{"id":59795,"date":"2020-06-23T19:49:44","date_gmt":"2020-06-23T19:49:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=59795"},"modified":"2020-06-23T19:51:33","modified_gmt":"2020-06-23T19:51:33","slug":"brit-bennett-reimagines-the-literature-of-passing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=59795","title":{"rendered":"Brit Bennett Reimagines the Literature of Passing"},"content":{"rendered":"

Brit Bennett Reimagines the Literature of Passing<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

The New Yorker<\/a>
\n2020-06-15<\/p>\n

Sarah Resnick<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/a>
\nPhotograph by Miranda Barnes for The New Yorker<\/em><\/small><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

In her second novel, the author uses a familiar genre to explore startling visions of selfhood.<\/em><\/p>\n

In \u201cThe Vanishing Half<\/a>,\u201d the story of two sisters divided by the color line yields new models of identity and authenticity.<\/em><\/p>\n

In 1954, a pair of identical twins\u2014creamy skin, hazel eyes, wavy hair\u2014flee a small town in Louisiana<\/a> and the narrow future it affords: nothing but more of the same. Desiree and Stella Vignes are sixteen and headed to New Orleans<\/a>. They scrape by for a while, and eventually Stella applies for a position as a secretary at a fancy department store, a job only white girls get. She doesn\u2019t mention she\u2019s black, and no one asks. She\u2019s apprehensive\u2014has she done something wrong?\u2014but her sister is adamant: why should the two of them starve \u201cwhen Stella, perfectly capable of typing, became unfit as soon as anyone learned that she was colored?\u201d Stella gets the job. Every morning, on the ride to the office, she transforms into her double, Miss Vignes\u2014\u201cWhite Stella,\u201d as Desiree calls her\u2014and every night she undergoes the process in reverse. It\u2019s \u201ca performance where there could be no audience. Only a person who knew her real identity would appreciate her acting, and nobody at work could ever know.\u201d For a while, the twins are brought together by the joint pleasure of pulling off the performance. But gradually the gap between them widens: \u201cDesiree could never meet Miss Vignes. Stella could only be her when Desiree was not around.\u201d One day, Stella disappears, leaving her sister a note: \u201cSorry honey, but I\u2019ve got to go my own way.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Vanishing Half<\/a>\u201d (Riverhead), the second novel by Brit Bennett<\/a>, tells the story of the Vignes sisters\u2019 diverging paths. In doing so, it belongs to a long tradition of literature about racial passing<\/a>. From the antebellum period<\/a> until the end of Jim Crow<\/a>, countless black Americans crossed the color line to pass as white\u2014to escape slavery or threats of racial violence, or to gain access to the social, political, and economic benefits conferred by whiteness. Narratives that dramatized this passage became a fixture of popular fiction, written by black and white, male and female authors alike. Charles W. Chesnutt<\/a>, James Weldon Johnson<\/a>, and Nella Larsen<\/a> wrote about it, as did William Dean Howells<\/a> and Kate Chopin<\/a>. \u201cImitation of Life<\/a>,\u201d the 1933 novel by Fannie Hurst<\/a>, was twice made into a movie (in 1934<\/a>, by John M. Stahl<\/a>, and in 1959<\/a>, by Douglas Sirk<\/a>). These stories repeat some version of a generic arc: the \u201ctragic mulatto<\/a>,\u201d often a woman, chooses to leave home and pass for white; in time, anguished by the betrayal of her black identity, she returns to her family, only to be met with a harsh fate\u2014sometimes death…<\/p>\n

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

In \u201cThe Vanishing Half,\u201d the story of two sisters divided by the color line yields new models of identity and authenticity.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,5,369,8,6462,20],"tags":[30881,30911,3886],"class_list":["post-59795","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-book-reviews","category-louisiana","category-media-archive","category-passing-2","category-usa","tag-brit-bennett","tag-sarah-resnick","tag-the-new-yorker"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59795","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=59795"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59795\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":59797,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59795\/revisions\/59797"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=59795"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=59795"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=59795"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}