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.
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