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This chapter presents a discussion of the “crisis of representation” at the root of Cold War anti-Communism. It concentrates on the instances when the American anti-Communist discourse of the 1950s explicitly reflected on the necessary limits of representation. The chapter examines the recurrent rhetorical and discursive strategies of official American anti-Communist politics in order to argue that Cold War anti-Communism primarily legitimized itself by reference to a number of privileged moments when representation reached a specific limit. It contrasts two basic paradigms of Cold War anti-Communism: the liberal aestheticization of politics and the conservative militarization of politics.

Reviewing the critical reception and scholarship on Nella Larsen’s Passing, the chapter documents the historical and contemporary appeal of the “passing plot” in US fiction, along with the social phenomenon of race passing. Like the slave narrative, the passing novel is structured by border crossings and functions as a form of social critique. And while, like many modernist texts, Passing focuses on the theme of identity, Larsen rewrites essentialist notions of identity with the postmodernist concept of performative identity. The chapter proposes that Larsen, in effect, narratively theorizes the postmodern debate around essentialism vs. constructionism, challenging the idea of innate racial difference while embracing an ideology of racial uniqueness. Juxtaposing central characters Clare, who embodies textual performance, and Irene, who embodies readerly performance, the chapter demonstrates how these miscegenous figures represent “a crisis of representation.” Larsen’s achievement, it concludes, lies in her reductio ad absurdum refutation of the essentialist position.

Chapter 3 returns to Inés and her daughter Dara to show how passing turns their projects to consolidate middle-class status inside out. From Inés’ tales of her past to a quibble over table manners, the chapter draws on a variety of ethnographic evidence from everyday life with the two women to unravel Tijuana’s contradictory semiotics of class status and mobility. The ambiguities of upward mobility and self-transformation play out in relation to multiple physical boundaries, whether the walls of the country club or the border itself. In face of these ambiguities, Inés and Dara’s multigenerational project for middle-class status ultimately merges with working-class sensibilities around social possibility in Tijuana and, in particular, the fascinating and unpredictable outcomes of anonymous encounter on the street. Fictionality takes over; middle-class “I”s dissolve in the imaginative inhabitance of scenarios that just might come true. The ensuing crisis of representation does not only affect personal projects of status; it affects the entire ideology of Tijuana as an ostensibly middle-class city of authorized border crossers, oriented towards the norms of liberal publicity.

This chapter examines the presence of Muslim envoys in France as an intentional political act from France's periphery that thrust concerns about France's global position—the very substance of royal authority—to the fore. Those concerns were reflected and refracted in the exploding pamphlet literature, images, and newspapers of the period leading up to the Estates General and in the “crisis of representation” that emerged after the Bastille fell in July 1789. The chapter shows how the “Muslim question” appeared in many different forms in the pamphlet war of 1788–1789. In fact, as a result of the changing geopolitical circumstances, Muslims were indeed passing through Paris, and some had real connections to the revolutionary ferment. These figures of real—and already politicized—Muslims were appropriated, caricatured, and ventriloquized in the pamphlet literature and on the stage.

This chapter identifies a typically late antique phenomenon: the emergence of a “poetics of silence” involving a metaliterary problematization of language and representation. This phenomenon, reminiscent of the postmodern “linguistic turn,” is not restricted to literature but is omnipresent in late antique culture; it underlies Augustine’s semiotics, Evagrius Ponticus’s hesychasm, Gregory of Nyssa’s apophaticism and Pseudo-Dionysius’s negative mysticism. The metaphor of silence is tackled by several authors: Sidonius Apollinaris, Fulgentius, Augustine, Ausonius, Rutilius Namatianus, and the anonymous writer of the Peruigilium Veneris. At times, silence is depicted as the haven of tranquillity enabling literary creation; at other times, as a threat of dissolution hovering over the fragility of the poet’s work. Above all, it is the deep, ultimately unknowable reality beyond the murmuring of words. Common to all these authors is a problematizing approach to language and a fundamental distrust of the classical idea of representation.

The book concludes with broader, more speculative reflections on subjecthood, spatiality, and humanism. Fin-de-siècle modes of literary, dramatic, and pictorial representation are frequently anti-humanistic in character, challenging as they do the centrality of the human form and the anthropocentric world view that elevated it to pre-eminence. But anti-humanism must not be equated with the anti-human. The relative marginalization of the human figure does not, contrary to what José Ortega y Gasset argues in The Dehumanization of Art (1925), necessarily entail a flight from ‘human contents’; as the work of Mallarmé, Apollinaire, Maeterlinck, and Jarry bears witness, those contents can be distributed into space, expressed as gaps, fragments, and fissures.