Race Trauma at the End of the Millennium: (Narrative) Passing in Philip Roth’s The Human Stain

This article surveys the relevance of passing in American literature, by emphasizing the performativity of race and the traumatic consequences of racial passing. Through a critique of The Human Stain, I address the trauma of an individual on the color line, as a result of exclusionary norms of racial identity. My reading examines the crucial role of Nathan Zuckerman, the listener to and narrator of Coleman Silk’s race trauma. Given his choice of narrative persona, Roth experiments with cross-racial representation of trauma—a daunting task at the end of the millennium.