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Overview
As a pioneer of feminist studies—and the object of some of the more rancorous criticism lodged against early feminist scholars—Gubar stands in a unique position to comment on current dilemmas. Moving beyond defensiveness produced by generational rivalry, the impasse propagated by smug deployments of identity politics, and the obscurity of poststructuralist theory, she claims that the very controversies that undermine feminism's unity also prove its resilience.
Gubar begins by considering the volatile impact of gender on recent redefinitions of race, sexuality, religion, and class proposed by four important groups in contemporary feminism: African-American performance and visual artists, lesbian creative writers, Jewish-American women, and newly institutionalized female academics. She then addresses major divisions—including the rifts between various area studies and women's studies, as well as strains between generations—that both threaten and invigorate feminist inquiry. Gubar's forays into art and activism, politics, and the profession provide a sometimes distressing, sometimes comical, sometimes optimistic view of feminism emerging from a time of contention into a lively period of pluralized perspectives and disciplines.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780231115803 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Columbia University Press |
| Publication date: | 02/03/2000 |
| Series: | Gender and Culture Series |
| Edition description: | New Edition |
| Pages: | 256 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.20(w) x 9.32(h) x 0.77(d) |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Chapter One
Women Artists and Contemporary Racechanges
I believe that racism's hardy persistence and immense adaptability are sustained by a habit of human imagination, deflective rhetoric, and hidden license. I believe no less that an optimistic course might be charted, if only we could imagine it. —Patricia J. Williams, Seeing a Color-Blind Future
I have ... [worried] about too hearty an endorsement of racial identification.... So here are my positive proposals: live with fractured identities; engage in identity play; find solidarity, yes, but recognize contingency, and, above all, practice irony. —K. Anthony Appiah, Color Conscious
More than any other field, African-American and Postcolonial Studies have transformed the work of feminist critics in the past three decades. Besides bringing black women writers into the literary canon, subverting the earlier propensity of thinkers to universalize whiteness, extending our understanding of the psychological dynamics of racist stereotyping, and historicizing the impact of slavery as well as imperialism on Americans from diverse ethnic backgrounds, feminists of color play such an influential role that they have effected a virtual racechange in Women's Studies. Paradoxically, race takes center stage in feminist criticism at precisely the moment when its fictiveness as a biological category has been fully demonstrated but also when its malevolence as a barrier to social justice has been fully documented. Perhaps this is why so many people have begun to sabotage even the mostapparently libertarian models we have previously used to fathom the impact of race on gender, of gender on race. Such saboteurs wonder: Has multiculturalism become as inoperative a racial paradigm as the earlier model of integration? At least partly inspired by their feminism, many critical as well as imaginative writers, performance artists, and painters seek to move us beyond integrationists' advocacy of assimilation and multiculturalists' of identity politics to a more nuanced understanding of race that might, in turn, lead to the post-racist society many people wish to inhabit. What I am calling feminism's "racechanges" are not simply those steps taken by contemporary thinkers to enlarge the sphere of feminism beyond what Adrienne Rich called "white solipsism" but also their imaginative efforts to enlist all of us more effectively in making racism as well as racial categories obsolete.
A sort of shorthand on the detriments of twentieth-century racial paradigms is provided by two brilliant paintings by Faith Ringgold. As its title suggests, We Came to America (1991) addresses the melting pot ideal many of us were taught as children (see illustration 1), the fairy tale that told us most folks came to America in boats, though the vessels varied. Some people paid for their tickets in first-class cabins, while others were purchased as cargo---but hey! once on these shores, we immigrants were all equal. From the 1920s until the Civil Rights movement of the sixties, the story presented assimilation as the key; color blindness as the ideal. Differences were supposed to melt away in an alchemical bowl or vat of steel, homogenized dross transmuted into gold or iron, carbon, nickel, chromium, and manganese toughened into one resistant substance, although the melting pot also summoned to some minds the image of a soup so long cooked that all the ingredients dissolved into each other.
Increasingly after the post WWII period, of course, the inequality of various ethnic groups made the melting pot metaphor suspect. Faith Ringgold had only to perform a racechange on the Statue of Liberty to demonstrate the horrific fate of Africans in the land of the free, the home of the brave. We Came to America depicts the tired and poor tempest-toss'd: a slave ship burns on the horizon (did a rebel set it ablaze?); castaways drown in the surf (or are their mouths open, their arms raised in exultation at a baptism repudiating a degraded life of captivity?); only a lonely baby survives (will the child in Liberty's arms grow up to be crucified on the cross of slavery?). As Moira Roth observes, "the scene blends exhortation, jubilation, and an almost biblical promise of deliverance" (58), but it also fuses these to a vision of apocalypse now. An America symbolized by a white Liberty white-washes the devastating past her dark double memorializes. The connection between the red-rimmed (rising or setting) sun on the horizon and the bloody waves, the ill wind that links Liberty's foregrounded torch with the smoke and fog of the backgrounded flames declare that the wretched refuse of America's teeming shore may be doomed rather than exalted. In the roiling waters of the Atlantic, African Americans will be forced to melt out of existence.
With the demise of the melting pot/assimilation/color blindness script by midcentury, multiculturalism emerged as a commitment to racial diversity, and it quickly became associated with identity politics. Not racial integration but racial pride; not assimilation but separatism; not differences neutralized but differences naturalized; not color blindness but color consciousness; not a melting pot or soup but a mosaic or salad bar: these would assure our respect for the jostling ethnicities that had to be understood, each in and for its own integrity. To counter insulting images of Aunt Jemima or Shylock, positive valuations of blackness or Jewishness were embraced as sources of pride. Awareness of shared racial (or, for that matter, sexual or ethnic or class) backgrounds could function to unite people struggling against prejudice. Since one's origins presumably authenticated one's political attitudes, discussions of subjectivities were replaced by attention to the position from which subjects wrote or spoke. Just as important, racial or ethnic identity provided certified credentials to representatives who claimed the right to stand for particular groups.
Recently, this type of identity politics has come under attack by feminists who chafe against its pigeon-holing, but who also refuse to return to the wornout assumptions of assimilation. Using shorthand to explain the problem of identity politics, Nancy K. Miller calls it a form of "as a" speaking: "if 'identity politics' has challenged bourgeois self-representations—with all its unself-conscious exclusions—speaking 'as a' has emerged as an equally problematic representativity" (GP 20). How can any one individual—with all the eccentricity life affords each human being—possibly represent a group so heterogeneous as, say, African-American women or Asian-American men, when even these composite categories hide multifaceted variants? According to Diane Elam, in some instances "identity politics promote the very stereotyping and tokenism that they allegedly fight against by trying to solve complex problems by merely invoking oversimplified labels" ("SA" 65). Equally skeptical, Nancy Fraser condemns "the balkanizing tendencies of identity politics" ("MA" 181), which "fail to connect" with "the social politics of justice and equality" (175). Valerie Smith has pointed out that "the circumstances of race and gender alone protect no one from the seductions of reading her own experience as normative and fetishizing the experience of the other" (57).
Once again, a Faith Ringgold canvas crystallizes the problem of hegemonic racial paradigms, in this case the difficulty of multiculturalism's allegiance to identity politics. In her 1967, six by eight feet U.S. Postage Stamp Commemorating the Advent of Black Power (see illustration 2), one hundred masklike faces are presented in a grid, 10 percent of them the darker ones that mount like steps from the lower-left toward the upper right side of the painting. The black letters spelling out BLACK POWER form an X with these faces (as in Malcolm X perhaps) since the word's letters descend from the upper-left to the lower-right side of the canvas. Containing all colors, black stands out as a positive identity for some 10 percent of the nation's population against the remaining 90 percent, who have less color here, unless one turns the work on its side so as to read its horizontal (instead of its vertical) letters. Then what surfaces (though previously invisible) are the huge, all-pervasive words "WHITE POWER." Identity politics, this image seems to hint, are well and good, directing our attention to minorities uniting to seek rights in American society; however, they disregard the universalized default position of a whiteness so pervasive it cannot be seen, a whiteness synonymous with the cultural air we unconsciously breathe in and out every minute of our lives.
To the extent that the X marked by African-American faces and the letters of black power on Ringgold's canvas does not topple but depends upon the all-pervasive whiteness on which it is inscribed, the ideology of black power calls for social justice without revealing the ubiquity of white power or subverting it. That some viewers of Ringgold's canvas see the X of black faces as a shadowy replication of the crossed bars on the Confederate flag, that others perceive all the images as male: these reactions multiply the ironies at work here. Do identity politics require African Americans to situate themselves in a preexistent pattern, the X-grid, regardless of their private desires? Does the Black Power movement commemorated on this U.S. Postage Stamp stamp out the individuality of blacks (as well as whites)? If human beings demand respect as blacks, will prescribed ways of being black become yet another tyranny? Ringgold's misgivings about the sexual politics of Black Power advocates suggest as much:
For me the concept of Black Power carried with it a big question mark. Was it intended only for the black men or would black women have power, too? (WF 158)
Because of her gender, Ringgold is especially sensitive to what Anthony Appiah calls the "imperialism of identity" (CC 103); a politics based on one identity marker risks making human beings forget the multiplicity of their various modes of identification. Just as important, the various shades of yellow, pink, and tan faces complicate the majority, reminding us how the vocabulary of "black" and "white power" obscures the presence of Chicanas, Indians, Asians, or people of mixed backgrounds. Thus the image broods over the tension between multiple skin colors and a dualistic black-and-white racial language, encouraging us to question the efficacy of racialized identity politics, which may not be able to dislodge white privilege or foster the interracial sensitivity and compassion this society needs so badly.
Exactly the contrast between Faith Ringgold's foregrounded "BLACK POWER" and her backgrounded "WHITE POWER" constitutes the combination of "deflective rhetoric" and "hidden license" that Patricia J. Williams diagnoses as the basis of racism's "hardy persistence." Yet, Williams cautions, "one of the greatest obstacles to progress at this moment [is] the paralyzing claim that racism has no solution" (SCB 67). A number of contemporary women artists, seeking to confound bigotry's resistance by envisioning solutions to it, extend our racial vocabularies, proposing new images beyond those provided by assimilationists and multiculturalists. For if, in the melting pot, racial difference is conceived as a kind of boundedness that must be relinquished (the nickel fuses with the carbon, the onion mixes with the celery); if, in the mosaic or salad bar, race is imagined as a distinct border that ought to be respected (the green tiles surround the yellow, the cauliflower sits next to the spinach); both models nevertheless envision race in terms of contours or perimeters, not unlike the "color line" W. E. B. Du Bois viewed as the central problem of the twentieth century (vii). Antithetically, contemporary feminists of color surface new images based on permeable boundaries to underscore the obsolescence of earlier racial lexicons, the need for fresh paradigms emphasizing the contingency of color, the idiosyncratic and incidental volatility of traffic across a shifting, blurred, multiplied, invisible, or nonexistent color line.
Although in the past most cross-racial representations have mocked those deemed Other, recent feminists—aware of the mutability of gender roles—deploy racechanges to exhibit the social construction of race. Perhaps performance artists and painters play a particularly important role in this undertaking because they address so directly the issue of the embodiedness of sex and color within a culture that increasingly invests visual symbols with powers previously paramount in language. Experimentalists such as Adrian Piper, Anna Deavere Smith, and Faith Ringgold employ the visual power of representation to confront the physicality upon which psychologically damaging classifications hinge. As performance artists and painters, in other words, these thinkers have privileged access to the process Richard Rorty terms "the literalization of selected metaphors" by which (he believes) social thought progresses (44). Located inside what Audre Lorde called "the very house of difference rather than [in] the security of any one particular difference" (Z 226), Piper, Deavere Smith, and Ringgold endorse, like Anthony Appiah, living with "fractured identities," engaging in "identity play," recognizing "contingency" within solidarity, and practicing "irony" (CC 104). As feminists, their contribution to racechange takes many forms, ranging from Piper's sensitivity to racism's peculiar assault on African-American men to Deavere Smith's exhibiting herself as a medium or spiritualist, and Ringgold's realization that race (given the multiplicity of colors) can be more easily scrapped than gender (given the binarism of male and female). But because, as Williams suggests, "we dream our worlds into being" (SCB 16), all these artist-theorists have begun to literalize new metaphors to generate the words needed to usher in post-racist as well as post-race worlds.
Playing the Race Card
In 1986 one of Adrian Piper's performances sought to surface racist misconceptions in a specific setting, namely when the light-skinned artist found herself in an otherwise exclusively white social event where she was presumed to be white herself. If racist remarks were made in her presence, she simply handed out her printed card:
Dear Friend,
I am black.
I am sure you did not realize this when you made/laughed at/agreed with that racist remark ...
I regret any discomfort my presence is causing you, just as I am sure you regret the discomfort your racism is causing me.
Sincerely yours
Adrian Margaret Smith Piper (OO I:220)
As with another card meant to protect Piper's privacy in public spaces (when men approach assuming she wants to be picked up), the action is intended to draw attention toward and ward off repercussions of singularity by redirecting an insult back on the insulter. In the all-white setting, various alternative options remain available to her: saying nothing at all; denouncing the culprit; announcing on arrival her race; abdicating her black identity after the slur. But these would have tangled her up in psychologically harmful processes. The card, according to Piper, has the benefit of "a semiprivate context" with a specific person guilty of having made a prejudiced remark and it might actually facilitate dialogue (OO I:219-20). As Judith Wilson has explained, "Both the card's association with antique forms of etiquette and its tone of exquisite civility underscored the artist's view that 'racism or sexism are not only unjust and immoral, they are also boorish and tasteless ...'" ("IMN" 55).
The resonant title of Piper's performance—My Calling (Card)—contains at least four suggestions about the disposition of the race card: first, as Wilson asserts, it functions like an anachronistic visiting card containing the name of a person who has not been received, just as Piper's full identity has not been fully perceived; second, it hints that the card constitutes Piper's spiritual "calling"—the sanctified work she is meant to do to right the wrong of racism; third, it "calls" a form of behavior by its right name, not letting it slide by; fourth, it operates like a parodic business card. To take the old-fashioned visitor's card first, Piper's announcement dramatizing her presence—in this case, as a black person—remains at odds with the visual appearance of her features. Displaying the unreliability of ocular perceptions in the area of race, Piper's "female impersonation" of a prim, proper Victorian lady extricates corporeal signs from racial categories, proving how easily duped white people can be. No wonder, then, the playing of the race card constitutes Piper's spiritual calling, for with it she proves that race is merely a flimsy, nonsensical house of cards that can be blown away with the breath it takes to say a monosyllabic word. Reversing highly popular "passing" narratives, from Mark Twain's Puddn'head Wilson to Fannie Hurst's Imitation of Life to Showboat, all of which assume that power and privilege require a white camouflage, Piper rejects the racial closet and conspicuously, voluntarily "outs" herself.
Though a "call" often invites a response, Piper appears "genuinely surprised" that "No one who got this card ever initiated dialogue" with her (Shatz 52). Perhaps no response occurs because the card "calls" racism just that, protesting against its irrational but painful wounding. In this respect, playing the race card functions something like dispensing a traffic ticket; that is, issuing a violation against the offender. Besides "calling" an act of incivility (instead of letting it go), Piper's riff heralds a businesslike exchange of goods or services by initiating a series of interesting racechanging deals. What the card's "I am black" proclaims to its recipient is "you are white." The newly raced reader experiences the shock of being an Other to the previously-thought-to-be confederate. Inducted into a consciousness of his or her whiteness, the receiver of the card may feel the jolt of being raced for the first time since whiteness so often remains disguised as a universal category of humanity.
Reversing the relation between self and Other in exactly the way Maurice Blanchot describes, Piper as "the Other relates to me as if I were the Other and thus causes me to take leave of my identity.... When thus I am wrested from myself, there remains a passivity bereft of self (sheer alterity, the other without unity)" (18). This trauma of alterity (generated by being racially marked) is one that many African Americans can remember in their own lives: one has only to think of Zora Neale Hurston's famous "I remember the very day that I became colored" (152) or Patricia J. Williams's recollection, "Three was the age when I learned that I was black" (SCB 7). The embarrassment at having made a racial slur that the card's white reader then undergoes also parallels the earlier chagrin of the card-carrying African American who—knowing she had the hidden card on hand in case of need—endured her unperceived racial identity as something about which she ought not speak, a secret infirmity perhaps or clandestine source of embarrassment. In this regard, the card curiously recalls the sorts of notes handed out by those who used to be called the "deaf and dumb" on subways and sidewalks to elicit financial or physical help. It signals, after all, the impossibility of speech in a particular setting where Piper's articulation of her feelings would certainly disconcert either herself or a roomful of people.
Piper's "I am black. I am sure you did not realize this" card solves the problem the poet Toi Derricotte encountered when "in conversation with a white person who [didn't] know I'm black," she tried to "prepare [herself] for painful distinctions" (25-6). Significantly, Derricotte entitled an early section of her autobiographical The Black Notebooks "The Club," not only because she wished to explain how excluded she felt from the whites-only private club her neighbors attended but also because whiteness itself seemed like an exclusive membership to her. "Whiteness is a kind of clubhouse" Patricia J. Williams believes (52), as does Marilyn Frye: being white "is like being a member of a political party, or a club, or a fraternity—or being a Methodist or a Mormon" (149). Frye goes on to advise those who don't relish the arbitrariness of the club's privileges to resign their membership or figure out ways to get kicked out.
Although race is "constructed as something inescapable," according to Frye, what antiracist people require may be "conceptual creativity, and perhaps conceptual violence" (131). If you are a member of the white club and you wish to draw upon Piper's creativity to resist assimilationist as well as multicultural models of race, you could resign by obtaining and distributing the race card at moments when bigoted pronouncements are made in your vicinity. Remember, elsewhere Adrian Piper has urged more white people to acknowledge the black ancestors who populate most Euro-American family trees in this country. Whether or not individuals can find such progenitors, what is to stop them from not exactly false, but perhaps slightly misleading advertising? Jane Lazarre, the Jewish mother of black sons, once received a compliment in the form of the following description given to her children: "Your mother isn't really white. She's a Black person in disguise" (25). Espousing this appellation and thereby engaging in precisely the "identity play" that Appiah prescribes, you might discombobulate racist relatives or colleagues by simply decking them with a copy of Piper's calling card.
Needless to say, this suggestion constitutes a somewhat disturbing piece of advice, given the long history in which white mimicry of African Americans has remained contaminated in and by the degradations of minstrelsy. But it gets at Piper's efforts to rob race of a fixed or essential status. After all, at the all-white social event, Piper herself remains "white" to most partygoers, "black" to one or two others. Not an ontological statement of being, her emergence as a person of color is performed only in the context of a racist remark and thus takes on the aura of a personal intervention. Her declaration of difference, in other words, marks not a naturalized physical state but an entrance into a public disagreement about racial ideology; not who she is, but what she thinks—what she claims to be—is the issue. The resulting cognitive dissonance, occurring in a highly localized setting, is meant to affect a single person's shift in consciousness and thereby tacitly acknowledges the recalcitrance of those economic and psychological structures that continue to buttress bigotry. Not always deployed, not necessarily believed, the race card also signals the asymmetry of our definitions of black and white, for a dark-skinned person would receive very different results distributing an "I am white" voucher, which might just mark her as a "card"; that is, a jester. If to some minds Piper's permit alludes to the racial identity certificates required of South Africans under apartheid, it draws attention to the political repercussions of racial categories that have governed discriminatory social interaction. Given the United States context, many of the issues related to the relative ease with which nonblack immigrants (Jews, Italians, Indians) assimilated into America by becoming white—which James Baldwin called "the price of the ticket"—accrue around Piper's transfer, a "pass" that challenges the involuntary nature of racialized group identities.
"We no more choose our color than choose the language by which we communicate," Amy Gutmann believes (168), and the fact that "we are not free" to pick "a racial identity is morally troubling" because "it has the effect ... of dividing human beings against the cause of social justice" (169). Yet in the case of fiction, of course, writers are free to select a racial identity at odds with the one they were assigned at birth. That the best-selling Native-American classic Education of Little Tree was actually composed by the KKK author of Governor George Wallace's famous "Segregation now ... Segregation tomorrow ... Segregation forever" speech proves that authorial instances of cross-racial impersonation (which scholars term "racial drag" or "ethnic transvestism") may not have been undertaken to serve "the cause of social justice." Such hoaxes abound in American literary history, with non-Jews masking their roots to pen purportedly "Jewish novels," non-Chicanos publishing what are advertised as "Chicano memoirs."
More pointedly libertarian in purpose, however, are recent texts such as Toni Morrison's Paradise as well as her earlier story "Recitatif" in which ambiguous racial markers make readers conscious of the (curiously gratuitous, idiosyncratic) basis upon which they apply racial labels. How we interpreters determine that an indeterminate character is "really" white or black speaks volumes about the assumptions brought to such societally formative language. That Morrison titled her short narrative about a "salt and pepper" pair of girls "Recitatif"—the boring, prosey parts of an opera's narrative—suggests that the reader's quest to ascertain which character is black, which white constitutes a silly script decidedly subordinate to the dramatic arias worthy of attention. When she opened her later novel Paradise with the sentence "They shoot the white girl first" and closed it without ever revealing which character that was, Morrison explained that she "wanted the readers to wonder about the race of those girls until those readers understood that their race didn't matter." The mystery remains unsolved to prove that "Race is the least reliable information you can have about someone.... it tells you next to nothing" (Gray 62).
While a select number of ambiguous characters and light-skinned people can deploy the race card in a variety of playful ways, Adrian Piper understands full well that the metaphor has another significance for darker-skinned men. When an allusion to it appears in Piper's photomontage Forget It, the race card ominously materializes in the central panel as an application for a credit card superimposed on an image of a black man with an erect penis as well as heavy testicles, the hypersexualized rapist of racist lore, the same figure she herself impersonated in her Mythic Being series of performances. Executed during the early seventies, this instance of street theater featured Piper sporting an Afro, bell bottoms, and dark glasses, which helped her "swagger, stride, lope, ... sit with my legs wide apart on the subway, so as to accommodate my protruding genitalia" in an effort to "embody everything you most hate and fear" (Golden 26). Clearly, this man need not apply; he should simply "forget it." Credit—be it financial or moral, monetory or ethical—will not be given to him in our society. Carded, he will be denied entrance into the club of privilege, or so Piper insinuates in an allegation against American culture justified by the grotesque statistic that by the year 2000 one out of every three African-American men will spend time in American prisons. Though the race card seems flimsy, it can turn up in a number of power games that arbitrarily assign gratuitous values to the faces of differently colored suits, playing havoc with people it reduces to "spades."
"What does it mean that the deep wound of race in this country has come to be euphemized as a card," Anne Anlin Cheng asks about the deployment of this rhetoric during the C. J. Simpson trial (49). According to Cheng, "one would 'play' a card only because one is already outside the larger game, for to play a card is to exercise the value of one's disadvantage, the liability that is asset" (50). In other words, the "I am white. I am sure you did not realize this" card deployed by a light-skinned man or woman would not work exactly the same way as Piper's since the person whose whiteness automatically trumps other suits need neither shuffle nor deal to win. Transmuting liability to asset and back again into liability, Piper's race card confronts the perplexing conjunction between minority identity and injury for people who know they haven't been dealt the "full deck" that would make playing the card unnecessary. Taken together, My Calling (Card), Mythic Being, and Forget It demonstrate how Piper's feminism shapes her sensitivity to the engendering of racism that robs all African Americans of respect but reserves a particularly vicious form of representational violence for black men. A singular anomaly as an African-American woman in the departments of philosophy and fine art that hired and fired her, Piper could use both her race and her gender to make herself what she calls "a cognitive anomaly"—a Euro-looking black, a macho-looking female (Shatz 46).
A Bridge of Moving Identifications (With—Not As)
Since, as Piper knows, there is no biological basis for racial language, why can't individuals in quest of a consciousness that takes color as accidental and inessential escape the Manichean divide between black and white? Although sociologists, ethnographers, and anthropologists keep on explaining that "nobody has a race" (Appiah CC 37), it remains a recalcitrant category in many people's minds, one that literary and visual artists have begun to undermine by means of identification. Whereas historically African Americans have been socialized to identify cross-racially with the mainstream culture in which they have had to survive, Euro-Americans have deformed or deflected identification with various modes of mockery. Attempting to detonate such disavowals, some contemporary artists convert the one-way traffic jam across the color line into a two-way street. Because they multiply differences, moreover, interracial (not cross-racial) identification constitutes their goal; or, if we attempt to take the deconstruction of "race" seriously, moving identifications with people of various colors.
Yet according to Toni Morrison and Adrienne Kennedy, the effort to detach color from race—commendable as it may be—labors ineffectually under the burden of the past. A quest for color without race impels the wonderfully named Baby Suggs in Morrison's Beloved, for example, who finds herself so horrified with the cruelty of the slave system that she takes to her bed to study the harmlessness of lavender, pink, blue, yellow, and green. But Baby Suggs's "appetite for color" (4) is less than wholesome, for it attends her relinquishing of the Word, her refusal to preach, and she dies soon after taking to her bed. Color without race cannot sustain the fading, silenced Baby because race—inscribed in black and white on all the legal, religious, scientific, literary documents of print culture—reigns supreme, despite either its fictiveness or Baby's desires. Elsewhere in Morrison's novels, color without race functions destructively, promoting gender bonding at the expense of racial adhesion. A fascinating scene in Paradise dramatizes the effect of switching the lens from color to race on a character named Elder, when he witnesses two men arguing with a woman:
From her clothes, Elder said, he guessed she was a streetwalking woman, and registering contempt for her trade, he felt at first a connection with the shouting men. Suddenly one of the men smashed the woman in her face with his fist. She fell. Just as suddenly the scene slid from everyday color to black and white. Elder said his mouth went dry. The two whitemen turned away from the unconscious Negro woman sprawled on the pavement.... He never got the sight of that whiteman's fist in that colored woman's face out of his mind. Whatever he felt about her trade, he thought about her, prayed for her till the end of his life. (emphasis mine, 94-5)
Everyday color-vision causes Elder to identify with the respectable men against the streetwalking woman, but the raced-perspective of black and white leads him to ally himself with the hurt Negro woman against the abusive whitemen. Efforts to substitute color for race remain doomed for Baby Suggs, for Elder, because they inhabit a rigidly raced world.
By linking the black-and-white mindset to the flimsy unreality of celluloid film and then exhibiting the stranglehold of Hollywood movies over the material and psychological realities of African-American lives, Adrienne Kennedy dramatizes the supreme power of the destructive fictions of race over the physiological facts of color. In one of Kennedy's most formally innovative plays, A Movie Star Has to Star in Black and White, the doomed African-American heroine, Clara, has so internalized the images of Hollywood that white stars of the screen tell the story of her life. A "Negro woman of thirty-three" (according to the stage directions), Clara ignores her surroundings, writes in her notebook, and lets "Her movie stars speak for her" (2086). Those movie stars, played by actresses who "look exactly like their movie roles" (2081), are Bette Davis in Now Voyager, Jean peters in Viva Zapata, and Shelley Winters in A Place in the Sun.
Glamorous white actresses articulating Clara's depression about the conflicts between her dark-skinned father and light-skinned mother, her bleeding after a miscarriage, and her eventual sense of drowning in an unhappy marriage accentuate the surrealism of a life shaped by a culture assigning the African-American woman writer a bit part. The allure of Hol- lywood's black and white pictures drains Clara of any color so her famous- ly seductive white avatars express her interiority. In other words, her sub- jectivity has been undermined by an industry that has colonized her consciousness. Unlike the voiceless white actors, the white actresses can speak "for" Clara precisely because they suffer the wounds of gender, men- strual and miscarriage bleeding she endures as well. As the black blood of movie stars spatters on sheets exhibited on the stage, as the black letters of Clara spill out on the sheets of her pages, Kennedy insists on the persistent tensions between maternal procreativity and aesthetic creativity. Lest we assume that menstruation, pregnancy, and miscarriage are a cross-racial problem for all women, however, the audience is constantly reminded that the actresses' obsession reflects the personal suffering Clara has projected onto them, a projection that robs Bette Davis, Jean peters, and Shelley Win- ters of Otherness. Merely doubles, the film stars remain images, as if white- ness itself is only a fetishized mirage or simulacra (Diamond i38). They therefore cease to provide an escape from or alternative to Clara's pain, merely reflecting it back to her.
It seems fitting that the brilliant performance artist Anna Deavere Smith began the research that issued in her ongoing series of dramatic creations— On the Road: A Search for Mmerican Character-in I982 when she was direct- ing a production of A Movie Star Has to Star in Black and White (Richards 40). Cross-racial identification, which both Morrison and Kennedy study, combines with the multiplication of categories of alterity in Deavere Smith's work to generate forms of empathy that do not usurp the Otherness of peo- ple from unassimilated immigrant groups. For Fires in the Mirror (I993) and Twilight 0994), Deavere Smith conducted interviews with participants in racially charged conflicts and then she learned to replicate their words, man- nerisms, and appearances in theatrical performances of people who become her varied cast of characters.22 Murderous moments of violence witnessed by private citizens, rioting, name-calling, internecine disputes between judicial, police, political, and community spokespeople fuel what Cornell West calls the "xenophobic frenzy" behind the testimonies that are given and then per- formed verbatim in what he terms a "kind of polyphony of perspectives" (F xviii-xix).
To the extent that Deavere Smith becomes an "empty vessel, a repeater" (F xxv), she hopes that "the reenactment, or the reiteration of a person's words would also teach [her] about that person" (xxvi): "The frame of refer- ence for the other would be the other," she declares; "Learning about the other by being the other requires the use of all aspects of memory, the mem- ory of the body, mind, and heart, as well as the words" (xxvii). No one is more self-conscious than the artist herself about how her work rebuts the premises of identity politics:
If only a man can speak for a man, a woman for a woman, a Black person for all Black people, then we, once again, inhibit the spirit of theater, which lives in the bridge that makes unlikely aspects seem connected. The bridge doesn't make them the same, it merely displays how two unlikely aspects are related. These relationships of the unlikely, these connections of things that don't fit together are crucial to American theater and culture if theater and culture plan to help us assemble our obvious differences (xxix).
Because she displays the dissonance between herself and, say, a white male personage she plays, Deveare Smith neither expects her audience to identify her as a white man, nor identifies herself as a white man. Besides being delu- sive, such a form of identification—mentally becoming what one is not— could be viewed as a form of arrogation. Instead, she fosters the audience's identification with her and with the white man to whom she relates through her unlikely impersonation.
Recorded on video and therefore easier to analyze, Fires in the Mirror, about the 1991 conflict between Lubavitchers and blacks in the Crown Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn, documents reactions to the killing of seven-year-old Gavin Cato by one of the cars in the Hasidic rebbe's proces- sion, followed by the fatal stabbing of the twenty-nine-year-old Yankel Rosenbaum by a group of young black men. Deavere Smith plays A1 Sharp- ton and Angela Davis as well as Letty Cottin Pogrebin and Rabbi Joseph Spielman, Gavin Cato's mourning father as well as Yankel Rosenbaum's grieving brother. No stasis, no fixity, but a volatile assemblage of personae parade before our view, some endowed with an exceptional degree of indi- viduation, others teetering on the edge of stereotype. The "bridge" is Dea- vere Smith's own body, on which and through which she convenes a host of manifest differences in diction, lexicon, hairstyle, costume, education, body language, physical ease, rhetorical control, temperament, etc.
Blasting racial and sexual essentialism, the multiplication of differences—some classifiable like education, but those related to personality highly intangible—emphasizes divergences among blacks, variations among Jews, despite the fact that the media presented each group as monolithic. Deavere Smith, by encouraging her audience to look closely and listen intently to a diverse assortment of unique beings, demonstrates that "not every yarmulke is the same kind of yarmulke," that the black men whom she interviewed talked with "accents which were a mixture of bold Brooklynese with rap hand gestures, and Caribbean lilts" (xxxvi). If (as Tania Modleski suggests) the actress conjures up the image of "a spiritual medium" ("DJ" 60), if (as the actress herself puts it) she manipulates the "spiritual power" of words to "become possessed" ("WBY" 192), then the bridging presence she herself sustains amidst her various roles functions something like the reincarnation that huants the heroines to be found in the novels of Alice Walker or Octavia Butler. As in those fictions, in which one woman feels herself to be a composite of many people, and as in the more generalized image of the woman as spiritualist (or medium or witch), Deavere Smith's incarnations emphasize the links between people who themselves do not feel connected and whose racism often prohibits any acknowledgment of similitude. This connectedness—so evident to the drama's spectator, so indiscernible to the dramatized participant—promotes what we might call xenophilia (a term strikingly absent from most dictionaries).
Not the printed word but the physical intonations, accents, and rhythms of speech enable Deavere Smith to be perceived at one and the same time as the light-skinned African-American actress embodying all the parts and as a militant Muslim leader or a Lubavitcher mother. Visual ambiguities defy the conceptual categories upon which conventional sexual and racial languages depend. Because an actual, named person has been recreated through each of the characters' monologues, we see not only the actress playing the part and the persona she plays but also the shadowy real person being both eclipsed and evoked, caricatured and characterized by the performance. Each of the brief narrative skits, then, simultaneously contains three presences—actress, character, real person—and at least two of these can be male and female, black and white. Added volatility comes from the abrupt switches between sketches: sharp dislocations between soliloquies disrupt notions of continuity, emphasizing the differences of the opinions being aired. With no hope of closure, the spectator shifts through a series of emotionally moving identifications with characters who often cannot relate to each other, no less inhabit the same settings. An audience member who finds herself sympathizing with people tragically hurt and enraged by the injuries inflicted by racism may simultaneously and distressingly sense herself to be the target of that baffled pain and anger.
While inside the variously located soliloquies (a synagogue, a community outreach center), each character identifies as a particular ethnic type, members of the audience may find themselves empathizing with a cacophony of conflicting perspectives. Using the language of Richard Rorty, we might say that no "metavocabulary" ("which somehow takes account of all possible vocabularies") emerges to allow us "to step outside the various vocabularies" we have heard deployed (xvi). Instead, Deavere Smith teaches her audience how to "juggle several descriptions of the same event without asking which one was right—to see redescription as a tool rather than a claim to have discovered essence" (39). For, as Rorty puts it about the cognitive functions of irony and nominalism, the aim is not some transcendent or final truth but instead "an expanding repertoire of alternative descriptions" (39-40). By shifting the race-color dialogue out of the historical past and beyond the narratives that baffled the characters of Morrison and Kennedy, Deavere Smith's vertiginous drama produces a kaleidoscope of juxtaposed identities sometimes at odds, sometimes in accord, so that spectators can find no stable overview but must instead make room for the jostling registers spoken with such passionate conviction that the actress's impersonations of race and gender paradoxically emphasize for some viewers the recalcitrance of their markings.
The affliction suffered by many of Deavere Smith's characters can convince other members of her audience that no just recompense could ever repair the suffering racism has inflicted, that the very catharsis the theatrical event seeks to prompt may have arrived too late in American history. Yet to the extent that the cast of characters emerges through one body—that of Deavere Smith—and that their composite voices elegaically mourn and thereby memorialize the dead, this woman artist herself becomes the oracular priestess, the shaman of America's commitment to e pluribus unum, a composite of Walt Whitman and Jack Kerouac on the road to becoming a cosmos.
(Continues...)
Table of Contents
I. Enormous Changes at the Last Minute1. Introduction
2. Women Artists and Contemporary Racechanges
3. Lesbian Studies 101 (As Taught by Creative Writers)
4. Eating the Bread of Affliction: Judaism and Feminism
5. The Graying of Professor Erma Bombeck
II. Contending Forces
6. What Ails Feminist Criticism?
7. Feminist Misogyny: or, The Paradox of "It Takes One to Know One''
8. A Chapter on the Future
What People are Saying About This
Envisioning, as a new century approaches, a renewal of feminist energies -- those of internal dissent and contention as well as those of coalition and solidarity -- Susan Gubar's lucid, unflinching argument for a feminist future is sure to play an important role in securing that future for us all.
— Lee Edelman, professor of English, Tufts University
—Susannah Herschel, Dartmouth College
A magnificent description of the dilemmas facing feminist theory as it enters the new millennium. Jewish and African American feminists, in particular, will be fascinated [Gubar's] analyses of the configuration of gender, race, and ethnicity int he multicultural agenda.
In this lively, eminently readable overview, Susan Gubar takes the pulse of feminism and women's studies, as well as gay and lesbian studies, at a time of increasing division within the ranks. A provocative summing up for the next millennium.
— Gerald Graff, associate dean of Liberal Arts and Sciences, University of Illinois at Chicago
Susan Gubar, one of the twentieth century's pioneers in feminist literary studies, provides us with a magnificent description of the dilemmas facing feminist theory as it enters the new millennium. Jewish and African-American feminists, in particular, will be fascinated by her analyses of the configuration of gender, race, and ethnicity in the multicultural agenda.
— Susannah Heschel, Eli Black Professor of Jewish Studies, Dartmouth College