The Historian's Passing: Reading Nella Larsen's Classic Novel as Social and Cultural History ed. by Lynn Domina (review)

Accessible, low-cost editions of previously out-of-print texts are essential to the recovery of women writers whose work was lost or deemed inferior by critics in other eras. The current availability of Nella Larsen's novels and short stories, along with two meticulously researched biographies, makes clear that Larsen is a prime example of how a woman writer who once languished in obscurity can become canonized because of the recovery efforts of African American activists and feminist literary critics, which began in the 1970s and 1980s. In addition to a wealth of scholarship on the author, her work, and her female Harlem Renaissance contemporaries, a new edition of Passing, one of Larsen's psychologically complex, richly textured novels, is evidence that her recovery project has far from abated.

The Historian's Passing: Reading Nella Larsen's Classic Novel as Social and Cultural History, edited by Lynn Domina, joins several other editions of Larsen's 1929 novel, all of which are suited for classroom teaching. Some editions, such as Penguin's, contain introductions and explanatory notes; others, such as Rutgers's, contain introductions, explanatory notes, and Larsen's other work; still others, such as Norton's critical edition of Passing, contain primary sources, such as original reviews and correspondence, among other ancillary materials. What, then, distinguishes The Historian's Passing given all these choices?

For one, the book's title announces that this reprint of Passing is designed to broaden the novel's reach by appealing to readers who have "a strong interest in history—students, history teachers, history buffs" (vii). Included in The Historian's Annotated Classics series, which aims to "connec[t] each book to crucial historical issues of its time—both the time of its setting and the time of its writing" (vii), this edition encourages the continuation of historians' long-standing practice of using fiction as primary sources and introduces Larsen's work to students at all levels in a variety of advanced high school and college classes.

Another distinguishing feature of this edition is that it situates Passing in larger social structures in order to aid readers' grasp of the novel's themes, allusions, and significance. For example, the book opens with a chronology organized in two columns, one called "Key Events in American History" and the other called "Key Events in Nella Larsen's Life." This useful teaching tool enables readers to understand Larsen's biography and publications in the context of legal, social, and cultural US history. Beginning in 1788 with the inclusion of slavery in the US Constitution and ending with the fall of Saigon in 1975, the chronology emphasizes the history of US racial formations and sets the stage for two fifteen-page introductory essays that follow. The first provides a succinct overview of Larsen's biography, underscoring how her "identity as a mixed-race person situated within her specific mixed-race family" was pivotal to her life and professional careers (1). The second outlines the events, places, laws, and ideologies that affected Larsen and the issues she explores in Passing. Synthesizing a great deal of interdisciplinary material in lucid and lively prose, Domina offers teaching aids that could be used as models for student papers and a springboard for discussion and further research.

Twelve illustrations in both essays make the history Domina discusses visible. For example, in the biographical essay, photographs of Fisk University enable readers literally to see what the institution and its students looked like when Larsen attended its affiliated Normal school in 1907. Similarly, in the history chapter, a 1915 poster decrying how alcohol consumption destroyed families and a 1920s photograph depicting "Government agents" dumping "liquor into a sewer" (29) dramatize the discussion of Prohibition and speakeasies. The absence of photographs of Larsen or the first edition of Passing emphasizes this reprint's...