Decoding Essentialism: Cultural Authenticity and the Black Bourgeoisie in Nella Larsen's Passing Author(s): Candice M.

Jenkins Source: MELUS, Vol. 30, No. 3, Personal and Political (Fall, 2005), pp. 129-154 Published by: The Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States (MELUS) Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/30029776 Accessed: 17/11/2010 09:04
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Decoding Essentialism:
Cultural Authenticity and the Black Bourgeoisie in Nella Larsen's Passing
Candice M. Jenkins
CUNY, College of Staten Island [T]he Negro is not born per se but reborn out of the detritus of American racialism. It is not so much a matterof deracinationas reracination,the productionof the Negro as a markerof the universal and the cosmopolitansuch that even the 'whitest' individual(the mulatto) might proudlyproclaim, 'I am a Negro American.' -Robert Reid-Pharr "Cosmopolitan AfrocentricMulattoIntellectual" (52)

Adrian Piper's 1992 essay "Passing for White, Passing for Black" recounts her experiences as a self-identified African American woman with "white" skin, and the resultant alienation from both whites and blacks which she has experienced throughout her life. At one point in the essay, she describes what she calls the "Suffering Test of blackness" (236), administered by primarily working-class, darker-skinned blacks, who "recount at length their recent experiences of racism and then wait expectantly, skeptically, for me to match theirs with mine" (236). Piper's initial compliance with these expectations is based on the assumption that these acquaintances hoped to bond via shared experience, but she soon discovers otherwise: I realized I was in fact being put througha thirddegree. I would share some equally nightmarishexperience along similar lines, and would
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then have it explained me why thatwasn't reallyso bad, why it to wasn'tthe same thingat all, or why I was stupidfor allowingit to happen me. So the aim of theseconversations clearlynot muto was
tual supportor commiseration.(236)

Piper's fair skin here provides, for some blacks, evidence of her racial inauthenticity; experience of racism as a "white-looking" her black person, ratherthan indicating her similarityto other blacks, instead is dismissed as inevitably less severe or is used to markher as foolhardyfor willingly subjectingherself to such treatment. Piper recounts an entirely different experience with middleclass blacks, however. Noting that it wasn't until her college years that she "reencountered middle- and upper-middle-class the blacks who were as comfortablewith [her] appearanceas [her] family had been" (238), Piper goes on to suggest that this group of blacks had an entirely different reaction to and attitude towards her racial identity: "SufferingTest exchanges almost never occur with middle-class blacks, who are more likely to protest, on the contrary, that 'we always knew you were black!'-as though there were some mysterious and inchoate essence of blackness that only other blacks have the antennae to detect" (238). Interspersinga quote from Frances Harper's 1893 novel, Iola Leroy, in which a white Southernerclaims that "tricks of the blood" betray white-looking blacks to a practiced (white) eye, Piper implicitly aligns these inclusive assertions on the part of middle-class blacks with exclusionary statementsmade by racist whites near the turnof the twentieth century, when hysteria about miscegenation and interracial proximitywas reachingits peak in the South.1 Piper's juxtaposition of these two parallel assertions suggests that both are based in an erroneousassumptionabout black homogeneity, the presupposition of "an essentializing stereotype into which all blacks must fit"-while in fact, as she goes on to insist, "no blacks, and particularlyno African American blacks, fit any such stereotype"(238). For Piper, then, middle-class blacks who claim an innate ability to recognize her otherwise invisible blackness are not only as caughtup in restrictivestereotypeas are working-class blacks who assume that Piper could not possibly be "really"black because of her light skin, but they are also as limited as racist whites, relying upon an overly narrow understandingof

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blackness in orderto situatewhite-skinnedblacks like Piper within the group. Indeed,Piper's inclusion of the quote fromIola Leroy in her discussion of middle-class blacks implies that this stereotypical assumption about blackness is based in not just cultural but biological essentialism: middle-class blacks claim a special ability to see how Piper's body is physically "marked"by her race in the same way that the novel's racist Southernerclaims the ability to see the "tricks of blood" which "always betray"the passing mulatto. There may be more at stake, however, in this seemingly essentialist racial ascription practiced by the middle-class blacks that Piper describes. In fact, what Piper reads as biological essentialism, and the presuppositionof an essential black sameness, may in fact be quite the opposite: an acknowledgementof differences,particularly color and class differences, among blacks, and a strategic deploymentof racializedknowledge as a means of solidifying otherwise tenuous community boundaries. With this in mind, I turn now to the subject of this article, namely, an analysis of the complex politics of racial ascriptionin Nella Larsen's fiction. My discussion begins by calling attentionto AdrianPiper's work because Piper's essay, different though it may be in context and content, brings up issues about middle-class black identity that Larsen's writing attemptedto addresssome sixty-threeyears earlier. Both of Larsen's short novels, Quicksand (1928) and Passing (1929), include heroines whose racial identities are ambiguousto, if not directly contested by, other characters.While Quicksand's central character is a biracial woman whose ancestry and light complexion are a continual source of complication for her throughoutthe narrative,Passing takes the issue of racial ambiguity much further.It tells the story of an embattled friendshipbetween two black women who are both fair enough to "pass" as white; Irene Redfield, with a visibly black husbandand child, does so rarely, while Clare Kendry makes her life as a white woman. More importantly,however, in Larsen's text these "ambiguously raced"figures are frequentlyrecast as black by other charactersin the narrative, through an assertion of their alleged similarity to those same characters.The basis for this supposed similarityseems initially to suggest an essentialist logic, employed by Larsen'smid-

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die-class black charactersin order to recuperatemulatta figures from whiteness, just as Adrian Piper's middle-class associates seem to make recourseto essentialism in orderto claim Piper herself as black. In this essay I'd like to suggest, however, that such a gesture towards racial essentialism, and its accompanying recuperationof the ambiguouslyraced figure, actually indicates a more complicated,and perhapsmorejustifiable, political effort. I use "ambiguouslyraced" and "mulatta"advisedly here; even as I claim a kind of synonymity between these two terms, the two do not present an exact equivalence. Certainly, a charactermight be ambiguously raced and not mulatta at all, or vice versa; some mixed-race people look quite unambiguouslyblack. More importantly, a figure's statusas racially ambiguousis often dependenton the perspective of the observer; figures whom I might call "ambiguous" are unambiguouslywhite to some eyes. Still, I choose to use these terms roughly synonymouslybecause they seem to apply in similarways to charactersin Larsen's fiction; even though characters who can pass for white are not always mulatta, and even though mulatta characterscannot always pass, in both instances how these characters"read" racially in Larsen'swork varies in different settings. In other words, that the "truth" a character'sraof cial identity depends wholly on who is making the judgment may be all the evidence necessary to demonstratethat character'sracial ambiguity,her position in the muddiedspace between "black"and "white." While this article will focus primarily on Larsen's Passing, I would suggest that both of her novels point out how ambiguously raced figures are simultaneouslynecessary and unsettling to notions of black identity. They accomplish this in part by constructing a series of tensions between the notion of an intangibleblack "essence" and a rigidly concrete code of black behavior and custom, which mulatta figures are seen repeatedly to embody and to violate. Not coincidentally, in both texts Larsen situates these racial issues within narrativesof domestic disruption and conflict: Helga Crane,the mulattaprotagonistof Quicksand,is uncontained by marriageuntil the disastrousconclusion of the novel, and Clare Kendry, the ambiguously raced figure in Passing, not only exists outside of a traditionalblack bourgeois family structure,but re-

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peatedly defies the confines of this structure,suggesting an overlap for Larsen between ambiguous racial characterand sexual or familial impropriety.This overlap marksa thematicconvergence between erotic or domestic indiscretionand racial disloyalty, located in the transgressivebodies of ambiguouslyraced charactersin both texts. In violating a black moral code (whose largercontent is representedmetonymicallyby the trope of the patriarchal family), the mulattadisruptsa perceived black racial sanctity, invalidatingthe racial authenticityshe may have gained through other blacks' efforts to reclaim her. As such, she operates as a kind of cultural turncoat,whose perceived miscreance on an intimate level translates into traitorousassaultupon her communityat large. Clearly, then, part of my contentionin this essay is that in both Quicksandand Passing, but particularlyin the latter,the ambiguously raced figure is understoodas a threatto the physical and psychic boundariesof race. Such a contention is hardly new, or even controversial.Ratherthan focus on the way this figure challenges the boundariesof whiteness, however, as most other critics of Larsen's writing have, I am interested in how the mulatta unsettles blackness and notions of an internalizedblack authenticity,particularlyin the middle-class communityof the New Negro Renaissance that is interrogatedin Larsen's work.2Because her physical body cannot always be understoodas black, the ambiguouslyraced figure elucidates an alternativeconception of blackness, a conception which, although it initially appearsessentialist, ultimately relies upon a sharedpractice of will for coherence. This reconceptualization of blackness has a particularurgency in Larsen's work, I suggest, because in the historical moment during which Larsen's novels take place, the middle-class blacks she writes about were estrangedfrom an assumedblack "authenticity," because black and bourgeois social and culturalspaces in that historicalmoment were commonly integrated by whites. At the same time the mulatta, whose recognizability as black is vital to the bourgeois (re)definition of racial identity, is also disruptiveto that definition,because of her frequentassociation with erotic excess and domestic indiscretion in Larsen's texts. Her moral transgressivenessintersects with, indeed, is the source of, her racial transgressiveness.In its challenge to other characters'desire for lucid sexual and racial

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boundaries,the body of the ambiguously raced figure is thus an unsettled and unsettling presence in the black bourgeois social sphere. Black Bourgeois Community In his analysis of attitudesabout racial authenticityduring the New Negro Renaissance, J. Martin Favor writes that during the period, "the ruralfolk [.. .] in the process of becoming urbanproletariat,are [understoodas] the basis of African American experience [. ... F]olk experience forms the core of the New Negro's

identity"(12). As Favor notes, this belief predatesthe New Negro Renaissance, perhaps beginning with W.E.B. Du Bois's seminal The Souls of Black Folk, which sought to documenta section of the black communitythat Du Bois himself consideredto be most "human and real" (108). Still, by the late 1920s, when Larsen'snovels were written, this valorizationof the folk was well established, as was a sense that "the middle class-or at least the nonfolk-are excluded from what is 'fundamentally or distinctly' African American"(Favor 21). This middle-class estrangementmay well have been deliberate on the part of some bourgeois blacks, however, since "folk" is equated with stereotypical "primitivism"in many minds of the period. A description of Alain Locke and CharlesJohnsonby New Negro Renaissance historianDavid Levering Lewis successfully capturesthis link. Lewis writes, "Locke and Johnson made a perfect team because at bottom, both wanted the same art for the same purposes-highly polished stuff, preferably about polished people, but certainlyuntaintedby racial stereotypes or embarrassingvulgarity. Too much blackness, too much streetgeist and folklore-nitty-gritty music, prose, and versewere not welcome" (95). The alignment, in this passage, of words like "stereotypes" "vulgarity" and with words like "streetgeist" and "folklore" is certainly insidious, in that the sign of "blackness," also invoked, ultimately comes to correspond with the worst of primitivist stereotype-at least when that blackness is truly "authentic." Larsenrepresentsthis correspondencein her portrayalof Quicksand's Anne Grey, who despises whites while imitatingwhite pat-

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terns of behavior; Grey is, apparently, secretly dismissive of the black folk culture that she claims to celebrate: While proclaimingloudly the undilutedgood of all things Negro, she yet disliked the songs, the dances, and the softly blurredspeech of the race. Toward these things she showed only a disdainful contempt, tinged sometimes with a faint amusement.(48) Anne's distaste for black folk culture, I suggest, is at least in part a

function of her allegiance to black bourgeois proprietyand disciplinary narratives of what Kevin Kelley Gaines calls "uplift ideology": specifically, the belief among middle-class blacks in the late nineteenth century that "rights and freedom would accrue to those [blacks] who had achieved the status of respectability" (Gaines 16). Because this allegiance drives status-conscious blacks in Larsen's work to eschew "racial stereotypes or embarrassing vulgarity," it also (less explicitly, to be sure) enables their detachment from black authenticity, precisely because those stereotypes are associated with true "blackness," "streetgeist and folklore." To remain culturally authentic, Larsen's middle-class blacks would need a redefinition of black authenticity, one that could more easily accommodate their own class position. Such a redefinition was also necessary in light of the unusually integrated setting of 1920s Harlem, one in which white and black Americans socialized together freely and collaborated with one another culturally and artistically.3 This bi-racial setting created a particular conundrum for the avowedly African American subject during the period. In an arena where sociocultural interaction might involve as many whites as blacks, and where blacks and whites are often physically indistinguishable, the need to articulate new conceptualizations of racial belonging could take on a significant political urgency, particularly for a group of people already distanced from aspects of blackness most considered "real." As Robert Reid-Pharr notes, Harlem Renaissance authors, including Larsen, "were caught up in the question of how to rectify the supposed Africanity of the black community with the reality of its cosmopolitanism"; according to Reid-Pharr, such authors' response to this question was a renewed interest in the "novel of passing," a novel "in which one can be black without acting or

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looking black" (81). Larsen's Passing certainly supportsthis theory, and in both of her novels, putatively black, middle-class characters express what appearsto be racial essentialism, as well as a reliance upon rigid codes of moralistbehavior, as markersof their own blackness. I will suggest, in the remainderof this essay, that such renegotiationsof black identity were attemptsto grant middle-class African Americans a greater power over the imagined boundariesof their community. "A thing that couldn't be registered" After receiving a letter from her mother's brothercontaining a considerable sum of money, Quicksand's Helga, now with an "out"from her life in Harlem,ruminateson her ties to black people: "It was as if she were shut up, boxed up, with hundredsof her race, closed up with that something in the racial characterwhich had always been, to her, inexplicable,alien. Why, she demandedin fierce rebellion, should she be yoked to these despised black folk?" (54, 55). The most obvious answer to this question, because she shares phenotypic characteristics with other blacks, is also the one most easily discounted by the sense of something "inexplicable, alien" to racial character.The mundanities of facial features and hair texture, or of skin color, are likely not the indefinableand unfamiliarcharacteristics thatbind Helga to otherblacks. Rather,this bond is allegedly based in something intangible, "something broader,deeper, that made folk kin" (55). This intangibilityrecalls Alain Locke's 1925 assertionthat a "deepfeeling of race is at present the mainspringof Negro life" (11, my emphasis). Locke attributesthis feeling to blacks' "reactionto proscriptionand prejudice" (11), but similarto Larsen's character,goes no furtherin explaining how such a feeling operates,or might be quantified. Helga's sense of the "inexplicable"in black racial character also seems relatedto the assertionsof black writerCharlesGibson, who claimed in a 1931 article in PsychoanalyticReview that "thereis an undescribable [sic] something which enables a Negro to spot [a fair-skinned black person "passing" for white] sometimes at a glance" (qtd. in Robinson 719, my emphasis). Gibson's recourseto "passing"is instructive,for the sense of blackness as consisting of

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an "[in]describable something" becomes most coherent when all other physical markers of racial identity-skin color, hair texture, facial features-are invisible. As Elaine Ginsberg has written, the very notion of "passing" might be understood to imply that "identity categories are inherent and unalterable essences: presumably

one cannot pass for something one is not unless there is some other, pre-passing,identity that one is" (4). Or, as SamiraKawash puts it, "[c]ommon sense dictates that passing plays only with appearance and that the true identities underlying the deceptive appearancesremainuntouched"(126). It is perhapsnot surprising,then, that in Larsen's second novel, Passing, where both majorcharacterscan pass for white, racial belonging is also addressedas an intangible "something,"a kind of mysterious essence. In that text, Clare Kendry, the fair-hairedand fair-skinneddaughterof a half-whitejanitor, is marriedto a white
man who does not know she is black. Irene Redfield, Clare's

childhood friend, encountersClare duringa visit to Chicago. Ironically enough, Irene too is "passing"at the moment of their meeting, enjoying a cool drink in the restaurant a segregated downof town hotel, and in the first moments of the encounterher own racial character is placed under the scrutiny of Clare's as-yetunrecognizedgaze: [G]radually thererose in Irenea small innerdisturbance, odious andhatefully familiar. laughed She softly,buthereyes flashed. Did thatwoman,couldthatwoman,somehowknowthatherebeforeherveryeyes on theroofof theDrayton a Negro? sat Absurd!Impossible!White people were so stupid about such thingsfor all thattheyusuallyasserted theywereableto tell; and that by the mostridiculous means,finger-nails, palmsof hands,shapesof
ears, teeth, and other equally silly rot [. .. .] Never, when she was

alone,hadthey even remotelyseemedto suspectthatshe was a Negro. No, the woman sitting there staringat her couldn'tpossibly
know. (150)

Of course, the woman staringdoes know, precisely because she too is black, and shares a history with Irene; Irene's disdain for white ways of recognizing black people depends upon the erroneousassumption that this seemingly "white"woman will rely on pheno-

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type to judge Irene's racial membership.Indeed, in her smugness Irene falls into the very trap of white judgment that she ridicules; Irene's belief that Clare is white is based on Clare's physical appearance, though it is formed as Irene herself exploits the unreliability of appearanceto secure her own entranceinto the Drayton. Thus Clare, who recognizes Irene as her formerplaymatewell before the otherwoman is awareof their connection, is ironicallybetter equipped to "read" Irene's blackness than Irene is to read Clare's. Certainly, the "text" of Clare's reading is still Irene's physical manifestation,but ratherthan looking for tell-tale markers of black ancestry as Irene assumes she will, Clare looks for evidence that Irene is, in fact, the 'Rene she remembersfrom childhood. Clare, here, functions as the "knowing spectator"that Samira Kawash has determinedto be a "necessity"of passing, what gives passing meaning as passing (145). Irene and Clare soon change roles, however, with Irene serving as the unhappy spectator to Clare's passing performance; is in these instances when Larsen's it text seems most to imply an intangible black racial essence. The most striking of such scenes is an afternoontea at Clare's home, which includes a third childhood acquaintance,GertrudeMartin. Gertrude,also a black woman who looks white, is marriedto a white manjust as Clareis, but unlike Clare,her husbandknows her racial background.The full importof this distinctionis made clear when Jack Bellew, Clare's husband, arrives to join the group for tea. Writes Larsen, "The first thing that Irene noticed about [Bellew] was that he was not the man that she had seen with Clare Kendry on the Draytonroof' (170). Disconcertedby this evidence of Clare's marital indiscretions, Irene is further amazed when Bellew affectionately calls his wife "Nig." Prodded by Clare to explain this curious moniker, Bellew says good-naturedly,"'Well, you see, it's like this. When we were first married, she was as white as-as-well, as white as a lily. But I declare she's gettin' darkerand darker.I tell her if she don't look out, she'll wake up one of these days and find she's turned into a nigger"' (171). All present enjoy this little joke, none more than Irene, who in recognizing its true irony laughs far longer than is prudentfor the circumstances.

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Kawash's reading of Irene's hysterical laughter in this instance as "a moment of breakdown in the structuring order of race" is persuasive, and an indication of the "chaos glimmering just beneath the surface of order and regularity" (156). I might suggest, how-

ever, that Irene's inarticulatehysteria is generated not simply by the joke's inadvertentexposure of Clare's racial instability,but by Irene's own fragile racialpositioning in this moment-the threatto Irene's blackness imposed by Bellew's hostile whiteness and her silence in the face of this hostility. This threatis made clear when, after Irene regains her composure, Bellew details his dislike of blacks at some length. Irene laterrecalls the encounter:"[M]ingled with her disbelief and resentmentwas anotherfeeling, a question. Why hadn't she spoken that day? Why, in the face of Bellew's ignorant hate and aversion, had she concealed her own origin?" (182). There is a linguistic connection to be made here, between speaking and existence, between silence and ceasing to exist. Judith Butler argues in a differentcontext that speech has often been grantedthe power to "reinvok[e]and reinscrib[e]a structural relation of domination"(Excitable 18). In other words, "speech is figured as having the power to constitutethe subject"(Butler, Excitable 19). By refusing to speak in the moment of Bellew's onslaught, Irene's black self is literally disappearedfrom the room, leaving only her "white"body to signify for her. Withouther voice to constitute her blackness, however, that body can only "speak" whiteness, producinga crisis of identity for Irene, a self-identified "racewoman,"which cannot easily be resolved. Philip Brian Harper'sdiscussion of FrancisHarper's1893 novel Iola Leroy calls attentionto a similar contradiction: "[S]ince lola's skin color does not correspondto her racial identification[. . .] that racial identificationremarkably takes on the statusof a secret-one whose revelationwill always come as a shock precisely because it disrupts the standard association between skin color and racial identity"(14). Harpergoes on to suggest that "racialidentification, which is normallytaken to be a matterof public knowledge, is for lola actually a private matterthe publicationof which will extensively affect her private life" (15). Harper'sargumentpoints to the ways in which a certain kind of black articulationis required of fair-skinned African Americans who wish to be understood as

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such. Western reliance on the visual, what Robyn Weigman calls

"the cultural training that [. .] teaches the eye not only how but

what to see" (22), as a self-evident proof of racial identity collapses when the object of vision is a body that cannot be phenotypically recognized as black. And because whiteness is understood as "neutrality" "invisibility"in American racial parlance, or such a body must reveal its secrets, deliberatelymake public what has become private,in orderto be read as "raced"at all.4 While Harperis right to suggest that the publication of a "secret" racial identificationwould deeply impact the private life of the person whose secret is exposed, there is still more at stake in Larsen's text, namely, the secrets of those other fair-skinned blacks, like Clare, with whom Irene considers herself allied. In other words, because Irene's own stabilizing self-revelationwould jeopardize the meaning of Clare's racial silence, Irene too must remain silent. In spite of her discomfort, Irene accepts this as obligatory to her sense of race-basedmorality: "She had to Clare Kendry a duty. She was bound to her by those very ties of race, which, for all her repudiationof them, Clare had been unable to completely sever" (182). The sense of indelible racial connection that Helga Crane speaks of thus resurfaces here. Oddly enough, however, these ties that Clare seems unable to escape have little to do with regardor interest,as Irenenotes:
And it wasn't, Irene knew, that Clare cared at all about the race or

whatwas to becomeof it. She didn't.Or thatshe had for any of its
membersgreat, or even real, affection [. . . . ]Nor could it be said that

she hadeventhe slightartistic sociological or interest the racethat in some members otherracesdisplayed. hadn't.No, ClareKenof She
dry carednothing for the race. She only belonged to it. (182)

In the absence of such connections, why does Clare belong? For that matter, why does anyone? While racial membershipcannot, evidently, be discernedbased on phenotype, it also seems to have little to do with outward expressions of enthusiasm or concern. Certainly if Clare, who has for years made her home among whites, can still be considered a member of the black race, then race must be not only deeply internal,but utterly unrelatedto behavior or allegiance.

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Of course, the "truth" blackness has always been difficult to of define, in part because "race"itself is a kind of social fiction that has meaning only so long as participantsin it agree that it does. As David Lionel Smith has written,"Race is a commonsensenotion. It falls apart under rational scrutiny"(180). Furthermore, according to Smith, blackness in particularhas been nearly impossible to categorize, even though large numbers of people either consider themselves or are consideredto be black: Unfortunately, one has ever succeededin producing adequate no an definitionof [blackness]. Black people can have white skin, blue eyes, and naturallystraighthair;they can be half, three-quarters, seven-eighths morewhite;theycanevendenyornotknowtheyare or black.Claimwhattheywill or look as theymay,theyarestill by law andcustomblack.(180) It is the "custom"side of the law and custom synergy which seems most at stake in Larsen's two texts-for it is certainly not deference to legal strictureswhich leads Helga Crane to claim that she shareswith otherblacks "[t]ies thatwere of the spirit.Ties not only superficially entangled with mere outline of features or color of skin. Deeper. Much deeper than either of these" (95). Neither does law explain why, in the words of Irene Redfield's husband,Brian, blacks passing for white "always come back"to the black community; "But why?. .. Why?" Irene demandsof him, to which he replies, "If I knew that, I'd know what race is" (185). That neitherhe nor we seem able to grasp it suggests that Larsen is deliberately playing upon this racial haziness, that, in fact, the amorphouscharacter of race is key to its representationas a kind of "essential" quality in her fiction. The meaning of this seeming essentialism among Larsen'smiddle-class black charactersmay be more complex, however, than it appearsat first glance; in fact, I would argue that such recourseto a kind of internalizedblack spirit or sentimentis effected more in the service of a politics of racial reclamationthan as essentialism per se. Even if, for Larsen's characters, the quantifiability of blackness seems almost an impossibility-even if instead, characters seem to intuit where they belong racially, and understandthis belonging instinctively-this so-called intuitive knowledge and

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understanding serve a political purpose.They are one means of can establishing and maintainingthe boundariesof race for bourgeois blacks in Larsen's fiction, precisely because only blacks seem capable of gaining that knowledge, reaching that understanding.In this sense, Larsen's characters perform what Gayle Wald has called "racial ascription as a radically social practice (albeit one that cloaks itself in the mantle of essence)" (13). For by restricting the ability to recognize blackness, even among people who are fair enough to be taken for white, to only other blacks, Larsen's characters make it possible to delimit the boundariesof blackness on their own terms. Or, as Wald puts it, such a restriction"entailed [. . .] owning thatprerogativeto name and possess usually assumed by whites" (8). A case in point in Passing is Irene's conversationwith Hugh Wentworth, a wealthy and well-known white guest at the Negro Welfare League dance that Irene is helping to host. Facetiously discussing whether Clare, who has insisted on attending against Irene's wishes, is a black woman or not, the two end up in an exchange aboutracial character. Her smile changed a laugh."Oh,Hugh!You'reso clever.You to
usually know everything.Even how to tell the sheep from the goats. What do you think?Is she?"

He blew a long contemplative wreathof smoke. "Damned I if

know! I'll be as sure as anythingthat I've learnedthe trick. And then in the next minute I'll find I couldn't pick some of 'em if my life depended on it." "Well, don't let thatworryyou. Nobody can. Not by looking." "Not by looking, eh? Meaning?" "I'm afraid I can't explain. Not clearly. There are ways. But they're not definite or tangible." "Feeling of kinship,or somethinglike that?" "Good heavens, no! Nobody has that, except for theirin-laws." "Rightagain! But go on about the sheep and the goats."
"Well, take my own experience with Dorothy Thompkins. I'd met

her four or five times, in groups and crowds of people, before I knew
she wasn't a Negro. One day I went to an awful tea, terribly dicty.

Dorothy was there. We got talking. In less than five minutes, I knew she was 'fay.' Not from anything she did or said or anything in her

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appearance. Just-just something. A thing that couldn't be registered." "Yes, I understand what you mean. Yet lots of people 'pass' all the time." "Not on our side, Hugh. It's easy for a Negro to 'pass' for white. But I don't think it would be so simple for a white person to 'pass' for coloured. "Neverthoughtof that." "No, you wouldn't. Why should you?" (206) The irony of Irene's using "the sheep and the goats" as metaphoric stand-ins for blacks and whites is, of course, that sheep and goats can be distinguished from one another fairly easily by their physical appearance. Not so for the black and white people Irene and Hugh discuss. In fact, Hugh's reliance on the visual is subtly derided in the passage. Hugh's inability to determine Clare's racial identity recalls Irene's earlier mental assessment of whites' racial awareness: "White people were so stupid about such things for all that they usually asserted that they were able to tell" (150). Irene's comment to Hugh that he is usually "so clever" thus also strikes an ironic note, suggesting that, to the contrary, Hugh's whiteness reduces him to naivete in this instance. What's more, Irene's seeming reassurance to him that "nobody" can tell soon becomes another indictment of whites' tendency to attempt mere visual discernment; her added "not by looking" implies that Hugh is as misguided as other whites in his efforts to master the elusive "trick" of detection by using his eyes alone. This naive reliance upon the visual is precisely what Sarah Chinn implies when she writes that "[w]hite spectators cannot hold the passing body still enough to read accurately the messages inscribed on it. They assume a stasis of identity that is evidentiarily transparent and limpidly legible" (64). Chinn suggests that the black observer, of which Larsen's Irene is the best example, succeeds in detecting the passer by "accumulat[ing] readings over time, paying attention to detail, never assuming [she] know[s]" (64); similarly, Amy Robinson argues that for the in-group spectator of the figure passing for white or for straight, "the eyes are named as the privileged vehicle of intuitive knowledge" (720, 721). In other words, for these critics the difference between white

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and black spectatorsof the passing body, and the resultantdifference in ability to detect the one who passes, is based in differing angles of vision, different modes of reading the physical signals (the "messages inscribed")that this body provides to the practiced eye. I would propose, however, that Irene's own languageseems to base her knowledge of racial identity on something more intangible than merely looking, even the looking of an adept observer.In the passage quoted previously, she returns to the vocabulary of ambiguitywhen she suggests that "thereare ways" of distinguishing between those who are white and those who merely look it. Irene's realizationthat DorothyThompkinsis white is based not on "anything in her appearance"but on "just-just something," a thing that not only could not be registered, but nearly cannot be articulated,as Irene's stutteron the word "just"indicates. Ultimately, the fact that this mysterious black "something"can only be discerned,and effected, by other black people is made evident by Irene's rejoinderto Hugh that passing happens successfully in only one direction. The logic behind this claim is fairly straightforward: black person who looked white might be able to a conceal the elusive black "something"from a communityof white eyes trained only to look for physical markers,and who see even those markersonly accordingto their desire or whim (witness John Bellew's dismissal of Clare's visible darkening).A white person, however, would find it almost impossible to affect that alleged black intangibility that already no white person can quite grasp, and that every black person seems able to sense, to understand, to "just know" after a mere five minutes of personal conversation. When this concept is followed to its most obvious conclusion, a tautology develops: because whites are not black, they lack the capacity to decide whetherthey are black; because they cannot intuitively "understand" blackness, they can never know whether they do, in fact, understandblackness. The very inscrutabilityof black racial charactermakes it somethingthatwhites can never grasp. Samira Kawash explains this tautological relationship from a slightly different perspective in her discussion of passing narratives. Kawash suggests that the fetishized "one drop" of black blood-which in US legal and culturalhistory has determinedthe

DECODING ESSENTIALISM IN LARSEN'S PASSING blackness of even the whitest-looking individuals-ultimately duces to a meaningless determinant of difference:

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[I]nsofaras this drop of blood is nothingbut a mark,the essential difference between black and white is [. . .] only the fact that black may be distinguished from white. Every other difference may disappear; black and white may be identical in everything, and still the difference between black and white remains as simply the insistence that they are not the same. (148) In other words, racial difference resides only in the possibility of making the distinction, rather than in any actual difference between black and white-or, as Kawash suggests, "race [. . .] is not a nothing-at-all, but a something that says nothing" (155). Still, this something-saying-nothing serves a purpose in Larsen's novel because, as already noted, it allows bourgeois blacks to control the boundaries of their community from within. In this sense, Irene's mysterious ability to separate the sheep from the goats, the "fay" from the fowl, if you will, serves as a means of protecting black collective identity from whiteness-not the white cosmopolitan participation in black social spaces that took place during the New Negro Renaissance, but a longer history of racist exclusionary practices that relegated any body that could be marked as black to a position of stigmatized oppression. For example, in the aforementioned passage from Iola Leroy quoted in Adrian Piper's essay, a white Southerner comments that "There are niggers who are as white as I am, but the taint of blood is there and we [whites] always exclude it[.]" He smugly concludes that "[T]here are tricks of blood which always betray them [... ..] I can always tell" (Harper 229). It is this presumptive power to identify and exclude, claimed historically by whites, that blacks in Larsen's texts resist by themselves claiming the ambiguously raced figure away from whiteness. This interpretation does enact an ironic reversal subjecting the figure which Robinson calls the "hegemonic reader" (the white spectator) to "the interpretive authority of the ingroup" (731), but I would argue that just as importantly, it reinstates the power of the in-group in relation to that group's own members.

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In other words, while the appearancein Larsen's charactersof a mystifying ability to recognize other blacks, even those who are visibly indistinguishablefrom whites, does seem superficially to locate black identity in the realm of the intuitive, the instinctivegiving middle-class blacks a safer kind of access to that primitivist authenticitywhich the "mysterious[. . .] darkhordes"(Quicksand 95) of the black poor and working class were already believed to possess-its more profoundpurpose seems to be reinstatingblacks with the power of readingand "recognizing"their own community. Ralph Ellison wrote in "The World and the Jug"that "being a Negro American involves a willed (who wills to be a Negro? I do!) affirmationof self as against all outside pressures-an identification with the group as extended through the individual self. ... And those white Negroes. .. are Negroes too, if they wish to be" (178). Ellison's attentionto the power of will suggests, in part,that racial belonging is a choice, a decision that must be made by each person who would consider herself black-and his reference to fair-skinned"whiteNegroes" is anotherreminderthat a phenotypically "white"body must willfully reveal the "secret"of its racial identificationin orderto be African American. Indeed, in the book chapterfrom which this article's epigraphis drawn, Robert Reid-Pharralso uses Ellison's words, to argue in a different context that in this period, racial categorization was a matter of conscious ideological realignment (52). More importantly for my purposes, Reid-Pharravers that during the Harlem Renaissance, "much of the effort on the part of black writers was to erase the prior distinction that had once existed between the black and the mulatto,"suggesting the constructedness the racial of grouping we now uncriticallyunderstandas "black"(55). Prior to 1920, "mulatto"was a separatecategory from "Negro"on the US census (46).5 Given the temporalproximityof this institutionaldistinction to Larsen's historical moment, it should not be surprising that her characters,particularlythe primarily fair-skinned bourgeoisie who would only recently have become "Negro,"should be concernedwith the practiceof reclamationas a possible reaffirmation of racial membership.The choice outlined by Ellison is thus not simply an individualone. If Larsen's work is any indication,a collective choice is also required,the choice to claim figures like

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Clare Kendry as black, precisely because the exercise of such a choice is an empoweringone for other black people, replacingthe majority's power to exclude and stigmatize with the will of the marginalizedto include and valorize. The strengthof will implied by Ellison's words lies not simply in what the particular mulattoor mulatta proclaims about her own identity, but also in how other members of the group choose to repossess that seemingly "white" individualas a way (ironically)of markingtheir own blackness. Not coincidentally,white racism's alleged power to markblack bodies as racially "tainted" and imperfectis the same power which has taken as its prerogativethe negative stereotypingof black familial and sexual character.This may explain what I have already identified as the overlap between racial and sexual transgressionin Larsen's fiction, and it suggests, furthermore,a possible link between black reclamationof the power to name and black efforts, following uplift ideology and the cultural impulse towards bourgeois propriety so evident among Larsen's characters,to sanitize blacks' intimate reputation.That this latter recuperativeeffort has such restrictive consequences for blacks, particularly black women, may indicate the limits of all racial projects which begin as a reactionto white misappropriations black identity. Still, the of reassertion of a black power to identify racially seems in many ways to be a largely worthwhile effort, a complex project of selfdetermination,one which is only underminedby the obsessive recourse to decorum exhibited by figures like Quicksand's Anne Grey and Passing's Irene Redfield. Nowhere is this more evident in Larsen's fiction than in responses to the sexual indiscretionsof the ambiguously raced figure, who, even as she is a key player in black bourgeois renegotiationsof racial ascription,refuses to participate in codes of moral behaviorthat have equally to do with the meaning of blackness in Larsen'stexts. Recuperating the Transgressive Body Ambiguously raced characterssuch as Clare Kendry, far from being less black as a result of their fair skin, are even strongerrepresentatives of black identity in the ascriptive refiguring of race effected by the black middle class. This is because in the absence

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of physical markers,the recognizability of their blackness is entirely dependentupon the "will" to blackness (their own or that of other blacks) to which Ellison refers. As such, they are the ultimate evidence that bourgeois blacks possess the recuperatedpower to categorize; the reclamation of ambiguously raced characters as black is thus a necessary part of bourgeois recastings of racial authenticity. This reclamationalso presents a problem, however, because the ambiguouslyraced figure frequentlybehaves in a manner by which other bourgeois blacks in Larsen's fiction cannot abide; disruptingcodes of moralitywhich, I argue, are also constitutiveof "blackness."To put it differently,in Larsen's fiction the mulattais a kind of cultural "traitor" because she refuses to play by the racialized rules of the group which goes to such great pains to claim her. When J. M. Favor suggests that "discourses of black identity have as some of their basic premises rules for the expression of sexuality that determineone's standing as a racial being" (96), he anticipates Gayle Wald's claim that cultural pressures exist "to maintain and/or secure sexual and gender 'respectability' as a means of racial self-assertion" (18). Both statements remind us that the central aim of the black bourgeois social sphere in Larsen's moment, "respectability,"might itself be understood as a marker of blackness.6 To demonstrate a deliberate resistance to codes of respectability is thus to disregardracial community, at least in the bourgeois context about which Larsenwrites. The ambiguously-racedwomen in Larsen's fiction betray black bourgeois culture by challenging racialized attempts to confine black women's sexual expression to the black nuclear family structure, what Frank Hering calls "the fantasy of idealized domesticity" (38). In doing so, they presentan appearanceof sexual impropriety that the decorum-obsessedcommunity of bourgeois blacks cannot tolerate.7 Thus it should be no surprisethat in the novel Passing, character Clare Kendry is a source of both fascination and aversion for Irene Redfield, the textual representative of bourgeois "uplift"; Clare's seductive behavior disrupts racialized respectability in multiple ways.8 In part, this disruption arises from her sexual availability to white men: not only is she married to the racist

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Bellew, but she dallies with still otherwhite men on the side, if her indiscretions at the Drayton Hotel are any indication. Clare may performthis sexual liberationwhile living as a white woman, but it is precisely her affiliation with "blackness"which makes her behavior threatening-witness, for example, Irene's mental note, once she has recognized Clare as black, that the latter woman's flirtatiousbehavior towards a male server is inappropriate: "Again that odd upward smile. Now, Irene was sure that it was too provocative for a waiter" (152). The emphasis createdby the comma after "now" makes it clear that Irene's suddenly confident disapproval is based in Clare's blackness, which only takes shape in the temporal space following their introductoryconversation,the period of Irene's racialrecognition(and reclamation)of Clare. Further,Clare's sexually daring interactionswith whites seem to parallelher perceived availabilityto already-married black men, a groupjust as socially forbiddenby black bourgeois community. The sexual and domestic propriety embraced by uplift-driven, race-conscious figures such as Irene Redfield absolutely prohibits those behaviors that would threatenthe safe function of the black nuclear family and its attendantpatriarchal stability, the "security" that Irene clings to throughoutthe novel. This social prohibition suggests that Irene's suspicion of Brian and Clare's sexual involvement is based at least in part on an assumptionabout Clare's political disloyalty. Of course, no concrete evidence is given in Passing for the adulterousindiscretion, and beginning with Deborah McDowell's groundbreaking analysis of the novel as a covertly lesbian text, numerouscritics have suggested that Irene's suspicions only expose her sublimateddesire for Clare.9Whether or not Irene's suspicions are founded, however, or based in her own desires and jealousies, there remains a sense in the text that Clare would be capable of such betrayal, empowered as she is with the "abilityto secure the thing that she wanted in the face of any opposition, and in utter disregardof the convenience and desire of others" (201). Clare's potential for an adulterous involvement with Brian is emblematic of the potential for racial "infidelity"that resides in the mulatta figure more generally in Larsen's work. The sense throughoutLarsen's novels that these figures are capable of "taking quietly and without fuss the things which [they] wanted"

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(Quicksand 129) is a referenceto selfishness, yes, but a selfishness which translatesinto disregardfor black codes of social convention more generally. In the case of Passing, however, the disregard for racialized codes of proprietywhich so unsettles Irene's rigidly orderedworld is still not enough to free Irene from the racial bond she imagines herself to share with Clare. Even when she encounters Bellew while in the company of a visibly black friend, she is unable to expose Clare by allowing him to recognize her. Afterwardsshe berates herself for a missed opportunityto rid herself of Clare once and for all:
Irene was thinking:"I had my chance and didn't take it. I had only to

speakand to introduce to Felise with the casualremark he him that was Clare'shusband. Onlythat.Fool. Fool."Thatinstinctive loyalty to a race. Why couldn'tshe get free of it? Why shouldit include Clare?Clare,who'd shownlittle enoughconsideration her, and for hers.Whatshe felt was not so muchresentment a dull despair as becauseshe couldnot changeherselfin this respect,couldnot separate individuals fromtherace,herselffromClareKendry. (227) Separation becomes particularlydifficult when the individual in question performssuch productivemetaphoricalwork in certifying Irene's own blackness. Irene is unable to relinquishthe power of racial naming that her connection to Clare gives her. This leaves Irene in a terrific quandary.To embracethis transgressivemulatta figure is to redefine culturalauthenticity,to reaffirmthe strengthof racial will-at the same time as it is to allow the existence of an abhorrent intimate misconduct which is understood as racially treacherous. It is no wonder, then, that the novel concludes in Clare's death, ostensibly at Irene's hand. Irene, representative of a bourgeois black community driven to maintainsexual and racial decorum at any cost, destroys Clare because the latter woman's misconduct proves too much for Ireneto tolerate(38). This misconductbetrays a "respectable" reconceptualization blackness, and insofar as the of mulatta's sexual transgressivenessrecalls the common primitivist stereotype about black erotic passion and excess, it also reifies a stigmatized version of blackness that many bourgeois blacks long

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to escape. Only in death can Clare and figures like her continue to symbolize a recuperated black power of recognition sans the messy transgressivenessthat their actual bodies enact. As I conclude I would suggest, however, that the definition of blackness troubledby the mulatta's so-called sexual indiscretionis rendered vulnerable to such betrayal precisely because of its reliance on conventional markers of respectability. In other words, the mulatta's cultural "betrayal"is made possible by a conceptualization of allegiance that limits black intimate characterto a breathtakingly narrow field of expression: the bourgeois patriarchalfamily structure.Not only does such a limited field exclude queer desire and other "alternative" forms of black intimacy, it reinscribesthe racist hegemony which stigmatized black sexual characterin the first place, as Kevin Gaines so aptly points out in his critique of uplift ideology (5-6, 13-14). Perhapsmore importantly, "willed affirmation" blackness the of that Ellison outlines-a profoundlyhumanistproject, the decision to claim others and to affirm the ways that we belong to one another-loses coherence if in order to choose blackness one must unchoose a whole host of other intimatepossibilities. Elsewhere in "The World and the Jug,"Ellison writes that being black in the US "imposes the uneasy burdenand occasional joy of a complex double vision, a fluid, ambivalentresponse to men and events which represents, at its finest, a profoundly civilized adjustmentto the cost of being human in this moder world" (178). If, as the bourgeois blacks under critique in Larsen's novel would have it, the price of maintainingblack respectabilityis the loss of this "complex [. . .] fluid, ambivalent"mannerof being human, then a contingent racial "betrayal" may be the most culturallyauthenticalternative for us all.
Notes 1. As Hartmannotes, the Plessy vs. Ferguson decision, handeddown only a year before Harper'snovel was published, institutionalizedsegregation in the South based on white "fears of engulfment and contamination"by "scandalously proximate[black] bodies" (206).

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2. For more on the mulatta,passing, and whiteness, see Sollors, 246-284; for more on Larsen's work and race, see, for example, Blackmer, Berlant, and Kawash, among many others. 3. A number of scholars have addressed this social and cultural integrationin significant detail; see Douglas and Hutchinson. For a related work that undertakes a very specific reading of Harlem Renaissance texts through the "colorblind"teachings of mystic G.I. Gurdjieff,see Woodson. 4. I refer, here, to what Haney-Lopez has called "the omnipresenteffects of transparencyand of the naturalization race," which renderthe "white"body of invisible (193). 5. For more on the history of racial categories and classifications in the United States, see Davis. 6. The irony of readingrespectability,defined by conformityto patriarchal family structures,as a mark of "blackness"-even bourgeois blackness-is that the patriarchalstructureswhich are the criteriaof that respectabilityactually issue from white, Western ideology. Hence I find myself in the paradoxicalposition of arguing that an aspect of whiteness serves to define blackness. However I make this claim not to suggest that black identity is generally dependent on hegemonic structuresof dominance for its own coherence, but to call attention to, and problematize, the ways in which intimate behavior has always been a partof how black people choose to situatethemselves as political subjects. 7. This policing of black female sexuality in the dubious service of racialprotection is the hallmarkof what has elsewhere been identified as the "salvific wish." While a detailed exposition of the term is beyond the scope of this essay, it might be briefly explained here as a largely feminine aspirationto rescue the black community from racist stereotypes of black sexual excess, through the embrace of traditionalnotions of domesticity and propriety,an aspect of uplift ideology specific to women and concernedwith characteristics respectability of related to so-called feminine matters, domesticity and sexual decorum. For a fuller discussion of this idea in anothercontext, see Jenkins. 8. Butler offers a much more detailed psychoanalyticreading of this simultaneous revulsion and attraction her discussion of Larsen'stext. in 9. See McDowell. Butler is the most well known of the critics to follow and complicate McDowell's reading. Works Cited Berlant,Lauren."NationalBrands/National Body: Imitationof Life." Comparative AmericanIdentities. Race, Sex and Nationality in the ModernText.Ed. Hortense Spillers.New York: Routledge, 1991. 110-40. Blackmer,CorinneE. "TheVeils of the Law: Race and Sexuality in Nella Larsen's Passing." Race-ing Representation.Voice,History, and Sexuality.Ed. Kostas and Linda Myrsiades.LanhamMD: Rowman& Littlefield, 1997. 98116.

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Butler,Judith.Excitable Speech. A Politics of the Performative.New York: Routledge, 1997. -. "Passing,Queering:Nella Larsen's PsychoanalyticChallenge."Bodies that Matter. On the Discursive Limitsof Sex. New York: Routledge, 1993. 16785. Chinn, Sarah.Technologyand the Logic ofAmerican Racism:A CulturalHistory of the Body as Evidence. Londonand New York: Continuum,2000. Davis, F. James. Whois Black: One Nation's Definition. 1991. University Park: PennsylvaniaState UP, 2001. Douglas, Ann. TerribleHonesty: Mongrel Manhattanin the 1920s. New York: Farrar, Strausand Giroux, 1995. Du Bois, W. E. B. The Souls of Black Folk. 1903. New York: Signet, 1969. Ellison, Ralph. "TheWorldand the Jug." 1963. The CollectedEssays of Ralph Ellison. Ed. and Intro.JohnF. Callahan.New York: The Modem Library, 1995. 155-88. Favor,J. Martin.AuthenticBlackness: TheFolk in the New Negro Renaissance. DurhamNC: Duke UP, 1999. Gaines, Kevin Kelly. Upliftingthe Race: Black Leadership,Politics, and Culture in the TwentiethCentury.ChapelHill: U of North CarolinaP, 1996. Ginsberg,Elaine K. Ed. and Intro.Passing and the Fictions of dentity.Durham NC: Duke UP, 1996. Haney-Lopez,Ian F. Whiteby Law: TheLegal ConstructionofRace. New York: New York UP, 1996. Harper,FrancesE. W. lola Leroy, or Shadows Uplifted. 1893. New York and Oxford:Oxford UP, 1988. Harper,Phillip Brian.Private Affairs: Critical Venturesin the Cultureof Social Relations. New York:New York UP, 1999. Hartman,Saidiya. Scenes of Subjection:Terror,Slavery, and Self-Makingin Nineteenth-Century America.New York and Oxford:OxfordUP, 1997. Hering, Frank."SneakingAround:Idealized Domesticity, IdentityPolitics, and Games of Friendshipin Nella Larsen'sPassing." Arizona Quarterly57.1 (2001): 35-60. Hutchinson,George. TheHarlem Renaissance in Black and White.Cambridge and London:HarvardUP, 1995. Jenkins,Candice M. "QueeringBlack Patriarchy: The Salvific Wish and Masculine Possibility in Alice Walker's The Color Purple."ModernFiction Studies 48.4 (2002): 969-1000. Kawash, Samira.Dislocating the Color Line. Identity,Hybridity,and Singularity in African-American Literature.StanfordCA: StanfordUP, 1997. Larsen,Nella. Quicksandand Passing. 1928, 1929. Ed. and Intro.Deborah McDowell. New BrunswickNJ: RutgersUP, 1986. Lewis, David Levering. WhenHarlem Wasin Vogue. 1979. New York: Penguin, 1997. Locke, Alain. TheNew Negro. 1925. Intro.Arnold Rampersad. New York: Macmillan, 1992.

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McDowell, Deborah.Introduction. Quicksandand Passing. New BrunswickNJ: RutgersUP, 1986. ix-xxxv. Piper,Adrian."Passingfor White, Passing for Black."Passing and the Fictions of dentity.Ed. Elaine K. Ginsberg.DurhamNC: Duke UP, 1996. 234-69. Reid-Pharr, Robert.Black Gay Man:Essays. New York and London:New York UP, 2001. Robinson,Amy. "It Takes One to Know One: Passing and Communitiesof Common Interest."CriticalInquiry20.4 (1994): 715-36. Smith, David Lionel. "Whatis Black Culture?" House that Race Built. Ed. The WahneemaLubiano.New York: Pantheon,1997. 178-94. Sollors, Werner.Neither Black Nor WhiteYetBoth. New York: Oxford UP, 1997. Weigman, Robyn.AmericanAnatomies: TheorizingRace and Gender.Durham NC: Duke UP, 1995. Wald, Gayle. Crossing the Line: Racial Passing in Twentieth-Century LitUS erature and Culture.DurhamNC: Duke UP, 2000. Woodson, Jon. To MakeA New Race. Gurdjieff Toomerand the HarlemRenaissance. Jackson:UP of Mississippi, 1999.