John Barth, Blackface, and Invisible Identity

Moriarty’s Ghost

“…This performance might be called straight-faced, citing all the referents of proper masculinity—yet disruptive moments in the texts may open failures of proper male identity that call that essential category into question. I have adapted, thus, usage of “straight-faced” from Duvall’s (2008) helpful theorization of “white-face.” White-face is a performance of proper whiteness by white-skinned fictional characters who cannot be easily identified with whiteness in the culturally legitimate sense theorized by Dyer (1997), by virtue of, for instance, their class or sexual identity. The coinage “straight-faced” stresses the performativity of straightness, while the lack of a subject to the phrase emphasizes that the performativity of sexuality is not a deliberate free play but a cultural structure of citation that limits and enables subjectivity.…”

“…Yet as Duvall (2008, 36) notes, once the performance of cultural legitimacy has slipped, it can never be fully recuperated or made whole again. In his context of race studies, “ once white has mixed with black, it is no longer white.…”