American Anatomies: Theorizing Race and Gender.

Robyn Wiegman. American Anatomies: Theorizing Race and Gender. Durham: Duke UP, 1995. 288 pp. $45.95 cloth/$15.95 paper.

American Anatomies is an ambitious book; as its subtitle suggests, it promises to read race and gender as mutually complicating categories, and it's often quite successful in illuminating the many ways in which U.S. culture maps the one onto the other, either by feminizing blackness or by negotiating gender relations via the interracial male-bonding adventure. Then again, American Anatomies is not nearly so ambitious as it thinks it is, and that's probably a good thing: "It has been one of the major projects of this book," writes Wiegman at the outset of her final chapter, "to tease out the rhetorical and organizational dynamics of twentieth-century social struggle in the context of this formation of identity and modern discipline" (180). Personally, I hope I never come across a book that addresses twentieth-century social struggle, all of it, as only one of its major projects. American Anatomies does contain provocative and intelligent analyses of the work of Leslie Fiedler, the gender politics of Black Power, the psychodynamics of lynching, the interracial buddy film of the 1980s, and the nineteenth-century discipline of comparative anatomy; but it is not primarily or even convincingly a book about social struggle except in the most attenuated sense.

That's partly because the book's general ambitiousness is clear and its actual ambitions are not. For instance, Wiegman rightly resists the reduction of race and gender to the stock formula "blacks and women," and like many cultural critics, she notes that the formula ensures the misrecognition and undertheorization of black women. What, then, is to be done? At the end of her book's first section, "Economies of Visibility," Wiegman suggests that the disjunction between "race and gender" and "blacks and women" might be strengthened rather than superseded by "situating the black woman at the center of investigative study." As an example of this corrective or compensatory strategy Wiegman cites bell hooks's Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center, but with the critical proviso that "there is no assurance, after all, that methodological centrality retrieves the black woman from her historical erasure, no matter how politically crucial the project of reclamation may be." Instead, writes Wiegman, "we might ask whether the methodological shift can radically resist without remarketing, in modernist fashion, the logics of presence and visibility conditioning and contributing to the black woman's historical expulsion." If presence and visibility are traps that black women will do well to avoid, how then can anyone, or any analysis, fail to exacerbate the historical expulsion of black women? Wiegman's daring answer is to undertake "investigative travel in an initially contradictory direction, into that domain of cultural relations most underwritten by the African-American woman's historical absence: those among black and white men." Although this approach regrettably allows Wiegman to bypass Hazel Carby's Reconstructing Womanhood as a study of race and gender in the post-Reconstruction U.S. (Carby is mentioned briefly in one note), it does have the benefit of forcing a kind of shotgun marriage between Eve Sedgwick and Leslie Fielder (imagine a book called Love and Death Between Men in the American Novel). Then again, notes Wiegman, her approach may also be part of the problem and not part of the solution; as Wiegman says, "it may risk reinscribing [the] methodological displacement" of the black woman even as it "moves haltingly toward her socio-symbolic return."

Here, I think, we have a theoretical impasse that sounds a little like Woody Allen's parodic commencement speech: "More than any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroad. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly." For if you're reinscribing the methodological displacement of the African-American woman on one hand, and remarketing in modernist fashion the logics of presence and visibility conditioning and contributing to her historical expulsion on the other, it seems to me that you're not really taking a hell of a risk by centering your investigative study on black women after all. Why not, then, err on what would seem to be the side of caution, and foreground the histories of black women as the sociocultural narratives that will most effectively undo the reduction of race and gender to "blacks and women"?

If American Anatomies does not answer this question, and it doesn't, that's not only because Wiegman is unsure about which side might actually be the side of caution in so complex and overdetermined a field of theoretical-political activity; it's also because the book repeatedly backs away from any attempt to draw conclusions from its inquiries. The final chapter, accordingly, careens wildly across the terrain, putting up "Caution" signs everywhere. Can our critical work in the present redress the wrongs of the past? To think so, says Weigman, "may not only abandon the contingencies of the historical for a mythically transcendent present but also produce a devoutly racist rendition of feminism by evacuating from view the noninstitutional or anti-institutional sites of activism through which various kinds of feminist politics have been waged." So, it seems, we'd better not think of contemporary work on race and gender as an attempt to rethink the undertheorization of race in the work of white feminists of the nineteenth century. But that's not all we should beware of. We should also avoid thinking of nineteenth-century feminism as having undertheorized race, and we should avoid our avoidance, too:

We routinely raise the figure of Sojourner Truth to demonstrate the

elision of racial difference and black female subjectivity seemingly

paradigmatic of nineteenth-century feminism, but it is precisely in that act

that we condemn her to a certain passivity. She becomes,

in short, an emblem of a historical erasure that her presence could, on

the contrary, be read to defiantly deny. To purport the past as the history

of the black woman's erasure in feminist thought is to relinquish "feminism"

to its most racist and institutionally complicit construction, a construction

that seems to me to retrace, albeit in vague and asymmetrical

ways, some of the integrationist impulses of contemporary U.S. culture.

And as if that weren't scary enough, there's also the possibility that feminism's current engagement with issues of race does violence not only to the past but to the present and the future as well: "While I do not discount the significance of such work and while my own scholarly preoccupations are clearly part of this contemporary trajectory, I am nonetheless stunned by the ideological affinities (and their recuperatory potentials) between such preoccupations and the economy of visibility that structures the integrationist containment of `difference' in American culture itself." Cultural critique, then, is apparently a murderous business in which there's just no way not to be a racist--or worse. Every step you take, it seems, might crush a living thing.

I think there are two reasons that American Anatomies is so conflicted and evasive a book--three, perhaps, if you're not convinced that its range of topics has a sufficient internal logic linking comparative anatomy to lynching to the sci-fi film Enemy Mine. One reason has to do with the contrary movements of Wiegman's final chapter, in which she comes close to arguing that we must not reinscribe black women into the modern economy of visibility, then comes close to acknowledging that this argument entails the position that we need not concern ourselves with whether black women occupy positions of power (whether in university faculties, corporate boardrooms, or elected offices), then tacks back and argues that "I am not saying that the project of reconstructing Western knowledges about minoritized people is not an important, indeed vital, aspect of cultural struggle," before concluding the book with a reading of Uncle Tom's Cabin. The other reason has to do with Wiegman's major premise, namely, that "the most taken-for-granted assumption of Western racial discourse" is "that the body is the visible domain of difference." On this premise Wiegman bases her argument about the modern economy of visibility, and by "modern" she means "since about 1500 or so." In other words, American Anatomies does not concern itself with so parochial a subject as twentieth-century social struggle; in the end, the book is about the visual-discursive construction of legible "difference" in the West since the days of Magellan.

Only from this perspective, insists Wiegman, can we finally get a handle on what race and gender have really been all about in the past five centuries:

Such shifts--from vision to the visual to the visible--point to the various

cultural modalities and historical contexts through which issues of race

and gender (and their convergences and divergences) will be read. These

modalities, understood as economies of visibility, are clearly part of the

development and deployment of the economic arrangements of capitalism, but

this study hopes to approach the concept of visual economies in more

expansive terms. In Western racial discourse, for instance, the production

of the African subject as non- or subhuman, as an object and property, arises

not simply through the economic necessities of the slave trade, but according

to the epistemologies attending vision and their logics of corporeal 

inscription.... This does not mean that imperialism was not well served by

the negative equation between "blackness" and an ontological difference,

but that the framework for such an equation must be approached in terms

broader and more historically and culturally comprehensive than the slave

trade and its necessity for ideological and economic justification.

I will not attempt to pass on Wiegman's repeated implication that we need Foucauldian analyses of modernity and the visual in order to understand race and gender because the ideological and economic justifications for the slave trade, not to mention the mechanics of the slave trade itself, are too "simple" and "narrow" to be of much use. This passage seems sweepingly dismissive of a great deal of scholarship on the origins and historical transformations of the slave trade, but since that's well beyond my envelope of expertise, I will leave it to other readers. Besides, there are times in American Anatomies where Wiegman's insistence on the primacy of "visual economies" is well taken, as when she argues, apropos those integrationist buddy films, that "in the frantic move toward representational integration, in both popular culture and the literary canon, the question of political power has been routinely displaced as a vapid fetishization of the visible has emerged to take its place." Here, Wiegman is pinpointing the Benettonization of race, and she's entirely justified in doing so. But when Wiegman stretches her theory of "economies of visibility" to account for the history of race and gender in the United States (or the West), I begin to get the sense that something in this book is very wrong.

I can try to sum it up in one sentence: Homer Plessy was "white."

And every American historian knows it. Homer Plessy, the man whose unsuccessful, lawsuit against segregated railway travel eventually gave us the landmark 1896 Supreme Court decision of Plessy v. Ferguson, both enshrining and engendering nine decades of legal segregation after the close of the Civil War, was physically almost indistinguishable from white boys like me. Plessy had to inform railroad officials that he was legally a "Negro" under the "one-drop rule," and he did so precisely in order to challenge a legal definition of blackness that had nothing whatsoever to do with the register of the visible.

It is not too much to say, in fact, that, if you're going to approach the history of race in the U.S. by way of "economies of visibility," you're going to miss a great deal of what's driven our national psychoses concerning miscegenation--as dozens of "passing" narratives will testify. And just as black persons were frequently "white," so too were white persons discursively "black," especially if they arrived on these shores during the period 1860-1920. But Wiegman's book affords us no understanding of how it could have happened that the Irish, the Jews, and the Italians were all, in their turn, coded as "black"--how they lived out their imaginary relations to blackness by way of blackface, prizefighting, and/or race riots, and then how they differentiated themselves from African Americans in such a way as to disable or at least complicate the class politics and mass labor movements characteristic of other Western industrialized nations. It's telling, in this context, that American Anatomies never mentions David Roediger's groundbreaking work The Wages of Whiteness; perhaps Roediger's emphasis on labor and economics makes his work insufficiently broad and comprehensive for Wiegman's purposes, but then again his book undertakes an impressive analysis of how "race" in the United States has always exceeded the politics of the visible, and it's hard to imagine that Wiegman's analysis would not have benefitted from the challenge.

This is no mere scholarly quibble. At the outset of her first chapter, Wiegman cites the early scene in Nella Larsen's Passing in which Irene Redfield, sitting in the offically segregated Drayton Hotel in Chicago, muses about how "white people were so stupid" as to believe they could deduce a person's "racial" descent from "finger-nails, palms of hands, shapes of ears, teeth, and other equally silly rot". Irene's meditation on the unreadability of race and her habit of passing-for-convenience every now and then, in places like the Drayton--certainly warrants further investigation in Wiegman's terms, since the register of the visible is of primary importance here. But there's no reason for Wiegman to ignore the contrary report filed by Larsen later in the same novel, when Clare Kendry's nakedly racist husband, John Bellew, insists that, for him, race has nothing to do with skin:" `You can get as black as you please as far as I'm concerned,'" he tells his wife in front of two other "black" women he thinks are white (including Irene)," `since I know you're no nigger. I draw the line at that.'" Bellew may be blind to Clare's ancestry, but in an important sense literal "blindness"--and literal visibility--clearly isn't the issue here. Yet Wiegman not only avoids John Bellew on the politics of passing, Plessy on Jim Crow, and Roediger on whiteness; she also manages to write about the cultural meaning of lynching without referencing James Weldon Johnson, and to write on lynching and gender without mentioning Ida B. Wells. For a book that insists on the importance of economies of the visible, these would seem to be curious blindnesses. But more important is the fact that American Anatomies would surely have been a stronger book had it focused less on "the visible" than on the visible presence of critics who've discussed race in more insightful--and, yes, more comprehensive terms.