What do you think?
Rate this book
Dislocating the Color Line: Identity, Hybridity, and Singularity in African-American Narrative
Inquiries into the meaning and force of race in American culture have largely focused on questions of identity and difference―What does it mean to have a racial identity? What constitutes racial difference? Such questions assume the basic principle of racial division , which todays seems to be becoming an increasingly bitter and seemingly irreparable chasm between black and white. This book confronts this contemporary problem by shifting the focus of analysis from understanding differences to analyzing division. It provides a historical context for the recent resurgence of racial division by tracing the path of the color line as it appears in the narrative writings of African-Americans in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In readings of slave narratives, "passing novels," and the writings of Charles Chesnutt and Zora Neale Hurston, the author asks: What is the work of division? How does division work? The history of the color line in the United States is coeval with that of the nation. The author suggests that throughout this history, the color line has not functioned simply to name biological or cultural difference, but more important, it has served as a principle of division, classification, and order. In this way, the color line marks the inseparability of knowledge and power in a racially demarcated society. The author shows how, from the time of slavery to today, the color line has figured as the locus of such central tenets of American political life as citizenship, subjectivity, community, law, freedom, and justice. This book seeks not only to understand, but also to bring critical pressure on the interpretations, practices, and assumptions that correspond to and buttress representations of racial difference. The work of dislocating the color line lies in uncovering the uncertainty, the incoherency, and the discontinuity that the common sense of the color line masks, while at the same time elucidating the pressures that transform the contingent relations of the color line into common sense.
280 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1997
26 people want to read
About the author
Samira Kawash
3 books3 followersBrooklyn-based author Samira Kawash has a Ph.D. in literary studies from Duke University and is a professor emerita at Rutgers University. She is the founder of the website CandyProfessor.com and has written about candy for The Atlantic, Gastronomica and Saveur.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 of 1 review
March 18, 2008
This is quite seriously one of the best books of literary criticism I have ever read. The language is complex when it needs to be and clear when complexity would be merely confusing; the ideas are meaningfully embedded in debates about African American literature (and literature more broadly), identity politics and race consciousness, philosophy and political theory, and the relationship between theory and praxis; and the argument is a fascinating one, one that has actually affected the way I think about my own life and not just about literary texts.
Kawash's argument is fundamentally bound up in the relatively recent turn (accompanying postmodern theory) toward hybridity and fragmentation in analysis of race. She writes, for instance, that "within the critical community at times it seems that invoking something like hybridity serves as an inoculation against the dreaded essentialism. One stakes one's claim in hybridity and points one's finger at 'those bad essentialists,' secure in the knowledge that having discovered hybridity in and for itself, essentialism has been effectively banished" (4). However, she states, "It is impossible to effect an unambiguous, absolute move beyond the 'false' representation of the color line to a 'true' representation of heterogeneity, hybridity, creolity, or cultural diversity" (22).
She illustrates and explores this possibility by analyzing 19th century and early 20th century African American literature and the ideas contained therein about the color line. In "Freedom and Fugitivity: The Subject of Slave Narrative," she examines slave narratives (most notably those of Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs) and their representation of fugitivity as a space outside of the binary opposition of slavery and freedom. This space is not livable, however. Some critics envision this "'outside' that cannot be reduced to either term" (80) as a freedom itself, but Kawash counters this by saying, "Reading the corporeal topography of the space of fugitivity, one becomes increasingly skeptical of the blithe, celebratory invocations of the subversive powers of boundary-crossing, nomadism, or excess--all figures that might be mobilized to describe the space of fugitivity. The fugitive cannot in any way be read as representing some idealized absolute freedom of fluidity or boundlessness. . . . The fugitive body does not escape the violence of order; what it does do is expose on its surface the violence necessary to preserve order, hierarchy, boundedness, propriety, and property" (82).
Kawash goes on to make similar, thoughtfully detailed and nuanced arguments from Charles Chesnutt's The Marrow of Tradition and passing narratives like James Weldon Johnson's The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man and Nella Larsen's Passing, focusing on the ways in which the color line is a material part of life and the ways in which it is troubled by mulatto bodies and by practices such as passing. She writes, "While the mulatto challenges the myth of racial purity, the figure of the passing body goes a step further, challenging the stability of racial knowledge and therefore implicitly the stability of the order that has been constructed on that knowledge" (131). In her discussion of Passing, Kawash pushes her argument regarding the illusion of certain even further: "the text seems to insist that there is nothing more than what we are told, that this is all knowledge can be, an unreliable, scattered filtering of events and artifacts that refuse to add up to a truth" (165).
In "Community and Contagion: Zora Neale Hurston's Risky Practice," Kawash provides the fullest expression of her ideas about risk, chance, and the possibilities that accompany them. She sees in Hurston's ideas about nationalism an opening for a new kind of community: "Hurston's adamant refusal to implicate herself in this choice of one violence or another [white supremacist or black nationalist] points toward another strategy of resistance: not the opposition of one good order to another bad order but the refusal to choose any order at all. Hurston's refusal to choose an order does not, however, mean that we must conclude that she has chosen chaos instead. Rather, I would suggest, she seeks to refuse the violence of order that follows on the determination to exclude and prevent chaos, the determination to eliminate accident, ambiguity, and disorder" (178). In other words, Hurston refuses to embrace the "totalizing tendencies" (180) of enforced order in favor of remaining open to chance and connections that cannot be predicted through identity politics or race consciousness. This way of remaining open creates a space for a new kind of community, one that is not built on the liberal subject but that is built upon contagion, or "together-touching" (200). Kawash writes, "The you and me of contagion are neither joined by essential identity nor separated by agonistic difference. We are rather singular and touching, together in our singularity. We cannot choose contagion; contagion is what happens to us. Equally, we are what happens in contagion" (205). She builds this argument from the events of Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God and from Hurston's political statements in her autobiography, but this argument reaches outward from the text and into the real, modern world. She writes, "What is needed, perhaps, is an openness to this contagion, a willingness to recognize and respond to contagion rather than attempting to restore purity and autonomy. This openness to contagion is an ethical posture, a way of being in the world. But this is not the ethics of the modern subject, the ethics that takes as its supreme object the realization of the inner being, the authentic self of the subject. Rather, it is an ethics that begins from together-touching, from the condition that we exist only in our togetherness and that therefore our first responsibility is to and in terms of that togetherness. . . . It is, in fact, always and precisely a question of response, of responsibility, of responding to the other otherness that erupts in contagion. This is the only possibility of responsibility or of justice: to respond and be responsible to rather than seeking to destroy, control, or contain the other otherness, the singular, that which is unknown, unpredictable, uncertain, uncontrollable" (208-9).
Kawash concludes her book with "Speculations: Hybridity and Singularity," in which she draws together the threads of the text and returns to the initial claim that hybridity, etc., cannot merely replace the color line or identity politics: "The demands of fixity, knowability, identity, and authenticity given form in the figure of the color line are constantly exceeded by something else, by a force we might call hybridity. But the hybridity that has emerged in the course of this book is not another substance, however socially constructed, that would displace the essentially conceived notion of blackness. The individual is not hybrid; rather, hybridity constantly traverses the boundaries of the individual. . . . This hybridity cannot be positioned as a goal or an end; it is therefore not subject to the teleological narrative of the beyond that would rescue us from error" (217).
Where Kawash really speaks to me is in her discussion of contagion and Their Eyes Were Watching God and in her concluding pages, where she emphasizes (yet again) the risks attendant upon this move toward contagion and uncertainty. She insists that this uncertainty and even perplexity "demands our attention, not as a puzzle to be solved, but as a condition to learn to inhabit" (218), but she does not allow this to remain the kind of postmodern idea of openness that is detached from politics and from ethics. Instead, she pushes this postmodern concept of indeterminacy and hybridity into the realm of politics: "Perhaps the introduction of perplexity into the various struggles by which we enact politics may also be political, insofar as perplexity demands the suspension of the standards of right and authority by which any particular interest or position becomes unassailable, self-evident, or commonsensical. In the face of perplexity or hybridity, 'we cannot be sure that we have judged justly or committed the right political act. . . . There are no assurances, and for that reason we are more not less responsible.' Without absolute assurance of the right or the just, we are faced with the continual, and necessarily political, demand of responsibility not just for one time or for one decision but at each instant, in each relation. This means more political engagement, not less, more challenging, more questioning, more struggling to expose and counter the violence disguised and justified in the name of self-evidence, nature, justice, or common sense" (218).
I find myself not only intellectually convinced but personally affected by her move to bring together theory, politics, and ethics in this idea of contagion and hybridity. What she describes is indeed a difficult thing, but being aware of the responsibility we carry in our daily lives and interactions, the violence that is built into our lives, and the structures of power that surround us is necessary in order for us to build a better, more just world. And, finally, unavoidably, an analysis of what is meant by a better, more just world and a refusal to take the easy way out by just accepting the definitions we are given must accompany our growing awareness and our actions. We are, in the end, responsible for all of these things, not just as individuals, but as individuals in relation to one another.
Kawash's argument is fundamentally bound up in the relatively recent turn (accompanying postmodern theory) toward hybridity and fragmentation in analysis of race. She writes, for instance, that "within the critical community at times it seems that invoking something like hybridity serves as an inoculation against the dreaded essentialism. One stakes one's claim in hybridity and points one's finger at 'those bad essentialists,' secure in the knowledge that having discovered hybridity in and for itself, essentialism has been effectively banished" (4). However, she states, "It is impossible to effect an unambiguous, absolute move beyond the 'false' representation of the color line to a 'true' representation of heterogeneity, hybridity, creolity, or cultural diversity" (22).
She illustrates and explores this possibility by analyzing 19th century and early 20th century African American literature and the ideas contained therein about the color line. In "Freedom and Fugitivity: The Subject of Slave Narrative," she examines slave narratives (most notably those of Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs) and their representation of fugitivity as a space outside of the binary opposition of slavery and freedom. This space is not livable, however. Some critics envision this "'outside' that cannot be reduced to either term" (80) as a freedom itself, but Kawash counters this by saying, "Reading the corporeal topography of the space of fugitivity, one becomes increasingly skeptical of the blithe, celebratory invocations of the subversive powers of boundary-crossing, nomadism, or excess--all figures that might be mobilized to describe the space of fugitivity. The fugitive cannot in any way be read as representing some idealized absolute freedom of fluidity or boundlessness. . . . The fugitive body does not escape the violence of order; what it does do is expose on its surface the violence necessary to preserve order, hierarchy, boundedness, propriety, and property" (82).
Kawash goes on to make similar, thoughtfully detailed and nuanced arguments from Charles Chesnutt's The Marrow of Tradition and passing narratives like James Weldon Johnson's The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man and Nella Larsen's Passing, focusing on the ways in which the color line is a material part of life and the ways in which it is troubled by mulatto bodies and by practices such as passing. She writes, "While the mulatto challenges the myth of racial purity, the figure of the passing body goes a step further, challenging the stability of racial knowledge and therefore implicitly the stability of the order that has been constructed on that knowledge" (131). In her discussion of Passing, Kawash pushes her argument regarding the illusion of certain even further: "the text seems to insist that there is nothing more than what we are told, that this is all knowledge can be, an unreliable, scattered filtering of events and artifacts that refuse to add up to a truth" (165).
In "Community and Contagion: Zora Neale Hurston's Risky Practice," Kawash provides the fullest expression of her ideas about risk, chance, and the possibilities that accompany them. She sees in Hurston's ideas about nationalism an opening for a new kind of community: "Hurston's adamant refusal to implicate herself in this choice of one violence or another [white supremacist or black nationalist] points toward another strategy of resistance: not the opposition of one good order to another bad order but the refusal to choose any order at all. Hurston's refusal to choose an order does not, however, mean that we must conclude that she has chosen chaos instead. Rather, I would suggest, she seeks to refuse the violence of order that follows on the determination to exclude and prevent chaos, the determination to eliminate accident, ambiguity, and disorder" (178). In other words, Hurston refuses to embrace the "totalizing tendencies" (180) of enforced order in favor of remaining open to chance and connections that cannot be predicted through identity politics or race consciousness. This way of remaining open creates a space for a new kind of community, one that is not built on the liberal subject but that is built upon contagion, or "together-touching" (200). Kawash writes, "The you and me of contagion are neither joined by essential identity nor separated by agonistic difference. We are rather singular and touching, together in our singularity. We cannot choose contagion; contagion is what happens to us. Equally, we are what happens in contagion" (205). She builds this argument from the events of Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God and from Hurston's political statements in her autobiography, but this argument reaches outward from the text and into the real, modern world. She writes, "What is needed, perhaps, is an openness to this contagion, a willingness to recognize and respond to contagion rather than attempting to restore purity and autonomy. This openness to contagion is an ethical posture, a way of being in the world. But this is not the ethics of the modern subject, the ethics that takes as its supreme object the realization of the inner being, the authentic self of the subject. Rather, it is an ethics that begins from together-touching, from the condition that we exist only in our togetherness and that therefore our first responsibility is to and in terms of that togetherness. . . . It is, in fact, always and precisely a question of response, of responsibility, of responding to the other otherness that erupts in contagion. This is the only possibility of responsibility or of justice: to respond and be responsible to rather than seeking to destroy, control, or contain the other otherness, the singular, that which is unknown, unpredictable, uncertain, uncontrollable" (208-9).
Kawash concludes her book with "Speculations: Hybridity and Singularity," in which she draws together the threads of the text and returns to the initial claim that hybridity, etc., cannot merely replace the color line or identity politics: "The demands of fixity, knowability, identity, and authenticity given form in the figure of the color line are constantly exceeded by something else, by a force we might call hybridity. But the hybridity that has emerged in the course of this book is not another substance, however socially constructed, that would displace the essentially conceived notion of blackness. The individual is not hybrid; rather, hybridity constantly traverses the boundaries of the individual. . . . This hybridity cannot be positioned as a goal or an end; it is therefore not subject to the teleological narrative of the beyond that would rescue us from error" (217).
Where Kawash really speaks to me is in her discussion of contagion and Their Eyes Were Watching God and in her concluding pages, where she emphasizes (yet again) the risks attendant upon this move toward contagion and uncertainty. She insists that this uncertainty and even perplexity "demands our attention, not as a puzzle to be solved, but as a condition to learn to inhabit" (218), but she does not allow this to remain the kind of postmodern idea of openness that is detached from politics and from ethics. Instead, she pushes this postmodern concept of indeterminacy and hybridity into the realm of politics: "Perhaps the introduction of perplexity into the various struggles by which we enact politics may also be political, insofar as perplexity demands the suspension of the standards of right and authority by which any particular interest or position becomes unassailable, self-evident, or commonsensical. In the face of perplexity or hybridity, 'we cannot be sure that we have judged justly or committed the right political act. . . . There are no assurances, and for that reason we are more not less responsible.' Without absolute assurance of the right or the just, we are faced with the continual, and necessarily political, demand of responsibility not just for one time or for one decision but at each instant, in each relation. This means more political engagement, not less, more challenging, more questioning, more struggling to expose and counter the violence disguised and justified in the name of self-evidence, nature, justice, or common sense" (218).
I find myself not only intellectually convinced but personally affected by her move to bring together theory, politics, and ethics in this idea of contagion and hybridity. What she describes is indeed a difficult thing, but being aware of the responsibility we carry in our daily lives and interactions, the violence that is built into our lives, and the structures of power that surround us is necessary in order for us to build a better, more just world. And, finally, unavoidably, an analysis of what is meant by a better, more just world and a refusal to take the easy way out by just accepting the definitions we are given must accompany our growing awareness and our actions. We are, in the end, responsible for all of these things, not just as individuals, but as individuals in relation to one another.
Displaying 1 of 1 review