Women writing racelessness: performativity and racial absence in twentieth century women's writing.

Permanent URL: http://hdl.handle.net/2047/D20318696
Title:
Women writing racelessness : performativity and racial absence in twentieth century women's writing
Creator:
Payne, Sarah (Author)
Contributor:
Kaplan, Carla (Advisor)
Aljoe, Nicole (Committee member)
Matthews, John (Committee member)
Language:
English
Publisher:
Boston, Massachusetts : Northeastern University, 2019
Date Accepted:
March 2019
Date Awarded:
May 2019
Type of resource:
Text
Genre:
Dissertations
Format:
electronic
Digital origin:
born digital
Abstract/Description:
Ample literary criticism exists on racial passing and multiracialism. Implicit in much of this work is that one must still identify as one or more races. However, throughout the twentieth century numerous historical figures and fictional characters try to opt out of racial categorization. Yet there is a dearth of literary scholarship on what I call "racelessness." I define racelessness as an often temporary, frequently unsuccessful existence outside of racial categorization. Influenced by theories of performativity, I argue racelessness is determined by reciprocal negotiations and constitutive negations. Characters can actively refuse race; external forces can also impose racelessness. Many examples involve a negotiation between individual desires and dominant social beliefs about race. Additionally, racelessness rarely manifests as a verbal denial of racial identity. More often, racelessness occurs during silences, omissions, and formal gaps such as dashes and ellipses. The silences, refusals, and negations that accompany racelessness are not empty voids, but significant moments that constitute meaning. I analyze women's writing from the 1920s through 1960s across three geographical regions: the U.S. South, the Caribbean, and Harlem. The temporal and spatial scope illustrates how historical, political, and social conditions produce different variations of racelessness. Yet the shared history of slavery, colonialism, and racial hierarchies also creates textual similarities in seemingly disparate works. I focus on eight writers: Josephine Cogdell Schuyler, Esther Chapman, Marie Stanley, Jean Rhys, Nella Larsen, Eliot Bliss, Zora Neale Hurston, and Georgia Douglas Johnson. There is little scholarship on many of these authors, some of whom embodied racelessness in their own lives. The neglect of these authors is not due to literary merit, but to the fact that representing, and attempting to live out, racelessness engenders social illegibility. Examining a range of textual genres, I develop four versions of racelessness: interracial sex, liminal racial identities, traveling and mobility, and the subversion of class status. I also analyze how these authors grappled with race in their own lives and used literature not only to represent racelessness, but to constitute the concept itself. This dissertation aims to recuperate several under-appreciated authors and to acknowledge racelessness as a literary phenomenon. I argue racelessness is a prevalent concept in twentieth century literature, but one that has evaded our attention because of its inherent illegibility. Attending to racelessness forces us not to conflate absence with emptiness and raises the challenge of representing identities premised on negation without describing them as negative.
Subjects and keywords:
Gender
Modernism
Performativity
Race
Literature
Women's studies
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.17760/D20318696
Permanent URL:
http://hdl.handle.net/2047/D20318696
Use and reproduction:
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