Oct 29, 2017 | 3:30 PM - 5:00 PM | Loft 2

Hannah Nahm

Ethics of Neighbor Love in Passing: Willard Savoy's Alien Land

If there is one African American novel from the postwar decade that uses the motif of passing in its most historically and thematically recognizable convention of black-to-white trajectory, it would be Willard Savoy’s Alien Land (1949). Narrated in the first-person voice that resonates with the one we hear in James Weldon Johnson’s Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, the basic plot of Alien Land seems in keeping with the traditional thematic of passing: It is a story of a biracial male protagonist who begins his racial career as black but after several starts and stops and ultimately confronted with the insufferable danger—and degradation—of being black in a racist world, passes for white (similar to Johnson’s Ex-Colored Man whose tipping point is the witnessing of a gruesome lynch scene, for Savoy’s protagonist Kern Roberts, it is the witnessing of the scorched and abject body of his uncle Jake). Yet to view this novel as simple addition to the traditional passing narrative would be a misreading.

Whether penned by white or black authors, in traditional passing novels and films leading up to and including 1949, the narrative arch is so formulaic and certain factors so naturalized (such as the acceptance of the one-drop law that deems mixed-race individuals essentially black no matter how white they appear) that they elide any considerations of possible contradictions or complications extant in the storyline involving passing.  As Valerie Smith notes, these works “presuppose that characters who pass for white are betrayers of the black race,” leaving no room for interpreting passing in subversive or any other light; moreover, whereas “the logic of these texts for the most part condemns passing as a strategy for resisting racism,” black females who pass are singularly punished with their future options foreclosed while black male passers are granted some measure of reprieve (43,44-5). Among these contemporaneous narratives on passing, Willard Savoy’s Alien Land stands apart. Savoy’s novel carries out a radical overhaul of the infrastructure and economies of the passing novel, re-constructing it to underscore ethical ramifications and questions of passing that have heretofore eluded the literary radar.

I believe Alien Land offers an excellent case study of how a black American writer from the postwar years takes the oft-used and tired trope of passing in its most conventional form and imbues it with reinvigorated layers of complexities—racial (both inter- and intra-), gendered, psychological, philosophical, and above all, unflinchingly ethical. In doing so, Savoy’s novel reveals that far from monolithic, passing is gradated (in terms of duration and degree), bilateral (passing works both ways: black-to-white and white-to-black), and relentlessly paradoxical.

I want to propose that Savoy’s revisionist narrative confronts us with the urgent connection between passing and the ethics of neighbor-love, particularly, a genuine love between the historically embittered black- and white- Americans, and the implication of passing as the site of gender-power struggle and negotiation. In Savoy’s narrative, passing becomes a play, one that is at once profane and ethical, and in that paradoxical playfulness, desecrates the dogmatic religiousness of American racism and the construction of race that this racist religiousness sanctions. I argue that in Alien Land, Savoy undertakes the deeply controversial and daring project of using the trope of passing as the agent of love, one that conveys that genuine love between blacks and whites is not only a possibility but a moral imperative; and that art (including the art of passing) and the artist can play a redemptive role in expressing and solidifying this neighbor-love.

Dr. Bill Scalia, PhD

Kierkegaard on the Mississippi: Huck Finn’s Crisis of Conscience

In Fear and Trembling (1843), Soren Kierkegaard considers Abraham’s condition at the moment he was asked by God to sacrifice his son Isaac.  For Kierkegaard, God led Abraham into a paradox, since Abraham had an "absolute duty to God” but also a duty to protect the life of his son.  Kierkegaard reasons that Abraham solved the paradox by a “double movement” of faith in the absolute:  faith that God would not ask him to violate the ethical (the telos of human existence) without reason; but, Abraham believed that in the act of sacrifice he would have Isaac restored to him by God.  Thus, Abraham transcends the ethical and is, by virtue of his faith, reentered into the ethical (and his son is, in a sense, “restored”). In The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), Mark Twain leads Huck into a similar paradox, his celebrated “crisis of conscience.”  Huck is, in a sense, an inverted form of Abraham’s paradox:  if Huck obeys “God,” he will save himself but sacrifice Jim; if Huck decides not to betray Jim to Miss Watson, he will save Jim but (he believes) will damn his own soul.

My essay will consider Kierkegaard’s assessment of Abraham’s paradox and demonstrate how Twain inverts the paradox to expose the hypocrisy of slavery and Christian culture that supports it. Huck resolves his paradox not in the double movement of faith in the absolute (sacrifice / restoration), but in the moral ethos of Huck’s own conscience, as Huck understands his conscience to be formed not by the southern church of his day, but by his experience of Jim’s love.  By refusing to suspend the ethical to allow for a leap of faith, Twain chooses to rewrite the ethical:  thus, Huck saves Jim, and in so doing offers a model for social justice.