By/passing Identity: A Response to Women and Theatre 1992

COMMENTS ON PROCESS By/passing Identity: A Response to Women and Theatre 1992 Amy Robinson The 1992 WTP kickoff session "Interrogating Cultural Pluralism," served primarily as a forum for its panelists' responses to Adrian Piper's video installation Cornered, the panel as a whole seemed to anticipate the contentious agenda of the days to come. For in retrospect, each paper not only offers a response to Adrian Piper, but to the very promise of Women and Theatre itself—demanding an expanded vocabulary of identity in which difference need not always appear in the guise of passing or tokenism. In this spirit, I have simply excerpted from each presentation whenever possible. (The first person usage in each section refers to the speaker's usage, not mine.) Rather than renew a claim to authenticity, such an approach foregrounds the necessary collage1 of community and accents the hazard of mediation which is, of course, the risk of all such discursive coalitions. Part I: Amy Robinson Adrian Piper's Cornered meticulously documents the profound instability of the visual as a guarantor of racial knowledge. The putative visibility of race, what Franz Fanon called the "epidermal schema" (112) of racial difference is thrown into disarray by Piper's dispassionate performance of her refusal to pass. But while Piper rejects passing as a degraded manifestation of "sick values," like the pass itself, her video undermines the fidelity of visual categories by accentuating the presumptive mechanisms which allow identity to be read at all. Calling attention to the apparatus of presumption which generates both the possibility of passing and the formal structure of her performance, (for in a sense her monotone lecture only "works" if we are indeed insulted because of our presumption that she is white), Piper disowns the legacy of the "pass" by deploying the fiction of readable identity. In other words, that one can with surity, "know it when one sees it" is the promise against which Piper poses her own racial identification. In a culture in which passing is not always intentional (to quote from the program), Piper's disclosure—"I am black"—foregrounds the role of the spec75 76 Amy Robinson tator in the vexed economy of the pass. "If I tell you who I am," she alleges, "you become nervous or uncomfortable or antagonized, but if I don't tell you who I am, I have to pass for white." It is the spectator's presumption of whiteness which authorizes the pass, and yet, in an intriguing theatrical migration, Piper herself presumes the whiteness of her audience. In what will be series of strategic confessions directed towards a complicit spectator presumed to be white and inclined to be liberal—a viewing audience I might add for which Women and Theatre might be considered an exemplary instance—Piper imposes the violence of presumption onto her audience.... By placing the onus of the passer's obligatory confession onto her audience, Piper successfully redeploys the pass against the very spectator who animates its practice.... But by addressing her remarks to a spectator presumed to be white,2 Piper stages her confession as an exercise in the primary exclusion of an African American audience. Not only omitted from the reprimand of her disclosure but ostensibly from the obligation of choice, the black spectator is the limit-text of this performance, always outside but necessary for the critical formulations which underwrite it. Part II: Valetta Anderson Valetta Anderson's informal remarks located passing as performance in the framework of history and lived experience which produces passing as a strategy of survival. Recounting a story about a branch of her own family that had passed, Anderson made a distinction between temporary passing for a "weekend lark" and that passing which constitutes a wholesale denial of self, family, and community. For in order to fully insert an African American person into a white value construct, she argued, it is precisely one's family of origin which must be rejected. In this context, Anderson foregrounded the acts of bravery and affirmation implicit in the decision not to pass. Simultaneously asserting the primacy of race in her own work and articulating the artificiality of "race" as a construct derived from...