{"id":60205,"date":"2020-09-19T20:36:32","date_gmt":"2020-09-19T20:36:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=60205"},"modified":"2020-09-19T20:36:34","modified_gmt":"2020-09-19T20:36:34","slug":"how-the-vanishing-half-fits-into-our-cultural-fixation-with-racial-passing-stories","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=60205","title":{"rendered":"How The Vanishing Half fits into our cultural fixation with racial passing stories"},"content":{"rendered":"

How The Vanishing Half fits into our cultural fixation with racial passing stories<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

Vox<\/a>
\n2020-08-14<\/p>\n

Constance Grady<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

<\/a>
\nZac Freeland\/Vox<\/em><\/small><\/p>\n

The Vox Book Club is linking to Bookshop.org<\/a> to support local and independent booksellers.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\u201cPassing for white<\/a> never left.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

In Brit Bennett\u2019s<\/a> The Vanishing Half<\/em><\/a>, the character of Stella haunts the narrative like a ghost. Stella is the half who vanished: half of her family, half of her sister\u2019s heart. And she vanished by excising half of her own identity.<\/p>\n

Stella is a light-skinned Black woman, and when she is 16, she decides to start passing for white<\/a>. Her identical twin sister Desiree, meanwhile, grows up to marry the darkest-skinned man she can find. Stella breaks away from her family, and we don\u2019t get a chance to meet her on the pages of the novel until nearly halfway through the book when at last her niece, Desiree\u2019s dark-skinned daughter, tracks her down. It\u2019s only in that last section that we finally learn exactly what happened to Stella.<\/p>\n

Stella\u2019s fate haunts the novel, and so does the genre her story belongs to. There\u2019s a long history of narratives of racial passing in the American novel, and The Vanishing Half<\/em> plays with the genre in new and interesting ways. So as the Vox Book Club spends the month talking about The Vanishing Half<\/em>, I wanted to put it in the context of the passing novel more broadly.<\/p>\n

To get an expert view, I called up Alisha Gaines<\/a>, an English professor at Florida State University and the author of Black for a Day: White Fantasies of Race and Empathy<\/em><\/a>. Together, we talked through the history of the African American passing novel, what passing looks like after Jim Crow (sorry, Ben Shapiro<\/a>), and how passing novels can show us how race is produced and reproduced. Below is a transcript of our conversation, lightly edited for length and clarity.<\/p>\n

The first African American stories of racial passing are slave narratives<\/strong><\/p>\n

Constance Grady<\/strong><\/p>\n

Do we know when the first of these narratives emerged? How old are stories about racial passing?<\/p>\n

Alisha Gaines<\/strong><\/p>\n

It\u2019s an old story. In literature and in life, America<\/a> has a fascination with impersonation, which includes blackface minstrelsy<\/a>. And passing narratives, if you want to be technical about it, in African American literature, they start with the slave narrative…<\/p>\n

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

\u201cPassing for white never left.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,125,1196,8,6462,20],"tags":[4703,30881,23503,1340,2367,330,91,1305,834,1307,87,18116,31173,19065],"class_list":["post-60205","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-identitydevelopment","category-literary-criticism","category-media-archive","category-passing-2","category-usa","tag-alisha-gaines","tag-brit-bennett","tag-constance-grady","tag-danzy-senna","tag-fannie-hurst","tag-frances-e-w-harper","tag-frances-harper","tag-gayle-wald","tag-george-schuyler","tag-james-weldon-johnson","tag-nella-larsen","tag-vox","tag-vox-book-club","tag-william-and-ellen-craft"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60205","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=60205"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60205\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":60207,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60205\/revisions\/60207"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=60205"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=60205"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=60205"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}