Passing Flashcards
Biographical context
- New Negro
-Nella moved to Harlem - Nella duel heritage- worked as a nurse
Harlem Renaissance
- intellectual and cultural revival of African American movement- New negro movement
Great Migration of African American workers fleeing the racist conditions of the Jim Crow Deep South
Historical context
- Rhinelander Case
-One drop rule
-Great Migration
-Curse of Ham- justification of slavery
-plessy vs ferguson- seperate but equal
-Stream of consciouness
-Transatlantic Slave Trade - Tragic mulatto-doomed tragic mixed-race character
Clare quotes
-Stepping always on the edge of danger’
-an ivory mask
-Clare Kendry cared nothing for the race. She only belonged to it’
‘Death by misadventure’
Irene quotes
’ Race.. the thing that bound and suffocated her.. she wished that she had not been born Negro’
‘What if Bellew shall divorce Clare. Could he. There was the Rhinelander Case’
‘weary and depressed’
Brian quotes
’ Brian was unhappy restless, withdrawn.. aching to go somewhere else’
‘If they’ve got to live in this damned country, they better find out what they’re up against’
‘forever wanting something he couldn’t have’
John Bellew
I hate them… the black scrimy devils’
‘tallish person, broadly made… an impression of latent physical power’
Literary context
Unreliable narrator
The frame novel-a story within a story
- Epigraph- Countee Cullen
Du Bois- the struggle to remain true to black culture whilst also conforming to dominant white society
Social context
Brazil- absence of colour bar- multi-racial society
James Baldwin- ‘ You cannot lynch me and keep me in ghettos without becoming something monstrous yourself
‘It is a tragic story rooted in inescapable facts of American life, that whiteness conferred an almost universal unearned advantage’
Bernstein
Paradoxically, Irene is both attracted to and appalled by Clares desire to live on the edge
Scruggs
The emotionally complex female characters in the novel keenly feel the oppressive nature of living in a white male-dominated society
Christianson
Clare’s attempt to live free is defeated by the way others view her
Hutchinson
Existing within both white and patriarchal power systems, Black women are forced to face oppression on two fronts: for their Blackness and their womanhood
Lorde
