Approaching Identity Politics in Literature: Reading, Interpreting, and Teaching Nella Larsen’s Passing

Though I have published on Nella Larsen and am a specialist in American women’s literature of the twentieth century, I did not realize initially how challenging it can be to explore and study the identity politics of a gendered and racially inflected modernist work in the twenty-first-century classroom. I first taught Larsen’s Passing (1929) in 2008 in a large, required class on prose, composed of ethnically-diverse traditional and nontraditional students in a small college town at a mid-size state university in the Deep South where race is still a contested and uncomfortable issue. Since then, I have taught the novella annually in an Introduction to Fiction course to non-literature majors at a Midwestern university. In this article, I shall endeavor to articulate the dynamics that are embedded in pedagogical approaches to teaching and thinking about this widely taught and anthologized work, and I shall attempt to elucidate how Passing works as a relevant critique of our own gendered, heteronormative, and race-conscious (and race divided) world while suggesting approaches to the novel that may prove helpful to other teachers. I approach the novel not only as a modernist text but as one that continues to ask us to examine our preconceptions of gender, race, class, and sexuality.

On Contextualizing Passing

Studying literature, I emphasize to my students, constitutes them as better readers and critical thinkers, and it enables them to be more socially aware and better citizens. At the very least, it helps them to think about themselves, their places in the world, and their relationships with people different from themselves, in addition to positioning them to reflect on the very real social and material conditions that make up our world. And these points proved to be important ones to make because, unfortunately, serious racial tensions were present in the class I taught in the South on the construction of blackness, following the aftermath of the Jena Six incident.¹ But race is not the only sensitive issue embedded in Passing. Throughout this article, I will refer to race, gender, class, and sexual orientation as interactive and intersectional in a structural and multiplicative model.²

In order to engage students as active consumers of something like Passing, I lead the class in an exercise of constructing and deconstructing binary oppositions, prompting the students to set up the binary oppositions that underpin our cultural expectations or understanding of value in relation to subject positions and characteristics before we move on to complicate them with our study of a novel that refuses to be circumscribed. I model the taxonomy presented by Hélène Cixous’s theoretical opening to “Sorties” (63). In her binary constructions, it becomes clear where woman is culturally positioned, always occupying a place of limited value, lack of privilege, and disenfranchisement.³ In class, the students split notions of race, gender, class, sexuality, and region into binary constructions. Following are some examples we typically begin with to ignite the class discussion:

white/black

male/female

rich/poor

heterosexual/homosexual

North/South

logical/irrational

mind/body

good/bad

And then we probe these constructions as a class, coming up with examples for each pair that confound such easy, rigid, and false categorizations. And yet these binary oppositions will come into play in Passing: we discover that we bring our latent or fully manifested expectations to bear on the text: what should these mixed female bodies do? Where should they go? What are they capable of? Why? Because, as Elizabeth Grosz observes, the “body is coded in terms that are themselves traditionally devalued,” assigning the body to women and the mind to men, and this “correlation is not contingent or accidental but is central to the ways in which philosophy has historically developed and still sees itself even today” (4). Add to the female body the complexity of a mapping of what race signifies (or does not signify), not to mention signifiers of class and sexual orientation, and we have a very complex constellation of meanings and associations, identities and stereotypes invoked and converging...