Passing as Modernism

In 1990 Barbara Johnson gave a series of lectures at the University of Chicago on psychoanalysis and African American literature. In those days many feminists were exploring the question of whether or how post-structuralist theories could be applied to multicultural literatures. At the time I was an untenured assistant professor heavily influenced by Johnson’s style of deconstruction, so you can imagine my discomfort when I learned that the second lecture in that series, entitled “No Passing,” was to be a reading of Nella Larsen’s Passing, the very novel I was then writing about in an essay that would turn out to be the inception of Passing and Pedagogy: The Dynamics of Responsibility (1999). So at the reception following the first lecture, I cornered Johnson and anxiously spewed out all the ideas I was exploring in that essay, seeking to convince her (and possibly myself) that I hadn’t taken my ideas from the lecture that I hadn’t yet heard. I talked about the nature of our authority, as white feminist critics trained in a Eurocentric theoretical and literary tradition, in the African American literature classroom where, as Patricia Hill Collins and Diana Fuss remind us, knowledge derived from experience is given more credibility than knowledge acquired through training. How does racial difference inflect the process of transference that you have helped us to see as central to the pedagogical relation, I asked her? What does it mean to learn from the one presumed not to know, from (so to speak) an unreliable narrator? In response to these questions that I found so urgent and complicated, Johnson replied with her characteristic composure: All I know is, she said, I don’t want to be another Carl Van Vechten.1 Johnson’s response came back to me several years later when I was researching and teaching at the Newberry Library in