The Penumbral Spaces of Nella Larsen's Passing: Undecidable bodies, mobile identities, and the deconstruction of racial boundaries

Abstract

Nella Larsen's 1929 novel, Passing, is a psychological drama centering around two fair-skinned women. One, Clare Kendry, passes as the White wife of a financially successful racist; the other, Irene Redfield, is a ‘race woman’ living in upper Manhattan during the era of the Renaissance Harlem. Clare and Irene are undecidables, neither White nor Black, fluid subjects traversing the boundaries of race—passing. Passing is an act of insinuating oneself into forbidden spaces by jettisoning former identities. It is as much a transgression of spatial boundaries as it is of racial boundaries. In the novel Clare passes by merely crossing from Black space into White space, and along the way shedding a Black identity for a White one. This paper examines the mobility of identities across racial geographies and how this movement destabilizes notions of race and of raced spaces.

We encounter the world in our bodies, and through our bodies' most exquisitely sensitive sense, our skins, we take the world into ourselves. We have made and remade a world where nearly every experience is shaded and shaped by the color of those bodies, the tones of those skins. (Jane Lazarre, Beyond the Whiteness of Whiteness: memoir of a White mother of Black sons, 1997, p. 94)

Los Espacios Penumbrales de Passing por Nella Larsen: Cuerpos indecisos, identidades móviles, y la deconstrucción de fronteras raciales

La novela Passing, escrito por Nellie Larsen en 1929, es una drama sicológica que se centra en dos mujeres con piel clara. Una de ellas, Clare Kendry, se hace pasar por la esposa blanca de un exitoso racista rico. La otra, Irene Redfield, es una ‘mujer de raza’ que vive en el Alto Manhattan durante la época del ‘Renacimiento de Harlem’. Clare e Irene son indecisibles, ni blancas ni negras, sujetas fluidas atravesando las fronteras de la raza—pasándola. Pasando es un acto de insinuarse en espacios prohibidos a través de desechar otras identidades; es un traspaso de fronteras espaciales tanto como fronteras raciales. En la novela, Clare se hace pasar solo por cruzando de un espacio negro a un espacio blanco y en el paso se muda una identidad negra por una blanca. Este papel examina la movilidad de identidades a través de geografías raciales y cómo este movimiento se desestabilizan ideas de raza y espacios racializados.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Camila Bassi for her generosity, Susan Mains for her close reading of and comments on an earlier version of this paper and Katherine McKittrick for her assistance at a critical juncture in this project. Also I would like to acknowledge the helpful suggestions of the three anonymous reviewers of this paper. Special thanks go to the individual who inspired this project, Toby Saad, and to Linda Peake for all her encouragements and all her hard work.

Notes

1. ‘Look, a Negro!’ comes from a chapter entitled ‘The Fact of Blackness’ in Franz Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks. Fanon describes Black identity as in part a White objectified identity, which closely links the physicality of the Black body to a White imagined Blackness. The state of racial cognizance that arises from this White construction of Blackness mirrors Du Bois's theorization of double consciousness (1903):

‘Dirty nigger!’ Or simply, ‘Look, a Negro!’ I came into the world imbued with the will to find a meaning in things, my spirit filled with the desire to attain the source of the world, and then I found that I was an object in the midst of other objects… As long as the black man is among his own, he will have no occasion, except in minor internal conflicts, to experience his being through others…For not only must the black man be black; he must be black in relation to the white man… And then the occasion arose when I had to meet the white man's eyes. An unfamiliar weight burdened me. The real world challenged my claims. In the white world the man of color encounters difficulties in the development of his bodily schema. Consciousness of the body is solely a negating activity. It is a third-person consciousness. (1967, pp. 107–9)

2. The term ‘miscegenation’ came into being as part of a ruse. Miscegenation, a neologism composed from the Latin miscere (to mix) and genus (race), first appeared in a pamphlet produced in 1864 by two New York City Democrats entitled Miscegenation: The theory of the blending of the races, applied to the American White man and Negro (Roediger, 1991, pp. 155–6). Its authors hoped to smear the Republican party and it presidential nominee, Abraham Lincoln, by writing a pamphlet that advocated inter-racial sex and passing it off as a Republican party sanctioned document (Lemire, 2002, p. 116; Tucker, 1994, p. 302 n. 92). Miscegenation presumes polygenism, i.e. that human races actually represent different biological species (Gould, 1981, p. 39–42; Lemire, 2002, p. 128).

3. Hypo-descent is another term for the one-drop rule which is an asymmetric definition of ‘race.’ It falsely assumes that races are pure categories and that an individual no matter how White they may look in bodily appearance is actually not if they are the issue any of non-White ancestors. For example, hypo-descent defines as Black an individual whose father is White and whose mother is Black. It also defines as Black an individual whose great-great-grandfather is White while the rest of their lineage is composed of Black ancestors. Hypo-descent is asymmetric in the sense that a ‘drop’ of Black blood defines a person as Black, yet a ‘drop’ of White blood never defines a person as White.