“You’re Neither One Thing (N)or The Other”: Nella Larsen, Philip Roth, and The Passing Trope

Posted in Articles, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive, Passing, United States on 2019-05-22 17:53Z by Steven

“You’re Neither One Thing (N)or The Other”: Nella Larsen, Philip Roth, and The Passing Trope

Philip Roth Studies
Volume 8, Number 1, Spring 2012
pages 45-61

Donavan L. Ramon, Assistant Professor of Liberal Studies
Kentucky State University

Philip Roth has historically been situated in a male literary tradition, with critics assessing him alongside Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, and more recently, Charles Chesnutt and Ralph Ellison. Because of his problematic portrayals of women characters, Roth is not often discussed alongside women writers. My paper goes beyond this by situating Roth alongside a black woman writer, Nella Larsen. In fact, Larsen’s Passing (1929) and Roth’s The Human Stain (2000) share several thematic and structural similarities, such as the tropes of belated race learning, double consciousness, anonymous letter writing, taboo sexualities, and ambiguous deaths. My essay argues that these tropes underlie passing narratives and reveal the development of twentieth century passing texts.

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Racial Passing and Double Consciousness in Philip Roth’s The Human Stain

Posted in Articles, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive, Passing, United States on 2018-10-25 00:35Z by Steven

Racial Passing and Double Consciousness in Philip Roth’s The Human Stain

Philip Roth Studies
Volume 14, Number 1, 2018
pages 55-69
DOI: 10.5703/philrothstud.14.1.0055

Dyanne K. Martin, Assistant Professor of English
Broward College, Fort Lauderdale, Floirida

Philip Roth’s nuanced understanding of the issues of race in pre- and post-Civil Rights America offers fresh thinking in a field that perhaps needs to explore new directions. The approach in this article is to use techniques of semiotics to assess the subtle cues in the linguist protagonist’s language as his statements move in and out of clarity, ambivalence, and doubleness. I argue that these forms of semiotic doubleness represent the dualities and ironies with which mixed-race people struggle in a society still divided by race.

Much has been said about Philip Roth’s use of racial passing as a trope in his novel The Human Stain. Critics such as Luminita Dragulescu and Jennifer Glaser argue that the novel represents the complexities of identity performance. Dragulescu, in particular, positions Roth’s use of racial passing as “a terrain of discursive power” (96). Glaser agrees with Dragulescu but adds that Roth’s mixed-race protagonist, Coleman Silk, portrays the traumatic complexities of the mulatto’s decision to traverse not just the color line but also the ethnic line. Passing as both white and Jewish, Silk illustrates what Glaser calls the “ongoing dynamics of racializcd power” in the discipline of critical race theory, a theory that is “inherently comparative” (1465). While these critics have engaged important issues in The Human Stain, they leave unaddressed Roth’s use of verbal or syntactic ambivalence in relation to the trope of racial passing in his novel. When Coleman Silk in a pivotal scene lashes out that he “don’t carry no nigger,” he seems, ostensibly, to be making a simple, straightforward statement (Stain 117). Yet Silks words are both…

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Clearly Invisible Racial Passing and the Color of Cultural Identity by Marcia Alesan Dawkins, and: The Souls of Mixed Folk: Race, Politics and Aesthetics in the New Millennium by Michele Elam (review)

Posted in Articles, Book/Video Reviews, Media Archive, Passing, United States on 2013-10-08 21:15Z by Steven

Clearly Invisible Racial Passing and the Color of Cultural Identity by Marcia Alesan Dawkins, and: The Souls of Mixed Folk: Race, Politics and Aesthetics in the New Millennium by Michele Elam (review)

Philip Roth Studies
Volume 9, Number 2, Fall 2013
pages 99-103
DOI: 10.1353/prs.2013.0024

Donavan L. Ramon
Rutgers University

Marcia Alesan Dawkins, Clearly Invisible: Racial Passing and the Color of Cultural Identity, Waco: Baylor University Press, 2012, vxi + 229 pp.

Michele Elam, The Souls of Mixed Folk: Race, Politics, and Aesthetics in the New Millennium, Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2011, xxiii + 277 pp.

According to W.E.B. DuBois’s prophetic theory articulated in The Souls of Black Folk (1903), “the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line” (221). Myriad critical and popular pieces over the past several years suggest that this theory has run its course: the celebration of mixed race people putatively implies the “end” of race. Certainly the election of the first biracial president has been touted as the epitome of post-race life in America. Yet as recent critical interventions by Michele Elam and Marcia Alesan Dawkins remind us, race remains prevalent because of biracial people, not in spite of it.

The continuities between DuBois’s theory and Elam’s are underscored by the title of the latter’s monograph. In The Souls of Mixed Folk, the Stanford University English Professor asserts that the notion of post-Black art being apolitical is a complete fiction, much like the idea that post-Civil Rights politics are in decline. By examining the images of mixed race subjects in a wide range of artistic forms, Elam argues that these venues are the newer locations that “engage issues of civil rights and social change” (16). To accept this belief, she begins her book by convincing readers that the increased interest in mixed race deludes many people into believing that race no longer exists. If this is truly the case, then why do fictional representations of biracial people continue to represent anxiety across a multitude of genres? More specifically, why has the last several years seen a resurgence in narratives of racial passing—such as Philip Roth’s The Human Stain?

Elam explores these questions across five thoroughly researched and well-written chapters. The first traces the history of mixed race studies in curricula across the nation while raising related yet ignored issues. For instance she problematizes the focus of heteronormative depictions of mixed race families at the expense of homosexual ones, while also reminding us that mixed Americans have historically been the result of sexual violation. She believes we must be mindful of considering the product of these unions as representatives of racial progress without understanding the nuances of slavery and violence inflicted on black bodies by whites.

Chapter two changes the focus from history to contemporary comic strips by Aaron McGruder and Nate Creekmore. In their works, Elam rightly sees racial identity as “a matter of public negotiation, social location, cultural affirmation, political commitment, and historical homage” (58). In chapter four, Elam situates the traditional European bildungsroman against the “mixed race bildungsroman”. The former focuses on the “social incorporation of the individual” (125) whereas protagonists in the latter are not “incorporated into the society or the social progress that they are supposed to represent . . . [and they] challenge the popular image of the ‘modern minority’” (126). She applies her theory of the “mixed race bildungsroman” to Emily Raboteau’s The Professor’s Daughter (1997) and Danzy Senna’s Symptomatic (2004). Elam’s last chapter examines performances of mixed race in Carl Hancock Rux’s play Talk and “The Racial Draft” skit from Dave Chappelle’s defunct late-night comedy show. Her argument here is that in both performances, there is a “re-visioning and a re-membering of the national order” (161).

The middle chapter is the one that is most germane to this journal, as it examines racial passing in Danzy Senna’s Causcasia (1999), Philip Roth’s The Human Stain (2000), and Colson Whitehead’s The Intuitionist (2000). Despite research to the contrary, Elam begins this chapter by arguing that racial passing literature is far from being an obsolete genre, as these novels attest. Despite living in a post-race era, these narratives collectively argue for the rebirth of racial passing as a “social inquiry” (98). Explaining further, the novels addressed here force readers to reconsider “the performative, iterative nature of racial identity as a rich social heuristic” (98).

This is nowhere more evident than in The Human Stain , where racial passing acts as a “reactionary vehicle to critique political correctness”—particularly because it is set during President Clinton’s sex scandal (98). In this regard, “performance,” can have multiple meanings in the novel: one referring…

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Reading The Human Stain through Charles W. Chesnutt: The Genre of the Passing Novel

Posted in Articles, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive, Passing on 2012-08-16 03:03Z by Steven

Reading The Human Stain through Charles W. Chesnutt: The Genre of the Passing Novel

Philip Roth Studies
Volume 2, Number 2 (Fall 2006)
pages 138-150
DOI: 10.1353/prs.2011.0066

Matthew Wilson, Professor of English and Humanities
Pennsylvania State University, Harrisburg

This article historicizes The Human Stain, placing it in the genre of the passing novel. The analysis is filtered through a reading of Chesnutt’s passing fictions, particularly The House Behind the Cedars and The Quarry.

Philip Roth’s The Human Stain was published in 2000, the year I was on sabbatical writing my book, Whiteness in the Novels of Charles W. Chesnutt. At the time, and even more subsequently, I was struck by the surprising continuities between the passing fictions ot Chesnutt and other writers of his era and Roth’s representation of race in The Human Stain. One of Chesnutt’s novels in particular, The House behind the Cedars (1900), helps us see that although exactly one hundred years separate these two texts, little has changed with regard to race in America. Despite the dismantling of the legal system of American racial apartheid that had its origin in Chesnutt s lifetime, the American racial imagination remains largely intact, and we continue to insist on our racial binary, continue to maintain and police the color line. As Judy Scales-Trent has observed. “[W]hite America expends enormous resources in school and in the media to teach (about) the intrinsic rightness” of the color line, so that it won’t questioned and so that future generations will continue to “stand guard” (481). Of course, the genre in which this standing guard is most obvious is the passing narrative because the liminality of the “white negro” (to use a nineteenth-century locution) calls into question the supposed impermeability of the color line. In this article, I use Chesnutt’s work, both fiction and nonfiction, as a way of approaching the issue of passing and race in The Human Stain, and of exploring the persistence of racial essentialism in American thinking and the responses to that essentialism that maintain the existence of the color line.

Before going on to discuss the issue of race in particular texts, I need to unpack the term “racial essentialism.” As Adrian Piper makes clear in her important esaay “Passing tor White, Passing for Black,” the function of racial…

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