No Telephone To Heaven

In Michelle Cliff’s novels, Abeng and No Telephone to Heaven, she writes about a society where your place is defined by your skin color. Race and identity are questions raised in her novels. Clare, the main protagonist, comes from a family being fairly white, in particular, herself and her father, that enjoys a quite favorable status in Jamaica. Elaine K. Ginsberg’s text, “Passing and the Fictions of Identity” widens the definition and representation of “passing” to one that describes different categories of identity and gives a description of the anxiety that it provokes.

The text is very useful as it gives a lot of information about race and how it is understood. As a result, it helps us to get the ambiguity behind Clare’s figure who belongs to two worlds and the origins of the political reason behind the preservation of identity categories and the way they have been constructed in the United States.

The purpose of Ginsberg’s text is to give a broader meaning and illustration of the term passing.

The text talks about the problematic of accessing the privileges and how passing defies the stiff frame of identity politics. Ginsberg questions how people interpret, understand and create meaning on the way, others behave, speak or on their physical appearance. The fact that passing challenges the connection between the physical appearance and identity, it then, consequently, questions the real meaning of race. Identity issues in American culture can thus be better understood. Ginsberg identifies passing as an action violating and overstepping the limits of not only the law but also ethnicity.

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One of the key ideas in the text about passing is that it “is about identities”, the limits set up between the various categories of them and the anxiety as the result of going beyond those limits (p2). The introduction gives an overview of the term passing, and what it means, and Ginsberg explains how passing challenges essentialism; being something…

Abeng Michelle Cliff Summary