How Nella Larsen’s Passing deconstructed the question of race

Posted in Articles, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive, Passing, United States on 2021-11-15 17:38Z by Steven

How Nella Larsen’s Passing deconstructed the question of race

The New Statesman
2021-11-12

Gary Younge, Professor of Sociology
University of Manchester

Photo by Pictorial Press Ltd / Alamy Stock Photo

Larsen’s 1929 novel, now a Netflix film, illustrates the degree to which race is a construct – without lecturing the reader.

Every year approximately 12,000 white-skinned Negroes disappear,” Walter White, the former head of the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People, wrote in a 1947 article. “People whose absence cannot be explained by death or emigration… Men and women who have decided that they will be happier and more successful if they flee from the proscription and humiliation which the American colour line imposes on them.”

White had first-hand experience. The black president of the NAACP had blonde hair and blue eyes. He would “disappear” himself from time to time, so that he could safely investigate lynching in the American South. The piece, published in TIME magazine, was called “Why I Choose to Remain a Negro”.

The term “passing” relates to those who disappear – pretending to be something, and therefore someone, that they are not, usually in search of a better, safer or easier life. The practice is not limited to race. It could be a Jew posing as a gentile; a Catholic as a Protestant. But the challenges remain the same and lend themselves easily to narrative tension – the need to cut yourself off from your past, the fear of being discovered, the construction of a life that is a lie.

Nella Larsen’s laconic novella, Passing, draws from the human toll and intrigue that emerges from the transgression, subterfuge and outright deceit involved in an African American woman passing as white in 1920s America. Published in 1929, it has been adapted into a film by the British actor Rebecca Hall, now streaming on Netflix. The novella has long been one of my favourites among the works from the Harlem Renaissance, the literary movement that emerged among black artists and writers in 20th-century New York and saw the likes of Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen and Aaron Douglas become prominent. Sparsely written, character-driven and emotionally complex, it illustrates the degree to which black is a political colour, race is a construct, and racism is a system in which colour is a component, not a determinant – without actually lecturing the reader on any of that…

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What To Know About the Novel Passing Before Watching the Netflix Movie

Posted in Articles, Biography, Book/Video Reviews, History, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive, Passing on 2021-11-14 03:06Z by Steven

What To Know About the Novel Passing Before Watching the Netflix Movie

TIME
2021-11-12

Cady Lang

In Passing, the film adaptation of Nella Larsen’s seminal 1929 novel of the same name, two women reckon with who they are and how they identify. Although both are Black, they are light-skinned enough that they can “pass” for white. The film, which premiered at Sundance and hits Netflix this week, takes a nuanced approach to parsing out the complexities of race and its role in our lives—not just the construct of it, but the performance of it. Larsen’s novel centers on two childhood friends whose chance encounter as adults shifts not only how they see themselves, but how they view their places in the world, with dramatic consequences.

This complex friendship is the inspiration for Rebecca Hall’s film adaptation, which is also her directorial debut. Actors Tessa Thompson and Ruth Negga play Irene and Clare, respectively, the two women whose reunion will upheave both their worlds and cause them to reconsider the lives they have chosen and the reasons behind those choices.

Here’s what to know about the Passing movie adaptation and the book it was based on…

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The Passing Trailer Highlights That Race Is A Delusion

Posted in Articles, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive, Passing, United States, Women on 2021-11-13 00:36Z by Steven

The Passing Trailer Highlights That Race Is A Delusion

Refinery29
2021-09-24

Nylah Burton

Photo: Courtesy of Netflix.

“Race is a delusion,” my friend sighed. We had been discussing passing, the act of someone from one race being accepted or perceived as a member of another, usually a marginalized race to white. After numerous anecdotes about the ridiculous race science-y tactics — gauging the slope of a nose is a popular one — that people employed to categorize others, this was our conclusion.

A week later, our Twitter timelines were scattered with comments on a tantalizing trailer for Passing, a forthcoming Netflix movie based on Nella Larsen’s 1929 novella of the same name. The film, which will be released on November 10, stars Ruth Negga as Clare and Tessa Thompson as Irene. According to Larson’s original story, both Clare and Irene are supposed to be white-passing.

Still, no matter how good their acting is, Negga and Thompson are not Clare and Irene. They’re not “dark-white” or “olive-skinned” characters on a page onto which we can project our own individual images. They’re flesh and bone people that the public solidly recognizes as Black women. There’s no real chance of delusion because we already feel in the know. Because of that, Twitter debated whether these two women could actually be white-passing. For many, the idea was ridiculous. They pointed out the features of Negga and Thompson’s flesh and bone — their skin, the shape of their noses, the curl of their baby hairs — to say it was impossible that these two women could have passed for white in the 1920s…

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From Joseph Boyden To Michelle Latimer – Why Does This Keep Happening?

Posted in Articles, Audio, Canada, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive, Native Americans/First Nation, Passing on 2021-11-12 15:41Z by Steven

From Joseph Boyden To Michelle Latimer – Why Does This Keep Happening?

Canadaland
2021-02-15

Our gatekeepers keep elevating Indigenous artists with tenuous connections to Indigeneity.

Through most of 2020, Michelle Latimer was the hottest Indigenous filmmaker in Canada. In September, she had two works at TIFF: the feature documentary Inconvenient Indian, which took the top two prizes for which it was eligible at the festival, and the first instalments of Trickster, a prestige CBC drama about growing up on reserve whilst contending with monsters both figurative and literal.

“Latimer’s young characters are multifaceted, her interplay between score and imagery sets an energetic pace, and, most importantly, her respect for the trickster in Indigenous storytelling is evident,” TIFF’s Geoff Macnaughton wrote in his programme note for Trickster. “If the archetype can truly impact younger generations, that respect is paramount — and Latimer’s version exemplifies why it matters who gets to tell the story.”

When she appeared on the cover of NOW‘s annual TIFF issue, the magazine proclaimed that she “reclaims Indigenous storytelling.”

But three months later, the CBC published an investigation that brought forward serious questions about Latimer’s evolving claims of Indigenous identity and heritage — concerns about which had been raised privately since at least the summer.

In short order, Inconvenient Indian was pulled from the 2021 Sundance Film Festival and its future release thrown into doubt. The CBC chose to not move ahead with a second season of Trickster, following conversations with the cast, crew, and author of the source material.

And as first reported by Variety, Latimer hired crisis PR firm Navigator to manage the fallout, serving the CBC with a notice of libel.

There’s a lot to unpack there, and today’s episode of CANADALAND attempts to do so, through interviews with comedian and Thunder Bay host Ryan McMahon, filmmaker Alethea Arnaquq-Baril, and Inuk seal hunter Steven Lonsdale, the latter two of whom were featured in Inconvenient Indian.

For host Jesse Brown, one of the big questions is: Why does this keep happening? Between Joseph Boyden, once Canada’s hottest Indigenous novelist, and now Michelle Latimer, why do Canada’s white cultural gatekeepers keep elevating Indigenous artists whose actual connections to Indigeneity are tenuous? Brown implicates himself in this, as he and McMahon had recently met with Latimer about helming a potential dramatic television adaption of Thunder Bay.

Listen to the episode (00:59:49) here.

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“Lying about a Lie”: Racial Passing in US History, Literature and Popular Culture

Posted in Articles, Communications/Media Studies, History, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive, Passing, United States on 2021-11-05 16:07Z by Steven

“Lying about a Lie”: Racial Passing in US History, Literature and Popular Culture

Journal of American Studies
Volume 50, Issue 2 (May 2016)
DOI: 10.1017/S0021875816000219

Sinéad Moynihan, Associate Professor of English
University of Exeter

In June 2015, the parents of Rachel Dolezal, president of the Spokane, Washington chapter of the NAACP, claimed that their daughter was passing as black. While she professed to be of mixed (white, African American) racial heritage, her parents asserted that she was of white European descent, with some remote Native American ancestry. The revelations precipitated Dolezal’s resignation from her role at the NAACP and a flurry of articles about the story that were disseminated around the world on Twitter under the “Rachel Dolezal” hashtag.

Much of the media coverage attempted to account for the fact that this story should elicit such impassioned reactions given that race has long been acknowledged as a performance. As Jelani Cobb wrote in the New Yorker, Dolezal had dressed herself in “a fictive garb of race whose determinations are as arbitrary as they are damaging.” This does not mean that Dolezal “wasn’t lying about who she is.” It means that “she was lying about a lie.” Meanwhile, in the New York Times, Daniel J. Sharfstein pointed out that the kind of passing we saw in Dolezal’s case – passing from white to black; so-called “reverse passing” – was not as historically uncommon as other writers had claimed. What is unusual is that Dolezal should feel the need to pass as black when there were no legal (and comparatively few social) obstacles to her forming “meaningful relationships with African-Americans, study[ing], teach[ing] and celebrat[ing] black history and culture and fight[ing] discrimination.” For Sharfstein, the explanation lies in the fact that “when blackness means something very specific – asserting that black lives matter – it follows for many people that categorical clarity has to matter, too.”

The pervasive media and public interest in the Dolezal story confirms the ongoing fascination with racial passing within and beyond the United States, a popular interest that has its counterpart in the proliferation of academic studies of the subject that have been published in the past twenty years. The scholarly attention paid to racial passing inaugurated, arguably, by Elaine K. Ginsberg in her edited volume Passing and the Fictions of Identity (1996) continues unabated in two recent works on the subject. Julie Cary Nerad’s edited volume Passing Interest is concerned with cultural representations of passing, while Allyson Hobbs’s A Chosen Exile grapples with its history.

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The Fearlessness of Passing

Posted in Articles, Book/Video Reviews, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive, Passing, United States on 2021-11-02 22:02Z by Steven

The Fearlessness of Passing

Dissent
2021-10-27

Charles Taylor

Ruth Negga’s Clare (left) and Tessa Thompson’s Irene in a still from Passing. (Netflix)

Rebecca Hall’s adaptation of Nella Larsen’s 1929 novel continues the author’s exploration of the suffocating strictures of the color line.

Making a movie of Nella Larsen’s 1929 novel Passing, one of the great works of the Harlem Renaissance—and, I’d argue, a great American novel—would be tricky in any era. That the actress Rebecca Hall, making her directing debut, has done a close-to-devastating job of it in this era is a remarkable achievement.

The novel is the story of two girlhood friends who reencounter each other as young, married women, one passing for white and the other firmly settled into the life of Harlem’s black bourgeoisie. Larsen practically invites the careless reader to fall into well-intentioned sociological clichés—in other words, to believe that this is a novel about the tragedy that befalls those who, driven by racist persecution, cross the color line and betray their own.

Actually, the novel is about the absurdity of the color line as a concept, about race as “the thing that bound and suffocated.” For Larsen, the idea that you could betray your race was another way of saying that people should stick to their own kind. It’s the passing Clare, a slim, pale-skinned, heedless beauty, who is Larsen’s heroine. Clare, taken in as a maid by her poor white aunts when her alcoholic father dies, doesn’t decide to pass because she’s oppressed but because she’s shunned by the well-heeled black people among whom she grew up. (In one stinging scene, Clare, already passing, approaches an old school friend whom she recognizes while shopping in Marshall Field’s, only to have the woman cut her dead.) Clare is hungry for life and for pleasure, which she takes as it comes to her. The way in which she crosses back and forth between black and white, between the thrill of a Negro Welfare League dance and white upper-middle-class society, makes a hash of the polite segregation—of both race and class—to which the novel’s other protagonist, Irene, pays obeisance…

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The Fiction of the Color Line

Posted in Articles, Biography, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive, Passing, United States, Women on 2021-10-21 01:01Z by Steven

The Fiction of the Color Line

Vulture
2021-10-18

Brittany Luse

Photo-Illustration: Vulture; Photo: Getty, Yale University Library

Black women writers have long used passing stories to crack our façades of race, class, and gender.

Somewhere on Long Island around 1980, a blondish preteen is onstage at summer camp channeling Hodel from Fiddler on the Roof, her confident voice and star power self-evident. Her tawny-skinned father beams from the audience, and as she takes her bow, soaking in the applause, he approaches the stage bearing a hefty bouquet of daisies. He hands her the flowers, their eyes and hearts locking for a beat in shared pride. Then the girl realizes that every other parent, instructor, and child in the auditorium is staring at them. “Not in a way that felt good, not because I had given the outstanding performance of the night,” she would recall decades later. “They were staring because my father was the only Black man in sight, and I belonged to him.” The others had assumed until that moment that Mariah Carey — the girl with the frizzy honey-blonde hair — was white like them.

The Meaning of Mariah Carey, the singer’s delectable memoir co-written with Michaela Angela Davis, a former editor at Essence and Vibe, recalls many such stories. In doing so, it’s in direct conversation with the American literary tradition of novels about passing and passing-capable Black women — stories about the concealment, or the possibility of concealment, of one’s Black parentage and all of the attendant personal and social complexity. Since the late-19th century, writers have used passing as a narrative tool to do everything from encouraging white readers to sympathize with the struggles of Black characters to scrutinizing the hypocrisy of America’s racial hierarchy…

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The Problem of the Prism: Racial Passing, Colorism, and the Politics of Racial Visibility

Posted in Dissertations, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive, Passing, United States on 2021-10-20 13:10Z by Steven

The Problem of the Prism: Racial Passing, Colorism, and the Politics of Racial Visibility

University of Maryland
2020
DOI: 10.13016/kkbp-vio4

DeLisa Hawkes

In The Problem of the Prism, I argue that activist writers challenged the normalizing of white supremacy and imagined black futurity within the intersections of racial visibility, nation, and culture by transforming and repurposing racist and colorist ideologies. Through a wide range of cultural materials, I recuperate overlooked discourses on race and color by broadening the parameters through which we understand the black-white color line.

Focusing on neglected texts by understudied authors allows for a deeper consideration of how assumed ancestry and legal segregation impact America’s construction of citizenship and social hierarchies. For this reason, I consider how critical attention to skin complexion and visible ancestry illuminates institutionalized feelings of inferiority. I call these the politics of racial visibility. In the first chapter, I consider Albion Tourgée’s 1890 novel Pactolus Prime and the ways in which it offers readers an examination of how the black-white color line fosters notions of inferiority within both races.

In chapter two, I argue that Sutton Griggs inspires the “New Mulatta,” a revision of the “tragic mulatta” trope, that inspires race pride throughout the Black Diaspora by rejecting colorist ideologies. In chapter three, I recover the works of Olivia Ward Bush-Banks and Sylvester “Chief Buffalo Child” Long Lance as critical lenses through which to deconstruct black separatism by considering African-Native American identities within New Negro philosophy. I argue that their works reconceptualize the “tragic mulatta/o” outside of the confines of the black-white binary while acknowledging the fraught relationship between African Americans and Native Americans. Thus, their works reveal a black-red color line that disables anti-racist and anti-colonialist collaboration. In the final chapter, I argue that 1940s and 1950s Ebony magazine articles shift readers’ attention to racial anxieties within the “white” appearing spectrum of the black-white color line to critique internalized racism. By addressing social implications anticipated within racial ambiguity in the space of the home, this commercial magazine allows readers from all socioeconomic backgrounds to engage with pressing concerns over racial visibility. Ultimately, Ebony magazine’s persistent focus on colorism and racial passing brings the efforts of nineteenth and early-twentieth-century authors full circle.

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A qualitative examination of familial racial-ethnic socialization experiences among multiracial American emerging adults.

Posted in Articles, Family/Parenting, Identity Development/Psychology, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive, United States on 2021-10-20 02:10Z by Steven

A qualitative examination of familial racial-ethnic socialization experiences among multiracial American emerging adults.

Journal of Family Psychology
Volume 35, Issue 7 (Oct. 2021)
DOI: 10.1037/fam0000918

Annabelle L. Atkin, Ph.D., Postdoctoral Scholar
T. Denny Sanford School of Social and Family Dynamics
Arizona State University

Kelly F. Jackson, Associate Professor of Social Work
Arizona State University

Rebecca M. B. White, Associate Professor of Family and Human Development
Sanford School of Social and Family Dynamics
Arizona State University

Alisia G. T. T. Tran, Assistant Professor in the Counseling and Counseling Psychology Program
Arizona State University

This qualitative interview study investigated the types of parental racial-ethnic socialization messages received by Multiracial American youth over the course of their development. The Multiracial population in America is the largest demographic group among individuals under the age of 18 (Saulny, 2011), but there is a dearth of research about the development of this rapidly growing population. Multiracial youth are members of multiple racial-ethnic groups. Thus, racial-ethnic socialization is particularly complex for Multiracial families because parents typically have different racial backgrounds and experiences compared to their children. Interviews were conducted with 20 Multiracial emerging adult college students (Mage = 20.55; 10 male, 10 female) of diverse racial backgrounds to identify the types of parental racial-ethnic socialization messages they received growing up. Using thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2006), nine themes of racial-ethnic socialization content emerged: Cultural socialization, racial identity socialization, preparation for bias socialization, colorblind socialization, race-conscious socialization, diversity appreciation socialization, negative socialization, exposure to diversity socialization, and silent socialization. This research advances the literature by (a) identifying domains of racial-ethnic socialization messages for Multiracial American families, (b) examining a diverse sample of male and female Multiracial youth, (c) differentiating monoracial versus Multiracial socialization messages, and (d) distinguishing the unique connotations of egalitarian socialization messages (e.g., colorblind, race-conscious, diversity appreciation). The findings have important implications for understanding the development of Multiracial American individuals and families.

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Race Off: The fantasy of race transformation

Posted in Articles, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive, Passing on 2021-10-09 02:47Z by Steven

Race Off: The fantasy of race transformation

The Yale Review
2021-09-27

Namwali Serpell, Professor of English
Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts

Genevieve Gaignard, People Make the World Go Round, 2019. Photo: Robert Wedemeyer. Courtesy the artist and Vielmetter Los Angeles.

This essay was first delivered in September 2021 as the Finzi-Contini Lecture at Yale University’s Whitney Humanities Center. The Finzi-Contini lectureship was endowed in 1990 by the Honorable Guido Calabresi, Judge, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and former Dean of the Yale Law School, and Dr. Paul Calabresi, in memory of their mother, Bianca Maria Finzi-Contini Calabresi.

WHAT IF YOU COULD change your race? Some disturbing scandals of late have put this hypothetical to the reality test. A cluster of white American academics and activists, all women it seems, have been revealed to have spent years cosplaying a different race—Latinx, North African, black—deceiving their colleagues and comrades. The valedictorian of this recent class of racial fakers remains Rachel Dolezal, the former college instructor, activist, and president of an NAACP chapter, who was outed by a reporter in 2015. She confessed that she was “born white to white parents,” but still declares herself to be “racially human” and culturally black.

Such deceptions are nothing new. Racial hoaxes have been around for a long time, as Laura Browder explains in Slippery Characters: Ethnic Impersonators and American Identities (2000). In the mid-nineteenth century, P. T. Barnum showcased people of concocted races, such as “the Circassian Beauty,” and promoted a “Negro” who claimed to have discovered “a weed that turns a black person white.” Newspapers at the time called out runaway slave imposters, who went around “soliciting money,” “purchasing relatives and friends.” White writers published fake slave narratives, with some unconscious tells, according to Browder: their narrators tend to discover that slavery is bad (as if this were not obvious) and to betray both “disgust with the African-American body” and “an obsession with physical pain.” As late as the 1920s, the British- born Archibald Stansfeld Belaney disguised himself as Grey Owl, a Native American man. In his 2017 history Bunk, Kevin Young notes that “the hoax regularly steps in when race rears its head—exactly because it too is a fake thing pretending to be real.”…

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