Passing Narratives - Black Lit

Catalog description

In W.E.B DuBois' 1903 foundational text The Souls of Black Folks, he suggests emphatically that the most significant problem for the 20th century (and beyond) will be the color line. But what about those who write across the color line? What do we do with authors who write tales that straddle, obscure, erase that line? In the US, passing has almost exclusively referred to racial passing and more specifically, Black people passing as white people. Passing is understood to occur when a person deemed a member of one racial group performs as and is recognized as a member of a different one. Literarily, its meaning, presence and articulation has been far more broad. Some authors have written passing as an act of intentionality, one designed to undermine an oppressive racial classification system that habitually denies Black people basic human, social and political rights. For other authors, passing lacks any such political frame and rather exists as a place to express the complications of an ephemeral identity. This course will examine the range of such literary expressions.