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 Posted: Tue 10 May 2005 16:13 Post subject: Scholars Explore Blurred Lines of Race, Gender & Ethnicity |
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The author here makes an the pretense of questioning the status quo, but she is, in fact, enforcing it. She presents the accusation that Anatole Broyard was "black" as fact. She also accepts the anti-passing novel and the myth of the "light-skinned black" as truth.
| Quote: | From the issue dated July 11, 1997
Chronicle of Higher Education
Scholars Explore Blurred Lines of Race, Gender, and Ethnicity
By Karen J. Winkler
In the early 20th century, a Jewish boy named Asa Yoelson donned blackface and built a successful music and acting career as Al Jolson. In 1993, the actor Ted Danson sparked a storm of protest when he wore blackface to a Friars Club roast. Is that progress?
In Charles W. Chesnutt's 1899 novel The Conjure Woman, a slaveholder dreamed of becoming black. Did that vision help the white character -- and readers -- better understand the plight of slaves?
The jazz musician Billy Tipton married at least five times and was the father of three adopted children; only at his death did family and fans learn that he was a she. The masquerade opened professional doors for Tipton, but was it demeaning?
Elizabeth Stern, the illegitimate daughter of a Welsh Baptist and a German Lutheran, used the persona of the daughter of an Eastern European rabbi when she wrote I Am a Woman -- and a Jew, a best-selling novel of immigrant life. The 1926 book is still taught in college classes on women and Judaism. Has it fostered stereotypes of Jews?
A burgeoning scholarly literature is raising those questions today. Scholars who study culture are fascinated with crossing the boundaries of race, gender, or ethnicity. They are talking about transvestism, about impersonation, about"passing," about racial mixtures -- all complications to the notion of stable identity. For many scholars, discussions of crossing hold out a hope of moving beyond some of today's most contentious issues about race and gender.
Check out recent scholarly titles: From Marjorie Garber's 1992 Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing & Cultural Anxiety to Susan Gubar's just-published Racechanges: White Skin, Black Face in American Culture, crossing boundaries is big. Look at papers given at the most recent meeting of the American Studies Association:"The Whiteness of the Jew in Blackface," "Crooners and Gangsters: Love and Violence in Black/Italian Crossover,""Masculinities in Motion: Transvestism and Migration."
Last fall, graduate students at Columbia University sponsored a much-discussed conference called"Passing" -- more evidence, scholars say, of the many dissertations on the subject now in progress.
"I'm still surprised by the changed climate for this kind of work," says Werner Sollors, a professor of English and Afro-American studies at Harvard University. His new book, Neither Black Nor White Yet Both: Thematic Explorations of Interracial Literature, spans texts from ancient times to the present that have explored mixed identity. It calls attention to a long tradition of books that do not fit neatly into such categories as African-American literature or white culture.
Dr. Sollors remembers a literary conference a number of years ago, when a speaker read aloud the description of a fictional mixed-race character."Almost everyone in the audience laughed," he says."When I asked what was so funny, there was a moment of embarrassed silence. That wouldn't happen today."
Indeed, scholarly interest in crossing is the product of converging trends. On one level, crossovers are ubiquitous in contemporary culture, crying out for study. White suburban youths imitate ghetto dress and music; Dennis Rodman preens in a wedding dress; Robert Colescott plays on race to transform well-known works of art -- for example, turning a picture of George Washington crossing the Delaware into one of George Washington Carver. A 1993 cover of Time shows faces from various racial and ethnic groups morphing into a composite "New Face of America."
Many Americans are also increasingly unwilling to accept society's definition of their identity. In a 1993 piece published in Transition, the performance artist and Wellesley College professor of philosophy Adrian M.S. Piper described the conflicting emotions and caustic comments she has endured as a light-skinned, white-looking woman who identifies herself as black. Growing up, she was rejected by black children; in graduate school, a white professor accused her of trying to cash in on affirmative action.
"So no matter what I do or do not do about my racial identity, someone is bound to feel uncomfortable," she concluded."But I have resolved that it is no longer going to be me."
Elaine K. Ginsberg, a professor of English at West Virginia University, chose to end the collection of essays that she edited, Passing and the Fictions of Identity (1996), with Dr. Piper's piece."More and more people want to be able to say, This is who I am -- I don't fit into your categories," says Dr. Ginsberg."Scholarship has picked up on that."
The new work on crossing also grows out of 20 years of trends in the humanities. By challenging traditional gender identities, feminist research and"queer studies" have opened the door to the exploration of crossovers. Many of today's scholars working on posing, passing, and impostors credit Judith Butler's argument about gender and"performativity" (from her 1990 book, Gender Trouble) with stimulating their own research.
In like fashion, African-American studies has highlighted the issue of racial identity. For years, black writers and scholars, from W.E.B. Du Bois to Toni Morrison, have urged Americans to consider how an awareness of black people has helped shape white identity. Now some scholars are taking that admonition into studies of"whiteness," while others examine black influences on white culture.
Still others are looking at impersonation. Dr. Gubar's Racechanges, for example, takes up the myriad ways that whites have imitated and impersonated blacks in the 20th century. A professor of English at Indiana University, she has been in England this summer. She says her mother recently called to say that bookstores in New York are selling her book in their sections on African-American studies."At first I thought, Hey, my book is about white people," Dr. Gubar says. "But then I realized that it fits, because my work is so indebted to African-American studies."
In another sense, however, recent work on crossing and mixing identities also attempts to go beyond African-American and gender studies -- and beyond the identity politics that an increasing number of scholars say has run its course.
A reviewer in The Nation noted that Dr. Gubar's"exuberant, full-contact absorption in the details and lore of transracial adventure in literature, art, and the movies is tonic for nerves battered by Galloping Otherness."
"For a long time," Dr. Gubar says,"people were afraid to talk about crossing. They had been taught by right-minded academics to speak only as a member of a correct and authentic category.
"But the history of cross-racial and cross-gender impostors suggests that identity politics may be a fiction -- we're all hybrids. People are ready to hear that today."
"A number of us are looking for a middle ground in culture," agrees Dr. Sollors.
That's the optimistic interpretation. Ann duCille, the author of Skin Trade -- on how America peddles racial and gender stereotypes, from Barbie dolls to breakfast foods -- is more pessimistic."Scholars like Susan Gubar have done important work, with wonderful close readings of texts," says Dr. duCille, a professor of American and African-American literature at the University of California at San Diego."But black writers have been talking about crossing the boundaries of identity for a long time."
"It's taken the interest of white scholars to make the issue important in the academic world," she says.
"There's a basic naivete at work here," says bell hooks, a professor of English at City University of New York City College."So many scholars seem to have a fantasy that we can solve racism or sexism simply by emphasizing mixing and crossing. Race and gender aren't as fluid as they think."
That is the crux of debate about crossing: Is it transformative? Transgressive? Appropriative? Denigrating?
The manufacturer of the best-selling Barbie doll has brought out a variety of"ethnically correct" versions, but in fact just a few stereotypical features have been added to the white version, notes Dr. duCille."The new Barbies represent a way of denying that race matters," Dr. duCille says. They are less a sign of a new multicultural society than evidence that white society can deal with race only in superficial ways, she argues.
Laura Browder, a professor of English at Virginia Commonwealth University, has looked at what she calls"ethnic impostors" -- people such as Elizabeth Stern, who pretended in her fictional autobiography to be an immigrant Jew.
In a book due out next year, Dr. Browder argues that posing fulfills complex psychological needs for the poser: Stern had been sexually abused by a Jewish foster father and, like many other victims, took the identity of her oppressor.
Ethnic impostors play a role in society as well."They appear in clusters, at times when American identity is up for grabs -- like the period of massive immigration -- and people are nervous," Dr. Browder says."By their very nature, impostors succeed by acting within an accepted tradition and reaffirming stereotypes."
"It's a question of at whose expense mimicry comes," says Michael Rogin, a professor of political science at the University of California at Berkeley."And who profits."
In last year's Blackface, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting Pot, Dr. Rogin argued that Jewish immigrants in the early 20th century put on blackface in the movies as a way of becoming American. Calling the American heritage of slavery their own, they defined themselves as white by being able to put on -- and take off -- blackface. And they made money doing so, while black actors were shut out of the early cinema, Dr. Rogin noted.
Other scholars are not quite so critical of crossing. Its cultural uses have changed over time, Dr. Gubar says. When blackface first showed up on-screen, she notes, it often served to discredit blacks. In Birth of a Nation (1915), white actors blacked up to pose as sexual predators and criminals. Al Jolson's The Jazz Singer (1927) demeaned blacks as boyish Uncle Toms.
But today, Dr. Gubar continues, there are signs of change. Painters such as Robert Colescott mock racial stereotypes. Performance artists such as Anna Deveare Smith take on the personas of Hasidic Jews, Korean shopkeepers, blacks, and still others.
"That kind of thing holds out hope that racial divisions are mutable, that we can move toward a post-racist culture," says Dr. Gubar.
Other scholars say it would be a mistake to forget how much fun impersonations can be. Diane Wood Middlebrook, a professor of English at Stanford University, is writing a book on Billy Tipton, the jazz musician, that is due out next spring. She calls Tipton an"opportunist" who masqueraded as a man to gain entry into the man's world of jazz.
But more was at stake than career success. Dr. Middlebrook places Tipton in the context of lesbian culture and speculates that she thoroughly enjoyed playing the role of a man."The people I talked to who had been fooled by Billy said that she had given them so much pleasure, they wished she had gotten away with it."
Scholars are asking a host of other questions about crossing. If you write about someone such as Billy Tipton, who kept her identity secret, are you violating her privacy?"The dead are fair game," Dr. Middlebrook says, but some scholars worry about"outing," even posthumously. When the literary critic Henry Louis Gates, Jr., recently revealed in The New Yorker that the late cultural critic Anatole Broyard was black, some people said Broyard had been entitled to present himself as he wished.
If you emphasize the ease of crossing identities, are you homogenizing cultures -- as many critics say the Time composite face of the"New American" did?
Moreover, is there a fundamental asymmetry in crossing? Is it different for blacks than for whites? John Howard Griffin, whose 1961 book Black Like Me described traveling the South while posing as a black man, wasn't trying to convince black people that he was black. He was trying to tell white people about black life. But novels such as Nella Larsen's 1929 Passing, featuring black people passing as white, stress the anxiety of being found out -- and the guilt of denying one's race.
In 1993, Eric Lott, a professor of English at the University of Virginia, wrote an acclaimed book, Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class. It argued that 19th-century minstrel shows were racist -- allowing vulnerable white workers to feel superior to black people -- as well as transgressive, filled with white envy of and identification with black sexuality.
Subsequent scholarship left Dr. Lott with doubts."When all the books came out saying that crossing is part of what a culture lets you do safely, without threatening established norms, I began to worry that I had been wrong to talk about transgression," he says."Now Susan Gubar's book makes me more willing to stick to my guns."
His ambivalence marks most of the current scholarship on the subject."Crossing," he says,"is a complex issue that is by no means settled."
A Selection of Recent and Forthcoming Books on"Crossing"
Laura Browder, Ethnic Performance and American Identities, University of North Carolina Press, 1998.
Ann duCille, Skin Trade, Harvard University Press, 1996.
Lesley Ferris, ed., Crossing the Stage: Controversies on Cross-Dressing, Routledge, 1993.
Marjorie Garber, Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing & Cultural Anxiety, Routledge, 1992.
Elaine K. Ginsberg, ed., Passing and the Fictions of Identity, Duke University Press, 1996.
Susan Gubar, Racechanges: White Skin, Black Face in American Culture, Oxford University Press, 1997.
Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in 19th Century America, Oxford University Press, 1997.
Diane Wood Middlebrook, A biography of Billy Tipton (no title yet), Houghton Mifflin, 1998.
Stephen Orgel, Impersonations: The Performance of Gender in Shakespeare's England, Cambridge University Press, 1996
Michael Rogin, Blackface, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting Pot, University of California Press, 1996.
Werner Sollors, Neither Black Nor White Yet Both: Thematic Explorations of Interracial Literature, Oxford University Press, 1997.
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