The Theme of "Passing" in the Novels of James Weldon Johnson and Nella Larsen

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

…And I think with racial issues in the country, historical memory has really played to serve the ends of White Privilege, essentially. And it has done so in any number of ways. The most basic to start with, is simply we have as a nation erased essentially from any of our larger memory the racial complexity of the country. That this has been a racially mixed country from the very beginning. That every racial group has played a really interesting role in constructing and building the country. That there has been racial mixing between groups from the beginning. That race lines have been fluid. And that history of racial mixing, racial contributions just gets lost…

Renee C. Romano, “Multiraciality Is As Old As This Country: Gender, Sexuality & Race Mixing with Professor Renee Romano,” Is That Your Child?, (February 10, 2010): 00:11:30-00:12:21.

The Theme of “Passing” in the Novels of James Weldon Johnson and Nella Larsen

The Theme of “Passing” in the Novels of James Weldon Johnson and Nella Larsen

International Journal of Interdisciplinary and Multidisciplinary Studies (IJIMS)
Volume 1, Number 4 (2014)
pages 53-58
ISSN: 2348-0343

Dinesh Babu. P.
Department of English
Ramanujan College (University of Delhi), Kalkaji, New Delhi, India

The depiction of the experience of a very fair-skinned person of some “coloured” background who successfully passes into white society was a recurrent theme in early African American writings. In this paper an attempt is made to look at, and compare and contrast, two African American novels, The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man (1912) and Passing (1929) which deal with the theme of passing, written by James Weldon Johnson and Nella Larsen, a Black man and a Black woman writer. This paper analyses how the two novels reject the rules of colour division, rules which demand that one accepts a position within a predetermined hierarchy.

Read the entire article here.

Tags: Dinesh Babu. P., IJIMS, International Journal of Interdisciplinary and Multidisciplinary Studies, James Weldon Johnson, Nella Larse

This entry was posted on Monday, May 5th, 2014 at 17:57Z and is filed under Articles, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive, Passing, United States. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

Mixed Race Studies

The Theme of “Passing” in the Novels of James Weldon Johnson and Nella Larsen

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