Tag: Lori Harrison-Kahan

  • Nella Larsen’s novels Quicksand and Passing, published at the height of the Harlem Renaissance, fell out of print and were thus little known for many years. Now widely available and taught, Quicksand and Passing challenge conventional “tragic mulatta” and “passing” narratives. In part 1, “Materials,” of Approaches to Teaching the Novels of Nella Larsen, the…

  • Explores how the trope of racial passing continues to serve as a touchstone for gauging public beliefs and anxieties about race in this multiracial era.

  • Imitation of Life, one of the classic narratives of racial passing, originated as a 1933 novel by Jewish writer Fannie Hurst, but it is perhaps best known as the 1959 melodrama directed by Douglas Sirk inducing finale of the Sirk film, the prodigal black daughter, who has crossed the color line and passed for white, returns home…

  • The White Negress: Literature, Minstrelsy, and the Black-Jewish Imaginary (review) Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies Volume 31, Number 1, Fall 2012 pages 206-208 DOI: 10.1353/sho.2012.0123 Andrea Levine George Washington University This volume’s title signals its central critical intervention, a challenge to the masculine biases that have shaped studies of minstrelsy and of cross-racial…

  •  Her “Nig”: Returning the Gaze of Nella Larsen’s “Passing” Modern Language Studies Volume 32, Number 2 (Autumn, 2002) pages 109-138 Lori Harrison-Kahan, Full-time Adjunct Faculty in English Boston College In a scene from Nella Larsen’s 1929 novel, Passing, a white man, John Bellew, enters his Chicago hotel room to find his wife, Clare, taking tea…

  • The White Negress: Literature, Minstrelsy, and the Black-Jewish Imaginary Rutgers University Press 2011-01-19 248 pages, 3 photographs Paper ISBN: 978-0-8135-4783-1 Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8135-4782-4 eBook ISBN: 978-0-8135-4989-7 Lori Harrison-Kahan, Full-time Adjunct Faculty in English Boston College During the first half of the twentieth century, American Jews demonstrated a commitment to racial justice as well as an…