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WiSe 12/13: Narratives of Passing

Hannah Spahn

Comments

“We make our customs lightly; once made, like our sins, they grip us in bands of steel; we become the creatures of our creations.” This famous reflection of the old judge in Charles Chesnutt’s The House Behind the Cedars (1900) presents American conceptions of “race” as the result of both liberty and necessity, of choice as well as determinism, of contingent conventions peculiarly able to perpetuate the legacy of slavery and hold self-made men and women in metaphorical bondage. In our seminar, we will approach this problem by taking a closer look at the phenomenon of “passing” in American culture. Before the background of its particular history in the United States – a history shaped, since the later nineteenth century, by the “one-drop rule” that sought to establish an especially rigid racial binary while simultaneously opening up new possibilities for its subversion – we will focus on passing in its most prominent form, i.e. from “black” to “white” identities. As we will discuss, however, not only could the crossing of the “color line” work in the other direction, it often implied transgressing conventional boundaries of class and gender as well. Studying poems, paintings, slave narratives, novellas, novels, and films, we will ask, for instance, whether their accounts of passing mainly served to challenge, or to reinforce dominant hierarchies of race or gender; in what sense they can be understood as arguments about a specific historical context or, more generally, as narrative devices illustrating universal problems in the process of identity formation; and in how far we may be said to have arrived at a “post-passing” perspective today. The seminar will be held in English. close