Jumping off Olivia's statements about whiteness, noncorporeality and individuality and blackness as attached to the body and signifying the social type--what becomes of the mixed body? What does photographic technology offer to 'ambiguously' racialized subjects?
The mixed body occupies an abstract and artificial embodiment, free from racial categorization yet unable to fully claim the noncorporeality of whiteness. Yet, unlike the mixed woman, the identifiably black woman can easily pass through American culture because her embodiment is highly visible and intelligible to the white mind. The mixed body, however, is unintelligible under the rules of racial binarism and classification that organize American culture--and technology. Although her in-between-ness renders her abstract, she remains trapped in her body. She is in the unique position of being able to choose her own public identity, to be both visible and invisible at once. Sarah Jane, in Imitation of Life, is barred from reconciling her public white and private black bodies within the technology used on film. Sarah Jane’s passing body does not receive corporeality or noncorporeality, visibility or invisibility, in representation.
So what happens to Sarah Jane, or very light-skinned blacks deemed 'black' by the census and Jim Crow, who read as 'white' on film? She appears white and we only understand her as black through her blood-lines--her mother's presence. Does Sarah Jane 'pass' for white on screen, tricking the camera into believing she's white? Or, is she technically 'white' and only socially and politically defined as 'black'? Are the nuances of race untranslatable to a technology that only reads black/white or light/dark binary?
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