Crossing the Color Line: Racial Passing in American Literature |
Crossing the Color Line: Racial Passing in American Literature
Wesleyan University
AMST 322 / ENGL 319
Fall 2015
Amy Cynthia Tang, Assistant Professor of English
Narratives of racial passing having long captivated readers and critics alike for the way in which they provocatively raise questions about the construction, reinforcement, and subversion of racial categories. This course will consider several examples of the “literature of passing” as it has been established as a category within African American literature alongside more ambiguously classified 20th-century narratives of ethnic masquerade and cultural assimilation as a way of exploring how literary and film texts invoke, interrogate, and otherwise explore categories of race, gender, class, and sexual identity.
Key texts will include James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, Nella Larsen’s Passing, Douglas Sirk’s film Imitation of Life, Richard Rodriguez’s memoir Hunger of Memory, Chang-Rae Lee’s novel A Gesture Life, and Philip Roth’s novel The Human Stain.
Tags: Amy C. Tang, Amy Cynthia Tang, Amy Tang, Chang-rae Lee, Douglas Sirk, James Weldon Johnson, Nella Larsen, Richard Rodriguez, Wesleyan University