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Post-Racial Realities Passing Narratives in Contemporary U.S. Fiction

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Post-Racial Realities Passing Narratives in Contemporary U.S. Fiction Post-Racial Realities Passing Narratives in Contemporary U.S. Fiction Inaugural Dissertation zur Erlangung des akademischen Grades einer Doktorin der Philosophie am Fachbereich für Philosophie und Geisteswissenschaften der Freien Universität Berlin Graduiertenschule für Nordamerikastudien John-F.-Kennedy-Institut für Nordamerikastudien, Abteilung Literatur Vorgelegt von Mag.a Artium Yulia Kozyrakis Berlin, August 2014 Gutachter: Erstgutachterin: Prof. Dr. Ulla Haselstein Zweitgutachterin: Prof. Dr. Ruth Mayer Datum der Disputation 02. Februar 2015 Ehrenwörtliche Erklärung Ich erkläre hiermit ehrenwörtlich, dass ich die vorliegende Dissertation selbstständig und ohne fremde Hilfe angefertigt habe. Andere als die angegebenen Quellen und Hilfsmittel wurden nicht benutzt. Die den benutzten Quellen wörtlich oder inhaltlich entnommenen Stellen sind als solche kenntlich gemacht worden. Ich habe bisher weder diese, noch eine andere Arbeit als Dissertation vorgelegt. Berlin, August 2014 POST-RACIAL REALITIES PASSING NARRATIVES IN CONTEMPORARY U.S. FICTION Yulia Kozyrakis TABLE OF CONTENTS ILLUSTRATIONS ................................................................................................................ V 1. INTRODUCTION ............................................................................................................. 1 1.1. REPEATING THE PARENTS’ HISTORY? THE RETURN OF THE RACIAL PASSER ....... 5 1.2. FOCUSING ON THE PASSING FIGURE.................................................................... 15 1.3. THE GENRE OF THE PASSING NOVEL .................................................................. 27 1.4. THE REPERTOIRE OF RACE: LABELS, TERMS, AND DEFINITIONS ........................ 35 2. THE BOXER IN THE RING: NARRATING IDENTITY IN THE HUMAN STAIN BY PHILIP ROTH .............................................................................................................................. 42 2.1. FICTIONS OF IDENTITY AND IDENTITY AS FICTION .............................................. 48 2.2. THE BOXING RING AS A STAGE ........................................................................... 55 2.3. RACIAL ENCOUNTERS: AMERICAN JEWS AND AFRICAN AMERICANS ................. 67 2.4. IDENTITY FORMATION AND SOCIAL RECOGNITION ............................................. 84 3. THE RECITALIST: MUSIC AND RACIAL RDENTITY IN THE TIME OF OUR SINGING BY RICHARD POWERS .......................................................................................................... 94 3.1. LIFE BEYOND COLOR .......................................................................................... 97 3.2. STAGING RACIAL PERFORMANCE ..................................................................... 117 3.3. PERFORMATIVE IDENTITY AND THE SPECIAL CASE OF THE PASSING FIGURE ... 123 4. THE TRAVELER: THE POST-SOUL PASSING FIGURE IN CAUCASIA BY DANZY SENNA 146 4.1. “THIS IS WHAT I REMEMBER”: THE NARRATIVE OF BIRDIE LEE ...................... 152 4.2. LANGUAGE, NARRATIVE VOICE, AND AGENCY ................................................ 163 4.3. “THERE’S A MIRROR LOOKING BACK AT YOU” ................................................ 173 4.4. CONTEMPORARY NOVELS OF PASSING AND THE POST-SOUL GENERATION ..... 181 5. AFTERWORD. READING FICTION UNDER FALSE ASSUMPTIONS? .............................. 191 5.1. POSTHUMOUS PASSING FOR BLACK: EMMA DUNHAM KELLEY-HAWKINS ....... 196 5.2. WHEN BLACK SUDDENLY TURNS WHITE ......................................................... 205 5.3. CONCLUDING REMARKS ................................................................................... 212 BIBLIOGRAPHY ............................................................................................................. 220 ENGLISH ABSTRACT ..................................................................................................... 234 DEUTSCHE ZUSAMMENFASSUNG .................................................................................. 238 PUBLICATIONS .............................................................................................................. 243 CURRICULUM VITAE .................................................................................................... 244 ILLUSTRATIONS Fig. 1: Two families cast in Black.White (FX Networks) 1 Fig. 2: Levy's rye-bread advertisement 42 Fig. 3: Cartoon by Charles R. Johnson 122 Fig. 4: Emma Dunham Kelley-Hawkins 200 1 1. INTRODUCTION pass·ing, noun \ˈpa-siŋ\: the act of moving toward and beyond something; a person’s death; the act of officially approving a bill, law, etc.1 When on March 8, 2006 the first episode of FX Networks’ reality show “Black.White” was aired, it drew four million viewers to their TV screens, making the series launch the “most successful launch of any show on cable TV” to that date.2 Co-produced by the rapper Ice Cube, the show invited two families, one black and one white, to live together for a certain period of time under camera surveillance in order to explore how far the factor of race still matters in everyday life in the U.S. The show suggested that via passing—facilitated by specific “insider” knowledge about the other race, behavior coaching, and stage make-up— the show’s participants would be able to experience firsthand what it means to be black/white in America. Fig. 1: Two families cast in “Black.White”: the Sparkses (above) and the Wurgels (below) in their natural and made-up look respectively.3 1 “Passing.” Merriam-Webster.com. Merriam-Webster, n.d. Web. 24 Jul. 2014. 2 “Premiere of Ice Cube-produced ‘Black. White.’ Sets TV Ratings Rrecords.” XXL Mag. 10 Mar. 2006. Web. 7 Aug. 2014. 3 Gilbert, Matthew. “’Black.White.’ Is More Than a Reality Gimmick”. www.boston.com. 8 March 2006. Web. 18 June 2014. 2 The fact that the experiment took place within the commercial genre of reality television precluded any insights that could function as a “pointed inquiry into the visual protocols of racial classification” and challenge the audience’s views (Wald, 3). Unlike its satiric 1980’s counterpart “White Like Me” skit by Eddie Murphy, which, despite its short length, still managed to undermine racial stereotyping, the reality show “Black.White” instead followed predictable situations of racial misunderstanding and persistence of stereotypic thinking. Gradual estrangement of both families developed in place of the expected reduction of the distance between them. Reservation against the genre of reality TV notwithstanding, the show triggers a number of thought-provoking questions concerning racial performance and authenticity. One of the central issues that arise in this context is the idea that racial identity is performative and that phenotype, which is popularly equated to race, is only a marker of race, not its content. The “content” of race is hence the constant performative repetition of socially, historically, and culturally specific ways of behavior. Furthermore, we might ask then where the difference between ‘passing for’ and ‘being’ a member of a certain race can be located, and what consequences it has for the discussion of the concept of authenticity. The audience’s urge to believe in the attainability of something like authentic experience across the color line via actors, theatrical make-up and a fixed script speaks to the returning urge for authenticity that various scholars have observed in recent fiction and popular entertainment. The possibility of passing for a member of another race, introduced here in the context of the “Black.White” show, has always been part of American race-thinking. Every encounter of the Puritan settlers and their descendants with the racial Other—first the American Indians, then with African slaves, and later with immigrants—has immediately called into question the significance of visually distinguishable differences between the members of the so-called white and non-white races. Since these visual differences had legal consequences for the person’s citizenship, property and voting rights, and marriage, for many light-skinned individuals, passing for white constituted a viable, even if highly risky, possibility of re- 3 arranging their lives. It is interesting to note thereby that the fascination with the theme of passing has widely exceeded the actual practice of passing, since physically only a small portion of mixed-race individuals are able to pass, and many of them never do. As Michael Rogin suggests, “the society that developed materially from establishing rigid boundaries between the white and dark races developed culturally from transgressing those same boundaries. Hysteria over miscegenation and the mixing of bodily fluids operated alongside racial cross-dressing” (Rogin, 25). In a way, passing or refusal to do so led to the 1896 legal enforcement of the infamous ‘one-drop rule’, which designated every person with any traceable African American origin as “black”. As Marc Golub argues in his essay “Plessy as ‘Passing’: Judicial Responses to Ambiguously Raced Bodies in Plessy v. Ferguson”, Plessy’s ability to pass for white (and his publicly staged refusal to do so) called attention to the social and legal processes of racial sorting through which purportedly natural and discrete racial groups are produced and maintained. Reading Plessy as a case fundamentally about racial passing reveals the Court’s deep anxiety regarding mixed-race individuals and the specter of interracial sexuality that ambiguously raced bodies necessarily signify. (Golub, 564-565) The sheer possibility of passing, hence, seems
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