From 19th-century minstrel shows to Michael Jackson's highly publicized experiments in surgical Anglophilia, "racechange" has long been a part of American culture. But while the faces of new generations of Americans are moving ever closer to the racially mixed "Eve" morphed onto a recent Time magazine cover, many white TV viewers thought O.J. Simpson grew blacker during his trial, associating the change with widespread conviction about his guilt.
How far has our society really progressed since the days of mawkish blackface performances? And what does the history of cross-racial art tell us about the issues still separating white and black America?
In Racechanges: White Skin, Black Face in American Culture, IU's Susan Gubar -- who transformed the way we think about women's literature as co-author of The Madwoman in the Attic -- turns her attention to the incendiary issue of race. Acknowledging the legacy of minstrelsy, she explores cross-racial impersonations and imitations in modern American film, fiction, poetry, painting, photography and journalism.
"The thinking for this book really began when I was reading Toni Morrison's pioneering work, Playing in the Dark," Gubar explained. "Part of that book deals with Ernest Hemingway's Garden of Eden, in which the white heroine attempts to transform herself into an African girl as well as a boyish twin of her husband. In the second volume of No Man's Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century, Sandra Gilbert and I had discussed Garden of Eden in terms of sexual transmutation, entirely ignoring the heroine's experiments on the color line. I was shocked by my own blindness, that I had missed this. So, in writing the book I was trying to understand and come to terms with this."
To admit blindness on her part regarding transracial crossing puts Gubar in the company of many other academics. As she puts it in the preface to Racechanges: "Not only has the blatant racism of minstrelsy made white impersonations of blacks seem shameful, it has also spilled over to discourage scholarship about its ongoing impact on American culture."
Some critics would go so far as to say that only women should write feminist criticism, while blacks alone are qualified to produce works on African-American studies and that one must be gay to write about gay issues.
By foregrounding cross-racial and transsexual imagery, Gubar disarms this argument and helps foster understanding about the impossibility of ghettoizing scholarship or literature along racial and sexual lines.
"I'm very aware when teaching African-American literature, particularly at IU, of speaking as a white person," Gubar said. "I think it's important for us to begin to understand that whiteness is a racial category, not an invisible default position for universality. I think that being able to say you're speaking as a white person about either whiteness or blackness helps foreground the issues.
In Racechanges, Gubar shows that while many blacks were forced to adopt white masks as a means to gain equal rights, whites engaged in transracial crossing willingly, even desirously.
"I think there is a trajectory in the 20th century in terms of cross-racial impersonation," Gubar said. "It begins with mockery of African Americans by white people, then it moves toward a kind of mimicry based on admiration, then, finally, to a sense of mutuality. I think white people are becoming increasingly aware of their envy of, or admiration of, or attraction toward black culture. It's becoming a little less embarrassing for whites to somehow admit what's always been there anyway."
In addition to its detailed scholarly examination, Racechanges contains a stunning array of illustrations -- paintings, photographs, film stills and computer graphics -- that help shed new light on the persistent pervasiveness of racism, even as it holds out exciting possibilities for lessening the distance between blacks and whites.
In 1973, two young and brand-new faculty members got into an elevator in IUB's Ballantine Hall, introduced themselves and started a conversation. They haven't stopped talking since.
That inital conversation, between Susan Gubar, now a Distinguished Professor of English at IUB, and Sandra Gilbert, a poet and professor at the University of California-Davis, was the beginning of a collaboration that has sustained itself for nearly a quarter century.
Gilbert and Gubar, as they are referred to in American letters, have made an indelible mark on feminist literary criticism and the teaching of literature by women. Racechanges is Gubar's first solo book. Says Pulitzer Prize winner Toni Morrison: "Professor Gubar's readings are marvels of precision and insight. This is brilliant scholarship of tremendous significance."
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