week 8 response
Dear Matt Johnson,
Reading Incognegro made me think rigorously about how to the act of passing interacts with the fiction of race. We all know that race is fictitious and unnatural — a societal construction. I found myself, while following the journey of Zane, wondering about how the fiction involved in passing heightens our awareness of the fiction of race itself. Zane is passing for a race called white, because society has constructed a fiction of race around his ancestry and society will call him out and tell him who he "really" is once they discover his secret. Thus, the threat of discovery we see hang over both Zane and the character Pinky in the film of the same name must never be understood as a fear of being caught lying. Neither Zane nor Pinky are lying by passing. Instead, the fear of discovery is really the fear that society will realise that Zane and Pinky have called out society's lie. Society's lie is thus challenged by the "fiction" that Zane adopts, and by lying to a lie, he is really speaking the truth.
Perhaps it is not Zane who builds a fiction. He uses his agency to add his own fiction to a world that has already been fictitiously constructed. Passing — fiction upon fiction — thus calls attention to the first fiction. It troubles the stability of the first fiction of race through its own unstable fiction.
Best,
Sadhana
Reading Incognegro made me think rigorously about how to the act of passing interacts with the fiction of race. We all know that race is fictitious and unnatural — a societal construction. I found myself, while following the journey of Zane, wondering about how the fiction involved in passing heightens our awareness of the fiction of race itself. Zane is passing for a race called white, because society has constructed a fiction of race around his ancestry and society will call him out and tell him who he "really" is once they discover his secret. Thus, the threat of discovery we see hang over both Zane and the character Pinky in the film of the same name must never be understood as a fear of being caught lying. Neither Zane nor Pinky are lying by passing. Instead, the fear of discovery is really the fear that society will realise that Zane and Pinky have called out society's lie. Society's lie is thus challenged by the "fiction" that Zane adopts, and by lying to a lie, he is really speaking the truth.
Perhaps it is not Zane who builds a fiction. He uses his agency to add his own fiction to a world that has already been fictitiously constructed. Passing — fiction upon fiction — thus calls attention to the first fiction. It troubles the stability of the first fiction of race through its own unstable fiction.
Best,
Sadhana
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