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Dying to Be Black: White-to-Black Racial Passing in Chesnutt's “Mars Jeems's Nightmare,” Griffin's Black Like Me, and Van Peebles's Watermelon Man

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 July 2009

Baz Dreisinger
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Extract

Is racial passing passé? Not according to contemporary book sales. The theme remains central to at least three recent best sellers: Danzy Senna's Caucasia, Colson Whitehead's The Intuitionist, and Philip Roth's The Human Stain. Roth's novel made it to the big screen this fall, just as Devil in a Blues Dress, the adaptation of Walter Mosley's novel starring Denzel Washington, did in 1995. Renewed academic attention is being paid, of late, to “classic” passing narratives; once-ignored ones, including Charles Chesnutt's The House Behind the Cedars, are being revived; and still others being reread in the context of passing.

Type
Research Article
Information
Prospects , Volume 28 , October 2004 , pp. 519 - 542
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2004

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References

NOTES

1. For recent studies of classic and nonclassic passing narratives, see Wald, Gayle's Crossing the Line: Racial Passing in 20th Century American Literature and Culture (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Kawash, Samira's Dislocating the Color Line: Identity, Hybridity, and Singularity in African-American Literature (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997)Google Scholar; Harper, Philip Brian's chapter on passing in Are We Not Men? (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996)Google ScholarPubMed; and Fabi, Maria Giulia's Passing and the Rise of the African-American Novel (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001)Google Scholar. Two collections are helpful: Ginsberg, Elaine's Passing and the Fictions of Identity (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996)CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Sanchez, Maria and Schlossberg, Linda's Passing: Identity and Interpretation in Sexuality, Race, and Religion (New York: New York University Press, 2001)Google Scholar. The most recent books to treat passing are Kennedy, Randall's Interracial Intimacies (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003)Google Scholar and Taltry, Stephen's Mulatto America (New York: HarperCollins, 2003)Google Scholar.

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22. The first film was Crossfire (1947), directed by Edward Dmytryk and starring Robert Mitchum.

23. Kate Baldwin sees this as central to Black Like Me; in Gentleman's Agreement, Phil closes his article by stating, “Equality and freedom remain still the only choice for wholeness and soundness in a man or in a nation.”

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