Passing Novels in the Harlem Renaissance: Identity Politics and Textual Strategies

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

One thing I really stressed throughout the dissertation was focusing not so much on the forms of Blackness that can be accepted but focusing on the forms that can’t be accepted. For me that was a highly gendered and sexualized thing. So for example, the mulata can be accepted because she fits particular sexualized scripts that make her accessible to white men. And so that’s a way in which race intersects with gender – this racially mixed woman who is not white, but is not Black. She becomes aesthetically more beautiful yet still retains that hypersexual script. And so that’s another way of saying that Brazil is more benign because there are many interracial relationships and marriages and also [mixed race] children. Many people thought through interracial mixture, that Brazil could actually whiten itself within a hundred years. And it’s not just about women. Black men are expected to be able to have bodily mastery either in culture, such as music or dance, or athletics, such as capoeira or football, that can be consumed for national cultures and portray Brazil as more benign. As far as desire and attraction goes, Black men kind of take a back seat in the racial democracy discourses of miscegenation to white men. You see far less representations of Black men with white women in popular culture. The emphasis on interracial mixture is how non-Black men have access to Black women’s bodies, often without considering what her own desires are. And these really serve a heteropatriarchal and white supremacist desire to sexually and culturally consume Black bodies in various ways. And what is outside of what serves those interests is relegated to the realm of subalternity and deemed less worthy in Brazil. And so I wanted to emphasize that as the forms of Blackness that can’t be accepted in Brazil and using that as a site of critical inquiry. —Dr. Bryce Henson

Morten Stinus Kristensen, “Disrupting Racialized Knowledges: Blackness in Salvador da Bahia,” Friktion Magasin for Køn, Krop and Kultur, October 2016. http://friktionmagasin.dk/index.php/2016/10/01/disrupting-racialized-knowledges-blackness-in-salvador-da-bahia/

Passing Novels in the Harlem Renaissance: Identity Politics and Textual Strategies

Passing Novels in the Harlem Renaissance: Identity Politics and Textual Strategies

Lit Verlag Munster
2003
224 pages
ISBN 3-8258-5842-1

Mar Gallego, Associate Professor of American Studies
University of Huelva (Spain)

Passing Novels in the Harlem Renaissance offers an insightful study of the significance of passing novels for the literary and intellectual debate of the Harlem Renaissance. Mar Gallego effectively uncovers the presence of a subversive component in five of these novels (by James Weldon Johnson, George Schuyler, Nella Larsen, and Jessie Fauset), turning them into useful tools to explore the passing phenomenon in all its richness and complexity. Her compelling study intends to contribute to the ongoing revision of the parameters conventionally employed to analyze passing novels by drawing attention to a great variety of textual strategies such as double consciousness, parody, and multiple generic covers. Examining the hybrid nature of these texts, Gallego skillfully highlights their radical critique of the status quo and their celebration of a distinct African American identity.

Tags: George Schuyler, James Weldon Johnson, Jessie Fauset, Lit Verlag Munster, Mar Gallego, Mar Gallego Durán, Nella Larsen

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 3rd, 2011 at 01:45Z and is filed under Books, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Monographs, Passing, United States. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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Mixed Race Studies

Passing Novels in the Harlem Renaissance: Identity Politics and Textual Strategies

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