Tag: Jessie Fauset

  • Mar Gallego. Passing Novels in the Harlem Renaissance: Identity, Politics and Textual Strategies [Review] African American Review Volume 38 (Winter 2004) pages 720-723 Mar Gallego. Passing Novels in the Harlem Renaissance: Identity, Politics and Textual Strategies. Hamburg: Lit Verlag Munster, 2003. 214 pp. Zhou Yupei Until very recently, novels of passing that appeared during the…

  • Passing Novels in the Harlem Renaissance: Identity Politics and Textual Strategies Lit Verlag Munster 2003 224 pages ISBN 3-8258-5842-1 Mar Gallego, Associate Professor of American Studies University of Huelva (Spain) Passing Novels in the Harlem Renaissance offers an insightful study of the significance of passing novels for the literary and intellectual debate of the Harlem…

  • Race Passing and American Individualism University of Massachusetts Press February 2003 176 pages Cloth ISBN: 1-55849-377-8 (Print on Demand) Kathleen Pfeiffer, Professor of English Oakland University, Rochester, Michigan A literary study of the ambiguities of racial identity in American culture In the literature of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America, black characters who pass for…

  • Written in 1929 at the height of the Harlem Renaissance by one of the movement’s most important and prolific authors, “Plum Bun” is the story of Angela Murray, a young black girl who discovers she can pass for white. After the death of her parents, Angela moves to New York to escape the racism she…

  • As W. E. B. DuBois famously prophesied in “The Souls of Black Folk,” the fiction of the color line has been of urgent concern in defining a certain twentieth-century U.S. racial “order.” Yet the very arbitrariness of this line also gives rise to opportunities for racial “passing,” a practice through which subjects appropriate the terms…

  • Why can a “white” woman give birth to a “black” baby, while a “black” woman can never give birth to a “white” baby in the United States? What makes racial “passing” so different from social mobility? Why are interracial and incestuous relations often confused or conflated in literature, making “miscegenation” appear as if it were…

  • Of all the images to arise from the Harlem Renaissance, the most thought-provoking were those of the mulatta. For some writers, artists, and filmmakers, these images provided an alternative to the stereotypes of black womanhood and a challenge to the color line. For others, they represented key aspects of modernity and race coding central to…

  • An analysis of how black women used the mulatta figure to contest racial barriers.