{"id":13618,"date":"2011-05-03T02:50:10","date_gmt":"2011-05-03T02:50:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=13618"},"modified":"2015-11-08T15:12:33","modified_gmt":"2015-11-08T15:12:33","slug":"mar-gallego-2003-passing-novels-in-the-harlem-renaissance-identity-politics-and-textual-strategies-forum-for-european-contributions-in-african-american-studies-munster-lit-verlag-214-pp-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=13618","title":{"rendered":"Mar Gallego 2003: Passing Novels in the Harlem Renaissance: Identity Politics and Textual Strategies. Forum for European Contributions in African American Studies. M\u00fcnster: Lit Verlag. 214 pp. [Review]"},"content":{"rendered":"

Mar Gallego 2003: Passing Novels in the Harlem Renaissance: Identity Politics and Textual Strategies. Forum for European Contributions in African American Studies. M\u00fcnster: Lit Verlag. 214 pp. [Review]<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Atlantis: Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies<\/a>
\nVolume 26, Number 1<\/a> (2004)<\/p>\n

Isabel Soto Garc\u00eda<\/a>
\nUniversidad Nacional de Educaci\u00f3n a Distancia\u00a0 (UNED)<\/em><\/p>\n

In her wide-ranging and ambitious work Passing Novels in the Harlem Renaissance: Identity Politics and Textual Strategies<\/a><\/em>, Mar Gallego refers to W. E. B. Du Bois\u2019<\/a> theory of double consciousness<\/a> as \u201cinfluential.\u201d The reference is, at the very least, an understatement. Du Bois\u2019 articulation of the African American experience, famously declared in the opening pages of The Souls of Black Folk<\/a><\/em> (1903), as straddling, or simultaneously occupying, both sides of the perceptual divide\u2014the unremitting sense of \u201ctwoness . . . two warring ideals in one dark body (11)\u201d\u2014is arguably the theoretical paradigm against which twentieth century African American expressive culture, particularly written culture, has been interpreted. Robert Stepto<\/a>, Henry Louis Gates, Jr.<\/a> and Paul Gilroy<\/a>, all prominent late twentieth-century theorists of the experience of New World Africans, explicitly acknowledge an indebtedness to Du Bois. Without the Duboisian precedent, these writers would possibly not have elaborated their respective theories of call-and-response (Stepto 1979), signifying (Gates 1988) and the black Atlantic (Gilroy 1993)\u2014all theories which are predicated on notions and strategies of doubleness; one may assume they would have formulated them differently.<\/p>\n

William Edward Burghardt Du Bois was born in 1868, one year after the First Reconstruction Act<\/em> granting, among others, the right to vote to black males in Confederate States. His formative years, then, coincided with this initial period of postbellum optimism and progressive legislation, as well as post-Reconstruction<\/a> reaction, culminating in such Supreme Court rulings as the notorious \u201cseparate but equal\u201d Plessy v. Ferguson<\/a><\/em> decision of 1896. Where Plessy and other court decisions erected a de jure<\/em> wall of containment between black and white Americans and encoded the segregationist principle, Du Bois countered with double consciousness, taking the reader as it were beyond the veil\u2014or at least lifting it to reveal what lay on the other side. That a potential white readership be invited to partake of African American consciousness is in and of itself a radically subversive gesture. If we are given the wherewithal to experience reality as an African American (\u201can American, a Negro\u201d), then Du Bois is making a brazenly transgressive proposition: an invitation to engage in a sort of literary miscegenation.<\/p>\n

Miscegenation<\/a> or, in nineteenth-century terms, amalgamation<\/a>, is the transgression at the heart of a rich body of writing that coincided with the first third of Du Bois\u2019 life and the period\u2014Reconstruction and post-Reconstruction\u2014that preceded the publication of The Souls of Black Folk<\/em>. This fiction was coincidentally organized around the literary embodiment\u2014the mulatto<\/a>\u2014of Duboisian double consciousness, while it similarly subverted the artificial binarism encoded in Plessy. The mulatto genre can be said to date back at least to Louisiana-born Victor S\u00e9jour\u2019s<\/a> short story \u201cLe Mul\u00e2tre<\/a>\u201d (1837), considered the earliest known work of African American fiction. William Wells Brown\u2019s<\/a> Clotel, or the President\u2019s Daughter: A Narrative of Slave Life in the United States<\/a><\/em> (1853) is held to initiate the genre by an African American writer in English. Clotel<\/em> is representative of a further, related tradition, that of the passing<\/a> novel, with its eponymous heroine crossing racial as well as gender lines (gender and racial passing is a frequent trope in antebellum slave narrative: see, for example, Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom<\/a><\/em> [1860] and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl<\/a><\/em> [1861]).<\/p>\n

Read the entire article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Mar Gallego 2003: Passing Novels in the Harlem Renaissance: Identity Politics and Textual Strategies. Forum for European Contributions in African American Studies. M\u00fcnster: Lit Verlag. 214 pp. [Review] Atlantis: Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies Volume 26, Number 1 (2004) Isabel Soto Garc\u00eda Universidad Nacional de Educaci\u00f3n a Distancia\u00a0 (UNED) In her wide-ranging […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,5,6462,20],"tags":[18920,21806,2785,6209,6204,6205,122],"class_list":["post-13618","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-book-reviews","category-passing-2","category-usa","tag-atlantis","tag-atlantis-journal-of-the-spanish-association-of-anglo-american-studies","tag-isabel-soto","tag-isabel-soto-garcia","tag-mar-gallego","tag-mar-gallego-duran","tag-w-e-b-du-bois"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13618","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=13618"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13618\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":43820,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13618\/revisions\/43820"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=13618"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=13618"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=13618"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}