Other editions of book Passing

Passing Excerpted from the Introduction by Thadious M. Davis to the 1992 Penguin Books edition of Passing by Nella Larsen: In Passing (1929), Nella Larsen explores the cultural identity and psychological positioning of modern black individuals unmarked by difference from whites. Locating her narrative within the liberating 1920s, the golden days of black cultural consciousness, she critiques a societal insistence on race as essential and fixed by representing racial fluidity inherent in Clare Kendry Bellew and Irene Westover Redfield, women who choose their racial identities. In portraying Clare, who becomes white, and Irene, who passes occasionally, Larsent represents passing as a practical, emancipatory option, a means by which people of African descent could permeate what W.E.B. Du Bois themed “the veil of color caste.” Larsen defines passing in a meeting between Clare and Irene as a simple but “hazardous business,” requiring “breaking away from all that was familiar and friendly to take one’s chance in another environment, not entirely strange, perhaps, but certainly not entirely friendly.”