Mixed Race Studies

Racial Passing in Twenty-First Century Literature: Complicating Color in the African-American Fin-de-Siècle Novel

Indiana University of Pennsylvania
December 2014

Pamela S. Richardson, Chief of Staff & Assistant to the President for Strategic Initiatives
Edward Waters College, Jacksonville, Florida

A Dissertation Submitted to the School of Graduate Studies and Research in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy

This dissertation focuses on how racial passing can be a critical strategy for defining and validating a nuanced conceptualization of blackness in twenty-first century African-American Literature. Specifically in the works of Sapphire, Danzy Senna, and Colson Whitehead, the historical moment of passing yet endures into the future. Scholars have thoroughly analyzed racial passing in African American literature according to a standard definition of narratives written primarily in the early twentieth-century. These texts are steeped in sentimentality and tragedy about the abandonment of the black body and social identity. However, the popularity of post-racial discourse at the turn of the twenty-first century marks a shift in racial passing as a millennial concept, creating a space for the expansion of what constitutes a passing narrative. These millennial narratives address and parallel the changing social-political American racial climate. This research is an attempt to trace the shifts of the racial passing construct that allow for questions of representation, resistance, agency, and power relative to race and race relations in an ever increasingly, but arguably, post-racial society. Furthermore, passing narratives at the turn of the century critique the importance of maintaining fixed racial identities in order to empower the individual through redefining, reconnecting, and reclaiming one’s blackness.

Read the introduction here.

ENGL 773 (or) ENGL 873: Topics in Minority Literature: (W)Rites of Passing: Narratives of Shifting African American Identities

Indiana University of Pennsylvania, Indiana, Pennsylvania
Fall 2012

Veronica Watson, Associate Professor of English

“Passing” is a term that has, until quite recently, been used to refer almost exclusively to a person classified by society as a member of one racial group choosing to live as a member of a different racial/ethnic group. In the U.S. it was borne out of an oppressive racial classification system that placed African American at the bottom of a hierarchy that denied them basic human, social, and political rights. Passing, as narrative content and form, has traditionally been understood as a response to those conditions, a critique of American social systems, and a revealing argument about the ambiguity of “race.” This almost sociological approach to reading the phenomenon of passing in literature accounts for the canonization of a fairly narrow list of titles within African American literature.
 
In this class we will engage a broader mix of 19th-21st century texts as passing narratives than is typically considered. We will also expand our understanding of the passing narrative by examining contemporary scholarship on the topic, like Mary Balkun’s The American Counterfeit: Authenticity and Identity in American Literature and Culture, Steven Belluscio’s To Be Suddenly White: Literary Realism and Racial Passing, Juda Bennett’s The Passing Figure: Racial Confusion in Modern American Literature, and Laura Browder’s Slippery Characters: Ethnic Impersonators and American Identities.

By the end of the class you are sure to have a new appreciation of the complexities and richness of these works and to have thought about new research trajectories that could lead to cutting-edge scholarship and publication opportunities.

The tentative literary reading list is as follows:
 
Charles Chesnutt: House Behind the Cedars
Willam and Ellen Craft: Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom
Grace Halsell, Soul Sister
Jessie Redmond Fauset: Plum Bun
Pauline Hopkins, Of One Blood
James Weldon Johnson: Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man
Nella Larsen, Passing
Martha A. Sandweiss, Passing Strange: A Gilded Age Tale of Love and Deception Across the Color Line
George Schuyler, Black No More
Danzy Senna, Caucasia
Walter White, Flight

The Discourse of Interracial and Multicultural Identity in 19th and 20th Century American Literature

Indiana University of Pennsylvania
May 2007
373 pages
AAT 3257969

Dale M. Taylor

A Dissertation Submitted to the School of Graduate Studies and Research In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy

The narratives of and about mixed-race people have provided a varied and rich artistic canvas. Using various literary works as tools for investigation, this project explores a discourse for mixed-race people and determines to what extent that discourse shapes conceptions about them. In addition, it examines to what extent subjects of mixed-racial heritage and identity establish and form new cultures, struggle for the validity of their existence in spite of racial binaries, affirm their experiences and to some degree question the validity of race itself. A discourse of mixed-race subjects is related to a discourse about race. Issues of hybridity, creolization and mestizaje have affected postcolonial subjects and Americans throughout the Diaspora. The project will consider people of mixed Native American, African, Latin, Asian, European descent and others. Literature involving and about mixed-raced subjects is their history—whether fiction or nonfiction—a history that has been silenced by political, economic and racial ideology. Mixed-racial and mixed-cultural subjects exist in the “between” spaces of racial binaries. They are “called into place” by self and others through discourse to define and negotiate power. Among the writers and works used are: Gigantic, by Marc Nesbitt, The Human Stain by Philip Roth, “Désirée’s Baby” by Kate Chopin, “Stones of the Village” by Alice Dunbar-Nelson, “After Many Days,” by Fannie Barrier Williams, Passing by Nella Larsen, “The Downward Path To Wisdom” by Katherine Anne Porter, “The Displaced Person” by Flannery O’Connor, Yellowman by Dael Orlandersmith, “Origami” by Susan K. Ito, and poetry by Derek Walcott, Walt Whitman and others.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• One: THE DISCOURSE OF MIXED-RACE SUBJECTIVITY AND IDENTITY
  • Introduction
• Two: MIXED-RACE DISCOURSE IN “DESIREE’S BABY” BY KATE CHOPIN, “STONES OF THE VILLAGE” BY ALICE DUNBAR-NELSON, AND ‘AFTER MANY DAYS: A CHRISTMAS STORY” BY FANNIE BARRIER WILLIAMS
  • Introduction
  • “Desiree’s Baby” by Kate Chopin
  • “Stones of the Village” by Alice Dunbar-Nelson
  • “After Many Days: A Christmas Story” by Fannie Barrier Williams
  • Closing Remarks For Chapter Two
• Three: MIXED RACE AND DISCOURSE IN THE WORK OF KATHERINE ANNE PORTER, NELLA LARSEN AND FLANNERY O’CONNOR
  • Introduction
  • “The Downward Path To Wisdom” by K.A. Porter
  • “The Displaced Person” by Flannery O’Connor
  • Passing by Nella Larsen
  • Closing Remarks For Chapter Three
• Four: YELLOWMAN, THE HUMAN STAIN, GIGANTIC AND THE DISCOURSE OF INTERRACIAL AND INTRARACIAL SUBJECTIVITY
  • Introduction
  • Yellowman by Dael Orlandersmith
  • The Human Stain by Philip Roth
  • Gigantic: “The Ones Who May Kill You In The Morning” by Marc Nesbitt
  • Closing Remarks For Chapter Four
• Five: THE FUTURE AND THE DISCOURSE OF MIXED-RACE SUBJECTIVITY
  • Conclusion
• WORKS CITED
• APPENDICES
  • Appendix A – Permissions Letter Professor Natasha Trethewey
  • Appendix B – Permissions Letter Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture The New York Public Library

Purchase the dissertation here.