Mixed Race Studies

Clare Kendry’s “True” Colors: Race and Class Conflict in Nella Larsen’s Passing

Callaloo
Volume 15, Number 4 (Autumn, 1992)
pages 1053-1065

Jennifer DeVere Brody, Professor of Drama
Stanford University

Interpretations of Nella Larsen’s Passing (1929) often have failed to explain the complex symbolism of the narrative. Indeed, dismissive or tendentious criticisms of the text have caused it to be eclipsed by Larsen’s “earlier and more intriguing” book, Quicksand (1928). This essay reexamines Passing as a work concerned with the simultaneous representation and construction of race and especially class, within a circumscribed community. As such, my paper contributes to debates within Black feminist criticism about the value of these aspects of identity in relation to the production of black female subjectivities. I contend that the novel’s main characters are neither purely “psychological” beings, as Claudia Tate asserts, nor are they essentially “sexual” creatures, as Deborah McDowell argues. Rather, I read Irene Redfield and Clare Kendry as representatives of different ideologies locked in struggle for dominance.

In her introduction to Passing Deborah McDowell one of the most astute critics of Larsen’s work, states that “many critics have been misled by the novel’s epigraph … [since] it invites the reader to place race at the center of any critical interpretation.” It would appear that McDowell herself has been misled by Passing’s obviously unreliable narrator. So too, McDowell seems to agree with Claudia Tate’s belief that, “Race is peripheral to Passing. It is more a device to sustain the suspense than a compelling social issue.” I disagree with these assertions because it seems to me that the text is “all about race” or rather, the mediation of race in relation to sexuality and class.

McDowell recognizes certain tropes employed by Larsen and, like many other critics, she maintains that Irene Redfield is the primary referent of the novel’s title. Ultimately, however, McDowell is unable to give a full explication of the texf s meaning since she tries to read/uce the text as a tale of latent sexual passion without discussing the key issues of race and class. Thus, while her discussion is certainly valuable, one might also say that it reifies sexuality at the risk of not exploring how sexuality is connected inextricably with other historically produced phenomena such as race and class. In order to sustain her ingenious reading of Passing as a tale that “passes for straight” and sublimates lesbian desire, McDowell misses the more intricate implications addressed by Larsen’s work. The iconography McDowell reads as sexual is simultaneously racial: it also expresses class positionality. For example, the objective correlative envelope used in the first paragraph of the novel signifies not only the “sexual” (McDowell reads it as a “metaphorical vagina”) but also the sender’s race (alien) and class (elite). Thus, my reading emends McDowell’s by insisting on the importance of race and class in Passing.

If race as well as class conflict must occupy a primary position in any discussion of…

Bessora: A Writer with a Thirty-Eight Shoe Size

Wasafiri
Volume 24, Issue 2 (2009)
pages 60-65
DOI: 10.1080/02690050902771779

Adele King

The character of literary criticism combined with pedagogical strategies tends to categorise, moving one accepted orthodoxy forward by pushing another out of the way. Early approaches to European literature were to treat it as a body of work by white Europeans and Americans. New classifications of it are, of course, more varied, but still include such undifferentiated general categories as black, immigrant, mixed race etc. The problem is that such comparlmentalisatlons not only ignore the actual diversity of people and their social contexts but, by imposing a presumed political or cultural vision on something quite different including writing against such categorisation—can also obscure what writers are actually doing. I am not going to review the history of postcolonial criticism and pedagogy here, but want to introduce a very good author writing in French who not onfy does not fit reductive categories, but who also seems to be writing against them. Bessora’s work has been well received; in 2000 she won the prestigious Prix Félix-Fénéon, for a literary work by an author under thirty-five (previously awarded to Robbe-Grillet among others) for Les Tachts d’Encre [Ink Stains], and Cueillez-Moi Joiis Messieurs [Pick Me Nice Gentlemen] won the Grand Prix Litteraire d’Afnque Notre in 2007. Bessora’s work has not yet, however, received any extended literary attention.

In contrast to the UK, where a number of writers of mixed African-European parentage were born and work, there are few part-sub-Saharan African, part-European writers in France. Bessora (her full name is Sandrine Bessora Nan Ngueaia), who was born in Belgium in 1968, is part Swiss, part Gabonese. To my knowledge, the only other writers in French born in Europe to mixed European and sub-Saharan African parentage and living outside Africa are: Sylvie Kandé, a poet and university professor of French-Senegalese parentage, who now teaches in the United States; Binéka Lissoumba, of French-Congolese parentage, who now teaches in Canada; and Véronique Tadjo of French-Côte d’Ivoire parentage, who has taught at universities in Africa and lived in the United States, England and South Africa. Like Bessora, these writers are from social elites and are well educated, holding advanced degrees. They are less likely to have faced direct racial prejudice than to have encountered more nuanced occlusions, which come from not being identified with either white or black communities. They are not really representative of immigrant communities, unlike second generation writers of part North African origin (the beurs), who are a different, larger group, sometimes from poor immigrant families.

Bessora’s fiction is part of a change from the overly serious treatment of political themes of much earlier African writing. Among her contemporaries in the francophone world, her work has similarities with a few other writers—a younger generation who never lived under colonialism and who came to France when they were in their early twenties. While of African parentage, they are cultural hybrids, who usually write about individual problems rather than the community. Such works include Abdourahman Waberi’s comic anthropological treatment of Djibouti in Cobier nomade (1996); Alain Mabanckou’s satiric tales of life in Congo in Memoires de porc-epic (2006); Kangni Alem’s Cola Cola Jazz (2002), a book that often playfully refers to itself and that mocks Togolese society; and, from the previous generation. Boubacar Boris Diop’s Le temps de Tomango (1981), with its science fiction tales of wildly differing historical periods, from the era of slavery to the mid-twenty-first century. Bessora, however, as the only métisse [mixed race woman] of this group, is more concerned with the paradoxes that result from classifying people by skin colour and with questions of identity in Europe. She is also more amusing.

Bessora’s life, places of abode and education have been international. Her father is a Gabonese diplomat. Her mother is Swiss, of German and Polish origin, the daughter of a pastry chef. Her father had four children by his first wife, as well as two children, Bessora and a brother, by his second. As a child she lived in Switzerland, France, Austria and Washington, D.C. during her father’s career as a diplomat, as well as in Gabon. She studied business management and applied economics at a prestigious HEC—Hautes Etudes Commerciales—in Switzerland. Later, when she came to France, she studied anthropology and wrote a doctoral thesis on the myths and legends of the oil business in Gabon. This…

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In the Shadow of Her Ancestry: The New Tragic Mulatta

North Carolina State University, Raleigh
2004
60 pages

Vonda Marie Easterling

A thesis submitted to the Graduate Faculty of North Carolina State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts

This thesis examines the plight of the infamous tragic mulatta. Because of the mulatta’s lack of black features and her close resemblance to the white race, she was labeled by white society as the privileged of the black race. She was also referred to as the most tragic of all beings and elevated by white society over the darker skinned blacks. Thus, the mulatta found herself in a peculiar position in a race oriented, black-white society. Isolated from the black community and rejected as a part of the white community, the mulatta’s existence was then considered tragic.

Over the years, social and emotional change has occurred within the mulatta community. No longer considered the taboo of transgression, the mulatta still suffers from many of the same injustices as her ancestral mulatta. This research examines the psychological and emotional effects depicted in the 1959 film of Fannie Hurst’s Imitation of Life with sections of Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye and events from actress Dorothy Dandridge’s life. The research also analyzes Passing, Nella Larsen’s complex novel of the 1920s, to interrogate the strategy that many unidentifiably mulatto people mastered in order to achieve social and financial mobility. Lastly, the research explores the experience of the contemporary mulatta through Rebecca Walker’s memoir, Black, White and Jewish: Autobiography of a Shifting Self, in order to explore the issues of the newly termed bi-racial person. The research explores the lineage between the historical mulatta figure and the new bi-racial persons to defuse the theory of the tragic mulatta as a mythical allusion.

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• Chapter One: Reel to Real: The Cinematic Mulatta
• Chapter Two: To ‘Pass’ or Not to ‘Pass’: The Multi-Layered Practice of ‘Passing’
• Chapter Three: As Time Goes By: The New Tragic Mulatta
• Conclusion
• Works Cited

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Race and Ethnicity in “The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man” and “The Rise of David Levinsky”: The Performative Difference

MELUS
Volume 29, Numbers 3/4, (Autumn-Winter, 2004), Pedagody, Canon, Context: Toward a Redefinition of Ethnic
American Literary Studies
pages 307-321

Catherine Rottenberg, Assistant Professor
Department of Foreign Literatures and Linguistics and the Gender Studies Program
Ben-Gurion University, Beer-Sheva, Israel

Contemporary critics have questioned the reliance on the blac-white binary as the defining paradigm of racial formation in the United States. Eric Goldstein contends that despite the black-white dichotomy’s power “it was never a sufficient framework for understanding the much more complex set of categories through which Progressive-Era Americans understood and spoke about race” (398). Susan Koshy warns us of the dangers of leaving “the intermediary racial groups” untheorized (159). Racialization has indeed been a complex and uneven process in the US, and the black-white divide is insufficient for explaining how racial categories have operated on the level of social practices. However, I argue that the very intelligibility of intermediary racial groups and ethnicity depends on the prior construction of the black-white binary. In effect, the black-white axis has operated to secure the tenuousness of race to a framework of stable boundaries, which in turn has provided the necessary grounding for the ideology of white supremacy (Wiegman 9).

In what follows I examine two seminal novels from the Progressive Era: Abraham Cahan’s The Rise of David Levinsky (1917) and James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912). These texts, now canonical within Jewish American and African American literary traditions respectively, were written just a few years apart. Both novels explicitly query what it means “to be American,” and they do so by exploring how “race” affects one’s chances of success in the Progressive Era US. Werner Sollors sums up the similarities between the two novels in the following way: “Both books depict the externally upward journeys of protagonists from poverty to material success, from ethnic marginality to a more ‘American’ identity, and from a small-town background to the urban environment of New York” (170).

While Sollors underscores the affinities between the two novels, I highlight the differences by juxtaposing specific scenes from each text, scenes that have certainn arrativea nd structurals imilarities. I examine the distinctive modalities of race and ethnicity as manifested in these Progressive Era texts, arguing that the texts reveal three aspects of racial discourse in the United States. First, racial discourse has largely evolved around an ideology of a binary opposition: the black-white divide. Second, racial discourse has created a very patent racial stratification; while black and white have, for the most part, served as the reference points and the defining terms, there have been “intermediary” racial groups. Third, the constructions of race and ethnicity have had very different historical trajectories in the US context. The texts, in sum, gesture toward both the historical difference between the racialized status of African Americans and the racial in-betweenness of other minority groups, as well as the way in which the black-white divide informs the construction of these in-between groups…

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“Still Seeking for Something”: The Unspeakable (Loss) in “Passing” by Nella Larsen

Wagadu
Volume 6, 2008, Special Issue: Women’s Activism for Gender Equality in Africa
16 pages

Agnieszka Mrozik

The paper analyzes Nella Larsen’s Passing (1929) through the lens of the theory of melancholy from Freud to Butler. Examining the dynamic relationship between Irene Redfield and Clare Kendry, two protagonists of Larsen’s novella, I attempt to demonstrate that under the surface of clearly expressed racial tensions, focused upon the dilemma of passing, there is a more deeply hidden problem—the one of gender identity and sexual desire.

I am saturnine—bereft—disconsolate,
The Prince of Aquitaine whose tower has crumbled;
My lone star is dead—and my bespangled lute
Bears the Black Sun of Melancholia.

Gérard de Nerval, El Desdichado

The Melancholic Souls

In his famous essay “Mourning and Melancholia” (1917), Sigmund Freud writes that the loss of an object normally provokes a reaction known as mourning. The mourner knows whom or what he/she lost and is aware that suffering is part of a normal process at the end of which a new life begins. Yet, Freud adds that in some people the same event produces melancholia instead of mourning. In many cases one cannot see clearly what it is that has been lost. This situtation is common in psychoanalysis, even when the patient is aware of the loss which has given rise to his/her melancholia, but only in the sense that he/she knows whom he/she has lost, but not what he/she has lost in him/her. Freud suggests therefore that melancholia is in some way related to an object lost which is withdrawn from consciousness.

The most striking characteristic of the melancholic personality is extreme diminution in self-regard: somehow the loss of an object has triggered an impoverishment of the self. As Freud puts it: “In mourning it is the world which has become poor and empty; in melancholia it is the ego itself” (Freud, 1989: 585). In other words, while it would seem as though the loss suffered is that of an object, what the melancholic has actually experienced is a loss of self.

According to Julia Kristeva, the author of Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia, the melancholic suffers not from the Object but the Thing (French Chose) lost, which is “an unnamable, supreme good, something unrepresentable, that […] no word could signify. […] The Thing is inscribed within us without memory, the buried accomplice of our unspeakable anguishes” (1989: 13-14). Kristeva identifies the Thing with the Mother, by which she understands the pre-Oedipal Mother—the one strongly bonded to the child and then prohibited in the Name of the Father. The mother is the child’s first love which has to be abandoned in order to enable him or her to become the subject, which in Lacanian terms means to enter the language…

…Nella Larsen’s Passing (1929), read through the lens of the theory of melancholy from Freud to Butler, confirms this observation. Analyzing the dynamic relationship between Irene Redfield and Clare Kendry, two protagonists of Larsen’s novella, one may figure out that under the surface of clearly expressed racial tensions, focused upon the dilemma of passing, there is a more deeply hidden problem – the one of gender identity and sexual desire. Or, putting it in other words, in Larsen’s text, there is a great accumulation of racial, gender and sexual tensions which remain unrelieved as long as the characters obey the rules of white, patriarchal and heteronormative society that represses any exception to these rules, and especially Black lesbian desire.

Claiming that Larsen’s female characters are “still seeking for something,” I am going to demonstrate that what they are really looking for is another woman: the object of desire and the link to the first lost object which is the Mother herself. The loss of the Mother combined with denial of desire for the same-sex object leads to melancholic self-destruction. As a result of women’s appearing in relations with men only and their supporting the traditional system of values, they are doomed to loneliness and experience the loss for which they cannot even find words. Broken maternal genealogy and locked access to language, in which the female desire might be expressed, doom women to silence and squander their chances of building an alternative world to the existing one…

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Passing: Race, Identification and Desire

Criticism: A Quarterly for Literature and the Arts
Volume 45,  Number 4 (Fall 2003)
pages 435-52

Catherine Rottenberg, Assistant Professor
Department of Foreign Literatures and Linguistics and the Gender Studies Program
Ben-Gurion University, Beer-Sheva, Israel

IN THE SECOND HALF of the nineteenth century, African-American writers such as William Wells Brown and Frances Harper began invoking the phenomenon of passing in their texts as a way of investigating the complexities and contradictions of the category of race in the United States. The light-enough-to-pass Negro (but usually Negress) would play a central role in the imagination of African-American writers for the next fifty years. Charles Chesnutt’s The House behind the Cedars, Jessie Faucet’s Plum Bun, and James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man are perhaps the best-known examples. Nella Larsen’s 1929 novella, Passing, the text under discussion in this essay, can thus be seen as inheritor and perpetuator of a long tradition of such narratives. In recent years, Larsen’s text has become the most celebrated instance of a story about passing in African-American literature, eclipsing the tradition that preceded it. This is not coincidental, for Larsen is a master of ambiguity and intrigue, and the enigmatic finale of her novella has generated heated debates and countless interpretations.

Many analyses have attempted to determine whether or not Larsen’s use of passing can be seen as a subversive strategy, that is, whether the narrative serves to reinforce hegemonic norms of race or whether it ultimately posits passing as a viable survival strategy, which has the potential to disrupt “the enclosures of a unitary identity.” While this question still informs several critiques, in the past few years commentators have been concentrating more and more on how passing interrogates and problematizes the ontology of identity categories and their construction. Rather than trying to place passing in a subversive recuperative binary, these articles and books use passing as a point of entry into questions of identity and identity categories more generally.

In this essay I contend that Larsen’s text can assist critics in understanding the specific and, as I will argue, irreducible features of race performativity. That is, the novella can help us begin mapping out the differences between gender and race norms since it uncovers the way in which regulatory ideals of race produce a specific modality of performativity. Passing is especially conducive to interrogating the modality of race performativity because, unlike other passing narratives of the period, Larsen’s presents us with two protagonists who can pass for white; yet only Clare “passes over” into the white world. The depiction and juxtaposition of these two characters reveal the complexities and intricacies of the category of race. While Irene can be seen to represent the subject who appropriates and internalizes the hegemonic norms of race, Clare’s trajectory dramatizes how dominant norms can be misappropriated and how disidentification is always possible.

This essay commences with a theoretical discussion of race. Although much has been written on the constructed nature of the category of race, very few analyses have offered a convincing and rigorous account of how race might be conceived of as performative reiteration. The second section offers a reading of “passing” scenes from the novella in an attempt to unravel some of the distinctive mechanisms through which race norms operate. On the one hand, the novella suggests that race in the United States operates through an economy of optics, and the assumption of whiteness is one of the consequences of this economy. On the other hand, the novella reveals that skin color (i.e., optics) does not really constitute the “truth” of race.

Invoking Homi Bhabha’s notion of mimicry as a supplement to Butler’s concept of gender performativity in the third section, I interrogate and theorize the ways in which the definitional contradiction of race (“can be seen” versus “cannot be seen”) produces race as performative reiteration. While there are two idealized genders under regimes of compulsory heterosexuality, albeit with a very great power differential between them, there has historically been only one hegemonic and ideal race under racist regimes. This difference, I argue, has far-reaching implications, one of which is the need to rethink the desire/identification nexus, a nexus that operates differently in race and in gender. Understanding the particular relationship between desire and identification in the novella also helps us begin to gauge the critical question of disidentification.

At least one clarification is needed at this point, however. This essay focuses on the ways in which power—in the Foucauldian and Butlerian sense—operates on the hegemonic level and does not make a claim about the multiplicity of social practices per se. Hegemony, though, as we will see in the last section, is never complete, indicating that there are always counterdiscourses and alternative norms circulating within any given society…

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Identity Formation in Biracial Female Authors’ Narratives of Passing: Transgressing Racial and Sexual Boundaries in Nella Larsen’s Passing and Danzy Senna’s Caucasia

Aristotle University of Thessaloniki
September 2008
150 pages

Stamatia Koutsimani

A Dissertation submitted to the Department of American Literature and Culture, School of English, Faculty of Philosophy of Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts.

The complex presence of the mulatta figure in American cultural history is mostly reflected in twentieth-century narratives of passing where the light-skinned enough to pass Negress becomes a vehicle for challenging both the color line and the very notions of blackness and whiteness. Contrary to nineteenth-century whites’ stereotypical representations of the “tragic mulatta” as a victim of her divided racial heritage, the use of the passing mulatta by twentieth-century biracial female authors has served to criticize racial as well as gender essentialisms. In this respect, this thesis will focus on Nella Larsen’s Passing, published in 1929 and Danzy Senna’s Caucasia, published in 1998, trying to show how the changing representation of the passing mulatta characters reflects the gradual reversal of the tragic mulatta myth and reveals the interconnections among race, gender, class and sexuality in different sociopolitical contexts. By examining the authors’ use of the passing mulatta as a trope through which to question the dominant political and racial ideology of their time, the thesis will attempt to explain how the biracial female characters’ transgression of racial and gender boundaries contributes to the understanding of identity as constructed and performed. More specifically, the reading of Passing and Caucasia will be based on Judith Butler’s concept of gender performativity and Catherine Rottenberg’s theoretical discussion of race performativity. In addition, Kimberlé Crenshaw’s theory of intersectionality, which is central to Valerie Smith’s notion of black feminism, will play a major role in the analysis of the two works.

Based on a comparative analysis of the novels, the thesis will draw attention to the central mulatta characters’ search for racial and gender identities, with a view to tracing potential changes in the authors’ employment of the passing theme in the increasingly multicultural US racial context. Moreover, by highlighting the passing novels’ difference from stereotypical depictions of mulatta figures, the thesis aims at responding to questions regarding racial dualism and ongoing debates over mixed race identity. On the whole, it will reveal that the biracial female authors’ representations of the permeable borders between identity categories serve to challenge dominant cultural understandings of racial and gender differences which have long contributed to the mulatta figure’s liminal status in American society.

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Ethnographic Pictorialism: Caroline Gurrey’s Hawaiian Types at the Alaska–Yukon–Pacific Exposition

History of Photography
Volume 36, Issue 2 (May 2012)
pages 172-183
DOI: 10.1080/03087298.2012.654943

Heather Waldroup, Associate Professor of Art History
Appalachian State University, Boone, North Carolina

In 1909, a series of photographs by Honolulu portraitist Caroline Gurrey was exhibited at the Alaska–Yukon–Pacific Exposition (AYPE) in Seattle. The photographs, which combine elements of the Pictorialist style and ethnographic photography, are portraits of young men and women of either Native Hawaiian or mixed-race heritage. The archival record indicates that the photographs were purchased in Honolulu by a member of the Exposition’s administration, and Gurrey’s original intention for them is currently unknown. Nevertheless, the author argues that through their display at the AYPE – an exposition that stressed industry, expansion and commerce as its key themes – Gurrey’s portraits served a significant role in the articulation and visualisation of the Exposition’s central goals and the United States’s desires for settlement of the newly-acquired Territory of Hawaii by bourgeois white agriculturalists.

A portfolio of portraits of Hawaiian teenagers created by Caroline Hawkins Gurrey in 1909 tells a rich story about the intersection of American imperial interests and the persuasive powers of photography in the early twentieth century, Gurrev was already a successful portrait photographer in Honolulu when this portfolio was selected to be exhibited at the Alaska-Yukon-Pacifc Exposition (AYPE) in Seattle during the summer of 1909. She photographed a number of Honolulu’s elite, such as Sanford Dole, using the Pictorialist style, and was known for producing various photographs documenting life in contemporary Hawai‘i. The fifty photographs in the Hawaiian Types’ series—now held at the Smithsonian’s National Anthropological Archives—were chosen and displayed by the AVPE’s administration to illustrate Hawaii’s racial landscape for a very large audience of fairgoer. The photographs’ style which combines tropes of ethnographic photography with the aesthetics of Pictorialism, underscores a key goal ol the AYPE: to combine supposed truth with aesthetic beauty in order to market Hawai‘i to potential settlers of the relatively new American territory…

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English R1A: Keeping it Real?: Racial & Queer Passing in American Literature

University of California, Berkeley
Fall 2010

Rosa Marti­nez

“I had a literature rather than a personality, a set of fictions about myself.”
—Kafka Was the Rage by Anatole Broyard

This course intends to explore the “art” of racial passing and masquerade in American literature and culture through a diverse sample of American novels and short stories, such as traditional narratives of black-to-white passing, which is historically prevalent particularly in African-American literature, and other modes of passing, for instance gender and ethnic ambiguity as well as posing and the “closeting” of one’s sexuality. What are the connections or disjunctions between “closeting,” posing, and crossing the gender or color line? By focusing on the trope of the passing figure, we will ask how people and imagined characters negotiate their identity in various and varying social spaces and also, how authors disclose the frailty of social order regarding sexuality, race and the body to make alliances in unimagined ways. Venturing out of the closet as another and as they please, these passing figures are, indeed, queer. Yet what are the personal costs in relinquishing a disfavored identity for a favored one?

This course intends to hone your reading and writing skills, and will focus on helping you make thoughtful questioning and “interesting use of the texts you read in the essays you write.” Through a gradual process of outlining, rewriting and revising, you will produce 32 pages of written work (including brief response papers and three 3-4 page argumentative essays).

Book List

Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, Naufragios (1542); William and Ellen Craft, Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom (1860); Joseph Harris, Rewriting (2006); Nella Larsen, Passing (1929); Mark Twain, Pudd’nhead Wilson (1894); a course reader containing critical readings.

From The Birth of a Nation to Havoc: The Evolution of Traditional Blackface to Modern Racial Passing in U.S. Cinema

Pennsylvania State University
August 2009
122 pages

Dorian Randall

A Thesis in Media Studies by Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Master of Arts

Race is a complicated and debatable term in the United States today. Film is one venue in which the construction, deconstruction, and reconstruction of race is challenged, particularly with representations of minstrelsy and episodes of racial passing that also evolve into performance of class distinctions. Through textual and rhetorical analysis, I chronicled the evolution of minstrelsy as a form of racial passing through a cinematic lens and demonstrated how the racial/class performance creates multiracial identity in the films’ characters. The purpose of this research is to add to the continuing analysis and investigation of racial passing and minstrelsy by evaluating the construction of multiracial identity in monoracial characters that perform a race other than their own in the films under analysis. This study also reveals how the definition of race evolved through class performance as race and class are heavily related terms.

Table of Contents

• 1. Introduction
• 2. Literature Review Part I: A Brief History of Slavery
• 3. Literature Review Part II: Minstrelsy and Racial Passing
• 4. Burnt Cork Cinema: From Black and White to Color
• 5. Fade into White: Passing Films
• 6. Class Act: Race/Class Films
• 7. Conclusion
• Bibliography

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