“Suspect-Proof”? Paranoia, Suspicious Reading, and the Racial Passing Narrative |
“Suspect-Proof”? Paranoia, Suspicious Reading, and the Racial Passing Narrative
American Literary History
Volume 34, Issue 1, Spring 2022
pages 272–282
DOI: 10.1093/alh/ajab089
Sinéad Moynihan, Associate Professor of English
University of Exeter
This short essay considers racial passing narratives in relation to the “postcritical turn,” highlighting the proliferating reappraisals of the practices of “suspicious” or “symptomatic” reading in literary studies and the extent to which passing narratives offer an opportunity to test some of the claims of this body of scholarship. The utility of the passing narrative for this critical project lies in its persistent, self-conscious foregrounding of reading practices. Revisiting passing narratives in light of postcritique reveals that symptomatic reading is not a monolithic practice; rather, there are multiple ways of reading suspiciously. Moreover, and more importantly, passing narratives disclose that what has now become an orthodoxy in postcritique—that attitudes such as “paranoia,” “suspicion,” and “vigilance” profoundly limit “the thickness and richness of our aesthetic attachments”—ignores contexts, like that of a passer in a white supremacist society, in which such strategies are not a choice but are essential for survival (Felski 17). The key question posed herein is: What forms of privilege enable a reader to relinquish her attachment to paranoia, suspicion, and vigilance; to opt for openness rather than guardedness, submission rather than aggression (21)? Narratives of racial passing provide one answer to that question.
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Tags: American Literary History, Amy Robinson, Anne Anlin Cheng, Carolyn See, Charles Chesnutt, Charles W. Chesnutt, Charles Waddell Chesnutt, Danzy Senna, Donna Seaman, Erika Renée Williams, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Frances E. W. Harper, Frances Harper, Gayle Wald, Heather Love, Hershini Bhana Young, James Weldon Johnson, Jeff Zaleski, Langston Hughes, Merve Emre, Nella Larsen, Ralph Ellison, Rita Felski, Sinéad Moynihan, Willard Savoy, William Faulkner