{"id":59828,"date":"2020-06-26T03:17:02","date_gmt":"2020-06-26T03:17:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=59828"},"modified":"2020-07-27T00:41:25","modified_gmt":"2020-07-27T00:41:25","slug":"brit-bennetts-new-novel-explores-the-power-and-performance-of-race","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=59828","title":{"rendered":"Brit Bennett\u2019s New Novel Explores the Power and Performance of Race"},"content":{"rendered":"

Brit Bennett\u2019s New Novel Explores the Power and Performance of Race<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

The New York Times<\/a>
\n2020-05-26<\/p>\n

Parul Sehgal<\/strong><\/a>, Book Critic<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

Brit Bennett, The Vanishing Half, A Novel<\/em><\/a> (New York: Riverhead Books, 2020)<\/strong><\/p>\n

No nation can lay lasting claim to a genre, save perhaps one. The story of racial passing<\/a> is a uniquely and intensely American form. From its earliest avatars, the 19th-century novel \u201cClotel<\/a>,\u201d for example, to Langston Hughes\u2019s<\/a> short stories and Nella Larsen\u2019s<\/a> 1929 masterpiece, \u201cPassing<\/a>,\u201d to the melodrama films of the 1950s, like \u201cPinky<\/a>\u201d and \u201cImitation of Life<\/a>,\u201d it is a story central to the American imagination, re-examined and retold so regularly it seems to enjoy a perpetual heyday.<\/p>\n

In recent years, passing narratives have shed their sentimentality and turned surreal (Boots Riley\u2019s<\/a> film \u201cSorry to Bother You<\/a>\u201d), comic (Spike Lee\u2019s<\/a> \u201cBlacKkKlansman<\/a>\u201d) and playful (Mat Johnson\u2019s<\/a> novel \u201cLoving Day<\/a>\u201d). Others have flipped the formula so that it is black identity that is coveted by characters who are racially ambiguous (in the fiction of Danzy Senna<\/a>, for example) or plainly white (as in Nell Zink\u2019s<\/a> novel \u201cMislaid<\/a>\u201d).<\/p>\n

Through all the ways the genre has been rewritten, its potency has remained \u2014 its singular ability to enact the notion of race as arbitrary, as a performance, as something seen through, all the while inscribing its power as a source of kinship, pain and pride. Certainly few transgressions are punished so severely in literature. To pass is to court moral ruin; it is an elective orphanhood (in \u201cImitation of Life,\u201d passing results in actual matricide<\/a>), depicted as a kind of amputation or suicide.<\/p>\n

In her new novel, \u201cThe Vanishing Half<\/a>,\u201d Brit Bennett<\/a> brings to the form a new set of provocative questions: What if passing goes unpunished? What if the character is never truly found out? What if she doesn\u2019t die or repent? What then?…<\/p>\n

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

In her new novel, \u201cThe Vanishing Half,\u201d Brit Bennett brings to the form a new set of provocative questions: What if passing goes unpunished? What if the character is never truly found out? What if she doesn\u2019t die or repent? What then?<\/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":[30881,2640,29218,2327],"class_list":["post-59828","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-new-york-times","tag-parul-sehgal","tag-the-new-york-times"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59828","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=59828"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59828\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":60017,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59828\/revisions\/60017"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=59828"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=59828"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=59828"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}