Category: Passing

  • More than a century after its initial publication in 1912, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man by James Weldon Johnson continues to generate commentary. The narrator’s racial passing, along with the novel’s twist of genre through “passing” for an autobiography, has led much scholarship to address the issues of race and narrative.

  • The Arresting Eye: Race and the Anxiety of Detection University of Virginia Press May 2015 224 pages 6×9 inches Cloth ISBN: 9780813937014 Paper ISBN: 9780813937021 Ebook ISBN: 9780813937038 Jinny Huh, Associate Professor of English University of Vermont In her reading of detective fiction and passing narratives from the end of the nineteenth century forward, Jinny…

  • Ina Ray Hutton rose to fame in the 1930s and was known as blonde bombshell of rhythm. But she had a secret that could have damaged her stardom.

  • We evaluate the socioeconomic costs and benefits of being Black and inequalities in citizenship status between Blacks and Whites. Furthermore, we examine the socioeconomic and political capital of Blackness versus Whiteness in an attempt to explore the rationality of passing for Black.

  • Good questions breathe life into the world. “We Cast a Shadow,” Maurice Carlos Ruffin’s debut novel, asks some of the most important questions fiction can ask, and it does so with energetic and acrobatic prose, hilarious wordplay and great heart.

  • We Cast a Shadow, A Novel One World (an imprint of Penguin Random House) 2019-01-29 336 pages 6-1/8 x 9-1/4 Hardcover ISBN: 9780525509066 Ebook ISBN: 9780525509080 Audiobook ISBN: 9780525637363 Maurice Carlos Ruffin “You can be beautiful, even more beautiful than before.” This is the seductive promise of Dr. Nzinga’s clinic, where anyone can get their…

  • In today’s post, I’d like to explore those questions. By the end of considering them, I hope we will understand northeastern N.C.’s history a little better and understand where Edna Ferber found at least some of the inspiration for her most popular and enduring literary work…

  • Adrian Piper as African American Artist American Art Volume 20, Number 3 (Fall 2006) DOI: 10.1086/511097 John P. Bowles, Associate Professor of African American Art History University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill African‐American artist Adrian Piper has repeatedly staged her own racial transformation in order to unsettle the racist attitudes of her artworks’ American…

  • Nella Larsen’s Etiquette Lesson: Small Talk, Racial Passing, and the Novel of Manners Novel: A Forum on Fiction Volume 51, Issue 1 (2018-05-01) pages 1-16 DOI: 10.1215/00295132-4357365 Matthew Krumholtz Department of English Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey This essay explores how novelists of the Harlem Renaissance deploy small talk to disrupt racial identification. Nella Larsen’s…

  • This book explores the Spanish elite’s fixation on social and racial ‘passing’ and ‘passers’, as represented in a wide range of texts. It examines literary and non-literary works produced in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that express the dominant Spaniards’ anxiety that socially mobile lowborns, Conversos (converted Jews), and Moriscos (converted Muslims) could impersonate and…