Mixed Race Studies

The Penumbral Spaces of Nella Larsen’s Passing: Undecidable bodies, mobile identities, and the deconstruction of racial boundaries

Gender, Place & Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography
Volume 13, Issue 3, 2006
pages 227-246
DOI: 10.1080/09663690600700972

Perry L. Carter, Assistant Professor of Human Geography
Texas Tech University

Nella Larsen’s 1929 novel, Passing, is a psychological drama centering around two fair-skinned women. One, Clare Kendry, passes as the White wife of a financially successful racist; the other, Irene Redfield, is a ‘race woman’ living in upper Manhattan during the era of the Renaissance Harlem. Clare and Irene are undecidables, neither White nor Black, fluid subjects traversing the boundaries of race—passing. Passing is an act of insinuating oneself into forbidden spaces by jettisoning former identities. It is as much a transgression of spatial boundaries as it is of racial boundaries. In the novel Clare passes by merely crossing from Black space into White space, and along the way shedding a Black identity for a White one. This paper examines the mobility of identities across racial geographies and how this movement destabilizes notions of race and of raced spaces.

We encounter the world in our bodies, and through our bodies’ most exquisitely sensitive sense, our skins, we take the world into ourselves. We have made and remade a world where nearly every experience is shaded and shaped by the color of those bodies, the tones of those skins. (Jane Lazarre, Beyond the Whiteness of Whiteness: memoir of a White mother of Black sons, 1997, p. 94)…

Read or purchase the article here.

Choose Your Own Race

Sunday Book Review
The New York Times
2014-08-29

Emily Raboteau

‘Your Face in Mine,’ by Jess Row

Do you ever dream of starting again in a new skin? This is the central question of Jess Row’s provocative and intriguing first novel, “Your Face in Mine.” It’s also a tag line of the shady enterprise in Bangkok where the book’s central character, Martin Wilkinson (né Lipkin), has paid a hefty sum to undergo something called racial reassignment surgery, to transform from a white Jewish man to an African-American one.

We’ve seen variations on this premise before, in the 1986 comedy flop “Soul Man,” in which C. Thomas Howell takes self-tanning pills so he can attend ­Harvard Law School on a scholarship for African-Americans, and in the 1961 best seller “Black Like Me,” wherein the white journalist John Howard Griffin disguised himself as black to tour the segregated South by bus. Those stories advanced blackface tradition from minstrelsy to illustrate (as only a white man can — with a wink) that it’s harder in this country to be black than white. Thankfully, Row’s narrative delves into more nuanced territory.

Martin becomes black not to teach anyone a lesson but to better reflect his “true self.” As in Adam Mansbach’s novel “Angry Black White Boy,” Martin’s condition speaks to a generation of suburban white kids who came up in the 1990s possessed by a vibrant hip-hop culture that let them access sincere rage at the world’s injustice in a way music hadn’t done since punk. (One of the book’s sharpest moments is its loving remembrance of the Spike Lee film “Do the Right Thing,” and Row is gifted throughout at writing about music.) Martin’s self-diagnosis is “Racial Identity Dysphoria Syndrome.” He compares his plight to that of a transsexual, but oddly enough, instead of being born into the wrong gender, he believes that he was born into the wrong race. Odder still, that race can be purchased, packaged and sold. More convincingly, he demonstrates it can be performed…

Read the entire review here.

A Mother’s Love: Stories of Struggle, Sacrifice, Love and Wisdom

The Root
2014-05-11

Breanna Edwards

Journalist Alysia Steele’s explores the “jewels in the Mississippi Delta” who held it down for their families through decades of strife and racial struggle.

It’s Mother’s Day weekend, and many of us may feel the keen absence of the women who meant the most to us.

How many times have you wished you could turn back the hands of time and have one more conversation with one of the most influential women of your life? Maybe have notes of memorable anecdotes they shared?

This was one of Alysia Steele’s biggest regrets concerning her paternal grandmother, Althenia A. Burton, who died 20 years ago. Since then, the memory of her grandmother has stayed with Steele, never fading, and ultimately culminating in the conception of her current project, a book proposal, “Jewels in the Delta,” that has gained interest from publishers.

“I have a huge sense of regret that as a trained journalist I never had the foresight to get her story and I’ll never hear her voice again, and I can’t even tell you how much that hurts me,” Steele tells The Root.

Steele has interviewed about 47 women and is conducting the last of what will be a total of 50 interviews in the coming days. The project has taken her approximately 11 months to complete and countless hours of recording, transcribing, coaxing and traveling. It’s been hard work, to be sure, but to Steele the end goal has been more than worth it.

“How many of us stop and talk to our grandparents to get to their stories? To really ask them the questions that are hard?” she adds…

…In an excerpt from Steele’s book proposal, Virginia Hower, 93, shared how she “felt dirty” because of her ability to pass for white in a segregated society.

It was horror. You felt bad because you couldn’t be with your grandmother or your grandfather. You just accepted it. I couldn’t be with them because they were darker. Sometimes you felt bad because you could ride in a clean coach and just to think that your grandmother couldn’t kiss you as you stepped off the train. But they accepted it, so why not enjoy the clean train? And then when I got down on the streets, we all kiss and carry on. Those was happy moments. And then you got to thinkin’ how foolish this life is, how foolish. Then you got to thinkin’ about it and say take advantage of it and a lot of people down here in Clarksdale, they went to Chicago in ’41 and never revealed they were colored.

So many fascinating stories from unassuming women who had nothing but love for their respective husbands and children and who never really spoke about the troubles and trials they had endured…

Read the entire article here.

White Papers

University of Pittsburgh Press
January 2012
80 pages
6 x 9
Paper ISBN: 9780822961840

Martha Collins

Winner of the 2013 Ohioana Book Award for Poetry

White Papers is a series of untitled poems that explore race from a variety of personal, historical, and cultural perspectives, questioning what it means to be “white” in a multi-racial society.

White Papers is a series of untitled poems that deal with issues of race from a number of personal, historical, and cultural perspectives. Expanding the territory of her 2006 book Blue Front, which focused on a lynching her father witnessed as a child, this book turns, among other things, to Martha Collins’ childhood. Throughout, it explores questions about what it means to be white, not only in the poet’s life, but also in our culture and history, even our pre-history. The styles and forms are varied, as are the approaches; some of the poems address race only implicitly, and the book, like Blue Front, includes some documentary and “found” material. But the focus is always on getting at what it has meant and what it means to be white—to have a race and racial history, much of which one would prefer to forget, if one is white, but all of which is essential to remember and to acknowledge in a multi-racial society that continues to live under the influence of its deeply racist past.

Read a section from the book here.

Passing Interest: Racial Passing in US Novels, Memoirs, Television, and Film, 1990–2010

State University of New York Press
July 2014
352 pages
Hardcover ISBN13: 978-1-4384-5227-2
Electronic ISBN13: 978-1-4384-5229-6

Edited by:

Julie Cary Nerad, Associate Professor of American Literature
Morgan State University, Baltimore, Maryland

Explores how the trope of racial passing continues to serve as a touchstone for gauging public beliefs and anxieties about race in this multiracial era.

The first volume to focus on the trope of racial passing in novels, memoirs, television, and films published or produced between 1990 and 2010, Passing Interest takes the scholarly conversation on passing into the twenty-first century. With contributors working in the fields of African American studies, American studies, cultural studies, film studies, literature, and media studies, this book offers a rich, interdisciplinary survey of critical approaches to a broad range of contemporary passing texts. Contributors frame recent passing texts with a wide array of cultural discourses, including immigration law, the Post-Soul Aesthetic, contemporary political satire, affirmative action, the paradoxes of “colorblindness,” and the rhetoric of “post-racialism.” Many explore whether “one drop” of blood still governs our sense of racial identity, or to what extent contemporary American culture allows for the racially indeterminate individual. Some essays open the scholarly conversation to focus on “ethnic” passers—individuals who complicate the traditional black-white binary—while others explore the slippage between traditional racial passing and related forms of racial performance, including blackface minstrelsy and racial masquerade.

Table of Contents

• Preface: The “Posts” of Passing / Gayle Wald
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Introduction: The (Not So) New Face of America / Julie Cary Nerad
• 2. On the Margins of Movement: Passing in Three Contemporary Memoirs / Irina Negrea
• 3. “A Cousin to Blackness”: Race and Identity in Bliss Broyard’s One Drop: My Father’s Hidden Life / Lynn Washington and Julie Cary Nerad
• 4. Can One Really Choose? Passing and Self-Identification at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century / Jené Schoenfeld
• 5. Passing in Blackface: The Intimate Drama of Post-Racialism on Black. White / Eden Osucha
• 6. Broke Right in Half: Passing of/in Alice Randall’s The Wind Done Gone / Julie Cary Nerad
• 7. Passing for Chicano, Passing for White: Negotiating Filipino American Identity in Brian Ascalon Roley’s American Son / Amanda Page
• 8. Race in the Marketplace: Postmodern Passing and Ali G / Ana Cristina Mendes
• 9. Passing for Black, White, and Jewish: Mixed-Race Identity in Rebecca Walker and Danzy Senna / Lori Harrison-Kahan
• 10. Smiling Faces: Chameleon Street, Racial Passing/Performativity, and Film Blackness / Michael B. Gillespie
• 11. Consuming Performances: Race, Media, and the Failure of the Cultural Mulatto in Bamboozled and Erasure / Meredith McCarroll
• Bibliography
• Contributor Biographies
• Index

Mixed Mondays Film Series at the Brooklyn Historical Society

Crossing Borders, Bridging Generatons
Brooklyn Historical Society
128 Pierrepont Street
Brooklyn, New York 11201
Mondays, 2014-08-04 through  2014-08-18, 18:30 EDT (Local Time)

Hosted by and post-screening discussion with:

Erica Chito Childs, Professor of Sociology (author of Navigating Interracial Borders and Fade to Black and White: Interracial Images in Popular Culture)
City University of New York

This series is co-sponsored by MixedRaceStudies.org.

August 18: Toasted Marshmallows (2014): 

Come watch the first public screening of the documentary Toasted Marshmallows in the U.S.! Follow filmmakers Marcelitte Failla and Anoushka Ratnarajah on a journey across Canada and the U.S. as they document the experiences of other mixed-race identified women, delve into their own cultural and ethnic histories, and tell stories about color, passing, privilege, ancestry, and belonging. An extended preview of the film will be followed by a dialogue with the filmmakers and Erica Chito-Childs.

August 11: My Beautiful Laundrette (1985):

British-born, half-Pakistani playwright and novelist Hanif Kureishi won an Oscar nomination for his 1985 screenplay for My Beautiful Laundrette, a richly layered film about Pakistani immigrant life in Thatcherite London.

Come watch the protagonist, Omar, navigate mixed-income and mixed-race arrangements in his family and develop an unlikely, yet beautiful, queer relationship with Johnny (Daniel Day Lewis). Set against the backdrop of anti-immigrant racism and fascism, the story of Omar’s laundrette presents an electrifying set of possibilities around class, race, sexuality, belonging, and love.

August 4: Imitation of Life (1959):

The Mixed Monday film series launches with a 1959 Lana Turner classic—Imitation of Life—which explores the story of an African-American woman and her light-skinned, mixed-race daughter who passes for white. Come munch on popcorn, watch the film and discuss the history and cultural context around mixed families, race relations and popular culture.

Your Face in Mine, A Novel

Riverhead Books (an imprint of Penguin Press)
2014-08-14
384 pages
Hardcover ISBN: 9781594488344
ePub ISBN: 9780698168817

Jess Row

An award-winning writer delivers a poignant and provocative novel of identity, race and the search for belonging in the age of globalization.

One afternoon, not long after Kelly Thorndike has moved back to his hometown of Baltimore, an African American man he doesn’t recognize calls out to him. To Kelly’s shock, the man identifies himself as Martin, who was one of Kelly’s closest friends in high school—and, before his disappearance nearly twenty years before, skinny, white, and Jewish. Martin then tells an astonishing story: After years of immersing himself in black culture, he’s had a plastic surgeon perform “racial reassignment surgery”—altering his hair, skin, and physiognomy to allow him to pass as African American. Unknown to his family or childhood friends, Martin has been living a new life ever since.

Now, however, Martin feels he can no longer keep his new identity a secret; he wants Kelly to help him ignite a controversy that will help sell racial reassignment surgery to the world. Kelly, still recovering from the death of his wife and child and looking for a way to begin anew, agrees, and things quickly begin to spiral out of control.

Inventive and thought-provoking, Your Face in Mine is a brilliant novel about cultural and racial alienation and the nature of belonging in a world where identity can be a stigma or a lucrative brand.

In a Novelist’s World, You Choose Your Race

The New York Times
2014-08-11

Felicia R. Lee

In the weak light of a February afternoon, Kelly Thorndike has a strange chance encounter in a Baltimore parking lot with Martin Lipkin, an old friend from high school. But time has brought a big change. The Martin that Kelly knew was white. The man standing before him is black.

Their meeting sets the stage for “Your Face in Mine,” Jess Row’s debut novel, which is to be published on Thursday by Riverhead Books, joining a long tradition of fiction about racial guises. Mr. Row’s tale is set in a near future in which Martin is the first person to undergo “racial reassignment surgery” to change his features, skin color, hair texture and even his voice. His surgical package includes a new biography and even a dialect coach — all a corrective for Martin’s “racial dysphoria.”

“I wanted to make the novel the logical outcome of the way certain vectors in our society are going,” Mr. Row, 39, a soft-spoken, self-described WASP, said during a recent interview. He pointed to the current state of plastic surgery, in which it’s possible for features and body parts to be changed to mask or remake ethnicity. “I wanted people to ask, ‘If I could have the surgery, would I?’ ” said Mr. Row, the author of two story collections, “The Train to Lo Wu” and “Nobody Ever Gets Lost.”

A fan of James Baldwin’s work, Mr. Row said he set out to have “Your Face in Mine” explore the ways people try to escape their racial identities, as well as investigate their desire for racial reconciliation and deeply unconscious fears and discomforts around race.

“Passing” has been a major theme in African-American literature for over a century, and has usually meant blacks living as whites to escape bias. “Your Face in Mine” owes something to classic stories of passing like “The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man,” by James Weldon Johnson (published anonymously in 1912 and under his name in 1927), and the 1931 satire “Black No More,” by George S. Schuyler, in which blacks rush to embrace a new scientific process to become white.

It also calls to mind “Black Like Me,” the groundbreaking 1961 account by John Howard Griffin, a white journalist, who darkened his skin to appear African-American and wrote about the discrimination he experienced…

…“Is Race Plastic?,” a recent New York magazine cover article, considered just this issue, exploring the implications of “ethnic plastic surgery” with its menu of procedures that go about “sharpening the stereotypically flat noses of Asians, blacks and Latinos, while flattening the stereotypically sharp noses of Arabs and Jews.”

Allyson Hobbs, an assistant professor of history at Stanford, whose book, “A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life,” comes out in October, said that in life and in literature, passing showed the complexity, and even absurdity, of racial categories.

“Historically, it was much clearer what was to be gained by being white, in the literature as well,” she said. “There was a social and economic logic to becoming white.” About “Your Face in Mine,” she said: “What this book sort of raises as a question is what someone expects to gain by being black, Hispanic or Asian in the 21st century? What is gained and what is lost through a racial reassignment in the 21st century?”…

Read the entire article here.

The De(con)struction of Black/White Binaries: Critiques of Passing in Charles Waddell Chesnutt’s “The Wife of His Youth” and Other Stories of the Color Line

Callaloo
Volume 37, Number 3, Summer 2014
pages 676-691
DOI: 10.1353/cal.2014.0106

Tanfer Emin Tunç, Professor of American Culture and Literature
Hacettepe University, Ankara, Turkey

When asked to elaborate on the “Negro Problem,” or the co-existence of racial inequality and democracy in the United States at the beginning of the twentieth century, African American historian W. E. B. Du Bois conveyed that the “’Negro problem’ of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line.” Kelly Miller, his contemporary and fellow National Association for the Advancement of Colored People activist, proposed a radical solution to this American dilemma: the “Negro must get along, get white, or get out” (qtd. in Brown 275). Thus the official word that African Americans received from the NAACP, arguably the most influential civil rights organization of the early-twentieth century, was that the color line, or the divide along racial lines (usually black and white), would dominate the lives of African Americans for the next hundred years. Moreover, only three solutions existed: “get along” (accommodate); “get white” (assimilate); or “get out” (leave the United States), which many individuals, including artists such as Josephine Baker, eventually did. Miller’s second solution to the Negro problem—”get white”—caused the greatest controversy within the black intellectual community for obvious reasons. Many activists, including Marcus Garvey and his supporters, believed that the future of African Americans lay not in their ability to disappear into the white race, but in their blackness—that is, their ability to resist “miscegenation” and the dominant racial hegemony of the United States.

The battle that emerged along the color line during the turn of the twentieth century was chronicled in American literature, specifically through the works of writer Charles Waddell Chesnutt who devoted his entire career to the “Negro problem” (See Wright and Glass). Born in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1858, but raised in Fayetteville, North Carolina, Euro-American in appearance but of African American heritage, Chesnutt straddled multiple worlds: North, South, black, and white. Early on in his life, he developed a double consciousness which shaped his career as a fiction writer, essayist, pedagogue, political commentator, lawyer, and legal stenographer at a time when African Americans could not even serve on juries or testify on their own behalf. This double consciousness also influenced his personal life, which he spent in the interstices of the black and white worlds (Ferguson, Introduction 2–3). Chesnutt maintained that because of the intractable racism of American society, the solution to the “Negro problem” lay not in one of Miller’s three solutions, but in the hands of middle class, educated, progressive “color line” blacks such as himself—individuals who transcended categorization by straddling the racial and cultural divide, especially between urban whites and rural blacks (Ferguson, Introduction 5; Ferguson, “Chesnutt’s Genuine Blacks” 113). Moreover, “Chesnutt’s recognition of, and emphasis on, these interstices, the in-between-ness of race, disturb[ed] turn-of-the-century race science; they exposed the color line as flexible and mutable, a barrier with real social consequences, but nevertheless a biological fiction” (Toth 77).

In essays such as “What Is a White Man?” and “The Future American,” Chesnutt describes race as “a modern invention of white people to perpetuate the color line.” He believed that racial fusion or “amalgamation” would eventually (when racist legal restrictions on interracial marriage were revoked) bring an end to race as a category of identity by creating a mestizo, all-inclusive, “future American ethnic type” who defied boundaries: “there would be no inferior race to domineer over; there would be no superior race to oppress those who differed from them in racial externals” (qtd. in McElrath, Leitz, and Crisler 125, 232). Because, as he argued, whiteness was a cultural fiction (“black and Indian blood” already flowed in the veins of many Southern whites), Chesnutt’s utopic vision of American race relations, and plan for the elimination of prejudice and “racial discord,” hinged not on peoples of color assimilating into the dominant white race, which he believed was already “impure,” but in the flexibility and adaptability of hybridity (McElrath, Leitz, and Crisler 125, 232; Fleischmann 466). For Chesnutt, the “future American” would be an “admixture” of races, ethnicities, and consciousnesses.

Although Chesnutt was proud of his black heritage, he understood why some individuals who lived along the color line perceived…

Reading Race in Nella Larsen’s Passing and the Rhinelander Case

African American Review
Voluume 46, Numbers 2-3, Summer/Fall 2013
pages 345-361
DOI: 10.1353/afa.2013.0076

Rebecca Nisetich, Assistant Director, Honors Program
University of Southern Maine

Toward the end of Nella Larsen’s Passing (1929), the protagonist Irene Redfield imagines how her friend Clare Kendry’s racist husband might react if he discovers his wife’s “true” racial identity: “What if Bellew should divorce Clare? Could he? There was the Rhinelander case.” This essay argues that what seems like a casual reference to a contemporary event actually underscores a central theme of the novel: the Rhinelander case and Passing both illustrate the problematic ways Americans sought to categorize mixed-race individuals in the 1920s, but while the Rhinelander verdict denies the existence of a middle ground between racial absolutes, the novel affirms it. Larsen directly references the Rhinelander case only once, but its themes echo throughout the text of Passing, which challenges the visibility of race and the conception of racial identity as intimately connected to one’s essential self. Irene’s reference calls to mind a very public trial that forced Americans to question their understanding of racial difference. In Passing, Larsen explores the conceptions of race as a real physical fact and as an imagined social construct, and challenges the logic of “common knowledge” and visibility in assigning racial identity to individuals.

Read the entire article here.