Passing

"I chose Nella Larsen’s impressionistic yet mathematically-plotted book of fiction, first published in 1929, for two reasons. First, because it was, as you say, adapted in 2021 as a beautiful black-and-white film by the English director Rebecca Hall. Second, because it’s about the lack of categorical exclusivity, so to speak, that Gates insisted on. With first-wave Freudian intensity, Passing explores the psychology of racial passing, the inner dilemmas light-skinned African Americans faced when crossing the color line separating white from Black. But it distinguishes itself from the surprisingly large sub-genre of passing novels by pushing on passing from dozens of intellectual directions—and this in less than a hundred pages, in the crammed space of a novella effectively passing as a novel. Why shouldn’t Black-born passers be seen as brave contributors to the tradition of American self-making? (“If one’s the type, all that’s needed is a little nerve.”) Why do some successful passers desire to return to their original racial communities? (“If I knew that, I’d know what race is.”) Despite their racist pretensions, why do white Americans seem easier targets for passing fancies than Black ones? (“Maybe because there are so many more of them, or maybe because they are secure and don’t have to bother.”) Most of all, how is racial passing like and unlike the passing of queer desire for its straight cousin, and vice-versa? Hall’s film, like recent scholarship, wonders if Passing is at bottom a lesbian text passing for a racial one. Beyond Larsen’s deliberate ambiguity on this score, climaxing in a sudden murder mystery compressed into the book’s last pages, Passing forthrightly reveals what we’d now call the intersectional nature of Harlem Renaissance writing. Here and elsewhere, this writing joins racial identities to categories of class and gender and sexuality, region and nation and empire, and so on—categories not always publicized in racially-defined American art."