Dislocating the Color Line: Identity, Hybridity, and Singularity in African-American Literature (review)

In this study Samira Kawash treats the slave narratives of Henry Bibb, Henry “Box” Brown, Frederick Douglass, and Harriet Jacobs, as well as novels by Charles Chesnutt, James Weldon Johnson, Nella Larsen, and Zora Neale Hurston in order to interrogate the “color line” principally as a conceptual mechanism rather than as a marker of physical, racial segregation. The study focuses on a historical span of about one hundred years, and its governing critical concepts are boundaries and hybridity. Although these concepts have made fairly widespread appearances in the recent academy, Kawash engages them in ways that not only reiterate but, more importantly, extend their relevance to the context of racial blackness and whiteness in the United States. Engaging “the uncertainly, the incoherency, and the discontinuity that the common sense of the color line serves to mask” (vii), the aim is to expose ways in which the logic and mechanisms of racial specification fail to sustain themselves uniformly and, in particular, in the terms of the literary works interrogated.

The sustained discussion of slave narratives in the second chapter, however, has a more ambitious scope. This chapter adeptly considers the leading body of criticism on slave narratives as well as its governing assumptions about racial subjectivity. Kawash troubles (particularly in relation to Douglass’s narrative) a line of thought that leaves unquestioned the manner “in which the relations of mastery and possession that define the relation between master and slave also define the relation of the sovereign subject to itself” (35). Imagining racial subjectivity beyond the opposed terms of enslavement and freedom, Kawash uncovers the limitations of the notion of the liberal subject underwriting that opposition. The argument that the conditions of enslavement and liberal subjectivity invert, but nonetheless hold in place, a set of relations mutually implicating property and personhood. In order to “expose the contingency of the totalizing appearance of the duality free/enslaved and [. . . to] undermine the image of the freedom of the subject as absolute freedom” (82), Kawash examines the dynamics of fugivity and self-purchase, which are much less considered in the body of criticism on slave narratives. Although one might initially hesitate before yet another treatment of Douglass’s narrative, the extended analysis offered in this chapter is so thorough in considering the assumptions of previous discussions and so thorough-going in its revisionary interventions that it seems destined to become an enduring, even classic, analysis of Douglass’s text and of the theoretical dimensions of slave narratives in general.

The remaining four chapters are not so ambitious as to reconsider preeminent lines of thought in recent criticism, but do as assuredly interrogate the complications of the enforced binarism of racial blackness and whiteness. The reading of Johnson’s Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man is the most engaging and revolutionary of these other textual investigations, while the reading of Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition is perhaps the least compelling offered in the book. By the end of the study, Kawash emerges as an astute interpreter of texts as well as a theoretician very skillfully enumerating imaginative and politic dimensions of powerfully inscribed social divisions.