Beyond Identity Politics?

Susan Gubar. Racechanges: White Skin, Black Face in American Culture. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. Pp. xxiii + 327. Elaine K. Ginsberg, ed. Passing and the Fictions of Identity. Durham: Duke University Press, 1996. Pp. 298. Harry Stecopoulos and Michael Uebel, eds. Race and the Subject of Mascu- linities. Durham: Duke University Press, 1997. Pp. 419. Responding to Norman Mailer's now infamous piece The White Negro (1957), James Baldwin wrote that "the roles that we construct are construct- ed because we feel that they will help us to survive and also, of course, because they fulfill something in our personalities; and one does not, there- fore, cease playing a role simply because one has begun to understand it" ([1961] 1985,291). Baldwin's maxim here might serve as a healthy reminder that contemporary academic cultural criticism committed to destabilizing conventional and historically motivated identity categories—especially cate- gories of race, gender, and sexual orientation—need not have significant political consequences. As much of this work is performed and consumed in a relatively insular academic context, it can afford to be more or less oblivious to pragmatic issues of belief, or to the tenacity of binary modes of thought or of regulatory fantasies of what is normal and natural (never more oper- ative than in flamboyant styles of rebellion).