Mixed Race Studies

Challenging the Racial Dichotomy in Nella Larsen’s Passing

St. John Fisher College, Rochester, New York
English Senior Seminar Papers
2012-12-11
22 pages

Samantha Davis
St. John Fisher College

Nella Larsen’s Passing introduces two African American women on a quest for an integrated identity. Irene and Clare are two pale-skinned, childhood friends who are light enough to pass for white. Passing is a work concerned with the representation and construction of race. Clare Kendry passes for white and she “whitens” her lifestyle by adjusting her clothes, behavior, gestures, and etiquette while resisting and denying any existence of her black culture. Irene on the other hand, lives as a black woman but remains a part of the black community only superficially. She occasionally masks her blackness and passes for white for her own convenience. Despite this racial divide, both women desire to achieve an integrated identity to live as both black and white. Irene attempts to achieve this integrated identity by accepting and practicing white standards while living as a black woman. Clare attempts to achieve an integrated identity by finding her way back to the black community. However, they ultimately fail at achieving this integrated identity as the novel reinforces the societal belief that a person can only have one race as either black or white, but not both…

Read the entire paper here.

Crossing B(l)ack: Mixed-Race Identity in Modern American Fiction and Culture

University of Tennessee Press
2013-01-11
150 pages
Cloth ISBN-10: 1572339322; ISBN-13: 978-1572339323

Sika A. Dagbovie-Mullins, Associate Professor of English
Florida Atlantic University

The past two decades have seen a growing influx of biracial discourse in fiction, memoir, and theory, and since the 2008 election of Barack Obama to the presidency, debates over whether America has entered a “post-racial” phase have set the media abuzz. In this penetrating and provocative study, Sika A. Dagbovie-Mullins adds a new dimension to this dialogue as she investigates the ways in which various mixed-race writers and public figures have redefined both “blackness” and “whiteness” by invoking multiple racial identities.

Focusing on several key novels—Nella Larsen’s Quicksand (1928), Lucinda Roy’s Lady Moses (1998), and Danzy Senna’s Caucasia (1998)—as well as memoirs by Obama, James McBride, and Rebecca Walker and the personae of singer Mariah Carey and actress Halle Berry, Dagbovie-Mullins challenges conventional claims about biracial identification with a concept she calls “black-sentient mixed-race identity.” Whereas some multiracial organizations can diminish blackness by, for example, championing the inclusion of multiple-race options on census forms and similar documents, a black-sentient consciousness stresses a perception rooted in blackness—“a connection to a black consciousness,” writes the author, “that does not overdetermine but still plays a large role in one’s racial identification.” By examining the nuances of this concept through close readings of fiction, memoir, and the public images of mixed-race celebrities, Dagbovie-Mullins demonstrates how a “black-sentient mixed-race identity reconciles the widening separation between black/white mixed race and blackness that has been encouraged by contemporary mixed-race politics and popular culture.”

A book that promises to spark new debate and thoughtful reconsiderations of an especially timely topic, Crossing B(l)ack recognizes and investigates assertions of a black-centered mixed-race identity that does not divorce a premodern racial identity from a postmodern racial fluidity.

The Fictive Flapper: A Way of Reading Race and Female Desire in the Novels of Larsen, Hurst, Hurston and Cather

University of Maryland, College Park
2004
391 pages

Traci B. Abbott, Lecturer, English and Media Studies
Bentley University, Waltham, Massachusetts

Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Maryland, College Park, in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

This study seeks to reevaluate the 1920s icon of assertive female sexuality, the flapper, as represented in the novels of four women writers. Although cultural images often designate, by their very construction, normal and alteritous social categories, I argue that the flapper’s presence and popularity encourage rather than restrict this autonomy for even those female populations she appears to reject, notably lower-class women, nonwhite women, and homosexuals. Specifically, the flapper was predicated upon the cultural practices and beliefs of many of the very groups she was designed to exclude, and therefore her presence attests to the reality of these women’s experiences. Moreover, her emphasis on the liberating potential of sexual autonomy could not be contained within her strictly defined parameters in part because of her success in outlining this potential. Each chapter then focuses upon images of black and white female sexuality in the novels, chosen for their attention to female sexual autonomy within and beyond the flapper’s boundaries as well as the author’s exclusion from the flapper’s parameters.  Nella Larsen’s Passing suggests that the fluidity of female sexual desire cannot be contained within strict dichotomies of race, class, or sexual orientation, and women can manipulate and perhaps even transcend such boundaries. Fannie Hurst’s Imitation of Life offers a critique of the flapper’s excessive emphasis on sexual desirability as defined by conspicuous consumption, maintaining that lower-class white and black women can and should have access to sexual autonomy, while Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston similarly questions the denigration of working-class and non-white women in this model with her affirming view of Janie Woods, but also complicates the cultural presumption that any woman can find autonomy within a heterosexual relationship if such relationships are still defined by conventional notions of gender power. Finally, Willa Cather’s last novel, Sapphira and the Slave Girl, contends modern black and white women have the right to control their own sexual needs within an unusual antebellum setting. Thus, all of these novel provide other models of sexual autonomy besides the white, middle-class, heterosexual flapper while harnessing the flapper’s affirming and popular imagery.

Read the entire dissertation here.

“And None for Clare Kendry”: The Mulatta Clique and Female Jealousy in Nella Larsen’s Passing

AsianShakespearean ~ Poetic Justifications, Artistic Testimonies…
2012-04-25

Rebecca Hu

Scholarship on Nella Larsen’s Passing has frequently been approached from the angles of race and queer theories.  H. J. Landry and soon after, Brian Carr, have recently broken ground in their demonstrations of a new synthesized approach to the discourses, taking into account symptomatic readings of homosexual desire as an expression of hooksian feminism and ethnic pride. Nevertheless, by synthesizing, both critical approaches tread dangerously on the delicate lines concerning race and gender: Landry, although meticulously addressing his usage of the term, “mulatto,” in his third footnote, takes the political construction of “race” for granted; his perpetual separation of “black” and “white” as distinct figures even as he rebukes this constructed “blood quantum version of race” undermines the internal, complex “cultural authenticities” which Candice Jenkins just a year before him had striven to demarcate in her analysis of the same novel (46-47). So undermining, Landry problematically critiques that performance of conventional femininity through submission to black men is “embracing inferiority” (25). Carr, in a similar vein, situates paranoid interpretations of passing as “nothing” for “something,” implying consequently that “blackness” and “whiteness” are, in fact, differentiated by absence and existence respectively. Carr’s ironic dichotomy necessitates qualification throughout his assessment of paranoia. He admits repeatedly that concentrated focus on the nothing does, indeed, further paranoia itself. Controversy arises in Carr’s article when he subsequently links paranoia with homosexuality with the “killing desire” which ultimately eliminates Clare Kendry (291) — this time, without sufficient qualification. These racial and gender pitfalls caution us to re-evaluate our current synthesis when speaking of Passing…

Read the entire article here.

Paranoid Interpretation, Desire’s Nonobject, and Nella Larsen’s “Passing”

PMLA (Publication of the Modern Language Association)
Volume 119, Number 2 (March, 2004)
pages 282-295

Brian Carr

Nella Larsen’s Passing (1929) has occasioned a great deal of paranoid interpretation, in large part because the novel is about nothing. I use nothing in the sense of no thing or a non-object, both of which are irreducible to the familiar meaning of nothing as inconsequential or strictly nonexistent.’ In the framework of paranoid interpretation, desire and knowledge imaginarily coincide with an object much that everything, imagined to include nothing, becomes something. Paranoid interpretation is less a property of Passingthan a transactional dynamic between the novel and the critical work on it, a dynamic activated in large part by many critics’ “hateloving” attachment to Passing’scentral character, Irene Redfield. Reading Irene’s interpretations of her life as paranoid delusions, many critics have an inverted and corrective investment in her. As if to resolve yet sustain Irene’s wild interpretations, the contemporary scholarly archive on Passing is virtually unified in its belief that her paranoid apprehensions can be submitted to a proper reading that will furnish the positive knowledge Irene systematically misses.

Critics are not strictly wrong in their characterization of Irene as, in Deborah E. McDowell’s words, “clearly deluded” (xxvi). And yet, the fact that many critics work to procure for themselves the clarity they need to assign paranoid delusion to Irene leads one to wonder, how “deluded” are the critics? If paranoia, through delusion, converts nothing into something, the bulk of the critical work on Passing is in reach of paranoia, since the work, too, impulsively confounds something with nothing, truth with what at best can be only half told, desire with what Kaja Silvermanaptly calls its “impossible nonobject”(39). Critics often find that Irene’s delusional mentality and Larsen’s manifest text of racial passing and heterosexual jealousy collaborate to occlude a latent homosexuality, which neither Larson nor…

White Negroes

Guy Foster, Assistant Professor of English

Bowdoin College, Brunswick, Maine
Africana Studies/Gender and Women’s Studies
Spring 2013

Close readings of literary and filmic texts that interrogate widespread beliefs in the fixity of racial categories and the broad assumptions these beliefs often engender. Investigates “whiteness” and “blackness” as unstable and fractured ideological constructs. These are constructs that, while socially and historically produced, are no less “real” in their tangible effects, whether internal or external. Includes works by Charles Chesnutt, Nella Larsen, Norman Mailer, Jack Kerouac, John Howard Griffin, Sandra Bernhard, and Warren Beatty.

Identity in “Passing”

Allison Tetreault, Journalist and Student
November 2011

Allison Tetreault

Nella Larsen’s Passing destabilizes the traditional conception of ethnic, racial, and gender integrity, revolutionizing the very idea of an accepted definition of identity. By developing unstable characters, Larsen conveys how easy it is to lose one’s sense of self. Clare Kendry, who breaks the tragic mulatto stereotype, never has the chance to align to a particular race because of her untimely death, while Irene Redfield, who becomes obsessed with and jealous of Clare, single-handedly destroys her own sense of self by committing psychological suicide. Nella Larsen herself wrestles with identity, as she was raised in an all-white household after her father, a black West Indian, disappeared from her life; her own struggle identifying with other people leads to a modernist expression of delusion, uncertainty and ambiguity in her novellas. While overtly discussing racial passing, the novella also covertly analyzes gender passing, or a person’s ability to reify society’s expectations of a certain gender through physical and behavioral cues. Irene’s relationship with Clare is based on desire, jealousy, and obsession, and she develops an infatuation for her that combats societal expectations. In addition, Larsen attempts to pass not only her characters, but herself as a novelist and her novel as a fiction. By exposing the convention of the mulatto as unsympathetic instead of tragic, Larsen ironically captures her readers. She tries to “pass” her novel by writing about something she thinks they will want to read, but destroys their expectations by shattering the mulatto stereotype and concentrating more on gender passing, eventually exposing presupposed identity for what it is: malleable, even nonexistent. Both Clare and Irene fail in trying to pinpoint their identities, and by offering nothing but ambiguity in the point of view and the final scene of the novella, Larsen presents identity itself as ambiguous, transient, and never fully identifiable…

Read the entire essay here.

Essence and the Mulatto Traveler: Europe as Embodiment in Nella Larsen’s Quicksand

The Journal of Transnational American Studies
Volume 4, Number 1 (2012)
15 pages

Jeffrey H. Gray, Professor of English
Seton Hall University, South Orange, New Jersey

Originally published as Jeffrey Gray, “Essence and the Mulatto Traveler: Europe as Embodiment in Nella Larsen’s Quicksand,” NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction 27, no. 3 (1994): 257–70.

This 1994 article by Jeffrey Gray originally appeared in the journal NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction (Duke University Press). An early foray into transnational American Studies, Gray’s analysis of the role “Europe” plays both in the narrative and in the life of the author herself begins with a discussion of the object of art—the self as exoticized, distanced other—imagined and displayed against the carceral black body in the American imaginary, an imaginary that holds the protagonist, Helga, hostage to an indeterminacy represented by her mulatto status. Gray argues that the “quicksand” of the search for essence, whether located in the body or in the eyes of others, eventually dissolves the protagonist’s sense that a change of place can change the truth that essence does not exist. Gray references the shared observation among African American international celebs (Richard Wright, James Baldwin, and Josephine Baker—whose 1973 interview with Henry Louis Gates, Jr., is cited) that “being different is different” in Europe, yet that otherness is finally also not an experience of self, which the narrative (and perhaps the author’s life as well) proves to be endlessly deferred.

Read the entire article here.

Toward a Narratology of Passing: Epistemology, Race, and Misrecognition in Nella Larsen’s Passing

Callaloo
Volume 35, Number 3, Summer 2012
pages 778-794
DOI: 10.1353/cal.2012.0078

Gabrielle McIntire, Professor of English
Queens University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada

In one of his posthumously published essays Georges Bataille poses a question that we might borrow to consider the narratological and epistemological quandaries at the heart of Nella Larsen’s telling of racial unbelonging in her 1929 novella, Passing. Bataille writes, “why must there be what I know? Why is it a necessity? . . . In this question is hidden—it doesn’t appear at first—an extreme rupture, so deep that only the silence of ecstasy answers it” (109). Bataille queries the necessary binding of ontology and epistemology—that mysterious and what he calls “divine” strangeness that what and how we know, and the language we use to conceptualize the world, inevitably condition our ways of being. I want to suggest that Larsen’s novella works its way toward some similar questions. What happens in 1920s Harlem when one’s skin color does not announce a clearly decipherable racial genealogy? How does one know how to belong to a “race” when race itself is inordinately prone to the mutable semiotics of skin and the prejudices of its (always racially traversed) readers? How does “race” bind communities and ban its outlaws? Further, how do we discover the truth content of a story concerned with racial, sexual, and familial belonging whose heroine/anti-heroine, Irene Redfield—the figure with whom the omniscient narrator is most identified—develops relationships with both her husband, Brian, and her childhood friend, Clare Kendry, in conjunction with a severely limited (and possibly paranoid) epistemological frame? Must what Irene knows function as the limit of what we, as readers, know? In seeking to answer these questions, I want to propose that Passing still takes us to the largely inarticulable limits of both race and desire—how they mean, and how they function together—by performatively embedding confusions about the legibilities of race and desire within a commensurately riddled narration where none of its plot-lines or dominant preoccupations (with the ethics and allures of passing, with anxieties about an extramarital affair, or with the lesbian-erotic subtext) submit to a definitive reading. Instead, all of these polyvalent concerns co-exist in a matrix of meaning which suggestively proposes that an echolalic symmetry exists between broken sexual and racial epistemes and the tasks of their telling.

Critics, though, often want to insist that Passing can be read to produce very particular (often hierarchized) answers about the relative importance of its homoerotic, racial, and psychological concerns. Instead of pursuing a line of inquiry that would propose another variant on the ambiguities of the story, I want to suggest that part of why this novella continues to fascinate is because of its mise en abîme structure of indecipherability. The story draws us in so powerfully because Larsen’s palimpsestic layering of race with desire’s own signal unknowability approximates the enigmatic bind between knowledge and power that animates the projects of both reading and telling. As if it were a detective story, just as we think we have discovered and joined all the pieces of its puzzle, Passing surprises us and asks us to double back and look again. The proliferation of interpretive possibilities within this short narration mimics the stress lines at play in twentieth- and twenty-first century American culture around what it means to inhabit African American-ness, or to know race, with Larsen insisting that sexual, racial, and psychic un-narratability together provoke us and draw us into a maze of epistemological unrest. Ultimately Larsen shows us that the vagaries of narration and interpretation are as prone to misrecognitions and mistakes as are race and desire; in other words, she reveals that race and desire are structured as forms of narration and are thus replete with potentially hazardous misreadings. In the process, Larsen offers a book that seems to “pass” for a readable document and yet ceaselessly withholds resolution on multiple levels at once.

Part of what Larsen achieves in her interrogation of modes of passing is a warning against sealed epistemologies or…

Passing as White: The Life Altering Effects on Loved Ones

Southern Connecticut State University
May 2006
122 pages
Publication Number: AAT 1435422
ISBN: 9780542641824

Kathleen Daubney

A Thesis Submitted to the School of Graduate Studies In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirement for the Degree of Master of Science

This thesis analyzes the theme of passing in Harlem Renaissance literature and deals with the consequences that such transitions to white society had on the passers’ friends and relatives. Choices that one person makes can have a domino and long lasting effect on his or her family and friends. This study focuses on: Passing by Nella Larsen, The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man by James Weldon Johnson, “Passing,” by Langston Hughes, and Comedy: American Style and Plum Bun both by Jessie Fauset. This thesis discusses if the family and friends have knowledge of the passing, if they had a voice in the novel, and if the children had knowledge of their heritage. It also discusses the effects passing had on the families and friends of the passers, along with their responses.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• PASSING AS WHITE: THE LIFE ALTERING EFFECTS ON LOVED ONES
• FAUSET’S PLUM BUN: PASSING AND RETURNING
• LARSEN’S PASSING: ESCAPE, WEALTH, OR APPEARANCE
• THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF AN EX-COLOURED MAN: WHITE, BLACK, WHITE?
• HUGHES “PASSING”: I LOVE YOU, BUT
• COMEDY AMERICAN STYLE: OLIVIA’S PASSING, THE FAMILY’S ESCAPE
• CONCLUSION: TO PASS OR NOT TO PASS
• REFERENCES

Purchase the dissertation here.