ABSTRACT
Revised title and institutional information: Milo Obourn, Associate Professor of English and Women and Gender Studies, The College at Brockport, State University of New York, USA
This chapter reads Nella Larsen’s novel Passing and Toni Morrison’s short story “Recitatif” against each other to uncover a set of shared themes related to the cost of racialized subjecthood in the United States and ways that white supremacy reproduces itself via ideologies of ableism and inequitable distribution of accommodation and access. In both texts, the threat of racial unknowability is revealed to be psychically destabilizing to subjects living under white supremacy. Passing suggests that for white, white-passing and white-approximating subjects, this psychic instability is accommodated by the cultural environment, while for those subjects marked as Black, such an instability can become untenable. Larsen uses representations of physically accessible and non-accessible racially coded spaces to suggest that a stable relation to whiteness for Black subjects demands able-bodied status in a white supremacist environment. “Recitatif”’s narrative structure places the reader in a precarious position in relation to racial unknowability, and the threat of this unknowability is figured via cultural signifiers of disability. Morrison utilizes the character of Maggie and her figuration in the memory of the main characters to call the reader’s attention to the ways in which ableism is involved in replicating the violence of raced subjectivity in the U.S.
