Performativity and Performance: Identities and Multi-Dimensional Psychological Passing in Go Tell It on the Mountain

Abstract

ABSTRACT This essay explores how key characters from James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain exhibit psychological passing and performative identity formation in relation to race, religion, and sexuality. By analyzing Florence’s performing of interior whiteness, Gabriel’s performing of surface-level morality and shifting versions of exterior Blackness, and John’s performing of religiousness, straightness, and Blackness, this paper argues that Baldwin’s character development shows identities to be a performative process of multifaceted passing which on the one hand compels people to reiterate and reinforce relevant identity norms under the interpellation of hegemonic ideology in race, religion, and sexuality, but which on the other hand invites people to gain agency by challenging and subverting these regulatory norms and stereotypes through strategic performance. Through the novel, Baldwin conveys that identity formation is inherently dynamic and unstable, that passing is about interiority and religion and sexuality as well as about exteriority and race, and that the ability to see both the stage and the backstage, the ability to exhibit a surface exterior which mismatches with interior thought, is a key resource for Black survival, especially for queer Black survival.