel, however, that the terms FAfrican.American critics“ or “critics of African American literature” are more inclusive than if I were to simply say "feminists” or "African American feminists.“ CHAPTER ONE Reading, “Race," Gender and Passing/Passing Black Feminist Poststructuralist, Not an Oxymoron An examination of the ways interpretive communities of feminist and African American literature have responded to and continue to respond to Nella Larsen and to her novel Passing (1929) reveals important relationships among race, gender and reading and how these issues relate to readers, texts and authors. In the last ten to twelve years, much has been written and spoken about the shift from text-centered criti- cism to reader-centered criticism, Setting itself up against New Criticism, reader-response criticism takes as its themes: "the kinds of readers various texts seem to imply, the role actual readers play in the determination of literary meaning, the relation of reading conventions to textual interpretation, and the status of the reader’s self" (see Tompkins, ix). Reading Larsen's Passing in light of these themes and in light of current debate about difference challenges us to examine our interpretive strategies. Reading Larsen's Passing in light of these themes also challenges us to examine how discussions of race, gender, and class as additional and overlapping texts of the process of reading and.the process of interpretation shape our theories of analysis. I argue in this chapter and throughout this work that Black feminist theory, when used as an overlapping text in the process of reading and interpretation, becomes a useful tool for critical 13 l4 analysis because it 'revoices' the discourse of .African American and feminist literature. By locating itself in the gaps where discussions of race, gender and reading should intersect and interact with each other but do not, Black feminist theory creates the opportunity for new and different kinds of conversations to occur about texts and about ourselves as members of interpretive communities. Because of this, I use Black feminist theory as the primary critical lens through which to view and read not only Larsen’s text(s) but also the strategies of communities of interpreters who have responded to her texts. I argue that Black feminist critical practice provides a way to analyze the relationships that race, gender, and reading have to the author, the text, and the reader. Though it is difficult (and probably undesirable) to identify a single definition.of Black feminist theory; I do suggest in this chapter some tentative definitions. I do so to help demonstrate how Black feminist theory is able to change the reading process itself because it addresses the interlocking issues of race, gender, and class and the role they each play in literary production. Borrowing from Mikhail Bakhtin and Don Bialostosky, I argue that Black feminist theory is a dialogical critical practice which.brings together in conversation a diversity of individual voices and/or interpretive and activist communities. The implementation of Black feminist theory when reading and interpreting texts in African American literary 15 canons has brought about a challenge to and a deconstruction of the idea that there is a unified and stable category called "woman” or "Black" (or ”white“ or "man" for that matter). Bell hooks has argued, for example, that ”the efforts of Black women/women of color to challenge and deconstruct the category 'woman’ [has resulted in] the insistence on recognition that gender is not the sole factor in determining constructions of femaleness [and Blackness]. . .' (1992b, 4). Hooks further argues that the critical intervention of Black women/women of color in the ”contemporary production of feminist theory" revolutionizes feminist thought by 'interrogat[ing] and disrupt[ing] the hegemonic feminist theory produced primarily by academic women, most of whom were white” (1992b, 4). Echoing hooks, Hortense Spillers reminds us that as ”a category of social production" gender, when applied to Black women, has "not yet assimilated to women of color“ (Spillers 1989, 166). According to Spillers, Black:women.become instead "the very negation of femaleness“ (1989, 170). When reading Nella.Larsen's text(s) of Passing through.the critical lens of Black feminist theory, then, the ungendering and e-racing of Black women becomes undone. Because, in poststructuralist terms, we are all said to be formed through language, the identity of each one of us can be seen as a kind of text. Larsen’s presentation of Black women's bodies as bi-racial -- a presentation that effectively blurs the boundaries of racial identity -- magnifies the fact that all of us are indeed socially constructed texts. iReading 16 Passing through the critical lens of Black feminist theory demonstrates how both the theory itself and Larsen's text(s) revolutionize past and present theories of reading and interpretation. The presence of the two qualifiers in the term Black feminist theory'themselves make us aware of how the racial, sexual and class identities that Black women embody can help revolutionize current theories of reading and interpretation. Even at its most superficial level, in other words, at the level where this criticism simply embodies two visibly ”othered identities, " Black feminist theory in general revolutionizes theories of reading' and. interpretation. by making possible simultaneous discussions of raced and gendered discourse and identities. Black feminist theory, more particularly, unleashes the multiple meanings of a text like Passing by interrogating and disrupting the interpretive strategies of those communities who are content to read only the most superficial layer of all the many layers that constitute the texts of our bodies and those of the novel itself. Interpretive communities who read only the surface of the texts of our bodies and therefore the text(s) of Larsen’s Passing often read under the guise of the new old adage "believing is seeing." It is in this way that they fail to lift the mask Larsen has constructed for us in order to read beneath it. The critical lens of Black feminist theory challenges interpretive communities to (re)read and (re)interpret texts (and thus themselves) in ways that engage the intellectual, 17 political, and social constituencies of past and present interpretive communities and.the interpretive strategies they employ; In so doing, Black feminist theory' challenges interpretive communities to address the implications of the historical, social, and political situations not only of themselves as readers (and thus as texts) but also of the texts they read. My discussion in this chapter, then, takes a look at how the historical, social, and political situations of communities of readers and the interpretive strategies they employ have shaped their responses to Larsen’s text(s) of Passing. I take as my example the responses of interpretive communities to Passing from its 1929 publication date to the early 19705. In my analysis of this forty year period of critical response, I describe the debates that have taken place over the meaning(s) of this novel and try to suggest what issues seem to be at stake. My approach will be to examine the historical, social, and political situations of those interpretive communities who have responded to Passing. I argue that at each stage in this critical response, the discourse on race and gender has been rendered increasingly problematic, particularly as it has pertained to the idea of ”Black” and/or "woman’s“ experience.1 Toward a Black Feminist Dialogics A.number of texts written in the last decade or so, which take as their task to examine the politics of interpretation, 18 have notably failed to address how the interlocking issues of both gender and race affect the reading strategies interpre- tive communities have developed to read texts.2 In contrast to positions taken in these texts, Judith Rivkin takes the position in "Resisting Readers and Reading Effects: Some Speculations on Reading and Gender“ that we do not “suspend different features of our identity -- of our biological selves when we read" -- despite the fact that "many theories of reading draw on such a suspension of identity” (11). Citing Roland Barthes’s argument in The Pleasure of the Text that ”textual pleasure, like sexual pleasure, comes at moments of self abandon," Rivkin argues that ”gender, . .. like class or other ’exclusions' continues to matter at the moment of textual ecstasy" (11). According to Rivkin, ”[e]ven at the moment of self-forgetting, gender remains an issue: [because] to base one's model of reading on an erotic experience is to make sexual difference a critical category" (12).3 But what about racial difference in addition to gender difference as a critical category? What are the material consequences of embodying particular gender and racial identities simulta- neously and.how'does the simultaneous embodiment of these two identities affect the reading'jprocess?’ Though. feminist critics in general have done much to develop the connection between gender and reading and their social, political, and historical contexts, it has been Black feminist critics in particular who have developed a theory of reading and inter- pretation that demands that we acknowledge that ”the politics 19 of sex as well as the politics of race and.class are crucially interlocking factors” not only in the works of Black women writers but in all literature.‘ In a review essay for Tulsa Women’s Studies Claudia Tate defines Black feminist criticism as 'designat[ing] the category of critical methodology for interpreting the signifi- cance of the issues of race and gender in expressive culture in which the authority is Black and female" (119).5 Tate argues that [B]lack feminist criticism postulates theoretical and practical strategies for interpreting meaning in these cultural products by identifying ideologi- cal issues, economic conditions, social conven- tions, assumptions, values, and prejudices that have shaped Afro-American women’s lives in general and as a consequence, have largely determined the subjects that Black women writers address in their writing as well as its modes of representation and patterns of signification (119). Black feminist theory takes as its central issues not only the recovery and.rereading of "lost“ texts of Blacknwomen, it also undertakes, ”as any good theory does, an explanation of the mechanisms operating within the text and the mechanisms that go beyond what has become the text. '5 By examining these mechanisms Black feminist theory’ makes us aware of the interrelationships that exist among those “ideological issues, economic conditions, social conventions, assumptions, values 20 and prejudices" which Tate points out have shaped Black women's lives and their literary production. These issues, I would add, also factor into our readings of Black women’s texts and the interpretive strategies we‘develop to respond to them” Having said this, however, I want to make it clear that I am not suggesting that the racial and sexual qualifiers of Black feminist theory should lead us to form.a type of reader- response criticism which naturalizes the process of reading Black women's texts or for using Black feminist analysis. Inevitably a discussion of Black feminist criticism or theory leads to a question of what it is and who can use it. Having learned from the shortcomings of earlier attempts at Black feminist analysis, more recent Black feminist critics like Claudia Tate remind us that the term "Black feminist criti- cism' is not "a label designating the biological identity of those critics who elect to use it" (though it can) nor are the racial and gender categories of Black feminist criticism a "license [n]or a prohibition for its application! (Tate 1988, 120). Drawing from Tate’s assertions, I would say that Black feminist theory "is not mysterious and unknowable, an exotic territory inevitably foreign to all those who are not Black and female” (120). It is instead, as Tate argues, "accessible to those who choose to learn as well as practice its tenets" (Tate 1988, 121). Black feminist criticism, in my assessment, is a critical strategy'which.not only "[attends] to the issues of race and gender in literary production" (120) as Tate 21 argues it does, it exposes the process of constantly changing interests which inform this production. In her now much heralded book Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Noveli_s_§ (1987), Hazel Carby’ examines the development of Black feminist criticism and Black women's literature, unleashing it from some of its essentialist and ahistorical moorings.7 Carby’s examination of the texts of Black women and Black feminist criticism.moves to a more critical and analytical look at how issues of race, gender, and class shape theories of reading and literary production. Carby’s analysis is useful because she sets the tone for how feminist critical practice can encompass what she refers to as an "articulation of race and gender" in ways that do not essentialize the categories of ”Black woman, " ”Black womanhood, " ”Black woman's identity, " or ”the Black experience." Borrowing from Stuart Hall, Carby uses the word ”articulation" to mean -- ”a coming together of separate discourses.'° Carby suggests that in order for the discourses of race and gender to "come together,“ we must be "historically specific and aware of the differently oriented social interests within one and the same sign.community‘ (17). Stated more plainly, terms like “Black" and "feminist,“ to follow Carby's argument, are not 'transhistorical forms . . . of identity“ (17) because these terms, among others, acquire "specific political or economical meanings at different moments in history" (18). An historically specific articulation of the discourse on race, gender and reading, 22 then, because its terms are not transhistorical, suggests a constantly changing dialogue which is determined by the social, political, and historical contexts of our writing, reading, and speaking about these issues. Bakhtin’s notion of dialogics is useful here. In "Discourse in the Novel" Bakhtin argues that ”The novel can.be defined as a diversity of social speech types . .. . and a diversity of individual voices, artistically organized“ (262) . For Bakhtin the Stylistics of the novel is amdialogizing force where the ”multiplicity of social voices and.a‘wide variety of their links and interrelationships (always more or less dialogized)" come together (263). In the case of Black feminist theory (which does not necessarily have to be limited to Black women's texts) I am suggesting that there are parallels to what Bakhtin argues here. For example, Black feminist theory and its material counterpart, Black women's texts, bring together in dialogue the multiple, overlapping and interrelated social, political and cultural voices of a number of interpretive communities. Both.Bakhtin's notion of dialogics and my appropriation of his concept represent a move away from falsely unifying language inside and outside the text. In making this move, Black feminist theory, in effect, works to enhance the heteroglossia -- the multivoicedness -- of both written texts and the texts of our bodies. Bakhtin describes and defines the novel as a way to talk about language. In his discussion of dialogics what is at issue is the interrogation of language. In my appropriation 23 of his ideas for use in Black feminist theori(es) , what is at issue is not only the interrogation of language as unified and undialogized within texts but also of how similar methods of false unification and undialogization of language occurs outside of texts as well. According to Bakhtin, language that is not dialogized is authoritative, it is ”conceived as ideologically saturated, . . . as a world view, even as concrete opinion, insuring a maximum of mutual understanding in all spheres of ideological life" (271) . Similarly, discussions of our identities -- of our (socially constructed) selves -- are viewed in this same manner. American cultural descriptions/definitions of our raced and gendered bodies, for example, work to enforce the idea that there is a single human body (a topic I will address in the next chapter) that is a universal citizen through whom a specific ideology or world view is filtered to suggest ”mutual understanding." Black feminist theory read as an overlapping text to this (re)pres- entation of an ideal (singular) human body illustrates Bakht in ’ s theory that " undialogized language [1] s authoritative“ (427) . It does so by demonstrating that often the "world view" that is being portrayed is only one of several views, that the "concrete opinions" that are being presented are only concrete because they have been imposed on others' opinions, and that a "maximum of mutual understanding“ (Bakhtin 271) often passes for what is actually a maximum of minimal understanding. ”A word, discourse, language or culture,” to follow Bakhtin, can be interpreted as a 24 "dialogizing' mechanism only when it 'relativizes' and 'de- privileges” other acts of speech -- other novels, discourses, languages or cultures, thus revealing "competing definitions for the same things” (427). Black feminist theory, because it must always embody two identities -- must always serve two voices -- within the same body simultaneously, is then, very much a dialogic enterprise. Don Bialostosoky describes dialogic criticism as encompassing ”relations among persons articulating their ideas in response to one another, discovering their mutual affinities and oppositions, their provocations to reply, their desires to hear more, or their wishes to change the subject according to their particular perspective" (Bialostosky 789). My appropriation of Bakhtin's notions of dialogics for Black feminist theory supports Bialostosky’s description. Whether we are discussing dialogics strictly in the Bakhtinian sense or extending it to talk about group/community interaction, Bakhtin's notion of dialogics makes it possible to "open the borders of closure“ that exist among and within communities of interpreters and the strategies they develop to respond to texts.10 Dale Bauer’s use of dialogics in Feminist Dialogics: A Theogy of Failed Community (1988) provides me with another way to develop my arguments here. She takes the notion of dialogics and adds what she calls a "feminist turn to" it. Bauer argues that central to “Bakhtin's dialogic model of discourse is the notion that. we engage in simultaneous 25 cultural and personal dialogues” (131) and that by adding "a feminist turn" to Bakhtin's notion of dialogics, "the dialogic community Bakhtin theorizes becomes a much more ambivalent territory" (xiv). Bauer argues that her pairing of feminist thought with dialogics ”raises the question of class and gender residing in the voices of the text, of the contemporary critical debate, in the classroom, and in all of the other territories of [hers and our] own lived experiences” (xvii). I would argue that adding the question of race in addition to the questions of class and gender ”as residing in the voices of the text and those of the contemporary critical debate," makes the dialogic communities both Bakhtin and Bauer theorize about even more ambivalent. A Black feminist critical practice that is dialogic is a prime example of this. By bringing together African American and feminist discourse, Black feminist theory, like dialogics, permits a.multip1icity of social voices to come together -- to cross and open borders. By virtue of the race and gender qualifiers in the term."Black feminist theory," as I have already suggested, we are made aware of the dialogic discourse a Black feminist discourse embodies. Black feminist theory shows us that as we falsely unify language within texts, so to do we often falsely unify language without the text -- both the texts of our bodies and those of the written.word. This false unification results in a disconnection of the links and interrelationships among interpretive communities, thus severely restricting the possibilities of dialogic discourse that could otherwise be 26 taking place among them. Tb slightly reshape Dale Bauer's comments in Feminist Dialogics then, I want to suggest that when we place theories of race, feminism, and dialogism together, ”the contradictory moments of representation and sexual [as well as racial] difference" can.be revealed (xiv). When applied to (re)readings of written texts and ourselves as texts, Bakhtin's notion of dialogics is useful to a Black feminist critical practice because it reminds us that we cannot ignore the material culture of the read- er/writer/speaker. As with any other writing, literature by Black women does not exist ”in a vacuum" but rather, as Deborah McDowell points out, they exist "in a complex social framework that includes interaction with Black men, white men, and white women, among diverse social groups and subgroups" (1989, 54). Because of these complex interrelationships and the "diversity“ within Black women's writing itself, it is necessary, as McDowell herself points out, to use "multiple and interdisciplinary critical approaches" to explicate Black women's texts (and.probably all texts, literary or otherwise) (54). A Black feminist critical practice that is dialogic presents a way to frame multiple critical lenses because as a theoretical practice it not only addresses the diversity of Black women's cultural, economic, and political circumstances, it also addresses the complex social interactions that Black women have with diverse social groups other than themselves. A Black feminist critical practice that is dialogic crosses and opens up boundaries by inviting interpretive communities 27 to reconsider our assumptions about the stability, unity, and coherence not only of the texts we read but also of the texts of our bodies. Black feminist critical practice, I would argue, is an interactive framework -- one that can be used to decentralize language and thus provide the necessary link for multiple voices to come together’while still acknowledging the material reality of race and gender difference at different moments in history. I use what I will now call a Black feminist dialogics to examine how the different reactions interpretive communities have had to Passing are instructive of how the discourse on race and gender -- and thus the reading strategies of interpretive communities -- has failed to participate in what Mae Gwendolyn Henderson has called a "simultaneity of discourse."11 My discussion of a Black feminist dialogics, like Henderson’s concept of "the simultaneity of discourse, " "seeks to account for racial difference within gender identity and gender difference within racial identity“ (17). Rereading Passing through a Black feminist dialogics, invites radically divergent (re)readings of Passing because this dialogics can speak more adequately to the multiplicity and complexity of the social, historical and cultural positionality of Black female subjectivity and Black female writing. By placing African American cultural analysis and feminist theories in dialogue, such a theoretical approach recognizes and acknowl- edges the simultaneous cultural and. personal. (political) interactions occurring within Larsen's text(s) of Passing. I 28 turn now to a more specific discussion of interpretive communities and how they function as groups of privileged readers and speakers. I argue that an examination of the critical response interpretive communities have made to a single text such as Passing provides us with ways to address the divisions within discursive practices that privilege certain voices, certain categories of analysis over others. Though I am aware that generally in postmodern studies of literature it is perhaps unusual to focus on a single text, I believe that Passing invites us to make an exception to this rule. In this study I read and interpret Passing not as one text but as several texts contained within a single body (much like the way Larsen constructs her characters in the novel). Readers, Writers, and Interpretive Communities When I talk about interpretive communities, I draw on Stanley Fish’s notion of interpretive community which he first develops in his essay "Interpreting the Variorum.‘ In this essay Fish defines an interpretive community as being made up of "those who share interpretive strategies not for reading (in the conventional sense) but for writing texts, for constituting their properties and assigning their intentions" (1980a, 182) . In "Interpreting the Variorum" Fish argues that the concept of an interpretive community is one way to account for the "facts“ of reading. Fish’s analysis addresses issues such as: 1) why it is that "the same reader will perform 29 differently'when reading two 'different' texts . .. '; 2) why it is that "different readers will perform similarly when reading the ’same’ text“,- 3) why it is that two or more readers find it possible to agree about.a particular text; and why it is that “habitual differences in the career of a single reader ever occur" (1980a, 179-182). Fish concludes that "both.the stability [of interpretations among readers] and the variety [of interpretation in the career of a single reader] are functions of interpretive strategies rather than texts” (1980a, 179). I would add to this that the strategies interpretive communities develop also provide a way to interpret ourselves as interpretive communities. When these communities attempt to look back at texts with ”fresh eyes," the way Adrienne Rich invites us to do (1979, 35), I would argue that they are examining a minimum of two texts (thus my use of text[s] in this context). One of these texts, of course, is the text created by the author of a novel, poem, or short story. The other text, one that as readers and critics we have not always acknowledged the importance of, is the text interpretive communities create in our interactions with -- our (re)readings of -- texts. If, as Jonathan Culler has argued, our interpretive strategies, our literary conventions, are what enable us to read literature, then an examination of how these strategies are formed and by whom allows us to better understand inter- pretive communities and the various political and cultural ideologies that they bring to bear on a text (1982, 104). 30 Similarly, Jean Kennard reminds us that in order to "read/write any story in a [Black] feminist or any other way, we are . . . dependent on some interpretive strategies, some reading conventions which, if not fixed, have remained relatively so for a long period of time. . .' (78). Critics like Jean Kennard and Jonathan Culler teach us that we come to texts with certain expectations based on our previous literary' experiences. IBoth. Culler' and. Kennard address in their work the relationship of the individual reader to the community in their analyses. For example, Jonathan. Culler’ argues that, 'study[ing] one’s :modes of reading" provides "a source of information about literary activity“ particularly ”in the ways in which meaning is produced" (1980, 116). Culler argues that by making “explicit one's sense of the comprehensible and incomprehensible" we "facilitate" readings of ourselves (1980, 117). Picking up»on this point, Jean Kennard argues that while we are able as individual readers to "choose to make of the text anything we wish“ through our (re)readings, "in practice we do not do so" (86). According to Kennard readers elect instead to not make explicit their own sense of what is comprehensible or incomprehensible in texts as Culler argues we do because we are also :members of interpretive communities (86). As individual readers, Kennard argues, "we seek affirmation for our readings from our interpretive community“ and thus we "surrender some jpart of [our] individual freedom[s]' of interpretation for this affirmation (86). We do so because 31 "if our reading is not accepted, it will not satisfy us, that is comfort us by providing that sense of community'we read for in the first place” (86). When we read, then, according to Kennard "we [are] seek[ing] a coming together, a convention" (86). Based on Culler’s and Kennard’s assertions, then, the task of rereading, which is also the work that has been crucial to much of Black and feminist scholarship, is extreme- ly important because it reveals the changes that literary conventions and interpretive communities undergo. Feminist scholars' rereadings of canonical and noncanonical texts demonstrate how agreements among interpretive communities develop and change regarding the meaning and value of texts. An interpretation or reading of any text, as Kennard points out, is both dependent on "the literary conventions known to the reader at the time . . . [and the] choices the reader makes to apply or not [to apply] any one of these conventions” (74). Stated another way, each time we read a text as an individual and/or as a member of an interpretive community we (re)construct and therefore (re)create meanings of texts by imprinting them with our own ”identity themes. '1’ Who a reader is, plays a significant role in how they will imprint their identity on certain texts at a given time. In addition, the interpretive communiti(es) that a reader belongs to at a given time will also determine or at least shape their identity themes. Membership in a single community or multiple communities over time shapes the choices a reader makes about 32 a text and how particular readers or reading communities determine meanings of texts. That we “invent rather than discover new meanings" of texts based on issues such as these, however, does not lessen the importance of the exercise of (re)reading (Kennard 85). Rereadings of text(s) like Passing can demonstrate how interpretive strategies and the communities who create these strategies, develop and change. An examination of text(s) like Passing is useful for revealing and describing particular debates, issues and conflicts -- what seems to be at stake -- among interpretive communities. To analyze the strategies of interpretive communities who read Passing is to analyze how interpretive communities develop literary conventions and how we sometimes resist change, thus functioning as gatekeepers of particular ways of reading and seeing. In other words, an examination of the strategies interpretive communities develop to read texts reveals how we create those very strategies which will best allow us to read in order to serve our needs as readers.13 An investigation of interpretive communities who have prescribed how Nella Larsen's text(s) of Passing should be read makes more concrete a number of the arguments I have been outlining thus far regarding how interpretive communities determine the criteria for what makes particular interpreta- tions of a text acceptable. Interpretive communities’ responses to Passing/passing, for example, have reinforced what Deborah McDowell has described as the “interlocking 33 assumptions“ that underlie dominant African American critical paradigms in interpretive communities of African American literature.“ MCDowell, in “Boundaries: Or Distant Relations and Close Kin, " describes these "interlocking assumptions“ as: '1. the world is neatly divided into Black and white; 2. race is the sole determinant of being and identity, subsuming sexual difference; 3. identity is preexistent, coherent and known; and 4. literature has the power to unify and liberate the race“ (1989, 58). McDowell points out that the interlocking assumptions of the critical discourse in this "paradigm. pivots on a set of oppositions: black/white, positive/ negative, self/other" (58). McDowell's description of these issues helps to foreground a number of questions about the social and political interests of interpretive communities and how these interests are reflected in their interpretations of Passing. Like individual readers, interpretive communities bring particular ideologies to their readings and interpretations of texts. As I will demonstrate in the example of Passing, interpretive communities can function so authoritatively that they “exercise their power by the threat of exclusion or by misuse ofjpoweru . .' (Bauer xi). The authoritativeness of the community, the "hierarchical structure" of the community, which Dale Bauer argues "maintains the essential form and boundaries of a particular community, assuming the identity in reading“ (xi), is transgressed by a text like Passing. Because Larsen and her text(s) do not "play by the rules" of 34 a particular interpretive community, her "resistance” becomes misread, undone, "manipulated, " or otherwise "appropriated into the interpretive community" (Bauer xi). In this instance, the interpretive or authoritative community functions to "disarm and master the desire for resistance or aggression" within the text itself (Bauer xiii) . The critical response of interpretive communities to Larsen's text(s) , for example, has tended to reduce her text(s) to a single meaning, reinscribing the very power of naming that Larsen challenges. In short, communities of readers have attempted.to silence the Black feminist dialogic -- the "simultaneity of discourse" -- Larsen sets up in Passing. This is really an attempt on the part of interpretive communities to negate the text’s ability/power to contradict and unsettle the disciplinary gaze of interpretive communities. This contradiction and unsettling takes place not only internally, within the text(s) of Passing itself, but also externally as well, in the disciplinary gaze the reader, the interpretive community, casts upon the text(s) of Passing. Bauer herself reminds us that '[r]eading is not 'free,’ but an activity determined by the text and by the ideological discourses one brings to bear on the text. . ." (15). Michel Foucault's ideas in "The Discourse on Language” are useful here. In "The Discourse on Language,” Foucault describes how commentary' controls meaningu This idea is useful when discussing the functioning of interpretive communities who “constitute a system of control in the production of 35 discourse” because they determine the conditions under which discourse may be employed in relation to a particular text (224). In their readings of Passing, for example, critics, ironically enough, have employed the very conditions of power Larsen challenges. Interpretive communities can function, then, particularly'when responding to texts by Black women, as groups of readers who participate in Fredric Jameson’s "strategies of containment," because the communities often function, sometimes unwittingly, to limit.and.'repress" new'or different readings of a text/body, thereby manipulating and undoing the text's/body's modes of resistance.15 Even so, Larsen’s text(s) of Passing have the power to deflect the reader’s gaze by disrupting the power of regulation and determination the interpretive community would exercise over the text(s). Larsen's counterpower springs from her resistance to those who wish to dominate her with their language when they attempt to neutralize the effects of her power to disrupt the gaze. In the next section I address the power interpretive communities have had to restrict meaning(s) of Passing. ‘ I then move to a discussion of how Larsen's text(s) can be read as a way to counter this power. 36 Interpretive Communities (Re)reading Ourselves Reading Passing: 1929-1959 The first thirty'years of formal response to Passing from 1929 to approximately 1959 reflect the underlying assumptions concerning race and.gender found in interpretive communities. Like the contemporary interpretive communities that Deborah McDowell describes, readers during the 19203 through the 19505 also believed in interlocking assumptions about African American literature which "neatly [divides] race into Black and white,” makes "race the sole determinant of being and identity," unifies subjectivity, and assumes that literature can play a role in helping to write and "liberate” Black people (54). Reviews of Passing during the 1920s reached both Black and white audiences. Journals and periodicals such as The New York Herald Tribune Book§_, The New York Times Book Review, file Saturday Review of Literature, Opportunity, and The Crisis, among others, each addressed.Larsen's novel as emphasizing the exotic (and erotic) nature of miscegenation and passing. These themes are also reflected in the titles of some of the reviews of Passing, such as: 'Do They Always Return,” 'The:Cat Came Back," "Touch of the Tar Brush,” "Novel of Race Con- sciousness." Those reviewers who emphasize race and miscege- nation as central issues in the novel include Margaret Cheney Dawson, for example, who argues in.The New'York.Herald.Tribune 37 gppkg, review' ”The Color Line“ that there is a strange excitement which arises "from the mere mention of race, as from the word sex” and that Larsen’s portrayal of middle- class, well educated.Blacks was startling to whites who viewed Blacks as either "different beings“ with "utterly foreign feelings” or, “in a sad, luscious way, entirely romantic" (6). Then there is Mary Fleming Labaree's review of Passing in the August 29, 1929, edition of Qpportunity in which she argues that Passing failed to achieve its potential for greatness because Larsen did not fully utilize (sensationalize) the racial themes in the novel. Labaree argues that Larsen needed to take time off from writing so that when she returned she would be able to "give the world its needed epic of racial interaction between thinking members of the American social order belonging to both African and European stocks" (255). In a final example, W.E.B. DuBois, in the July 1929 issue of The Crisis, reviews Passing along with Jessie Fauset's 21pm Bpp, Walter White’s Flight, and.Wallace Thurman's The Blacker the Berpy, as addressing the ”intriguing and ticklish subject of a person’s right to conceal the fact that he had a grandparent of Negro descent" (234). DuBois argues that the question of identifying racial background "is all a petty, silly matter of no real importance which another generation will comprehend with great difficulty“ (234). For DuBois the reason passing and racial identity and background are “a matter of tremendous moral import" to white Americans was because ”so many white people in America either know or fear 38 that they have Negro blood“ (234). DuBois, unlike the other two reviewers, praises Larsen for her ability to explain what passing is, arguing that Larsen describes ”the psychology of the thing; the reaction of it on friend and enemy" (248). He claims that the central question Larsen raises in her text is ”under what circumstances would a person take a step like this and.hOW“would they feel about it? .And how“would their fellows feel?” (248). Through the types of questions that he argues Larsen raises in her novel and the way she portrays middle-class Black life and culture, DuBois demonstrates the reasons for why Larsen was categorized as an example of a “New Negro."16 Alain Locke, in his essay and.edited volume of the same title, describes the New Negro as not new at all because the 'old Negro“ was such a myth. Nonetheless, this not-so-new New Negro, according to Locke, boldly announced to the world that a new spirit of self awareness artistic consciousness and racial pride existed among the "advance guard of the African peoples in their contact with Twentieth Century civilization" (14). Harlem, Locke claimed, was "the laboratory of a great race‘welding‘ bringing together diverse elements olelack life and culture from the African and West Indian to the African American. In part because of this cultural milieu, critical response to Larsen's text during the 19208 by white and Black reviewers alike praised or condemned Larsen's presentation of her characters Clare and Irene based on howHwell they felt her characters demonstrated the new spirit of self—awareness and 39 artistic, politica1,and racial consciousness of the supposedly New Negro. For some of the reviewers like DuBois, Larsen is praiseworthy because she did not embrace the ”primitive school" (also called the Bohemian school) of the New Negro Renaissance writers.17 Those writers in the primitive school, a school in which Langston Hughes, Rudolph Fisher and Claude McKay are often placed, are said to bathe readers in a primitive emotionalism that portrays Blacks as simplistically instinctive. Other reviewers, especially those writing in the decades following the New Negro Renaissance, criticized Larsen for supposedly representing, like W.E.B. DuBois, the “genteel school” in African American literature, which emphasized the melodramatic, sentimental, and romantic elements of the literature. W.E.B. DuBois, who was a central figure in the genteel school or the “best foot forward literature" in the African American literary canon, actively campaigned for Black writers and artists to fulfill what he saw as their obligation to portray Black life and culture in a way that promoted racial uplift as opposed to the uninhibited self expression and realism he accused Alain Locke of presenting in the .N_ev_v_ 2132922." Presenting Black Americans in a positive light, DuBois argued, countered the negative stereotypes of Black Americans whom he said had been portrayed in American litera- ture as ”prostitutes, thieves and fools."1’ DuBois argues that artistic "freedom" to portray Black Americans as such is 40 ”miserably unfair.”’° As a result, in the February 1926 issue of The Crisis, DuBois set the stage for a debate that has continued well into present day discussions of African American literature. DuBois posed seven questions in the "Opinion” of The Crisis to address what readers felt about how Blacks should be portrayed in literature and to address the issue of art versus propaganda.21 DuBois asked: 1. When the artist, Black or white, portrays Negro characters, is he under any obligations or limitations as to the sort of character he will portray? 2. Can any author be criticized for painting the worst or the best characters of a group? 3. Can publishers be criticized for refusing to handle novels that portray Negroes of education and accomplishment, on the grounds that these characters are no different from white folk and therefore not interesting? 4. What are Negroes to do when they are continually painted at their worst and judged by the public as they are painted? 5. Does the situation of the educated Negro in America with its pathos, humiliation and tragedy call for artistic treatment 41 at least as sincere and sympathetic as "Porgy" received? 6. Is not the continual portrayal of the sordid, foolish and criminal among Ne- groes convincing the world that this and this alone is really and essentially Negroid, and. preventing' white artists from knowing any other types preventing black artists from daring to paint them? 7. Is there not a real danger that young colored.writers will be tempted to follow the popular trend in portraying Negro character in the underworld rather than seeking to paint the truth about themselves and their own social class? In his questions DuBois demonstrates one faction of the reigning critical ideology during the 19203.22 He developed the questions listed above in an attempt to reassign and create new definitions for how literature by and about Black people should be produced, evaluated, and read. For DuBois, (re)creating and (re)constructing the literary pasts of racial oppression and the dehumanizing stereotypes that accompany them only serve to rewrite the negative pasts of African Americans. In other words, DuBois assigned aesthetic value to literature based on how well the literature met the criteria to promote racial uplift. 42 The younger generation of writers, with few exceptions, disagreed with DuBois, opting instead to write without being worried about the social and political pressures of how to present Blacks in art and literature. These writers chal— lenged DuBois's argument that Black literature should be based on "rigid social or political ideology" or that they should choose to ”uplift the race by portraying educated, middle- class' Blacks in their writing.23 Excerpts from responses to DuBois's questions, printed on the pages of The Crisis between March 1926 and November 1926, included writers such as Carl van Vechten, Georgia Douglas Johnson, H.L. Mencken and Langston Hughes, who agreed with Charles Chestnutt that ”the realm of art is almost the only territory in which the mind is free, and of all the arts that of creative fiction is the freest.'“ Langston Hughes, for example, argues both in his response to DuBois and in his essay "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain," that "the true literary artist is going to write about what he chooses anyway regardless of outside opinions".25 In The Crisis Hughes argues that those who accept DuBois’s perspective on literature to talk only about the 'niceties' of bourgeoisie Black life should also accept writers like Rudolph Fisher and like Hughes himself who talk about the Black masses and the 'seedier' side of Black life. In.both.cases, Hughes argues, the*writers are correct in their portrayals. In both cases, Hughes argues, the writers are worth reading. 43 Hughes manages to inject another perspective into the early dialogue among interpretive communities of African American literature. More specifically, his discussion of how Blacks should be portrayed in art attempts to move DuBois’s discussion of Black art and Black literary theory away from binary thinking and toward an idea of interpretation of Black life and culture that would be multi-focal. Hughes suggests that there does not have to be a one way to talk about Black literature nor does there have to be one way to represent Black people in art. Instead, Hughes argues that it is correct to discuss the "positive" and the ”negative," the beautiful and the ugly, aspects of Black life and culture. He says in "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain" We younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual dark—skinned selves without fear or shame. If white people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, it doesn't matter. We know we are beautiful. And ugly too. The tom-tom cries and the tom-tom laughs. If colored people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, their dis- pleasure doesn't matter either. We build our temples for tomorrow, strong as we know how, and.we stand on top of the mountain free within ourselves. For Hughes “an artist must be free to challenge what he does, but he must also never be afraid to do what he might choose” (Hughes 172). Hughes's artistic credo became the unofficial manifesto for many Black writers of his era who were 44 attempting to break free of what they saw to be the restrictive and assimilationist project of the older generation. In his "manifesto” Hughes does what DuBois does in his forum: he helps to set the stage for another side of a debate that continues to be central to the discussion of African American literature and critical theory. At the heart of Hughes’s discussion is still the issue of how Blacks should be portrayed. He differs from DuBois, however, in that he adds the dimension of there being a possibility of portraying Black American life and culture in more than one way. Both Hughes’s and DuBois’s discussions reveal the tension that has always existed within African American expressive culture, regarding the (re)presentation of images of Black people in a society that does not often allow room for complexity and diversity among them. Despite their obvious differences on the surface what unites the ideas of DuBois and Hughes -- both politically and artistically -- is their attempt to address how to develop useful interpretive strategies for simultaneously responding to the political and artistic elements of Black bodies/ Black texts. What should become clear from my discussion thus far is how at least two of those interpretive communities, writing from the 19205 to the 19305 when DuBois and Hughes were writing, divided themselves into schools of thought which to a large extent were based on the juxtapositions and conflicts of differing generations and differing concepts of Black art and Black identity. Those writers who wrote from perspectives 45 similar to DuBois's, that is, members of the Genteel school, used the novel as a means to further their agenda of proving to whites that, with the exception of color, Blacks are just like them. By portraying Black people in this manner, writers from the Genteel school believed that racial discrimination would end when whites saw how intellectual and well mannered Blacks could be. Members of the Genteel school were considered to be the older generation of writers (or writers with old generation outlooks) and included in their ranks W.E.B. DuBois, Jessie Fauset, Georgia Douglas Johnson, and Nella Larsen. Those writers who worked from the perspective of Langston Hughes or the Bohemian school, on the other hand, considered the characterizations of Black people with Victorian manners and sensibilities portrayed by Genteel school thinkers as ridiculous caricatures of white society. Generally, those writers in the Bohemian school believed that the Genteel school writers ignored or tried to “whitewash" the life and culture of the Black masses. They argued that the masses of Black people did not live like the Redfields and Freedlands of Passing for example. In addition, Black and white members of the Bohemian school, with the notable exception of Carl van Vechten, rejected Larsen's portrayal of Northern, urban. middle-class Blacks because they argued that Blacks neither lived, spoke, nor thought inmways similar to Larsen's portray- als. Generally speaking, members of the Bohemian school, as exemplified in the response made by the .N_ew York Herald 46 Tribune Books reviewer, were united in their portrayal of the romantic and ”primitive” element (essence) of Black life and literature. Though for the sake of brevity'I have reduced.some of the complexity of the debates that have occurred among interpre- tive communities of African American literature during the New Negro Renaissance to two dominant schools of thought -- the Genteel school and the Bohemian school -- I do believe it is safe to say that central to the arguments of both, despite their different approaches, was the desire to create art in a way that would no longer have to testify to the humanity of Black people. The New Negro, Henry Louis Gates argues, served as the central text of the idea that the process of creating art -- rather than.writing as propaganda —- would serve as the social weapon of Blacks (1980, 34). However, as Gates also points out, the text The New Negro (and I would add the concept and identity of the “New Negro" as well) is a work/concept/identity that deconstructs itself because “its discrete segments undermine its explicit thesis“ (34). Each of the issues I have outlined thus far can also be found in current debates on African American literature. More recently in ”Negative/Positive Images,“ for example, Michele Wallace describes the current debates within interpretive communities regarding negative/positive images in African American literature and art. Similar to‘what.was reflected in discussions among interpretive communities of African American literature during the thirties to the sixties, more recent 47 discussions among interpretive communities also have as their central issue discussions of how Blacks should be portrayed in art. Wallace points out in her discussion, for instance, how African American literature and art continue to be subject(ed) to the "peculiar limitations of the notion that only 'positive images' are appropriate to Afro-American cultural production, particularly cultural production by women" (1). In her discussion Wallace further outlines those binary oppositions which Deborah McDowell describes as consistent with the underlying assumptions of interpretive communities of African American literature. Through the presentation of four issues she sees as central to the problems of African American cultural production in mass or popular culture, Wallace addresses the effect these assumptions have on our readings and interpretations of this production. She argues first that since in some critical communities ”the widespread conviction that blacks are morally and/or intellectually inferior defines the ’commonsense’ perception of blacks, a negative/positive cultural formula“ develops so as "to reverse . . . already existing assumptions" (1). As a result of a belief in this formula, there is also a tendency among white and Black cultural critics to judge African American cultural production, either as a failure or a success based on how well the work supports the goal of reversing these assumptions and whether or not it participates in the explicit project of "racial uplift” and the eradication of "denigrat[ing] images" (1). 48 In her second point, Wallace argues that the paradigm of negative and positive images does not address the question of African American culture as a product of ”internal coloniza- tion" (2). A discussion of ”internal colonization,” Wallace argues, points to the fact that African Americans have been "permanently exiled“ not only from their "homeland . . . but also from their bodies" (2). As a result of this "internal colonization, " Wallace reminds us, "Afro-American culture has traditionally seemed fully aware of its own marginality to the white mainstream“ (2) which has allowed African American culture to "deconstruct" and "signify“ upon racist ideology in the dominant culture. Both passing as an act and Passing the text are examples of this kind of deconstruction and signification upon racist ideology in dominant culture. Though I take as my focus in chapter two a more detailed discussion of how and why this occurs, I will briefly say here that Pagsing/passing subverts racist ideology by demonstrating the limitations of our gazes upon the text(s) of our (raced and gendered) bodies and upon our written text(s) . Wallace makes a similar argument in the third point she makes when she argues that the " concept ion " and development 0 f negative/positive images in our critical discourse " [lack] the crucial capacity to differentiate between the visual and the textual" (3) . Black women in particular, whom Wallace argues are ”visualized in mainstream American culture most prominently as fashion models or as performers in music videos," are rarely ”allowed to speak their own words, or 49 speak about their own condition as ‘women. of color, as novelists . . .“ (3). Larsen and the women she creates, for example, become performers in a very provocative dance of moving inside and outside of their assigned roles. These women, in other words, refuse to follow the scripts (both Black and white) society have assigned them. Finally, Wallace argues that "the negative/positive schema discourages us from looking at Afro-American mass and popular culture from the crucial [and I would add critical] perspectives of production and audience reception" (3). For Wallace, crucial to the project of looking at “perspectives of production and audience reception" is the determination of how African American cultural practice can "incorporate feminism, anti-racism, gay liberation and other contemporary critiques and issues such as homelessness and Rainbow coalition poli- tics' (4). Ultimately, then, at issue for wallace as for a number of other Black feminist critics, myself included, is the necessity for developing a politics of location -- a critical/theoretical position that would accommodate multiple issues and multiple perspectives. In her discussion.Wallace updates a number of the issues DuBois and Hughes present by introducing gender as well as race to the discussion. If we keep the points wallace raises in mind, we begin to look at initial responses to Larsen's Passing in an entirely different light. We begin to see, for instance, how reducing discussions of Black literary and theoretical production to a negative/positive schema has 50 particularly pernicious consequences for Black female theoret- ical and literary production, both during Larsen's time and now. Discussions of negative/positive as it relates to African American women’s theoretical and literary production, have tended to mute the multivocality and multitextuality (not to mention multibodiedness) of this production. As I outlined above, reviews from the 19205 demonstrate that because Larsen wrote about passing and the northern, urban, Black middle- class, and did not, as many believed, write about race or race relations in an overt political way, critics often viewed her text in a negative manner. Larsen’s texts were seen, particularly during the ”Black Arts Movement" or the "Second Black Renaissance“ as illustrative of her unwillingness to construct herself or her characters in ways that supported the party line. In other words, both Larsen and the text(s) she constructed were judged on the basis of what appeared to be her failure to work within the paradigms of racial uplift and the need to portray useful, positive images of Black people in literature and art. Contemporary Black women writers face this problem as well. One need only look at the debates that have occurred in the last ten to twelve years to see that contemporary Black women writers, similar to Black women writers of Nella Larsen's day, have been accused of not meeting the expectation of how Black women should construct (conduct) themselves. I cite Mel Watkins's article in the New York Times Book Review, "Sexism, Racism, and Black Women Writers" as support for both 51 Wallace's and my own assertions that the negative/positive schema consistent in the critical discourse about African American literature is reductive for African American litera- ture in general and for African American women's literature in particular. :n: this essay, Watkins describes contemporary Black women writers, in effect, as traitors to Black literary traditions. According to Watkins "those Black women writers who have chosen black men as a target have set themselves outside of a tradition that is nearly as old as B1ack.American literature itself " (emphasis mine, 34) . The tradition Watkins is describing here is one he claims that Black writers have been committed to, " [s]ince [the] publication of William Wells Brown’s ngppl. or th§,President's Daughter (1853)," -- that of "rectify[ing] the antiblack stereotypes and propagandistic images created by nonblack writers” (34). Citing W.E.B. DuBois's Dark Princess (1928) and James Weldon Johnson’s Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man (1912) in addition to works by other Black writers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Watkins argues that there has been a trend "from the later Harlem Renaissance writers through post- Depression writers and on to recent Black Esthetic [sic] school of writing" to counteract images by what he calls the "Plantation School” whose works portrayed Blacks as ”happy-go- lucky slaves and smiling mammies' to name just two examples. Watkins confirms what I have been arguing thus far, that even during the earlier period in Black literary history, there was not consistent agreement on "proper images to be 52 presented" of Black people in Black literature. Still, Watkins argues, there pgg been consistent agreement ”on the basic underlying desire to present positive images of blacks“ in African American literature -- that is, according to him, until Black feminists began writing (34). Watkins seems to believe that Black feminist writing ignores the "parameters” of writing within the Black tradition that enforces the presentation.of specific (i.e. 'positive“) images of Blacks in literature (34). We must pause to ask, however, who gets to determine which images are positive and which are not? .And.at whose expense are we developing these 'positive" images? Watkins, invoking language that echoes first the Bohemian or "Primitive School" of writers during the New Negro Renaissance and then, ironically, the Black Aesthetic critics of the 19605, accuses contemporary Black women writers of '5hift[ing] their priorities from the subtle evocation of art to the blunt demonstration of politics and propaganda" (35).26 Watkins's arguments here demonstrate that the perception of "racial uplift" like other' concepts, qualifiers, and notions of identity, is not transhistorical and in fact becomes something quite different depending on what moment in history we are talking about. What Watkins says about contemporary Black women writers is not new. Instead he is raising questions about what it was Black women writers were and are saying about their experiences in literature just as I am here, though with differing results. Often, because Black women live and speak about their experiences in ways 53 different from the men, they are perceived, as Watkins's article suggests, as being outside of Black literary traditions. June Jordan probably provides us with the best response to Watkins. In "Notes Toward a Black Balancing of Love and Hatred" (1974), Jordan argues that we must not fall victim to participating in the "either/or system of dividing the world into unnecessary'conflict' (85). She argues that we have lost "many jewels“ in Black literature because ”we were misled into the notion that only one kind_ of writing -- protest writing -- and.that only one kind of protest writing deserves our support and study" (86 - 7). Jordan includes the examples of Richard Wright and Zora Neale Hurston in her arguments to make her point. Describing Richard Wright, whom I will discuss in more detail in a moment, Jordan argues that he 'conform[s] to white standards we have swallowed, regarding literary' weight“ because his work is often seen as "symbolic (rather than realistic), ’serious' (unrelievedly grim), socio-political (rather than 'personal') in its scale and. not so :much 'emotional’ as impassioned in its deliberate execution" (87).T7 Hurston's work, on the other hand, has been 'derogated as romantic, the natural purview of a woman (i.e. unimportant), ’personal' (not serious) in its scope, and assessed.as sui generis, or an idiosyncratic accomplishment of no lasting reverberation or usefulness” (88-9).28 In a sense Richard Wright contributes to the dichotomy Jordan outlines between him. and writers like Hurston. In his 54 1937 essay "A.Blueprint for Negro‘Writing," Wright argues that Black writing assumed two general aspects: it either "became sort of conspicuous ornamentation, the hallmark of 'achieveme- nt'" or it became "the voice of the educated Negro pleading with white America for justice" (316). Black writing in the twenties and early thirties was "confined to humble novels, poems, and plays, prim and decorous ambassadors who went a begging to white America" (Wright 315). Wright argued that the purpose of this type of writing was to show that Black people were not inferior, that they were human, and that the lives of Black people are comparable to those of other people (Wright 315). In what is an obvious allusion to the writers of the New'Negro Renaissance, Wright claimed that the writing of Blacks during this era either "crept in through.the kitchen in the form of jokes; or it was the fruits of that foul soil which was the result of a liaison between inferiority complexed Negro 'geniuses' and burnt- out white Bohemians with money“ (315). Wright argued in a "Blueprint for Negro writing“ that literature and theory should be used as tools to look inward -- to develop "an attitude of self-consciousness and self- criticism [which] is far more likely to be a fruitful point of departure than mere past achievements” (Wright 317) . For Wright the task of the Black writer was to find a way 'to stand shoulder to shoulder with Negro workers in mood and outlook“ (317). Wright makes the issue of the politics of Black literature and culture more central to discussions of 55 African American cultural production. When he asked: “Shall Negro writing be for the Negro masses, moulding [sic] the lives and consciousness of those masses toward new goals, or shall it continue begging the question of the Negroes' humanity?" (318), he set the tone for new(er) critical directions and perspectives in African American literature. Perspective for Wright, after all, is the “intellectual space where a writer stands to view the struggles, hopes, and sufferings of his people" (341). Critical response to Passing in the two to three decades following its 1929 publication date demonstrates how the "systems of knowledge and belief, points of view and structures of vision" related to race and gender identity, evolved and changed depending on the current "reigning critical ideology" of interpretive communities (Kolodny 152) . Though there was not a great deal of critical response to Passing during the period of Richard Wright's generation, his discussion is useful to us because he brings into focus a number of the tensions and perspectives that would become central to interpretive communities of African American literature during the 19605 and 19705. My readings of interpretive communities from the sixties and seventies will be the focus of the remainder of this discussion. I argue that the strategies interpretive communities used from 1929 to the middle period addressed in Wright’s discussion came full circle in the critical analyses of Black Aesthetic criticism in the 19605 and 19705. Once again, arguments for the 56 positive portrayal of Black life and culture in texts by Black authors, for the Black writer to be free to address the topics of her/his choice uninhibited by pressures to depict particu- lar attributes of Blacks, and for a politicization of the literature that draws direct connections between the Black masses and the Black elite, became elements that were central to interpretive communities of African American literature. In fact, I would argue that the work of the interpretive communities of African American literature during the 19605 and 19705 more clearly displays the battle lines -- what is at stake -- regarding discussions of African American literature and critical theory. Of particular interest to me in this portion of my analysis are the racial and gender ideologies that interpretive communities from the 19605 and 19705 present in their critiques of Passing. The particular ideologies these communities espouse set the tone for the second wave of rereadings of Larsen’s texts of Passing. Passing and the Black Aesthetic: 1960-1972 During the 19605 and 19705 interpretive communities claimed that Larsen's text(s) were about the positive and unified status of a racial self, with nothing to say about gender or class. Because Larsen did not write about Black life and culture in a way that reflected the true beauty and essence of Blackness and because she chose to use middle- class, mixed race Black women as the central characters in her 57 novel, she was considered during this time to be "apolitical" and lacking the "correct" racial consciousness. In other words, Larsen was criticized by some members of interpretive communities of African American literature during the sixties and seventies for not presenting the lives of the women in her text(s) as being easily divided into clearly defined categories of womanness, of Blackness, of Black womanness. Writers during what I will be calling the second wave of rereadings of Larsen’s text(s) looked upon her use of mulatta or biracial characters as her wish to deny her Blackness and subscribe to the values of bourgeois culture. Larsen's choice of depicting bi-racial, Black, middle-class, women was considered politically incorrect among some Black Aesthetic critics. On the one hand, some Black Aesthetic critics equated middle-class experience with dishonesty and mediocrity.29 On the other, Larsen’s portrayal of bi-racial Black women ran counter to the unified essential ”Black” self characteristic in the rhetoric of Black aesthetic critics. Because of some of their political beliefs, those interpretive communities who employed Black aesthetics as the critical lens through which to view texts were not very sympathetic to a biracial Black middle-class woman writing about other biracial Black middle-class women. For many of these critics Passing reflected an act of treason at its worst -- for others it was a novel that deserved only to be summarily dismissed and quickly forgotten. Larsen's texts were viewed in this way, I would argue, because her novel 58 challenged. readers to relinquish. much. of their received knowledge regarding issues of race and gender. Larsen's text(s), for example, raise a number of questions about the racial subject and how s/he is organized, administered and produced -- questions that were anathema to Black Aesthetic critics. In her act of reading race, gender, and class in American culture through Passing/passing, Larsen.parodies and unmasks the cultural ideologies Black Aesthetic critics held regarding reading, race, gender, and class and the difference these ideologies made to their interpretive strategies. Her acts of reading'and unmasking race, gender, and.class ideology reveal the powers and hierarchies that existed within interpretive communities of African American and women's literature during the Black Arts Movement. Larsen’s novel points to the fact that there are really no black and white answers, a situation that made it easier for critics to dismiss her work rather than rethink their positions. Black Aesthetic critics, for the most part, did not view Larsen's text(s) as playing by the rules for inclu- sion in the (African American) literary canon. Because Larsen's text(s) did not play by the rules, as I would argue her discussion of the concepts of race and gender in Passing clearly demonstrate, interpretive communities attempted to absorb the resistance of the novel. When this absorption or appropriation cannot occur, texts like Larsen’s become silenced. 59 As I suggested earlier in my discussion, Larsen's text(s) resist the disciplinary gaze of interpretive communities. As a result, however, the novel gets left out of their lists of canonical literature. Because Larsen did not work within the paradigms of African American literature that demanded the assurance of a racial and gendered self that is unified, Larsen’s text(s) of Passing were usually held up by Black Aesthetic critics as an example of what an "unBlack' text would do. Larsen challenges the notion, however, that in reading texts/bodies one can easily find black and white answers, though this is exactly how a number of Black Aesthetic critics choose to interpret her work. Instead, she presents racial and gender identity as complex and ambiguous. David Lionel Smith argues in "The Black Arts Movement and Its Critics” that "critics of the 19805 and 19905 generally hold writing of the Black Arts Movement in low esteem" (93) for a number of the reasons I outline above. He argues, for instance, that Black Aesthetic criticism: ”often confuses social theory with aesthetics, failing to articulate the complex relation between the two; much of it is predicated upon crude, strident forms of nationalism that do not lend themselves to careful analysis; and too often the work is marred by the swaggering rhetoric of ethnic and gender chauvinism' (Smith 93) . Smith argues that much of the work of the Black Arts Movement tends to be judged on these extremes. I agree with a number of Smith's assertions. In fact, I would go so far as to argue that the ”egregious errors“ of some 60 Black Aesthetic critics have had adverse effects on how interpretive communities have read and continue to read novels by African American women. Critics during the Black Arts movement do not differ much from their earlier counterparts in that they too failed to recognize that Larsen did not use the model of the tragic mulatto the way that it had normally been used -- as a way to demonstrate that Black people can be "just like whites" echoing the supposed motto of the Genteel school. Instead, I think it can be argued that Larsen uses the theme of the "tragic mulatta" as symbolic of the experiences of African American women’s having to challenge the limitations placed on them as racial and gendered subjects. Through her characters Larsen subverts the strategies of interpretive communities and American culture at large, both of whom want to say that to be Black and female is to always already be unified, coherent, stable and known -- to always already be read.30 It will be recalled, for example, that critics during the Black Arts movement by and large rejected Larsen's use of the ”tragic mulatta“ figure mainly because she challenges the concept of ”Blackness“ that was crucial to their interpretations of her work. In his introduction of the 1971 Collier edition of Passing, for example, Hoyt Fuller suggests that Larsen's text places race at the center of identity, subsuming sex, without questioning how either one is constituted. Fuller claims that "without the element of intrigue and suspense injected by 61 race, Miss Larsen’s novel might have been relegated to the lost ranks of the massive body of fiction designed to titil- late middle-class housewives on a long and lonely afternoon“ (24). One of the founders of the Black.Aesthetic and the OBAC (Organization of Black American Culture), Fuller argues that there are "universal values" and "universal interpretations for Black life" ("Towards" 11). FMller looks through the critical lens of the Black Aesthetic which he defines as, 'a system.of isolating and.evaluating the artistic works of Black people which reflect the special character and.imperatives of Black experience” in order to find what he and other Black Aesthetic critics believed was a "mystique of Blackness” (11) . Fuller believed that "Black critics had the responsibility of approaching the works of Black writers assuming these quali- ties to be present" in the works (11). Though Fuller recognizes in.his analysis the ambivalence that Larsen felt about. her' own. racial identity’ and. the identity of her characters, he nevertheless chooses to read this ambivalence as an attempt to reject ”Blackness" and sees the remedy to this situation as an acknowledgement of a unified Black identity.31 Instead of reading Larsen's text(s) as a possible rejection of the narrowly circumscribed existence of her Black female world as it had.been defined in the twenties and thirties, Fuller sees Larsen and the characters she creates as desiring to be a part of this world. The critical lens Fuller employs prevents him from understanding the text(s) (of the body and the written word) 62 Larsen has presented.in Passing. Instead of reading under the mask and beneath the skin of Larsen's characters and her text(s), Fuller reinscribes the unity of the racial and gendered subject that Larsen writes against. In another example, Mary Mabel Youman another critic who uses the Black Aesthetic as her critical lens, argues in "Nella Larsen's Passing: A Study in Irony“ that the merits of Passing have been obscured by a mistaken critical emphasis on Clare Kendry; and for an accurate reading of the novel, Youman suggests that Irene Redfield must be seen as the protagonist. Youman feels that Passing is "a novel which shows that Blacks can and do lose the spiritual values of Blackness though they remain in the Black.world' (235). For Youman it is Irene more than Clare who has truly lost her heritage because .she ”literally removes herself from Black life and lives among whites" (235). Youman’s interpretation of Passing is extremely ironic, particularly when one considers the title of her essay"Nella Larsen’s Passing: A Study in Irony." In her own title Youman identifies not only the title of the novel and how it is an ironic study, but she also implies that Larsen herself is participating in the act of passing (Nella.Larsen.is passing). Like Fuller in her use of the critical lens of the Black Aesthetic, Youman reads Passing/passing as an individual's failure to singly align herself with characteristics that are uniquely specific to the (Black) subject. Though Youman suggests in her essay that the irony she pursues is the fact 63 that readers have tended to view Clare and not Irene as the central character ("passer“), the real irony is Youman's missing the point that the idea of Passing/passing itself is the recognition of the nonbiological basis of race. Passing: New(er) Critical Directions Reading Larsen’s Passing (in all senses of the phrase) demonstrates how we (re)create and (re)construct the past -- our literary pasts -— through our (re)readings of texts, our literary history, and our critical and theoretical practices. We are able to (re)read texts and thus re-vision them in the way that Adrienne Rich invites us to do, because we look.back at these texts from new, or should I say newer, critical directions. Based on these critical directions I am able to re-enter Larsen's text(s) in. a. way that calls up jpast discussions of Passing and past discourse on the socially constructed identities of ”race” and "gender" in order to add new(er) dimensions to former (re)readings of the text(s). Stanley Fish has pointed out that whenever interpretive communities claim to have discovered the “real point" by announcing new'positions we hold, new interpretive strategies we have developed as a way to break from the old, we are, in actuality, not breaking away at all.32 Instead, our new positions, our advancing of new interpretations is, in fact, “radically dependent on the old" because it is only in the ”context of some differential relationship that it can be 64 perceived.as new or, for that.matter, perceived.at all" (1980, 349). We are able to claimlnewier) critical directions, then, because we can make these claims only in relation to what is already in our literary and historical canons. These canons, ”which [function] as a model by which to chart the continuities and discontinuities, as well as the influences upon the interconnections between works, genres, and authors, " are, as Annette Kolodny argues, models that we create (151). Kolodny reminds us, for example, that ”our sense of 'literary history' and.by extension, our confidence in the 'historical' canon, is rooted not so much in any definitive understanding of the past as it is in our need to call up and utilize the past on behalf of a better understanding of the present" (151). In “Dancing Through the Minefield: Some Observations on the Theory, Practice and Politics of Feminist Literary Criticism” Kolodny gives us what she calls "three crucial propositions” to describe how communities of scholars enter into dialogues with each other about texts and the critical ideologies in our literary histories. Kolodny argues that: “(1) literary history . . . is a fiction; (2) . . . what we engage in when we read are not texts but paradigms and . (3) . . . the grounds upon which we assign aesthetic value to texts are never infallible, unchangeable or universal” making it necessary for us to examine not only our ”aesthetics" but the ”inherent biases and assumptions informing the critical 65 methods which (in part) shape our aesthetic responses" (151) .33 In the examples I have provided of the critical response to Passing the propositions Annette Kolodny outlines are clearly at work. Earlier in this chapter I argued that an examination of the strategies interpretive communities develop to read texts reveal how we create strategies to allow us to read. When we look back at the critical response to Passing over the years, we are shown how interpretive communities have created literary history and developed interpretive strategies by engaging in paradigms which would allow us to read in ways that serve our needs as readers. But what were the needs of past communities of interpreters? How did the needs of these past communities differ from the needs of current interpretive communities of Larsen's texts or of interpretive communities of African American literature in general? How do the interpretive strategies of current interpretive communities of African American literature responding to Passing serve the needs of readers now? In this chapter I have attempted to address these questions by identifying some of the ways past communities of interpreters have responded to Larsen’s text(s) . In so doing, I demonstrate how the episodes in the literary history of text(s) like Passing necessitate the community's rejection of once time-honored critical and theoretical perspectives in favor of more compatible ones based on the "reigning critical ideology“ of the community’s respective era." Annette 66 Kolodny suggests that the further removed we are from a particular author or era, the further removed we are from access to "systems of knowledge and.belief, points of view'and structures of vision" that existed during a particular time in which the author existed and wrote (153). Kolodny argues that there is really no way to know exactly what happened in the past or to identify and decipher what an author actually intended. Instead what we do is reconstruct "an approximation of an already fictively imputed past made available through our own interpretive strategies for present concerns" (Kolodny 153). We (re)create and (re)construct the past -- our literary pasts -- in other words, through our rereadings of texts, literary'history, our critical and.theoretical.practic- es. In my (re)readings and (re)constructions of past interpretive communities of Passing, I argue that a major underlying theme in much of the critical response to the text(s) within interpretive communities, regardless of what era they were writing in, was the theme of Black liberation. The development of theoretical and critical perspectives by interpretive communities that were compatible with the theme of Black liberation reflected and also produced’shifts in the literary history of texts in African American literature and the interpretive strategies these communities developed to respond to Passing. Over time, interpretive communities, often determined by their social, historical and political contexts, developed strategies to read Passing based on how 67 the theme of Black liberation (and by the 19605 and 19705 we can add to this women's liberation) developed and changed. I propose here yet another critical perspective from which to view and respond to Larsen's text(s): Black feminist dialogics. The Black feminist dialogic that informs my readings of Passing is a continuance of the project of embracing and rejecting my "literary antecedents" (D. Smith 96). Where my project, and the project of a number of other Black feminist and/or poststructuralist theorists begins is the place where a number of us feel Black Aesthetic criticism leaves off. Instead of attempting to locate a "true” or ”real“ essence of "Blackness" and Black art, Black feminist poststructuralists investigate the very concept.of ”Blackness" itself inlconjunc- tion with issues of gender difference. As I will demonstrate in the next two chapters, at the heart of much of the resis- tance to developing a critical paradigm in African American and feminist literature that would treat "race'I and "gender” as socially constructed concepts is the belief that if we argue that subjectivity is not unified, coherent, stable and known, we somehow disavow the political and liberatory function of the literature of these communities. My readings of Larsen's text(s) of Passing, however, will demonstrate exactly the opposite of this. During the time W.E.B. DuBois and Langston Hughes were responding to texts like Passing, negative/positive images in the portrayal of African Americans in literature and art and 68 the role of the Black writer and artist to the 'Black.communi- ty' were important issues. The prevailing thought then as it is now (though it manifests itself differently) was that Black people had to write in order to "re-create the image of the race in European discourse."3S By writing, in other words, a number of the critics of DuBois’s and Hughes' era believed that they could somehow prove the humanity of Black people. Henry Louis Gates tells us, "We black people tried to write ourselves out of slavery, a slavery even more profound than physical bondage. Accepting the challenge of the great white Western tradition, black writers wrote as if their lives depended upon it . . . ."3‘ The writers of the 19605 and 19705 wrote out of this desire as well, basing their theories of race and.gender ideologies on the context of the 'differen- tial relationships” (Fish 349) of previous interpretive communities. Their writings, however, affirmed the ”Blackness of Blackness" that previous interpretive communities were not able to. In The Black Aesthetic Addison Gayle states that the Black Aesthetic was "conceived . . . [as] a corrective -- a means of helping black people out of the polluted mainstream of Americanism, and offering logical, reasoned arguments as to why he [Gayle himself] should not desire to join the ranks of a Norman Mailer or William Styron" (xxii). For both Addison Gayle and Hoyt Fuller, the Black Aesthetic was a tool to discover the ”true“ and essential nature of "Blackness." To return to David Lionel Smith's arguments in "The Black Arts Movement and its Critics,” in order to understand the critics 69 of the Black Aesthetic period, or any other period for that matter, it is important to know “How [the] writers [conceived] [of] themselves in relation to their literary antecedents” (96).” In learning this, Smith argues, we are able to discern “what they explicitly embrace and reject" (96). We are able to "[define] the broader field of works which they feel an obligation to know -- in other words, the basis of their literary education" (96). Smith argues that for the interpretive communities of Black Aesthetic writers, past Black writing ”was mostly a chronicle of evasions: failures and refusals to express authentic Black consciousness" (90). This belief is reflected in the two examples of Black Aesthet— ic readings of Passing that I have given in this chapter. I argue in the next chapter that Larsen provides a new concept of identity, a concept few have been willing to address. Larsen's use of the “tragic mulatta,” as Hortense Spillers tells us, ”becomes key to the identity of African American women in their historic status as captives."38 In attempting to locate Black women in the intersections of the discourse of race, gender, and theories of reading, a novel such as Larsen's Passing can be read as a way of changing existing systems of signification.which force "Blackness” and "femaleness" to appear as though “they are an "impossible simultaneous pairing" (Spillers 1985, 9). Larsen's work can be read as a direct challenge to theories of reading and interpretation that support binary thinking. Juxtaposing Clare and Irene at the center of her narrative as subjects and 70 as personalities the way she does, Larsen poses plurality against unity; Clare (re)presents multitudes of meanings in the written text(s) of Passing and in the text(s) of her body against Irene's partially self imposed.single fixedymeanings. By reassigning or creating new'definitions for how text(s) (of both the body and the written word) are produced, evaluated, and read, Larsen changes the model for how we assign aesthet- ic, critical, and ideological value to texts. 71 Notes 1 See Jonathan Culler’s On Deconstruction (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1982). In "Reading as a Woman" he makes this argument about the evolution of feminist theory. See pp. 43— 64. 2 See for instance Susan Suleiman, The Reader in the Text: Essays on Audience and Interpretation (Princeton UP, 1980); and Jane Tompkins, Reader-Response Criticism from Formalism to Post-structuralism.(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1980) among the antholOgies of reader-response criticism which do not address the implications race and gender have on reading. W.J.T. Mitchell's The Politics of Inteppretation (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1983) also reflects this fact. 3 What Rivkin does not point out, however, and what I missed as well in my initial readings of Rivkin, is that this point is only accurate when discussing heterosexuals. ‘ Here I am citing Barbara Smith, "Toward a Black Feminist Criticism," The New Feminist Criticism: Essays on Women Literature and Theopy, ed. Elaine Showalter (New York: Pantheon Books, 1986). For more discussion of this idea see also Patrocinio Schwieckart, ”Reading Ourselves: Toward a Feminist Theory of Reading, " Gender and Reading Essays on ReadersI Texts and Contexts, . ed. Elizabeth Flynn and Patrici- nio Scwhieckart (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1986). 5 Tate credits Houston Baker with coining the term "expressive culture“ to describe discursive artifacts. 72 6 See Julia Lesage, "Feminist Film Criticism Theory and Practice,“ Sexual Stratagems: The World.of Women in Film, ed. Patricia Erens (New York: Horizon, 1979) 144. 7 For example, Carby argues for a move away from a reductive Black feminist analysis which she argues relies on the assumption of ”a common or shared experience" among all Black women. Carby also rejects the notion that there is a common 'Black.female language.” For Carby language cannot be unique to a particular group because "language is a terrain of power relations" (17). In other words, the power relations between "competing groups” determine the difference in how a particular group "language is accented” (17). For Carby, the struggle “within and over language reveals the nature of the structure of social relations and the hierarchy of power, not the nature of a particular group" (17). ° Carby credits Stuart Hall as being a "key figure“ in the aspect of cultural studies which has analyzed issues of race and the study of black culture” (179-80). See particularly Hall’s ”Race, Articulation and Societies Structured in Dominance“ Sociological Theories: RaceI and Colonialism (Paris: UNESCO, 19980) 305-45. In addition, Hall's ideas regarding race and.articulation.are also cited in Jaqueline Bobo's “The Color Pupple: Black Women as Cultural Readers,“ Female Spectators: Looking At Film and Television, ed. E. Deidre Pribram (London: Verso, 1988) 90-109. In her 73 notes Bobo states that Hall is drawing from the ideas of Ernesto Laclau. m See Hortense Spillers, "Black/Female/Critic," .gpp Women's Review of Bookg. Sept. 1985: 9. “ Mae Gwendolyn Henderson. "Speaking in Tongues: Dialogics, Dialectics, and the Black Woman Writer's Literary Tradition," Cheryl A. Wall, Changing Our Own Words: Essays, Criticism, Theopy, and.Writing by Black.Women (New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1989) 17. n The notion of an "identity theme” is taken from.Norman Holland's argument in "Unity, Identity, Text, Self" in which he argues that readers imprint every text with their own identity themes. Holland states that ”identity defines what the individual brings from old experiences, both those from the world.without and those from the biological and emotional world within, by which the individual creates variations which are his life lived in historical time“ (122). Jean Kennard and Jonathan Culler among others point out that though there are limitations to Holland's definition of identity, they find his arguments useful for addressing the subjective judgements of the individual reader (see Kennard p.72 for instance). “ See Kennard's discussion of this point p.85. “ McDowell outlines these assumptions in the context of a discussion. about. Mel. watkins's now' notorious article, "Racism, Sexism, and Black Women Writers, " New York Times Book .Review, 15 June 1986: 36. .Among other things, MCDowell points 74 _ out that Watkins feels that "in the great majority of their novels, Black women indicate that 'sexism is more oppressive than racism'" (57). Watkins also argues in his article that Black women single out Black men as their targets when they write and it is because of this that Black women have 'set themselves outside of the tradition" devoted to "establishing humane, positive images of blacks (Watkins 36) . There is much more to Watkin's argument. I provide more detailed discussions of Watkin's arguments at several points in this study. ” Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Sympolic Act (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981) 53. “5 Though Alain Locke is often cited as having coined.the term in his 1925 essay ”Enter the New'Negro,' Wilson J. Moses points out that the term "New Negro" began to appear in Black publications as early as the mid-1890's. For instance, he cites the expression "New Negro" was probably first seen in the Cleveland Gazette (28 June 1895) in an article discussing a group of Blacks involved in a New York civil rights law; In another example, Booker T. washington.uses the term.New Negro in his collection of essays entitled A New Negro for a New Qentury; an Accurate and Up-to- ate Record of the Upward Struggles of the Negro Race (Chicago, Illinois: American Publishing House, 1900). Finally, in 1916 William Pickens used the term in his book The New Negro His Political, Civil 75 and Mental Status (New York: Neale Watson Academic, 1916) For more discussion see Wilson J. Moses, "The Lost World of the Negro, 1895-1919: Black Literary and Intellectual Life Before the Renaissance," Black American Literature Forum, 21.1-2 (Spring/Summer 1987): 61s See also Lawrence W. Levine, "The Concept of the New Negro and the Realities of Black Culture,” Nathan I. Huggins, Martin Kilson, Daniel M. Fox, eds., Key Issues in the Afro-American Experience, vol. 2 (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1971) 125-47. 17 The period between 1915 to 1930 (though these dates vary as well) in African American.literary history is known by several different names, the "Harlem Renaissance" being the name that is most popular; II prefer to use the term New Negro Renaissance or New Negro Movement because I feel it does not reflect the geographical bias for Harlem that the other name connotes. I think Alain Locke's comment about Harlem being a laboratory of race welding among Black people is accurate. Harlem was not where "it all began" -- it was where "it all ended up." In other words Harlem was the show window for what was occurring all over the country among Black artists. What is known as the Harlem Renaissance -- the generic definition being the self-conscious artistic movement among Blacks immediately after WW I, as a result of massive migration to Northern cities —- actually took place in many cities other than Harlem including but not limited to 76 Washington, D.C., Baltimore, Philadelphia, Boston, Chicago, and Atlanta. “ See Singh, The Novels of the Harlem Renaissance, 28. 1’ Th_e_C_r_i_si_s, 31.4 (1926): 165. m The Crisis, 31.4 (1926): 165. n The Crisis, 31.4 (1926): 165. 22 In Chapter two of their work, ”Toward the Renaissance, " Abby Arthur Johnson and Ronald Mayberry Johnson argue that DuBois believed that the truth about Blacks during the first half of the 19205 was slow in coming. According to the Johnsons, DuBois and his contemporaries attempted to right (write) the wrongs of negative depictions of Black people by "depicting irreproachable and, to DuBois, totally unbelievable heroes and heroines" (45). DuBois felt that the questions he outlines in The Crisis would get writers to say ”the best and highest and noblest" about Black people. As the Johnsons argue, DuBois, in the seven rhetorical questions that he poses, asks respondents to essentially agree “that Afro- American writers ought to concentrate on.the lives of educated blacks“ (46). ” See Singh, ng,Novel§pof the Harlem Renaissance, 120. u The Crisis 33.1 (1929): 28. n The Crisis 31.6 (1926): 278. 2‘ watkins’s echoing'ofIBlackHAesthetic critics is ironic because of their active attempts to silence the voices of Black women, particularly Black women who are feminists. 77 27 I think it is interesting to note here that in her attempts to find a more inclusive -- more diverse way to talk about Black writing, Jordan appears to build her argument on the assumption that there is pp; type of "white” writing. 2“ There are parallels between how Jordan describes Hurston’s work and how I am describing the work of Nella Larsen. Like Hurston, Larsen's work has also been dismissed on the basis of its being romantic, unimportant, or useless. This dismissal has occurred because both of these women create themselves and their characters in ways that conflict with Black and white societal expectations. Black writers, to return to Mel Watkins's arguments, were supposed to portray the "inner-community life" (watkins 34) of Black people in Black literature. 3’ David Smith points out, for instance, that Leroi Jones/Amiri Baraka in his article "The Myth of a Negro Literature,“ reflects his early Black Aesthetic thinking that middle-class experience is inherently dishonest. "Hence, any art, no matter how accomplished, dealing with middle-class experience would be false and mediocre" (97). .According to Smith, Baraka/Jones "equates black with lower class. Hence by Jones's prescription, for middle-class black. writers to produce ’high art,’ they must repress the truth of their own actual experience and write instead as though they were lower class" (97). m I intend to play on the word "read" to mean both what 78 it means in the context of this sentence and.what it means in Black vernacular -- to always already be "told about your- self." ” In a footnote Fuller mentions how Larsen, like Helga Crane, the protagonist in Quicksand leaves her husband, Dr. Elmer Imes, and goes off to Europe. Fuller states that reportedly Larsen was considering leaving her husband. Fuller's motivation for including this information suggests that Larsen, like her character Helga Crane and Clare in Passing, attempted to reject her Blackness but then changed her mind deciding to "return" to the Black community. 3’ Fish argues this in "What Makes an Interpretation Acceptable?” p.349. ” Kolodny's arguments here and.on.the following page seem derivative of Hans-Georg Gadamer’s arguments in Truth and Method. Though Kolodny does not cite Gadamer in her essay, her arguments parallel Gadamer’s discussion of the reconstruc- tion and integration of hermeneutic tasks. Specifically, to provide two brief examples, Gadamer argues that ”Reconstruct— ing the conditions in which a work passed down to us from the past was originally constituted is undoubtedly an important aid to understanding it” (166-67). In addition, he argues, “What is constructed, a life brought back from the lost past, is not the original" (167). I will return to the ideas of both Kolodny and Gadamer and a discussion of the connection between the ideas of these two critics in the fourth chapter. “ See Kuhn p. 6 79 35 Henry Louis Gates, introduction, "Race," Writing, 'Race' and the Difference it Makes,” Henry Louis Gates ed. nggpl' Writing, and Difference (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1985) 11. ” Gates, “Writing, ’Race,’ and the Difference it Makes," 13. ”'Watkins points out, for example, that "both writers and critics of the Black Arts movement frequently articulated the notion that they had few if any antecedents" (96). ” Spillers, 'Black/Female/Critic," 9. CHAPTER TWO Fooling White Folks; Or, How I Stole the Show by Mbssin' with the Gaze It is no coincidence that at a time when poststructuralist theories are enjoying some recognition (both positive and negative) Nella Larsen’s Passing/passing has resurfaced as an important text of the New Negro Renaissance. Both passing as an act and Passing the text easily lend themselves to the type of analysis poststructuralist theories invite. Though ambiguous and difficult to define, generally speaking poststructuralism can be characterized as claiming that meaning is inherently unstable, that there is no unity between a stable "sign” and a stable "subject" and that this disunity' calls into question. any’ relevance to identity, causality, or truth. Not having one simple fixed meaning itself, poststructuralism is used as an umbrella term for "a range of theoretical positions . . . developed from the work of [such theorists as] Derrida, Lacan, Kristeva,.Althusser and Foucault (Weedon 19). For the purposes of this discussion, I am most interested in the work of Michel Foucault and his discussion of the subject, power, knowledge, and government as they are each related to the body. Poststructuralist theories such as those of Foucault introduce different methods of formulating how we come to know literary texts, and ourselves as (raced and gendered) texts. If we use the critical lens of poststructuralism to read the 80 81 “raced“ and ”gendered" bodies Larsen presents us with in Passing, it would seem that both Passing the novel and passing the act force us to question.whether we can ever use “race“ or "gender” as signifiers without simultaneously undermining them. Michel Foucault's ideas are useful in this type of study because his interrogation of how our bodies and our texts are constructed challenge us to focus our discussion on hpyg, instead of lily the "history of the different modes by which, in our culture, human beings are made subjects" occurs (Foucault 1982, 208). Taking my cue from Foucault I have as my task in this chapter two things. First, I will discuss both the social and.discursive construction.of the‘written.and physical body and how they are each inscribed by legal and governmental institutions. I will do this by extending Foucauldian theories of subjectivity to an analysis of Passing/passing. Second, keeping in mind the misgivings certain scholars of African American literature and theory have voiced, I will attempt to connect some of the more abstract theories as to how our physical and written bodies are defined, inscribed, and constructed, to the material realities of these same bodies. I argue in this chapter that one of the reasons some scholars of African American literature are reluctant to engage poststructuralist theories is because of what they see as lack of connection between our theories and our practice. 82 (Re)presentations of the Body: Hybridized Text(s) In the previous chapter I argued that Black feminist dialogics is an interactive theoretical process that can be used to bring together in simultaneous discourse communities of speakers and knowers who have rarely, if ever, been placed together in dialogue. Discussions of texts by Black women, I argued, point to the necessity of having a theoretical position that simultaneously addresses the multiple identities of interpretive communities and the multiple layers of texts including those of our bodies. The theoretical position of reading multiple layers of texts simultaneously is one that well serves those of us who attempt to read Passing/passing. More specifically, when we read the multiple layers of the physical body as text or the written text simultaneously, we are able to get a panoramic view of the body as the locus of numerous practices, ideologies, and discourses. That is to say, we are able to see how the texts of our bodi(es) and of our written texts are hybrid constructions. Both evolve from the intermixture of and simultaneous membership in various race, gender, class, and interpretive communities. In this chapter and indeed throughout this work, then, I always have as my focus a.minimum.of two texts. My discussion is as much about the novel Passing itself and the political, social, and cultural issues that exist within the text as it is about the political, social, and.cultural issues that exist 83 without the text. ZMy close readings of the novel are informed by an analysis that gives equal weight to literary and extraliterary issues and how they each shape, implicate, and inform critical response to Passing/passing. This is true when I am discussing the written text(s) of the author and the text(s) the interpretive community or reader (re)creates in interaction with the text(s), and it is true when I am discussing Passing as a text and passing as an act. Of particular interest to me in both my literary and extraliterary analyses in this work is a discussion.of how the historical situations of raced and gendered bodies, not only the usually assumed visible "Black" and ”female" bodies but also the bodies of what is often described as the invisible white (male) body, are consumed (erased) by hegemonic versions of language. Chris Weedon reminds us, for instance, that “it is important to investigate . . . those hegemonic versions of language and subjectivity which most people take for granted” (75). Foucault reminds us that "the real political task in a society such as ours is to criticize the working of institutions [and I would add texts] which appear to be both neutral and independent. . .' (1974, 171). I read Passing/passing as an example of what happens when we call into question what appears to be neutral and independent -- what goes without saying.1 An analysis of what we take for granted in our constructions of ourselves and of our texts I would suggest, following Foucault, unmasks the political ideologies working obscurely within and upon texts. 84 An examination of how we speak about, or, perhaps, how we go about ppp speaking about race, gender and class, provides some insight into how'we are constructed by language. In this discussion, for example, I connect my investigation of how to speak the unspoken.about "race,” "gender,” and the body to how we theorize about these identities, and how they are described and inscribed on our bodies. A discussion of Black women’s bodies can be particularly useful as we attempt to address some of these issues because reading the historical situations of their bodies demonstrates how the theoretical does not always connect with the material.2 Though it may seem incongruous to do so, I use Passing/passing as a vehicle to bring these issues together —- to connect (1) our theories of hegemonic versions of language, and (2) our theories about race, gender, and.class, with.(3) our practices as they relate to the Black woman’s body. I do so because, like Hortense Spillers, I think this kind of pairing reveals to us the "subtleties that threaten to transform.the living subject into an inert mass and suggests the reincarnations of human violence in their intellectual and symbolic array“ (166). 85 Extraliterary Affairs Let's face it. I am.a marked.woman, but not everyone knows my' name. "Peaches" and ”Brown Sugar," “Sapphire" and ”Earth. IMother," "Aunty‘ "Granny,” God’s "Holy Fool," a ”Miss Ebony First," or ”Black Woman at the Podium": I describe a locus of confounded identities, a meeting ground of investments and privations in the national treasury of rhetorical wealth. My country needs me, and if I were not here, I would have to be invented.3 -- Hortense Spillers In Passing/passing Larsen invites us to examine how we speak the unspoken legacies of "race," "gender,” and the body in American literature, history, and culture. She does so by (re)presenting the "Blackness" of her female characters as “whiteness." Through.her (re)presentations of biracial women Larsen demonstrates the problem of binary thinking in the context of racial identity and gives us the opportunity to address how our use of language in this context silences a discussion of the complexity of our selves and of our texts. 86 She also asks us to address how our silence (our failure to use language) implicates us in continuing the legacy of reducing our selves and our texts to the binary equation of either/or and how this reduction obscures the power dynamics this equation is laden with. Finally, she asks us to address how our language informs our readings of texts and of ourselves as texts. Passing is often described as the lesser of Larsen's two novels. As I stated in the introduction, since its publication Passing has often been read as a novel whose primary focus is "race“ with nothing to say about sex.or class as the center of identity. Clare Kendry not Irene Redfield has often been assumed to be the central character in the novel, and it is often assumed that Clare alone is passing. The novel takes place over the course of two years when two childhood friends (and I use that term loosely) meet again as married women while they are both "passing" in a hotel restaurant in Chicago. The action and later suspense of the novel are set in motion by the competing agendas of these two women. These two competing agendas are important to note because they exemplify how Larsen unmasks the hidden political and ideological functions of language particularly in the context of racial and gender identity. On the surface, the novel appears to be about Clare Kendry’s "passing" and the cultural and psychological costs of her actions. It could also be argued, however, that the novel is about Irene Redfield and her desperate attempts to "keep 87 undisturbed the pleasant routine of her life“ (Passing 229). Still, these are only two possibilities for reading the novel. Instead of reading Passing in ways that reduce the multiple meanings of the text, I propose that we read Passing in much more complex ways -- in ways that pay heed to the multiple meanings of the text. A number of contemporary critics -- particularly, but not only, Black feminists -- have begun to reread the novel and to re-evaluate its critical response in order to challenge the long-held belief that it is weak. Cheryl Wall, for example, argues that Larsen's work is "Among the best written of the time" and that her two novels "comment incisively on issues of marginality and cultural dualism that engaged Larsen’s contemporaries such as Jean Toomer and Claude McKay . . ." (97). Claudia Tate argues that though Passing does "relate the tragic fate of a mulatta who passes for white, it also centers on jealousy, psychological ambiguity and intrigue” (142). Tate argues that by focusing on these four elements, we can actually achieve a fuller reading of the novel that transforms it "from.an anachronistic, melodramatic novel into a skillfully executed and enduring work of art" (142). Both of these critics point to the skill and sophistication Larsen demonstrates in her unfolding of events. They argue that the reason Larsen’s skill and sophistication have been "obscured" in the past is because readers have only paid attention to the "bourgeois ethos" of the novel (Wall 97) . Readers, in other words, have read only the text's surface level. 88 Larsen' 5 work, which has often been characterized as part of the "rear guardf‘ of the New Negro Renaissance, has been characterized this way because, as Hiroko Sato describes, she does not discuss "race" in terms it has traditionally been described in African American literature -- "She does not use race for protest or propaganda" (89). Larsen’s work.has often been read in opposition to the work of New Negro Renaissance writers like Jean Toomer or Claude McKay because she "played up" middle-class folks in her novels. According to Arthur P. Davis, for example, Larsen is usually grouped with Jessie Fauset and other supposedly "rear guard” New Negro writers because they 'play[ed] up the same kind of folk, the Negro middle class; . . . treat[ed] passing as a major phenomenon in upper-stratum.Negro life; and . . . practically ignore[d] the presence of 'other’ blacks" (94). In his description Davis touches on an important reason for' why Larsen.was read the way she was and.why her work; has been received.in.interpretive communities the‘way it has been. Her use of the literary convention of the "tragic mulatta“ is often read pgp as a manipulation and a rewriting of this old convention but as a support of and a belief in it. We might say neither Larsen herself, as an African American, nor her work can escape the dilemmas that confronted the Black women she wrote about. I would suggest, however, that Larsen uses the convention of the tragic mulatta to create a new concept of identity for herself and for the African.American literary canon. This new concept of identity takes into account the 89 intersections of race, gender, and class. Compared to the masses of Black women, the lives of virtually any mulattas are extremely atypical in terms of appearance, education, and social class. Though on the surface, perhaps, Larsen's characters do indeed seem to support the tragic mulatta literary convention, upon closer examination Larsen, in her use of this convention, actually portrays the psychological costs racism and sexism have on the lives of a specific group of Black women -- middle-class Black women. Consistently throughout the narrative Larsen subverts the traditional notion of the mulatta figure. Instead of presenting these women as "noble and long-suffering, " as Cheryl Wall points out the mulatta is often characterized, or afflicted with "a melancholy of the blood" as Barbara Christian describes, Larsen's depiction of Clare and Irene challenges this notion. They do not conform to the stereotype of the tragic mulatta who feels ”pangs of anguish" because she has '[forsaken] her Black identity" (Tate 1980, 142) . Instead, I would argue, as Cheryl Wall does, that the tragedy of Clare and Irene exists not because they are mulattas per se but because they are unable to fulfill their "quest for a wholly integrated identity” (98). According to Wall, both Clare and Irene "attempt to develop a sense of themselves that is free from both the restrictions of ladyhood and the fantasies of the exotic female other" (98). Passing invites a different kind of discussion to take place about "race" and ”gender" -- about the exoticized 90 "Black" female "Other” and ”ladyhood" -- not only as these issues are problematized in the body of the mulatta, but also in situations where it appears that "race" and "gender" are most physically precise. Ini Passing/passing, for example, Clare’s bodi(es) suggests that when it comes to reading’bodies (physical or written) there are no definite black or white answers. Her successful, albeit temporary, usurpation of "whiteness,” tells us that we can never assume or accept that what we see is "real" or "true" despite the practice in Western culture "that [equates] knowing with seeing“ and understanding (Benstock xv). The bodies of Larsen's characters challenge our traditional methods of reading (or seeing) "race" and "gender“ by emphasizing how our belief in the image, in the hue of skin color or other physical markers of identity, actually blinds us to the possibilities of there being other ways to know, see or read these same bodies/texts. When the historical situations of Black women's bodies in American culture become central to the discussion, we create space for‘ a. discussion. of their' bodies "as a locus of confounded.identities” (Spillers 1987, 65). One such.identity is the identity of the mulatta figure that I have been describing. Larsen's use of an excerpt from.Countee Cullen's poem “Heritage" as the epigraph for her novel supports this point, when the poet asks, One three centuries removed From the scenes his father loved 91 Spicy grove, cinnamon tree, What is Africa to me? This excerpt from ”Heritage” signals that Larsen herself is about to explore heritage andwwhat.it:means for "Black"women. In addition, Larsen’s use of Cullen's poem signals her connection to other New Negro writers and artists of the day who were also contemplating issues of identity (racial and otherwise) in their own works. Cullen, considered “Harlem’s poet prodigy“ (Lewis 75), published his first collection of poems, Cplgp (1925) , when he was only twenty—two years old. The volume, divided into three sections, includes a number of the poems Cullen is best known for: "Yet Do I Marvel,“ "To A Brown Girl,“ "Incident," and “Heritage.” In ”Heritage," Cullen addresses the theme of "alien—and-exile' that critic .Arthur' P. Davis argues is characteristic of the work of a number of writers during the New Negro Renaissance. According to Davis the "alien-and- exile” theme "had its origin in th[e] [New Negro] movement’s attempt to make Africa a literary homeland of the Negro creative artist."5 Davis argues that it is in Cullen's "racial" poems where he ”states or implies that the Negro in America is a perpetual alien, and exile from a beautiful sun-drenched Africa, his lost homeland” (390). For Cullen, according to Davis, Blacks are ”both geographical and spiritual exi1e[s]" (390). The use of Africa in his poems signifies the romantic impulse of not only Cullen.but.a.number of the New Negro Renaissance authors who looked to Africa to 92 reconnect with their roots. As Davis notes, Africa is not a place for these writers when it is used in this context. Instead, Africa is used as a symbol of an idealized land where Black people had once been "happy, kingly, and free“ (Davis 390) . Though I am not suggesting that Larsen uses the refrain from "Heritage” as a way to reconnect with a romanticized mythic Africa, I would suggest that, like Cullen, Larsen is attempting to explore, though through the use of the mulatta figure, the historical and contemporary problems of racism and sexism that Black women confront. By using what I would call the extreme example of the mulatta figure -- extreme because unlike most ”visible” bodies, the racial demarcations of the mulatta’s body are blurred -- Larsen's characters invite us to play with the inscriptions and descriptions of ”race" upon the body. The existence of the mulatta violates the law and logic of "race“ and ”race" ideology. The bodi(es) of the mulatta can be read as evidence of the illicit "deeds of a secret and unnamed fatherhood made known . . ." (Spillers 1989, 167). In other words, the absent body of the white parent (usually the father) who has gone unnamed is exposed (1989, 167) . Winthrop Jordan argues in White Over Black (1968) that the "social identification of children requires self-identification in the father” (Jordan 167). It is commonplace in our culture for children to take the name of the father; thus, even in his absence, he is present in the children's surname. In the case of the mulatta, however, the child's surname no longer 93 functions as a signifier of the father; instead the mulatta child’s color does. Because the child gets her or his identification from the father, and because the (white) father is absent, some profound questions are raised about the issues of miscegenation. and familial (particularly' patrilineal) relations. Larsen responds to the question of these issues through her (re)presentation of Clare and Irene as mulattas. In the (re)presentations of their bodies as biracial, she contrasts those subjects who are able to suppress the 'historical (familial) situations of their bodies in invisible abstract bodilessness, with those who are not able to suppress their situation because they have been defined as visible and therefore ”Other“ in our culture. In writing the bodies of Clare and Irene, Larsen acknowledges the gaps, contradictions, and parodic potential of the American system’s construction of subjectivityu She‘does so by inserting the supposedly legally inscribed visible bodies of her characters ('Black' but not too "Black") within this either/or binary equation and then subverting it. Because those of us who have Black and/or female bodies have been legally defined as visible in our culture, we usually do not have the option of bodilessness. Larsen’s characters, however, can be read as an inversion of this idea because the bodies of her characters look “white" even though they are supposed to be ”Black." Larsen's (re)presentations of Clare and Irene as mulattas in her fiction are a part of a recurring theme in African 94 American literature. In fact as early as 1861 William Wells Brown in.Clotel Or, The President’s Daughter, considered to be the first novel to be published by an African American man in the United States, states that Bottles of ink, and reams of paper, have been used to portray the finely-cut and well-moulded features, the ’silken' curls, the dark brilliant eyes, the 'splendid forms,’ the ’fascinating smiles and accomplished manners' of those impassioned and voluptuous daughters of the races -- the unlawful product of the crime of bondage.7 Brown is often credited with creating the prototype for descriptions of the mulatta in novels by African Americans (Christian.23). Barbara.Christian tells us that between 1861, when Clotel was published, to 1945 when.Ann Petry's The Street was published, novels by African.Americans disproportionately used the mulatta heroine as their protagonists (Christian 22) . Christian's assertions seem to support Cheryl Wall’s argument that the "tragic mulatto figure was the only formulation historically available [to Larsen] to portray educated middle- class Black women" (97). ID; addition, Larsen (along with Jessie Fauset) was said to have been greatly affected by the publication of T.S. Stribling’s Birthright (1922) (Christian 42) . This novel, about the tragedy of a mulatto Harvard graduate*who returns to his small town in.Tennessee to educate and "uplift the race,” was considered at the time to be “the most significant novel on the negro [sic] written by a white 95 American.'° Building on the examples of William Wells Brown and T.S. Stribling, Larsen.moves on to write another identity for Black women. Claudia Tate argues in “Nella Larsen's Passing: A Problem of Interpretation" (1980), for example, that Larsen uses the mulatta as a vehicle for "setting the story in motion, sustaining the suspense, and bringing about the external circumstances for the story’s conclusion” (1980, 143). The fact that her characters are mulattas, in other words, is only one component of a more complex story and dialogue Larsen is attempting to engage us in. Passing Glances To a large extent it is Irene, not Clare who can be considered the central character in the novel, mainly because of the role Larsen gives her as narrator. At no time in her fictional development, for example, do we see Clare without Irene's eyes. Clare, by Irene’s description, is always associated with danger and with her desire to have more regardless of the costs to others. In the clever juxtaposition of Clare and Irene, Larsen obscures the fact that it is Irene who is at least just as dangerous as Clare and who, in the end, is really the one who will do anything to protect what is hers regardless of the costs to others. From.the opening scenes of the novel to its ending we are consistently told of Clare’s ability to flirt with danger, ”her stepping always on the edge of danger: .Always aware, but 96 not drawing back or turning aside. Certainly not because any alarms or feelings of outrage on the part of others" (Passing 144). From the letter Clare sends Irene at the beginning of the novel, we immediately get the sense that Clare herself is "exotic" and "unreadable." In the first passage of the opening scene, for example, readers are introduced to Clare through a letter she has written to Irene. In the passage we are told It was the last letter in Irene Redfield's little pile of morning mail. After her other ordinary and clearly directed letters the long envelope of thin Italian paper with its almost illegible scrawl seemed out of place and alien. And there was, too, something mysterious and slightly furtive about it. A thin sly thing which bore no return address to betray the sender (143). Clearly Larsen is signifying here on the reader’s (in)ability to read between the lines -- to see past the surface of what she has presented us with. Clare's letter to Irene, as we will find out, telegraphs how Clare herself will eventually be presented -- as exotic, unreadable ("illegible”) , 'flaunting, " with no outward markers to betray her identity. Larsen uses strong visual imagery and language at several points in Passing to set the action of the novel in motion and to maintain suspense. We are constantly told about 'unseeing eyes" (148), "shadowyeyes'I (200), ' "dark, black.eyes" (149), "gleaming eyes" (205). Through her use of visual imagery and 97 language Larsen shows us the multiple levels upon.which gazes function within Passing/passing. Both the act of passing and the novel itself rely on their ability to keep up appearances in order to fool the reader/gazer. In Passing/passing, after all, what everything comes down to is visibilityx The scenes in the novel which focus on passing and the gaze, however, demonstrate for us how the (mis)reading of skin color can actually blur the gaze and make visibility appear as invisibility. The first indication that Larsen gives readers of the power of the gaze occurs at the beginning of the novel when Irene is recognized by Clare while they are both passing for white in a restaurant in Chicago. Lost in thought, Irene suddenly realizes that she is being observed. She begins to wonder how someone she assumes to be a stranger can unabashedly choose to stare at her. Irene grows increasingly uncomfortable under the steady scrutiny of the gazer (Clare). She begins to question herself, begins to feel a range of emotions from.anger to fear, from.indignation to trepidation. As Clare continues to stare, Irene feels her color heighten under the continued inspection and slides her eyes down. Irene feels discomfort because of Clare’s gaze not because "she was ashamed.of being'a.Negro, or even.having it declared. It was the idea of being ejected from any place [because she is a Negro] . . . that disturbed her' (150). Under the gaze Irene literally becomes more visible and therefore she feels more easily detectable and knowable as a 98 Black woman. She knows what the discovery of her ”Blackness" would mean to the gazer who has the power to qualify, classify, and punish. She is aware that if the gazer detects her "race“ she can. be publicly’ humiliated, abused, and punished. As a result of Clare's gaze, Irene begins to scrutinize herself; she begins to internalize the gaze, in an attempt to dis-cover the reason for why she has become a spectacle -- the subject of and subjected to -- steady scrutiny by the gazer (Clare). Irene intuitively knows that the gaze imposes upon her a visibility through which she can be controlled. She also knows, however, and this is an important theme Larsen emphasizes both implicitly and explicitly throughout the text, that because her body is not visible in the way a "Black” body usually is, the burden of proof is on the gazer. Irene draws calmness and a brief moment of courage from.this knowledge. She reasons to herself that “Suppose the woman did know or suspect her race. She couldn't prove it” (150). Gazes criss-cross in this opening scene because neither Irene nor Clare realizes the power that each of them has invested in the other’s gaze. Though we are never told what Clare sees or what Clare feels as she is gazing on Irene, or the effect Irene’s attempts to return Clare's gaze have on Clare, we do get the sense based on Irene’s reaction to Clare’s gaze that the gaze has a powerful effect on both of them. 99 In another scene where gazes play a crucial role in the action of the novel, Irene and Gertrude Martin (a childhood friend of Clare and Irene) meet John Bellew, Clare's (white) husband. Once again in this scene the gaze is a site (sight) of criss-crossing meanings where the distinction between.what is believed to be true and.what is actually true is collapsed. As in the previous scene with Irene in the Drayton hotel, Clare is able to cast the gaze, along with the others, on her husband. This time she is joined in her power to gaze by Irene and Gertrude. As I have stated, what Passing/passing comes down to is visibility'and the ability of the passer to keep up appearances. With little difficulty Clare, Gertrude, and Irene are able to do just that. The “success of passing [Passing]', as Winthrop Jordan argues, 'depend[s] upon its operating in silence” (174). Clare, Irene, and Gertrude successfully conspire against Bellew by maintaining their silence about their being defined as "Black" women. They are able to challenge the rigid color line in American culture that is based.on'visibilityu Because of the rigidness of this racial system, the invisible "visible" bodies of Clare, Irene, and Gertrude are overlooked and they are able to slip through the cracks. Ironically it is not the "Black" women in this scene but Bellew, the "white“ man, who is the one visible and therefore knowable. iBecause he does not know'he is sitting in a room surrounded by three 'Black" women drinking tea (despite Irene's desire to shout this point out to him) the women are not ”visible" to him. Therefore Bellew, unaware of who 100 ("what") he is looking at, does not know he has the power of the gaze. Instead, it is Irene's gaze that is perhaps most penetrating, most visible here. In fact, it could be argued that throughout the novel Irene is the one who exhibits the power of the gaze. It is through.her eyes, after all, that we see almost everything that goes on. Larsen alternately emphasizes and de-emphasizes how powerful Irene’s gaze is, and how it shapes what we, as readers, see and how we interpret it. While Irene’s eyes are exhibiting the power of the gaze in this scene with Gertrude, Bellew, and Clare, Clare's eyes have become "mysterious and canceling Negro eyes" (161). Having to rely once again on Irene's eyes to record the scene, we learn that Clare is unaffected by what is going on in the room, particularly when her husband enters and calls her 'Nig.“ We also learn, based on Irene’s gaze, what Gertrude's feelings and responses are in this scene. Gertrude, we are told, is startled by Bellew’s calling Clare "Nig" and briefly wonders to herself whether Clare has told Bellew about her ”race." For his part, Bellew explains to Irene and Gertrude that he calls Clare 'Nig" because he believes she has grown progressively darker throughout their marriage. For Bellew, in this instance seeing isn't believing. Even when he is presented with the ”evidence" of Clare’s dark body he chooses to reassure himself and Clare that as long as he kpgg§_she’s no "nigger” Clare can be as dark as she wants to be. Through his comments Bellew makes clear what his feelings are about 101 "Blacks": though he (thinks he) doesn’t know any of them personally, he insists that he ”knows them better than they know their own black selves" (172). According to Bellew's logic of racial naming, one does not have to knoW' an individual Black personally, one must only'be able to identify them as "Black" to know who they are. The irony occurs in the fact that it is not the "white" man in the scene, but the "Black! women, who have the power of the gaze. Possessing the power of the gaze enables Irene, for instance, to qualify and.classify the people and.avents around her. She records for us the thoughts and feelings of each individual in the room. Unlike Irene's gaze, and to a lesser degree that of the other ”Black! women in this scene, Bellew's gaze is made visible to us. In his statements to Clare, Irene, and Gertrude, Bellew not only demonstrates his flawed method of racial naming and the uselessness of ever trying to construct these types of signifiers, he also makes himself visible as a gazer and demonstrates how his gaze functions. Bellew’s gaze is only functional when "Black” bodies are instantly and constantly recognizable. It is this blind spot in his gaze that allows Clare and the others to usurp his power as gazer. In sum, gazes criss-cross in this scene, in that Bellew’s gaze does not detect Clare, Irene, and.Gertrude as "Black” but Clare, Irene and Gertrude's gaze detect Bellew as white -- or is he? I ask this question because it seems to me that Larsen forces us to deconstruct our notions of 'race' as a biological reality -- she forces us to question the 102 possibility of seeing correctly. In so doing, she gives readers the opportunity (power) to challenge what Bellew holds most dear about himself -- his apparently I'self-evident" whiteness. When Bellew literally bumps into Irene and her friend Felice Freedland on the street, his gaze and its limitations are again made clear to us. In this scene, once again, Bellew does not recognize that there are multiple ways to read bodies -- that is until Irene and Felice force him to see otherwise. It is Felice’s "golden" skin and her "curly black Negro hair“ that force Bellew to focus his gaze in a way that finally allows him to "accurately" read Irene’s, Felice’s, and later Clare’s bodi(es) (226). Though Irene has the opportunity in this scene to deflect Bellew's gaze before he reads her body against Felice’s and "recognizes" her, she uses this opportunity instead to make Bellew see her and to let him know that ghg has seen pig; all along. This scene is the first instance where Bellew must experience the gaze of "the Other. " Another example of where Bellew experiences "the Other’s" gaze occurs in the concluding and perhaps most controversial scene in the novel. In this scene Bellew confronts Clare about her racial identity while she is attending a party at the Freedland’s (freed-land's) home. Bellew, when he sees Clare in the room with the other “Blacks“ -- when he finally focuses his gaze on their bodies, but most particularly on Clare's body -- sees her as ”Other” too, he sees her as "Black, " "as nigger“ and expresses feelings of “rage and pain" 103 (238) . In direct contrast to what occurs in the previous scene, seeing Clare's bodi(es) in the room with other “Blacks“ this time, causes Bellew to reread her body. In the eyes and bodi(es) of the 'Other’s" that Bellew is now gazing on, he also sees himself reflected as well. with the 'Other's" eyes acting as mirrors, Bellew must read, must see, must confront the legacy of the unknown and unnamed (white father) and his relationship to his named and known, visible, and embodied ”Black”/mulatta daughter/wife. Having finally been embodied himself by the gaze of the "Others," Bellew confronts what Hortense Spillers has described as the "violent mingling and commingling of bloodlines” (1989, 167). A mingling and conmingling that has made possible bodies like Clare's body to exist -- a body whose “race" is not easily detectable. As Karen Sanchez-Eppler points out, ”the less easily race can be read. . . from flesh the more clearly the white man's repeated penetrations of the black body are imprinted there” (40). Reading, "Race," and the Body Our belief in race and gender as biological facts of the body are based on long-held cultivated beliefs in gender and race ideology in the United States. Even when we are presented with bodies that challenge how we classify and categorize them, we find ways to compensate for their contradiction. Historian Barbara Jeanne Fields argues in "Ideology and Race in American History, " for instance, that we 104 are able to do this, that we are able in the late twentieth- century to ”refer to physically 'white’ people” as "Black“ because of the ”ideological context [of race] that tells people which details to notice, which to ignore, and.which to take for granted in translating the world around them into ideas about the world" (1982, 146). According to Fields, our belief in 'race' and racial ideology ”has long since taught [us] which details to consider significant at classifying people” (1982, 146). Reading the bodies of Clare and Irene shows us how easily our definitions of raced and gendered bodies can be challenged. Clare's and Irene’s bodies allow them to pass. Their bodies allow them to tamper with the evidence the law would seek -- in this case the evidence of a dark-skinned body -- to determine whether "Black” bodies have fraudulently usurped the privileges of “white" skinned bodies. Any attempt to reduce the possibilities for reading their bodies into a mere binary equation demonstrates not only the limitations of our reading strategies, but also how'we must reshape our views of how we construct and define raced and gendered bodies in American culture. Lauren Berlant’s arguments in "National Brands/National Body: Imitation of Life“ are useful here. Berlant describes the various relationships Clare Kendry and Irene Redfield have to their own bodies and to each other's bodies as ”absent- from-their-bodies" (110). Berlant describes the relationship Clare and Irene have with their bodies in these terms because 105 Clare and Irene must literally leave their bodies -- must.pass -- in order to release themselves from the ”colonizing gaze whites wield“ which categorizes and hierarchizes them (Berlant 110). In her characters Larsen demonstrates how passing becomes necessary for women who want to claim the multiple meanings of their bodies not only in terms of their appearance but in terms of the historical situations of their bodies. These women, in other words, want to be free of the oppressive gaze that has historically categorized them as exoticized other. In her depictions of Clare and Irene, Larsen demonstrates for us how they attempt to negotiate an existence in a society that does not want to relinquish this gaze and in fact, as Lauren Berlant argues, wants to continue to literally and figuratively "[polarize] [their] bodies” (111). The biracial women Larsen portrays in Passing (re)present the problem of how we have defined bodies in the United States. Lauren.Berlant suggests that the United.States, which "prides itself liberally on the universal justice it distributes to its disembodied or 'artificial citizen[s]" unwittingly becomes a useful tool for the mulatta figure who is, perhaps, "the most abstract and artificial of embodied citizens (Berlant 113). When the subject/citizen is embodied in the United States, the application of universal justice, as we will see, is an extremely problematic issue. For example. John Rawls argues in A Theopy of Justice that it is "the veil of ignorance“ that allows for a belief in a universal justice that is distributed to all citizens regardless of the 106 possibilities for how their bodies can be read. According to Rawls, we get to the point of the "veil of ignorance“ by operating from an "original position" -- a position that allows us "to set up a fair procedure so that any principles agreed to will be just” (136). In order for us to get to the point of an "original position, " Rawls argues we must equalize the access different communities have to ”social and natural circumstances" (137) . In so doing, Rawls suggests, we lessen the ability of "specific contingencies which put men [sic] at odds and tempt them to exploit social and natural circumstances to their own advantage” (136). Equalizing the access of ”specific contingencies“ to social and “natural circumstances," Rawls argues, situates us behind a veil of ignorance (136-7) . This veil of ignorance that Rawls describes makes it possible for people not to “know how the various alternatives will affect their own particular case and they are obliged to evaluate principles solely on the basis of general considerations" (136-7). Rawls describes the situation of the veil of ignorance as one that allows a person to step outside of "his [or her] place in society, his [or her] class position or social status ' (137). If one is able to do this then it is assumed that a distribution of universal justice is possible. The opportunity for exploitation, it would seem, is eliminated. However, when the mulatta or biracial bodies of Larsen's characters, or any other visibly gendered and raced bodies for that matter, are inserted in this equation of justice a number 107 of problematic issues arise. Those of us who have bodies whose “race" is a "race" other than “white" or whose gender is not "male,” find it extremely difficult to imagine locating ourselves in an "original position" by situating ourselves behind a "veil of ignorance.” Rawls's argument seems to suggest that if we locate ourselves in an original position we do so with an awareness of ”general truth[s] about human beings and social organization" (Kukathas and Pettit 20) . The problem with this arrangement is in determining whose general truths about human beings and which social organization get presented. The bodies Larsen presents us with in Passing demonstrate that general truths about human beings and about social organization can be distorted depending on who the truth teller is. In the case of the mulatta and in the case of Black and/or women's history in general, I would argue that the veil of ignorance becomes something else.’ In the context of a discussion of raced and gendered bodies the veil of ignorance becomes a willful desire not to know, not for the purpose of achieving justice or equality in an original position that asks us to suspend these categories, but for the purpose of silencing these same raced and gendered bodies and the histories these bodies are evidence of. Rather than suspending categories, the veil in effect works to support these categories. When the texts of our bodies are read against bodies that are male and/or white, or, in other words, what has been 108 considered to be the ideal raceless/genderless bodiless citizen, it is the bodi(es) of ”Black? women, particularly the bodi(es) of the mulatta, who challenge this imposition of silence. Disciplining the Body: "Race,” Rape, and Lynching Southern trees bear strange fruit, Blood on the leaves and blood on the root. Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.10 —- sung by Billie Holiday -- words by Lewis Allen The things that influenced my conduct as a Negro did not have to happen to me directly; I needed but to hear of them to feel their full effects in the deepest layers of my consciousness. Indeed, the white brutality that I had not seen was a more effective control of.my behavior than that which I knew (emphasis added).11 -- Richard Wright, Black Boy Because of the historical situations of their bodies, "Black" women are subjected to one type of gaze and "white” women to another.“' Hortense Spillers argues that through Passing/passing, Clare and Irene reveal the "structure of 109 traits that would. designate 'black’ and. ’female' as an impossible simultaneous pairing” (Spillers 1985, 9). Because the mask of "Blackness" has been removed, Spillers argues, the "tragic mulatta's” body more fully reveals 'how 'femaleness' as a category of social production, has never assimilated to 'black’ and vice versa' (1985, 9). Passing/passing demonstrates how Clare and Irene substitute their ”Black" bodi(e5) under the gazes of "Black" and ”white" society for “white" and "female" creating the need perhaps for another type of gaze or at least for a reconfiguration of the old.one. By crossing the boundaries of "race" and "gender" in order to relieve themselves of one type of specularization for another, Clare and Irene challenge us to rethink and resee our bodies and how we define them. In my discussion of the issues surrounding Passing thus far, what has been implicit in.my arguments is how'what we see (or don't see) shapes and thus writes who we are allowed.to be as individuals. The concept of the gaze and how the gaze functions are crucial components in this equation because the gaze determines how written and textual bodies are controlled and defined. The gaze functions in my analysis on three levels: on the level of hoW'Larsen introduces and.utilizes the concept of gaze in the novel itself, on the level of how readers' gazes (re)shape the novel, and on the level of how the gaze is described and defined by' poststructuralist theorists like Michel Foucault. It is the latter two ideas that I want to turn to in the rest of my discussion. 110 Michel Foucault’s ideas in _D_i_scipline and Punish provide a way to read Passing and the experiences of its central characters in ways that acknowledge their complexity and attest to Larsen's skill not only in portraying psychological ambiguity but also the ambiguities of how raced and gendered bodies are formed and defined. As I stated in the preface, at the heart of Foucault's poststructuralist project is the interrogation of subjectivity itself. Because, in poststructuralist theories, we are all said to be formed through language, the identity of each one of us can be seen as a kind of text. Some would argue that as individuals we have no control over language or how the textual body is read or written. I join those on the other side of this argument who say that as we are introduced and subject(ed) to other texts of the world (other bodies), we are never entirely at the mercy of what we receive. In fact we rewrite these texts -- our bodies. By passing, Clare and Irene refuse to be at the mercy of what they receive. They rewrite themselves and their "Blackness" from the perspective of what Hortense Spillers calls the "peculiar new world invention“ of their mulatta bodies (Spillers 1989, 165). For Spillers, the mulatta figures are "stranded in cultural ambiguity" -- they "conceal the very strategies of terministic violence and displacement that have embedded a problematics of alterity regarding the African American community in the United States” (1989, 165). Spillers argues that the mulatta figure was "created to provide a middle-ground of latitude between 111 'black' and ’white" (1989, 165) . The creation of the bodies of the mulatta, according to Spillers, represents a “neither/nor" proposition in American culture because it has in its inscriptions neither an historical locus nor a materiality other than one that is "evasive and shadowy on the national landscape" (1989, 165). For Spillers, the mulatta body can be read as "an accretion of signs that embody the ’unspeakable’ or the Everything that the dominant culture could forget” (1989, 166) . The term mulatta, itself derived from Portuguese or Spanish for mule, a hybrid or mixed blood, is used as a disguise or to cover up "the social and political reality of the dreaded African presence“ (Spillers 1989, 166) -- or perhaps the dread of the presence of "white" blood in the African or ”Black" body.13 As described in the previous section, the mulatta’s body can be read as evidence of the repeated penetrations by the “white" male body. The term thus becomes not only a displacement of a violent history that has largely caused this mixture but also "a displacement [of the] proper name" of the white father who signifies on the body of his mulatta/o children through their color " [I] have willed to sin“ (Spillers 1989, 168) . Even Clare, who is never referred to in the narrative by her married name, is denied the protection of her ”white“ husband. Judith Butler argues that “the notion of the body as an historical idea suggests only that for the body to have meaning for us, for the body to appear within a field of 112 intelligibility, it must be signified within an historically specific discourse of meaning."“ Butler, in 'Gendering the Bodyw Beauvoir's Philosophical.Contribution," argues that.this formulation suggests that the gendered, and I would add the raced body, are historical ideas or constructs "that the body assumes as if it were its natural form“ (254). As I have argued, a crucial component of this project is the interrogation of what is assumed to be ”natural” as opposed to what is constructed about the descriptions and inscriptions of our raced and gendered bodies. To use Butler's questions: ”How does a body come to signify an historical idea? By what mechanism or modality does a natural body become an historical construct and, in the case[s] of gender [and race], how is it that a natural body becomes historically constructed as a gendered [and raced] body which subsequently disguises itself as a natural fact?" (254). I have already begun to play'with Butler’s questions in my discussion of the mulattas' bodi(es) and how their bodi(es) can be instructive of the experiences of what are assumed to be more visible bodies. The mulatta's bodies, the way I describe them borrowing from Hortense Spillers, serve to cover-up the historical situations that have led to the process of translating their “Black" (mulatta), female bodies from subject to object -- from natural body to historical construct (see Spillers 1985, 9). In 'Black/Female/Critic," for example, Spillers argues that the 'tragic:mulatta,' particularly in the works of Jessie Fauset and Nella Larsen, 'demarcate[s] a special problem of 113 invention and representation . . . for the reader“ (1985, 9). Spillers argues that the tragic mulatta's body, cloaked in "mystery and mystification,” "becomes key to the identity of African American women.in their historical status as captives" (Spillers 1985, 9). Angela Davis argues, for instance, that "sexual coercion was . . . an essential dimension of the social relations between slavemaster and slave“ (175). According to Davis "the right claimed by slaveowners and their agents over the bodies of female slaves was a direct expression of their presumed property rights over Black people as a whole" (175). In ”Rape, Racism.and the Myth.of the Black Rapist' Davis tells us that "slavery relied.as much.on routine sexual abuse as it relied on the whip and lash" (175). If the slave owner had unlimited access to the Black woman's body, and thus to her womb, either for his own pleasure or the pleasure of his agents, through forced breeding, or through relationships that occurred between Black men and Black women, he had increased his capital investment.“ Unlike the bodies of white women, which were used as the ”repository for white civilization,““ Black women's bodies were used to increase the slave stock but also to allow white men to participate privately in the very activities they detested publicly -- miscegenation. Historically, miscegenation usually took the form in American culture of either rape or concubinage of Black women by white men. White men's access to Black women’s bodies insured their access to her womb and thus, to their insured 114 reproduction of a slave workforce. As the ("white”) father, he has the power to name as ”Black" the children from his sexual liaisons with "Black” women. As Winthrop Jordan reminds us, ”white blood becomes socially advantageous only in overwhelming proportions” (167) or, in other words, when Blackness cannot be read on the body. To prevent Black men from participating in similar sexual activities with white women, traditions of "ritualized violence“ (Harris 2) were developed to discipline their bodies. These forms of "ritualized violence“ included the rape and concubinage of Black women to prove to Black men that they did not have the same patriarchal control or access to either Black women’s bodies or white women's bodies; they also included a tradition of mob violence and lynching.17 In either case these forms of violence against Black bodies, male and female, were intimately bound to the politics of sex and sexuality.18 Whether we are discussing rape or lynching, or some combination of the two, the Black body becomes a theater where the site (sight) of the received cultural meanings of 'race" and "gender" is acted out and becomes a constant production and reproduction on these same bodies.” Trudier Harris tells us that "before Emancipation," Black bodies, brutalized by lynching among other forms of torture, were "left as a warning to other slaves" (xi). By being raped and lynched, in other words, Black bodies literally became inscribed as cultural texts of violence and oppression in 115 American society. Black bodies, then, were not only marked by 'race' and "gender“ but also by violence. Jacquelyn Dowd Hall tells us that "rape -- an act of violence against women's bodies -- was inseparable from lynching -- an act of terror against men's [bodies]' (328). Dowd Hall points out that lynching, usually accompanied by torture and sexual mutilation, ”served as a tool of psychological intimidation aimed at blacks as a group“ (Dowd Hall 330). According to Hall, while the 'industrializing North" of the nineteenth-century "moved toward a criminal justice system in which police, courts, and prisons administered . . . discipline" and control, the South directly contrasted this (Dowd Hall 329) . In the South, Dowd Hall argues, order was maintained "through a system of deference and customary authority in which all whites had formal police power over all blacks" (Dowd Hall 329). The state, for its part, Hall goes on to argue, ”encouraged vigilantism as part of its overall reluctance to maintain a strong system of formal authority that would have undermined the planter’s prerogatives" (329).20 In addition to the acts of violence themselves, the "expansion of communications and the development of photography in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries“ intensified the power of the gaze and discipline of white society on the bodies of Blacks (Dowd Hall 330). Robyn Wiegman tells us in ”The Anatomy of Lynching" that "Both mainstream and alternative newspapers regularly ran stories 116 documenting the scenes of violence, often offering graphic detail of the practices of torture through which the entire African American population could be defined and policed as innately, if no longer legally, inferior (451—2). Richard Wright supports Wiegman’s claim, describing in the second epigraph of this section, how acts of violence against Blacks instilled fear and horror not only in the immediate victim but for all other Blacks who saw or heard about the event.21 The recording of these events of lynching is then, according to Wiegman, "a mode of surveillance" because it '[reiterates] its performative qualities carving up the black citizen’s body in the specular recreation.of the initial, dismembering scene” (452). Disciplinary Constructions of the Body Wiegman tells us that "Above all lynching is about the law: both the towering patrolman who renarrates the body and sadistically claims it as a sign of his own power and the symbolic as law, the site of normativity and sanctioned desire, prohibition and taboo" (445). According to Wiegman, in the circuit of relations that governs lynching in the United States, the law as legal discourse and disciplinary practice subtends the symbolic arena, marking out a topos of bodies and identities that gives order to generation, defines and circumscribes social and political behavior, and punishes transgression . . . (445). 117 Wiegman’s discussion of rape and lynching as well as the acts themselves as forms of disciplinary power, can be directly correlated to Foucault’s arguments in Discipline and Punish. Rape and lynching prove to be similar in nature to the modes of torture of the body that Foucault describes early on in the work.22 In France, these forms of torture gave way, however, to more simple forms of discipline. Foucault argues, for instance, that "the success of disciplinary power derives from the use of simple instruments: hierarchical observation, normalizing judgement, and their combination in a procedure that is specific to it -- the examination" (Foucault 1979, 170). The first example of a simple instrument, hierarchical observation, is described by Foucault as "The exercise of discipline [which] presupposes a mechanism that coerces by means of observation" (1979, 170). Foucault argues that along side of the construction of major technologies which enhance sight -- the telescope, the lens, and the light beam -- there are also the minor techniques "of multiple and intersecting observations, of eyes that see without being seen; using techniques of subjection and methods of exploitation, an obscure art of light and the visible. secretly preparing a new knowledge of man" (1979, 171). In this form of observation or "the gaze,“ power is exercised through exact observation. Observation or the gaze is used as a tool by those in. power to keep those not in power subordinant. The gaze is so powerful because the gazers do not have to be present for their power to be felt. 118 In his discussion of the camp, the constructions of working class estates, hospitals, and. asylums, Foucault demonstrates how in an ideal situation, "all power would be exercised solely through exact observation"; he argues that "each gaze would form a part of the overall functioning of power” (1979, 171). For Foucault a problematic develops: that of an architecture whose purpose is not the passive one of being seen by human beings, but the active one of instituting control over them -- “an internal, articulated, and detailed control" (1979, 172). In more general terms, this architecture becomes one that ”would operate to transform individuals: to act on those it shelters, to provide a hold.on their conduct, to carry the effects of power right to them, to make it possible to know them, to alter them! (Foucault 1979, 172). In this instance, the old schema of architecture functioning as a means of confinement and enclosure that prevents entering and leaving is replaced. Architecture becomes a place of action where one is able to observe individuals carefully, to separate them based on information developed from these observations, and to train these individuals. In my reading of Larsen's fictional architectonics, Clare and Irene also represent the problematic that develops when the architecture no longer exists simply to be seen. If we use the architecture Foucault describes as a.metaphor for the skin, or more specifically skin color, then we can say that the hue of skin functions as something more than something 119 simply to be looked.upon, Like the old schema of architecture functioning as a means of confinement and enclosure, 'race' and, to some extent “sex," are also supposed to prevent those inside of it from entering and leaving. Skin, depending on what color it is, is supposed to invite a gaze that is "internal, articulated, detailed, and [control]led' (Foucault 1979, 172). It also renders those who are inside of it visible and knowable. But Clare and Irene’s skin color inverts the notion of skin color (architecture) as control. They'are able to challenge the idea that once one is inside of a particular body (architecture) one cannot enter and/or leave this particular "raced” and "gendered” body. Because Clare and Irene look "white,“ they can and.indeed.do change their “race" and the particular way "race“ causes them.to‘wear their bodies -- they enter, leave, and reenter, try on and. discard different modes of wearing their bodies. Clare and Irene make the architecture of ”race” and "gender" a site (sight) of action, They' clearly' demonstrate Foucault's ‘point that "although surveillance rests on individuals, its functioning is that of a network of relations from.top to bottom, but also to a certain extent from bottom to top . . .' (1979, 177). Clare and Irene participate in this "relational power“ network by seizing the opportunity to serve as both observer and the observed, the object and the subject (Foucault 1979, 177). They are not, in other words, totally at the mercy of what they receive but are participatory agents in the mechanism of the use of the simple instruments of hierarchical observation. 120 In another example of a simple instrument, normalization, Foucault argues that it, like surveillance, is a. great instrument of power. In normalization, what was once the mark that "indicated status, privilege, and affiliation," becomes or is supplemented by "a whole range of degrees of normality indicating membership of a homogenous social body" (1979, 184). Foucault argues that "normalization.is powerful.because it imposes homogeneity; it also, however, 'individualizes by making it possible to measure gaps, to determine levels, to fix specialties and to render the differences useful by fitting them one to another” (184). Normalization functions, in other words, as a disciplinary institution which "compares, differentiates, hierarchizes, homogenizes, excludes” (183). Normalization is opposed term by term to a judicial penalty whose essential function is to refer not to a set of observable phenomena, but to a corpus of laws and texts that must. be remembered; that operates not by differentiating individuals but by specifying acts according to a number of general categories; not by hierarchizing, but quite simply by bringing into play the binary opposition of the forbidden; not by homogenizing but by operating the division (Foucault 1979, 183) Clearly‘ the rituals of violence that included rape and lynching that I describe in the previous section are examples of a form of the judicial penalty Foucault critiques here. (M1 121 the other hand, Clare and Irene embody and to a large extent make a mockery of Foucault's notion of normalization. Since normalization has as part of its basis "a set of observable phenomena, " the bodies of Clare and Irene challenge the process of normalization, therefore making it difficult to accurately observe, compare, differentiate, hierarchize, homogenize and exclude them. The examination, the third and final example of a simple instrument is a combination of hierarchical observation and normalizing judgment. The examination is "a normalizing gaze, a surveillance that makes it possible to qualify, to classify and to punish” (1979, 184). Through the examination the individual is made visible in order to be "differentiated! and “judged“ (1979, 184). The disciplinary power of the examination manifests itself in ”the subjection of those who are perceived as objects and the objectification of those who are subjected“ (1979, 184-5). Basically, through the process of three steps the examination introduces a mechanism that links certain formations of knowledge with certain forms of exercising power (1979, 187). First, it transforms "the economy of visibility into the exercise of power" (1979, 187). Instead of a power that is visible and found in the principle of force, disciplinary power is exercised through invisibility while simultaneously '[imposing] on those whom it subjects a principle of compulsory visibility“ (1979, 187). Second, the individual is introduced (subjected) to ”a field of documentation" that "places individuals in a field of 122 surveillance [which] also situates them in a network of writing . . ." (1979, 189). Through the apparatus of writing, the individual becomes a 'describable [inscribable], analysable [sic] object" which maintains instead of reduces the individual ”in his [or her] individual features under the gaze of a permanent corpus of knowledge” (1979, 190). In addition, through the apparatus of writing comes the development of a system which makes it possible to compare and “measure overall phenomena, the description of groups, the characterization of collective facts, the calculation of the gaps between individuals, [and] their distribution in a given 'population'” (1979, 190). Third and last, the examination, through its documentary techniques, makes each individual a case -- a case which simultaneously ”constitutes an object for a branch of knowledge and a hold for a branch of power“ (1979, 191). Through ”disciplinary methods" the describability of the body/subject is placed in the realm of "ordinary . . . everyday individuality“ (191). No longer reserved for the privileged few for whom describability and writing were formed as part of the "ritual of power, " the new describability reversed this relationship making ”description a means of control and a method of domination“ (191). I describe the forms and uses of the simple instrument —- hierarchical observation, normalization, and the examination -- at length in order to demonstrate how Larsen and her characters both support and undermine these concepts. For 123 example, during the Negro Welfare League dance, Irene is having a discussion with Hugh Wentworth, a "white" man whom she has earlier in the novel described as similar to hundreds of other whites who come to Harlem to ”gaze on the Negroes“ (Passing 198). During the course of the evening at the N.W.L. dance Wentworth becomes attracted to Clare and attempts to find out her name, and.her marital and racial status. Because Wentworth isn’t believing what he is seeing during the course of his discussion with Irene, he asks her to help him focus his gaze, pressing her to tell him what Clare’s racial identity is. Until he gets this information, he feels he cannot know Clare or how to read her body. To Wentworth, finding out Clare’s race will make her known to him. If he knows what Clare is then he can know, for instance, what her motivations are for being at the N.W.L. dance -- whether she is herself one of the great gazers or just one of the Negroes to be gazed upon. .According to Hugh, sometimes he will “be as sure as anything that [he's] learned the trick. And in he next minute [he'll] find that [he] couldn't pick some of 'em if [his] life depended on it” (206). In response to Hugh's comment, Irene counters with the proposition that you cannot tell another person’s race simply by looking. Hugh Wentworth is one of the few readers inside or outside of the narrative who looks for multiple ways to read what he sees, but even he falls prey to reductive thinking. Though it is true that he recognizes the existence of multiplicity in reading bodies (texts), he still looks for a 124 more unified system. As occurs in Foucault's regime of disciplinary power, Wentworth wants to compose, differentiate, homogenize, and exclude. With few exceptions, each time critics have read Passing/passing they have fallen.into a trap similar to Wentworth's. They too have tried to reduce the text(s) to a single meaning, seeing Passing/passing as texts which are solely about “race" and ignoring the possibilities of reading the text(s) as a discussion of how we pass critically and culturally as readers -- as members of particular gender, class and/or interpretive communities. Even so, these types of readings cannot silence the many voices of the text. By ignoring the many possibilities for reading the texts and its meanings, critics have ironically enough employed the power of language, particularly the power of naming, that Larsen challenges. Larsen's counterpower, as I stated earlier, springs from her resistance to those who wish to dominate her with their language. Another brief example of how she employs this resistance in her texts is evident in Clare's reaction to her husband when he discovers her in Harlem, There is a smile on her face as she backs away from Bellew, not the expression of horror that one might expect. Clare’s smile seems to indicate that she has enjoyed flaunting her visibility as invisibility, and the power it gave her if only briefly to neutralize those who tried to dominate her. Clare laughs at what the power structure says is true. The power of Clare's gaze lies in her Negro eyes which see without being seen. 125 Parting Looks I am waiting for them to stop talking about the I'other," to stop even describing how important it is to be able to speak about difference. It is not just important what we speak about, but how we speak and why we speak.23 -- bell hooks Perhaps we need a moratorium on saying ’the body.’ For it’s possible to abstract ’the’ body. When I write ’the body,’ I see nothing in particular. To write ’my body,’ plunges me into lived experience, particularity: I see scars, disfigurements, discolorations, damages, losses as well as what pleases me. . . . To say ’the body’ lifts me away from what has given me a primary perspective. To say ’my body’ reduces the temptation to grandiose assertions.“ -- Adrienne Rich Certain scholars of African American literature are somewhat reluctant to use, if not totally against using, poststructuralist theories of subjectivity to talk about texts in their respective canons.” While African American scholars have contributed extensively to poststructuralist 126 anti-humanist critiques of subjectivity, critiques which in part expose the bias of supposedly neutral subject positions, there are also those in these same interpretive communities who are hostile to anti-humanist critiques. Even though.those who engage poststructuralist theories declare that they are talking about difference, "otherness," and marginality, the fact is that when a number of us who are located in these categories hear this, we get that same old feeling of here we are again, co-opted and appropriated. Like the voice of authority bell hooks describes in my epigraph.or the character of John.Bellewu who says something very similar in Passing, we (whoever ”we“ is) feel misused, rewritten, and silenced. I have these feelings of ambivalence myself; however, I believe that instead of refusing to engage in dialogue with these theories we should address the reasons for why these critics are suspicious. Still, addressing the misgivings of certain critics should not preclude our using any critical tools available to us to respond to texts. Addressing the misgivings of certain theorists and thus the shortcomings of certain theories should instead.be turned into what Katherine Fishburn has described as an interactive process of reading.26 For example, in this chapter I use the ideas of Michel Foucault, particularly his ideas in Discipline and Punish, to read Passing/passingu I use Foucault as part of my analysis because he is useful, though with limitations, in a discussion of otherness and marginality." My use of Foucault has been an interactive process. In other words, 127 while I have been using Foucault to read Larsen, I have also been using Larsen to read Foucault. In so doing, my attempts to use Foucault’s ideas and respond to the gaps in his discourse through my readings of Larsen have helped me to achieve the type of Black feminist dialogic I have been calling for. By engaging in the type of interactive process Fishburn develops, I have attempted to bring theory and practice together -- or, as she says -- I have attempted to read the theory and let the theory read me (Fishburn 9). Cornel West has argued that the job of the critic is to do more than reinterpret or describe, to "cull other disciplines for stunning juxtapositions of cultural and artistic practices" (West 1989, 121). Instead, what we should be doing is examining the theories and the multiple layers of the texts we apply them to in ways that address the roles they play in "shaping and being 5haped.by the world of ideas, political conflicts, cultural clashes, and the personal turmoils of its author and audience" (West 1989, 121).28 By incorporating the shortcomings of the theory into the theory itself we can identify and analyze the gaps where poststructuralist theory' does not. address 'historical situations of oppression and co-optation. In so doing we can (re)shape the types of questions that we ask about texts, about how they are constructed, and about ourselves as texts and how we are constructed as well. The problem a number of scholars of African American literature have with poststructuralist theories of 128 subjectivity, particularly those scholars who are themselves African American, is that it appears that no one is addressing the positions from which they speak. Not examining the positions from which we speak, these theorists claim, creates the problem of speaking for and, therefore, silencing those who may not have been given equal voice -- who cannot speak 'with equal authority. Instead of refusing to engage in dialogue with these theories, however, or, more perniciously, questioning the racial and sexual allegiances of their practitioners, we might more productively give voice ourselves to those forms of exclusion and historical omission that we find. We must be aware of and constantly interrogate, as Linda Alcoff suggests, “how where one speaks from affects the meaning and truth of what one says" (6) .29 As part of our dialogic engagement with poststructuralism, we should examine how the subject positions of the theorists themselves -- theorists like Foucault -- allow them to make the types of omissions they make. Instead of rejecting these theories and the theorists outright, we must ask ourselves what do these theories look like -- how do they change (if they do) in the hands of Black and/or feminist literary critics? If these theoretical concepts do change when we Black and/or feminist critics use them, what is it about our subjectivity and subject positions that make these theories take a different form in our hands? But even after we begin to address these questions, there is still another problem. With the difficulty that comes with 129 addressing the problem of speaking for others is the problem of who is considered a member, at a particular moment, of a particular communityu Posed another way, how'are we, as Linda Alcoff questions, determining the "criterion of group identity” (8)?. Alcoff asks, "On what basis can we justify a decision to demarcate groups and define membership in one way rather than another“ particularly since any number of us, including Alcoff herself, have membership in many conflicting groups -— a membership which in each case is problematic (8). What we are talking about is a "crisis of representation" (9).30 At the root of the resistance of a number of scholars of African American and/or feminist interpretive communities to engage in poststructuralist theories is a belief that there has not been a serious attempt to address "who bears the costs of the ’absences’ present in one's discourses and in one's exercise of authority and power" (West 1989, 121). Who is being represented, in other words, and who is not? 130 Notes 1 I owe my thinking on theorizing about "what goes without saying" to some of the ideas of Hortense Spillers. I heard her discuss this concept in a different context during a talk she gave at Michigan State University during the spring of 1992. 2 For further discussion of this connection see Patricia Williams, The Alchemy of Race and Rights: DianL of A Law Professor (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1991) 256. 3 Hortense J. Spillers. "Mama’s Baby, Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar Book, " Diacritics. 17.5 (Summer 1987) : 65-81. 3 Robert Bone uses this term to describe Larsen’s work in "The Rear Guard," The Negro Novel in America (Yale UP, 1965). 5 Arthur P. Davis. "The Alien-and-Exile Theme in Countee Cullen's Racial Poems." Phylon 14 (Fourth Quarter 1953): 390- 400. 5 In _Wh_i_tLe jger Black Jordan makes the point that "American’s lump together' both socially“ and. legally' all persons with perceptible admixture of Negro Ancestry, thus making social definition without regard to genetic logic; white blood becomes socially advantageous only in overwhelming proportion" (167). This was not true outside of the continental United States, particularly in the West Indies. 7 Cited in Christian, Black Women Novelists. Christian cites from the 1969 reprint of the text published by Mnemosyne Publishing. This reprint, based on one of at least three 131 versions of the Brown text, is taken from the edition Clotel, or the Colored.Heroine: A.Talerof the Southern States (Boston: Lee and Shepard 1867). I am relying on Christian’s citation here because as of this point all of my efforts to locate this particular edition of the text that she cites from have been unsuccessful. Other editions include Miralda or, the Beautiful Octoroon (New York: The Weekly Anglo-African Magazine, 1860); Clotel; Or, the President's Daughter (London: Patridge and Dakey, 1853). 5 See Christian p. 43. Despite the praise William Stanley Braithwaite showers on the novel as being ”the most significant novel on the Negro written by a white American,” it would be an understatement to say, nevertheless, that the novel has racist undertones. Stribling’s novel, written in 1922 was considered startling because it portrayed the possibility of Blacks developing an educated middle-class. In addition, he portrays the 'negrophobia" of Southern whites, whom he suggests are economically backward because of their intense fear of Blacks. Still, Stribling reaffirms stereotypes of Blacks as odoriferous, lazy, and prone to stealing. See discussions in Frank Durham, “The Reputed Demises of Uncle Tom; or the Treatment of the Negro in Fiction by' White Southern .Authors in. the 1920’s.” The Southern Literapy Journal 2.2 (Spring 1970): 26-50. See also William -Stanley Braithwaite. ”The Negro in Literature.” The Crisis. 8.5 (September 1924): 204-10. 132 5 "The veil" is also used as a metaphor in African American literature. For example W.E.B. DuBois, often credited with popularizing the use of the term 'the Veil,” uses it as a way to discuss the division in American life between Blacks and whites. m Lewis Allen, ”Strange Fruit,” Edward B. Marks Corporation, 1939. This song was popularized by Billie Holiday. It is most often described as an anti-lynching song that was inspired by Holiday’s experiences while touring the South. The rest of the lyrics are: Pastoral scene of the gallant South, The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth. Scent of magnolia sweet and fresh, and the sudden smell of burning flesh. Here is the fruit for the crows to pluck, or the rain to gather, for the wind to suck. For the sun to rot, For the trees to drop. Here is a strange and bitter crop. The title Strange Fruit was also utilized.by Lillian Smith in a novel about interracial love. See Lillian Eugenia Smith. Strange Fruit (New York: Reynal and Hitchcock, 1944). 13 Richard Wright. Black Boy. (New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1937) 190. u A case could be made here that the Black male’s body is subject to yet another gaze -- one that is different from 133 the gaze on the woman’s body Black or white and from the gaze on the white male’s body. Once again I would refer to the epigraph from Richard.Wright’s Black Boy as an example of the effect the gaze has on the Black male body. 13 Winthrop Jordan points for example that unlike the Portuguese and Spanish colonists, the English, particularly in the colonies of Maryland, Virginia, and.the Carolinas, did.not develop a social hierarchy based.on.degrees of intermixture of "white” and "Black” blood (167). The term mulatta/o in the United States was rarely used except as a term for biological as opposed to social contexts. The mulatta, then, is not distinguishable from "Blacks" as far as racial definition or treatment goes (167). See Jordan, White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro. “ Judith Butler, "Gendering the Body: Beauvoir’s Philosophical Contribution," Women, Knowledge, and Reality: Explorations in Feminist Philosophy,. eds. Ann Garry and Marilyn Pearsall (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1989) 254. Butler argues here that Simone de Beauvoir’s arguments that "the body is not a natural fact but an historical idea“ and that one is not born.but rather becomes a woman are derivative ofIMerleau- Ponty’s ideas in Phenomenology of Perception. See de Beauvior, The Second Sex, trans. H.M. Parshley (New York: Bantam Books, 1974) 30, 249. “ See Barbara Omolade, "Hearts of Darkness,‘ Powers of Desire: ths Politics of Sexuality, eds. Ann Snitow, Christine 134 Stansell and Sharon Thompson (New York: Monthly Review Press) 352-355. “ See Winthrop Jordan, 148. See also the entire section "Fruits of Passion" in Black Over White. U Trudier Harris in Exorcising Blackness: Historical and Literapy Lypching and Burning describes lynching as a form of rape of Black men; she defines lynching as an act of ”communal rape" (25). For Harris lynching of Black men and the castration that usually accompanied it was an act that effectively served to literally eliminate the Black male’s visible traits of masculinity, his penis. 13 For further discussion of these ideas see Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, " ’The Mind That Burns in each Body:’ Women, Rape and Violence," Powers of Desire: the Politics of Sexuality. eds. Ann Snitow, Christine Stansell, and Sharon Thompson (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1983) 329. See also Charles Herbert Stember, Sexual Racism: The Emotional Barrier to and Integrated Society New York: Elsevier, 1976). u I am.manipulating and in a sense rewriting some of the ideas of Judith.Butler here from the previously cited essay on de Beauvior. “ Larsen herself included.a.passage in Passing where the issue of lynching comes up. Writing during the late 1920’s, a time where rituals of violence like lynching were still prevalent, Larsen could not help but to make this subject a 135 part of the topic of conversation among her characters. See Passing pp. 230-1. ’1 Dowd Hall also cites this passage from Richard Wright’s Black Boy. IDowd.Hall, however, uses a longer passage from.the text than I do here. I had included this passage in this study before I had encountered Dowd Hall’s use of it. I felt the passage from Black Boy perfectly demonstrated how the gaze affects Black (male) bodies. 33 See part one ”Torture" and part two “Punishment" in Discipline and Punish. ” bell hooks, ”Choosing the Margin as a Space of Radical Openness," Yearning: Race, Gender and Cultural Politics, (Boston: Southend Press, 1990) 151. “ Adrienne Rich, "Notes Toward a Politics of Location,” _Blood Bread and Poetry, Selected Prose 1979-1985, (New York: W.W. Norton, 1986) 215. 35 A similar debate. is taking place among feminist scholars who object to using poststructuralist theories for reasons similar to the objections I describe here. IBecause of the scope of my project, however, I choose not to address these issues here. 1“ Fishburn.makes these arguments in.her manuscript Cross Cultural Conversations: Reading Buchi Emecheta. She argues that it is necessary to read interactively in order to call into question moments of misunderstanding that might occur 136 between her experiences as a (white) Western reader and the (Black) African experiences described in Emecheta’s novels. 2’ For instance Cornel West argues that Foucault ”provides more concrete social and.historical analytical substance to a discourse of otherness and marginality" in his work than the work of other poststructuralist theorists like Lyotard or Derrida. Even Foucault, however, as West also points out, investigates "others" that "remain within European boundaries“ (89) and does not interrogate his own position of power and authority as the speaking subject, author. See West, "Black Culture and Postmodernism,“ Remaking Histopy: Discussions in Contemporapy Culture, eds. Barbara Kruger and Phil Mariani (Seattle, Washington: Bay Press, 1989) 88-9. 35 I am borrowing from Cornel West here, slightly shifting the context of his ideas. In his essay "Critical Reflections” West is discussing the role of the critic of visual art. I think his ideas are just as applicable to the role of the literary critic. ” See Linda. Alcoff. "The Problems of Speaking for Others," Cultural Critigpe, (Winter 1991-92): 6. Katherine Fishburn also addresses this issue in Cross—Cultural Conversations: Reading Buchi Emecheta. ” Alcoff’s use of the phrase ”crisis of representation” represents for her an ”engaging in the act of representing the other’s needs, goals, situation, and in fact, Egg ppsy,sps' (9). Alcoff argues that she is "in poststructuralist terms, 137 participating in the construction of their [the ’other’s’] subject positions“ (9). CHAPTER THREE Theories In the Flesh: Poststructuralism, Postmodernism, and African.American Literature The Politics of Location In their studies of African American literature, African American critics often respond to the social, political, and cultural experiences of Black people in the United States.1 This investigation has meant, primarily, that in the literature, as well as in the criticism by and about African Americans, both the critic and. creative ‘writer' discuss, analyze, challenge, and attempt to eradicate the effects of oppression and domination of African Americans by the larger culture. In preceding chapters I have demonstrated how, in at least two ways, African American literary critics have gone about addressing these issues: 1) through.the interrogation.of hegemonic versions of language and subjectivity which, among other things, entails the critique of dualistic, unitary approaches to knowledge and subjectivity and 2) through an investigation of how the intersections of language, race, gender, and class help us displace, in Foucauldian terms, the dichotomy between the ”constituting (Cartesian) subject who possesses agency and autonomy, and the constituted subject that is wholly determined by social forces” (Hekman 72). Put more concretely, I have argued that reading Larsen through Foucault (and. thus reading' Foucault through. Larsen) has allowed us to see how the raced and gendered bodies of 138 139 Larsen’s characters in Passing displace the conceptualization of the subject/body as passive in modernist/Enlightenment thought. In Passing Larsen’s characters, particularly Clare and Irene, reject the notion that they are wholly determined by the forces around them. They are instead resisting subjects -- subjects who are not solely at the mercy of what they receive but who are instead engaged in what Foucault has called the "permanent provocation" of the "power/knowledge" nexus that makes human beings into subjects (Foucault 1983, 222).2 Larsen anticipates in her depictions of Clare and Irene what some would call today a Foucauldian (postmodern) conception of subjectivity. Her characters, even when one considers how their life-stories end, resist the constitution of their subjectivity -- of their (racial and.gendered) selves -- by the society at large. In this chapter I want to further explore the notion of the resisting body/subject, stepping both inside and outside of the novel. I do so in order to reveal how the idea.of a resisting subject -- a subject who is not totally at the mercy of a received identity -- has strong implications for developing a more radical African American literary criticism. I want to discuss reasons why, for instance, African American literary, critical and cultural studies can (and should) have a strong affinity to current poststructuralist and postmodernist theories, why some critics of African American literature believe it can (and should) not have such an affinity, and why despite the disagreement, we 140 should develop one anyway. Using as my example the current, often acrimonious, debates among scholars of African.American literature, particularly among those who are themselves African American, I will outline the terms of the debate surrounding the uneasy relationship among poststructuralism, postmodernism, and African American literature. I will then provide some of the intellectual and political histories behind the various positions held by the parties involved. In so doing, I hope to demonstrate not only a way to mediate this conflict so as to initiate a more productive conversation among African American literary scholars but also to suggest the potential for a poststructuralist, postmodernist, and feminist African American literary criticism. Part of the knock against postmodernist and poststructuralist theories is that they don’t gp_anything -- that neither of these theories liberate or create. Instead, it is argued, they tear down and negate. In the very act of interrogating the categories of ”race” or 'sex" and the differences they make in interpretations of African American literature, for instance, those who utilize postmodernist and poststructuralist theories are accused of undermining and subverting the very categories of resistance themselves. This issue has been a particular sticking point for some African American scholars who believe that it is through the use of racial (and gendered) categories that they find the means to talk about their subjectivity. For instance, in discussions of Passing, as I argued earlier, critics have tended to focus 141 solely on what they considered to be the racial elements of Passing/passing. The text and often the act itself, in other words, were often seen as a "psychological phenomenon of blacks crossing the color line” (Wall 105) rather than a study of how racial categories are actually categories we create ourselves. I would argue that a similar line of reasoning lies behind how interpretive communities have responded to current poststructuralist and postmodernist theories. Certain critics believe, for example, that arguing that "race" is socially constructed, the way poststructuralist and postmodernist theorists do in their interpretations, is to erase (e—race) the (raced and gendered) subjectivity of the characters inside of the text and the subjectivity of the readers outside of the text. Following Chris Weedon, I would say that the "terms subject and subjectivity“ are understood in the context of this discussion "to refer to the conscious and unconscious thoughts and emotions of the individual her sense of herself and her ways of understanding her relation to the world“ (Weedon 32). In poststructuralist theories of subjectivity, discussions of the subject "break with humanist conceptions of the individual which are still central to Western philosophy and political and social organization" (Weedon 32). "Humanist discourses," which are seen as '[presupposing] an essence at the heart of the individual which is unique," have been useful to Black and feminist groups because these discourses invite discussions about what the essence of Blackness or womanness 'is" (Weedon 32). 142 Determining what and who an essential Black and female self is, these groups argue, makes it possible politically and culturally to say what these identities are not. In Passing/passing, however, Clare proves to be a.pmoblem for critics who follow this line of reasoning. Clare -- by the mere fact that her body can "pass" as ”white" -- reveals the tenuousness of arguments that support locating and naming "race“ as a fact of the body. The project of saying what Blackness and womanness are and what they are not has been important to the project of claiming a self and a body for Black women and men that is free from Western determinations and definitions of what and who they are. Poststructuralist and postmodernist theories make the project of claiming an essential self different, however. In. poststructuralist and. postmodernist thought, claiming an authentic or essential self is often referred to (pejoratively) as essentialism. For the poststructuralist and postmodernist, essentialism, or the ”belief in true essence -- that which is most irreducible, and unchanging, and therefore constitutive of a given person or thing” (Fuss 2) is "nothing more than the philosophical enforcer of a liberal humanist idealism which seeks to locate and to contain the subject within a fixed set of differences“ (Fuss xiii). For example, the desire to identify a Black essence was particularly evident during the Black Arts and Black Power Movements when African American literary theory appealed to an original and 143 pure Blackness, one that lay outside of racist (but not always) sexist oppression. Poststructuralist and postmodernist theories attempt to break from the conception of the individual as a contained subject, adopting instead a more constructionist approach. A constructionist approach for the poststructuralist and postmodernist theorist enables her/him to argue, in opposition to essentialism, for a self that has no fixed essence -- for a self that is instead historically and self-constructed. In African American literary traditions, the slave narrative is perhaps the ur-narrative of this notion of self as historically and self-constructed. At issue in both the slave narrative and Larsen’s text(s) of Passing/passing is how to write a self that is free from the disciplinary "gaze" of whites on the Black body. I would argue, for example, that Clare and Irene, like the Black women writers of slave narratives during the nineteenth-century, are attempting nothing less than to create themselves.3 Because of the constructionist position postmodernist and poststructuralist theories invite, these theories are often seen by some Black and/or feminist scholars as anti-Black and anti-woman. The activities of undermining and subverting the essence of racial and gender categories that poststructuralist and postmodernist theories call for make difficult the project of naming and claiming experience. As a consequence, some Black and feminist literary scholars have argued that when we undermine these categories we also undermine the possibilities 144 of using these categories as a means of resistance -- as a means for radical political change. To this scenario I would respond, well, not necessarily. In addition to challenging the humanist subject, poststructuralist and postmodernist thought, like African American literary and critical studies and feminist studies, also attempts to critique some of the fundamental, hierarchical dichotomies of Enlightenment thought, among them: ”rational/irrational, subject/object, and, nature/culture“ (Hekman 5).‘ Each school of thought (postmodernism, poststructuralism, African American, and feminist criticism) argues that there is a fundamental problem. with these hierarchical dualisms and, at first glance, each school of thought seems to argue that.it is necessary to eradicate them, Upon closer examination, however, it becomes clear that some African American and feminist scholars, while rejecting these dualisms or perhaps rejecting the hierarchy’ within the dualisms that privileges maleness and/or whiteness, slsg reject the postmodern argument that these dualisms must be completely dissolved. The resistance on the part of these theorists is due largely to wanting to determine and define a self in opposition to the selves that are imposed on them within Western culture. To completely dissolve the dualisms of Enlightenment thought, these groups believe, would be to dissolve the foundation.upon which ”true" and.'real' Blackness and femaleness stand. .Again I turn to Passing to demonstrate why this is the case. Skeptics of Passing point to Clare as 145 being the problem to be focused on in the novel, not the circumstances that cause her to make the choices she makes. Clare is often seen by critics as transgressor or villain because she crosses the boundaries of race and gender expectation. Clare flaunts her ability to use (and abuse) the racist sexist caste system in American culture for her own benefit. If Clare can do this, if she can '(by)pass" the boundaries built to keep her in -- to keep her controlled -- she demonstrates how easily this can be done for everyone. Relinquishing the ability to determine for themselves what Blackness "is" or what womanness "is” has been a particularly difficult task for some African American and feminist scholars because, as some have pointed out, just when we were beginning to name ourselves, just when we were beginning to challenge the nature of our marginalization as “Other,” the concept of subjecthood has become problematic.5 Some African American and feminist scholars, rather than agreeing to dissolve the dualisms of Enlightenment thought or accept the constructionist position that we must totally do away with essentialism, seek instead to redefine the hierarchical dualisms by reversing them (by privileging Black over white for instance). In so doing, they argue, they are creating a space to claim their bodies, their identities, and their experiences in ways a complete dissolution of these concepts would not allow. Retaining dualisms in order to claim self and experience, however, leaves us with the problem of perpetuating the very dualisms that subordinate these 146 groups to inferior subject positions in the first place. I want to argue that we can decenter subjectivity the way postmodernist and poststructuralist thought suggests we do, without relinquishing the project of claiming our selves. That is, I want to argue that we can, even as poststructuralists, still claim our raced and gendered.bodies as a means of resistance and as a location of radical political change. When we decenter the notion of ourselves as fixed within a set of differences we are actually able to pgep our bodies and our interpretations of texts to change. II would further argue that initiating a conversation among African. .American, feminist, poststructuralist. and, postmodernist thought displaces the dichotomies not only of essentialism/constructionism but also dichotomies of Enlightenment thought. In so doing, our selves and our texts become open to allowing for certain conceptions of "race" and gender to exist while dissolving others. Diana Fuss reminds us that essentialism is not "always and everywhere reactionary" (21). To "buy into“ this belief, she argues, "is, for the constructionist, to buy into essentialism in the very act of making the charge“ (21). In order to put into action what Fuss tells us about the essentialist/constructionist dichotomy we should remember that our bodies are always the site (sight in some cases) of conflicting forms of subjectivity.‘ Further building on Fuss’s ideas, I would argue that "the political investment of the sign ’essence, ’ " particularly when this essence refers to 147 race or gender identities, is "predicated in the subject’s complex positioning in a particular social field“ (Fuss 20). The "appraisal" of the subject’s positioning in this field, Fuss argues, ”depends not on any interior values intrinsic to the sign itself but rather on shifting and determinative discursive relations which precede it" (20). In the next section I will demonstrate that it is because of the “shifting and determinative" nature of these "discursive relations" that we should be able to strategically employ essentialisms of raced and gendered identity for political and cultural purposes. Critical Theory and African American Critics African American literary scholars recognize that the project of naming what is taken for granted, what appears to be "neutral" in language, is particularly important. Our lives have depended on it. In our attempts to name what silences us, what excludes us, what causes our marginality, we are (as Houston Baker reminds us) constantly “embroiled in theory."7 What is theory, after all, but a ”name for the questions which necessarily arise when principles and concepts once taken for granted . . . become matters of controversy“ (Graff and Gibbons 9) . Recently theory, in the context of discussions of poststructuralism, postmodernism, and African American literature, has become the center of much controversy. This controversy as I will discuss it here stems 148 from tensions that have developed between the scholarly work of African American literature and.theory on the one hand, and the ethical, political, and pedagogical responsibilities of its practitioner on the other.8 Despite the crucial role theory has played in the lives of African Americans (and indeed.most other groups defined as outsiders in .American. culture), theory, as I ‘have been arguing, is seen by these same groups as being elitist, inaccessible, apolitical, un/anti-Black.and in some instances un/anti-female. Central to the reasons for why some Black and women literary scholars define theory in these negative terms is a fear that they will lose power -- lose power over self, over community, over language, over what Barbara Christian calls ”our" literature (1987, 226). In short, theory is often seen, by some Black academics and. nonacademics as not ”enabling . . . equipping and empowering people in a democratic manner (1987, 226)." Instead, theory is seen as "put-down and castigation."9 African. American literary critics who are resistant to postmodernist and poststructuralist theories, particularly in the context of interpretations of African American literature, often see these theories as negating the very basis of their political power and because of this they have argued that theory is not semething that is applicable to "our" experience. I turn now to a discussion of this anti-theoretical (anti-intellectual) stance, what some of the consequences are for maintaining this stance, and what we can do to perhaps alleviate some of the 149 tensions of maintaining a position like this. Barbara Christian’s arguments in “The Race for Theory“ are effective in helping to further illuminate these issues. In her essay Christian tells us that she intends “to break the silence” among those critics who feel “intimidated [and] devalued by what [she] call[s] the race for theory” (225). Christian argues that there has been a ”takeover" by people she calls the "New Philosophers” who, in their attempts to understand a world that is "fast escaping their political control[,]" have redefined literature and literary critical language to serve their "own purposes" (225). Christian argues that theory with its linguistic jargon, its emphasis on quoting its prophets, its tendency towards ’Biblical’ exegesis, its refusal to ever mention specific works of creative writers, . . . its preoccupations with mechanical analyses of language, graphs, algebraic equations, its gross generalizations about culture has silenced.a number of theorists to the point where they feel they cannot discuss our own literature . . . (227). The "our" Christian refers to are “black, women, Third.World" peoples, some of whom, she states, "have been influenced even coopted into speaking a language and defining these discussions in terms alien to and opposed to our needs and orientation” (226). Christian, in her critique of what she sees as the excesses of contemporary critical theory, poses 150 the question ”For whom are we doing what we are doing when we do literary criticism?“ (225). For whom indeed. I cite Christian here because hers is a strong voice among several Black and feminist scholars who raise questions about what they see as the liberal individualistic desires of those African American and feminist literary theorists who have, as she sees it, strayed from the orientations and needs of ”the community" by engaging in the "academic hegemony" of theory (226) . Christian’s conception of how to remedy this situation, it would seem, is to use simple language and personal experience to counteract what she sees as the high theory of postmodernism and poststructuralism. The problem with Christian’s assessments of the relevance and applicability of theory to discussions of what she calls "emerging literatures" (226) is that Christian seems to be arguing that as critics we should not or perhaps cannot pursue the project of simultaneously responding to the text the creative writer has produced and to the text that the reader/ interpretive community has produced. Christian argues that critics have displaced the writer and are "no longer concerned with literature,” but are instead concerned solely "with other critics’ texts" (225). She suggests that as a result of this displacement, current critical theory has nothing to say to emerging literatures. I disagree. I would argue instead that we transform the relationship between experience and theory -- between author, text, and critic -- when we weave elements of poststructuralist and postmodernist 151 conceptions of the author/subject with Black and feminist scholars’ conceptions of the author/subject. The issue is not an either/or situation as Christian seems to feel. We do not have to choose between, on the one hand, accepting the postmodern notion of the death of the author and decentering the subject, or, on the other, rejecting these ideas altogether. I do agree with Christian that some of these ideas do not necessarily hold for Black writers because of the historical situation of how their (our) identities have been constructed. I also believe, however, that the deconstruction of the "authority of authorship," and the decentering of subjectivity, have been crucial for Black and feminist literary critics because such deconstruction has made room for the text that is not always (white and/or male) authorized (Miller 105). The deconstruction of white and/or male authorship in addition to moves to decenter the subject, for example, have enabled Black and feminist literary critics to test the borders (the boundaries too) of literature. In so doing they make clear from their positions in the margins the problematic nature of assuming white and/or male texts as center. These theorists instead examine the previously unexamined foundations upon which these assumptions were based. Christian ties my hands when she suggests that I choose between theory and literature. Despite the misgivings that feminist and Black scholars like Christian have about the uses of theory for feminist and African American texts, other feminist critics like Chris Weedon help me to argue that 152 ”rather than turning our backs on theory and taking refuge in experience alone, we should think in terms of transforming both social relations of knowledge production and the type of knowledge produced" (7) . According to Weedon, we should "tackle the fundamental questions of how and where knowledge is produced.and by whom, and.of what counts as knowledge" (7). As I indicated in the previous chapter, and I think it is a point worth reiterating here, instead of rejecting theory altogether, or questioning the political allegiances of its practitioner, we must instead ask ourselves how a particular theory changes (if it does) in the hands of Black.and feminist scholars. If these theoretical concepts do change when Black and/or feminist critics use them, what is it about gu; subjectivity and subject positions that make these theories different when we engage them? If we are honest.with.ourselves despite*whatever feelings an honest answer might evoke, we would have to say that we write literary criticism largely for ourselves and for others in the academy.10 Christian’s critiques of the language of theory notwithstanding, the language we use in the academy, like the language of any' profession, is a language of exclusion -- serving for the most part only those who are a part of that profession, Sometimes we are able to find useful connections between our theoretical/critical work and the material realities of our daily lives, often we do not. What should become clear to us, however, if we are honest with ourselves, is how marginal such work really is, in Anthony 153 Appiah’s words, to "the central issue of the resistance to racism and ethnic violence -— and to sexism, and to other structures of difference that shape the world of power . . .' (Appiah ”Limits," 11). Appiah argues, for instance, and I agree, that we should come to 'the clear realization that the real battle is not being fought in the academy" (11). He points out that the riots in L.A. are a prime example of this fact. Appiah tells us that when the riots in Los Angeles occurred in April 1992, "it seemed oddly irrelevant to fuss about racial ideologies" (11). However, as Appiah also reminds us, we are well aware even as the anger and pain of the riots continued to unfold, of how "the shape of our world is in large part the product, often the unintended and unanticipated product of theories . . ." (11) . Appiah rightly points out that "We cannot change the world.simply by evidence and reasoning, but we surely cannot change it without them either" (11). To say this is pg; to suggest that African American ”critics/scholars/teachers" (Berube 548) should not or cannot make connections between theory and everyday life (the work of bell hooks and Cornel West are excellent examples of hoW’one can connect the theoretical to the:material). What is problematic is the expectation that the work ”we" do in the academy'ppsp_do this. As Houston Baker has said, to have the expectation that the work of African American "critictsl/ scholar[s]/teacher[s]" must articulate in the same moment of [our] work, pedagogically or as a scholar, social remedies for 154 Black teenage pregnancy . . . give the lowdown on Jesse Jackson’s candidacy for the U.S. presidency a word on Somalia.. . . [participate in] a rally for rent control . . . is an unfair burden for Afro-American literary critics (Berube 548). Naming the difficulties of this type of burden does not preclude one’s opting to pursue more aggressively the political aspects of our work and its impact outside of the academy if one chooses. What it does say is that the work we do in the academy alone is not enough to change anything. It is unrealistic to expect that this be a prerequisite for the academic work of Black scholars and, if one's work does not exhibit a certain politics, that this work. is somehow inadequate. At best literary criticism and theory are only two of a number of ways to address the social and.political ills of our society, as Anthony Appiah suggests. Our fights about whether or not theory is applicable to a discussion about our bodies, about the texts in our respective canons, or about whether or not one is somehow betraying their racial, gender, and/or ethnic allegiances by enlisting theories in our work, certainly contributes nothing. Instead I would argue that choosing to engage current forms of critical theory does not have to be seen.as creating a situation.where one must forfeit one’s flesh.-- where one must pass. It is possible to develop theories that are true to our bodies and.the bodies of readers in ways that alleviate this necessity. The material reality 155 of our bodies -- what they look like, what color they are, what "race” they are, what gender they are -- can and should be taken into account when developing theories. When thinking about the material reality of our bodies, for instance, we must remember that ”race" and color are not the same, as Clare (and to some extent Irene) demonstrates in Passing/passing. Based on the premise behind Passing/passing, we must argue instead that these two concepts, unhinged from one another the way Clare successfully (albeit temporarily) does, demonstrate that "race,” an historical claim of genetically determined social and personal characteristics, is different from "color," the trope ("sign”) I use (and Larsen uses) for the experience we have of being assigned a "race" and all its attendant qualities.“' Developing what Cherrie Moraga and Gloria.Anzaldua would call "theories in the flesh” (23), then, presents one way to create a ”theory of the body“ if you.will, and to respond to the critiques of critics like Barbara Christian without giving in to the binarism. and anti- theoretical tendency her position invites. For Moraga and Anzaldua, "theories in the flesh“ are theories, "where the physical realities of our lives -- our skin color, the land or concrete we grew up on, our sexual longings create a politic born out of necessity" (MOraga and .Anzaldua 23). They are a useful tool for naming what silences us, what excludes us, what causes our marginality and are often considered the necessary bread for cultural and political survival. Through a development of theories in the 156 flesh we can acknowledge, for instance, that there are different consequences for different speakers, related to what kind of body we are speaking from -- whether we speak from a male body or a female body, from the academy or from the street, from the center or from outside in the margins. Through theories in the flesh we are able to acknowledge that, as Linda Alcoff tells us, "a speaker’s location . . . has an epistemologically significant impact on that speaker’s claims and can serve to authorize or disauthorize [that person's] speech“ (7). I should stop at this point to say that as I argue this I am aware that by making some of the claims I am making here, I come dangerously close to invoking the type of essentialism that I have been arguing against. I feel I can avoid this dilemma, however, by drawing on the works of Diana Fuss and Gayatri Spivak who suggest, as I briefly mentioned in the conclusion of the previous section, that as we critique humanist conceptions of subjectivity, we can also retain certain essentialist notions of subjectivity if we do so strategically. Which brings me back to how I began. When ”we" (and I take "we" for the moment to mean African American and women scholars) recognize that the project of naming what is taken for granted, what appears to be ”neutral" in language, also encompasses our p_w_n_ “common sense" definitions of "Blackness,“ ”femaleness," identity, and culture, we can slough off unwanted layers of skin (language) and identity (though not completely and not always consistently). We must be able to do this so that we can 157 contribute, in Anthony Appiah’s words, to a Wdisruption.of the discourse of ’racial’ and ’tribal' differences" in American culture (11). To not do so, Appiah argues, would be to "[play] into the hands of the very exploiters whose shackles we are trying to escape" (Appiah 11). Appiah reminds us, "in effect, that the political meanings of identities are historically and geographically relative" and.because of this "we must argue for and against them [on a] case by case [basis]" (12). I want to take Appiah’s arguments one or two steps further and suggest that by arguing for and against the political meanings of our identities on a case by case basis, we are able to develop a more radical African American criticism and perhaps find a way to mediate, if not resolve, some of the tensions I have been outlining in this discussion thus faru If we accept that the theories we develop will have as their premise an evaluative process that allows readers to step inside and outside constructions of text, self, and culture, as Clare and Irene do in Larsen’s novel, then we can bring together the interrogating, undermining, and subversive qualities of postmodern and poststructuralist theories with some of these same qualities in African American and feminist literature. While Clare and Irene are not theorists, they show us how we can live in.more than one world at a time. Let me further demonstrate what I mean in the next section. 158 The Subject is Black To a large extent this entire project has been a study in "strategic essentialisms“ (Spivak 205) , or, that is to say, it has been a study in the strategic deployment of the meanings of identiti(es) on a case by case basis. This process has allowed me, at the very moment of attempting to undo constructions of race and gender identities and ideologies, to also invoke them, For .African .American scholars the ability to perform this task is particularly crucial. One way this has been done is by choosing to only participate in what is often referred to as a positive restructuring of the category "Black” in American literature and culture. Some Black and female critics have argued that to not participate in this positive restructuring or worse, to attempt to undermine its precepts, is to participate in the dismantling of the emancipatory impulse of Black (and women’s) liberation politics. In part, we could argue, this is what happened in the critical response to Larsen’s text(s). Because of their need to project (protect) a positive Black self in American literature, African American critics are described as following what JoAnne Cornwell-Giles calls a "conservative line" when it comes to criticism (85). Cornwell-Giles argues that African American criticism "when compared to that of Europe and mainstream America, . . . has consistently favored the nurturing of a dialogue -- both 159 actual and symbolic -— between the artist and the critic, with a demand for accountability to the intended audience” (85). The theories we utilize, therefore, are expected.to 'remain.in touch with the literature and not develop into an esoteric literature of [their] own” (Cornwell-Giles 89). This argument, however, can also be turned against itself. It would appear, for instance, that keeping in touch with Larsen, (or' with. contemporary’ novelists like Ishmael Reed, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, or Gloria Naylor, for that matter) would require familiarity with poststructuralist thought. As part of the project of remaining in touch with the literature and the literary community of African Americans, African American intellectuals developed a politics of Blackness that expressed itself in a number of ways. Since the mid-nineteenth century African Americans have used such political platforms as ”conciliation and integration, militant reform and redress, and nationalism and African freedom“ (Leitch 332) to pursue the goal of political and cultural liberation of Black people. Various forms of each of these positions resurfaced in the Black Power and. Black .Arts Movements of the 19605. The Black Power and Black Arts Movements became a location from which Black scholars, not all of whom were trained in literature, were able to speak and to exercise power. Never allowed po_t to have bodigs, the collective, the singular .body: of 'the Black” initially constructed by the West, was reconstructed by Black creative writers and critics (among others) as a body that could exist 160 and participate within the body politic. In the Black Aesthetic and Black Power Movements, Blacks became a community, a single body, a single political body. The collective Black body gained an access to the public (political) sphere that suddenly allowed a participation that had previously been denied. We could argue, then, that what the Black Aesthetic critics did during the 19605 is no different from what Larsen attempts to do in having Clare “pass” in Passing. With our taking on the West’s designation of our selves as singular, as a monolithic community, even with the new sense of power this instilled, however, came problems. In addition to our assignment as ”the Black” in public (political) discourse we also assigned ourselves this role -- and defined ourselves in it. In either case, whether within the larger context of the ruling body politic or within the context of our designation of ourselves as singular, problems of silencing, exclusion, and marginality occurred. In this study thus far I have described the body/ text as being a written text on the hand, or a way to read the body as text on the other. I have been arguing, in other words, that when we discuss texts we are always addressing a minimum of two texts -- the written text and the text of our bodies. For the next several pages I want to expand the body/text equation that I have set up, by adding to my discussion the notion of the body politic whose own materiality is symbolically represented by the physical body. I want to explore the notion of the body 161 politic and how it functions in Western culture. I do so as a way to move toward a discussion of how the notion of the body politic informs the functioning, on a smaller scale, of African American literary communities. The human subject/body, serving as the material representation of the body politic, according to Moira Gatens, "functions to restrict political vocabulary to one voice only: a voice that speaks of only gp_e. body, on_e reasoning, and p_r_1_e_ ethic“ (Gatens 1991, 81) . Gatens argues in “Towards a Feminist Philosophy of the Body" that ”The seventeenth century was witness to at least two births": 1) the "birth of the human subject: who is both subject g1: governance. . .and subject _t_o_ governance" and 2) "the birth of the modern body politic which is represented as a product of reason designed to govern, manage, and administer the needs and desires of its subjects" (1988, 81). The existence of African Americans as a (peripheral) part of the body politic has occurred because the raced and gendered difference of our bodies are viewed as signaling an absence, not a presence in modern political theory. Black and/or female bodies do not -- cannot -- represent the one body or agent that stands in for the many because of this difference. Our raced and gendered bodies, in other words, represent the disunified (absent) bodies located outside of universality. Clare’s and Irene's ability to, ”pass," however, poses a challenge to this logic. Their absence of “color“ (pale skin), for example, allows them to assert their presence (in the body politic) as white persons. 162 But, of course, unknown to the whites themselves, these (legally) Black women are simultaneously signalling (asserting) their existence to the white world. The white world can see them for what they 1r; (white) but not for what they have been pimpd (Black). The presence of their “Black” bodies as "white,” then, breaks up the (unified) human body and thus the body politic by ensuring that through its presence there are always at least pxyg bodies, _txvp modes of reasoning, at least gig ethics in addition to the pg of the metaphorical (unified) human body.12 In our attempts to insert (Black) bodies into the body politic -- and therefore to break up the bodies of the (unified) universal body in both literature and political theory, those of us who have not chosen or who, unlike Clare and Irene, have not had the option to pass for white and thus name themselves part of the universal body have invoked some of the same methods of falsely unifying voice, self, and body that have tended to exclude us. We have done so in order to counter our exclusion from reason and the exile of ourselves from our bodies. In the context of a discussion about the conservatism of African American literary critics and criticism, a point I began with and one I want to return to now, African American literary scholars have attempted in literature and criticism (as they have done in other arenas) to unite and solidify what they often refer to as ”the Black community." The idea of promoting a (monolithic) Black community is yet another example of how some African American and feminist critics have 163 attempted to pursue the goal of political and cultural liberation of Black people. The approach of communitarianism, as Iris Marion Young tells us, is the "common alternative vision offered” by Black and feminist scholars, among other social critics, who seek to ”formulate their vision of a society that is free from domination and oppression . . ." (Young 226). The ideal of community, according to Young, "exemplifies the logic of identity“ that "expresses a desire for the fusion of subjects with one another which in practice operates to exclude those with whom the group does not identify“ (227) . Communitarians reject the liberal individualist notion that each person is a “separate and self- contained atom . . . with the same formal rights . . ." (227) . Instead, those who believe in the ideal of community believe that community "evokes the absence of the self-interested competitiveness of modern society" (227). The tension that exists between communitarianism and liberal individualism finds its direct correlate in the tensions that currently exist within the Joyce Ann Joyce, Houston A. Baker, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. “exchange." In African American literary communities, there is a tension between those who hold the communitarian position of wanting to develop and maintain "the Black community" -- and those who do not support this kind of communitarianism. Those who do not hold the communitarian position, who do not maintain that there is a common consciousness and mutual understanding of a group of people based on "race“ for instance, are often called 164 (liberal) individualists because they point out that individuals cannot be fused into one group identityu For this group, affinity does not mean the transparency of selves to each other. In part two of this chapter I will explore further how often.in our attempts to affirmta.positive:meaning of group identity -- in our attempts to try to “enforce a strong sense of mutual identification -- we end up reproducing exclusions similar to those we confront” (Young 236). In a move similar to the one I describe above of how the "Black“ body breaks up the body of the unified body of the universal citizen, I will argue in the next section that the unified "Black“ body (the unified Black body politic) must be broken up as well. The Black.body in this instance, however, must be broken up by our own gaze (that of Blacks themselves) .13 Breaking up this body, as Larsen’s characters demonstrate, will create the space necessary for difference to occur within "the specificity of group affinity“ (Young 236) as well as without it. The Black Aesthetic Revisited Contemporary critical theorists continue to revisit debates similar to those I describe in chapter one which occurred within interpretive communities of African American' literature during the 19205 and 305. The debates among contemporary Black critical theorists, similar to the debates of those that preceded them, center around questions related 165 to who is Black, how should Blackness (or African Americanness) be portrayed, and who is allowed to write this portrayal. During the 19605, African American scholars set out to address these questions by developing a politics and a theory of art that supported the goals of creating and preserving what they believed to be an authentic and positive Black identity. The politics of Black power and its aesthetic counterpart, the Black arts movement, served as a mechanism to unite and solidify "the Black community“ -- it served to strengthen "the Black community," as I have already pointed out, through re-definition and self-definition. Black art, according to Black aesthetes, was to be an art that would speak directly to the needs and aspirations of Black.America, making it radically opposed to any concept of the artist that might alienate her or him from their community.“ Both the Black Power and Black Arts movement subscribed to the belief that there are in fact two Americas (odd that they only saw two) -- one Black and one white -- and that in order to produce an art that spoke directly to the needs and aspirations of Black America, new criteria had to be met. These new criteria of art basically called for a complete reordering and the possible elimination of what was referred to as a Western aesthetic. In order to competently undertake this task -- to construct a Black experience, aesthetic, and politics that was new and separate from "Western aesthetics“ -- Black Power/Black Arts advocates called for a new and separate symbolism, mythology, and critique to be developed. 166 The creation of Black Aesthetics was the response to this call. Black Aesthetics, a position that I have now discussed in several segments of this work already, reflected the critical and ideological position of a number of Black writers during the 19605 and early 19705. As I have been describing, the Black Aesthetic largely served three purposes: it was to provide Black writers with a means to secure positive identities as Black writers, it was to create political and social activities for the Black community, and it was to answer questions concerning the relationship between literature and society and.between life experiences of social human beings and the art that they produce.15 For the Black Aesthetic literary critic, Blackness is primary -- is essential -- above all else. In Black Aesthetic literary criticism one is Black before one is a writer -- one is concerned.more with the needs of the Black community than the needs of the Black individual. Black Aesthetic criticism attempted to turn the singular definition of Blackness in American literature as "the Black,” into what was assumed to be a positive Black unified (male) self. In short, it failed to acknowledge the complexities gender or class might add to this identity. Despite its critical and crucial influences, however, today the literary theory of the Black Aesthetic is usually only remembered for its excesses. To restate what these excesses are said to be: Black Aesthetic criticism is often seen as ”confusing social theory with aesthetics and 167 failing to articulate the complex relation between the two," it is seen as being "predicated upon easily refutable, crude, strident forms of nationalism,“ and it is seen as being "marred by swaggering rhetoric of ethnic and gender chauvinism" (D. Smith 93). Nevertheless, the arguments of Black Aesthetic critics had far reaching consequences for African American literature and theory, so much so that these arguments continue to inform and shape current critical responses to African American literature. In the next three sections I draw on a discussion of the influences and uses of Black Aesthetic criticism.and how it has deeply affected (and divided) three prominent contemporary African American literary scholars: Joyce A. Joyce, Houston A. Baker,Jr., and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. I argue that what Joyce, Baker, Gates argue about is reminiscent of what critics were arguing about in their discussions of Passing. At issue for Joyce, Baker, and Gates, in other words, is still the question of how to discuss, theorize, and come to an agreement about "race" in literature by African Americans. 168 Joyce, Baker, Gates And the Difference they Make Joyce I’ve got my life invested in you right now. Can’t turn my back on all the things that we share. Everything has its value, Everything has its price, All my assets I’ll cash in just for you. ’Cause I’m committed to keepin’ this love alive. I’m committed to staying in love with you. Third World, "Committed" lyrics by W. Stewart, S. Stewart, and M. Cooper I open this section with the excerpt from "Committed" by Third World as a way to insert myself in the now infamous "Joyce, Baker, Gates Debate." Indeed, those who are familiar with this exchange will remember Professors Joyce and Gates use Black popular music to respond to each other —- a strategy also employed by a number of other critics who wish to join the "conversation."16 "Committed" is my contribution. Like the choices made by Joyce, Baker, Gates et al., my choice of 169 lyrics says something very specific about me as an African American woman/feminist/teacher/scholar/critic. Among other things, what it says, as I suggested earlier in this chapter, is that I am interested in positioning myself in a way that will allow me to mediate the conflict that has occurred between Professors Joyce, Baker, and Gates. I would argue, as they only briefly allude to in their ”exchange,” that they’are a part.of a debate that was raging long before any of them had ever written a word. Indeed, the exchange that has occurred between.Joyce, Baker, and Gates, reflects part of what.as been a long tradition of often heated and very personal debates among Black intellectuals, particularly those engaged in literature and literary theory, who have attempted in their work not only to counteract negative images of Black people but also to bridge the ever present ”twoness" that W.E.B. DuBois is so often quoted as describing. For many literary scholars, reading Professor Joyce’s "The Black Canon: Reconstructing Black American Literary Criticism! was their first encounteerith.her'as a teacher and scholar. I, on the other hand, had known her for three years prior to the publication of this essay and its responses. I only mention this because of the personal tone much of this debate has already taken on. Professor Joyce was the first person to formerly introduce me to African American literature and to eventually suggest that I pursue the study of literature as an academic career. She is one of the reasons I do what I do the way I have chosen to do it. Having said 170 this, however, I now find myself in the awkward position of having to take issue with a number of the positions Professor Joyce, one of my mentors, has taken in her essay "The Black Canon“ and in her reply to Baker and Gates’s response, “’Who the Cap Fit’: Unconsciousness and Unconscionableness in the Criticism of Houston A. Baker, Jr. and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. " Like Professor Joyce I too at varying times have been paralyzed, energized, and sometimes just plain silenced in my attempts to deal with the intricacies of ”the historical relationship between literature, class, values, and the literary canon“ (335). Like her I am aware of how these complexities are magnified when one is an African American woman academic. Because of this, I have as one of my foci in this work an interest in how, at this point in time, African American literary scholars are negotiating these tensions -- tensions it would seem Professor Joyce is attempting to explore in her arguments as well. The Joyce, Baker, Gates debate gained national attention in 1987 for its notably bitter tone. This debate, of course, harkens back to a number of debates that occurred in interpretive communities of African American literature including those I describe earlier as happening during the heyday of the New Negro Renaissance. The debate, waged on the pages of New Literag Histogy, similar to the debates that preceded it, was largely concerned with determining what tools are appropriate for or applicable to the explication of "Black” texts (both written and physical). At issue for 171 Professor Joyce is how we should retain "race” as an important category of analysis in our discussions of (African American) literature. She takes issue with Henry Louis Gates’s arguments in "Preface to Blackness: Text and Pretext" and ”Criticism in the Jungle,'" for instance, because she says he is "immersed.in.poststructuralist critical theory“ (1987a, 336). Among other things, Joyce argues, Gates’s immersion in poststructuralist theory causes him to claim that " ’Blackness’ is not a material object or an event but a metaphor . . ." (Gates 1979, 67). Joyce cites Gates as arguing that “Blackness“ "does not have an ’essence’ as such.but is defined by a network of relations that form a particular aesthetic unity . . .' (1979, 67). Joyce reads the position Gates takes here as a rejection of race, and in a sense, of course, she is right. What Gates argues for here is a rejection of "race." What is also true of Gates’s argument, however, a point Professor Joyce fails to address, is that he is not calling for a rejection of the .material reality' of "race," an important distinction to make here, but is instead arguing that the interrogation -- 'e-race-sure” of "race" as a sign allows for a more sophisticated reading of Black texts.m There is a difference between arguing that "race" or “Blackness" does not have an essence and saying that there are no specific consequences for having a particular "racial" identity. What Professor Gates says does not negate (the material consequences of) Blackness (his or anyone else’s). Instead, what is negated is the use of the sign Blackness as 172 essence or true signifier of an authentic Black self. IBecause both Joyce and Gates are guilty here of not making the important distinction between the two, misunderstanding and "misreading" occur.19 Joyce attributes Gates’s use of poststructuralist theory to his adopting' of "mainstream. lifestyles and. ideology, particularly the middle-class Black.man’s" (338). But surely we (intellectuals in the academy, Black or otherwise) are all implicated in.Joyce’s indictment of Gates for'howrdoes any one of us escape "the mainstream“? All of us, as intellectuals, are exposed to, influenced by, and utilize tools adopted (adapted) from mainstream culture. This is particularly true when we consider discussions of mainstream or "Eurocentric" criticism or the concept of critique‘which.critics like Sandra Adell point out is ”itself a European concept.'” There is, in fact, a fundamental problem for Black literary critics who attempt to fully extricate themselves from ‘Eurocentric theories. They run into the difficulty of having to choose between theories that are "indigenous" to African American culture, for instance, and those that are not. But is there really a choice at all since, as I have already pointed, out much of Black. critical theory' is inextricably' bound to Eurocentric concepts of theory -- a claim that would seem to refute the possibility of an either/or choice that the would be African American critic is faced with?“‘ Is not the idea of choice (or difference) here utterly off the mark? beside the point? an incorrect description of the situation facing 173 critics? How'does the Black.critic avoid being e-raced.in the process of trying to reconcile the theoretical enterprise of our indigenous traditions and those that have been imposed upon us? Finally, what, if anything, does the utilization of a particular theory -- particular critical tools from "mainstream culture“ -- say about its practitioner? It would seem in her arguments that Joyce provides us with a number of possible responses to these questions, many of which leave her open to attack. She suggests in her arguments, for instance, that the task of the literary critic is ”to guide, to serve as an intermediary in the relationship between Black people and those forces that attempt to subdue them” (339). Joyce sees poststructuralist theories and their practitioners as being at odds with this role» Supporting the arguments of JoAnne Cornwell-Giles that I described earlier, Joyce believes that there is "a one—to-one relationship between Black literary critics and Black lives.“ For Joyce, Black poststructuralist criticism is paradoxical because it causes the “Black man” [sic] to merge 'into American mainstream society“ and look.upon.himself individualistically (339). In so doing, Black poststructuralist theories, according to Joyce, accept what she ambiguously calls "elitist American values" which cause the Black literary critic to "widen the chasm between his or her world view and that of the masses of Blacks whose lives are still stifled by oppressive environmental, intellectual phenomena" (339). 174 In her arguments Joyce acknowledges that there exists a chasm between the worldview of the intellectual and the “Black masses“ which follows her argument that there should be a one- to—one relationship between critic and community -- between art and life. This one-to-one relationship between Black critic, creative writer, and community that Joyce calls for becomes very tenuous, however, when one considers issues of class. The ”Black masses" for their part tend to be highly suspicious (and indeed they have every right to be) of the " intermediary position” (Joyce 339) the Black intellectual has supposedly taken up in their behalf. Isn’t this position actually one Black intellectuals have adopted for ourselves to assuage guilt —- a guilt "we" feel because the work we do removes "us" from the day-to-day workings of the "Black masses“? And aren’t the "Black masses" aware of this fact which causes "their“ suspicion of ”us”? Though we are all connected by the material effects that "race" has on our lives, we nevertheless experience this materiality differently based on gender, class, and level of and access to education. Joyce attempts to bridge the chasm that these differences make among Black intellectuals and the ”Black community” at large by relying on the ideals of communitarianism -- a concept I described in the previous section. Joyce wants, as Iris Marion Young argues is characteristic of communitarians, "fusion rather than separation as the social ideal“ (Young 229). She wants to see Black people in "unity with one another in a shared whole" 175 (229). Joyce’s ambiguous references to “elitist American or mainstream values,“ which she argues a ”poststructuralist sensibility“ invites, reflect her objection to a position that does not affirm a positive meaning of group identity. As admirable as this desire might be, however, it has the effect of silencing and narrowing the possibilities of dialogues that could occur, theories that could.be developed, questions that could be formed and asked. When we "fuse" rather than acknowledge our separate identities and how these individual identities could enhance group relations, we tend to miss important details. Communitarianism, while often convenient and sometimes politically expedient, often has the effect of suppressing difference and, as I suggested, shutting down discussion. What we should aim for instead, as Bernice Johnson Reagon suggests, is a way to build coalitions among individuals and groups.” To summarize, what Joyce calls the ”poststructuralist sensibility" does not "apply to Black American literary works" (341—42) because it claims to breach the " [slhared experiences [that] can bond a people together in ways that far exceed language" (341). In her description of poststructuralism Joyce cites this passage from Terry Eagleton nothing is ever fully present in signs: it is an illusion for me to believe that I can ever be fully present to you in what I say or write, because to use signs at all entails that my meaning is always somehow dispersed, divided, and never quite at one 176 with itself. Not only my meaning, indeed, but ms: since language is something I am made out of, rather than merely a convenient tool I use, the whole idea that I am a stable, unified entity must also be a fiction.23 Joyce uses Eagleton as evidence that poststructuralist theory (or a poststructuralist sensibility) is a dangerous point of view for Black intellectuals to adopt. She argues this mainly because she feels a poststructuralist sensibility divides "the community“ -- a community already divided by gradations of color, class, education -- and, more recently, religion. According to Joyce, ”For the Black.American -- even the Black intellectual -- to maintain that meaningful or real communication between human beings is impossible because we cannot know each other through language would be to erase or ignore the continuity embodied in Black American history" (342) . She seems to deeply misunderstand this language theory. Jche argues that, pushed to the extreme, poststructuralist theory becomes the rationale for "why it has become increasingly difficult for members of contemporary society to sustain commitments, to assume responsibility, to admit to a clear right and an obvious wrong“ (342). But surely we could argue that this problem existed long before the advent of poststructuralist thought. The experiences of Black Americans in this country or the "continuity of Black American history“ that Joyce describes (itself an historical construct) surely attests to this fact. It would seem that 177 Joyce would have all Blacks think alike. Why, then, converse? No expansion of horizons would occur because no one would encounter differences that need to be accommodated. Can one argue that Joyce is, without knowing it, profoundly poststructural, since she seems to think that the act of naming race an arbitrary sign can wipe out centuries of remembered and experienced repression that "Blacks” have shared? Baker For Houston Baker and Henry Louis Gates, Joyce’s argument that we cannot maintain meaningful communication between human beings because we cannot know each other through language does not hold.“ For the two of them, we do not igpore the ”continuity of Black _American history“ when we engage poststructuralist theories in our discussions of African American texts. What we do instead, they argue, is to demonstrate how complex this relationship has always been. Similar to Terry Eagleton, Baker and Gates argue in their works that nothing is fully present -- who a person “is" is not fully present -- in signs. Gates, more so than Baker, examines 'race" as a sign, arguing that who a person 'is" cannot be revealed or solely represented by their 'race.'35 Instead, as poststructuralist critics they argue (Gates more than Baker) that we are believing in illusions (believing what we are seeing, in other words) when we argue that a person’s 178 ”race“ reveals the true essence of a person’s self -— that this essence is then inscribed in the language that we speak, write, or wear on our bodies (if we were to use language as a metaphor for the skin). The ideas of Baker and Gates span numerous texts and articles. I choose for the remainder of this chapter to focus on a few of their key ideas as opposed to specific texts they have written which.I feel would take me beyond the scope of this project. Let me begin with Houston Baker. Baker, in his response to Joyce is immediately on the defensive. He opens his comments using battle imagery as a weapon to defend.himself against what he feels are unwarranted attacks against his person and his scholarship. First, Baker makes it clear that the grounds upon which the battles are taking place are not appropriate (for the pages of flex Literapy Histoxy). Second, he makes a point of saying that two African American women have chosen to pick up weapons against him, a point he claims is "altogether fortuitous," though I am not so sure (363). (Would he have taken up arms in the manner he does or chosen the particular ”weapons" he does if the persons he felt he was being attacked by were men for instance?).“ At any rate, Baker suggests in the opening comments of “In Dubious Battle,” his response to Professor Joyce’s ”Black Canon, " that those who attack him do so because they reject his support. of what he calls 'a. desirable expansiveness, diversity, originality and.. . . complexity'in the Afro-American critical and theoretical arsenal” (more 179 battle imagery) (363) .37 Had Baker taken what he says here and developed it further, his might have been an interesting prospectus of what is occurring in current African American theory and criticism. Unfortunately, what he does instead, using a particularly defensive tone, is accuse Joyce and Deborah McDowell (the other African American woman he accuses of attacking him) of having animosity toward him and the new critical and theoretical modes he employs. By their desire to maintain the critical/theoretical status quo, Baker argues, Joyce and McDowell willingly uphold "the minstrel simplicity that Anglo-Americans have traditionally imagined and assigned the black voice in the United States" (366) . Baker aligns himself in his arguments with poststructuralist critics who he says "move across both ethnic and gender boundaries and who have decisively relinquished the role of simple-minded, conservative spokespersons on behalf of a putatively simpleminded expressive culture" (366) . Baker argues that Joyce instead of embracing this new movement wants to remain wedded to " ’the good old days’ when a profound black critical utterance was held to sound like the following revelation: ’For the negro [sic], reality is real (reality: whatever controls yr/ thought [sic] processes; controls yr/pure & unpure actions). Blackpeople’s [sic] reality is controlled by alien forces’” (366-67). Baker could have been more charitable in his critiques of Joyce if he had perhaps thought about reasons why Professors Joyce and McDowell, two African American women critics, might 180 possibly see movements into poststructuralist theories as dangerous. I would suggest that the "new Black conservatism” that Baker accuses them of has a lot to do with questions of constructions of Black subjectivity. It could be argued, for instance, that Black women, who are simultaneously and multiply erased by the dispersals or erasures of subjectivity that poststructuralist theories call for, are reluctant to have themselves further fragmented by a theory which has this type of movement at its core. If we were to examine African American subjectivity, particularly African American women’s subjectivity, as another shift in what Houston Baker calls "generational shifts" we could begin to look.more closely, as I have been attempting to do in this project, at how Black women’s subjectivity is constituted.28 Nancy Miller, Diana Fuss, Hortense Spillers, and. Hazel Carby, to name four feminist critics, demonstrate for us in their works how the Black and/or female subject "begins [as] fragmented and dispersed" (Fuss 95). So in the case of Black women’s subjectivity, fragmentation is not something to move toward but something to be 'overcome."35 Black women along with women of other “races" have not had the luxury of having their subjectivity constructed as fixed and unified —- a concept of subjectivity that poststructuralist thought challenges. Despite some of the interesting possibilities for placing this kind of self under erasure, for Blacks and/or women sometimes it is very tempting to want to claim a fixed self." 181 It could be argued that Baker’s notion of a generational shift -- or ”an ideologically motivated movement overseen by young or newly emergent intellectuals dedicated to refuting the work of their intellectual predecessors and to establishing a new framework of intellectual inquiry" (1984, 67) -- is characteristic of his exchange with Joyce and McDowell. Though on one level they are technically a part of the same critical generation in terms of having their work influenced by Black Aesthetic criticism, Joyce and McDowell also represent a Black womanist/feminist shift in African American literature and criticism. It is telling for instance that Baker, in Blues Ideolggy and Afxo-American Literature (1984), did not make reference to the work of Black feminist critical work or to Black women’s texts for the most part. Not until his recent Workings of the Spirit (1991), in fact, has he paid considerable attention to the works of African American women. We could argue, then, perhaps that this reluctance to respond to the work of African American women and their writing might be an example of Baker’s own "disciplinary fears of the ’new’" that he says the "conservatives -- black and white alike" suffer from (369). I want now to turn to the thinking of Henry Louis Gates. Gates Diana Fuss makes the point in Essentially Speaking that both Houston Baker and Henry Louis Gates rely on the ”oral" 182 (90) (aural) in.their theories of.African American.literature. More specifically, Fuss identifies them both as wanting to ”romanticize" the Black vernacular (90). Fuss argues that they' do so largely" because as .Afro-Americanists and. as "professionalized literary [critic] s" the vernacular for these two men "has already been irrevocably lost” (90). For Baker and Gates the vernacular becomes a way to “recover, reinscribe, revalorize' their “lost origins" (90). The Black vernacular for Baker and Gates, according to Fuss, becomes the concept they essentialize, much.as the sign "Blackness" is the essentializing notion for their colleague Joyce Joyce. The ideas that Henry Louis Gates outlines in ' ’What’s Love Got to Do With It?’: Critical Theory, Integrity, and the Black Idiom" is a compilation of a number of the ideas he has presented elsewhere in his books and other essays. In "’What’s Love Got to do With It’” Gates argues that what love has got to do with the African American literature and the literary tradition is simply to bring to bear upon [a text] honesty, insight, and skepticism, as well as praise, enthusiasm, and dedication; all values fundamental to the blues and to signifying, those two canonical discourses in which Houston and I locate the black critical difference.31 Gates has discussed in "’What’s Love Got to do With It’” and in several of his essays and edited volumes the problematic relationship between theory and African American 183 literature. Unlike other traditions in which Gates argues theory has a "sustaining“ relationship (1987b, 348), in traditions of African American literature, theory has been “viewed with deep mistrust and suspicion“ (1987b, 349) . Gates argues in his response to Joyce Joyce that there has always been "a deep mistrust and suspicion [about theory] by those scholars who find it presumptuous and perhaps even decadent when criticism claims the right to stand, as discourse on its own, as a parallel textual universe to literature" (1987b, 349). In " ’What’s Love Got to Do With It’,” Gates suggests a solution to the dilemma of how to adequately respond to the tension between theoretical and literary texts in the African American canon: the use of the Black vernacular. For Gates, as for Baker, one of the guiding forces behind his work is to identify and to define a theory of African American literature that is ”indigenous” or that can be found within the tradition. In the "Blackness of Blackness: A Critique of the Sign and the Signifying Monkey" (1987a), for instance, Gates describes this theory of interpretation as one that is ”arrived at from within the black cultural matrix, [it] is a theory of formal revision, it is tropological, it is often characterized by pastiche, and, most crucially, it turns on repetition of formal structures and their differences" (1987a, 235). This theory of interpretation, which Gates identifies as signifyin(g), is a theory of reading which he argues arises from Afro-American culture (1987a, 235—6) . In other words, signifyin(g) is an "indigenous" theoretical 184 concept -- one that is drawn from the tradition of African American literature and culture. Gates argues that Signifyin(g), or, the Signifyin(g) Monkey as this concept is also known, is ”The ironic reversal of a:received.racist.image in the‘Western.imagination of the black.as simianlike" (1987a, 236). The Signifyin(g) Monkey, according to Gates, is '[slhe who dwells at the margins of discourse, ever punning, ever troping, ever embodying the ambiguities of language . . ." (1987a, 236). For Gates the Signifying Monkey is "our trope for repetition and revision, indeed our trope of chiasmus itself, repeating and reversing simultaneously as he does in one deft discursive act“ (1987a, 236). In response to Joyce Joyce and in defense of himself Gates argues that.he “work[s] through contemporary theories of literature not to ’apply’ them to black texts, but rather to transform by translating them into a new rhetorical realm" (1987b, 351). Diana Fuss calls this move by Gates -- this move of transformation -- "a complicated process of ’bitranslation" (83). Fuss argues this process is bitranslation because of the two directions (at minimum) that African Americans must negotiate between when they write and respond to texts. Playing on Gates’s surname as Diana Fuss does in her discussion of his work, we must remember that in the relationship between African American literature and critical theory the ”gates swing both.ways' (84). That is, as I have been arguing, not only does our use of a contemporary critical theory like poststructuralism help us "read! African 185 American texts, but African American texts help us "read“ these theories. I use the word 'read" here in both the standard English sense where one reads to interpret and understand, and in the Black vernacular sense where one reads someone or something -- where one comments on or critiques by signifying. Passing becomes for me, however, the ultimate text to "read“ all of these elements: the theory, the text, and the reader. Through Passing (passing?), Larsen helps us to "read” African American texts through her manipulation of "race” and gender categories. Similarly, Larsen’s Passing ”reads” (still in both senses of the word) theory by revealing its shortcomings and then incorporating them into the theory itself. I have demonstrated, for example, how Larsen’s characters "mess with" Foucault’s concept of "the gaze" by making a mockery of the idea that bodies have and retain a set of observable traits that will reveal the subject (object) to the disciplinary gaze. Finally, the reader is ”read" by Larsen and her texts of Passing because she plays on the predictability of the readers’ believing in what they are seeing and thus responding only to what is on the surface of her text(s). The Difference they Make At the heart of the debate between Professors Joyce, Baker, and Gates is a discussion of how one talks about "race,“ theory, and African American literature. More 186 specifically, their argument, like the arguments that have preceded them, involves the dilemma of how to de-essentialize "race" and still retain its cultural and political moorings. For Joyce we can do this by retaining an essential Black self and an essential (unified) Black community. For Baker and Gates the project of maintaining the cultural and political moorings of “Blackness" involves remaining connected to the vernacular -- remaining connected to the oral/aural sounds of Black language -- of Black difference.32 None of these theorists are as far apart in their positions as they would have us believe. Despite their arguments to the contrary, each of them is concerned, in some way, about the uncritical application of Western theories to African American texts. Each of these theorists are concerned in some way with finding a way to retain "Blackness" whether materially, politically, or rhetorically. Each of these theorists becomes indignant (not to mention defensive) when one of the others suggests that their approach.to achieving these goals is not the "Black way." What I have tried to do in this chapter and in those chapters preceding this is to answer the call Diana Fuss makes for "a closer look at the production of racial subjects, at what forces organize, administer and produce racial identities” in our society (92). In the next chapter, a chapter I call “Loose Endings,” I have two projects. As I pointed out in the introduction, this work is a hybridized text, it is a text in other words that combines two different 187 literary/political projects into one.33 One part of this project has largely been a discussion about Nella Larsen’s Passing -- about how she constructs the raced and gendered bodies of her characters and how these constructions help us read our own bodies as raced and gendered texts. The other part of this project has been.an investigation of interpretive communities of African. American literature -- how' these communities construct and determine the text(s) we read and how they develop (and argue about) the theoretical/critical tools we use in our explications of these same text(s). In "Loose End(ing)s," an appropriate title for the fourth and final chapter of this work, I will return to a discussion of Larsen’s Passing, to focus on the novel’s controversial conclusion. I do so in order to return to the notion of a Black feminist dialogic that I began with and to demonstrate how it is only through conversation (in the Gadamerian sense) that we as members of (often. warring) interpretive and intellectual communities, can "come to grips with a question as theoretically complex and politically urgent as the place and function of ’race’ in the era of poststructuralism! (Fuss 92). 188 Notes 3' I purposely' use the expression "African. American scholars" here and throughout this chapter as opposed to the more inclusive ”scholars of African American literature.“ I do so to indicate a shift in focus. I am in no way intending to suggest that non-Black.critics do not address some of these same issues in their work. 3 See Foucault’s arguments in the afterword, “The Subject and Power," Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, eds. Hubert.L. Dreyfus and.Pau1 Rabinow, 2nd.ed. (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1983) 222-224. 3 Several examples of Black women’s slave narratives come to mind. here, particularly’ Harriet. Jacobs’s often. cited Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (New York: Oxford UP, 1988) and Elizabeth Keckley’s Behind the Scenes, Or, Thirty Years a SlaveL and Four Years in the White House (New York: Oxford UP, 1988). The Schomburg collection of Nineteenth century Black women’s narratives is an invaluable source for mining this topic. ‘ The dichotomies of man/woman and black/white could.also be added to Hekman’s list. 5 See Nancy Hartsock’s arguments in “Rethinking Modernism; Minority’vs. Majority Theories,” Cultural Critigpe 7 (Fall 1987): 187—20. See also the writings of bell hooks, particularly Yearning and Talking Black, Talking Feminist; 189 Cornel West, "Black Culture and Postmodernism," in Remaking Histoxy: Discussions in Contemporaxy Culture. 5 See Weedon, 32. 7 See Houston Baker, "The Daughter’s Departure: Theory, History, and Late-Nineteenth-Century Black Women’s Writing,” Workings of the Spirit: The Poetics of Afro-American Women’s Writing (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1991) 1. 3 There are also tensions among African American novelists and critics which are similar to those I will outline that occur among the theorists themselves. Because of the scope of this project I will only touch on the tension that occurs among theorists and novelists only as it pertains to Nella Larsen and Passing. For a more detailed discussion of arguments that have taken.jplace among' novelists and theorists, particularly among contemporary writers and critics, see Deborah McDowell, ”Reading Family Matters," Changing Our Own Words: Essays on Criticism, Theoxy, and Writing by Black Women, ed. Cheryl Wall (New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1989). 5 See Cornel West, "Discussion,” Black Popular Culture, A Project by Michele Wallace, ed. Gina Dent (Seattle: Bay Press, 1992) 90. 1° Henry Louis Gates makes this admission in his essay "What’s Love Got To Do with It?: Critical Theory, Integrity. and the Black Idiom,“ In this essay, Gates’s contribution to the infamous "Joyce, Baker Gates Debate,” Gates argues that.he 190 has "no fantasy about [his] readership: I write for our writers and for our critics" (352). In addition, Edward Said describes in "Opponents, Audiences, Constituencies and Community” how when he was visiting an MLA convention he asked a sales representative at a major university press who read the highly specialize books the press was selling. Said says that he was told that the "people who write specialized, advanced criticism faithfully read each other’s books" (137- 8). 13 I am heavily indebted to Katherine Fishburn for my thinking about these issues and how I have expressed them here. Charles Moore was also useful in helping me to present these ideas more clearly. 13 I take the idea of "breaking up the body" from Homi Bhabha in "Interrogating Identity: The Postcolonial Prerogative." See p. 185. n It would seem that Larsen ends Passing just when she is beginning to work out this problem of Black gazes upon Black bodies. For instance Clare falls out the window just after she has come under the scrutinizing gaze of the other Blacks in the room. We could argue that the gazes of the other Blacks in the room are a contributing factor to "the break up" of her body. Larsen also, it could be argued, breaks up the body and to some extent the gaze of the (Black) reader by invoking and then e-racing “race" in her novel. It 191 would seem that nothing in the novel, not even Irene, the person telling us the story, is what it appears to be. 3‘ I draw my arguments and definitions of Black Aesthetics and Black Art in this section from the work of Larry Neal particularly from his essay ”The Black Arts Movement.” See Larry Neal, "The Black Arts Movement." The Black American Writer, ed. C.W.E. Bigsby (Baltimore: Penguin Books Inc., 1969) 2 vols. 187—201. 5 See Larry Neal, "The Black Arts Movement," 187-201. “ In his response to Joyce, Henry Louis Gates uses Tina Turner’s ”What’s Love Got to Do With It?” playing on Joyce’s conclusion of her essay "The Black Canon." In her conclusion Joyce argues Rather than being a "linguistic event" or a complex network of linguistic systems that embody the union of the signified and the signifier independent of phenomenal reality, Black creative art is an act of love which attempts to destroy estrangement and elitism by demonstrating a strong fondness and enthusiasm for freedom and an affectionate concern for the lives of people, especially Black people (emphasis mine, 343). Gates, then, titles his essay ”’What’s Love Got to Do With It?’: Critical Theory, Integrity, and the Black Idiom“ as a way to answer and defend himself against the claim that his use of poststructuralist theory reflects his lack of “love” 192 and ”commitment“ for the tradition of Black literature and literary criticism. My choice of “Committed” by Third World is an attempt to suggest how to be committed to this project. I am "committed.to keeping the love alive“ -- that is, keeping the love alive for' a rigorous discussion/explication. of African American literature (except when this discussion/explication deteriorates into a nasty game of the dozens). Other examples of using popular music as a method of response in this debate include another of Joyce’s essays "Black Woman Scholar, Critic, and Teacher: The Inextricable relationship between Race, Sex, and Class“ where she uses Steele Pulse’s ”Worth his Weight in Gold' (Rally Round) and Norman Harris’s use of Aretha Franklin’s "Who’s Zoomin’ Who" in his “’Who’s Zoomin’ Who’: The New Black Formalism.” ” Henry Louis Gates, Jr. "Preface to Blackness: Text and Pretext," in Afro-American Literature: The Reconstruction of Instruction, ed Dexter Fisher and Robert Stepto (New York, 1979). Also see Henry Louis Gates, Jr., “Criticism in the Jungle,“ in Black Literature and Literapy Theopy, ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (New York, 1984). “ See Gates, 'Criticism.in the Jungle," Black Literaturs and Literaxy Theopy, 7. 3’ One of the respondents to the Joyce, Baker, Gates exchange, Harold Fromm, makes a similar mistake. In his essay "Real Life, Literary Criticism, and the Perils of 193 Bourgeosification, " Fromm argues that both Gates and Baker are somehow not truly Black because they use poststructuralist theory, thus betraying their fellow and sister Blacks. Fromm describes Gates, for example, as being a gifted scholar and "as an intellectual [Gates is] as white and as bourgeois as [he]" (emphasis mine, 52). This is an amazing admission for Fromm to make. I’m sure even he did not realize the full implications of what he says here (at least I’d like to believe that he didn’t). By making such a statement what Fromm is really doing is chastising Gates and Baker for not wearing their Blackness correctly. They have stepped outside of their assigned roles and, if we follow Fromm’s argument, are guilty of "passing" as white intellectuals. ” Sandra.Adell, 'A.Function.at the Junction," Diacritics 20.4 (Winter 1990): 43-56. ” I would argue that part of what is usually at issue in debates that have taken place among African American literary critics is whether or not we can argue that there is an African American literary tradition separate from the larger American culture. The discussion initiated by DuBois in several issues of The Crisis, Langston Hughes’s manifesto “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,“ and Michele Wallace’s and Mel Watkins’s discussions about contemporary Black writers that I address in. previous chapters, all point to the writers’s and artist’s struggle to identify a common and independent (Black) culture. Ultimately, though, and why I 194 think this argument continues to reoccur, we find.that we, our texts, in addition to the strategies we develop to talk about texts, are all intertwined, intertextual, interwoven. See my discussions of Henry Louis Gates’s concept of signifying in this chapter. “ Johnson. makes this point in "Coalition Politics: Turning the Centuryn" HomezGirls: A.Black.Feminist.Anthology, ed. Barbara Smith (New York: Kitchen Table Women of Color Press, 1983) 356 - 368. 33 Terry Eagleton, Literagy Theogy: An Introduction, (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1983) 129-30. “ Hans-Georg Gadamer tells us, for instance, that language is all we, as humans, have that makes us human. See Gadamer Truth and Method pp. 377 -390. 25 See, for example, Gates, ed. "Race." Writing and Difference (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1986). 35 The answer to this question is probably yes and no. In another context, for example, though he isn’t under attack per se, Baker does seem to pick up arms against other male critics including Henry Louis Gates himself. In his essay "Caliban’s Triple Play" in Gates’ ”Race,” Writing, and Difference, Baker takes Gates to task for what he sees as Gates’s and..Anthony'.Appiah’s attempts to e-race "race." Ironically a number of Baker’s arguments in this essay are very similar to the ones JoycelJoyce1makes in.her critiques of both Baker and Gates. Again, what is at issue is the critics’ 195 failing to make the distinction between racial sign and racial selfh In.addition, Baker’s critiques of Sander Gilman’s essay "Black Bodies, White Bodies“ in the same volume is particularly harsh. Baker calls Gilman’s essay a "frighteningly embarrassing moment” (387) and states that it is simply "a whitemale [sic] confessional" (388). ” Baker shares the title of his essay with John Steinbeck, who uses the title for his novel written in 1936 which depicts conflicts between migrant fruit pickers and union organizers. Baker’s use of the title In Dubious Battle has to be more than a coincidence particularly when one finds that critics often describe Steinbeck’s In Dubious Battle as an attempt to question whether humanity is capable of placing individual differences aside for the greater benefit of the group. 28 See Baker, Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature: A vernacular Theopy, (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1984). 25 Though a number of feminist critics have made reference to the points I am making here, as I write this I am relying most on the works of Diana Fuss in Essentially Speaking. Fuss’s work, like mine, is also indebted to the work of Nancy Miller in "Changing the Subject" and W.E.B. DuBois’s discussion of the 'twoness" or fragmented self of African Americans in The Souls of Black Folk. 3° Nella Larsen, obviously, rejected this claim for 196 herself and for her characters. Though because of her own biracial background she did not have to identify herself as ”Black” if she did not want to, she chose to do so. I don’t really have any strong hunches as to why she did this. I do feel, however, that she remained deeply ambivalent about ”race“ and "racial identity." ” Henry Louis Gates, Jr, " ’What’s Love Got to do With It?’: Critical Theory, Integrity, and the Black Idiom." Nsy Literaxy Histopy 18.2 (Winter 1987): 347. ” Diana Fuss argues this point in Essentially Speaking. She points out the irony of Gates and Baker, two otherwise anti-essentialist theorists, who want to essentialize Black vernacular; Fuss argues that with.Gates and.Baker “the key to blackness is not visual but auditory; essentialism is displaced from sight to sound” (90). 33 I borrow my language and the idea of hybridization, obviously, from MgM. Bakhtin. ”Discourse in the Novel" Ips Dialogic Imagination. pp. 327-329. Katherine Fishburn also uses this concept to describe her previously cited project on Buchi Emecheta. CHAPTER POUR Loose End(ing)s: How Did I Get to Be So Black and Blue In this study I have been arguing for the development of a theory of reading that would allow readers to respond.to the multiple layers of our written texts and to the multiple layers of the texts of our bodies. I have done so in order to invite readings and interpretations of Black women’s texts that can occur on more than the most superficial levels. The critical tools I have used to pursue this task fall under the category of what I have called, in this study, a Black feminist poststructuralist or postmodernist theory of reading texts (and, I should add, of reading bodies as well). As I have demonstrated in my interpretations of Passing /passing, and in my insertion of myself in the controversial intellectual and interpretive debates surrounding the meaning of the novel, attempting to utilize postmodernist tools for the purposes of reading Passing «does not occur' without controversy. Some of this controversy, I have argued, stems from the contradictions and conflicts that arise when attempting to engage theories of poststructuralism and postmodernism with readings of African American literature. Certain Black and feminist critics, as I described in the previous chapter, reject the ‘use of these theories for interpreting texts in the African American canon. While the misgivings of these theorists must be taken into account, we 197 198 should not, however, use their misgivings as a reason to dismiss these theories altogether. In this study I have attempted to demonstrate how a Black feminist poststructuralist and. postmodernist approach to reading dialogizes the process of reading and the process of interpretation. What I mean when I say this is that Black feminist poststructuralist or postmodernist thought reveals the double-voicedness of discourse on African American texts 1) because it reveals how language is never neutral or free but always inflected by others’ intentions and 2) because, in terms of textual analysis, it reveals that at a minimum, the text contains two voices within a single (bodily/textual) construction (Bakhtin 293) . I have argued that Black feminist theory, when paired with poststructuralist and postmodernist thought, actually revolutionizes the reading process by providing us with a way to discuss the multiple layers of our bodies and our texts. As evidenced by the critical response to Passing over the years, critics have tended to be unifocal in their approaches to the text(s). Critics have, in other words, shut out other possibilities for reading the text(s) choosing instead to reduce the text(s)’ complexity; My focus in this study, then, has been to identify a way to maintain the complexity -- the multiple foci of texts. By bringing together in dialogue raced and gendered discourse and identi— ties with poststructuralist and.postmodernist theories in the analysis of a key text by an African American woman, I have demonstrated why this type of dialogue is important. Larsen’s 199 texts of Passing, for example, serve as a useful model for demonstrating how Black feminist poststructuralist or postmodernist theories dialogize the reading process because they force us to focus simultaneously on multiple issues, particularly mmltiple issues of identity, occurring inside (and outside) her text(s). Larsen’s text(s), then, provide us with a model for working with(in) some of the contradic- tions and.conflicts that arise when.attempting to engage these specific theories and texts because they provide us with the means to interrogate and disrupt the interpretive strategies of those interpretive communities who are more than willing to continue reading only the most superficial levels of a text or of a body; Those particular members of interpretive communities who attempt to reduce the complexity of texts also work to limit discussions we might have about texts and the critical tools we might use to reveal the workings of texts. Though the project I have pursued here of interrogating and disrupting our received knowledge about reading, ”race," and gender could probably benefit interpretations of any text, not just texts in the African American canon, I use Passing as a.model in.my discussion.because it easily lends itself to the type of multilayered multitextual analysis Black feminist poststructuralist.or postmodernist theoryinvites.1 Often.out of necessity, texts by African American women are multilayered and multitextual because they must accommodate demands society places upon their bodies and their texts to be ”twice deleg— itimated“ subjects/bodies/texts. This project came about, in 200 fact, as a result of what I saw as the need for developing an approach to African American women’s literature that could encompass the multiple issues present in the texts of their bodies and of their written texts. By and large I would.argue that many critics have failed to acknowledge the fact that, "race,” gender, and class are overlapping and intersecting elements in a text/body; they have also failed to acknowledge how each of these elements affect how we, as members of interpretive communities, read and respond to these same texts/bodies. Because critics have not, for the most part, acknowledged these intersections, their methods of reading and responding to Black women’s text(s) have largely been inadequate. Engaging‘ postmodernist or' poststructuralist theories with our readings of African American women’s texts, as I suggested.in the preceding chapter, is one way to open up the text and our dialogues about texts to avoid the reduction of both. If we were to use skin as a metaphor for language, as I suggested.that we do earlier, we could.argue that peeling back the layers of skin (the layers of language) from the texts/bodies of Black women could reveal how their texts/bodies, and indeed all our bodies, are constructed by specific political, historical, and social meanings. In fact, we are able to see how our bodies/texts have always been constructed in this manner. I have used the terms "poststructuralism" and ”postmoder- nism" as complementary and overlapping terms in this work. I have done so because postmodernism, which could probably be 201 viewed as the umbrella term under which poststructuralism falls, is a label that crosses a number of boundaries, from architecture and literature, to philosophy and the visual arts. In this study, the components of postmodernism that I have tended to focus on are related to those that denaturalize what we take to be natural or given. This project is one that is particularly fruitful for analyses of Black women’s texts because the process of denaturalization allows us to simultaneously invoke and subvert traditional literary forms and conventions. A Black ”feminist turn" (reminiscent of Dale Bauer) in postmodernist thought invites the subversion and installation not only of conventional theories the way postmodernism does but also the subversion and installation of postmodernist theory itself. Black feminist theory, in other words, turns postmodernism back on itself. In a fashion similar to postmodernism, poststructuralism takes as one of its key tasks the subversion and in some cases the eradication of subject-centered discourse. I have used the work of Michel Foucault, for example, to examine the complexity of the relationship between discourses and their objects. Foucault’s concept of "the gaze” exemplifies ‘how language can and often does function as a means to control the subject/object. I use Larsen’s Passing, however, to read Foucault and to suggest that it is possible to subvert this gaze and thus the power of language to control and define us. As I have said at several points in this study already, though 202 there are some who would argue that we have no control over language or how our textual bodies are written, I side with those who say that even as we are introduced and subject(ed) to other texts of the world as well as other bodies, we are never entirely at the mercy of what we receive. Larsen’s characters through their acts of "passing“ are a perfect example that this is true 5- that we can, in fact, rewrite our texts (our bodies) and resist those who would try to control us with their language. Larsen, by constructing her characters as physically "white"-looking "Black" women, clearly demonstrates for us how "race“ (and to some extent ”gender”) are pg; facts of the body and, because of this, how it is possible to subvert the powers of the gaze and the power of language to define and categorize. When Clare and Irene "pass" they ”pass" through the barriers or "racial” categories and societal expectations of them as Black women. They demonstrate for us all how, in a sense, "passing" (if one can get past the pejorative connotation of this concept) is an.option for us all if we are able to resist the temptation of being trapped by language. Though.most of us do not have the option of literally choosing our 'race' or our bodies as Clare and Irene do, their ability to pass does provide us with a model for how we too can reconstruct how we define and talk about our selves. If Stanley Fish is right, I could not have drawn any of the conclusions I have drawn here about Passing/passing, or the connections I have made here between current theories of 203 reading texts*without "radically'depend[ing]” (Fish.l980, 349) on the theories and theorists that preceded me. I am only able to claim the critical directions I do claim because of the "differential relationship" (Fish 1980, 349) I have with past interpretive communities, particularly those of African American literature, and how they have conceptualized theories of reading, "race," and gender. My rereadings of Passing demonstrate how we, in fact, (re)create and reconstruct the past -- our literary pasts -- whenever we reread texts. Annette Kolodny reminds us, as I pointed our in the opening chapters, that when we respond to texts, especially to those texts not of our own era, we actually "call up and utilize the past on behalf of a better understanding of the present" (151). In the case of reading and responding to Passing, I have argued that members of interpretive communities of African American literature throughout various points in the history of the text(s) have called up the novel based on a desire to better understand conceptions of race and, more recently, gender as well. Looking back on critical responses to Passing I find this to be particularly the case. When considering how past and present interpretive communities of African American literature have conceptualized raced and gendered discourse and identities I am able to see how, despite our arguments, we have been moving toward a better understanding of these issues not only in the context of the discourse on text/body construction but also toward a better understanding of these issues in the realm of politics and 204 culture as well. In using a Black feminist poststructuralist or postmodernist approach to respond to all of these issues, I have reconstructed.the text (and my self in the process) yet again, thereby contributing to the rewriting and reconceptualization of Passing and of raced and gendered discourse as well. Kolodny’s arguments that we reconstruct and recreate texts based on our attempts to understand the present, are derivative of the ideas of Hans-Georg Gadamer in Eggph and Methpd. I wish therefore to turn to the ideas of Gadamer for the remainder of my discussion. I do so in order to show how Gadamer provides us with a model, as I described at the conclusion.of the previous chapter, for determining how we might have more productive conversations among ourselves and within interpretive communities about texts. Gadamer’s metaphor for the interpretation of texts as a “fusion of horizons" is useful here. In Truth and Method, Gadamer describes our "horizon" as a standpoint that limits the possibiliti(es) of vision. For him, this standpoint is neither a fixed position nor a static one and.because of this, our horizons can never ”truly close“ (304). Instead, our horizon is one that "we move and that moves with us" (304). Arguing that "The historical movement of human life consists in the fact that it is never absolutely bound to any one standpoint,” Gadamer points out that ”the horizon of the past, out of which all human life lives and which exists in the form of tradition, is always in motion" (304). In addition, he argues that our horizons are 205 intimately linked to the prejudices that we bring to any situation since ''they constitute . . . the horizon of a particular present, . . . [and] they represent that which beyond it is impossible to see" (306). Finally, Gadamer argues that "the horizon of the present is continually in the process of being formed because we are continually having to test all our prejudices“ (306). Understanding, then, occurs when the horizons of our pasts "fuse" with the horizons of our present (306) . In other words, we have a "fusion of horizons" when we understand that there are no "isolated horizon[s]" (306) . Instead, old and new are "always combining into something of living value" (306). Gadamer’s arguments here (and by extension Annette Kolodny’s arguments as well) parallel what I have described as occurring in interpretive communities of African American literature. It is at the confluence of where horizons of past and present could possibly fuse but often do not that interpretive communities have had breakdowns in conversations regarding their interpretive process. Gadamer points out, however, that ”Every encounter with tradition that takes place within historical consciousness involves the experience of a tension between the text and the present“ (emphasis mine; 306). He also argues that "the hermeneutic task consists in not covering up this tension by naive assimilation of the two but in consciously bringing them out“ (306) . Finally, Gadamer argues, "In the process of understanding, a real fusion of 206 horizons occurs . . . [when. the] historical. horizon. is projected, it is simultaneously superseded” (307). Critical responses to Passing, and those interpretive communities who shaped and determined these responses, indicate how critical and theoretical perspectives in the episodes of a single text shift and evolve. Because of the horizon of our particular present, or the horizon of other eras when the novel was written and responded to, our interpretive strategies are always in a process of ”continually being formed" (Gadamer 210). We develop an understanding of the text and of the communities, past and present, who have responded to them, when we realize that these texts are continually in the process of being formed. Let me cite two brief examples. Joyce Joyce uses tradition as one of the reasons for why poststructuralist and.postmodernist theories cannot fuse with African American literature. Joyce argues, for instance, that because Henry Louis Gates and Houston Baker use poststructuralist theory with African American literature and therefore risk "dividing the community," they do not "share in the experiences [that] bond a people together . . . ' (341). In Joyce’s opinion Gates and Baker have moved away from the tradition of African American literary critics that supposedly has reflected a one-to-one relationship between critic and community. She sees their actions (and I guess would see my actions as well) as going against traditions in African American literature and criticism instead of "fusing" with 207 them. Joyce’s horizon, then, is limited by her belief that there can be isolated horizons -- that African American literature, for example, can exist unaffected by what is going on in other literary critical horizons around it. Her horizons cannot expand, and if we are to follow her conceptualization.of African American literature and literary theory, the horizons of African American literature cannot expand, because difference in opinion and in approach to African American literature should not be and cannot be accommodated. The tension between Joyce’s historical consciousness of past interpretive communities and their strategies and those of the present is not seen by her as a positive. In her case understanding of the others’ perspective, in the Gadamerian sense, has not occurred.because the historical or traditional horizon of texts in the African American canon has not been incorporated and then superseded by newer approaches . African American texts, then, for Joyce, are not in the process of continually being formed.but are instead fixed and.unaffected by the changes and influences of other texts. The controversy over the conclusion of Passing provides us with.yet another example of how texts are constantly in the process of being formed, Critics have tended.to interpret the conclusion of the Passing in one of three ways as: 1) Irene pushed Clare out of the window, 2) Clare jumped or accidentally fell out of the window, or 3) Bellew'pushed.Clare out of the window; In the first example, critics have argued 208 that Irene pushed Clare out of the window because she was jealous of Clare and.wanted her out of the way. Critics have also suggested that Irene may have pushed Clare out of the window because, Irene, suspicious that her husband Brian was having an affair with Clare, wanted Clare out of the way. In the second.most popular interpretation of what happens at the conclusion of Passing, critics have argued that either Clare jumped or accidentally fell out of the window of the Freedlands’ sixth floor apartment. Clare’s fall occurred, critics have argued, as a result of her being found out by her husband Bellew. Because she was either surprised at having her "racial identity” found out, or was determined not to suffer the consequences of her actions, critics have argued that Clare fell out of the window as a result of no one else’s actions but her own. Finally, in the third interpretation of the conclusion of the novel, John Bellew, Clare’s racist husband is believed to have pushed her out of the window. He is believed to have done so because of his discovery that Clare betrayed him by lying to him about her secret ”Black" life and ”Black" identity. Critics have made such a fuss over the novel’s conclusion because they feel that by determining who caused Clare’s death (if, indeed, anyone did cause it) a kind of closure could be brought to the novel in a way that its many text(s) in their existing form, do not allow. Had Larsen made a conscious decision to provide us with definitive answers about what occurs at the conclusion of the novel she would have not only 209 provided us with a more traditional form of narrative closure, she would.have possibly clued.us in to how she felt about what she laid out for us in her text(s). For example, is Larsen suggesting that Passing/passing entails a loss of identity as Addison Gayle argues? Is she implying that the jealousy and animosity Irene feels toward.Clare is really"a code for Black female desire” which thus "undercuts" the "superficially safe" plots focused on the respectability of Black middle-class life the way Deborah McDowell suggests? Is Clare, ironically through her acts of passing, as bell hooks argues, "the only character in the novel who truly desires ’blackness’?"2 I could go on here but I will stop. What I think is important to point out is that Larsen has left open how to read the conclusion(s) of her text(s). This is an important point to recognize especially if we remember that Gadamer argues that "when we read a text we always assume its completeness, and only’when this assumption.proves mistaken -- i.e., the text is not intelligible -- do we begin to suspect the text and try to discover how it can be remedied" (294). Critics with their numerous and often conflicting readings of the conclusion of Larsen’s novel demonstrate how this is true -- how Passing becomes suspect because it does not conform to reader expectations about closure. In fact, Gadamer argues that we "understand traditionary texts on the basis of expectations of meaning drawn from our own prior relation to the subject matter" (294). He goes on to argue that ”It is only when the attempt to accept what is true fails that we try to 210 ’understand’ the text. . ."(294). Finally, Gadamer argues that the "prejudice of completeness. . . implies not only that a text should completely express its meaning -- but also that what it says should be the complete truth" (294). To come to an understanding about texts, then, as the previous examples suggest, we must recognize that the text "is not to be compared with an immovably and obstinately fixed point of view that suggests only one question to the person trying' to understand. it. . ." (Gadamer 388). Instead, understanding a text, and.I would add understanding ourselves in the process, is a reconstruction and "reawakening [of] the text’s meaning” (388). In this sense, our "fusion of horizons" helps us to ”bring into play and put at risk" our own views about a text. We are able to "make [on our] own what the text says” (388). Taking this move, however, takes not a little bit of courage -- and sometimes we get ”black and blue” in the process. . ‘ 211 Notes 1 I should make a point here of saying that though my focus in this study is African American women’s literature I do not want to leave the impression that in discussions of "race" and literature, "race" only refers to "Black" texts (it can also refer to white texts, for instance) just as "gender" does not only refer to women’s texts. 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