Mixed Race Studies

Quicksand and Passing

Rutgers University Press
1986
246 pages
Paper ISBN: 0-8135-1170-4

Nella Larsen (1891-1964)

Edited by

Deborah E. McDowell, Alice Griffin Professor of English
University of Virginia

Nella Larsen’s novels Quicksand (1928) and Passing (1929) document the historical realities of Harlem in the 1920s and shed a bright light on the social world of the black bourgeoisie. The novels’ greatest appeal and achievement, however, is not sociological, but psychological. As noted in the editor’s comprehensive introduction, Larsen takes the theme of psychic dualism, so popular in Harlem Renaissance fiction, to a higher and more complex level, displaying a sophisticated understanding and penetrating analysis of black female psychology.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Notes to Introduction
• Selected Bibliography
• A Note on the Texts
• Quicksand
• Passing
• Explanatory Notes

The Dialogue About “Racial Democracy” Among African-American and Afro-Brazilian Literatures

University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
2008
262 pages

Isabel Cristina Rodrigues Ferreira

A dissertation submitted to the faculty of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures (Portuguese).

This dissertation focuses on the myth of racial democracy in the works of African-American and Afro-Brazilian writers in the early and late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Their novels, short stories, and a play dialogue among each other. The African-American novels Passing (1929) of Nella Larsen and Caucasia (1998) of Danzy Senna reflect on their perception of Brazilian reality of racial democracy, which was related to their own racial realities. Both authors use Brazilian racial harmony as an option to their characters to experience a different racial relation that did not involve segregation in the 1920s or violent acts in the 1960s and 1970s. The Afro-Brazilian selection of stories reflects on the Brazilian reality for Afrodescendants, which presents no sign of racial harmony. The novels Vida e morte de M. J. Gonzaga de Sá (1919) and Clara dos Anjos (1923-24) of Lima Barreto, Malungos e milongas (1988) of Esmeralda Ribeiro and Ponciá Vicêncio (2003) of Conceição Evaristo; the unpublished play Uma boneca no lixo of Cristiane Sobral; and short stories of Cuti, Márcio Barbosa, Éle Semog, Esmeralda Ribeiro, Oubi Inaê Kibuko, Conceição Evaristo, Lia Vieira and Cristiane Sobral show that Afro-Brazilian reality in the 1920s and in the late twentieth and early twentieth-first centuries is of discrimination, and prejudice, but they reflect on non-violent solutions to fight against their fate.

In Chapter One, I introduce the subject of racial democracy, which will be discussed in two African-American novels and some Afro-Brazilian literary works. Chapters Two and Three are overviews of Brazilian history, examining the role and perception of Afro-descendants by society, and Afro-Brazilian literature throughout the centuries, respectively. The former helps readers understand how important the myth of racial democracy was to maintain the order and power to those controlling the country’s economy and politics. Chapter Four examines African-American novels, relating them not only to their perception of Brazil, but also to their own history and racial relations. Chapter Five shows different racial issues discussed in some of the works. These interpretations of Brazilian racial reality can dismantle the discourse of the myth of racial democracy. The last Chapter is the conclusion of what I presented and discussed in the previous chapters and some thoughts about future research topics.

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“Recoil” or “Seize”?: Passing, Ekphrasis and “Exact Expression” in Nella Larsen’s Passing

Enculturation: A Journal of Rhetoric, Writing and Culture
Volume 3, Number 2, Fall 2001

Monique Rooney, Lecturer and Honours Convenor
College of Arts and Social Sciences
Austrailian National University

Part One: Deep Nothing

Mona Lisa’s famous smile is a thin mouth receding into shadow. Her expression, like her puffy eyes, is hooded. The egglike head with its enormous plucked brow seems to pillow on the abundant, self-embraced Italian bosom. What is Mona Lisa thinking? Nothing, of course. Her blankness is her menace and our fear.

—Camille Paglia

Camille Paglia’s analysis of “Mona Lisa,” the “world’s most famous painting” (155), plays on the ambiguous meaning of the spectacle—the visual image—in reading and writing practices. “Mona Lisa,” for Paglia, is an exemplary instance of the fascination and the anxiety surrounding the menacing power of the visual in Western epistemologies. She is an icon that is not only, as Paglia writes, “eternally watching” (154), she is also eternally watched. The Mona Lisa’s enigmatic smile displays but also dissembles the narcissism attributed to the feminised image. The portrait is often read as a nothing in and of itself but a something if it gestures, as the Mona Lisa’s smile appears to, towards the unreadable. Traditionally a sign of the “Mona Lisa”‘s intangibility, the smile in Paglia’s reading autoerotically evokes elusiveness through secrecy and distance (“receding into shadow”). The “Mona Lisa” wallows in this solipsism: she is “self-embraced” and enormous within the enclosure. Characteristically, Paglia’s polemic repudiates a more mysterious Mona Lisa beyond the surface of the painting, or a “thinking” woman who possesses an unreadable, interior, depth which transcends the limitations of the body. Her trivialisation of the much studied mysterious smile as hiding “nothing” is contradicted, however, by a close-up reading of the painting’s depth; she emphasises the “thin mouth receding into shadow,” the “hooded” eyes and the pillowed “brow.” The portrait overall evinces a grim determination to efface the representation of the feminine as vagina dentata, the toothed vagina or castrating woman. A disappearing line, the image retains its menacing reputation. For Paglia, the Mona Lisa’s threat is that she passes as an enigma.

Paglia’s ekphrasis of the famous face is of a partly open, partly closed surface. The description of deep “nothing” threatens the authority of the looking subject and is also thoroughly engaged in the pleasure of reading. According to Susan Stewart, it is an alluring opacity which places the human face at the centre of representations of subjectivity. “Because it is invisible,” writes Stewart, “the face becomes gigantic with meaning and significance” (125). The face is only ever visible to the other and it is a visibility that is elusive, revealing “a depth and profundity which the body itself is not capable of” (125). The eyes and mouth create the appearance of “depth,” as “openings onto fathomlessness, they engender the fearful desire to ‘read’ the expression of the face, for this reading is never apparent from the surface alone; it is continually confronted by the correction of the other” (127). The face appears to withhold its full meaning through openings such as the eyes and the mouth, stimulating the reader’s questing gaze which is always disrupted and fragmented by the broken surface. The act of looking, for Paglia and Stewart, delineates a process between subject and object which does not get beyond the surface but which generates meaning nonetheless…

…The passer is an objectified subject (for example black, female, homosexual) who refashions identity according to a superficial reading, or surface impression. In order to pass, the passer manipulates the body and the gaze so as to become legitimate. For example, the lightskinned black who passes for white synecdochically substitutes one part of the body (i.e., white skin) for the complete body (i.e., white identity). Passing for white utilises white skin as a part that stands in for a non-white body. This draws attention to two important aspects of racial identity. Firstly, the visible surface of the body is not necessarily a reliable or stable signifier of the body as a conclusively knowable entity. Secondly and contradictorily, for the passer, as an otherwise marginalised (because racialised) subject, the body’s visible surface becomes the central locus of an epistemology of identity, precisely because the body is misread as white. For the opportunistic passer, white skin functions as the point of a fraudulent entry into proper subjectivity and this inauguration (based on part not whole) destabilises the meaning of subjectivity per se. The white-looking-black proves the primacy and the ubiquity of skin as a visual surface that registers individuals as an identity, as the passer’s skin becomes a surface which dissembles a personal and social “black” history. In this sense, passing-for-white relies on skin as a bodily limit that opens up the possibility and privilege of being read and treated as white (and as a mainstream subject) but also punishingly closes the body’s past, its black heritage and history…

…Part Two: Reading and Writing the Passer

The passer is thus an enigma, a subject who is marked through his/her indeterminacy and whose attempt to escape categorisation is made visible in the passing narrative. This tension is explored in Nella Larsen’s Passing (1929), a novella which thematises both the racial and sexual passer (201). Passing is the story of two women, Clare Kendry and Irene Redfield, who are reunited after a long separation. Irene who occasionally passes for white tells Clare’s, the permanent passer’s, story. Irene lives in Harlem with her husband and her two sons where she does conscientious “race work” for the black community. Once childhood friends in their hometown Chicago, Irene and Clare are accidentally reunited while Irene is holidaying in Chicago and visiting her father. It is on this occasion that Irene discovers that Clare is passing for white and married to a racist white financier, John Bellew. Disturbed at finding Clare is passing for white, Irene discourages Clare’s desire for renewed friendship even though Irene can, and occasionally does, pass for white herself. Irene’s passing position is to some extent faceless (as narrator Irene evades self-description) whilst Clare’s passing body is obsessively and erotically pictured. In Passing, the permanent passer is spectacularised through the gaze of the casual passer who already partly knows what he/she looks for. As Edelman writes: “the fact of our ability to catch a glimpse of it [the faceless face of the homosexual] here bespeaks the possibility that we might not have done so had we not been prepared to identify what otherwise has the ability to ‘pass'” (219). Irene’s evasion is, typically, unsustainable: Clare eventually follows Irene back to Harlem where she becomes dangerously involved with Irene, her family and the “black” community. It is there that Clare’s hidden racial identity is eventually outed to her white husband. This outing, or what Butler refers to as a “killing judgment” (175), threatens Irene’s exposure and climaxes in her murder of Clare…

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Crimes of passing: The criminalization of blackness and miscegenation in United States passing narratives

University of California, Los Angeles
2005
158 pages
Publication Number: AAT 3175169
ISBN: 9780542133046

Susan Elaine Bausch

A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy in Comparative Literature

Between approximately 1880 and 1925, large numbers of legally black Americans crossed the color line and identified as white; in common parlance, they “passed.” After Reconstruction, the South attempted to legislate the separation of the races by enacting “Jim Crow” laws that mandated segregation and prohibited miscegenation (at least within marriage). This meant that many passers were not just violating a social taboo by crossing the color line, they were also breaking the law. Even in the North, there were some anti-miscegenation laws on the books, although convention and prejudice probably played a bigger role in limiting mixed-race marriages. In effect, these laws made it a crime for a black person to do what a white person did, which means that blackness itself was criminalized.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Chapter One: Imitation White and Secret Murderers: The Criminalization of Blackness in Mark Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson
• Chapter Two: Feminine Transgressions: Crossing Racial and Sexual Boundaries in Nella Larsen’s Passing and the Rhinelander Case
• Chapter Three: Passing for What?: Joe Christmas’s Racial Uncertainty and Criminal Fate in William Faulkner’s Light in August
• Chapter Four: A Passing Success: The Cost of Mobility in James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man
• Conclusion
• Works Cited

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Miscegenation and “the Dicta of Race and Class”: The Rhinelander Case and Nella Larsen’s Passing

MFS Modern Fiction Studies
Volume 36, Number 4, Winter 1990
DOI: 10.1353/mfs.0.1034
pages 523-529

Mark J. Madigan, Professor / Fulbright Program Advisor in English
Nazareth College, Rochester, New York

The 1986 Rutgers University Press edition of Nella Larsen’s two novels, Quicksand (1928) and Passing (1929), represents an important step in the resurrection of a neglected writer of the Harlem Renaissance. Larsen was the first African-American woman to win a Guggenheim Fellowship for Creative Writing (1930), and both of her novels were highly acclaimed before her literary career ended abruptly in the early 1930s for reasons that are still not wholly clear. There were well-publicized but unproven charges of plagiarism of a short story, yet, like most details of Larsen’s life, the reasons for her disappearance from the literary scene remain a mystery. Larsen wrote no more than the two novels and the one story titled “Sanctuary,” and in 1963 she died in obscurity after working some thirty years as a nurse in Brooklyn.
 
The Rutgers edition has made Larsen’s novels more accessible not only by publishing both in one volume with a substantial introduction but also by annotating references in the text to public figures, events, and parlance of the late 1920s. There is, however, a reference to “the Rhinelander case” in an important paragraph in Passing that remains unidentified in the Rutgers first and second printings and only briefly explained in those following. A deeper understanding of the details of this controversial divorce case not only helps to explicate the paragraph in Larsen’s novel but also provides an important historical subtext for the book and the several other Harlem Renaissance works dealing with racial passing.
 
The title of Larsen’s novel refers to the capability of light-skinned African-Americans to cross, or “pass,” the color line undetected. In writing of racial passing, Larsen worked within a well-established tradition: William Wells Brown, Charles W. Chesnutt, Kate Chopin, and James Weldon Johnson were only a few of the writers who had dealt with this topic before her. Passing, however, is distinguished by its deft presentation of the subject from the perspectives of two mulatto women of the 1920s: Clare Kendry and Irene Redfield. The novel begins in an expensive Chicago restaurant where both women are passing. There, Clare recognizes Irene as a childhood friend and invites her to tea at her home. Irene, the wife of a successful Harlem doctor, keeps the date, but when she meets Clare’s racist white husband—who does not know his wife’s true race—vows never to see her old friend again. The two do meet again, however, when Clare pays a visit to New York City two years later. Despite Irene’s reluctance to rekindle the friendship, Clare makes frequent visits to the Redfields’ apartment, and the plot is complicated when Irene begins to suspect that her husband is having an affair with Clare. Clare’s husband further complicates matters when he learns by chance that his wife is actually a mulatto. Irene then fears that her own husband will leave her if Clare is divorced. The Rhinelander case is mentioned at this crucial point in the narrative, as Irene wonders whether racial deception could be grounds for Clare’s divorce:

What if Bellew should divorce Clare? Could he? There was the Rhinelander case. But in France, in Paris, such things were easy. If he divorced her—If Clare were free—But of all the things that could happen, that was the one she did not want. She must get her mind away from that possibility. She must. (228)

Larsen’s offhand manner of referring to the Rhinelander case assumes a familiarity on the part of her readers, but what was once common knowledge now demands some explanation. The case centered on the marriage of Leonard Kip Rhinelander, a member of one of New York’s oldest and wealthiest families, and Alice B. Jones, a mulatto chambermaid, on 14 October, 1924—just one week after the twenty-two year-old Rhinelander had received a share of his family’s fortune in cash, jewels, real estate, and stocks. The improbable love-affair between the young…

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The Relationship Between Colour and Identity in the Literature of Nella Larsen and Richard Wright

Lethbridge Undergraduate Research Journal
Volume 3, Number 2 (June 2008)
ISSN 1718-8482

Elisabeth Hudson
King’s College London

The fiction of Nella Larsen and Richard Wright explores the struggle of African-American men and women to forge an identity for themselves that is free of the bonds placed on them by society. The protagonists of Larsen’s Quicksand and Passing and Wright’s Black Boy all have one thing in common: they do not wish for their identities to be defined by their race. Helga Crane, Irene Redfield, Clare Kendry, and the young Richard Wright all try to create identities for themselves that transcend racial boundaries. Because of this desire, they all have trouble relating completely to either white society or black society and, as a result, feel estranged from their communities.

In Nella Larsen’s Quicksand, the protagonist Helga Crane, who Hazel Carby called ‘the first truly sexual black female protagonist in Afro-American fiction,’ is trapped between two racial identities. The daughter of a white Danish woman and a black jazz musician she has never known, Helga has never had a black family member, and therefore struggles with the disconnect between her outward appearance and her external reality. Helga never truly feels at home in the company of either black people or white people and, as a result, is constantly fleeing from place to place in search of a society wherein she can ‘fit in.’ Wherever Helga finds herself, she is portrayed as the ‘other.’ In black society, she feels ostracised because of her colourful, flamboyant clothing, her distaste for ‘the race problem,’ and her ethnic identity as a mulatto. In white society, she is objectified as an exotic, primitive creature without agency. She is portrayed as a spectacle, almost never as spectator. Because she does not belong to one race completely, she never truly finds a place where she belongs. Helga’s sense of self is always censored by society’s restrictions and expectations. She never finds a version of reality that is not mediated by her surroundings…

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Clare Kendry’s “True” Colors: Race and Class Conflict in Nella Larsen’s Passing

Callaloo
Volume 15, Number 4 (Autumn, 1992)
pages 1053-1065

Jennifer DeVere Brody, Professor of Drama
Stanford University

Interpretations of Nella Larsen’s Passing (1929) often have failed to explain the complex symbolism of the narrative. Indeed, dismissive or tendentious criticisms of the text have caused it to be eclipsed by Larsen’s “earlier and more intriguing” book, Quicksand (1928). This essay reexamines Passing as a work concerned with the simultaneous representation and construction of race and especially class, within a circumscribed community. As such, my paper contributes to debates within Black feminist criticism about the value of these aspects of identity in relation to the production of black female subjectivities. I contend that the novel’s main characters are neither purely “psychological” beings, as Claudia Tate asserts, nor are they essentially “sexual” creatures, as Deborah McDowell argues. Rather, I read Irene Redfield and Clare Kendry as representatives of different ideologies locked in struggle for dominance.

In her introduction to Passing Deborah McDowell one of the most astute critics of Larsen’s work, states that “many critics have been misled by the novel’s epigraph … [since] it invites the reader to place race at the center of any critical interpretation.” It would appear that McDowell herself has been misled by Passing’s obviously unreliable narrator. So too, McDowell seems to agree with Claudia Tate’s belief that, “Race is peripheral to Passing. It is more a device to sustain the suspense than a compelling social issue.” I disagree with these assertions because it seems to me that the text is “all about race” or rather, the mediation of race in relation to sexuality and class.

McDowell recognizes certain tropes employed by Larsen and, like many other critics, she maintains that Irene Redfield is the primary referent of the novel’s title. Ultimately, however, McDowell is unable to give a full explication of the texf s meaning since she tries to read/uce the text as a tale of latent sexual passion without discussing the key issues of race and class. Thus, while her discussion is certainly valuable, one might also say that it reifies sexuality at the risk of not exploring how sexuality is connected inextricably with other historically produced phenomena such as race and class. In order to sustain her ingenious reading of Passing as a tale that “passes for straight” and sublimates lesbian desire, McDowell misses the more intricate implications addressed by Larsen’s work. The iconography McDowell reads as sexual is simultaneously racial: it also expresses class positionality. For example, the objective correlative envelope used in the first paragraph of the novel signifies not only the “sexual” (McDowell reads it as a “metaphorical vagina”) but also the sender’s race (alien) and class (elite). Thus, my reading emends McDowell’s by insisting on the importance of race and class in Passing.

If race as well as class conflict must occupy a primary position in any discussion of…

In the Shadow of Her Ancestry: The New Tragic Mulatta

North Carolina State University, Raleigh
2004
60 pages

Vonda Marie Easterling

A thesis submitted to the Graduate Faculty of North Carolina State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts

This thesis examines the plight of the infamous tragic mulatta. Because of the mulatta’s lack of black features and her close resemblance to the white race, she was labeled by white society as the privileged of the black race. She was also referred to as the most tragic of all beings and elevated by white society over the darker skinned blacks. Thus, the mulatta found herself in a peculiar position in a race oriented, black-white society. Isolated from the black community and rejected as a part of the white community, the mulatta’s existence was then considered tragic.

Over the years, social and emotional change has occurred within the mulatta community. No longer considered the taboo of transgression, the mulatta still suffers from many of the same injustices as her ancestral mulatta. This research examines the psychological and emotional effects depicted in the 1959 film of Fannie Hurst’s Imitation of Life with sections of Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye and events from actress Dorothy Dandridge’s life. The research also analyzes Passing, Nella Larsen’s complex novel of the 1920s, to interrogate the strategy that many unidentifiably mulatto people mastered in order to achieve social and financial mobility. Lastly, the research explores the experience of the contemporary mulatta through Rebecca Walker’s memoir, Black, White and Jewish: Autobiography of a Shifting Self, in order to explore the issues of the newly termed bi-racial person. The research explores the lineage between the historical mulatta figure and the new bi-racial persons to defuse the theory of the tragic mulatta as a mythical allusion.

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• Chapter One: Reel to Real: The Cinematic Mulatta
• Chapter Two: To ‘Pass’ or Not to ‘Pass’: The Multi-Layered Practice of ‘Passing’
• Chapter Three: As Time Goes By: The New Tragic Mulatta
• Conclusion
• Works Cited

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“Still Seeking for Something”: The Unspeakable (Loss) in “Passing” by Nella Larsen

Wagadu
Volume 6, 2008, Special Issue: Women’s Activism for Gender Equality in Africa
16 pages

Agnieszka Mrozik

The paper analyzes Nella Larsen’s Passing (1929) through the lens of the theory of melancholy from Freud to Butler. Examining the dynamic relationship between Irene Redfield and Clare Kendry, two protagonists of Larsen’s novella, I attempt to demonstrate that under the surface of clearly expressed racial tensions, focused upon the dilemma of passing, there is a more deeply hidden problem—the one of gender identity and sexual desire.

I am saturnine—bereft—disconsolate,
The Prince of Aquitaine whose tower has crumbled;
My lone star is dead—and my bespangled lute
Bears the Black Sun of Melancholia.

Gérard de Nerval, El Desdichado

The Melancholic Souls

In his famous essay “Mourning and Melancholia” (1917), Sigmund Freud writes that the loss of an object normally provokes a reaction known as mourning. The mourner knows whom or what he/she lost and is aware that suffering is part of a normal process at the end of which a new life begins. Yet, Freud adds that in some people the same event produces melancholia instead of mourning. In many cases one cannot see clearly what it is that has been lost. This situtation is common in psychoanalysis, even when the patient is aware of the loss which has given rise to his/her melancholia, but only in the sense that he/she knows whom he/she has lost, but not what he/she has lost in him/her. Freud suggests therefore that melancholia is in some way related to an object lost which is withdrawn from consciousness.

The most striking characteristic of the melancholic personality is extreme diminution in self-regard: somehow the loss of an object has triggered an impoverishment of the self. As Freud puts it: “In mourning it is the world which has become poor and empty; in melancholia it is the ego itself” (Freud, 1989: 585). In other words, while it would seem as though the loss suffered is that of an object, what the melancholic has actually experienced is a loss of self.

According to Julia Kristeva, the author of Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia, the melancholic suffers not from the Object but the Thing (French Chose) lost, which is “an unnamable, supreme good, something unrepresentable, that […] no word could signify. […] The Thing is inscribed within us without memory, the buried accomplice of our unspeakable anguishes” (1989: 13-14). Kristeva identifies the Thing with the Mother, by which she understands the pre-Oedipal Mother—the one strongly bonded to the child and then prohibited in the Name of the Father. The mother is the child’s first love which has to be abandoned in order to enable him or her to become the subject, which in Lacanian terms means to enter the language…

…Nella Larsen’s Passing (1929), read through the lens of the theory of melancholy from Freud to Butler, confirms this observation. Analyzing the dynamic relationship between Irene Redfield and Clare Kendry, two protagonists of Larsen’s novella, one may figure out that under the surface of clearly expressed racial tensions, focused upon the dilemma of passing, there is a more deeply hidden problem – the one of gender identity and sexual desire. Or, putting it in other words, in Larsen’s text, there is a great accumulation of racial, gender and sexual tensions which remain unrelieved as long as the characters obey the rules of white, patriarchal and heteronormative society that represses any exception to these rules, and especially Black lesbian desire.

Claiming that Larsen’s female characters are “still seeking for something,” I am going to demonstrate that what they are really looking for is another woman: the object of desire and the link to the first lost object which is the Mother herself. The loss of the Mother combined with denial of desire for the same-sex object leads to melancholic self-destruction. As a result of women’s appearing in relations with men only and their supporting the traditional system of values, they are doomed to loneliness and experience the loss for which they cannot even find words. Broken maternal genealogy and locked access to language, in which the female desire might be expressed, doom women to silence and squander their chances of building an alternative world to the existing one…

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Passing: Race, Identification and Desire

Criticism: A Quarterly for Literature and the Arts
Volume 45,  Number 4 (Fall 2003)
pages 435-52

Catherine Rottenberg, Assistant Professor
Department of Foreign Literatures and Linguistics and the Gender Studies Program
Ben-Gurion University, Beer-Sheva, Israel

IN THE SECOND HALF of the nineteenth century, African-American writers such as William Wells Brown and Frances Harper began invoking the phenomenon of passing in their texts as a way of investigating the complexities and contradictions of the category of race in the United States. The light-enough-to-pass Negro (but usually Negress) would play a central role in the imagination of African-American writers for the next fifty years. Charles Chesnutt’s The House behind the Cedars, Jessie Faucet’s Plum Bun, and James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man are perhaps the best-known examples. Nella Larsen’s 1929 novella, Passing, the text under discussion in this essay, can thus be seen as inheritor and perpetuator of a long tradition of such narratives. In recent years, Larsen’s text has become the most celebrated instance of a story about passing in African-American literature, eclipsing the tradition that preceded it. This is not coincidental, for Larsen is a master of ambiguity and intrigue, and the enigmatic finale of her novella has generated heated debates and countless interpretations.

Many analyses have attempted to determine whether or not Larsen’s use of passing can be seen as a subversive strategy, that is, whether the narrative serves to reinforce hegemonic norms of race or whether it ultimately posits passing as a viable survival strategy, which has the potential to disrupt “the enclosures of a unitary identity.” While this question still informs several critiques, in the past few years commentators have been concentrating more and more on how passing interrogates and problematizes the ontology of identity categories and their construction. Rather than trying to place passing in a subversive recuperative binary, these articles and books use passing as a point of entry into questions of identity and identity categories more generally.

In this essay I contend that Larsen’s text can assist critics in understanding the specific and, as I will argue, irreducible features of race performativity. That is, the novella can help us begin mapping out the differences between gender and race norms since it uncovers the way in which regulatory ideals of race produce a specific modality of performativity. Passing is especially conducive to interrogating the modality of race performativity because, unlike other passing narratives of the period, Larsen’s presents us with two protagonists who can pass for white; yet only Clare “passes over” into the white world. The depiction and juxtaposition of these two characters reveal the complexities and intricacies of the category of race. While Irene can be seen to represent the subject who appropriates and internalizes the hegemonic norms of race, Clare’s trajectory dramatizes how dominant norms can be misappropriated and how disidentification is always possible.

This essay commences with a theoretical discussion of race. Although much has been written on the constructed nature of the category of race, very few analyses have offered a convincing and rigorous account of how race might be conceived of as performative reiteration. The second section offers a reading of “passing” scenes from the novella in an attempt to unravel some of the distinctive mechanisms through which race norms operate. On the one hand, the novella suggests that race in the United States operates through an economy of optics, and the assumption of whiteness is one of the consequences of this economy. On the other hand, the novella reveals that skin color (i.e., optics) does not really constitute the “truth” of race.

Invoking Homi Bhabha’s notion of mimicry as a supplement to Butler’s concept of gender performativity in the third section, I interrogate and theorize the ways in which the definitional contradiction of race (“can be seen” versus “cannot be seen”) produces race as performative reiteration. While there are two idealized genders under regimes of compulsory heterosexuality, albeit with a very great power differential between them, there has historically been only one hegemonic and ideal race under racist regimes. This difference, I argue, has far-reaching implications, one of which is the need to rethink the desire/identification nexus, a nexus that operates differently in race and in gender. Understanding the particular relationship between desire and identification in the novella also helps us begin to gauge the critical question of disidentification.

At least one clarification is needed at this point, however. This essay focuses on the ways in which power—in the Foucauldian and Butlerian sense—operates on the hegemonic level and does not make a claim about the multiplicity of social practices per se. Hegemony, though, as we will see in the last section, is never complete, indicating that there are always counterdiscourses and alternative norms circulating within any given society…

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