The Penumbral Spaces of Nella Larsen’s Passing: Undecidable bodies, mobile identities, and the deconstruction of racial boundariesPosted in Articles, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive, Passing on 2014-09-08 20:07Z by Steven |
Gender, Place & Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography
Volume 13, Issue 3, 2006
pages 227-246
DOI: 10.1080/09663690600700972
Perry L. Carter, Assistant Professor of Human Geography
Texas Tech University
Nella Larsen’s 1929 novel, Passing, is a psychological drama centering around two fair-skinned women. One, Clare Kendry, passes as the White wife of a financially successful racist; the other, Irene Redfield, is a ‘race woman’ living in upper Manhattan during the era of the Renaissance Harlem. Clare and Irene are undecidables, neither White nor Black, fluid subjects traversing the boundaries of race—passing. Passing is an act of insinuating oneself into forbidden spaces by jettisoning former identities. It is as much a transgression of spatial boundaries as it is of racial boundaries. In the novel Clare passes by merely crossing from Black space into White space, and along the way shedding a Black identity for a White one. This paper examines the mobility of identities across racial geographies and how this movement destabilizes notions of race and of raced spaces.
We encounter the world in our bodies, and through our bodies’ most exquisitely sensitive sense, our skins, we take the world into ourselves. We have made and remade a world where nearly every experience is shaded and shaped by the color of those bodies, the tones of those skins. (Jane Lazarre, Beyond the Whiteness of Whiteness: memoir of a White mother of Black sons, 1997, p. 94)…
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