Racial Imperatives

Nadine Ehlers

Description

Formations of blackness and whiteness in U.S. culture

Nadine Ehlers examines the constructions of blackness and whiteness cultivated in the U.S. imaginary and asks, how do individuals become racial subjects? She analyzes anti-miscegenation law, statutory definitions of race, and the rhetoric surrounding the phenomenon of racial passing to provide critical accounts of racial categorization and norms, the policing of racial behavior, and the regulation of racial bodies as they are underpinned by demarcations of sexuality, gender, and class. Ehlers places the work of Michel Foucault, Judith Butler's account of performativity, and theories of race into conversation to show how race is a form of discipline, that race is performative, and that all racial identity can be seen as performative racial passing. She tests these claims through an excavation of the 1925 "racial fraud" case of Rhinelander v. Rhinelander and concludes by considering the possibilities for racial agency, extending Foucault's later work on ethics and "technologies of the self" to explore the potential for racial transformation.

Introduction
1. Racial Disciplinarity
2. Racial Knowledges: Securing the Body in Law
3. Passing through Racial Performatives
4. Domesticating Liminality: Somatic Defiance in Rhinelander v. Rhinelander
5. Passing Phantasms: Rhinelander and Ontological Insecurity
6. Imagining Racial Agency
7. Practicing Problematization: Resignifying Race
Bibliography
Index

Sujets

• Ethnic Studies
• Social History
• HISTORY
• Histoire
• América
• American
• Cultural Studies
• Law
• Discrimination

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 18 mai 2012
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780253005366
• Langue: English

Extrait

RACIAL
IMPERATIVES
RACIAL
IMPERATIVES

DISCIPLINE, PERFORMATIVITY,
AND STRUGGLES
AGAINST SUBJECTION
Nadine Ehlers
Indiana University Press
BLOOMINGTON AND INDIANAPOLIS
This book is a publication of
Indiana University Press
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Bloomington, Indiana 47404-3797 USA
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2012 by Nadine Ehlers
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication
Data
Ehlers, Nadine.
Racial imperatives : discipline, performativity, and struggles against subjection / Nadine Ehlers.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-253-35656-7 (cloth : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-0-253-22336-4 (paper : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-0-253-00536-6 (e-book)
1. United States-Race relations. 2. African Americans-Race identity. 3. Whites-Race identity. 4. Racism-United States. 5. Race discrimination-Law and legislation-United States. 6. Race-Philosophy. 7. Discipline-Philosophy. 8. Performative (Philosophy)
9. Jones, Alice Beatrice-Trials, litigation, etc.
10. Passing (Identity)-United States-Case studies. I. Title.
E184.A1E37 2011
305.800973-dc23
2011030457
1 2 3 4 5 17 16 15 14 13 12
In memory of my mother, Maria Ehlers
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments

Introduction

1 Racial Disciplinarity
2 Racial Knowledges: Securing the Body in Law
3 Passing through Racial Performatives
4 Domesticating Liminality: Somatic Defiance in Rhinelander v. Rhinelander
5 Passing Phantasms: Rhinelander and Ontological Insecurity
6 Imagining Racial Agency
7 Practicing Problematization: Resignifying Race

Notes
Bibliography
Index
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book would not have been possible without the support, friendship, and guidance of Joseph Pugliese (Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia). I am extremely grateful for his unwavering encouragement and his political commitment to the urgency of academic writing, which has always challenged and inspired me.
For their reading of drafts of an earlier incarnation of this project, and their extensive and invaluable criticism, I would like to thank Elin Diamond (Rutgers University), Dwight McBride (Northwestern University), and Moya Lloyd (then at Queen Mary, University of London and now at Loughborough University). The Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality, in the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University provided me with the opportunity to continue working on this project as a Visiting Scholar, and to teach material from the book in a summer course. Don Kulick, the then director of the Center, and Philip Brian Harper who was then director of the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis generously supported my work. I would also like to thank my colleagues in the Women s and Gender Studies Program at Georgetown University-particularly Leslie Byers, Pamela Fox, Dana Luciano, You-Me Park, and Elizabeth Velez-for the community they provide and their advocacy on my behalf.
I would like to thank Robert Sloan, Editorial Director at Indiana University Press, for his enthusiasm for this project. I also thank Sarah Wyatt Swanson, assistant sponsoring editor, for her dedication to detail, and Frank B. Wilderson III and an anonymous reader for the press, who productively engaged the project in ways that helped me to clarify my arguments.
My deepest gratitude goes to the friends who sustain me: Kirsty Nowlan, my rock and my academic interlocutor; Donette Francis, an intellectual ally, and a steadfast and enabling support; and Shiloh Krupar, who has given me a new energy for academic inquiry. Together they have read more drafts of this project than a friendship deserves, and their encouragement and critical engagement with the book (and its surrounding questions) strengthened its outcome. Clare Armitage and Nikolai Haddad have provided crucial sustenance over our years of friendship and they have helped me craft this project in unanticipated ways.
Four previously published essays of mine have lent materials to this book. Parts of them-in various rearrangements-appear in the book with the kind permission of the publishers. Retroactive Phantasies: Discourse, Discipline, and the Production of Race, Social Identities: Journal for the Study of Race, Nation, and Culture 3 (2008): 333-347; Black Is and Black Ain t : Performative Revisions of Racial Crisis , Culture, Theory and Critique 47, no. 2 (2006): 149-163; and Hidden in Plain Sight: Defying Juridical Racialization in Rhinelander v. Rhinelander , Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 1, no. 4 (2004): 313-334, have each been reproduced with the permission of Taylor and Francis Group and are available through the individual journals websites at http://www.informaworld.com . Passing Phantasms/Sanctioning Performatives: (Re)Reading White Masculinity in Rhinelander v. Rhinelander , Studies in Law, Politics, and Society 27 (2003): 63-91 is under the copyright of Elsevier and has been reproduced with their permission.
My family has lived with this project for many years and I thank them-Hans Ehlers, Duncan Ehlers, Domna Daciw, and Imogen Ehlers-for their endless and unconditional love. Most especially, I owe this book to the strength, courage, persistence, and resolute belief of my mother, Maria, who passed away before she could see the completion of this project. The book is dedicated to her.
RACIAL
IMPERATIVES
Introduction

It is not that the beautiful totality of the individual is amputated, repressed, altered by our social order, it is rather that the individual is carefully fabricated in it, according to a whole technique of forces and bodies.
-Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish

Norms are continually haunted by their own inefficacy; hence, the anxiously repeated effort to install and augment their jurisdiction.
-Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter

Criticism-understood as analysis of the historical conditions which bear on the creation of links to truth, to rules, and to the self-does not mark out impassable boundaries or describe closed systems; it brings to light transformable singularities.
-Foucault, preface to The History of Sexuality, Volume 2
On November 9, 1925, proceedings began in a Westchester County, New York, courthouse, in the trial of Alice Rhinelander, n e Jones. Alice s husband, Leonard Kip Rhinelander, had filed for an annulment of their marriage one year earlier, only a month after the young couple s wedding and at what seemed the insistence of his family. Their marriage could have been romanticized as a fairytale union across class lines, for Leonard was the scion of one of New York s oldest and wealthiest families, descended from the French Huguenots, while Alice was the working-class daughter of immigrants. In the legal complaint that initiated the trial of Rhinelander v. Rhinelander , however, Leonard charged Alice with fraud that went to the essence of their marriage, accusing her of having lured him to wed by claiming that she was white and not colored. 1 Alice had supposedly misrepresented her race, crossed the color line, and passed as white. Yet what came to be the central issue in the case was not whether Alice had indeed passed but, rather, whether she was able to pass. Equally important was the question of whether Leonard knew. If Alice had been able to pass, this would unsettle a racial economy that relied on the visual signification of what is supposedly racial truth. And, if Leonard had known that Alice did possess colored blood but married her nonetheless, then he had knowingly transgressed social protocols that censured interracial unions. The answer to these questions was ultimately sought through recourse to the examination of the bodies of the Jones family and, in the most sensational aspect of the case, Alice s own body, which was stripped naked and paraded before the all white, male jury.
The Rhinelander case generated so much public interest that it became one of the top ten news stories of 1925, attesting to America s obsession with what W. E. B. DuBois called the physical differences of color, hair and bone (2000 [1887], 80). One of the most apparent concerns underscoring the case was that these purported differences might be mixed through miscegenation, particularly via interracial unions between blacks and whites. Despite the fact that New York law did not prohibit interracial marriages, Leonard s attorney, Isaac Mills, positioned the threat of miscegenation as the central aspect of the trial. 2 Indeed, he compared his role in the case to the work of death penalty defense lawyer, stating: I consider this case of equal importance. I look upon it as a case of life and death. You might as well, gentlemen of the jury, bury that young man six feet deep in the soil of the old churchyard where his early American ancestors sleep, as to consign him to be forever chained to that woman ( CR 1277). Within broader white America, this aversion to miscegenation was linked to the fear of racial passing, with both phenomena threatening the taxonomical system of racial classification and the idea of white racial purity. But, in what would seem to be the effort to rule out the possibility of passing, the jury ultimately found in favor of Alice, stipulating that her blackness was indeed visible and that she had not deceived Leonard. In doing