Slippery Characters: Ethnic Impersonators and American Identities.

Gubar, Susan

Laura Browder. Slippery Characters: Ethnic Impersonators and American Identities. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2000. 312 pp. $49.95 cloth/$18.95 paper.

When the French philosopher Maurice Blanchot slyly warned, "If there is, among all words, one that is inauthentic, then surely it is the word 'authentic,'" he might have been cautioning against the authenticity touted on advertisements, flap or back copy, and reviews of many of the best-selling "ethnic impersonator autobiographies" that Laura Browder studies. Her cast of "slippery characters" includes Mattie Griffith, the abolitionist creator of The Autobiography of a Female Slave (1857); Lillian Smith, a "voluntary Indian" renamed "Wenona," who starred in Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show in the 1880s; the "imaginary Jew" Elizabeth Stern, whose I Am a Woman--And a Jew (1926) was penned by the illegitimate child of a Welsh Baptist mother and a German Lutheran father; Sylvester Lance, the son of former slaves who "transformed himself into the internationally famous Chief Buffalo Child Long Lance" and composed the memoir Lance Long (1928); Ben Reitman, a Jewish lecturer and Chicago fund-raiser whose Sister of the R oad: The Autobiography of Boxcar Bertha (1937) became a 1972 film about hobos directed by Martin Scorsese; John Howard Griffin and Grace Halsell, the passers who recorded their cross-racial impersonations in, respectively, Black Like Me (1960) and Soul Sister (1969); Asa Carter, the KKK racist whose The Education of Little Tree (1976) "sold much better than any other Native American autobiography published at the time"; and Danny Santiago, whose Famous All Over Town (1983) was praised for its rich portrayal of Chicano street life until, the secret behind the pseudonym revealed, he was replaced by the social worker Daniel James, a graduate of Andover and Yale.

The figures Werner Sollors calls "ethnic transvestites" demonstrate to Laura Browder that "the tradition of American self-invention," inaugurated by Ben Franklin, enabled a number of self-fashioners to apply the hegemonic logic of the "fluidity of class identity" in the United States to "the porousness of ethnic identity." With scrupulous detail, she examines not only each of these literary and social events, but also their reception so as to demonstrate that "ethnic passage from one identity to another is not an anomaly" in America. Following in the steps of such scholars as Eric Lott and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., who work on whites masquerading as people of color, Marianne Torgovnick, who studies Anglos imitating Native Americans, and Michael Rogin, who analyzes Jews blacking up, Browder proves that what historically has passed for authenticity may simply be a re-inscription of stereotypical and biologistic attitudes toward racial and ethnic identity. At the heart of this study stands the paradox that success ful racial and ethnic imposters have to master the racial registers they deploy, and so they may restrict rather than expand, re-inscribe rather than subvert their readers' assumptions about identity. For this reason, according to Browder, not so much the act of passing but the exposure of the impersonator offers the possibility of liberating readers from fixed ideas about race and ethnicity.

Some of the chapters in Slippery Characters veer away from ersatz autobiographies to discuss, for instance, theatrically staged performances at P. T. Barnum's racial exhibits; Helen Hunt Jackson's best-selling novel about Native Americans, Ramona (1894); Israel Zangwill's influential play The Melting-Pot (1908); and the "revolutionary blackface" performed by the Symbionese Liberation Army in the nineteen-seventies. Although Browder recognizes "the transgressive quality of an outrageous joke" in the racial impersonations she records, humorous and playful episodes are often eclipsed by the acts of racial violence and dispossession that she records. In large measure, too, Slippery Characters tends to focus on the ethnic impersonator autobiography, which is now "a genre on the verge of extinction." According to Browder's last chapter, where she glances at recent works like Shirlee Taylor Haizlip's The Sweeter the Juice and Gregory Howard Williams's Life on the Color Line, "a deconstruction of racial categories" h as begun and contemporary memoirs tend to dramatize not temporary racial passing so much as sustained processes of racial re-definition. On her last page, Browder summarizes her findings about what the tradition of the autobiography--which, she believes, is "uniquely suited" to America's mythologies--tells us about racial history: "While race may be a construction, it wields tremendous power in the lives of most people, for whom racial and ethnic categories are far from abstractions." Such a conclusion does not substantially enliven current thinking about race; however, Slippery Characters contains an ample archive of cross-racial masquerades in American cultural history.