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“Crimes of Racial and Generic Mixing in John A. Williams’s Clifford’s Blues”

As systems of classification, both genre and race lend themselves to policing activities. The establishment of generic boundaries, like the legal codification of racial difference, inevitably creates anxiety about the threat of transgression. As Jacques Derrida’s seminal essay “The Law of Genre” slyly reveals, “one must not cross a line of demarcation, one must not risk impurity, anomaly, or monstrosity” (53). Ultimately Derrida argues that the segregation logic of genre is unsound, and concludes that “a law of impurity or a principle of contamination” defines genre (53). In this, Derrida’s law of genre resembles the formula for “Optic White” paint in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man: “the purest white that can be found” created by incorporating ten drops of “dead black” liquid (202). Genre theory is rife with metaphors of purity and contamination, incarceration, and racial segregation. In The Anatomy of Criticism, Northrop Frye comments, “the forms of prose fiction are mixed, like racial strains in human beings” (305). John Frow describes genre as “a law against miscegenation” (1627). Bruce Robbins characterizes genre as a “conservative regime” and “agent of social domination” (1646). Likewise, Stephen Owen describes the mapping of generic boundaries as “remarkably close to legislation or border control” (1389). The “notion of genre purity in literary criticism,” Hayden White argues, “serves much the same function as the notion of species purity in racist notions of humanity and history” (599). On the