Hybrid embodiment and an ethics of masochism: Nella Larsen's Passing and Sherley Anne Williams's Dessa Rose - Critical Essay

African American Review, Fall, 2002 by Biman Basu

In the African American tradition, hybridity is represented in the slave narratives as part of a sadistic configuration of master, mistress, overseer, and slave. But the shift in modalities of power from a regime of punishment to one of discipline, and the progression in the political economy--from a slave economy, through Taylorism-Fordism, (1) to flexible accumulation--are attended by a shift in representations of hybridity. While desire was hybridized coercively in the regime of slavery, hybrid desire, once externally imposed, is now interiorized within already transgressed racial boundaries. In African American texts of the twentieth century, we find an increasing interrogation of racial and cultural boundaries and a proliferation of images of hybridity. The two novels I examine here, Nella Larsen's Passing and Sherley Anne Williams's Dessa Rose, represent these concerns in different ways, but both are relentless in their interrogation of hybridity.

We will pause briefly here to mark the moments in the political economy during which these novels were published, 1929 and 1986. These dates fall within a progression which spans the twentieth century from Taylorism-Fordism to a globalized regime of flexible accumulation. In these increasingly globalized regimes of accumulation, specific populations are targeted for "incorporation" into the "world-system." The incorporation of the African American population, and that of other decolonized peoples, has been undertaken, however imperfectly, in a post-1914 and specially in a post-1945 global economy of North American ascendancy.

In the incorporation of different peoples into a global economy, racism operates through what Wallerstein calls an" 'ethnicization' of the work force," a process which adjusts different "human genetic and social pools" to the "hierarchical needs of the economy" at different times and in different places (Balibar 33-34). Perhaps Deleuze and Guattari come closer to the phenomenon being addressed here in their assertion that racism operates "by the determination of degrees of deviance in relation to the White-Man face" (178); that is, the deviance from the physiognomy of whiteness. Commenting on the above passage from Deleuze and Guattari, Michael Hardt suggests that we speak of racist practice "not in terms of exclusion but as a strategy of differential inclusion" (146).

This strategy measures "degrees of deviance" along a chromatic slide, and this graded chromaticism seems to be based on a measure of mimetic efficacy. Differential inclusion inevitably seems to include those whose approximation of the physiognomy of whiteness has attained a degree of mimetic efficacy through markers of race and class. The incitement to approximation is pervasive, but equally pervasive is the imperative of distance and difference. Differential inclusion includes those whose degrees of deviance are muted through mimetic approximation, but whose deviance or difference never becomes undecipherable, as undecipherable difference always provokes extreme anxieties. These are strategies for the management of otherness in a regime of globalized flexible accumulation, strategies which locate otherness contiguously on a differential grid of heterogeneity, as inalienably he same and indisputably other.

In such a space, in which bodies are subject to a polymorphous incitement to approximate a physiognomy or topography of whiteness, we observe a proliferation of images of racial approximation. In Toni Morrison's work alone, we find figures of racial approximation in a succession of characters like Geraldine, Maureen, Helene, and Jadine, and Nella Larsen's Passing extends this line to Irene Redfield and Clare Kendry. If these figures are projected outward as hybrid embodiments of otherness, Clare has, in fact, become indistinguishably other. While characters like Geraldine and Helene seem to be figures of false consciousness and alienation, Clare Kendry is too conspicuously cultivated, her role too deliberately performed for her to be understood in these terms.

Clare Kendry's passing, to be sure, is predicated on a crossing over into otherwise barricaded economic zones. Reflecting on the past, she tells Irene, "'Then, too, I wanted things'" (40-41). With "'all things considered'" in her present circumstances, she reflects scandalously that "'it's even worth the price.'" With a casual "'Of course,'" she offers the provocatively realistic, if often elided, banality that "'that's what everybody wants, just a little more money, even the people who have it,'" since "'money's awfully nice to have'" (44). This is the other side of Jadine's remark that poverty is "'not being free'"; "'it's a prison, poverty is'" (171). (2)

Although there is a strong case to be made for the political economy of passing, it alone cannot account for the process of othering involved. To her assertion, "I wanted things," Clare adds, "'I knew I wasn't bad-looking and that I could "pass"'" (41). As Deleuze puts it, "The thrust of Marxism was to define the problem [of power] essentially in terms of interests"; however, "in terms of investments, whether economic or unconscious, interest is not the final answer; there are investments of desire that function in a more profound and diffuse manner than our interests dictate" (Foucault, Language 214-15). This is not to say that "interest" and "desire" are necessarily antagonisitc, because "we never desire against our interests, because interest always follows and finds itself where desire has placed it" (215). Although we may want to qualify what may seem to be the priority of desire in such a formulation, "interests" and "investments" do not operate discretely. The political economy of passing cannot be sep arated from its economy of desire.