Race and Other Clichés

Race and Other Clichés Russ Castronovo Formalism is on the return. The romance with the formal The Color of Sex: properties of discourse seemed on the rocks for several decades Whiteness, starting in the 1980s when critics had their heads turned away Heterosexuality, and the Fictions of White from the literary by cultural studies and the politics of identity. Supremacy Surely a renewed interest in form does not mean that cultural By Mason Stokes critique in the twenty-first century will pick up where New Criti- Duke University Press, cism left off. Attention to form once implied an evasion of politics 2001 coupled with a retreat to identifiable patterns that gave meaning A Question of Character: to literature. In contrast, form today circulates in an expanded Scientific Racism and the sense that includes identity, social role, and political function in Genres of American addition to the literary artifact. But the question remains how ad- Fiction, 1892–1912 equately can a “new formalism” grapple with configurations of By Cathy Boeckmann race, especially since these configurations nowadays appear old, University of Alabama one tired leg of a tired mantra that intoned “race-class-gender” as Press, 2000 criteria for evaluating a literary text? Technology and the Logic Formalists do not declare any hostility to examining race. of American Racism: A Rather, these readers privilege form as a set of historically dy- Cultural History of the namic phenomena that offers alternatives to the putatively pro- Body as Evidence grammatic ways race is used in a politics of identity. Thus John By Sarah Chinn Continuum, 2000 Brenkman argues that a methodology that brings race (or gender or class) to the forefront “has nothing to say about” complex mat- Crossing the Line: Racial ters of the black middle class and distributive justice because iden- Passing in Twentieth- tity is too static and fixed to account for the historically mobile na- Century U.S. Literature ture of class formation (122). Similarly, Ellen Rooney suggests and Culture that focus on the thematics of identity produces a “sterile reading By Gayle Freda Wald Duke University Press, practice” that scripts conclusions in advance (30). Such critiques, 2000 Rooney’s in particular, are crucial to revitalizing the study of form as a significant tool in understanding social as well as literary texts. But the problem with such critiques is that they often turn out to be merely formal, devoid of the historically and culturally specific promise of a new formalism. For instance, Brenkman provides no example of the “gender/race/class paradigm of identity” that in his mind has flattened the interpretative landscape (122). Nor does Rooney’s opposition of formalism to “various modes of thematization” (a phrase that seems intended to conjure up the thematics of race and other identity categories) offer a historically specific © 2002 OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS AMERICAN LITERARY HISTORY 552 Race and Other Clichés example of how such thematization manhandles the intricacies of form (29). It is instead necessary to historicize the uses of formalism in studying race, and the books under review here— Mason Stokes’s The Color of Sex: Whiteness, Heterosexuality, and the Fictions of White Supremacy, Cathy Boeckmann’s A Question of Character: Scientific Racism and the Genres of American Fic- tion, 1892–1912, Sarah Chinn’s Technology and the Logic of Amer- ican Racism: A Cultural History of the Body as Evidence, and Gayle Freda Wald’s Crossing the Line: Racial Passing in Twenti- eth-Century U. S. Literature and Culture—provide for such an op- portunity. To take advantage of the opposition between formalism and racial thematization, a little history is required. This history un- dermines that opposition, however, suggesting that race has always been entangled, often anxiously so, with form. Back when it was still the twentieth century, race existed on the outskirts of literary studies. It fell to disciplines not as invested in beauty and aesthetic pleasure, such as sociology or history, to examine the less than “universal” aspects of identities and culture. So Henry Louis Gates, Jr., sized up the academic professional terrain in his intro- duction to the landmark volume, “Race,” Writing, and Difference (1985), arguing that the “initial response” of most critics was that race had “‘nothing’ or, at the very least, ‘nothing explicitly’” to do with literature and literary theory (2). For critics today of Ameri- can literary and cultural studies, an era when race did not cen- trally enter into classrooms or shape research no doubt seems like the ancient past of what truly is another century. Time seemed to speed up as the millennium drew to a close, however. A decade after his first mapping, Gates, now writing with Kwame Anthony Appiah, anointed race, along with class and gender, “the holy trinity of literary criticism,” the three to- gether serving as “the regnant clichés of our critical discourse” (1). In Identities (1995), a follow-up volume to “Race,” Writing, and Difference, these coeditors observed that race as an intellec- tual frontier was closed, an announcement made not without a measurable degree of sadness, even worry, that the regularization of race as a topic of study might well presage its slide back into naturalized and unexamined forms. To think of race as a cliché is interesting not in the least because it implies race as pure form to the point where its specific history is rendered unremarkable, commonplace, and opaque. For this reason, it is necessary to “disrupt the cliché-ridden discourse of identity,” write Appiah and Gates (1). Articulation of a new understanding of race—in short, the capacity to “disrupt”—remains a crucial task for the human- ities and social sciences. But is a new discourse of race that would American Literary History 553 break with the accumulated traditions and set forms of identity possible for American literary and cultural studies research? And, in what ways would such an articulation always be a rearticulation, unable to escape from the clichés that make race both auto- matically knowable and uncannily artificial? Never one to shy away from a trite expression, I would say that there is a modest amount and perhaps even a whole lot of disruption—or, at least rearticulation—going on that challenges received notions of race by revealing the ways in which racial identity simultaneously shapes and is shaped by discourses of queer- ness, science, legalism, nation, and globalization. The books as- sembled here present a wide but less than panoramic snapshot of such efforts. Stokes’s The Color of Sex concludes by describing “the queer face of whiteness” (178) as part of an overall gambit to make seamless claims to identity impossible. Similarly, in a chapter on a white jazzman passing as black, Wald’s Crossing the Line describes the interplay of homophobia and homoeroticism that allows the uneasy transit between white identification and black bodies. Race, in Chinn’s Technology and the Logic of American Racism, is vitally connected with blood in ways that put the body’s flows and seepages at the center of national identity. What opens up the body’s text to analysis and interpretation, according to Chinn in a chapter on DNA and the Human Genome Project, is the discourse of science. The discursivity of science, especially in its tendency to characterize human subjects in ways similar to the characterization (and criminalization) of heroes and villains in fic- tional genres, is explored in Boeckmann’s A Question of Charac- ter. Each of these studies conjoins the cliché of race with another normative structure in an effort to stage the type of disruption that Appiah and Gates advocate. The hope is that the conjunction of race and x, where x is revealed as an emergent discourse still under construction and not yet fully naturalized, will dislodge whiteness as well as reified versions of blackness from the controlling centers that organize and unequally distribute social justice, enti- tlement, and self-worth. The persistence of race and identity as organizing principles in each of these works makes it difficult to realize such hopes. Moreover, it is not taking these studies lightly to ask if their con- tributions confirm clichés that have installed race, no matter if “race” is ritualistically made unfamiliar, at the center of our (academic) ways of thinking. While I do not believe that interventions in constructions of racial identity need to reject wholesale the con- cept of race, as the title of Paul Gilroy’s recent Against Race: Imagining Political Culture Beyond the Color Line (2000) implies, readers of the cultural and literary past nonetheless must worry 554 Race and Other Clichés that their focus on identity will repeat regulatory logics that set ...to what extent are normative limits.1 That is, to what extent are attempts to disrupt attempts to disrupt racial racial identity, because they remain concerned with a form of identity, because they identity, always clichés? Is not identity itself a worn-out form, a se- remain concerned with a ries of patterned moves and scripted countermoves, that simulta- form of identity, always clichés? Is not identity neously commits and limits us to a politics whose horizons of pos- itself a worn-out form . sibility begin and end with identity? In her contribution to Appiah that simultaneously and Gates’s Identities, Judith Butler wonders if “the [edited col- commits and limits us to lection’s] title was already anachronistic,” undermining “our abil- apolitics whose horizons ity to think through the more urgent questions of difference and of possibility begin and end with identity? democracy” (439). Identity is a drawback for our thinking, a lia- bility compounded by its particularization within discourses of race.2 As a foundation for politics, identity curtails ways of thinking and acting not governed by the modern interplay of subjectiv- ity and subjection.

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