Let It Pass: Changing the Subject, Once Again

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1-1997

Pamela L. Caughie Loyola University Chicago, [email protected]

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Recommended Citation Caughie, PL. "Let It Pass: Changing the Subject, Once Again." PMLA 112(1), 1997.

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Let It Pass: Changing the Subject, Once Again

PAMELA L. CAUGHIE teaches Unlike the stereotypical feminist model that suggests women best come to voice in an .. I students to work in an twentieth-century literature and atmosphere of safety ., encourage ... atmosphere where they may be afraid or see themselves at risk. theory at Loyola University, Chi- bell hooks, TalkingBack cago. She is author of Virginia Woolf and Postmodernism(U of Illinois P 1991) and is complet- the a ing manuscript of book, HIS ESSAY attempts to intervene theoretically and pragmati- Passing and Pedagogy:The Dy- cally at a critical moment in our profession, when literary stud- namics of Responsibility (U of ies in colleges and universities across the United States is increasingly Illinois P), which includes a ver- becoming culture studies.' This transformation over the past two decades in the social, philosophical, and political bases of the humanities is due sion of this essay. Another ver- partly to the academy's efforts to acknowledge diversity, by institution- sion of the essay will appear in alizing multiculturalism and various "studies programs" (women's stud- In Other Words:Feminism and ies, gay studies, ethnic studies, composition studies) in response to the Composition Studies, edited by influx of nontraditional students since the early 1970s, and partly to Susan C. Jarratt and Lynn Wor- poststructuralism's efforts to theorize difference and to destabilize the sham (MLA, forthcoming). very categories of identity on which those studies programs are founded. Such programs, particularly women's studies, have traditionally been devoted to a humanist concept of the subject as "source and agent of conscious action or meaning" (P. Smith xxxiii-xxxiv) and committed to opening this subject position to previously marginalized groups. In contrast, poststructuralist theories, including some feminist theories, have revealed the humanist subject to be a sham insofar as it is the effect, not the origin, of representation. As this essay suggests, when antifounda- tional theories that deconstruct the self converge with studies programs that revive it, anxiety arises over the positions we find ourselves in as scholars and teachers in the newly configured university.2 Culture studies would seem to offer a pedagogy for working through the tensions between these two perspectives on the subject since issues of identity formation and of subject position are central not only to its object of study but to its method of inquiry. Culture studies has shifted

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the focus of literarystudies from interpreting,trans- In recentwritings, I have deployed the termpass- mitting, or preserving individual texts considered ing to describe our subjectpositions in postmodern representative of particularcultures to analyzing culture and by extension in a culture studies para- cultureas a historically specific ensemble of social digm.4Passing traditionallyrefers to the practiceof practices and signifying systems that provide, in representingoneself-for social, economic, or po- Mary Poovey's words, "the terms through which litical reasons-as a member of a particulargroup humansunderstand our world [and] from which we not consideredone's own. Historically,the practice derive our identity" ("Criticism"618). Given that is mainly, though not exclusively, associated with the reading,writing, and teachingwe do as academ- the assumptionof a white identityby light-skinned ics partially constitute the cultural formations it AfricanAmericans. Passing is generallyimplicated seeks to interrogate, culture studies necessarily in a racist social organization.The painful psychic takes the work of teachersand scholarsas one of its consequences of passing attestedto in many narra- tives objects of scrutiny.Concerned with "the complex are corporeally depicted in Agnieszka Hol- land's 1991 film based on Solomon ways in which identity itself is articulated,experi- Europa,Europa, Perel's in which the a enced, and deployed"(Nelson, Treichler,and Gross- autobiography, protagonist, German tries to conceal his from his berg 9) and with the "politics of location" (Faigley Jew, identity Nazi what remains of his 218), culturestudies requires its practitioners"to in- companions by pulling clude in their critical view the conditions of their foreskinover the tip of his penis and tying it in place own existence" at the same time that it identifies with a piece of thread. In its traditionalsense, often carries itself "polemically with certain social constituen- passing pe- connotationsof and cies"-for instance,blacks, women, workers(Bath- jorative deception, dishonesty, When used as a with the rick 323-25). The classroombecomes a site of both betrayal.5 metaphor, opera- tive as, the termcan applyto situationsin which one culturalintervention and continualself-critique. To engages in impersonationfor the purposeof fraud. practice culture studies, as Susan Rubin Suleiman But in my use, passing (without the as) figures the writes in anothercontext, "is to implicate yourself, always slippery difference between standing for your self, in what you write"(2) and what you teach. something (having a firm position) and passing Yet however strong, however sincere, our com- as something (having no position or a fraudulent mitment as literature professors to certain social one), between the strategic adoption of a politi- constituencies and to continual self-critique, when cally empoweredidentity (e.g., when blacks pass as ethnicity becomes "the new frontier,accessible to white) and the disempowering appropriationof a all" (hooks, Yearning52), when men become femi- potentially threateningdifference (e.g., when men nists and become when African straights queer, pass as feminist), and between what one professes Americanstudies and women's studies become cul- as a teacher(the positions one assumes in the class- tural when a feminist can studies, prominent write, room, often speaking for another) and how one is "I to wonder whetherthere was began any position positioned in a society, an institution, a discourse, from which a white middle-class feminist could say or a classroom. Marking a discrepancy between on the without anything subject [of race] sounding what one professes to be (and what one professes, like white middle-class In exactly [a feminist].... as a writer or teacher) and how one is positioned, which case it be might better not to say anything" passing is risky business-but, as this essay pro- (Miller, "Criticizing"364)-something, it seems, fesses, unavoidable. For there is no occupying a has gone wrong. The practitionersof culture stud- position without passing. Thus I offer passing not ies experience a double bind in which the desire- as a solution to the double bind I outlined above indeed, the imperative-to speak as or for members but as a descriptivetheory of its dynamics. of a particularsocial group conflicts with the anxi- Unlike the more common notions of speakingas eties such a practiceevokes. The writerwho deliber- and speaking for, passing disrupts subject posi- ately assumesanother's position risks being accused tions. The difference between these two ways of of unconsciouslydoing so.3 conceptualizingthe problem is highlighted by two

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sentences that appear on the same page of Linda The impasse between Alcoff's two sentences Alcoff's "The Problem of Speaking for Others," gives rise to the structural dynamics that I term which analyzes many of the issues and impasses I passing. The slippage between the volitional and confront in this essay. For Alcoff, the problem of the performativesubject makes passing inevitable speaking for arises from the recognition that the whenever any I claims to speak for itself.8 Even if "positionality"of the speaker"bears on" the mean- as teachers and critics of culture studies we ac- ing and truth of what the speaker says (an insight knowledge our social locations as multiple and un- that women's studies and AfricanAmerican studies stable, shaped by specific histories and subject to programs were founded on) and that some privi- various representationaltechnologies, we always leged locations are "discursively dangerous" no talk of subject positions and self-critique as if we matterwhat the speaker'sintentions (6-7).6 Realiz- were immune to performanceand thereby resusci- ing the dangers but opposing a retreat from the tate in practice(in grammar)the subjectwe disman- practice of speaking for, Alcoff offers imperatives tle in theory. In this sense, as Mas'ud Zavarzadeh for ensuring that speakers' representationsof oth- and Donald Morton argue (15-16), the practice of ers are responsible. The primaryinjunction is that writing itself may resist the radicalinsights of post- speakersmust interrogatethe effects of their social modern theories, putting us all in the position of locations on what they say (24-26). passing when we speak for ourselves and others. Alcoff's insistence on self-critique combines a Passing is neither something one does (as in per- materialistfocus on specific locations with a post- forming a role) nor somethingone is (a subjectpo- modernistunderstanding of the discursive charac- sition we must account for) but a way of naming ter of subjectivity. The "mediatedcharacter of all and conceptualizingan interpersonal,psychopoliti- representations" (9) is acknowledged in the two cal dynamics that for many of us structuresthe ex- sentences I want to compare: perience of reading, teaching, and writing about literaturetoday.9 Passing is not always and only a WhenI speakfor myself, I amconstructing a possible volitional act that an already positioned subject self, a way to be in the world, and am offering that to chooses to engage in. Passing happens, and it hap- others, whetherI intendto or not, as one possible way pens despite, or more often because of, our sincere to be. efforts to get it right.'? In this essay, I engage performativelywith cul- When I for I am in the "speak myself" participating turaland pedagogicaldebates over the natureof the creationand reproductionof discoursesthrough which subjectby workingthrough the dynamicsof passing my own and other selves are constituted. (21) exemplified in a particularexchange on this issue among feminists, in two student responses to the Alcoff seems to be saying much the same thing 1934 film Imitation of Life, and in Fannie Hurst's in these two sentences, yet the quotation marks novel that inspiredthe film. My purposeis not only around "speak for myself" in the second make the to arguefor a performativeconcept of the I but also, (dia)critical difference. In the first sentence, the I and more important,to show that taking a certain takes for that it can for itself, that it granted speak on the as feminists, cul- can a that there even are position subject-whether occupy subject position, turalcritics, or literatureteachers-is not the same subject positions one can occupy, however self- as acceptingresponsibility for the subjectpositions consciously. In the second sentence, the I is perfor- we assume and put into play in the classroom. mative, constituted in and through speaking, the act of invoking an I. The second sentence reveals the The Subject in Feminism I of the first and the subject of Alcoff's imperatives to be a seduction of Bodies grammar (Butler, 6). The question of women as the subject of feminism raises The one who writes the first sentence forgets the I the possibility that theremay not be a subject who stands of the second, writing as if one could be immune to "before"the lavwawaiting representationin or by the law. the effects of performance.7 JudithButler, Gender Trouble

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Two prominent debates among feminists in the provide a pretext for analyzing the dynamics of 1990s have centeredon the viability of postmoder passing in culturalcriticism and criticalpedagogy." theories for feminist politics and on the political Homans criticizes certainfeminists (Diana Fuss, implications of the use white feminists make, in Donna Haraway,and JudithButler) for appropriat- their writing and teaching, of black women's texts. ing texts by "women of color" (Homans's term) to These debates are not unrelated, since black and figure a postmoderntheory of subjectivitythat cri- white feminists alike have accused some white fem- tiques "bodily or biological based theories of gen- inists of exploiting the "fracturedpublic identi- der"and identity(82). Citing only the "postmodern" ties" (Berlant 121) of African Americanwomen to aspects of the texts they appropriate,these theorists, promote a new postmodern subjectivity. Whereas Homanscharges, downplay the texts' ambivalence. twenty years ago white feminists were accused They ignore that the works in fact position them- (fairly) of ignoringblack women's writings and ex- selves on both sides of the identitydebate, invoking periences in their theories, today they are accused a naturalor alreadyexisting identity and revealing of turningto black women's writings and bodies to an awarenessthat such an identity is always "in the rereferentializeor rematerializean increasinglyab- processof being made"(79). Homansrevalues these stractand disengagedtheoretical feminism. Twenty texts' naturalizing tendencies, the ways in which years ago, before the institution of culture studies "womenof color" reclaim themselves as embodied in the United States academy,one of two mutually subjects.The texts promotea concept of identityas exclusive responsesto these chargesof neglect pre- embodiment:they constructthe black female body vailed: to add the particularoppressions faced by as natural (86). To use these texts as examples black women to a universaland liberationisttheory of postmodern theories of the subject, which for of gender oppressionor to admit, as PatriciaMeyer Homans are theories of disembodiment,is to deny Spacks did in The Female Imagination,that a white the texts' claim to the naturalwhile reembodying middle-class woman could not theorize about ex- theories of dis-embodiment, making "women of periences she had not had (see Carby, ch. 1). In color"do the culturalwork they have always done- contrast, contemporarycultural critics, who prob- namely,embodying the body for white culture(73). lematize the very boundariesof social identities on As an example, Homans contrasts treatments which such responses rested, are more likely to at- of SojournerTruth by Donna Haraway and Alice tend to "the operations of race in the feminine" Walker.Haraway urges us to be like SojournerTruth, (Abel 471). Today we hear less about the failure of who becomes in heressay a figurefor a "nongeneric, the (white) female imaginationto projectitself into nonoriginal humanity" (qtd. in Homans 78). For unfamiliarexperiences than about the exposure of Haraway, Homans says, the body of the black white (female) desires in that very effort-to speak woman is a "resourcefor metaphor"(77). Walker, as or for black women. in contrast, achieves a "personal identification" Two recentarticles by white feminist critics dem- with SojournerTruth, claiming to be her. Whereas onstratenot only the requirementof culturestudies Haraway's figurative language is "an alibi for de- that we speak on behalf of certain social constitu- materializingthe [black] female body"(78), Walk- encies while engaging in self-critique but also the er's identificationis a way of (re)claimingthat body. double bind created by this imperative. Margaret In Homan'sreading, Walker and Truthstand before Homans in "'Women of Color' Writersand Femi- the law (of representation),bearing an unmediated nist Theory"and ElizabethAbel in "BlackWriting, relation to the black female body-embodying it White Reading: Race and the Politics of Feminist naturally,as if their identity were so close to nature Interpretation"critique white feminists'use of black that it did not pass throughthe filter of culturaldis- women's texts and are, to differing degrees, self- courses, those "powerfulinstitutionalized rhetorics conscious, indeed nervous, about the double bind that providethe terms in which to representthe self of theirown positions as white feminist critics writ- as a subject in relationto others"(Brodkey, "Peda- ing on black women's texts. Togetherthese essays gogy" 138). Yet the ambivalence Homans notices

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in black women's writingswould also suggest these (76). The troublingquestion, as Homans acknowl- writers'recognition of the filter. edges, is whether this cultural problematic autho- Abel's critique of BarbaraJohnson follows the rizes or invalidates (or both) her position in her same lines as Homans's reading of Haraway and essay. While Homansnever explicitly returnsto this Butler. Johnson ignores in Zora Neale Hurston's question, she implies an answer. She comes close writings "a possible belief in, or desire for belief to suggesting (as does Nancy Miller in the remark in, a black identity,"Abel argues, because Johnson cited above) that white feminists should have noth- understands race as rhetorical rather than literal ing to do with-or at least do nothing with-the (480). For Johnson, representationsof a black es- writing of "women of color." Ironically, since she sence operate within "specific interlocutionarysit- uses such writing,this argumentwould put Homans uation[s]" and are "mattersof strategy ratherthan in the position of passing as black. But the differ- truth" (qtd. in Abel 480). By dereferentializing ence between Homansand the feminists she attacks race, Abel says, Johnson displaces "a discourse on lies not in the fact that they use black women's race" with "a discourse on positionality," a move writingsto defend their positions on the subjectbut that enables the white deconstructionistto write as in the positions they take. As Abel points out, for the black novelist. By as, Abel means not only "in Homans all women share the culturalcondition of the manner of" (for she has just compared John- embodiment, which is devalued because the sym- son's and Hurston'stechniques of framingtheir es- bolic register(figuration) depends on the exclusion says) but also "in the subject position of." For if of "thefemale (maternal)body" (literalness)(484). race is simply a matterof figuration,a white critic Thus, it is precisely the construction of the black can assume the position of a black writer.Drawing female body as naturalthat not only makes Alice on Johnson's critique of male philosophers who Walker's claim to (be) Truthtenable but also en- position themselves as women, Abel points out that ables Homans to represent a theory of embodied Johnson, while capable of positioning herself phil- subjectivitythrough Walker while at the same time osophically as a black woman,cannot be positioned saving herself from her own criticismof white fem- politically as black. Failing to make this distinc- inists who use black women to embody their theo- tion, Johnson risks "dislocating race from histori- ries. Homans exonerates herself from her racially cally accreteddifferences in power"(482-83). charged accusations against others by claiming to Homans and Abel demonstrate effectively that use black women's figures of embodimentinstead adopting a certain theoretical position on the sub- of making the women figures for her position on ject (in this case, a reputedly postmodernist posi- embodiment(which happens to coincidewith theirs). tion) is not the same as taking responsibility for Yet Homans'seffort to reclaim or reliteralizethe one's own subjectposition as enacted in one's writ- black woman'sbody, as she questions "thepolitical ing, and to this extent they advanceone argumentI utility of argumentsthat dissociate feminism from am makingabout passing. And both reveal,to recall the body" (87), does not save her from charges of Abel's phrase, "the operations of race in the femi- appropriationbut implicates her in an instance of nine." But what interests me are the solutions Ho- passing far more audacious than the examples she mans and Abel present to the problem of writing cites. Characterizingpostmodern feminists as the across racial differences, the ways in which they exploitative white mistress whose work is done by try to save themselves, as well as (white) feminist black women, Homans casts herself in the role of criticism, from exposing themselves-that is, from the domestic. As she puts it, black women in her passing in the pejorativesense. essay "are working . . . for themselves at least as Accordingto Homans,the "culturalproblematic" much as for me. Perhapsit could even be said that I in white feminist writings on black women's texts am workingfor them"(88). The rhetoricof domes- is both "a problemof race relationsin the academy" tic service serves Homans's interests in the same and partof "the widespreaddebate over the uses of way she claims black women's historically consti- postmodernisttheory for feministpolitical practice" tuted identities serve postmodernfeminists' inter-

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ests. The rhetorical gesture allows her to pass not forge a gender alliance" across race (to speak for) only as the domestic (workingfor others)but also as (485). Black and white writers meet in sharedfigu- a black woman, speaking as and for black women rality for Johnson;black and white women meet in in the pages of New Literary History and in this sharedliterality for Homans. Both feminists, Abel feminist debate over the subject. In the name of re- continues,use black women to legitimatetheir own claiming embodiment,Homans embodies another's positions, and for both, race is "a salient source of position and then uses that figurativeposition to at- fantasiesand allegiancesthat shape" white women's tack a theory of figuration.The rhetoric of her as- reading of black women's writing (486, 497). All sertion is incompatible with its explicit meaning, these efforts to read across racial lines are for Abel and her performance(her assumptionof an identity) forms of passing, and in the end, all passing fails comes into conflict with the identity she would as- because "our inability to avoid inscribing racially sume (take for granted). inflectedinvestments and agendaslimits white fem- I do not mean to deny the value of Homans'ses- inism's capacity either to impersonateblack femi- say, especially in its attention to the writings of nism, and potentially render it expendable, or to black feminist theorists. Rather, my point is that counter its specific credibility" (497). Instead of there is in the essay an incompatibilitybetween her deflecting these racial investments onto particular rhetoricand her meaning, her performanceand her feminists,Abel calls for a particularpractice among theory.This is, I argue, a function of the dynamics white feminists reading black women's writing: to that I have identified as inherent in the cultural provide"thick descriptions" of black women's texts problematicthat Homans sees as the problemto be and to engage in continualself-critique. resolved.Failing to interrogatehow this problematic In the opening of her essay, Abel practices self- inflects her writing (the ways in which she may be critique,embarrassingly exposing her own "racially passing), Homansdisplaces the generalfear thatthe specific investments"in her readingof Toni Morri- essence of feminism (not just a shared concept of son's story "Recitatif."For Abel, self-critique de- womanbut also the idea thatwomen sharethe same pends on confession, and the confessional I is the positions) is at risk in postmodernitywith the more guilty I. This I-whether Abel's or Nancy Miller's specific anxiety that "women of color" are being or Descartes's-responds to the anxiety of finding denied the opportunityto representthemselves be- that the I is not what it thinks (i.e., that it is a fraud) cause whitefeminists have unfair access to the means by trying to masterthe self, hailing us right back to of representing theory in the academy and unfair the Enlightenmentnotion of the subject before the access to "race"as, in hooks's words,"the new fron- law. The belief that we can and must rid ourselves tier."'2 I do not refute this specific claim, but I of unruly desires before we can write responsibly question the effort to get out of this structureby re- about others is not unlike the desire for an un- claiming the body in the name of "womenof color." markedposition that characterizesEnlightenment In calling for "thick descriptions"as a more vi- discourses. Both presuppose the self-determining, able feminist practice (496) and in engaging the rationalsubject of humanism.Abel's call for an al- writingsof feminists of differenttheoretical persua- ternative practice for feminist criticism assumes sions, Abel at least potentiallydirects her attention that honest individuals,who are coherent,compre- to feminist criticism as an institutionrather than to hending subjects, can give an honest account of a particularkind of feminism. Analyzing the work themselves (see Poovey, "Feminism"37, 42). For of Homans,Johnson, and SusanWillis, Abel argues Abel, as for Homans and Miller,the subjectin fem- that no matter what theoretical position they take, inism is already there, constituted by her (white) their readings across racial lines are marked by desires and exposing herself at every turn. white desires. Comparing Johnson and Homans, In Abel's and Homans's analyses, passing is Abel writes that whereas "privilegingthe figurative a charge to level against others, an illegitimate enables the white reader[Johnson] to achieve figu- subject position, or a practice to be consciously rative blackness"(to speak as), "privilegingthe lit- avoided through persistent self-critique. Isolating eral enables the white woman reader [Homans] to the categories of race and gender from other social

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determinants,as both women tend to do, does not contemporary),thereby renderingthem incapable invalidate the insights provided by their analyses, of analyzing the import of postmodernismfor the but it does mean that neither critic is capable of multiple subject positions that any person can in- analyzing the way in which passing originates in habit and that make up the body politic (see Wicke the cultural problematicthat Homans identifies as 30; Harper,Framing 90-91). This debatecan make a problemof race relationsin the academy and as a students feel they must get it right, say the right consequenceof postmoderntheory and culture. Suf- things, make the right moves, and avoid revealing fering guilt over prior exclusionary practices and too much of themselves. Yet, contradictorily,what anxiety aboutthe precariousnessof identityin post- women's studies, African American studies, and modernculture, some white feminists seek comfort composition studies-as responses to the influx of in confessions that aim to reclaim the subjectin the nontraditionalstudents into the academy-have his- name of those who in part have brought about the torically sought to do is to allow more exposure of crisis of identity in feminism and in the general the self in writing. As forms of critical pedagogy, culture. Indeed, practicing self-critique as confes- feminism and culture studies must resist efforts to sional seems to intensify white writers'tendency to reclaim "a sovereign, self-aware consciousness at use blacks "as a way of talking about and policing the center of the composing act," in practice as matters of repression and meditations on ethics much as in theory, by shifting attention from the and accountability"(Morrison 7). For this reason, individual writer to the scene of writing-to the Abel, who connects her critical projectwith Morri- possibilities and constraints of the rhetorical and son's in Playing in the Dark, cannot avoid partici- cultural situation in which we find ourselves (see pating in the very practiceshe seeks to expose. Nor Crowley 32-34, 46). For, and this is my second can I or anyone else who is similarly positioned in point, as a politics of positioning (not a new theory the academy. of identitybut a responseto the problemof identity Failing to account for the postmodern context in postmodernculture), passing is an effect of the of her own analyses, Abel misses the point of her institutionaland culturalrealities in which we teach call for thick descriptions of "a cultural economy and write. As Amy Robinson argues, "In an aca- which constructs the feminine in the domain of demic milieu in which identityand identitypolitics racial difference" (Wiegman 323). If white femi- remain at the forefront of a battle over legitimate nists, in Robyn Wiegman's words, tend "to circu- critical and/or political acts, the social practice of late 'racial difference' as a commodity in our own passing offers a productive framework through discourses,pasting over the white bourgeoiswoman which to reimagine the contours of this debate" who occupies the center of our theoretical par- (716). If culture studies is about nothing else, it is adigms with images of black women whose his- aboutrevealing the ways in which what appearsnat- torical and material we specificity thereby render ural, given, is historically and culturallyproduced. Abel indecipherable"(as and Homans argue), then In structuringour writingand readingassignments, "the future of feminism depends on revealing the we need to seize the opportunitiesfor passing that of its most inadequacies privilegedtheoretical cate- the emergence of culture studies in the academy This is gory"-women (326). the task of postmod- has created.Culture studies makespassing unavoid- ern if feminism, postmodernismis understoodas a able, perhapsinevitable. historical and cultural imperative and not merely as a theory of identity. Class Notes: An Interlude I have discussed this debate over the subject in feminism at some length for two reasons. First, at Womenhave rarelybeen composers.But we do have one least insofar as it gives rise to efforts to expose the advantage.We're used to performiing. passer and to a form of self-critiquethat entails po- LaurieAnderson (qtd. in McClary) licing identities, this debate can have the effect of making students unwilling to risk themselves in In a writing-intensive core course on the Harlem their writing (or, in Suleiman's terms, to risk being Renaissance, I showed the 1934 film Initation of

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Life, a melodrama based on a popular novel by Fan- reotype. All of her tendencies were describedas being nie Hurst and remade in 1959, and asked the stu- "natural."For example, Delilah said that it was "natural"for dents to respond in their journals to the relationship her to raise children.This idea goes back to the notion that mammies have an between the two mothers in the film, Bea Pullman overwhelmingmaternal instinct.It was also to see how Delilah was and her live-in domestic, Delilah. One woman, who interesting made to be asexual or not involved in any sort of sex- asked me not to share her response with the class, ual relationship.Even though she at least had one inti- the anxieties that arise when a hu- clearly expressed mate encounter [because she has a child], there was manist of the comes into conflict concept subject never any interestin her finding a man or love yet she with a critical pedagogy: was continually encouraging Mrs. Pullman to fall in love. In other words, Delilah's instinctswere maternal I am not even really sure if this is supposedto be an not sexual. importantpart of the movie but it got me thinking.It's It was interestingto see how they portrayedDelilah the "friendship"between Aunt D. and Miss B. The rea- as being the faithful servant. This stereotype, made son I am a bit confused is because I am not sure I am up by white America, helps defend the ideology that supposedto take it at face value. Here is the way I saw African-Americansare perfectly satisfiedin their sub- the I believe it was an honest to friendship: goodness servientposition. This is apparentwhen Mrs. Pullman one. For when Aunt D. was worriedsince her example, tells Delilah that she could stop working and be fairly didn't come home after she received a letter daughter well off but Delilah cannot bear the thought of not her left Miss B. wantedto stating daughter school, go taking care of Mrs. Pullman. We are to assume that with Aunt D. to her find her. I saw Miss B. as help Delilah cannot live independentlyof a white person. someone who cared a deal for Aunt D. Miss B. great This was importantbecause it made the audiencemore also let Peola know how she was in her disappointed comfortablewith the relationshipbetween Delilah and by the way she was treatingher mother. Mrs. Pullman.This reassuredthem that Mrs. Pullman The confusion lies here. that this is a class Being was not taking advantageof Delilah. on African Americans,I am not sure if I am not looking, or should be looking for hidden reasons (as far as This woman no anxieties in because color goes). Because Aunt D. did not move out and buy displays part her own house after she came into some money, am I her position in relation to the material she is writ- to think this had anythingto do with color? See, I being about is not an issue for her. The first woman lieve it does not. I myself am someone who enjoys risks putting herself into the text, as students in taking care of others. It has always been a part of my women's studies and African American studies are nature. Did Aunt D. because this too was a stay part often encouraged to do, and as a result feels like a of her nature or because since she was black she felt fraud. The second woman blows the cover, as it she would not be in her "place"if she did not stay and were, on the first's comments, showing that those take care of Miss B. and her daughter? Perhaps this "natural" are reflections was not a color issue. Just wondering. responses "ready-made which promise a false identity" (Lydon 248). Yet however much these offer The confusion, the hesitancy, the quotation marks journal responses of the of the "nat- as qualifiers suggest that the student has learned conflicting ways reading place ural" in our of the the two women that "an honest to goodness" response is not to be concepts subject, hold similar notions of themselves as sub- trusted, that what comes naturally to her may impli- writing The first wants to believe in her cate her in racist language, if not racist social prac- jects. desperately and her to the second tices. But the language also reveals a strong desire to authenticity authority speak; believe in her natural self, to assure herself that her simply assumes these. Indeed, although the second has desires belong to her and are "not a color issue." mastered better than the first the lesson of read- In contrast, another woman, who was more than ing and writing as taught in critical pedagogy, it was willing to share her response, shows that she has the first who came to change her notion of her self clearly learned the lesson of cultural criticism: as a subject through her writing in the course. For as her rhetoric so painfully reveals, she had implicated The characteristicsgiven to Delilah were many of herself in what she had written and, as a result, had the same characteristicsattributed to the mammy ste- undermined the authenticity of the I.

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I am not saying that the first studentwas the bet- picture a consideration of the Negro as part of the ter readerbecause she put herself into the text. The social pattern of American life" (Letter) or when second read with more sophistication at this point she wrote an editorial speculatingon the notion "if in the course. But I am saying that the first at least I were a Negro" ("Sure Way").'4Not surprisingly, came to experience throughthe act of writing itself Brown expressed no more gratitude for the white the kind of self-displacement that so many writers woman's efforts than does bell hooks for Paglia's on criticalpedagogy advocate.In otherwords, there comment cited above: "Naturally,all black Ameri- is more than one way of getting it right, or wrong. cans were more than pleased to have Miss Camille While intellectually and politically astute, the sec- give us this vote of confidence, since we live to ond student's argumentmakes no demands on her make it possible for white girls like herself to have subjectivity.While the firstreader sought, and failed, a place where they can be totally themselves"(Out- to suppressher whiteness, which emerged through law Culture 84). her writing as a category of analysis, the second The controversy surroundingHurst shares with implicitly suggests through her response that she current feminist debates the question of whether can and must disavow her whiteness in analyzing white women write about black women to make whiteness as a racializedidentity, thereby reinforc- black women's experiences and desires known to ing the notion that knowing can be separatedfrom the white public or to become more comfortable experience.13 with their own racial and gender identity at a time when many are anxious about the insecurity of Changing the Subject identity. Partly for this reason, I include Hurst's novel and the 1934 film version in my African Now I'm loud.... This is why I usuallyget along withAf- American studies course on the Harlem Renais- ricanAmericans. I mean, when we're together,"Whooo!" sance and in my women's studies course on the It's like Ifeel totally myself-we just let everythinggo! construction of femininity in twentieth-century CamillePaglia (qtd. in hooks,Outlaw Culture) Anglo-American culture. Written at a time of in- creasingconcern over the numbersof white women Few white women have so repeatedly attracted enteringthe workforceand of black women leaving charges of passing as has Fannie Hurst over some domesticservice, especially as live-in help, the novel sixty years of criticism. What made Hurst's repre- expresses the kind of ambivalencethat attendssys- sentation of black women so controversial,spark- temic social change. Workingthrough the complex ing a lengthy debatein Opportunitymagazine in the relationsamong race, gender,sexuality, and class in 1930s, was that Hurstactively supportedblack art- this novel can be a disorienting experience, as the ists, such as Zora Neale Hurston,her secretaryfor first student'sresponse to the film reveals,but it can a time. Through her 1933 novel Imitation of Life, also providea way of coming to termswith present- Hurstbrought politically chargedissues of passing day forms of passing. As in Nella Larsen's 1929 and racism to wide public attention.The 1934 film novel Passing, in Imitation of Life passing is the version of the novel was "one of the first screen site where the often competing narrativesof racial dramasthat linked issues of race, gender,and sexu- and gender oppressionconverge with sexuality. ality" (hooks, Yearning3-4). Yet the racist repre- On the one hand, the phenomenalbusiness suc- sentations of Delilah (the mammy) and Peola (the cess of Bea Pullman (who passes as "B. Pullman, tragic mulatta)and the two characters'relationship business man"[124]) celebratesthe mother'sescape to Bea (the mistress)fostered charges that Hurst was from domesticity into "a market economy where a closet racist, that her identity as a liberal was a she can supposedlyown her own labor"(Wiegman fraud. Hurst did not help to dispel this view when 309). On the otherhand, the novel appealsto nostal- she respondedto SterlingBrown's attack on the film gia for the security that the lost motherrepresents, with the patronizingsuggestion that blacks should especially in the way Bea domesticatescommercial be gratefulto her because the film "practicallyinau- space, fashioningher waffle houses as wombs, ken- gurates into the importantmedium of the motion- nels, and safe havens (134, 149, 161, 235-36). At

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the same time that the novel appeals in the charac- in Bolivia with her white husband,and the focus at ter of Delilah to "racialnostalgia" (Berlant 122) for Delilah's Harlem funeral is on Frank'sdiscomfort the lost mammy, it gives Delilah some of the most in the presence of so many black people. "Didn't explicit comments on the operations of race and know there were so many in the world," he says. racism in American society. But the novel's great "There can't be any darkies left anywhere." "Ex- interestto me is that it makes clear (as the two film cept one,"the narratornotes in a parentheticalaside. versions do not) that at times of increased anxiety "In her white man's jungle" (329). This reference over women's changing roles and identities, such to Peola (one of the few narrativeintrusions in the as Hurst's depression era or our postmodern mo- novel) reminds us that the plotlines of passing and ment, the need to returnwomen to the (maternal) of the maternalare chiasmaticallylinked. Bea too is body becomes all the more urgent. living in the white man'sjungle, the world of busi- What is offbeat about Hurst's novel is that the ness. Peola's disappearancefrom the novel leaves maternal,traditionally assumed to be woman's nat- open the possibility that she has successfully dis- uralrole, is exposed as a cover for racismand sexism ruptedcultural identities and identificationsand has in Americansociety precisely because the maternal therebyelided the effects of race on social relation- is linked with the inability to pass. Like the 1934 ships and personalidentity, a possibilitythreatening film, Hurst's novel ostensibly suggests that racism to a racialized society (and hence to Hollywood, can be overcome if women band together on the which must have Peola returnhome to reclaim her basis of their shared condition of motherhood.As racial identity).But the subversivenessof the novel the second studentunderstood, this proposed bond actually turns on Peola's sterilization and the link sentimentalizes racist social practices. But while between passing and motherhood. For if Bea is the film's sentimental ending invites such a read- punished at the end and Peola is not, it is because ing, the novel explodes it. Bea has tried to pass as a mother.Although Peola's In the novel, the maternal is revealed to inhibit sterilization may imply that passing is unnatural, passing when we find out that Peola, who passes as that a black woman passing as white can never do white and marriesa white man, has had herself ster- more than impersonate white womanhood, it also ilized (a scene not in the films). To pass, she must allows female desire to be detached from maternal reject the possibility of motherhood(giving birthto desire, suggesting that the cultural production of a dark-skinnedchild would expose her as a fraud), femininitycan proceed apartfrom the reproduction just as she must demand that her dark-skinned of motheringand of mammies and thereby under- mother, Delilah, "unborn,"or disown, her own mine the "natural"basis of female identity(Poovey, child. One cannot pass as a mother.This lesson is "Abortion" 243), as well as the basis for female reinforcedat the end of the novel (not in the films) bonding across racial differences. when Bea, whose business success has been driven Hurstlets the black woman pass, which could, as by a desperate need for domestic security, is de- Sterling Brown charges,reinforce the myth that all prived of the home she has spent a lifetime dream- blacks want to be white.Yet the representationsthat ing about, planning, building, and furnishing.The Brown uses to argue that Hurst's novel is racist- home is now occupied by her daughter, who has and it is, in more ways than Brown imagined-also marriedthe only man Bea ever loved, her business locate racism in the culturalproduction of feminin- manager eight years her junior, Frank Flake. This ity rooted in the maternal.The first studentrevealed cruel punishmentfor the workingmother may make the same connection, however unwittingly, when the novel seem complicit with a patriarchalagenda, notjust her whitenessbut her femalenessimplicated but the interdependenceof the racial and maternal her in a racialized identity: "I myself am someone discourses suggests a differentreading. who enjoys takingcare of others.It has always been Unlike both screen versions, where Peola returns part of my nature .... Perhaps this was not a color home at the end to throw herself on her mother's issue." Hurst's novel suggests that idealizing the coffin, the novel resists this nostalgiafor the imagi- maternalis one way white patriarchalculture dis- narymaternal. In the novel, Peola passes completely avows the threatposed by passing women and that

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in the psychoanalytic narrativeof subjectivity,the ever we make whiteness visible as a racialcategory, racializationof the maternalmay be more pervasive available for critique and open to delegitimation; than the occlusion of women within the symbolic whenever we reconceive concepts of essence and register.It is not a feminist project,Hurst suggests, experience in the aftermathof poststructuralistthe- to reclaim eitherthe maternalor the black woman's ories; and wheneverwe engage the politics of iden- body. You have to let it pass. tity in postmodernityand in culturalcriticism.15 The double bind created by the discrepancy between Let It Pass what we profess and how we are positioned, between the demands of a critical pedagogy and the LOUIS.I'm not racist. Well,maybe I am. constraints of postmodern culture, cannot be re- BELIZE.Oh, Louis, it's no fun picking on you; you're so solved only in theory but must also be confronted guilty. performativelyin the literatureclassroom. My read- Chicago productionof Angels in America ings of the critical essays, the student responses, and the novel are intendedto alert us to those mo- on the film Imitation the first stu- Writing of Life, ments when passing is happeningin our classrooms dent the of experienced precariousness identity and our writing so that we can exploit the analyti- that characterizesour moment. In the postmodern cal, political, and ethical possibilities it creates. a on the had less far- end, taking position subject It is not thatI would reject self-critiqueby whites for her than did reaching consequences writing writing on race or men writing on feminism. On her own for her doubts changing subject position, the contrary. But I would argue that self-critique and hesitationsmeant that she could no take longer can be effective only when we do not attemptto re- for her self as referent.She learned granted through claim the body, to revive the humanist subject, or her that the from which writing subject position to find appropriatefigures for postmodernsubjec- one and writes is never secure. no speaks Having tivity. Self-critique without a postmodernisteffort secure to which to returnis what position precisely to free concepts of identityfrom their metaphysical without the as from distinguishes passing passing foundationsleaves only a choice between the con- as. to terms with the of Coming precariousness fessional and the fraudulent. The problem is not one's own the of identity opens up possibility pass- self-critique: it is rather,as Mary Poovey writes in in Toni Morrison's of ing, or, words, "becoming," anothercontext ("Feminism,"esp. 38), that the hu- the of what one is from" "process entering estranged manist subject continues to be producedas a solu- not be those labeled other but the (4)-which may tion to the cultural problematic that places us all self that one has one's own. long thought Through in the position of passing. The more passing be- her efforts to come to terms with halting gender comes the possibilityopened up by ourinterrogation as the first studentcame identity racially inflected, of subject positions, the more, it seems, we defend to work both senses of that her through(in phrase) ourselves againstit by makingit unnaturalor illegi- own identificationsin a thatthe second way woman, timate. Such a culturalproblematic, however, can- however her was never able to do savvy response, not be elided by any I seeking a more authentic in her The second woman found a secure writing. position. We cannot get out of passing by attempt- from which to the firstwrote position write; through ing to reclaim the subject, the body, or the real some a precariouspositions, performativeprocess thing. We have to let it pass. that providedan experience of subjectivityas passing that the second woman's discourse rhetorically suppressed. The point of all this for the teaching of literature is that we need to provide our studentswith strate- Notes gies and occasions for workingthrough rather than a stand taking up-taking on-subject positions. I wish to thank the following friends and colleagues for their Such opportunitiesare especially importantwhen- helpful comments on this essay: Anne Callahan,Susan Cavallo,

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Judy Massey Dozier, Susan Jarratt,Eleanor Honig Skoller, Isa- These changes are registered,in Poovey's words, "as challenges iah Smithson, and Lynn Worsham.Thanks also go to Michele to the most basic units of humanist understanding-the indi- Troy for her editorial assistance and to Danielle Glassmeyerfor viduality of the subject and the bodily integrity of the person" her researchon Hurst. ("Feminism"39). I borrowthe term culturestudies from Isaiah Smithson, who 50n the characterizationof passing as betrayalin classic pass- attributesit to Gayatri Spivak. As opposed to cultural studies, ing texts, see V. Smith. culture studies designates less a distinct methodology and criti- 6Tryingto mediate between humanism'sautonomous subject cal traditionthan the state of the humanitiesin the aftermathof and poststructuralism'sdepersonalized subject, Alcoff's concept the theoreticaland social upheavalsof the past two decades. See of positionalitydefines the subjectby social location and histor- Smithson for a brief but detailed definition of culture studies. I ical experiences ratherthan by essential attributes.Positionality use cultural critics to refer not just to practitionersof cultural conceives the subject'sposition as "a place from where meaning studies and to critics of popularculture but also to scholars and is constructed,rather than simply the place where a meaningcan teachers whose object of study is the effect, not the origin, of be discovered(the meaningof femaleness)"("Feminism" 434). representationsand discourses and who see their task as one of 7My critique of arguments like Alcoff's that are based on a "interrogatingcultural phenomena rather than elucidating liter- notion of positionalityis meant not to deny that subjectsare po- ary masterpieces"(Smithson 1). sitioned but to undercut the idea that one acts from a fixed or Originally I intended the subtitle of my essay to allude to a priorposition. The kind of self-critiqueAlcoff advocates,where 1985 paperby Nancy K. Miller, "Changingthe Subject:Author- one identifies oneself by race, gender, sexuality, class, age, and ship, Writing,and the Reader"(ch. 5 in her Subjectto Change), so on, before speaking, assumes that the subject is positioned which argues that a poststructuralistconcept of the subject does before speaking. In a performativeview, the subject is brought not work for women. But I have since found this phrasein other into being throughthe engagementwith others. JudithButler in relevantworks. Changingthe Subjectis a 1984 collection of es- "Fora CarefulReading" and Phillip BrianHarper in "'The Sub- says that integratespsychoanalytic theories of subjectivitywith versive Edge"' correct common misreadingsof performativity a Foucauldianconcern for the social discoursesand technologies thatassume a subjectacts voluntarily,taking on a certainsubjec- that regulatesubjectivity (Henriques et al.). In "On the Subjects tivity as if playing a role. This voluntaristicI is not the subject of Class and Gender in 'The LiteracyLetters,'" Linda Brodkey that informsmy conceptionof passing. uses the phrase as the subtitle of a section on postmoderntheo- 8As Susan David Bernstein says, "Any rhetorical posture, ries of subjectivity. Gayle Greene and Coppelia Kahn gave the whether in an article or in the classroom, is already mediated, title Changing Subjects: The Makingof FeministLiterary Criti- compromisedby desires, by forces of languageand culture,that cisml to a 1993 collection they edited, which historicizes and cannot be grasped together by any one 'I.'" The subject is not theorizes the personalto reclaim for feminists the legitimacy of reducedto its linguistic performance,she adds, but "the dimen- saying "I"and "we." "Changingthe subject"seems to be a de- sions of language structure the representation of any episte- fining trope for feminism in the wake of poststructuralism. mological claims about an 'I"' (127, 142). Alcoff tries both to -In my text, I use the first-personplural pronoun ethically, to acknowledgeand, in the interestsof a coalition politics, to obvi- implicate my readers in a cultural problematic that requires a ate the truthof this deconstructionof the I. In contrast,my pass- shared structureof response. I differentiate between the we of ing is an effort to work through the radical implications of performativeengagement and the we of disembodied truth. In Derrida'spractice, as do JudithButler (Bodies and "Reading") a performativepractice, we refers not to discrete identities that and DrucillaCornell (Accommodation and Philosophy).Whereas exist before engagementwith othersbut to identitiesbrought into coalition politics makes the erroneousassumption that to surren- being throughengagement. While feminist and African Ameri- der categories of identityis to surrenderpolitics, Butler seeks to can critics have rightly questioned the imperial we in writing articulatea politics that is not tied to identity categories. In the that takes white male experience as the norm, now critics by no dynamics of passing, one cannot worry about being exposed as means marginalized can mobilize that resistance to the use of either the real thing or a fraud,for passing contaminatesthe dis- we in theirown interests,to escape theirimplication in the struc- tinction between the two. Passing delimits positionality but in tural dynamics that I call passing. But the issue is more compli- doing so no more abandonsthe notion of position thanDerrida's cated even thanthat. It would be too easy to distinguishabsolutely "iterability"-the principlethat any sign is necessarily a repeti- betweenthe imperialwe and the performativewve; such a distinc- tion or citation, which limits intentionality'srole in the determi- tion ignores the inevitable slippage between the two, which is nation of meaning-abandons the categoryof intentionality. the subjectof this article. 9The psychological no less than the political is historical 3On the issue of who can speak in the classroom, see, e.g., (Willis 320). Susan StandfordFriedman uses the term "psycho/ Fuss, Speaking,esp. the last chapter,"Essentialism in the Class- political dynamics" in an essay that attempts to negotiate be- room"; hooks, Teaching,esp. the critique of Fuss in ch. 6, and tween poststructuralistand nonpoststructuralistfeminisms, es- Yearninlg. pecially between theirconflicting notions of the subject (474). 4"Postmodernculture" is a shorthandto refer to a numberof 1?Iargue in the introductionto my book Passing and Peda- social, cultural, economic, and technological changes over the gogy that many performanceartists get it right-that is, they un- past three decades that have converged to alter profoundly our derstandthe performativityof subjectivity that academics may experienceof and our thinkingabout identity in Westernculture. concede in theorybut often forget in practice.

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1 The term critical pedagogy, referringto activist teaching in ."Postmodern Pedagogy for Progressive Educators." general, designates a practice that necessarily concerns itself Journalof Education 169.3 (1987): 138-43. with questions of subjectivity and agency in postmodern cul- Brown, SterlingA. "Imitationof Life: Once a Pancake."Oppor- ture. See, for example, Aronowitz and Giroux 117-18; Giroux; tunity:A Journalof Negro Life Mar. 1935: 87-88. George and Shoos 201-02; Jarratt107-17. My reading of Ho- Butler,Judith. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limitsof mans and Abel, like their readings of feminists, seeks to un- Sex. New York:Routledge, 1993. derstand the complex and contradictory positions writers and . "Fora CarefulReading." Feminist Contentions: A Phil- teachers inhabitin culturalcriticism and in postmodernculture. osophical Exchange. Ed. Seyla Benhabibet al. New York: I write on these essays not to refute them but to discover by Routledge, 1995. 127-43. working through them what I can say and do, what positions I - . Gender Trouble:Feminism and the Subversionof Iden- can and cannot assume as a feminist critic and teacher. tity. New York:Routledge, 1990. '2Poovey analyzes variousdefenses against the pervasivefear ."Imitation and Gender Insubordination."Inside/Out: that the nature of the human is at risk in postmodern culture Lesbian Theories and Gay Theories. Ed. Diana Fuss. New ("Feminism"35-36). I borrowfrom her descriptionto account York:Routledge, 1991. 13-31. re- for how postmodernist feminist theory prompts defensive Carby,Hazel V. ReconstructingWomanhood: The Emergenceof sponses in some feminists afraidthat it eliminates the body. On theAfro-AmericanWoman Novelist. New York:Oxford, 1987. the notion of at risk in see identity postmodernculture, Poovey, Caughie, Pamela L. Passing and Pedagogy: The Dynamics of Bodies and and Wicke. "Feminism";Butler, "Imitation"; Responsibility.Urbana: U of Illinois P, forthcoming. 3On this notion, see Harding. Cornell, Drucilla. Beyond Accommodation:Ethical Feminism, 14Hurst in other To lives she wrote passed ways. experience Deconstruction,and the Law. New York:Routledge, 1991. about, she would in Once she took a engage impersonation. job . ThePhilosophy of the Limit.New York:Routledge, 1992. as a in her father's so that she could shopgirl factory portray Crowley, Sharon.A Teacher'sGuide to Deconstruction.Urbana: such a in a novel. To create a for her, Hurst'sfa- lifestyle place NCTE, 1989. ther fired the real This example should be enough to warn thing. Derrida,Jacques. Limited Inc. Evanston:Northwestern UP, 1988. us against the dangers of overgeneralizing about the ethics of Europa, Europa. Dir. Agnieszka Holland. CCC Filmkunst;Les passing. "There is passing and then there is passing" (Butler, Films de Losange, 1991. Bodies 130). Faigley, Lester. 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