Passing and the Demolition of Identity[1]

 

It is a fact that people hate and kill each other because they think that something in their genes or blood, skin or religion, makes them be timeless members of an ontologically perceived group. If it were not for this scary thought, I would not hesitate to say that (ethnic) (racial) (sexual) (. . .?) identity on the threshold of the new millennium is a very funny business. If, on the one hand, you feel that society denies your identity, if it is illegal or danger­ous to be who you are, then passing becomes a necessity and identity becomes a most precious category. You then want a strong identity, sanctioned by the State and its laws, recognized by civil society. On the other hand, a strong identity is also a prison, and no one knows that better than all those who are stereotyped into one. In my film class, for example, I have an African Ameri­can student who hesitates to talk about the controversial repre­sentation of race in Scorsese’s films because she knows that her voice would be taken as the black voice. Identity politics, pre­scribing as it does that you must live discrimination in first person in order to be able to talk about it with legitimacy and credibility, is one of the nightmares of the present socio-cultural situation. It prevents solidarity, engenders mutual suspicion, and fosters the fragmented body politic on which domination thrives so well.

The “identity question” warrants scrutiny and calls for creative attempts to release the human subject from its hold. And this is exactly what Anna Camaiti-Hostert’s Passing does. A very dense and volcanic little book, Passing hinges obsessively on one central idea (the demolition of identity) and yet points in so many direc­tions and tangents that any attempt at summarizing it must per­force limit its scope and fluidity. But summarize it I must, for no other reason than respecting the author’s voice and chronicling her line of reasoning.

The first chapter, entitled “My Point of View,” sets the borders of the question and, most important, fleshes out and interrogates the author’s theoretical self portrait, in that it suggests the mark­ings—and splittings—that the subject of the enunciation deems relevant to her identification (woman, feminist, heterosexual, etc.). It is one of the best theoretical moments in the book, in that it grounds her words and hopefully sets an example of how autobi­ography must be intelligently incorporated in academic discourse. After such a self-positioning, she dedicates three chapters to an informative excursus on some of the recent voices in fields that have a stake in the identity issue: Feminist, African American, and Post colonial Studies. If most of her sources are academic (respectively Rosi Braidotti, Teresa de Lauretis, and Donna Haraway for Feminism; Cornel West and bell hooks for Africana Studies; and Homi Bhabha, Gayatri Spivak, and Trinh T. Minh-ha for post-colonialism), praiseworthy is Camaiti Hostert’s attempt to bring in popular culture in the form of cursory references to and readings of films (e.g., Spike Lee’s Clockers) and novels (e.g., Anita Desais’s Baumgartner’s Bombay). The common denominator of the material examined in these three chapters is a distrust for any form of strong thought, a precarious balance between the need of fighting oppression and domination all the while escaping the stereotyping that the acceptance of the subaltern identity entails. The first part of Passing ends with a chapter entitled “Irony,” in which Camaiti Hostert, using Rushdie’s latest novel and “poetic terrorist” Hakim Bey, performance artist Laurie Anderson, and Native American narrative, argues for a strategy of ironic distance from any rigid self-image, a plea against taking oneself too seri­ously, in favor of playing: giochiamo.

The second part begins with a chapter significantly entitled “Betraying Your Own Origins,” in which Camaiti Hostert dis­cusses African American writer Nella Larsen’s novel Passing, the tragic story of a black woman whose skin is light enough to tempt her into passing for white. Detecting a sense of exhilaration and liberation in the protagonist’s controversial and ill-fated attack against her duty to be black, Camaiti Hostert molds the concept of passing into a political dimension: the flight from the duties of nationalism and citizenship, race and identity. Significant is the mention of Kusturica’s Underground, the much criticized, fantastic saga that she interprets as the filmmaker’s refusal to be “Bosnian.” In the chapter “Rerun the Memory,” straying from Wiener and cybernetics to Sandra Bullock and The Net, Camaiti Hostert argues that “it is possible to rewrite the past destroying the necessitating purity of the events, the historical objectivity of its development and the symbolic system attached to it” (132). In a way, she inverts the commonplace dictum that “those who forget history are con­demned to repeat it,” provocatively suggesting, instead, that those who remember (their) history too well are indeed condemned to repeat it, condemned to keep wearing the same old uniforms.

Using Haraway’s manifesto and Mario Perniola’s book on “the sex appeal of the inorganic” (a concept borrowed from the femi­nist cut up artist Barbara Kruger), the following chapter does what its title, “Trespassing the Borders,” suggests: it trespasses the bor­ders of the human body, no longer seen as a natural given in which the boundaries between health and disease, exterior and interior, natural and artificial, biological sex and gender, can be neatly separated. Identity, by now, has become the anthropocen­tric dimension of a system of thought that has erected humans as the sole parameters of accomplished life on the planet. Blurring the oppositions that found any ontology, Passing suggests that humanity is more like a point of transit between the animal and the machine than the culmination of a divinely creative evolution. This is why vegans (those vegetarians who do not eat dairy prod­uct and eggs for ethical reasons) question anthropocentrism by calling Man the “human animal.”

Finally, the last chapter, “Passing,” performs a tour de force through some high specimens of “low” culture (e.g., lyrics from Roger Waters’s Amused to Death and Laurie Anderson’s Strange Angels) in order to return to the initial question of what-is-to-be-done-on-the-subject-of-identity, and outline the elusive practice of passing, in itself something that cannot be defined. Passing then “becomes a synonym for a social and communicative expression which effects an ironic alteration of the sacredness of the myth of origin and History” (176). Or, bringing together two of the other moments in the book which sketch, without freezing it, the con­cept of passing, we could say that passing “allows us to make visible states of fluidity which before could not be manifested” (14) and thus is a tool “for the dissolution of the identity construct . . . an answer to the theory of identity in the postmodern society, a politics of positioning that breaks with the solidity of the subject” (26).

Needless to say, there is value in the notion of subtracting one­self from any socio-ontological addi(c)tion, from that mathemati­cal operation that computes who you should be and always adds up to the duty to belong to some community. Refusing to play the identity game, shedding heaviness, severing roots: all these are fascinating trajectories for the nomadic subjectivity cherished by all those who set out to escape the colonialism in and of the New World Order.

And, in a certain sense, it is somewhat ironic, that I review Passing positively in the space of a journal like VIA which, in the­ory, bases its own existence on the éminence grise of ethnic identity. What makes you, reader, an Italian American?

Born in Italy and currently a resident of the United States, Anna Camaiti Hostert is not, technically, an Italian American, she is an Italian living abroad, but I am sure that her identity is no longer Italian. Inscribed in her personal situation is thus an awareness that identity is a matter of degrees, a matter of posi­tioning.

Together with the autobiographical self-positioning and the oc­casional forays into non academic culture, one of the book’s strong points is its language. Although a bit too academic (something which limits its fruition and tightens up its own identity noose), Passing’s Italian is heavily contaminated. Not only are the chapters titled in English, but English language crops up frequently enough to indicate the author’s awareness that strong identity resides also in language and may be just as dangerous. It is a call to practice linguistic miscegenation instead of fighting it. It is an invitation to creativity not only across languages, but also with new words.

For example, Camaiti Hostert uses a neologism (that is a new tool suggested in the light of new conviviality) in order to back up the concept of passing. In Italian it reads disidentificazione; let “disidentification” be its English equivalent. Dis-identification points at the action we can take in the process of subtracting our­selves from the formulas of identity. More than that, it under­scores an active notion of cultural identity. Already in the work done in the 1920s by anthropologist Margaret Mead on the sexual identity of the Samoans, the concept of culture shifted from pas­sive acquisition to active choice. When you’re saying that you are Italian American, you run the risk of mobilizing blood and genes as if they carried all sort of stable identity factors which you in­herit. In fact cultural, ethnic, sexual identities are also a matter of choice, of activity. In this respect, Passing forces us to move from the idea of identity to that of identification, the actions that indi­viduals take to fashion their identities. Hence dis-identification. Thus, Camaiti Hostert’s book can be seen as yet another voice in the long series of outcries against nature in favor of culture, an­other product of the thought that wrenches biological necessity away from human affairs—another step in the recognition of the freedom we have and do not use. What freedom are we talking of here? The freedom of practicing dis-identification, of choosing the identity we care for at each moment without getting stuck in it.

As mentioned earlier, in the “My Point of View” chapter, Camaiti Hostert maps the intricacies of (her) identity . . . white, woman, heterosexual, of Western culture, from the 1960s genera­tion (and what’s more not a spectator but active in politics and feminism), middle class. Most of these are “heavy” categories, in that each of them is capable of pinning someone down, of pro­viding a strong socio-discursive identity. But she merely acknowl­edges that these markings of the subject coexist in her person and refuses to give any of them a priority. She uses them as hypotheti­cal points of departure and lightens them up in the process of dis-identification. Let us briefly examine the list of categories she gives us and let us subject a few of them to the instantaneous flash of an archeological check. “White” refers to racial identity, some­thing that has been in place for centuries. “Middle class” refers to socio-economic identity, a factor whose pertinence in the identity discourse has been directly proportional to the misfortunes of Marxism and the Left. “Heterosexuality,” instead, is relatively re­cent in the spectrum of the possible purveyors of identity. Forty years ago, it would have been unthinkable. Likewise, the fact that she belongs to the generation of the 1960s became relevant infor­mation in an identification process precisely with that generation, in theory the generation that effected a break with the past. It fol­lows that identity markers are historically relative—post moder­nity being of course the fragmentation and multiplication of iden­tities. I do not have the space to discuss the ramifications of this fluidity across time. But the questions implicit in it bear scrutiny. Why are certain markings persistently thought of as purveyors of identity? Why are some others downplayed (for example, the pro­fessional identity which, especially in the USA, is harmfully strong, and that even the author of Passing seems to underesti­mate)? Moreover, new identity parameters keep coming up: Fat people, for example, can be seen as rallying for a recognition that would put them on the map as a group/subculture that is forced through the yoke of identity problems by the present social for­mation (cfr. the work of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick). And so are terminally ill patients (the birth of the group ASAP). And so are those who. . . .

Let me conclude with a quick mention of the few thorns whose stinging Passing perhaps underestimates. How is passing lightly from one identity to another different from the chameleonism or trasformismo at which Italians and politicians in general are so good? Although no all inclusive formulas can be provided, there is a good passing and a bad passing.

Also, although the author suggests that technology is like fire, helpful but also potentially dangerous, the book is pervaded by a cyber-optimism that consistently marks macchina (machine) as good. Let me remind you that macchina in Italian is also “car,” and that cars are polluting the planet. May the capitalist use of the “computer machine” steer clear of equivalent ravages.

Together with such techno-optimism, I found, here and there, a creeping rigidity in the heavy vs. light, slowness vs. speed, oppo­sitions. In a book that is very cautious in sidestepping every bi­nary rigidity, the adjective “heavy” and “slow” (which very often describe the qualities of “natural” processes, trees growing, roots branching out in the soil) are systematically cast as the bad guys in the face of “speed” and “lightness” (velocità e leggerezza), the qualities of immaterial production, the net, the web, telematic communication. At the risk of sounding like a nostalgic post-lud­dite, I admit to finding solace in watching trees go through their heavy, slow cycles. Often, I think I should learn from plants rather than from computers. And when it comes to intricate webs as metaphors for the mysteries of human communication and life on this planet, nothing can beat the stunning majesty of a ficus ben­galensis or banyan tree, that tree whose branches come down to penetrate the ground and become virtually indistinguishable from climbing roots. Don’t trees usually typify an upward mobile uni-linareity? Are those branches going down, or roots going up? What is up, and what is down? Perhaps it is no accident that trees like that, so rhyzomatic, do not grow in the West. And as I was reading Anna’s book next to one of such banyan trees, I thought of heaviness and slowness in a different light. Of course I do sub­scribe wholeheartedly to her political project of making strong identities weaker. Of course dis-identification is a tool that we can use to sever our ties from one of the most oppressive duties, cele­brated by Left and Right alike, the duty to belong to a community. Of course. Still, sometimes, heavy and slow is beautiful.

 

Maurizio Viano

Wellesley College

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


[1]Anna Camaiti Hostert, Passing: Dissolvere le identità, superare le differenze. [Passing: Dissolving identities, overcoming differences] (Roma: Castelvecchi, 1996).