Mixed Race Studies

“Recoil” or “Seize”?: Passing, Ekphrasis and “Exact Expression” in Nella Larsen’s Passing

Enculturation: A Journal of Rhetoric, Writing and Culture
Volume 3, Number 2, Fall 2001

Monique Rooney, Lecturer and Honours Convenor
College of Arts and Social Sciences
Austrailian National University

Part One: Deep Nothing

Mona Lisa’s famous smile is a thin mouth receding into shadow. Her expression, like her puffy eyes, is hooded. The egglike head with its enormous plucked brow seems to pillow on the abundant, self-embraced Italian bosom. What is Mona Lisa thinking? Nothing, of course. Her blankness is her menace and our fear.

—Camille Paglia

Camille Paglia’s analysis of “Mona Lisa,” the “world’s most famous painting” (155), plays on the ambiguous meaning of the spectacle—the visual image—in reading and writing practices. “Mona Lisa,” for Paglia, is an exemplary instance of the fascination and the anxiety surrounding the menacing power of the visual in Western epistemologies. She is an icon that is not only, as Paglia writes, “eternally watching” (154), she is also eternally watched. The Mona Lisa’s enigmatic smile displays but also dissembles the narcissism attributed to the feminised image. The portrait is often read as a nothing in and of itself but a something if it gestures, as the Mona Lisa’s smile appears to, towards the unreadable. Traditionally a sign of the “Mona Lisa”‘s intangibility, the smile in Paglia’s reading autoerotically evokes elusiveness through secrecy and distance (“receding into shadow”). The “Mona Lisa” wallows in this solipsism: she is “self-embraced” and enormous within the enclosure. Characteristically, Paglia’s polemic repudiates a more mysterious Mona Lisa beyond the surface of the painting, or a “thinking” woman who possesses an unreadable, interior, depth which transcends the limitations of the body. Her trivialisation of the much studied mysterious smile as hiding “nothing” is contradicted, however, by a close-up reading of the painting’s depth; she emphasises the “thin mouth receding into shadow,” the “hooded” eyes and the pillowed “brow.” The portrait overall evinces a grim determination to efface the representation of the feminine as vagina dentata, the toothed vagina or castrating woman. A disappearing line, the image retains its menacing reputation. For Paglia, the Mona Lisa’s threat is that she passes as an enigma.

Paglia’s ekphrasis of the famous face is of a partly open, partly closed surface. The description of deep “nothing” threatens the authority of the looking subject and is also thoroughly engaged in the pleasure of reading. According to Susan Stewart, it is an alluring opacity which places the human face at the centre of representations of subjectivity. “Because it is invisible,” writes Stewart, “the face becomes gigantic with meaning and significance” (125). The face is only ever visible to the other and it is a visibility that is elusive, revealing “a depth and profundity which the body itself is not capable of” (125). The eyes and mouth create the appearance of “depth,” as “openings onto fathomlessness, they engender the fearful desire to ‘read’ the expression of the face, for this reading is never apparent from the surface alone; it is continually confronted by the correction of the other” (127). The face appears to withhold its full meaning through openings such as the eyes and the mouth, stimulating the reader’s questing gaze which is always disrupted and fragmented by the broken surface. The act of looking, for Paglia and Stewart, delineates a process between subject and object which does not get beyond the surface but which generates meaning nonetheless…

…The passer is an objectified subject (for example black, female, homosexual) who refashions identity according to a superficial reading, or surface impression. In order to pass, the passer manipulates the body and the gaze so as to become legitimate. For example, the lightskinned black who passes for white synecdochically substitutes one part of the body (i.e., white skin) for the complete body (i.e., white identity). Passing for white utilises white skin as a part that stands in for a non-white body. This draws attention to two important aspects of racial identity. Firstly, the visible surface of the body is not necessarily a reliable or stable signifier of the body as a conclusively knowable entity. Secondly and contradictorily, for the passer, as an otherwise marginalised (because racialised) subject, the body’s visible surface becomes the central locus of an epistemology of identity, precisely because the body is misread as white. For the opportunistic passer, white skin functions as the point of a fraudulent entry into proper subjectivity and this inauguration (based on part not whole) destabilises the meaning of subjectivity per se. The white-looking-black proves the primacy and the ubiquity of skin as a visual surface that registers individuals as an identity, as the passer’s skin becomes a surface which dissembles a personal and social “black” history. In this sense, passing-for-white relies on skin as a bodily limit that opens up the possibility and privilege of being read and treated as white (and as a mainstream subject) but also punishingly closes the body’s past, its black heritage and history…

…Part Two: Reading and Writing the Passer

The passer is thus an enigma, a subject who is marked through his/her indeterminacy and whose attempt to escape categorisation is made visible in the passing narrative. This tension is explored in Nella Larsen’s Passing (1929), a novella which thematises both the racial and sexual passer (201). Passing is the story of two women, Clare Kendry and Irene Redfield, who are reunited after a long separation. Irene who occasionally passes for white tells Clare’s, the permanent passer’s, story. Irene lives in Harlem with her husband and her two sons where she does conscientious “race work” for the black community. Once childhood friends in their hometown Chicago, Irene and Clare are accidentally reunited while Irene is holidaying in Chicago and visiting her father. It is on this occasion that Irene discovers that Clare is passing for white and married to a racist white financier, John Bellew. Disturbed at finding Clare is passing for white, Irene discourages Clare’s desire for renewed friendship even though Irene can, and occasionally does, pass for white herself. Irene’s passing position is to some extent faceless (as narrator Irene evades self-description) whilst Clare’s passing body is obsessively and erotically pictured. In Passing, the permanent passer is spectacularised through the gaze of the casual passer who already partly knows what he/she looks for. As Edelman writes: “the fact of our ability to catch a glimpse of it [the faceless face of the homosexual] here bespeaks the possibility that we might not have done so had we not been prepared to identify what otherwise has the ability to ‘pass'” (219). Irene’s evasion is, typically, unsustainable: Clare eventually follows Irene back to Harlem where she becomes dangerously involved with Irene, her family and the “black” community. It is there that Clare’s hidden racial identity is eventually outed to her white husband. This outing, or what Butler refers to as a “killing judgment” (175), threatens Irene’s exposure and climaxes in her murder of Clare…

Read the entire article here.

Appropriating the One-Drop Rule: Family Guy on Reparations

Enculturation: A Journal of Rhetoric, Writing, and Culture
Volume 7: Open Issue (2010)

Jason Jones
University of Washington

The one-drop rule, or the notion that one drop of African blood renders a person black, once played a vital role in the expansion of the nineteenth-century American slave population and segregation under Jim Crow. Media, communication, and rhetorical studies, however, have yet to consider the extent to which the one-drop rule continues to function in contemporary American discourse on race. There are, nonetheless, scholars in other fields who have turned a critical eye to the one-drop rule and the ways Americans have taken up or challenged the one-drop rule in their language. Ronald Sundstrom studied the obstacles multiracial individuals have encountered in their efforts to assert their multiracial identities in the face of various parties who deny such identities on grounds informed by the one-drop rule and other perspectives that refuse the existence of mixed race (110-116). Joshua Glasgow and his colleagues performed an experiment in which participants were asked to racially classify a woman who looked white and self-identified as such, but discovered that she had a black ancestor; the overwhelming majority of participants categorized her as white (64). However, as Glasgow went on to point out, many Americans identify President Barack Obama as black despite common knowledge of his white mother. Given such observations, it is clear that there are vestiges of the one-drop rule in American racial discourse. But as Michel de Certeau explained, people appropriate discourses to achieve ends that do not always coincide with the ideological implications originally associated with some facet of language use (48). Being no exception, the one-drop rule no longer works to expand the ranks of dehumanized chattel nor does it serve as grounds for the legal removal of peoples from segregated areas, yet many still rely on it, though less rigidly, to identify some biracial Americans as black. The one-drop rule’s discursive utility, however, is not confined to regressive forms of racial identification and has been used for other strategic purposes as is the case in an episode of Seth MacFarlane’s Emmy-nominated Family Guy (“Peter Griffin…”) that parodies the slavery reparations debate, a veritable minefield for anyone willing to partake in the dispute…

Read the entire article here.