Mixed Race Studies

The Chinaberry Tree: A Novel of American Life

Dover Publications
2013-11-21 (Originally published in 1931)
352 pages
5.5 x 1 x 8.5 inches
ISBN: 978-0486493220

Jessie Redmon Fauset

Adultery, incest, and questions of racial identity simmer beneath the tranquil surface of suburban life in this novel, set in a small New Jersey town of the early 1900s. Lovely young Laurentine is obsessed with her “bad blood,” inherited from a common-law interracial union. Proud and independent, she longs for the respectability of a conventional marriage. Laurentine’s vivacious and self-confident cousin, Melissa, also aspires to “marry up.” But a family secret shadows Melissa’s dreams and ambitions as she approaches an explosive revelation.

African-American editor, poet, essayist, and novelist Jessie Redmon Fauset (1882–1961) was a prominent figure of the Harlem Renaissance. An editor of the NAACP magazine The Crisis, she was also an editor and co-author of the African-American children’s magazine, The Brownies’ Book. Her third novel, The Chinaberry Tree, draws upon elements of Greek tragedy in its powerful depiction of interracial love and marriage. The tale also offers a modern perspective on the struggle of its African-American heroines toward self-knowledge.

Reprinted from the Frederick A. Stokes Company, New York, 1931 edition.

The (Dis)Ability of Color; or, That Middle World: Toward A New Understanding of 19th and 20th Century Passing Narratives

University of Massachusetts, Amherst
2015

Julia S. Charles, Assistant Professor of English
Auburn University, Auburn, Alabama

This dissertation mines the intersection of racial performance and the history of the so-called “tragic mulatto” figure in American fiction. I propose that while many white writers depicted the “mulatto” character as inherently flawed because of some tainted “black blood,” many black writers’ depictions of mixed-race characters imagine solutions to the race problem. Many black writers critiqued some of America’s most egregious sins by demonstrating linkages between major shifts in American history and the mixed-race figure. Landmark legislation such as, Fugitive Slave Act 1850 and Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) are often plotlines in African American passing literature, thus demonstrating the failure of America to acknowledge its wrongdoings against people of color. While this project surveys passing narratives collectively, it pays careful consideration to those novelists whose presentations of the mixed-race figure challenge previously conceived notions of the “tragic mulatto” figure. I investigate how the writers each illuminate elements of the history of slavery and its aftermath in order to remark on black disenfranchisement at the turn of the century. Ultimately, however, I argue for the importance of the mixed-race figure as a potent symbol for imagined resolution between the larger narrative of American freedom and enslavement of blacks in the United States.

I examine several works of African American racial passing literature: William Wells Brown’s The Escape; Or, A Leap for Freedom (1858), the first published play by an African American writer. It explores the complexities of American culture at a time when tensions between North and South were about to explode into the Civil War. Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom; or, the Escape of William and Ellen Craft from Slavery (1860), tells the true story of the mixed-race Ellen Craft and her husband who escaped to freedom through various racial performances. Nella Larsen sets her novella Passing (1929) in Harlem in the 1920s. The story centers on two childhood friends reunited, but each dealing with their mixed-race ancestry in different ways. Jessie Redmon Fauset’s Plum Bun: A Novel Without a Moral (1928) and The Chinaberry Tree: A Novel of American Life (1931) and Charles W. Chesnutt’s “The Wife of His Youth” and “A Matter of Principle” (1900). endeavors to depict a better class of blacks through her examination of the fair-skinned bourgeois-striver Angela Murray. Each of these stories address American legacies of racism and representation beginning with the Civil War.

I investigate how these authors use the mixed-race figure (mostly) following the Civil War to mark the continuing impact that its legacy has had on black Americans through the New Negro Harlem Renaissance, but also to gesture to the mythic moment of freedom symbolized by successfully crossing the so-called color line. In addition to cataloguing an era of migration, the African American passing narrative represents the moment in which we shift from only seeing characters in terms of monoracial identities. These writers suggest that new performative modes of racial affiliation are necessary to achieve freedom. Reminding us that characters of mixed status practiced race in ways that enabled them to build shared identity despite an often disparate cultural heritage, these works suggest that identities like blackness are always constituted through performance. I argue that racial passing facilitated the “performance” of whiteness together with, an acknowledgment of what is accepted as blackness.

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The Harlem Renaissance’s Hidden Figure

Ursinus College
English Summer Fellows Student Research
2017-07-21
23 pages

Jada A. Grice
Ursinus College, Collegeville, Pennsylvania

This project will seek to look at the Harlem Renaissance’s hidden figure, Jessie Fauset. Jessie Fauset was born to an A.M.E. minister and his wife as one of ten children in Camden County, New Jersey and raised in Philadelphia. From there she got her college degree and began teaching all over the country. She has written four novels, There is Confusion, Plum Bun, The Chinaberry Tree, and Comedy: American Style, all of which I have read this summer. Each novel focuses on the early twentieth century black family. I will be analyzing these novels under the four themes of passing, acceptance, romance, and Paris/escape. I will also be mapping the characters in the novel on a QGIS system in order to indicate where the majority of the novel takes place and to see if certain characters have more movement than others. I will finally map Jessie Fauset’s life in order to see if her life parallels with the lives of her characters. Mapping consists of a close reading of the novel, identifying locations in the book, creating an [Microsoft] Excel spreadsheet, and plotting the spreadsheet onto an online map on QGIS.

Read the entire paper here.

“These narratives of racial passing have risen from the dead”

Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey
May 2015
275 pages
DOI: 10.7282/T38G8NJG

Donavan L. Ramon

Ph.D. Dissertation

Instead of concurring with most critics that racial passing literature reached its apex during the Harlem Renaissance, this project highlights its persistence, as evidenced in the texts examined from 1900 to 2014. Using psychoanalysis, this dissertation recovers non-canonical and white-authored narratives that critics overlook, thus reconceptualizing the genre of passing literature to forge a new genealogy for this tradition. This new genealogy includes novels, life writings, and short stories. In arguing for the genre’s continued relevance and production, this project offers a rejoinder to critics who contend that racial passing literature is obsolete. Part one of this dissertation complicates the notion that characters pass only in response to witnessing a lynching or to improve their socioeconomic status, by asserting that racial passing begins in the classroom for male characters and at home for their female counterparts. It thus precedes the threat of violence or middle class aspirations. Whereas the first half of this project is preoccupied with the gendered beginnings of racial passing, the second half examines its effects, on both writing and death. This project explores racial passing in Charles Chesnutt’s The House Behind the Cedars (1900), James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912), Jessie Fauset’s Plum Bun (1929), Vera Caspary’s The White Girl (1929), Alice Dunbar-Nelson’s The Stones of the Village (1988), Danzy Senna’s Caucasia (1999), Philip Roth’s The Human Stain (2000), Bliss Broyard’s One Drop (2003) and Anita Reynolds’ American Cocktail (2014).

Jessie Fauset’s Plum Bun and the City’s Transformative Potential

Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers
Volume 30, Number 2, 2013
pages 265-286
DOI: 10.1353/leg.2013.0031

Catherine Rottenberg, Assistant Professor
Department of Foreign Literatures and Linguistics and the Gender Studies Program
Ben-Gurion University, Beer-Sheva, Israel

We are mainly indebted to writers of fiction for our more intimate knowledge of contemporary urban life. (3)

Robert E. Park, “The City,” 1925

In a moment of accumulated outrage at the humiliations of everyday racism, Angela Murray, the protagonist of Jessie Redmon Fauset’s 1928 novel Plum Bun, decides to leave what she considers her staid hometown of Philadelphia and launch herself “into a freer, fuller life” that can be had only in a truly great city like New York (80). To avail herself of the greatest possible freedom, she also chooses to cross the color line and pass as white. This is a decisive—if expected—moment in the text, and the rest of the narrative details the various repercussions of Angela’s daring decision to set off as an unfettered woman. Fauset’s novel thus traces Angela’s movement over time and space: from her early years in a respectable black neighborhood in Philadelphia, through her adventures as a young woman passing as a white artist in bohemian Greenwich Village, and eventually to reclaiming her racial identity and moving to Paris to pursue her art. At the novel’s conclusion, Angela is coming into her own as a portrait artist and has been reunited with the love of her life, Anthony Cross.

Set exclusively in various and increasingly cosmopolitan city spaces—from Philadelphia to New York City to Paris—Fauset’s novel participates, at least to some degree, in the “urban aesthetics” of Harlem Renaissance literature that Maria Balshaw details in Looking for Harlem. In her book Balshaw considers the then-nascent discipline of urban sociology as practiced by thinkers such as Robert E. Park, whose words serve as the epigraph to my essay, and Charles S. Johnson. She demonstrates that their progressive ideas about urban space formed an important background to the optimism of the Harlem Renaissance (23). Yet Balshaw does not discuss Fauset’s work at any length, despite the fact that Plum Bun—like Nella Larsen’s Quicksand and Passing—clearly takes part in the ongoing debate about “the embeddedness of African American women in consumer culture and in the city” (97, emphasis added). Because Plum Bun engages in important ways with both urban aesthetics and the concerns of urban sociology, I will demonstrate that the novel can be read as raising crucial and timely questions about the emancipatory potential of urban space for upwardly mobile black women.

By emphasizing the centrality of city space in Plum Bun, I add a new dimension to literary criticism on Fauset while reinforcing Kathleen Pfeiffer’s claim that the novel’s narrative is “neither anachronistic nor marginal” but rather modern, complex, and worthy of serious scholarly attention (80). Susan Tomlinson has convincingly argued that Plum Bun “explores the intersections of race and gender constructions of black and white American women” (90). Angela Murray, Tomlinson suggests, manages to emulate two norms of womanhood: that of the New Negro Woman—characterized by racial pride and sexual respectability—and that of the New Woman—characterized by sexual experimentation and the pursuit of a public career. Yet, according to Tomlinson, not until the novel’s end—when Angela is in Paris, has disclosed her racial identity, and begins to devote herself to her artistic career—”do both gender and racial advancement coalesce in the unified female subject” (90). The impossibility of combining these norms in one female subject in turn reveals their contradictions and mutual exclusivity. Cherene Sherrard-Johnson makes a similar point, suggesting that the passing character as artist is the locus of Fauset’s oscillation between advocating an avant-garde womanhood and endorsing a more conventional New Negro womanhood (Portraits 49). Pfeiffer, on the other hand, examines the narrative in light of its even larger cultural context, suggesting that Fauset uses passing as a way to reflect on “the multivalent transformations in which white American culture at large was then participating” (80). Defending Plum Bun from critics who have summarily dismissed it, Pfeiffer claims that the novel is deeply invested in the larger philosophical question preoccupying contemporaneous US intellectuals, namely, whether “absolute freedom aid[s] or obstruct[s] the development of meaningful identity” (79). Fauset consequently records a general…

350:445 Revisiting Racial Passing in the 21st Century

Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey
Summer 2013

This is a course on racial passing, which many people wrongly believe is an antiquated phenomenon. Passing has historically referred to light-skinned African Americans who use their phenotypes to pretend to be white and enjoy the privileges of whiteness. As we will discuss in our seminar, today people pass in a variety of ways, and not just racially. For example, folks regularly pass economically, religiously, and/or through gender. In discussing contemporary passing, we will begin with President Barack Obama, who some have argued has engaged in a form of passing by having black skin yet “white politics.”

We will read primary and secondary material on this literary genre, to determine the tropes, images, themes, and formal elements that comprise “the passing narrative.” We will also consider the ways in which it has been expanded in this “post-race” era.

Primary texts will include:

• James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man
• Nella Larsen’s Passing
• Jessie Fauset’s Plum Bun
• Danzy Senna’s Caucasia
• Philip Roth’s The Human Stain
• Brooke Kroeger’s Passing (collection of contemporary personal narratives)
• Short Stories by Chester Himes, Langston Hughes, and Alice Moore Dunbar Nelson.

Films will include: “Imitation of Life” (1934 & 1959) and “The Human Stain” (2003).

For more information, click here.

Literature and Racial Ambiguity

Rodopi
2002
320 pages
8.7 x 5.9 x 0.9 inches
Hardback ISBN: 978-90-420-1428-2 / 90-420-1428-8
Paperback ISBN: 978-90-420-1418-3 / 90-420-1418-0

Edited by:

Teresa Hubel, Associate Professor of English
Huron University College in London, Ontario

Neil Brooks, Associate Professor of English
Huron University College at Western University, London, Ontario

Contents

• Neil Brooks and Teresa Hubel: Introduction
• 1. Peter Clandfield: “What Is In My Blood?”: Contemporary Black Scottishness and the work of Jackie Kay
• 2. Neluka Silva: “Everyone was Vaguely Related”: Hybridity and the Politics of Race in Sri Lankan Literary Discourses in English
• 3. Teresa Zackodnik: Passing Transgressions and Authentic Identity in Jessie Fauset’s Plum Bun and Nella Larsen’s Passing
• 4. Myriam Perregaux: Whiteness as Unstable Construction: Kate Pullinger’s The Last Time I Saw Jane
• 5. Bella Adams: Becoming Chinese: Racial Ambiguity in Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club
• 6. Jennifer Sparrow: Strategic Créolité. Caliban and Miranda after Empire
• 7. Jennifer Gibbs: White Identity and the New Ethic in Faulkner’s Light In August
• 8. Elizabeth DeLoughrey: White Fathers, Brown Daughters: the Frisbie Family Romance and the American Pacific
• 9. Rita Keresztesi Treat: Writing Culture and Performing Race in Mourning Dove’s Cogewea, The Half-Blood ‘(1927)
• 10. Kathryn Nicol: Visible Differences: Viewing Racial Identity in Toni Morrison’s Paradise and “Recitatif”
• 11. Yvette Tan: Looking Different/Rethinking Difference: Global Constants and/or Contradictory Characteristics in Yasmine Gooneratne’s A Change of Skies and Adib Kalim’s Seasonal Adjustments
• 12. Margaret D. Stetz: Jessie Fauset’s Fiction: Reconsidering Race and Revising Aestheticism
• 13. Paul Allatson: “I May Create A Monster”: Cherríe Moraga’s Transcultural Conundrum
• 14. Michele Hunter: Revisiting the Third Space: Reading Danzy Senna’s Caucasia
• Notes on the Authors

Comedy: American Style

Rutgers University Press
October 2009 (Originally Published in 1933)
304 pages
Paper ISBN: 978-0-8135-4632-2
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8135-4631-5

Jessie Redmon Fauset (1882-1961)

Edited and with an Introduction by:

Cherene Sherrard-Johnson, Professor of English
University of Wisconsin, Madison

Comedy: American Style, Jessie Redmon Fauset’s fourth and final novel, recounts the tragic tale of a family’s destruction—the story of a mother who denies her clan its heritage. Originally published in 1933, this intense narrative stands the test of time and continues to raise compelling, disturbing, and still contemporary themes of color prejudice and racial self-hatred. Several of today’s bestselling novelists echo subject matter first visited in Fauset’s commanding work, which overflows with rich, vivid, and complex characters who explore questions of color, passing, and black identity.

Cherene Sherrard-Johnson’s introduction places this literary classic in both the new modernist and transatlantic contexts and will be embraced by those interested in earlytwentieth-century women writers, novels about passing, the Harlem Renaissance, the black/white divide, and diaspora studies. Selected essays and poems penned by Fauset are also included, among them “Yarrow Revisited” and “Oriflamme,” which help highlight the full canon of her extraordinary contribution to literature and provide contextual background to the novel.

Passing as White: The Life Altering Effects on Loved Ones

Southern Connecticut State University
May 2006
122 pages
Publication Number: AAT 1435422
ISBN: 9780542641824

Kathleen Daubney

A Thesis Submitted to the School of Graduate Studies In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirement for the Degree of Master of Science

This thesis analyzes the theme of passing in Harlem Renaissance literature and deals with the consequences that such transitions to white society had on the passers’ friends and relatives. Choices that one person makes can have a domino and long lasting effect on his or her family and friends. This study focuses on: Passing by Nella Larsen, The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man by James Weldon Johnson, “Passing,” by Langston Hughes, and Comedy: American Style and Plum Bun both by Jessie Fauset. This thesis discusses if the family and friends have knowledge of the passing, if they had a voice in the novel, and if the children had knowledge of their heritage. It also discusses the effects passing had on the families and friends of the passers, along with their responses.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• PASSING AS WHITE: THE LIFE ALTERING EFFECTS ON LOVED ONES
• FAUSET’S PLUM BUN: PASSING AND RETURNING
• LARSEN’S PASSING: ESCAPE, WEALTH, OR APPEARANCE
• THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF AN EX-COLOURED MAN: WHITE, BLACK, WHITE?
• HUGHES “PASSING”: I LOVE YOU, BUT
• COMEDY AMERICAN STYLE: OLIVIA’S PASSING, THE FAMILY’S ESCAPE
• CONCLUSION: TO PASS OR NOT TO PASS
• REFERENCES

Purchase the dissertation here.

Beyond the Pale: Unsettling “Race” and Womanhood in the Novels of Harper, Hopkins, Fauset and Larsen

McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
December 1996
303 pages

Teresa Christine Zackodnik, Professor of English
University of Alberta, Canada

A thesis Submitted to the School of Graduate Studies in Partial Fulfilment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor Of Philosophy

This dissertation proposes that writers like Frances Harper, Pauline Hopkins, Jessie Fauset, and Nella Larsen “talk out both sides” of their mouths, parodying the values of the black bourgeoisie, racialized notions of womanhood, and understandings of racial difference popular at the turn into the twentieth century. Using complex modes of address, these authors have written novels that in all likelihood were read in different directions by their white and African American readerships. I contend that these narratives would have placated their white readership with familiar forms, while simultaneously forging a sense of community with their African American readers in novels of a highly political nature which questioned and subverted definitions of womanhood and “race”. These “tragic mulatta” and “passing” novels, published from 1892 to 1931 are contextualized with an analysis of three cultural efforts to consolidate turn-of-the-century American beliefs regarding race and gender: legal statutes codifying racial identities, theories of racial difference, and notions of gender identity disseminated through the cult of domesticity. Because the mulatto is neither white nor black, her ambivalent identity and experience make parody a significant trope with which these authors interrogate identity. In order to “pass” for “true women” or for white, these mulatto characters utilize and parody the very qualities designed to ensure the “purity” of whiteness and womanhood. This study argues that such parodies access an African American tradition of parodic performance that played to and on white notions of “blackness” and constructions of white identity. Moving from a consideration of such “signifyin(g)” acts as a challenge to gender and racial identities represented by heroines who pass for “true women,” the study concludes with a consideration of how race, as a political category of description, is destabilized through the representation of heroines who choose to pass for white.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• CHAPTER 1: Codifying and Quantifying “Race” in Turn-of-the-Century America
• CHAPTER 2: Unsettling “Race” and Womanhood in Tum-of-the-Century America: Frances Harper’s Iola Leroy and Pauline Hopkins’s Contending Forces
• CHAPTER 3: Policing the Bounds of Race: Jessie Fauset’s The Chinaberry Tree and Nella Larsen’s Quicksand
• CHAPTER 4: Transgressions and Excess: Passing as Parodic Performance in Jessie Fauset’s Plum Bun and Nella Larsen’s Passing
• CONCLUSION: New Trajectories of Self-Definition

Read the entire thesis here.