[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
.At very least, that is, we need to practicea self-consciousness in the ways we use the concept of race and in themethods we develop to read race in cultural production, lest the prac-tice of putting race in quotation marks as a sign of anti-essentialist cri-tique become rhetorical.This study of racial passing narratives wouldnot have been possible without this critique of racial essentialism, whichhas shaped U.S.literary and cultural studies of the last two decades.Atthe same time, in exploring the ongoing necessity of thinking throughthe value and costs of racial identity, it warns against the reification andappropriation of such critique.Cultural representations of racial passing demonstrate that the stakesof struggles for the cultural ownership of identities are particularly highfor those groups who historically have been least able to exploit the dis-courses of identity to express their own political will or social interest.For racially defined subjects, a strategic embrace of identities that arealso sources of oppression may be a necessary precursor to the establish-44ment of lines of safety and community.For such subjects, freedom does not necessarily or in every instance lie beyond the veil of racial defi-nition, in an ephemeral and problematically disembodied space that DuBois describes, quite tellingly, as a region of blue sky and wanderingshadows. 45 At the same time, these representations confront us withthe need to recognize how such interested mobilization of identity has invisibly and yet consistently served the interests of subjects whobenefit from their exemption from the categorizing imperatives of raceand gender.If we are interested in using the analysis of social mobilityand agency as a potential tool of political mobilization, then we need toacknowledge that identities, though not etched in permanence or tran-scendence, nevertheless have multiple and competing histories, and thatthey likewise can be deployed to serve a variety of interests.In our analy-ses we cannot lose sight of the project of identity any more thanwe canfail to recognize identities as historically pliable and multiply articulated46 fiction[s] of law and custom, as Mark Twain once put it.Our analy-ses must indeed proceed in the dual sense of carry on and issue from such insights, situating critiques of identity within the context ofa recognition of the work that identity historically has performed. CHAPTER 1Home Again:Racial Negotiationsin ModernistAfrican AmericanPassing NarrativesTo Market, to MarketTo buy a Plum BunHome again, Home again,Market is done. Children s rhyme and epigraph toPlumBun: A Novel without a Moral,jessie redmon fausetn 1926 Jessie Redmon Fauset decided to resign from her post at TheICrisis, the influential naacp house publication where she had servedas literary editor since 1919.After seven years of energetically promotingthe work of writers such as Langston Hughes, Countée Cullen, JeanToomer, and Claude McKay, Fauset may have turned in her letter ofresignation with the hope of securing more time to devote to her ownfiction (her first novel, There Is Confusion, had been published in 1924).Yet if she harbored any such intentions, Fauset chose not to reveal themto Joel Spingarn, a friend and patron of the burgeoning New Negro Re-naissance, whom Fauset solicited for help in finding new employment.In a letter to Spingarn, Fauset listed what she saw as her job prospects,in descending order of preference: to work as a publisher s reader, if the 26 Crossing the Linepay were sufficient; to be a social secretary in a private family; to workat one of the New York foundations; or to return to teaching French.Knowing that her opportunities would be limited, she tactfully advisedSpingarn what to do if the question of color were to arise. In the caseof the publisher s reader, she wrote, almost as an afterthought, I couldof course work at home. 1Citing Fauset s letter to Spingarn in her introduction to the 1990 re-issue of Fauset s novel PlumBun, a work that centers an artistically am-bitious female protagonist, Deborah McDowell writes that it showsFauset combining an enterprising spirit with a sober, no-nonsense rec-ognition of the realities of occupational segregation. 2 To this we mightadd that the letter and particularly Fauset s anticipatory offer to workat home as a way of negotiating the protocols of a segregated pub-lic sphere also resonates with multiple and subtle ironies.For one, itanticipates the literary-critical legacy that has extolled Fauset for herbehind-the-scenes role as editor while casting a more equivocal eye overher own literary production, which included four novels, children sliterature, and numerous short stories and essays.Echoing LangstonHughes s famous description of Fauset (in his autobiography The BigSea) as one of the three people who midwifed the so-called New Negroliterature into being, 3 scholars have typically assessed Fauset s contri-butions to African American literary tradition in terms of her help-ful encouragement of others.While protégés such as Hughes prospered,Fauset would eventually be assigned to the ranks of African Americanliterature s Rear Guard a term that paradoxically registers her im-portance in terms of her distance from the creative centers of mod-ernist culture.4 The self-seclusion suggested by Fauset s offer to workat home thus resonates with her willingness to promote the work ofyounger writers at the expense of her own literary reputation, whichsuffered, by comparison, for being rooted in the genteel traditions ofnineteenth-century bourgeois domestic fiction, which it also critiqued
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]