Performativity and Performance: Identities and Multi-Dimensional Psychological Passing in Go Tell It on the Mountain

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis essay explores how key characters from James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain exhibit psychological passing and performative identity formation in relation to race, religion, and sexuality. By analyzing Florence’s performing of interior whiteness, Gabriel’s performing of surface-level morality and shifting versions of exterior Blackness, and John’s performing of religiousness, straightness, and Blackness, this paper argues that Baldwin’s character development shows identities to be a performative process of multifaceted passing which on the one hand compels people to reiterate and reinforce relevant identity norms under the interpellation of hegemonic ideology in race, religion, and sexuality, but which on the other hand invites people to gain agency by challenging and subverting these regulatory norms and stereotypes through strategic performance. Through the novel, Baldwin conveys that identity formation is inherently dynamic and unstable, that passing is about interiority and religion and sexuality as well as about exteriority and race, and that the ability to see both the stage and the backstage, the ability to exhibit a surface exterior which mismatches with interior thought, is a key resource for Black survival, especially for queer Black survival. AcknowledgmentsThis article could not have been completed without the insightful and constructive feedback and reviews from Prof. Trudier Harris and Prof. Mark A. Reid as well as the anonymous reviewers.Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1. W. E. B Du Bois says in The Souls of Black Folk (1903) that “the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world” (8) and “[i]t is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness, ––an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder” (8). See more in W. E. B Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2007).2. Shakespeare says in his play As You Like It: “All the world’s a stage,/And all the men and women merely players/They have their exits and their entrances,/And one man in his time plays many parts,/His acts being seven ages … ” (Act II, Scene 7, Lines 139–42).3. Goffman develops the concept of dramaturgy in his 1950s monograph The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life to indicate the dynamics of human social interaction as the performance between the performer and observer. According to his theory, people are actors acting out roles on social stages and carefully manage their impressions given-off to fulfill the basic social roles required by the society, which constitutes the “front-stage” aspect of human lives. In contrast, people have “back-stage” areas where they can relax and prepare for the performance. See more in Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (New York: Anchor Books, 1959).4. Although Butler states that “race and gender ought not to be treated as simple analogies” (Gender xvi), she makes only a preliminary examination of race in her essay on Nella Larsen’s Passing in Bodies That Matter, so it is worthwhile to read others’ analyses of racial performativity.5. Views on racial passing are diverse and have shifted over time. Allyson Hobbs states that passing could be both a privilege and a racial “exile” (4), and that “by the 1940s, more African Americans rejected passing and liberated themselves from the fear and anxiety of discovery” (226) and that “[b]y the 1970s, many African Americans perceived passing as either a relic of the past or the worst form of racial treachery” (263). Yet, there are many who express compassionate understanding toward passing as a way of rejecting suffering and “a resourceful – even morally justifiable – response to circumstances beyond one’s individual choosing” (Wald 8). Julie Cary Nerad says that racial passing has served as “a tool to subvert the American system of racial classification throughout U.S. history” (12). Nikki Khanna and Cathryn Johnson find that there is “a striking reverse pattern of passing today – only a few respondents situationally pass as white, while the majority of respondents describe situations in which they pass as black,” in contrast to the Jim Crow era when passing meant passing as white (382). This essay presumes no ethical judgment upon passing, and focuses instead upon Baldwin’s depiction of passing as a Du Boisian “veil” of double-consciousness and as an opportunity for subversive agency.6. In the antebellum American South, the forcible separation of loving partners in Black families and selling of Black children in slave auctions are commonplace (Blassingame 174). When Black enslaved women had children, these infants were usually raised by their own mother, or were collectively assigned to an elderly woman in the “plantation nursery,” or were cared for by young Black children in the plantation community (Rose 43). It is well-known that many white slaveowners impregnated Black female enslaved women and that the resultant mixed-race children were also enslaved (King 26).7. It is not a coincidence that Baldwin describes his fictional congregation’s perception of his character Gabriel as “whitened.” Baldwin observed of Black Christian churches in his time that their religious language tended to be permeated with color symbolism interpellating congregants into viewing their own Blackness as debased and morally inferior: “wash me, cried the slave to his Maker, and I shall be whiter, whiter than snow! For the black is the color of evil; only the robes of the saved are white” (Collected 17).8. To gain a better understanding of the danger Gabriel faces from white people, it is helpful to examine some of Baldwin’s other works which deal with codeswitching for survival. Like Gabriel, the unnamed hero in Baldwin’s short story “This Morning, This Evening, So Soon” is also an expert in performing codeswitching and knows “how to pitch my voice precisely between curtness and servility, and … what razors’ edge of a pickaninny’s smile would turn away wrath” (Baldwin, Going 163), and “how to keep the white folks happy” and make them feel “they were god’s favor to the universe” (173). Baldwin’s short story “Previous Condition” also portrays a Black individual surviving an encounter with white police by strategically performing the stereotype of Black servility. The protagonist Peter summarizes: “I’d learned never to be belligerent with policemen … No matter who was right, I was certainly to be wrong … I realized that I had to play smart, to act out the role I was expected to play … when I faced a policeman I acted like I didn’t know a thing. I let my jaw drop and I let my eyes get big. I didn’t give him any smart answers, none of the crap about my rights. I figured out what answers he wanted and I gave them to him. I never let him think he wasn’t king. If it was more than routine, if I was picked up on suspicion of robbery or murder in the neighborhood, I looked as humble as I could and kept my mouth shut and prayed” (Baldwin, Going 88–89).9. A tarry service, also known as “Holy Ghost service” or “Fire Service” or simply “prayer service,” is an evening prayer service that usually happens on Wednesday, Friday, Saturday or Sunday in the Pentecostal churches. The name is derived from “tarry” meaning “to wait” and the service having the purpose of waiting for salvation, sanctification, and the power of the Holy Spirit. When the Holy Spirit chooses followers, they have an epiphany.10. As to whether John is converted or not, David E. Foster states that John “finds grace not in rejecting blackness but in seeking it the only way it is available to him – as a black man” (55). In other words, for Foster, John is successfully converted and embraces his religion and also his Blackness. Shirley S. Allen also interprets John’s action on the threshing floor as genuine conversion signifying “a second birth both in the Christian sense of regeneration and in the psychological sense of stepping from childhood into maturity” instead of the acceptance of his Blackness (187). However, Stanley Macebuh suggests that John is not converted in the end after a “provisional liberation,” but is actually saved in a new religion of homosexual love as his fear of God is exchanged for admiration and love of Elisha, who releases John from the “power of God’s vengeance” (66–67).11. The Temple of the Fire Baptized in the novel is a Black Pentecostal storefront church. In the Pentecostal traditions, to be “saved” means that “one has repented, asked forgiveness of sins, and confessed Jesus Christ as Savior and Lord. This experience imparts a basic ‘entry level’ of liturgical identity that distinguishes the saint from the unbeliever” (Sanders 58). Conversion means a spiritual turning away from sin in repentance and to Christ in faith. There are true conversions and false conversions. In the novel, congregants in the Temple of the Fire Baptized interpret behavior such as speaking in tongues, falling to the ground, shouting, dancing, trembling, shaking, and crying as evidence of a person infilling or receiving the Holy Spirit and becoming born again. This is consistent with Joseph A. Brown’s observation that “[c]all-and-response singing/shouting/preaching, repetitions of rhythms and phrases, vocal intonations that become increasingly frenzied in their deliverance are essential components of the Black Church performance” (60).12. In addition, this white female heroine in the film is, to some extent, an incarnation of John’s aunt Florence, who denies religious convention aggressively and who is sentenced to a pathetic death for it. Like Florence who soliloquizes “I can give it back. I can sell it. This don’t mean I got to go” (Baldwin, Go 75) after buying the ticket to the North for whiteness and prosperity, John also consoles himself by telling himself, “I can climb back up. If it’s wrong, I can always climb back up” (34). Both John and Florence hesitate at these pivotal moments out of guilt which stems from knowing that there is no compromise “between the way that led to life everlasting and the way that ended in the pit” (40).Additional informationNotes on contributorsLongyan WangLongyan Wang received her PhD from Xiamen University and now teaches at the School of Foreign Studies, Nanjing Forestry University.