As W. E. B. DuBois famously prophesied in The Souls of  Black Folk, the fiction of the color line has been of urgent concern  in defining a certain twentieth-century U.S. racial ''order.'' Yet  the very arbitrariness of this line also gives rise to opportunities  for racial ''passing,'' a practice through which subjects  appropriate the terms of racial discourse. To erode race's  authority, Gayle Wald argues, we must understand how race defines and  yet fails to represent identity. She thus uses cultural narratives of  passing to illuminate both the contradictions of race and the  deployment of such contradictions for a variety of needs, interests,  and desires.    Wald begins her reading of twentieth-century passing narratives by  analyzing works by African American writers James Weldon Johnson,  Jessie Fauset, and Nella Larsen, showing how they use the ''passing  plot'' to explore the negotiation of identity, agency, and freedom  within the context of their protagonists' restricted choices. She then  examines the 1946 autobiography Really the Blues, which details the  transformation of Milton Mesirow, middle-class son of Russian-Jewish  immigrants, into Mezz Mezzrow, jazz musician and self-described  ''voluntary Negro.'' Turning to the 1949 films Pinky and    Lost Boundaries, which imagine African American citizenship within  class-specific protocols of race and gender, she interrogates the  complicated representation of racial passing in a visual medium. Her  investigation of ''post-passing'' testimonials in postwar African  American magazines, which strove to foster black consumerism while  constructing ''positive'' images of black achievement and  affluence in the postwar years, focuses on neglected texts within the  archives of black popular culture. Finally, after a look at liberal  contradictions of John Howard Griffin's 1961 auto-ethnography Black  Like Me, Wald concludes with an epilogue that considers the idea of  passing in the context of the recent discourse of ''color  blindness.''    Wald's analysis of the moral, political, and theoretical dimensions of  racial passing makes Crossing the Line important reading as we  approach the twenty-first century. Her engaging and dynamic book will  be of particular interest to scholars of American studies, African  American studies, cultural studies, and literary criticism.

Crossing the Line: Racial Passing in Twentieth-Century U.S. Literature and Culture PDF

The list of books you might like