Passing literature first emerged in the United States with the saga of George Harris, a bi-racial man striving to flee from the burdens of slavery and to find a place in a racially divided society in Stowe’s "Uncle Tom’s Cabin" (1852). In Latin America, the topic of passing first emerged in Gertrudis Gomez de Avellaneda’s "Sab" and "A Escrava Isaura" (Isaura, The Slave Girl) from Bernardo Guimarães. In both regions, the context is set by abolitionist and anti-slavery campaigns. Those authors sought to engage the audience in the suffering faced by blacks and bi-racial men and women while producing a social critic of imperialism, colonialism, the mores of nineteenth protestant and catholic societies, patriarchal abuses and familial relations. Whiteness is described in those pieces as an asset; a status that could grant protection as well as access to privileged circles, education, better employment, and advantageous marriages. Thus, a condition worth the struggles an individual must endure while seeking to pass for a white person. The more complex and thriving plots that characterize this literary style, however, were created during the so-called Harlem Renaissance. Here, the focus was placed not on a social denounce but on the psychological drama faced by ‘mulattos’ in race coded societies, avoiding stereotypes about blacks and bi-racial individuals. In some pieces, passers are seen as in-between individuals who inhabit third spaces created by the borders that establish which bodies are human and entitled to pleasure and affection as well as worth of desire. In other pieces, passing is approached as a space of non-existence, a transgression that conveys room to discuss other transgressions, such as same-sex sexuality in the first decades of the twentieth century, inter alia. Lastly, in Latin America, claims to whiteness have a very distinctive nature. For example, the background of narratives can be influenced by whitening policies (state-sponsored white immigration), and by the doubt about the ‘whiteness’ of Latin American peoples, etc. (The latter usually entangled with narratives of nationality.)
Although some critics see passing as a dated literature, there has been renewed interest on it. As postcolonial and feminist scholars have showed, the challenges met by passers and their societies are not only current, but they also provide us with great material to discuss matters of representation, embodiment, hybridity, consciousness, mimicry, belonging, performativity and the contingence of gendered racial lines.
This course combines methods of discourse analysis with hermeneutics to analyze literary pieces and movie excerpts. Enrolled students will be required to give a presentation about one of the texts listed in the lecture syllabus. In every session, two participants will present one of the texts. Short handouts should be circulated to guide the presentation and allow for better quality meetings. Students will be provided with a model to prepare the handouts. In order to achieve credit points, besides giving an oral presentation and taking part in the discussions, students should deliver a term paper.
By engaging with current debates stemming from critical literary studies, postcolonial literary studies as well as North American and Latin American race studies, students will acquire skills to identify and analyze gender, intersectionality, mimesis and hybridity in the assigned novels. The reading and exercises to be carried out during the classes are also aimed to boost the development of skills to conduct inter-textual analysis.
References:
Abel, Elizabeth (1997). Female subjects in black and white: race, psychoanalysis, feminism. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Bhabha, Homi (2004). The location of culture. London: Routledge.
Ginsberg, Elaine (1996). Passing and the fictions of identity / ed. by Elaine K. Ginsberg. Durham: Duke Univ. Press.
Hiraldo, Carlos (2003). Segregated Miscegenation: On the Treatment of Racial Hybridity in the North American and Latin American Literary Traditions. New York: Routledge, Chapter 2, pp. 31-54.
Hubel, Teresa (2002). Literature and racial ambiguity. Amsterdam: Rodopi.
Kristeva, Julia (1993). Desire in language: a semiotic approach to literature and art. Oxford: Blackwell.
Sollors, Werner (1997). Neither black nor white yet both: thematic explorations of interracial literature. New York a.o: Oxford University Press.
Wilson, Mary (2013). The labors of modernism: domesticity, servants, and authorship in modernist fiction. Farnham: Ashgate.
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Diese Veranstaltung gehört zum Anmeldeset "Phil Hist Romanische Literaturwissenschaft Spanisch SoSe 2019".
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